Farside

by Ben Bova

  McClintock broke into an easy smile. “A-twenty-four. That’s halfway down the next cross corridor.”

  “I know. Okay.”

  His smile fading, McClintock said, “You’ve something of a reputation, you know.”

  “Oh?” Grant felt his pulse start to race.

  “Fine engineer,” said McClintock, “but … well, dependent on … medications.”

  “I’ve got some physical problems, that’s true,” Grant admitted. “I can’t return to Earth. I’ve got to stay here on the Moon.”

  McClintock nodded. “I heard that you were bounced out of your job at Selene.”

  Grant admitted it with a mute nod.

  “Fighting. You wrecked the Pelican Bar, they tell me.”

  His voice low, Grant replied, “I had help. It was a free-for-all.”

  “So now you’re stuck here at Farside.”

  “That’s right, I guess.”

  “Apparently you’ve kept your nose clean here,” McClintock said.

  Grant nodded again, thinking, When is this inquisition going to end?

  “Well, you’ve risen to the top of the tech gang, but that’s only temporary. You’re on trial, Simpson.”

  So what else is new? Grant asked silently.

  McClintock broke into his sunny smile again and said, “But we’ll see what we can do to make your temporary promotion a permanent one.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” Grant mumbled.

  “Good.” McClintock started down the corridor, but as Grant tapped out the entry code for his door, he turned back and said, “Oh, and do take a shower before you come to my quarters. Right?”

  “Right,” Grant agreed.

  * * *

  All the living spaces at Farside were the same. Grant thought of it as an engineering-inspired bit of democracy. From the Ulcer down to the lowliest inventory clerk, everybody got identical living spaces. The engineers who designed and built the underground facility had decided it would be cheaper and easier to build that way.

  Selene had started out the same way, back decades ago when it had begun as Moonbase. But over the years, as Selene grew larger, the newer living quarters became bigger, more luxurious. Two and three bedrooms. Spacious sitting rooms: well, spacious by the standards of a community where every corridor, every room, every living and working space had to be carved out of the solid lunar rock by plasma torches.

  Of course, there was that grotto at Selene’s deepest level, a natural cave that zillionaire Martin Humphries had turned into a blooming botanical garden with his own luxurious mansion smack in its middle. Incredibly expensive to maintain, but the Humphries Trust footed the bill and sponsored the fantasy that the area was an ecological research center, dedicated to studying how to establish an Earth-type environment deep underground on the Moon.

  Yeah, Grant thought as he hurried down the corridor toward McClintock’s quarters. A research facility, with the richest man in the solar system living in splendor smack in the middle of it.

  NANOMACHINES

  Grant found unit A-24 and tapped on the door. It was precisely 1700 hours.

  McClintock’s muffled voice called, “It’s not locked.”

  Sliding the door back, Grant saw that McClintock was already speaking with a woman’s image on the wall-mounted display screen. She was a good-looking blonde, too young to be Dr. Cardenas, the nanotech guru and a nominee for the Nobel Prize. To Grant she looked more like a California surfer chick: golden curly hair, strong shoulders, and a glowing complexion.

  She was saying, “Nanomachines aren’t magic wands, Dr. McClintock. You can’t say ‘abracadabra’ and have them work wonders for you.”

  McClintock was sitting on the small sofa, his long legs stretched out beneath the coffee table, his eyes focused on the woman’s face. Still, he waved to Grant, gesturing toward the upholstered chair at one end of the sofa. Grant crossed the room and sat there, thinking that while all the living quarters at Farside were exactly the same size, McClintock’s room was furnished much better than the one he himself lived in.

  “I understand,” McClintock said to the screen. “So tell me what you need to build a mirror with nanos.” Before she could reply, he added, “And how quickly you can do it.”

  It is Cardenas, Grant realized. Must be. She must be at least sixty, but she sure doesn’t look it.

  “First,” Kristine Cardenas replied, “I’d need an exact list of the elements that the mirror is made of. Elements and compounds, down to the smallest impurities. Nanomachine assemblers work at the atomic and molecular levels; they take atoms and molecules and put them together to form the macrostructure you want.”

  McClintock nonchalantly waved one hand in the air. “We can get that information for you.”

  The woman looked doubtful. “As I understand it, optical glass consists mainly of silicon and oxygen, but there are plenty of minor constituents, too. And they can be critical, isn’t that so?”

  McClintock turned to Grant. “Is that right?”

  Grant said to the screen, “The glass is a borosilicate. About ten percent is boron oxide. And you’re right: there’re other constituents, as well.”

  “And you are…?” the woman asked.

  Before Grant could reply, McClintock said, “This is Grant Simpson. He’s the head of my technical staff.”

  My technical staff, Grant thought. The Ulcer would pucker his sphincter over that.

  “I’m Kris Cardenas,” the woman said, with a warm smile.

  “I’m very pleased to meet you, Dr. Cardenas,” said Grant.

  “Call me Kris. And I’ll call you Grant.”

  “Okay.”

  With just the hint of a frown on his chiseled features, McClintock said, “You can get Dr. Cardenas a detailed list of the ingredients in the optical glass we use for the mirrors, can’t you?”

  Grant started to answer, but Cardenas interrupted, “If you can simply give me a few samples of the glass, I can program a set of nano disassemblers to take them apart, atom by atom. That’ll give us the exact specifications we need.”

  “Disassemblers?” Grant asked. “You mean gobblers?”

  Cardenas’s face went cold. “Disassemblers,” she said flatly. “I use them in my lab here for analyses. They do not get outside of my lab, and even if they did they are programmed to shut themselves down at a fixed time limit. The area can also be bathed in high-intensity ultraviolet light, which deactivates the nanos quite thoroughly. There’s no need to worry about gobblers getting loose.”

  “Okay, okay,” Grant said, raising both his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I’m not a nanoluddite. I’m not scared of nanomachines.” It wasn’t exactly true, he knew, but close enough.

  McClintock soothed, “Of course not. That’s why we’re asking for your help, Dr. Cardenas.”

  She dipped her chin a notch in acknowledgement.

  “Now then,” McClintock went on, “once you know exactly what the ingredients are, how soon can you produce a hundred-meter mirror for us?”

  “How soon can you gather together all the necessary raw materials?”

  McClintock shrugged elaborately and turned to Grant again.

  “The glass is actually manufactured in Selene,” Grant said. “They ship it here in chunks and we melt it down at our mirror lab.”

  “Then I should talk with the people at the glass factory,” said Cardenas.

  “I suppose so,” McClintock said. “But once you have the raw materials, how quickly can—”

  Cardenas interrupted, “A hundred-meter mirror? To what tolerance?”

  Grant answered, “It’s got to be curved to within a fraction of the wavelength of visible light.”

  “Oof! That’ll take a bit of doing.”

  “We spend months polishing the surfaces to the correct figure,” Grant said.

  With a trace of a smile, Cardenas said, “If you can give me the exact specifications, my little guys ought to be able to do it in a week or so. Maybe ten days, on
the outside.”

  “A week?” McClintock gasped.

  “On that order,” she replied.

  “That … that would be fine,” McClintock said, grinning at the screen. “Wonderful.”

  Grant added, “I’ll talk to the head of the glass factory, tell him to give you a few samples of the optical glass they make for us.”

  “And I’ll get on this as soon as the samples are in my hands,” said Cardenas.

  “You’ll handle this personally?” McClintock asked.

  Cardenas gave him a rueful little smile. “I don’t have much of a staff here. Yes, I’ll make room in my schedule to handle this myself.”

  “Fine,” McClintock repeated. “Just fine.”

  “Thank you,” Grant said.

  Cardenas smiled again, warmer this time, and said, “That’s it, then. I’ll call you again when I get the glass samples. Good-bye.”

  McClintock said, “Good-bye for now.”

  The screen went dark. McClintock turned to Grant. “I want you to get over to Selene and see to it that she gets those samples with the speed of light.”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary,” Grant said.

  McClintock’s expression went stony. “It doesn’t matter what you think. You get your butt over to Selene. Now.”

  Grant fought down the flash of anger that surged through him. “I’ll have to clear it with Uhlrich.”

  “I’ll take care of Uhlrich. You get yourself moving.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. I know about your work history and I know about your drug habit.”

  “It’s not a drug habit!”

  “Medications, then,” McClintock amended easily. “I don’t care. Can you understand that? I don’t give a damn what you swallow or inject into yourself. As long as you perform your job well, you can fill yourself with all the designer drugs you can get your hands on.”

  Grant glared at him.

  McClintock broke into his handsome smile again. “Don’t get so tense, Grant. We’re going to get along just fine, as long as you do your job.” Easing back on the sofa, he added, “You do the work, and I’ll take the credit. Deal?”

  Grant said to himself, Another one. Just like Nate. At least he admits it openly, though.

  To McClintock he grudgingly muttered, “Deal.”

  DOSSIER: GRANT PHILIP SIMPSON

  For his eighth birthday Grant Simpson received a small Rubik’s Cube from his favorite uncle. Fascinated, Grant spent hours doggedly trying to rotate every facet of the wickedly intricate device until he had all the colors properly lined up. He stayed up late for two nights in a row, hiding under his bedcovers with a flashlight, until at last he had solved the puzzle and each side of the cube showed one color only.

  Proudly, he brought the cube to school and showed it off to his classmates during their lunch period. One of the boys asked if he could try it. Grant scrambled the facets, then gave the cube to him. Before the next class began the lad handed it back to Grant, grinning broadly. He had solved the cube perfectly.

  Grant felt utterly stupid. What had taken him days and nights to do, his classmate had done in less than an hour.

  It wasn’t until the end of the school term that the boy revealed, with an even bigger grin, that he had simply peeled the colored plastic stickers off the device, then pasted them back on in the proper order.

  From that shocked moment onward, Grant Simpson loathed the idea of using trickery instead of earnest hard work. He expected people to do their jobs honestly, the way he did.

  Grant always worked hard at whatever he attempted. Sometimes he tried too hard.

  He came to the Moon from his home in Johannesburg barely one step ahead of a lynch mob of South African police detectives, lawyers, and media pundits who heartlessly held him responsible for mass murder.

  All because he wanted to help the neediest of the needy.

  The greenhouse warming had struck suddenly and disastrously all across the Earth. After more than a century of a barely perceptible rise in global temperatures, the Earth’s climate reached a tipping point. Within little more than a decade ice caps melted, sea levels rose, coastal cities worldwide were flooded, farmlands parched, and devastating storms stripped millions of families of their homes, their livelihoods, their hopes for the future.

  Young Grant Simpson, clasping a brand-new degree in civil engineering, had dreamed of going to the Moon and helping to build lunar habitats for the newly independent nation of Selene. He had applied for a job permit at Selene and been accepted.

  “You can build new cities right here,” his stepfather had insisted. “God knows we’ve got enough homeless coolies pouring into South Africa. Blacks, Arabs, even refugees from Israel. Can’t keep ’em out. They need shelter almost as much as they need food.”

  His stepfather was a blustering shopkeeper who bullied Grant’s mother and everyone else around him. But although Grant would not be bullied, he still recognized the truth behind the old man’s words. He saw the need in the weary, frightened eyes of the helpless, homeless, hopeless immigrants.

  Grant tried. He tried very hard. He set aside his dreams of working on the Moon and took on the task of building housing for the desperate, bewildered people who had lost everything. The only challenge in the work was to get the units built faster and cheaper, always faster and cheaper.

  Grant warned his superiors that they were taking too many shortcuts. They ignored him. He went to the construction company’s management, and all that earned him was their cold disdain and the active hostility of his fellow workers.

  “Don’t get yourself all lathered up, Grant,” his supervisor told him. “We’re building for dumbass migrants, not the royal family, for chrissakes.”

  Offended by his coworkers’ slipshod efforts, and incensed even more by their careless attitude, Grant found himself isolated, friendless, alone in his fears that their sloppy work would lead to disaster.

  When the company’s latest and shoddiest apartment block collapsed, killing seventy-three sleeping men, women, and children, Grant got blamed. Somehow the company’s records showed that it was Grant Simpson who drew up the faulty design, Grant Simpson who approved the unreliable reinforcing bars and the fatally weakened concrete mixture.

  His stepfather regarded him with ill-concealed contempt. “Don’t look to me for help, young man. You made your bed, now you’ve got to lie in it.”

  Die in it, Grant thought. The courts are working up an indictment for mass murder. Any moment now the police will come to take me away.

  Grant had to run for his life. He fled to the Moon, where the men and women governing Selene at least listened to his side of the story and reluctantly gave him a chance to make good on his never-used job permit.

  South Africa tried to have him extradited, but Selene—independent since its short, sharp war against Earth’s United Nations—refused to cooperate. Grant immediately applied for citizenship, which was eventually granted. Selene’s need for men and women who were willing to work outweighed the tragedy in South Africa.

  Grant worked. Very hard. Outside, for the most part, out on the airless lunar surface. Building the solar farms that provided Selene’s electrical power. Constructing the second electrical catapult that hurled cargoes of lunar ores off the Moon to the space stations in Earth orbit. Erecting factories on the floor of Crater Alphonsus, factories that produced—among other things—the Clippership rockets that became the backbone of transportation between the Moon and Earth and, in slightly modified form, hypersonic aircraft that brought every place on Earth no more than an hour’s flight from any other place on Earth.

  Out in the open on Alphonsus’s dusty, rock-strewn floor, Grant could look up and see the blue-and-white sphere of the Earth hanging above him. He willed himself to feel no remorse; he told himself that he had cut all his ties with the world of his birth.

  He knew he would never again see the dim-witted, know-nothing tyrant who had married his mother, or the mother
who allowed the lout to dominate her, or the regimentation of a government that grew more restrictive, more authoritarian, with each new wave of desperate millions migrating into South Africa. He didn’t have to deal with the fools and opportunists and out-and-out thieves who grasped at power and money for themselves at the expense of everyone else.

  He had left Earth far behind him. Forever. Or so he told himself.

  He worked in a space suit, of course. He learned to accept the restrictions imposed by the burdensome, awkward suits: gloves that needed tiny servomotors just to flex the fingers adequately; canned air that chilled his lungs; lunar dust that crept into the suits’ joints and made them grind to an arthritic halt if you didn’t clean the suits thoroughly every time you used them.

  The biggest danger of working outside was the radiation, of course. Invisible, impalpable subatomic bullets rained down from the Sun and stars, blanketing the lunar surface every moment of every day and night.

  The suits protected their wearers against radiation, but only up to a point. A person was allowed to spend only so many hours outside on the surface; exceeding that limit meant that even with the suit’s protection, the wearer was accumulating a dangerous dose of radiation. Selene’s safety department had very strict rules about radiation exposure.

  But a hard-working engineer who had jobs to complete could be clever enough to evade the rules. Records could be doctored. Radiation dosage badges could be switched or even lost. Getting the job done was more important than allowing the nitpicking safety prigs to force you off the project.

  Grant worked hard, very hard, out on the Moon’s radiation-drenched surface. Happily, most of his fellow workers were almost as hard-driving as he was. Most of them. And even the medical staff who monitored the workers’ health status were lenient enough to let them get away with bending the safety regulations.

  Besides, there were medications to be had that could protect you from the damaging effects of long-term radiation exposure. Grant Simpson got those medications from fellow workers who knew where and how to obtain them. He took steroids, too, to improve his stamina out there in the open.