Farside

by Ben Bova

  He worried about taking such medications. Drugs, really, he thought. What am I putting into my body? he asked himself. At first. Once he found that the meds allowed him to work longer, harder, he put such worries behind him. Getting the job done was the important thing.

  Within a year Grant was dependent on those medications. They didn’t interfere with his work; they enhanced his performance. Steroids could be dangerous, he knew. But he soon realized that he couldn’t survive without them. What choice do I have? he asked himself.

  He worked hard. He got the job done.

  One of the side effects of the steroids, though, was a heightened tendency to anger: ’roid rage. All his life, Grant had kept his emotions bottled inside him. Now, with the steroids coursing through his blood, the anger burst out. He got into fights—real, bloody-knuckled, body-battering fights. He expected the people around him to do their jobs, and most of them did. But the few goof-offs and goldbrickers among his crew infuriated him beyond his self-control.

  After a wild brawl that smashed up the bar he and his crew frequented, Grant was brought before Selene’s personnel board and expelled from the technical staff.

  Devastated, Grant pleaded that he could not return to Earth, where an indictment for mass murder still hung over him. “You’ll be killing me,” he begged.

  After two excruciating days of deliberation, the board informed Grant that he could apply for a position with the technical staff that was building the astronomical facility on the far side of the Moon. He swiftly, gratefully, accepted.

  But he could not avoid a routine physical examination when he arrived at Farside, carried out by Farside’s resident physician, Dr. Ida Kapstein, a heavyset woman with hard ice-blue eyes.

  “Your liver function is deteriorating, you know,” she said, coolly unconcerned.

  The ache in my back, Grant realized.

  “It’s from all the shit you’ve been putting into yourself. Your blood sample looks like a pharmaceutical company’s product list, for god’s sake.”

  “I, uh … I’ve been taking … medications,” he stammered.

  “I’ve heard about your getting into fistfights at Selene. ’Roid rage, isn’t it?”

  Ohmigod, Grant thought. She’s going to redline me. If I can’t work here at Farside they’ll ship me back to Earth. Back to South Africa.

  Sullenly, he muttered, “I can control it.”

  “Sure you can.”

  It took Grant several minutes before he understood that Dr. Kapstein wasn’t threatening to redline him. She was offering to sell Grant the steroids and anti-radiation medications he had become dependent on. Dr. Kapstein had a thriving little business going, and Grant would swiftly become her steadiest customer.

  “I’ll take good care of you,” Dr. Kapstein told him. “You just put yourself in my care and you’ll be okay. The safety department’s rules are way too restrictive, anyway.”

  Grant agreed mutely.

  “I’ll take good care of you,” she repeated.

  For a price.

  BROKEN MIRROR

  Grant felt tired and irritable as he pulled the hard-shell torso of his space suit over his head and slid his arms through the flexible sleeves.

  Frigging suit smells like old sweat socks, he grumbled to himself. It’s time to requisition a new one. The Ulcer’ll hit the ceiling; I bet he hired McClintock to help keep the program’s costs down.

  It was an hour after his meeting with McClintock. You do the work, and I’ll take the credit, the man had said. Great, thought Grant. What choice do I have? Well, anyway, I ought to get a new suit out of it.

  The woman who was going outside with him was already suited up, helmet and all. She checked out his suit, then Grant checked out hers. The old buddy system. Never go out on the surface alone. Good rule. Except there were times when you had to. Rules are made to be broken, or at least bent.

  “Let’s make this quick,” the woman said as Grant fastened his fishbowl helmet to his suit’s neck ring. “I’ve got a date for dinner.”

  With their highly tinted helmets over their heads, neither person could make out the face of the other. Together they clomped heavily to the airlock, got the go-ahead from the excursion controller, snug and happy in her booth deep inside, and finally stepped out onto the surface of Mare Moscoviense.

  It was still daylight out there, although the Sun was dipping down toward the slumped old ringwall mountains. Long shadows were stretching across the dusty undulating floor of the Sea of Moscow.

  Grant took it all in with a glance, then stepped out of the airlock and headed toward the cracked mirror.

  “Into the valley of death,” muttered his companion, “rode the six hundred.”

  Grant shook his head inside his helmet. “We’re missing five hundred and ninety-eight guys.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  The damned mirror was sitting out there, next to the big airlock of the mirror lab, slightly tilted on the uneven ground. Its delicately figured glass was covered by a thin sheet of metal that was obviously warped.

  Grant stared at the damaged mirror inside its protective casing. Not protective enough, he knew.

  Why’d you have to crack? he asked the impassive mirror. Why’d you have to ruin all our work?

  “How’re we gonna get this puppy back into the lab?” his companion asked.

  Grant had to concentrate for a moment to remember which of his crew was with him. The bulky space suits removed all traces of individuality; if you weren’t close enough to read the name stenciled on the torso, you couldn’t recognize who was inside the suit.

  She checked you out in your suit, for chrissakes, Grant berated himself. Are you getting early onset Alzheimer’s? Then he remembered: Josie Rivera. Smokey Jo. Good-looking Latina, sharp engineer, bosomy and friendly, especially after a couple of drinks. With a pang, Grant realized that it had been months since he’d gotten laid. He hadn’t even thought much about sex lately. A side effect of his medications? he wondered.

  “It doesn’t go back into the lab,” Grant replied. “Not yet. Not until we finish the mirror we’re working on now.”

  “So we just leave it out here?”

  Shaking his head inside the helmet, Grant said, “We build a roof over it, protect it from temperature swings and micrometeorite abrasion. I’ll have to requisition the honeycomb sheets, then you and Harvey Henderson’s gang can put ’em up.”

  “Hurry-up Harvey.” Josie sounded a little resentful, Grant thought. Nobody likes working outside unless they really have to. He knew what was going through her mind: The damned mirror’s ruined; what’s the sense of putting up a protective roof when we’re just going to melt the thing down and start all over again with it?

  He said to her, “The Ulcer’s thinking about using nanomachines to build a new mirror.”

  “Nanos? Really?”

  “That administrator of his—McClintock—he’s talking about it with Dr. Cardenas back at Selene.”

  “Could it work?” Josie asked.

  Grant knew better than to try to shrug inside the bulky suit. “Cardenas seems to think so.”

  “Well, she would, wouldn’t she?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” Grant started pacing around the mirror’s edge. It was still mounted on the transporter, clamped rigidly in place. Not rigidly enough, he told himself. Otherwise it wouldn’t have cracked.

  To Josie, he said, “I want you to take snaps of the ground along the perimeter of the mirror, so Henderson and his guys have a full picture of the ground out here. They’ll need to build a foundation for the roof.”

  “I’ll have to go in and get a camera,” she said.

  Shaking his head, Grant said, “I’ll tell the controller to get somebody to put a camera in the airlock. All you’ll have to do is step in and pick it up.”

  “Okay.”

  Still pacing along the edges of the mirror, Grant called in to the controller for a camera. Once the controller told him that the camera had been p
laced on the airlock’s floor, he told Josie to pop in and get it.

  She came back with the credit-card-sized camera engulfed in one gloved hand. “You want me to take your picture, boss?” Before Grant could reply, Josie added, “Give the guys inside an idea of the scale.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Why the hell not?”

  So he stood beside the mirror while Josie snapped several images of him.

  “Better take shots of the transporter’s wheels, too,” he suggested. “Get close enough to see if any of ’em cracked or bent.”

  Josie got busy and Grant felt unneeded, but he hesitated to go inside and leave her alone. He knew that subatomic particles from the distant stars were machine-gunning him. His suit protected him from most of them, but there were always some extra-energetic ones that got through and burrowed into the atoms of his body, killing cells or mutating them. He started to feel almost naked beneath their constant, deadly, invisible rain.

  “Whattaya think of the Ulcer’s assistant?” Josie asked as she made her way slowly around the mirror’s perimeter.

  “You mean McClintock?”

  “Yeah. He’s good-looking, don’t you think?”

  Sourly, Grant answered, “Another layer of management. The Ulcer’s enlarging his domain.”

  “He’s supposed to be some kind of efficiency expert, isn’t he?”

  “Management specialist, I think. He’s like a consultant. You know, a guy who doesn’t know anything more than you do, but he comes from more than fifty klicks away and carries a briefcase.”

  She didn’t laugh. “Why’d the Ulcer hire him?”

  “Somebody else to blame when we hit a problem,” Grant snapped. Then he relented a bit. “The Ulcer’s hell-bent on getting the first imagery from New Earth. He wants to beat the IAA and get a Nobel Prize.”

  “You think?”

  “What else?”

  “Well, I hope the guy knows what he’s doing.”

  “He talked the Ulcer into considering nanotechnology,” Grant admitted. “McClintock talked to him for five minutes and now we’re working with Cardenas and the nanotech lab.”

  He heard Josie chuckle. “The Ulcer’s willing to take any shortcuts he can find, isn’t he?”

  “Could be,” Grant agreed. “Could damned well be.”

  The excursion controller’s voice sounded in his helmet speakers. “Grant, we have an urgent call for you. I’m patching it through. On freak two.”

  Grant raised his left arm and tapped the keyboard on his wrist for frequency number two. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Josie doing the same. She wants to hear what’s going on, he realized.

  McClintock’s voice snapped, “Grant, what are you doing out there?”

  Cripes! Grant thought. Has he been listening to our chatter?

  “We’re checking out the damaged mirror. Have to build a shield over it until we can get it back inside the lab.” He suppressed an impulse to add, “Sir.”

  “Well, I need you to get over to Selene and confer with Dr. Cardenas. A resupply lobber’s on its way here and I want you on it when it heads back to Selene.”

  “Okay. As soon as we’re finished here—”

  “Now, Simpson. Now. That lobber will be landing in half an hour and it’s not going to wait for you.”

  “But—”

  “Get somebody else to finish your little excursion. You get yourself ready for a shot back to Selene.”

  “Right,” said Grant.

  SPACEPORT

  Grant called Hurry-Up Harvey and told him to suit up and join Josie at the mirror. Then he ducked back inside and began to peel out of his space suit. Josie’ll be okay out there on her own for a half hour or so, he told himself. By the time he’d showered and changed into a fresh set of coveralls Henderson was suited up and entering the airlock.

  The lobber was still offloading its cargo when Grant got to Farside’s one-pad spaceport, toting his soft-sided overnight bag. Through the glassteel viewing port, Grant saw the squat, conical spacecraft, its dark diamond structure glittering in the lights that surrounded the blast-blackened concrete landing pad.

  To his surprise, the newbie was at the spaceport’s pocket-sized waiting area, standing at the viewing port, her nose practically pressed against the glassteel. What’s her name? Grant asked himself. Yost, he recalled. Trudy Yost.

  “Hello,” he said.

  She jumped as if somebody had swung an ax at her. Turning, she relaxed and replied, “Oh! Hello … Mr. Simpson.”

  Grant thought he heard a slight stress on the Mister. He tried to smile at her. “I guess I was kind of abrupt when we met. I’m sorry.”

  She immediately brightened. “That’s okay. You must have a lot of responsibilities.”

  “Sort of,” he said.

  A moment of awkward silence, and then they both said, “What are you doing here?”

  Trudy broke into a giggle and Grant laughed with her. Before she could ask again, he hefted his bag and said, “I’m heading back to Selene, once the lobber finishes off-loading.”

  “You’re leaving Farside?”

  “Only for a day or so. I’ll be back.”

  “Good,” said Trudy.

  “And you?”

  “Me?”

  “Why’re you here?”

  “Oh!” She seemed genuinely surprised at his question. “The lobber’s bringing a new batch of antennas for the Cyclops array. Professor Uhlrich asked me to make sure they get transported to the site okay.”

  “Asked?” Grant questioned. “The Ulcer asked you to?”

  Trudy admitted, “Well, it was really more like a command.”

  “That sounds more like the Ulcer.”

  “You really shouldn’t call him that,” she said.

  “No, I suppose I shouldn’t.”

  Again a silence settled between them. Feeling uncomfortable, Grant said, “I didn’t realize you’re a radio astronomer.”

  “I’m not,” Trudy said. “My specialty is optical … and infrared.” Before he could ask she explained, “I’m just supervising the antenna delivery because the professor asked me…” She broke into a halfhearted grin. “Told me to,” she amended.

  Grant nodded and turned back to the window. The lobber’s crew seemed finished with their offloading. Both of Farside’s tractors were piled high with cargo containers. The first one of them started trundling slowly away from the launchpad.

  In a small voice, Trudy asked, “Does he really give people ulcers?”

  “No,” said Grant. “Migraines.”

  “Oh, come on,” Trudy objected. “What’s he really like? Really.”

  “You’ll find out.”

  Trudy frowned slightly. “He … he’s sort of weird, in a way, isn’t he?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Obviously ill at ease, Trudy said, “The way he looks at a person. Staring the way he does. Like he’s looking right through me.”

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “He’s blind. Totally blind.”

  Trudy looked shocked.

  “Some accident back Earthside. Burned out his retinas. He can’t see at all.”

  “But he does see!” Trudy insisted. Then she added, “Doesn’t he?”

  “In a way,” said Grant. “They did some fancy brain surgery on him, linked the regions in his brain that handle sound and touch to his visual cortex. He sees through his ears and his fingers.”

  It was clear from the expression on her face that Trudy didn’t understand.

  “Look,” Grant explained. “His visual cortex—the part of the brain that forms visual images—it wasn’t damaged. Only his eyes. So the surgeons rewired his brain so that what he hears, and what he touches, form visual images in his brain.”

  “Couldn’t they grow new retinas for his eyes?” she asked. “You know, with stem cells?”

  Grant shook his head. “From what I heard, they tried but it didn’t work. That’s when the
y went to the surgery and rewired his brain.”

  “My gosh.”

  “Maybe he just got himself into the clutches of a neurosurgeon who needed a guinea pig,” Grant said. “It happens.”

  “The poor man,” said Trudy softly. Then she added, “But he does see … kind of.”

  “Whatever he touches or hears forms a visual image for him,” Grant said. “I don’t think he sees the same image of you, for example, that I see. But he sees something. He sees well enough to function and get around pretty well. But as far as his eyes are concerned, he’s blind as a bat.”

  SELENE

  It was a shocked and thoughtful Trudy Yost who left the spaceport waiting area and headed toward the control center, where she could monitor the crew that was unloading the latest batch of antennas for the Cyclops radio telescope site.

  Grant wondered if he’d been too brutally frank with her about Uhlrich’s condition. What the hell, he told himself, she’d find out about it one way or the other. The sooner the better. Help her to deal with the Ulcer.

  The lobber was being refueled with powdered aluminum and liquid oxygen propellants, both elements gleaned from the lunar regolith at Selene by specialized nanomachines. Within half an hour Grant was cleared to board the rocket for its return flight to Selene.

  * * *

  After so many months at Farside, Selene felt like a metropolis. There was an automated tractor to whisk passengers through the tunnel that connected the Armstrong spaceport, out on the floor of the giant Crater Alphonsus, to Selene proper, more than a kilometer away.

  As soon as he cleared the debarkation desk—manned by a smiling young woman in a coral red uniform—Grant phoned Dr. Cardenas to tell her he’d arrived.

  “Good,” she said. In the pocketphone’s minuscule screen her face looked somber, almost grim. “Come on over to my lab.” And she abruptly clicked off.

  Leaving his travelbag at the debarkation center, Grant used his pocketphone to find his way through Selene’s maze of corridors, although there were maps on voice-activated wall screens at every intersection. Dr. Cardenas’s nanotechnology laboratory was on the topmost of Selene’s four levels of living and working spaces, at the end of a winding side corridor. The corridor walls were blank, bare rock, and the low ceiling was lined with long strips of lights that seemed to be turned off.