Farside

by Ben Bova

Palmquist smiled genially. “I look forward to seeing the work you are doing, Professor Uhlrich.”

  As Grant walked with Trudy and the other three men along the corridor to Uhlrich’s office he was amused to see the Ulcer fawning all over the Swede. But when they reached his office door, Uhlrich turned to Grant and said, “Thank you for escorting Dr. Palmquist here, Mr. Simpson. You can return to your regular duties now.”

  Then the rest of them went into the office. Trudy glanced over her shoulder at Grant, looking surprised and concerned, but Uhlrich slid the door shut, leaving him standing alone in the empty corridor.

  Nodding to himself, Grant thought, Right. I’ll get back to work while you try to impress Palmquist. I’ll build what you need built and you work on getting your fucking Nobel.

  Feeling justifiably resentful, Grant headed toward the teleoperations center, which was where he did most of his work. There, and in his one-room quarters. Uhlrich had not assigned him a private office of his own.

  The teleoperations center was dim, shadowy, the only light in the chamber coming from the display screens of the consoles set against the far wall. A soft Cuban samba was purring from the overhead speakers. Josie Rivera was at one of the consoles, with narrow-eyed Nate Oberman sitting beside her.

  What’s he doing here? Grant asked silently, bristling at Oberman’s presence. He’s not on the tech staff anymore, we’re carrying him in administration until his contract’s up.

  What annoyed Grant most about Oberman was the guy’s snotty attitude. Nate could always get under Grant’s skin with just a few pointed barbs. Back in his ’roid rage days, Grant would have pounded Oberman’s face in. I would’ve sent him to the hospital, Grant thought. Or to the morgue.

  Dr. Kapstein was feeding Grant extra medications to control his steroid-induced fury, but nonetheless he had tried to keep as much distance from Oberman as possible. So it was only natural that when Uhlrich fired him, Oberman concluded that Grant had been angling for his job.

  “What’re you doing here, Nate?” he asked, trying to make his tone casual, noncombative.

  “Just visiting,” Oberman replied easily. “Got nothing much else to do.”

  Turning to Rivera, Grant asked, “What’s up, Josie?” as he slid the corridor door shut.

  Rivera swiveled her chair toward him and gave Grant a flashing smile. “Nothing much, boss,” she said. “It’s been pretty quiet around here lately.”

  “How’d your joyride to Selene go?” Oberman asked.

  Trying to ignore his snide tone, Grant replied, “I did what McClintock wanted; picked up this Swedish guy and brought him to Uhlrich. No sweat.”

  “You and Trudy Yost,” said Josie Rivera.

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Must be nice, taking a day off with a good-looking chick,” Oberman said.

  Before Grant could bristle, Rivera quickly asked, “Anything between you two?”

  Grant felt astounded. “Between … what’re you talking about?”

  With a knowing look, Rivera said, “Boy meets girl. It happens all the time.”

  “Come on, Josie,” Grant sputtered.

  Oberman asked Rivera, “He ever come on to you, Josie?”

  She shook her head, turning down the corners of her mouth in mock regret.

  “Maybe he’s gay,” said Oberman, with a malicious smirk.

  “I could straighten him out, I bet,” said Rivera.

  Grant remembered that he’d been attracted to Josie Rivera, with her friendly ways and generous figure. But he had made a decision not to get involved with any of the women at Farside. The place was too small, too inbred. A serious relationship, even a non-serious fling, could cause emotional fracture lines among the staff. Better to stay celibate, or go over to Selene for fun and games, Grant reminded himself. But it had been a long time since he’d had any fun and games.

  He didn’t know how to handle their bantering, so he decided to ignore it. “Now look, we’ve got a lot of serious work ahead of us.”

  But Oberman wouldn’t quit. “Work on who?”

  Grant gave him a withering look. “When’s your contract up, Nate? It can’t be soon enough.”

  Josie said, “Now boys…”

  But Oberman pointed a skinny finger at Grant and replied, “I’m leaving at the end of the month. And I’m getting a position in the IAA office at Selene. Whattaya think of that?”

  “Good,” said Grant, thinking, Anyplace but here.

  “Anita Halleck herself recommended me,” Oberman added, sneering.

  “And I thought she was supposed to be smart,” Grant said.

  “You think you’re better than me, don’t you?” Oberman growled.

  For the first time since Dr. Kapstein had started controlling his steroid dosage, Grant felt the urge to start punching.

  But he fought it down. “Forget it. We’ve got work to do.”

  WORK AGENDA

  “Serious work?” Josie asked, her teasing grin fading away.

  Pulling up one of the little wheeled chairs from the next console, Grant said, “We’ve got to lay out roads between here and Korolev and Gagarin.”

  “And improve the road to Mendeleev?” Rivera asked.

  “No, that won’t be necessary,” said Grant.

  Oberman huffed. “Hell, you couldn’t even get that mirror over the ringwall.”

  Again Grant fought the urge to smack the nasty little snot. Keeping his voice even, he told them, “We won’t be transporting mirrors. We’ll be hauling construction materials in regular tractors. No need to tow big mirror rigs.”

  “The mirrors are going to be built at the craters, then?” Rivera asked.

  “Right,” Grant replied. “By nanomachines.”

  Oberman whistled softly. “So you’ll be hauling nanobugs out to the three craters.”

  Grant nodded. “It’ll be easy to get the loads over the ringwall mountains and onto the sites for the telescopes.” Then he added, “Nanos are tiny little things.”

  “I just hope you don’t spill any of ’em,” Oberman said.

  “That won’t be a problem. If they’re exposed to ultraviolet light they’re disabled, and there’s plenty of UV in sunlight.”

  “Yeah, but if you’re moving them at night…”

  Rivera suggested, “Maybe we should schedule moving the nanos only during daylight hours.”

  Grant thought about it for a few seconds. “Makes sense, Josie. Probably unnecessary, but an extra safety precaution wouldn’t hurt.”

  “So how’re the bugs going to work once you’ve got ’em at the sites?” Oberman asked.

  “We build temporary roofs over each site. No big deal, just lightweight honeycomb metal sheets. That’ll protect the sites against incoming micrometeoroids as well as solar UV.”

  “And once the ’scopes are completed we can take down the coverings, right?”

  “Right,” said Grant. “The nanomachines’ work will be finished by then. They’ll be deactivated.”

  Oberman rubbed his long jaw as he asked, “You’re claiming that those nanobugs’ll produce mirrors shaped to the tolerances you need?”

  “Probably not. We might have to do some final polishing.”

  “That means hauling the measuring equipment to the craters,” Rivera said.

  “To Selene first,” Grant said. “We’ll have to check the demo mirror that Cardenas is building there.”

  “Yeah, but sooner or later you’ll have to lug the polishing equipment out to each one of the craters,” said Oberman. “Christ, you’ll have to haul the whole turntable from here to there. Three theres!”

  “Maybe,” Grant conceded. “But the turntable’s a lot more robust than the damned mirrors. Should be no sweat to haul it back and forth.”

  Oberman looked totally unconvinced.

  “That’s a lot of outdoor work,” Rivera said.

  “I know,” said Grant. “That’s why we’ve got to automate the work as much as possible. We need to adapt the robo
ts to do as much of the job as they can.”

  “Robots,” Oberman muttered. “You’ll wind up spending more time maintaining the damned robots than anything else.”

  “I’m going to put Harvey in charge of robot maintenance,” Grant told them. “His foot ought to be fine by the time we get started on this.”

  Josie nodded, accepting Grant’s decision. Oberman looked cynically doubtful.

  “Okay then,” Grant said. “Now, the first thing we need to do is get those roads scraped out.”

  * * *

  Once Grant had finished with Josie, he walked down to Farside’s little cafeteria. The place was nearly empty; dinner hour had long passed.

  As he stood before one of the food-dispensing machines, wondering which of the meager packaged meals he wanted to select, Trudy Yost came up beside him.

  “Hi,” he said, happily surprised. “I didn’t see you come in.”

  She gave him a grin. “You were studying the machine’s display as if your life depended on it.”

  He shrugged. “Well, it does, sort of. Don’t you think so?”

  “I guess so, if you put it that way.”

  “The Ulcer let you go?” Grant asked.

  “No way. I’m here to pick up meals for the four of us and bring them back to the prof’s office. We’re eating in there.”

  “Oh.”

  “The professor’s burying Dr. Palmquist with facts and figures,” Trudy said. “The poor guy’s eyes glazed over an hour ago but the prof is just plowing ahead, telling him how we’re gonna produce images of New Earth before anybody else can.”

  Grant banged one of the buttons at random and stooped down to grab the package that slid into the tray at the bottom of the machine.

  Her voice softening, Trudy said, “I’m sorry he cut you off like that.”

  He straightened up and looked into her gentle green eyes. “That’s okay. I’m used to it. I’m just a crummy engineer, far as he’s concerned. Dirt under my fingernails.”

  Trudy said, “You’re much more important than that, Grant.”

  “It’s nice of you to say so.”

  For a moment they stood facing each other, close enough to touch. Feeling awkward, almost like a teenager on his first date, Grant shifted his dinner package from one hand to the other.

  “Maybe we could have dinner together some time,” he heard himself say.

  Trudy smiled at him. “That’d be great.”

  “Uh, my quarters aren’t all that much, but I could microwave a meal for you. It’d be more private than the cafeteria here.”

  “I guess,” she said, a trifle uncertainly.

  “I’ve got some old movies, Hollywood classics. Or we could watch video from Selene.”

  “Sure,” said Trudy. “But right now I’ve got to get dinners for the professor, Mr. McClintock, and Dr. Palmquist.”

  “And yourself,” Grant added.

  She laughed. “Yep. And myself.” After a heartbeat’s pause, she said, “But I’ll look forward to dinner with you. Real soon.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Real soon.”

  CRATER MENDELEEV

  The weeks zipped past before Grant realized it. Palmquist returned to Selene, with Uhlrich falling all over himself to please the Swede and promising to send him the first images of New Earth that the Farside Observatory obtained.

  Grant’s days were long and busy, juggling the road-building work with planning the construction jobs that were needed at the three crater sites and coordinating Cardenas’s work on the sample mirror that her nanomachines were making at Selene.

  One of the tasks facing his team of engineers and technicians was to transport the materials for a protective roof to the Crater Mendeleev, 750 kilometers from the Farside facility. The load was too much for one of the short-range rocket hoppers that Farside kept on hand, and not big enough to warrant calling for a lobber mission from Selene. So Grant decided to send a tractor out to Mendeleev. And he decided to make the run himself.

  He was driving the tractor up the slumped, gentle slope of the mountains ringing Mendeleev crater, with one of his team, Sherrod Phillips, sitting beside him. They had driven continuously for more than twenty-six hours, taking turns sleeping in their space suits inside the tractor’s cramped cab.

  The road they had built here at Mendeleev had only a few switchbacks in it because the area Grant had picked to cross the ringwall was relatively low with an easy grade. We could have gotten that damned mirror up this mountain with no sweat, Grant told himself as he steered the tractor slowly along the smoothed road. If it hadn’t slid off the road back at Farside we could’ve gotten it up here and into Mendeleev okay.

  Yeah, a mocking voice in his head sneered. And if you’d put wings on the mirror you could’ve flown it here, wiseass.

  The two men were in their space suits even though the tractor’s cab was pressurized. It was enclosed with a thin metal roof and glassteel sides that gave them a layer of protection against the radiation out there in the lunar vacuum. Safety regulations insisted that they wear the protective suits, even though they could have ridden inside the cab in their shirtsleeves—in theory.

  It was still night, and would be for another week. The universe hung up in the dark sky, uncountable myriads of stars, hard cold points of light, unblinking. No Earth up there, no warmth or familiar comfort. The horizon was brutally near, a slash where the hard familiar world of lunar rock and dust ended like the edge of a cliff plunging into the infinite uncaring expanse of stars.

  Grant topped the ringwall mountain and started down the interior slope. In the distance, almost at the horizon, he could see the square, flat concrete foundation that had been laid out for the telescope mirror. It was his imagination, he knew, but the low slabs already looked old, worn, covered with lunar dust.

  Sherry Phillips was sitting in the tractor’s right-hand seat, encased in a bulky space suit. Grant couldn’t see his face through the tinted glassteel of his bubble helmet, but he heard the engineer say:

  “So whattaya think of this new kid?”

  “New kid?” Grant asked.

  “Yeah. The Ulcer’s new assistant. Trudy.”

  “She’s an astronomer.”

  “She’s a good-looker. Cute.”

  Grant knew that Phillips was married, but his wife was back Earthside with their two children. Phillips was a sharp engineer, a reliable man in the field, but possessed of a roving eye. Farside gossip claimed that he and Josie Rivera had had a fling several months back.

  “Forget it,” he told Phillips. “The Ulcer would have a stroke if you came on to her.”

  In his helmet speakers, he heard Phillips chuckle. “Hell, Grant, I wouldn’t tell the Ulcer about it. Or ask his permission, for that matter.”

  Grant shook his head. “Better stay clear of her. Don’t cause problems.”

  “Yeah. Maybe you’re right.” But Phillips didn’t sound convinced.

  Grant drove the tractor across the crater’s wide floor to the telescope site, then he and Phillips stepped out onto the dusty, rock-strewn ground. The tractor was carrying sheets of honeycomb metal that they would erect to form a roof over the foundation. It also carried a pair of slim, cylindrical-shaped robots that were supposed to do the actual construction work.

  “I’ll activate Mike and Ike,” said Phillips, walking around to the rear of the tractor. He was the robotics expert on Grant’s little team of engineers and technicians. Like almost all humans, he anthropomorphized the machines he worked with.

  Mike and Ike, Grant thought. What’ll he call the other pair, the ones we’re going to bring to Korolev? Punch and Judy?

  Using a handheld remote controller, Phillips stirred the robots to life and began checking them out while Grant set up the ramp they would roll down once they were ready to go to work.

  “Got a bad fuse on Ike,” Phillips muttered.

  Grant looked up at the tractor bed, where Phillips stood between the two shoulder-tall robots.

  �
�Dammit, those machines were checked out at Farside. How can they have a bad fuse?”

  He sensed Phillips trying to shrug inside his bulky space suit. “It happens, Grant. Murphy’s Law.”

  “Who did the checkout?” Grant demanded.

  “Dunno. You want to call back and get the file?”

  “Might as well.”

  While Phillips replaced the faulty fuse from the supply of spares they had carried with them, Grant called up the documentation on the robots’ checkout. The checkout had been done by Nate Oberman, filling in for the injured Harvey Henderson. Grant seethed. Who the hell let him do the checkout? That dumbass can’t even do a simple job without screwing it up. He just doesn’t care. He could get somebody killed and he just doesn’t give a damn about it. He can’t leave Farside soon enough.

  Phillips got both robots working and they rolled on their sturdy little trunions down the ramp, kicking up lazy clouds of dust as they moved to the tractor’s side and began unloading the honeycomb sheets with their long, spindly, many-jointed arms.

  Grant walked over to the concrete slabs of the foundation and began examining them with a handheld radar probe. Looks okay, he thought as he peered at the tiny screen’s display. No major cracks, everything within tolerances.

  “I’m putting them on their own,” Phillips reported.

  “Wait a minute,” said Grant. “Let me set up the linkage.”

  Using the keypad on the left wrist of his suit, Grant contacted Josie, back at Farside’s teleoperations center.

  “We’ve activated the robots,” he reported. “Putting them on autonomous mode now.”

  There was a barely noticeable half-second’s delay while his message was relayed from one of the communications satellites in low orbit.

  “Gotcha,” said Josie. “Signal’s coming in loud and clear.”

  Grant nodded inside his bubble helmet. “Okay, Jo. They’re your responsibility now. Anything exceeds nominal limits—”

  “I’ll shut them down and initiate the failure analysis program,” Josie said. “Don’t worry about it, boss. I’ve got ’em on my screen.”

  “Good.”

  The two men stepped away from the tractor and watched the robots methodically unload the honeycomb sheets and supporting aluminum beams. Then they began to assemble them into a gracefully curving roof that covered the foundation.