Farside

by Ben Bova

  “Ol’ man river…” Phillips began to sing, in a wavering baritone. Despite himself, Grant laughed at the guy’s sense of humor. Slave labor.

  But while they watched the robots patiently, efficiently, erect the roof, Grant’s thoughts wandered to the radiation invisibly sleeting down from all those distant stars. How much damage is it doing to us? he wondered. Phillips hadn’t been outside in two weeks, he knew. Safety regulations. You were only allowed so much time out on the surface per month. Grant regularly bent those rules, while Dr. Kapstein sold him the medications he needed to keep going.

  Well, he said to himself, we’ll see if Cardenas’s little bugs do their job. Just like Mike and Ike: do your work and don’t complain.

  What if the nanos don’t work? Grant asked himself.

  The answer came to him immediately. If they don’t work I’m a dead man.

  ON THE ROAD

  “We oughtta start back,” Phillips said.

  Grant lifted his arm and peered at the watch set into the pad on his wrist. Christ, we’ve been out here more than six hours, he realized. The roof was half finished and the robots were working away industriously.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Looks like the ’bots are working okay.”

  “Josie’s keeping an eye on them,” said Phillips as he headed for the tractor.

  Josie’s off-shift now, Grant knew. He tried to remember who was next on the duty roster for the monitoring task. Not Oberman, he told himself. I don’t care how shorthanded we are, I won’t let Nate get his hands on anything important. Keep him on the administrative side; let him do a clerk’s job.

  “You coming, or you gonna stay out here permanently?” Phillips called.

  “I’m coming.”

  Grant turned away from the busy robots. From here on they would be operated remotely, from the teleoperations center. Once the roof was finished their next task would be to erect a shelter for humans who visited the site and then construct a frame for the mirror that the nanos would build. There would be no need for humans to come to Mendeleev for many weeks. Unless something went wrong.

  Phillips was in the driver’s seat as Grant climbed into the tractor’s cab and sealed its hatch. Together they went through the tractor’s abbreviated checklist, then Phillips leaned a gloved finger on the start button. Grant heard nothing in the lunar vacuum, of course, but he felt the vibration of the tractor’s electric motor starting up.

  “We should’ve flown out here on a hopper,” Phillips said as the vehicle lurched into motion. “Make it in less than an hour instead of a frickin’ two-day trip, one way.”

  Grant knew that the flimsy little rocket hoppers couldn’t carry the cargo that they’d just delivered to the site, and he knew that Phillips knew. He was just griping for the sake of something to gripe about.

  Over the ringwall they trundled, then out onto the pockmarked plain, heading back to the Sea of Moscow and the Farside facility. After four days out in the open, Farside’s bare-bones accommodations would look like a five-star hotel, Grant thought.

  They followed the smoothed road across the barren plain. Grant thought the undulating ground looked like the waves of an ocean, only frozen solid. It was liquid once, he reminded himself. Molten lava, a few billion years ago. Now it was an empty expanse of dust-covered rock, pockmarked by craters of all sizes, from fingerpokes to depressions so deep and rugged that you didn’t dare drive a tractor into them.

  Half dozing, Grant recalled that some of those deeper craters were partially filled with dust. Drive into one of them and you sink into the dust, like a ship sinking in the sea. He remembered reading a story once about a place in India where a guy got himself stuck in a dust-covered depression and couldn’t crawl out. Was it by Kipling? he asked himself.

  Phillips’s voice jarred him into wakefulness.

  “Yeah, we’re moving along, no sweat,” Phillips was saying. Grant realized he was talking to the excursion monitor, back at Farside. “Gonna stop for a meal in a few minutes.”

  “Copy you stopping for meal,” came the voice of one of the technicians. Grant recognized Harvey Henderson’s sweet, almost girlish tenor.

  “What’re you doing on the monitor console, Harvey?” Grant asked.

  “Just filling in for a few minutes while Rava takes a leak, boss.”

  “How’s the foot?”

  “Just fine. I’m gonna take the new kid out dancing later tonight.”

  Grant knew Harvey was joking, but he also knew that “the new kid” he mentioned was Trudy Yost and his brows knitted at the idea.

  “Time to stop and get something to eat,” Phillips said, tapping a gloved finger on the mission schedule displayed on the control console’s central screen.

  Grant nodded, then realized that Phillips couldn’t see it inside his helmet and said, “Right.”

  Phillips actually pulled the tractor over to one side of the road. Grant smiled inwardly. Sherry doesn’t want to block traffic, he thought.

  They double-checked the seals of the cab’s hatches before removing their helmets. Grant’s nose wrinkled at the body odors. God, we smell like a couple of cesspools, he thought. But he said nothing as he turned awkwardly in his seat and reached into the storage bin at the back of the cab. They ate prepackaged sandwiches, chilled and soggy from refrigeration, and drank an energy-enriched fruit drink.

  Then Phillips said, “I’ve gotta take a crap.”

  Grant dreaded using the toilets built into the cab’s seats. In their space suits, it was a laborious and degrading ordeal: sealing the suit’s bottom to the toilet hatch, opening both, checking the readouts to make certain the connection was secure, and then finally doing your business. With your crewmate sitting beside you. Grant took the diphenoxylate pills that Kapstein offered and tried to avoid the whole ugly business. The pills made him thirsty as hell, but using the relief tube was a lot easier and much less humiliating than working the trapdoor.

  Once he was finished and buttoned up again, Phillips said, “I’m gonna flake out, Grant.” He started to crank his seat back as far as it would go.

  “Change your air tank first and then put the helmet back on,” Grant said.

  “I got enough air—”

  “Do it now,” Grant said.

  Phillips looked unhappy about it, but he gave in without a complaint. It was awkward sitting in the tractor’s seats, but they helped each other to replace the air tanks on their backpacks, then fastened their helmets back in place.

  “Now you can sleep in peace and the safety police will be happy with us,” Grant said.

  “By the book,” Phillips grumbled.

  “By the book,” Grant echoed. It’s always best to go by the book, he thought. But then he added, Almost always.

  Phillips slept like a dead man for more than five hours while Grant drove the tractor across the empty lunar wasteland. Rocks, rocks, and more rocks, some as big as a house, most of them the size of pebbles. Sinuous rilles snaking across the dusty ground. Craters. He thought about putting the tractor on autopilot and taking a quick nap, but fought off his drowsiness and doggedly kept control of the vehicle. Phillips woke up at last, popped his helmet to take a few sips from the thermos of coffee they’d brought with them, then took over the driving and allowed Grant to nod off.

  He slept well enough, although he dreamed of being a little boy in South Africa once again and sailing a raft out into the tossing waves of the ocean. The raft capsized and he was floundering in the freezing water when he suddenly woke up.

  Phillips was muttering as he bent over the tractor’s control panel, his thumb jammed against the starter button.

  “Sonofabitch died on me,” he said to Grant.

  FAILURE MODE

  “Died?” Grant mumbled, still thick-headed with sleep.

  “Motor just crapped out, pooey, just like that.”

  Grant couldn’t see Phillips’s face inside his helmet but the tone of his voice had an edge of fear in it.

  “Is it the m
otor or the generator?” Grant asked.

  The tractor’s electric motor drew its power from a miniaturized nuclear generator, buried inside heavy lead shielding in the belly of the vehicle.

  “How the hell should I know?” Phillips snapped. “It just happened.”

  “Check the diagnostics.”

  Together they ran through the diagnostics program.

  “Engineer’s hell,” Phillips muttered as they stared at the display screens. “Everything checks but nothing works.”

  “Life support’s still working,” Grant muttered. “Radio’s still powered up. The batteries aren’t discharging.”

  “So the generator’s still putting out kilowatts. It’s not the generator.”

  “Must be the motor.”

  “Better call Farside, get ’em to send a hopper out for us.”

  “Not yet,” said Grant. “I’ll go out and open her up, see what’s going on.”

  “We’re gonna need a hopper,” Phillips insisted.

  “Just tell Farside we’ve got a problem and we’re trying to fix it.”

  “But—”

  “Keep cool, Sherry. No need to panic.” But Grant added silently, Not yet.

  As his partner sent a message to the excursion monitor, Grant opened the hatch on his side of the cab and jumped down in lunar slow motion to the ground. Like most of the Moon’s surface, it was covered with several centimeters of soft, talc-like dust. Almost like a sandy beach, back Earthside. Grant walked to the rear of the tractor and as he opened the motor’s hatch he glanced back at the bootprints he’d left in the dust. They were bright and new-looking compared to the dust-gray surface of the ground.

  The motor looked all right to his eyes. But it wasn’t working. Grant couldn’t see any obvious damage. We haven’t been hit by a micrometeor, he thought, remembering that last year a hopper had been crippled while sitting at the edge of Farside’s spaceport by a chip-sized meteor that had hit its control computer as accurately as a sniper’s bullet.

  It’s got to be something, Grant said to himself as he bent over in his unwieldy space suit to examine the motor’s magnet coils more closely. They were superconductors, encased in metal dewars that held liquid nitrogen.

  The pressure gage on the stator coil’s dewar read zero. Grant blinked with surprise. All the nitrogen’s gone? How could that happen? He could see no obvious damage to the dewar, no puncture or leaking seal.

  Without the nitrogen coolant the magnet loses its superconductivity. Then it shuts down. Either that or it dumps all its energy into an explosion. We’re damned lucky the magnet didn’t blow up.

  The nuke was still generating electricity, that’s why the life-support equipment and the radio were still working.

  Okay, Grant said to himself as he plodded back to the cab. We know what’s wrong. Now we’ve got to fix it. And then figure out why it went wrong.

  Phillips was still on the radio, chattering nervously with the excursion monitor back at Farside, when Grant climbed back into the cabin.

  “Yeah, the motor’s dead,” Phillips was saying. “How many times do I have to tell you guys?”

  Sherry sounds scared, Grant thought. Normal reaction. I guess I am too, a little.

  “This is Grant,” he said as he settled into his seat. “Nitrogen coolant on the motor’s main coil is gone. We’ll need a replacement dewar.”

  He sensed Phillips staring at him from inside his bubble helmet.

  “Replacement dewar, yes,” the monitor’s voice replied. Grant recognized Rava Sudarthee, the Hindu computer analyst, taking her turn at the excursion center. “We’ll send it out on a hopper. It should get to you in one hour or less.”

  “Send a replacement crew with it,” said Phillips.

  “Negative,” Grant snapped. “Once we get the motor running we can drive this buggy back home.”

  Phillips said nothing, but Grant could feel the fear-driven anger radiating from him.

  Once he cut the connection to Rava, Grant said, “There’s no need for a replacement crew, Sherry. We can drive back home once we get the dewar replaced.”

  “Says you,” Phillips muttered.

  Grant drew in a breath and thought it over. Sherry’s scared. He wants out. Maybe I should be scared too, but it’s my responsibility. I can’t leave this to somebody else. It’s my responsibility.

  “Tell you what, Sherry,” he said. “You go back with the hopper. I’ll drive back to Farside.”

  “You know damned well you can’t go alone; the safety regs require two people.”

  Pursing his lips before replying, Grant said, “Okay, tell Rava to send Harvey along on the hopper. You can go back and Harvey’ll keep me company on the drive home.”

  Phillips hesitated only a heartbeat. “Okay, fine.” Then he added, “Uh … thanks, Grant.”

  * * *

  McClintock was waiting for Grant at the airlock. The instant Grant stepped through the inner hatch and began unfastening his helmet McClintock demanded, “What the hell happened out there?”

  Before Grant could begin to explain, McClintock’s expression went to disgust. “Good god! Go take a shower, for pity’s sake.”

  Grant saw that even though McClintock was wearing ordinary gray coveralls, like almost everyone at Farside, on him the coveralls looked somehow a cut above anyone else’s: crisper, newer, finer.

  Tightly, Grant replied, “Shower. Right.”

  “Then come straight to my office,” McClintock said to Grant’s retreating back.

  He’s just as bad as the Ulcer, Grant thought. Another pain in the ass.

  After showering and changing, though, Grant went not to McClintock’s office but to the maintenance center. It was little more than a scruffy workshop where technicians labored over various pieces of equipment, trying to keep them all in working order. Most of them knew that their work meant the difference between life and death outside on the Moon’s harsh surface.

  Grant went to the workbench where two of the technicians were bending over the dewar from his tractor’s motor.

  “So why’d it go dry?” he asked.

  Toshio Aichi looked up from the dewar. He was the best maintenance tech among Grant’s people, unsmilingly serious. His face was lean, sallow, with hollow cheeks and an unruly mop of straight black hair going every which way. Despite his scarecrow frame, Toshio could out-eat any of the technicians, and often won bets against newcomers about who could stow away the most chow in the least time.

  The dewar rested on the workbench, its cylindrical body split down its middle, its inner layers of insulation open to inspection.

  “Pinhole leak,” Toshio said. “Microscopic.”

  Grant looked down at the dewar.

  “You can’t see it with the naked eye,” Toshio told him. “We had to scan it with the laser probe to find the sucker.”

  “That small?”

  “Nanometer sized,” said the other technician, Delos Zacharias. He was physically Toshio’s opposite: a chubby, apple-cheeked kid, with an eternally sunny disposition.

  “That small,” Grant repeated.

  “Plenty big enough for nitrogen molecules to sneak through,” said Toshio. “The pinhole must have looked like the main gate of the Imperial Palace, to them.”

  “How come the coil didn’t explode?” Grant asked.

  Zacharias jumped in. “The enn-two escaped slowly enough so that the coil shut down. It wasn’t a rapid loss. The coil didn’t develop a hot spot. The whole assembly warmed up gradually and once it passed its critical temperature it stopped being superconducting and just shut itself down.”

  Grant looked from the empty dewar to the two technicians. “I guess we were pretty lucky, then.”

  Almost cheerfully, Zacharias said, “Actually, the system worked the way it was designed to, even in failure mode.”

  Toshio was more restrained. “You were indeed pretty damned lucky, Grant. A slightly bigger leak, a more rapid loss of coolant, and the coil could have gone off like a b
omb.”

  Zacharias disagreed. “There’s not that much energy in the coil—”

  “There’s enough to blow off the rear end of the tractor, rupture the cab, and shred the drivers with shrapnel,” Toshio insisted.

  Zacharias’s round face looked more like a disappointed little boy’s than a serious technician’s. “Oh, well, yeah,” he admitted. “Maybe so.”

  MCCLINTOCK’S OFFICE

  “How long does it take you to shower?” McClintock demanded as Grant stepped into his office.

  Uhlrich had given McClintock the office next to his own. Or, Grant wondered, did McClintock arrange things this way for himself? Grant still didn’t understand what McClintock was doing at Farside, or why Uhlrich tolerated the man. He wasn’t an astronomer, wasn’t a scientist or engineer of any stripe. All he seemed to be doing was getting in the way of the real work, adding another layer of bullshit to Uhlrich’s little empire.

  McClintock sat behind his standard-issue metal desk without asking Grant to take one of the curved plastic chairs in front of it.

  Staying on his feet, Grant said, “I stopped off at the maintenance center to see what they’d found out about the failed dewar.”

  “And?”

  “Pinhole leak. The nitrogen drained out and the coil went normal.”

  “Normal?”

  “Lost its superconductivity. We were lucky it didn’t explode.”

  McClintock leaned back in his swivel chair and fell silent. Grant thought he was a handsome guy, video-star looks, but there wasn’t much going on inside his head.

  “How could the dingus get a pinhole leak?” he asked at last.

  Grant shrugged. “Beats me.”

  “Maybe you should check all the other dewars, make certain they haven’t developed any leaks.”

  Grant’s estimation of the man went up a notch. “Good idea,” he said. “I’ll get right on it.”