Come In, Collins (Riddled Space Book 2)

by Bill Patterson

  “I told you, he's a manipulator. You just said so yourself.”

  “But the manipulation, if that's what you want to call it, is for the common good.”

  “As defined by him,” said Marcel, arm deep in a tube of his own, swabbing out the muck. “Who made him king, anyway?”

  “Well, the UN, for one. He is the Chief Engineer assigned to this station. He was the one who made all the ShelterCans that saved our lives.”

  “Yeah, saved for slow death at his hands.”

  Irma shook her head. “You give him too much credit, and then not enough. All I know is that we'd be long dead without McCrary. That doesn't make us his robots, though, and I thank you for that. He does have to explain to everyone why we're to work on dangerous projects for him, whereas he used to just order them done.”

  “Yes. It's a change, but it's not enough.”

  “Just what do you want, Marcel? Do you want to wave the baton on the Moon?”

  “Yes. No. I'm not sure. Sometimes, I think it's a great idea, other times, I'm horrified by the responsibility. How about...a place at the table? Right now, we're being lorded over by a UN tin-hat while the real Commander is locked away in Sick Bay. I wonder just how bad off Commander Lee really is. Maybe McCrary has him doped to the gills just so he can rule. That just proves it, nobody is safe around that maniac.”

  “Oh, Marcel, really.”

  “Don't 'oh, really' me. You know he's a menace. I think that's what I'll demand next, a surprise visit to Sick Bay and the good Commander Lee. I bet the man is doing the Thorazine shuffle, six ways ‘til Sunday.”

  ***

  “I'm surprised it took him this long,” McCrary said, when Peter Brinker told him that Marcel wanted to speak at the next sunrise meeting, subject not specified. “Besides him and this Huertas woman, how many others are in the conspiracy?”

  “Conspiracy?” said Brinker. “Isn't that a bit harsh?”

  “Not really. He's been agitating ever since that first cafeteria meeting. I don't know quite what he wants, but he is after something. Power, but not the actual responsibility. I see his type every time I had to go to the UN—hordes of people whose main ability is telling their fellow man how to behave, what to do, and where to live. When their ideas fail, it's not their fault—the victim just didn't implement them the right way.”

  McCrary warmed to his topic, standing back from his worksurface, folding his hands in front of him. All he needed was a marker and a whiteboard to be the perfect image of a professor.

  “People like Mr. Bossenhagen are legion. Their talents are not used to make anything faster, or more economical, or to better their fellow man. No, they use their gifts and talents for coercion, or to make some kind of new law to stymie those who are better than they are. It is amazing that humans have been able to progress at all while these parasites hold them back.”

  McCrary's eyes drifted to the ceiling of the compartment. “I expect him to call for Commander Lee to put in some kind of public appearance, or to let Mr. Bossenhagen examine him, even though Bossenhagen has no medical training. I better get the doctor to think about how to keep the Commander alive when this thumb-fingered idiot decides that Lee has to live outside Sick Bay 'so that the drugs can wear off.'“

  “You're serious, aren't you?”

  “Not kidding. Ten gets you twenty that's what he'll demand at the next sunrise meeting.”

  “But it won't work.”

  “Nope. I'll have Lee at the meeting, and ask Bossenhagen if he wants to take him home for a few days.”

  “Sometimes I wonder, boss.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Bossenhagen calls you an evil genius. I bet if you had Lee prepped and waiting at the meeting, he would be convinced you are one. May I make a recommendation? Make believe you are caught by surprise, and let him go see Commander Lee just as he is, no prepping.”

  McCrary pounded one fist into the other hand. “Grrr. That smacks of deceit. You know how I feel about that.”

  “If we were to hand Lee over to him on the stage, he will believe that we have him doped up on something and hypnotized to give the right answer. He will never believe us. However, if you were to be 'forced' into letting Lee go, unprepared, then Bossenhagen will believe he put one over on us, and believe whatever Lee tells him. It is for the higher good.”

  McCrary stared at Brinker with troubled eyes. “All my life, I have stuck to the truth as the easiest, most trouble-free way through life. This faking that I am surprised, this deception, this, this lying-for-the-greater-good stuff, is how politicians are sucked into the webs of deceit that dog them forever. I hate this, I hate this.”

  Brinker sighed. “I'll do it for you.”

  McCrary's face grew a dark red. “No! That is one thing I refuse to do—have others do my dirty work. If there is some evil that must be done, for whatever reason, it will be me who does it, not one of my crew.”

  Brinker nodded. This is why people followed McCrary. The man was totally inspirational.

  “I have one last question, sir. Why have you never bucked for command?”

  McCrary cracked one of his rare smiles. “Think about it, Brinker. Command. Budget meetings. Hassles. Endless second-guessing by grounded civilians with swivel-chair spread. Pfhui! As Chief Engineer, I'm spared all of that, and I get to do what I love, without having to lie, or be deceptive, or hide the truth from anyone. I do this job right now because a) it must be done, b) I know it will get done correctly if I do it, but most importantly, c) it is my duty as part of my UNSOC oath to assume command. You did a fine job, Brinker, make no mistake about it. But as soon as Commander Lee is better, he's going to get the full load, and I go back to getting the Collins back up to the best possible shape I can make her.”

  Temperature, and Heat

  UNSOC Lunar Colony Michael Collins, July 18 2082, 1244 EDT

  The melting of the thorium salt in the reactor was not a simple thing. First, engineers laid piping through the meteor shield into the Mighty Thor reactor. Next, they bolted a large flat-bottomed iron tun onto the reactor frames and screwed the pipes into it. Frank Maleski was loading chunks of magnesium metal into the tun from a bin wheeled over from The Works. When everything was ready, Horst gave the order, and the Moondogs focused solar mirrors into the iron tun, directing the blazing sun onto the magnesium.

  Frank watched the first few chunks melt and thought about the complicated reactor piping, blocked with solid, frozen salt.

  The idea was simple: melt the magnesium, direct it down the iron piping into Mighty Thor, circulate the melted metal through the core. Since the melting point of magnesium was far higher than that of the thorium salt, the salt would melt. When the salts were sufficiently liquid, they would be pumped into the reaction chamber. At that point, the nuclear reaction would do the rest—heating the remaining salt up to the optimum temperature. Then the engineers would dismantle and remove the magnesium melters and extra piping and the liquid magnesium itself would be removed from the salt loop at the xenon spargers.

  Frank suspected that the liquid magnesium just didn't have the heat capacity to melt all of the salt. It was the difference between air and water at forty Celsius. Earth deserts easily got up to forty in the summer, and people could live and work in air that hot. But to run a shower that temperature and one risked getting blisters from scalding. Water could carry more heat than air, even at the same temperature.

  “We're trying to clear these pipes with a hair dryer,” he muttered as he adjusted a solar mirror on the swiftly melting magnesium.

  It was simple in concept, but the implementation problems were endless. Liquid magnesium was hotter than the salt, but the salt had a higher heat capacity than the magnesium, so the salt remained a slushy mixture that clogged the reaction pipes. The time passed swiftly, and at the end of two weeks, the weary workers were back inside the Collins with little to show for their work but a pile of cooling magnesium and a blob of swiftly cooling thorium salts. Simp
le thermodynamics had defeated them—the ability to melt the thorium salt and keep it molten was not going to happen using liquid magnesium.

  The sun was nearly set, and McCrary was huddled with Horst and one of the reactor engineers.

  “How in the blue blazes did they start this thing up in the first place?” he asked.

  Horst looked at the engineer, Vito VonShaick, who was running his hands through his thinning hair. He had slept little in the previous two weeks, trying desperately to get the reactor pipes cleared so that the fluid salt could flow through the core.

  “When the reactor was first started up, everything was empty. There weren’t any pipes solid with fused salt! You can't just rip out the current pipes, either. They're made from a very special alloy that was lifted straight up from Earth. Hastalloy just isn't something that can be made on the Moon.”

  “OK, so now what?” asked McCrary. “You've had two weeks to go through the reactor. Shut it down. What needs to be reset, and how do we get it up and running again?”

  “The biggest problem is the lack of heat. Mighty Thor is in the middle of a whole bunch of shielding. That means that solar heat just doesn't get in there. We have to somehow heat up the entire insides of the reactor to thaw out the salt and get everything running. If we were on Earth, I'd recommend we use propane burners on the critical pipes or, failing that, some kind of resistance heating, like heat tape, on the pipes.”

  “What prevents that here?” asked Horst. He knew what McCrary was doing, having been the subject McCrary's Socratic problem solving process often enough.

  “No propane, and we'd be insane to burn any we found. No kind of combustion would work, really. We have no volatile fuel other than hydrogen, and I for one do not want to burn what might be the last of our water. The only other possibility is burning aluminum or magnesium, and that's just crazy—it would be so hot as to damage the pipes.

  “As for resistance heating, we're right up against the problem of power generation. We don't have any other generation capacity other than Mighty Thor, not in the size we need.” The reactor engineer hung his head, defeated.

  Horst cleared his throat gently. “There might be a way.” When the Vito looked up, he continued. “Remember the mirrors to melt the magnesium? Well, they're still there. Tell me, when the molten salt goes into the heat exchanger, what's on the other side?”

  “An electrical generator.”

  “We've been trying to get the salt melted to get the core free so that we can get Mighty Thor running to get really hot fluid salt to run the heat exchanger so we can get electricity. Question: what if, instead of all that, we just melted the salt in the solar tun and pumped it through the heat exchanger to run the generator? Wouldn't that crank out enough electricity to run your resistance heating?”

  Vito looked lost in thought. Both of the other engineers recognized the gaze, and left him to his thought processes. Never idle themselves, they turned to the only operating data node and began pulling out the specs on the heat exchanger.

  “It all depends on the heat flux,” said Vito. “If we can replace the quantity of heat input into the heat exchanger, then the output specs on the downstream generator should be enough to power the resistance heaters.”

  “Assuming full output is devoted to you, how long before the entire thorium salt loop is liquid?” asked McCrary. “I know you can't give me promises right now, but a ballpark estimate is enough.”

  “Get those toaster wires glowing cherry red, and it won't be more than a day,” mused Vito. “That would damage the pipes badly. Turn it down to just over the operating temperature, and it won't be more than a week,” he said. “That's a lot of resistance wiring, though. I don't think we have enough in stock.”

  “Prioritize it,” said McCrary. “Aren't there functions that can be cut out of the loop, like the xenon off-gassing section?”

  Vito VonShaick looked at the Chief Engineer with respect. “You know your stuff,” he said unthinkingly. “Yes, I can do a section-by-section reheat.” He stood up. “I have a lot of work to do this dark cycle to be ready when the sun comes up!” He nodded and raced out the door.

  “Now, why didn't we do it this way in the first place?” wondered Horst.

  “Because we focused on the wrong thing,” said McCrary. “Let that be a lesson to us—step back and think about things first. Now, let's go over the power figures. We have to make sure we live to see the dawn.”

  Heat & Resistance

  UNSOC Lunar Colony Michael Collins, August 6 2082, 1601 EDT

  The second Sunrise Meeting was progressing well, Horst thought. McCrary could profess to hate being in command (Brinker had back-briefed him at McCrary's insistence), but the man had a flair for it. Horst wondered sometimes if he saw individuals as little machines. In any case, the mutineers, as he thought of Marcel and his adherents, seemed to have backed off on their view of the entire expedition as doomed.

  “Lastly, this sun cycle, we will begin the rehabilitation of The Works,” began McCrary. “So much of our ability to not just survive but thrive as an independent installation is the result of The Works. Some aspects will be less important than others. For example, I take it as a given that the Chaffee and every other spacecraft has been destroyed. Thus, the need to create huge quantities of LOX will no longer dominate our efforts. However, I believe that we will become the key to Earth's return to space. Just how this is to come about is not entirely clear to me, but it is one of those things that I feel in my bones.

  “But enough of the destiny vision. Right now, we are still in the throes of survival. First, Mighty Thor must get restarted this cycle, or the reasons behind its shutdown known and fixed. Next, the oxygen furnace must be restarted, but at the level we need. Third, all of the scrap we have here must be separated, re-melted, and recast into useful objects. It won't be done all at once, and it won't be completed at the end of this solar cycle, either. As a famous man once said, 'This is not the end, this is not the beginning. But, perhaps, it is the end of the beginning.' If Mighty Thor is restarted, then we will be on our way to not just hanging on by our fingernails but moving on to grasping the last rung with both hands.

  “Are there any questions?”

  “Where's Commander Lee?” asked Marcel. “You haven't said anything about him. I think you have him doped up just so you can do whatever you want.”

  McCrary sighed. “What do you propose, Mr. Bossenhagen?”

  “I want to see him, right now.”

  “The doctor has repeatedly told me that he is not to be moved, that he is in a delicate state that requires constant care. In his condition, he could easily degenerate into a vegetative state.”

  “Oh, you'd love that, wouldn't you, McCrary? Then there's be nothing to stop you.”

  “Stop me from what, Mr. Bossenhagen?”

  “Ruling the Moon, and maybe even Earth.”

  “I have no desire to rule.”

  “Yes you do. And I am here to stop you.”

  “I see. I could tell you that Command is slowing me down from the rehabilitation of the Collins, but I see that you won't believe that. So, given that Commander Lee really should not be moved, how do you propose to determine that he is not in my thrall?”

  “I want to see him immediately.”

  “That can be arranged.”

  “No. No 'arrangements'. I want to go see him, right now. I don't want any cover-ups or arrangements. Immediately, before anyone can change anything.” Marcel stood. “I am going to Sick Bay to see him. Don't try to stop me.”

  McCrary motioned to Peter Brinker. “Please escort Mr. Bossenhagen to Sick Bay and bring him to Commander Lee.”

  The two of them left. At the doorway, Marcel whirled and faced the group.

  “I am perfectly healthy. If I am suddenly restricted to Sick Bay, then you will know this dictator has had me locked up!”

  After the door closed, the mood of the assembly turned ugly.

  “Boss, how about we shut that g
uy up?” called one of the Moondogs. Other mutterings agreed with this sentiment. Marcel's adherents glared but kept quiet.

  “Nobody will lay a hand on Mr. Bossenhagen. He might be rude, inhospitable, and holding some strange interpretations of events. None of those warrant physical action. I hereby order that he be left alone. Is that clear?” The growling subsided.

  “That's better,” said McCrary. He leaned back and sighed audibly. “Look, everyone reacts differently to stress. Some people become selfless martyrs, others turn apathetic, and some crack under pressure. Most of us fall somewhere in between. Mr. Bossenhagen may have different conclusions from the same data, but I suspect there are others here who might be thinking the same way that Mr. Bossenhagen does, but silently. It is to those that I address this message. Do not mistake my accommodations to Mr. Bossenhagen as carte blanche to act badly. If there is sabotage or other overt acts that affect our survival, you will be hunted down and stopped with impartiality, swiftness, and complete lack of mercy. Until then, I believe that I owe everyone all the information and data that I have. I would ask if everyone understands me, but I suspect nobody will want to raise their hand.

  “For the rest of us. Millions have died so that the freedom of speech reigns supreme. That freedom shall reign on this installation until it directly imperils our survival. So far, I do not believe it does, and I do not foresee how it can in the near future. Those that are fellow travelers with Mr. Bossenhagen will be left strictly alone. If they force their arguments on you, you may defend your stance, but it will not come to blows. Is that clear?”

  This time, the room roared, “Clear!”

  ***

  To say that Commander Lee woke up would be to put too sharp a border on it. It was more accurate to say that he emerged to consciousness slowly, like a figure in a fog, from a hazy dream state shot through with intense pain, to the reality of a dimly lit room, hazy thoughts, and a splitting headache.

  Jeng Wo Lee had a vague grip on reality. He grasped his brain was damaged. He knew that there was some kind of disaster on the Moon. He understood the crew were in a period of severe crisis. Beyond that, there was only the sense that things were getting better slowly, both for himself and for the Collins. Beyond that, the formation of discrete memories was spotty.