April 4: A Different Perspective

by Mackey Chandler

  Well, this is going to be fun, Chen decided. He never did work up the nerve to ask straight out, if Eddie was really Mafia.

  * * *

  "Do you think she is going to show up?" Frank wondered.

  "Oh sure. I don't think she'd ever consider needing to confirm she's coming. She's never had a job and likely has no idea how to relate to us. Certainly she never got taught anything useful like that in Earth schools. I do think she would let us know, or come by and tell us, if she wasn't going to be able to work."

  "I shouldn't expect too much," Frank decided. "Or get upset if she does something outrageous, like get herself a cup of tea and take a break with the customers waiting."

  "I can see her doing that easily, dear. It actually doesn't conflict all that much with the way we have run the shop ourselves. I've seen you get a coffee and kibitz with the customers when you don't have a task. Is she a high end employee, who would do something like that, or a cog who should make a show of being busy with make work, so we think we're getting something for our money?"

  "Well, no. You know I've always hated that kind of class foolishness."

  "Ah, then she is a high end employee. I'm glad we established that before she arrives."

  Lindsy showed up at the door just then. Dressed a little casually, but acceptable for her age, Cindy decided. It was even a few minutes before 1000, which was remarkable. It was obvious from her face she wasn't there to tell them she couldn't work. Cindy was relieved.

  "Good morning dear. I'm glad to see it went well with your parents. We thought it must have, when they didn't call and ask us any questions about the job, but we weren't really sure until you showed up."

  "Oh, I'd have stopped in to tell you if they wouldn't let me," Lindsy said surprised. "Mom had a fit that I was going to work on Saturday for some reason, but when my dad called he asked her exactly what she had planned, that I needed to be home, she couldn't come up with anything. I still don't know why she was upset."

  "Sometimes people are upset and even they don't know why," Frank advised. "Best to not argue most of the time, because they are just upset twice. I'm glad your dad helped you."

  "Do you have anything you want me to do yet?"

  Frank looked surprised, but Cindy jumped in ahead of him. "Not yet dear. Why don't you get a cup of tea and talk with us a bit? We'll tell you things to do as the day progresses and most of them you'll be able to see, like if the cloth trimmings pile up in the bin and need emptied. There are always little scraps and threads that get on the floor, so when you start to see them looking messy you can grab them or use the vacuum and tidy up. You can use your own judgment and do those sort of things without waiting for us to tell you, after you are aware of them."

  "OK. Thank you for the tea. Do your customers like to chat while they are waiting, or is it better to offer them some coffee and leave them alone?"

  "Now that is a very perceptive and difficult question," Cindy allowed. "Some of the older folks grew up on Earth back when chatty store clerks were viewed as irritating and as rising above their station. Others live alone and look forward to going out to shop, because they are lonely. Those welcome a chance to talk to anybody. You just need to learn to read people. That's a big part of retail. If you say a few words and get a irritated look and a one word reply, you know they want to be left alone. If they smile and start telling you stories, you know you have a talker."

  "And if you really need to go do something, you can always politely tell them you need to work," Frank pointed out. "They can get a cup of coffee and a kind word from us and are welcome to it, but they are principally here to have some clothing made," he pointed out.

  "I know just what you are talking about. We'd go visit my grandma when she was alive and my mom hardly had to say anything. Grandma had a week's worth of talking all stored up and it all just popped out as soon as we sat down. It's funny, if I called her on com it wasn't the same."

  "Yes, talking face to face has a different quality," Cindy agreed. "Ah, we got a live one." A customer wondered in, looking at the displays. Cindy went to greet her.

  * * *

  "I keep seeing that Oriental fellow, the one who is in line," April told Gunny. "He doesn't look Korean to me. I can't tell a lot of them apart. I worry about Chinese now, since the last assassination attempt, at least new Chinese I don't know. Could you find out who he is?"

  "I already know," Gunny told her from just a glance. "He is Chinese and he came up on the same shuttle as your buddy Papa-san. He's ex-Chinese intelligence and he is no longer in their good graces and can't go back. He's got a wife and kids here too, something I doubt a fellow here to assassinate you would bring along."

  "How do you know all that already?"

  "He meets with the security guys and I've worked with him already. He's OK. He's been augmented for speed and he's got good moves."

  "If he knows you, could you ask him to join us? I'd like to run some stuff by him and see what he says."

  "Sure." When Chen turned away from the line all it took was a tilt of the head by Gunny to make him change direction and come to their table. Interestingly though, he stopped and nodded hello, but waited for an invitation to actually set his tray down and join them.

  Gunny did formal introductions and Chen acknowledged he'd seen April, but was pleased to be made known to her.

  "I understand you have been a Chinese intelligence officer."

  "Indeed, that is true. I was plucked out of my mundane military service after my second year and recruited to do intelligence work."

  "Did you stay in military intelligence, or did you go over to the civilian arm?"

  "That's not an easy question," Chen said frowning. "The best way I can explain it is that there are tiers. Some of the higher tiers deal with more, political matters, yet they are still under military authority, even without a uniform. But when I instructed my wife to bring our children and meet me in Vietnam, it was the uniformed military police who tried to stop her and the children. Most internal security retains the uniform and a stricter military protocol and function."

  "Were they arrested?" April asked alarmed.

  "Not for long," Chen said smiling. The sort of feral smile that made April skip asking for any more details.

  "I've been the subject of a couple assassination attempts by the Chinese," April revealed, if he didn't know it. "One in Hawaii and one here." She filled in some details. "If you have any contacts left in your organization, or familiarity with how they plan and function, I'd like to buy your expertise. Either on a one time basis, or a retainer if you feel you can pursue a continuing watch to see if there is another attempt directed at me."

  "It would be my pleasure to do so. No payment is needed."

  "Home is an expensive place to live. I'm used to paying for value received," April insisted.

  "That would be a conflict on my part. I'm sure he has not had opportunity to inform you, but Mr. Persico has already paid for my services, with you named as one of the principals I serve. Although he encouraged me to seek other sources of income, I suspect he would be peeved with me if I took payment in the same service twice. I will add it to my task list and inform Mr. Persico. I'm sure he would have passed it on to me, if he was aware you required it."

  "You're right I haven't spoken with Eddie for a few days. Thank you for informing me. and glad to have you onboard. On board what she had no idea, but it sounded gracious.

  Later, when they were alone, April quizzed Gunny. "Were you aware Chen was hired out to Eddie?"

  "Not me," Gunny denied. "Not something I'm going to talk around either, now that I do know."

  Chapter 29

  "Mrs. Paddington? Your husband asked me to come by and tell you personally he is going to skip this leave period, to do some extra work for me and he will be along home the next time he has leave coming. He was going to tell you on com, but then he decided it was bad security to have him seen doing anything out of the ordinary and sent me. He said you would unde
rstand why."

  "There aren't any other difficulties with him you aren't telling me?" Linda asked, automatically afraid.

  "Not at all. In fact Mo is the one who suggested he do some survey work for me, since we don't really have the extra man-hours available to do this right now. He will be getting a substantial pay in kind for his lost leave. You will own an extra lot, in a newly partitioned development. He is available on com if you want the reassurance of calling him, but chances are he will be out in a rover with his transmission subject to interception. We don't have unbreakable encryption on common com, so I'd limit myself to casual news and expressions of affection if you do that. Not anything that suggests his being there is a break in routine."

  "Thank you. If he feels it is worth doing that's fine. I appreciate you telling me. We spoke just recently about mundane things. My daughter got a part time job, I changed my working hours. I think I'll skip calling right away, because I might not sound at all normal."

  "Is there anything I can help you with here on Home, that you were hoping your husband would take care of for you?"

  "No, but I have a question for you. My daughter is working Saturdays at a tailor shop. The couple are paying her forty dollars an hour for six hours a day. Are they treating her fairly by local standards? I don't want someone to take advantage of her."

  "Does she have any previous experience at tailoring or retail?"

  "No, she's a student. She was sent there as part of her schooling because she expressed an interest in clothing and fashion. After she'd spent a day being shown some of their procedures and equipment as a lesson, they offered her the part time employment."

  "Did they charge a tutoring fee for her day with them?"

  "No, it never occurred to me they would do that."

  "It sounds rather fair to me," Jeff said. "We don't have North American laws about minimum wage and children not being allowed to work until eighteen. Well, twenty-four for some things," he amended. "I'd be happy they offered her any cash payment for teaching her skills when she has none. There are folks who have taken apprentices on station and they ask an upfront fee to make sure their apprentices are serious and will stick with it, or demand a length of service into the time that they will have some useful journeyman skills, to reimburse the master for the time and effort expended and the fact he is creating someone who might compete with him."

  "That makes sense. It's just so different from down below."

  "So much is," Jeff agreed. "I hope not all of it is repugnant," he added genuinely. He remembered Mo said his wife was not entirely happy here. "We are so early in forming a society here. I think you can be part of directing it and adding your voice if you like." There, that was about as much graciousness and nice-nice as he had in him. He hoped it helped.

  "Thank you, Mr. Singh. I hadn't considered I might have that much influence. I have to admit, I'm not as put off by things as I was at first. The children… well it's in the nature of children to be more adaptable than adults. Thanks again for coming by," which was as clear a good-bye as you could want.

  * * *

  The only assay chemist on Home was employed by the company mining the Rock. Jeff arranged to hire his services from them for time and materials and a fixed margin. It was three days before he got a report however.

  "It's an odd composition," the assay chemist told Jeff. "Obviously lunar, but atypical for regolith. You are interested in element abundance, not details of the mineral forms, right?"

  To Jeff's nod he continued, "It has lithophile elements in abundance, lots of rubidium, magnesium, barium and so forth that would be typical of certain types of meteorites, but it also has relatively high amounts of sulfur, selenium and of all things, lead. It's atypical to what we know, but you said it was from tunneling operations? How far down?"

  Jeff thought about it a moment before he decided he wanted to trust the fellow with the information. "Somewhere between five and six hundred meters down."

  "That's deeper than any published data of which I'm aware. You're pretty much in virgin territory there. Most of the moon's surface is expected to be homogenous. It has had so many big impacts after there were any geological processes to differentiate minerals, that anything near the surface is expected to be mixed. This is still pretty mixed. Now the theory also is, that anything impacting the moon would hit so hard that it would vaporize. That then condenses and rains back down, or some of it might retain escape velocity and be lost to the Earth or off in solar orbit," he said dramatically waving it on its way.

  "Of course in millions of events you have to assume there is going to be a grazing impact that leaves unvaporized material under escape velocity, or a small concentration of something that gets pushed back and forth but never fully mixed. It's just not likely to be common."

  "Do you have any advice about it?"

  "It doesn't approach any concentration you'd call ore on Earth. You'd have to survey and find out how wide an area has this deposit before you'd know if it was worth setting up a process to recover anything from it. It would have to be a high volume operation, that would need a lot of feed stock to make it worthwhile. But it does make me think you need to keep watching for any other anomalous deposits as you go deeper. We've never been down there, so who knows what you'll find?"

  After he thought a moment he added, "If you were composting to make soil for food production I'd avoid this material as a filler. One of the three samples had almost a part per million of lead. Since some plants selectively take up heavy metals it would be a health issue. In fact, I wouldn't want to breathe the dust from this long term either. I imagine that's not a problem for you though. Would you mind if I keep a small piece of the material and the slides I worked up? It is an interesting and right now, unique specimen."

  "I don't need any of it back. I have thousands of tons of it and probably lots more where that came from. I don't see any commercial advantage in keeping it proprietary information either. If you want to write a paper or on it or talk to other scientists feel free."

  "Thanks, it's been a while since I did that. It might be nice to get my hand back in. If you find something else out of the ordinary again I'd love to see it."

  "Like you said, who knows? You're the only guy I have to bring it to this side of Earth."

  "If you just need a rough estimate of element abundance there is a spectrographic program that will read the emissions from vaporizing the surface with a laser. Would you like some references where to find the equipment?"

  "Very much so, because we are tunneling with lasers. We can set up to do a monitoring function real time on the boring machine."

  * * *

  "I'm an old fool," Frank concluded.

  "Yes dear, but you're trainable and I love you," Cindy said, patting his arm.

  "Don't try to sweet talk me."

  "No dear."

  "I'd forgotten why businesses hire pretty young girls as sales clerks. Did you see Mr. Falk? He's as tight with a buck as anyone I've known. When I finished up his order he was chatting Lindsy up over coffee and rather than wrap it up and go home, he contrived to buy a half dozen shirts he doesn't need and wanted them sewn up to take home today, so he could sit and talk to her longer."

  "Yes and I noticed that several of our men who would have come in mid-week and picked up their orders, decided to wait until next Saturday."

  "We certainly got our money's worth out of her today. What do you think?"

  "I thought since it was your idea to hire her, perhaps you found her decorative yourself. She's as cute as a puppy. If that never occurred to you, then it really is time for us to go start some life extension treatments. Don't you think?"

  "Yeah, you might have something there, Sweetie."

  * * *

  "It's big."

  "You laid out the basic design," Dave reminded Jeff. "It isn't near as big as a current generation American or Chinese landing shuttles."

  "Yeah and there is no way around it, to hold enough reactive ma
ss to drop to sea level and back. Planets can be a pain in the butt."

  "With a water landing we could pump water aboard and use it to lift. It would be a good technology to perfect. There is lots of water to be had in the outer system too."

  "Definitely a maybe for later. But I want better numbers before we build it. Some way to cut the oxy out and make it basically a hydrogen plasma engine. Oxygen and superheated steam are rough on equipment. There's lots of hydrogen in other forms, like methane and ammonia, in the outer system too."

  Dave inclined his head to acknowledge that was so.

  "You're right too, it really looks like a brick. I hope it flies better than it looks."

  "Nothing is going to turn nimbly at Mach 10," Dave pointed out. "At least nothing we can build now, probably not for a long time. I do however have the drone carrier you wanted almost done. Come look, I think you'll be pleased with it."

  "It looks like a jumbo fire hydrant."

  "Internally it can hold five Frisbee drones, or an underwater drone that itself carries three aerial drones. I'll have it ready to drop in another day."

  "It hurts to expend that much money on something unrecoverable. Much as I hate to, I need you to start another as soon as this is done," Jeff instructed him.

  "This should help a little," Dave opened his hand and there was a metal lozenge about a centimeter long. It appeared to be wire folded back and forth and compressed. "Watch it," Dave instructed and took a small light out of his pocket and shone on it. There was no quick reaction, then it started unfolding. When it was done it looked like a fragile insect perched on his hand.

  "Each Frisbee drone can drop six of these and act as a local net to collect the very low power burst transmissions from them and send the data back. They are powered by ambient light, direct strong sunlight is not needed. They can intercept local wireless, sound and send video."

  "My goodness, these must cost a fortune."