Diamonds in the Sky

by Mike Brotherton, Ed.

  Sure he was sick. Sick of Sand Lake, sick of the hardscrabble living conditions here. Sick of the Bolton dish. It had been a mistake on his part to move up into management. A big mistake to take over the project manager’s job when Phil Taylor was disqualified by a heart condition. If it had been Phil today, taking that heart-stopping fall, the hopper would be ferrying a corpse back to Yuegong Base.

  Less busy now, the pilot called back, hospitably, “Anybody want a Lifesaver?”

  “Bad for your teeth,” the doctor disapproved.

  “Good for the dustmouth,” the pilot rejoined, amiably.

  “Thanks.” Carefully John extracted one piece from the battered roll. Cherry. He welcomed it to mask the bitter tang of failure in his mouth.

  The giant crater Schrödinger rolled under the moonhopper. Sand Lake was a detail in the rough rim of Schrödinger, just as Bolton pocked the edge of Sand Lake. The far side of the Moon: big holes have little ones cratered in to blight them, little ones have lesser ones, and so ad infinitum. A short while later, the hopper passed the unmistakable ringed plain Humboldt. Something flashed in Humboldt like pale green heat lightning. A moonflash, lunar rock that sparked as it cooled off after the long hot day.

  Below and ahead of the hopper, the terminator, the edge of the day, threw the moonscape into vivid relief, craters dark, rims bright. The crawling terminator would take four weeks to make it around the Moon back to this place. The hopper easily overtook and left it behind. The sun glared in John’s porthole. He pulled down the sun filter. In the hopper’s wide cockpit window, the airless sky was black as ever over the sunlit horizon. The arc of horizon featured a wide shallow depression, the profile of the Sea of Crises.

  “There she blows!” the pilot sang out. And then the Earth rose out of Crisium. The edge of night bowed from pole to pole; day was a crescent of brilliant, glazed blue. The home planet hung on the Moon’s stars as lightly as a Christmas ornament in a tree. John started to cry.

  The other two men had fallen silent. Fingers pressed to the corners of his eyes, John squelched the tears. He heard a pen scratching on paper. The doctor. Making notes.

  The pilot took it upon himself to dispel the awkward silence. “Ever read the book Voyager? About the first plane to fly around the world?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” John managed to answer in an even tone.

  “That’s my all-time favorite book,” said the pilot. They were traversing the Sea of Crises now, with the beautiful blue globe of Earth ascendant in the cockpit window. “I always think about that when I see the Earth up there. They flew around the world — around that!” The pilot waved a hand at the Earth. “Nine days, one tank of gas, no stopping, right by one typhoon and over the mountains of Africa, and everything — I see a typhoon up there now.”

  The hopper skirted Serenity, and then began the final approach to its destination. Skillfully the pilot swooped over the rill and the mountain both named Hadley. A glint of sunlight marked the Apollo 15 Memorial. It was a very long way down. Fear of falling clenched John’s stomach with a vengeance.

  The radio crackled on with the information that a squad of paramedics would meet the hopper at the port. What was the status of the victim?

  “Not to worry,” the pilot replied. “There’s nothing really wrong with him that a few days of Earthshine won’t cure.”

  “They want my opinion, not yours,” said the doctor, icily.

  “Hey, I know what I’m talking about. I been on the Moon for two years and you just got here!” said the pilot, and nodded to John. “See ya around.”

  The doctor ordered a complete physical examination. John felt tired. He just wanted to rest. Instead he was stripped and prodded and sampled, while his examiners talked in grave undertones about multiple contusions. Meaning bruises.

  John had to argue for permission to make a call out. This is like jail, he thought grimly, one phone call if you insist. Finally they let him use the hospital uplink. He got a connection to Washington, DC, USA, Earth, with the bill for it to be sent to the Space Radio Astronomy Consortium. SPARAC’s budget was tight, and the call would have to be held to a few minutes, no more. No problem. What he had to tell the Consortium’s executive director was short and not sweet.

  * * *

  “I don’t believe this!” was Schropfer’s initial reaction. “There’s only one manmade structure on the Moon more than three hundred feet high, and you fall off it?!”

  “I didn’t expect the antenna to move under me!”

  “Why didn’t you just hang on?”

  “I panicked,” John grated. “What’s this crap about a supernova, anyway?”

  “There’s a brand new one in the Magellanic clouds. Baltazar was beside himself with curiosity, and it occurred to him to try the Bolton dish on it.”

  John swore.

  “He had my approval,” Schropfer said mildly. “Would have been good PR, a nice headline. NEW LUNAR RADIO TELESCOPE STUDIES SUPERNOVA.”

  “What for?” John asked coldly.

  “Good question. Baltazar prevailed upon VLBA America to take a look. But at a declination of minus 73 degrees, only the dishes in Hawaii and the Virgin Islands could pick it up at all, just over their southern horizon. The data was noisy.

  “The Australia Telescope happens to be committed to a configuration incompatible with investigating the supernova. And VLBA Pacifica is all buttoned up because of a typhoon bearing down on Easter Island. That leaves Bolton. Which is in just the right place and ready for its first trial run.”

  “I’d like a full report on all this.”

  “I take it you haven’t checked your email,” said Schropfer.

  “They won’t let me out of the hospital tonight! They’re wasting my time and theirs, because I feel fine—”

  “A 591-foot fall is not trivial, my friend. Not even on the Moon.”

  “The dish absorbed most of the impact.”

  With a delay of two and a half seconds, the signal traveled to Earth and Schropfer’s reply came back. Schropfer seemed to pause longer than that, though, before John finally heard him say, “That’s too bad.”

  * * *

  Being in the hospital offered one single advantage: hot showers. John rubbed a clear spot in the fogged bathroom mirror and inspected his contusions. Dark bruises blotched his back, with smaller and more painful yellow spots.

  It was well past midnight, Moon Mean Time. That left just enough night for it to be a very bad one. He dozed off, felt himself falling, and jerked awake in a sweat, his heart fluttering. With a loud scuff of shoe soles on a floor with a high coefficient of friction, the nurse walked in to check on him. Finally, in the last hour or two, he slept. He dreamed about moon-gray dust spattered with the vivid red of blood.

  In the morning they let him go. Still wearing the despicable plastic bracelet on his wrist, he left the hospital building. The skylight over Dave Scott Plaza framed the crescent Earth. He paused to admire Earth, and another pedestrian, presumably late and rushing to work, promptly ran into him. Suddenly John wondered whether his idiotic fall had been publicized. Did people here in Yuegong Base know all about it? The prospect mortified him. Breaking into a hot sweat, he hurried toward his office.

  The office was an out-of-the-way cube of space shared with the staff of the Yuegong Sino-American Observatory. None of them had arrived for the day yet. He checked the clock. 8:13 a.m. Typical, he thought: astronomers tend not to exist at that hour of the morning. He found the report from Schropfer in his email inbox, and a video file from Ramona. Remembering one last roll of wintergreen candy, somewhere in his desk, he rummaged to find it. Then he viewed the video. He sat down and sucked on a piece of candy as he watched his wife’s image.

  Her backdrop was recognizable girderwork, the bolted-together but unfinished interior of the big space station under construction at Earth-Moon Lagrange Point Five. “Hi. I’m in the center of L-5 Station.” She placed a pen in the air in front of her. It hovered with a slight slow dr
ift. “No gravity. So I’m not going to be saying anything too serious!” She smiled, not with her lips but rather with her brown eyes. She had secured her long brown hair in Apache braids. Very much his Ramona. She retrieved the pen before it drifted away. “I have a friend I want to introduce you to. He’s very nice.”

  Instantly, John felt a pang of jealousy.

  Ramona whistled softly, “C’mere, sweetie!” Something fluttered into the picture. A bunch of highly active feathers. It attached itself to Ramona’s proffered finger, and resolved into a parakeet, perched upside down relative to her. “This is my little friend Admiral. Admiral Bird!” Ramona declared. So much for jealousy. The bird wasn’t even green, it was blue. Ramona gently turned her hand and the parakeet upright. “People thought birds would freak out in zero gravity. Not Admiral! He’s learned how to fly here.” The bird preened the feathers of one wing. “Humans can fly in zero g too….” She finished with a shy glance and a curl of a smile.

  He understood, and he longed for her. The last time he visited Ramona in L-5, she had taken him to a special corridor of the space station. Not finished or furnished, the management intended it to be a weightless art gallery at a future date. It had a picture window full of stars and Moon and shining Earth. Quite unofficially, it served the inhabitants of L-5 as Lover’s Lane in zero g. Where, as Ramona put it, you could make love like the birds called white-throated swifts, which mate in the air, tumbling together as they fly in the canyons of the West.

  She ended the video by saying, “I wish it wasn’t three more weeks before you come to L-5 again. I love you and honor what you’re doing. Make it work.”

  * * *

  It was very quiet in the office. The resident astronomers had yet to appear. Odd. Enjoying the privacy, he read the report on the supernova.

  Right ascension one hour, six minutes; declination minus seventy-three degrees. That put the supernova in the Small Magellanic Cloud and closer than any supernova since the 1987 event in the Large Magellanic Cloud. OK. An interesting object. But supernovas weren’t great radio sources, not until well after the catastrophic fact.

  In the case of SN 1987A (appended) the neutrino blast came first, then ultraviolet. Then the balefire blaze of visible light. Satellite observatories picked up x-radiation six months later and gamma rays right after that. Eleven years later came the first whisper of synchrotron radio emission, and the first radiograph of the supernova remnant was produced by the VLA, a blurry image of the clotted shell of matter thrown into space when the giant blue star exploded.

  The detection of a pulsar had been announced in 1989. And retracted in 1990. The “pulsar” turned out to have been a fluke in the observing equipment at Cerro Tololo. The real thing had yet to be confirmed: thirty years and still no pulsar, though theory predicted that the supernova should have left one to mark its place.

  Baltazar knew all of this, yet hadn’t been able to wait even a day to have a look at this newest supernova!

  The VLBA data was interesting in a Rorschach way — the human brain could imagine something significant in it. Much less imaginative, the VLBA supercomputer had not managed to massage the data into anything recognizable. Schropfer had been in management, fund-raising, begging for bucks, so long that he couldn’t even make a sound scientific judgment anymore, John thought disgustedly. He rubbed his neck. There was a nagging twinge, a crick in his neck. It bothered him more than the soreness and stiffness of the remainder of his body.

  Dec -73. Solidly in the Bolton reflector’s observing swath on the celestial sphere. And RA 0106. The supernova had appeared near Bolton’s zenith. Ironic: right now Bolton was in a great position to register the radio data that might take months and years to show up.

  John called Schropfer again. “For what it’s worth to look at the supernova, we can repair the dish,” he said, without preamble. “Some segments fell out. But we have spares in case of micrometeorite hits.”

  Schropfer shook his head grimly. “Jen did a damage assessment, which I just got. It’s worse than a hole. Two of the support pylons are buckled and the whole dish is sagging. As in, out of round. As in, inoperable!”

  “Oh, no!”

  “What did you expect? You’re two hundred pounds on Earth, the suit’s just about that much more, and I’m too upset right now to convert to newtons of force that hit the dish! How in the name of perdition am I going to meet the cost of replacing pylons?”

  In shock, John shook his head. The Space Radio Consortium subsisted on whatever money its member universities could spare. Plus funding that Schropfer elicited from government and the private sector. Building the Bolton dish had blown the seams of SPARAC’s budget and, furthermore, had put SPARAC embarrassingly in debt to the SETI Society. Schropfer continued, “Yuegong Hospital sent me a report on you, too. I conclude that the worst damage to you is your ego. Too bad. It would have been cheaper to fix your bones than the bones of the dish!”

  Thanks for the sympathy, John thought, you little son-of-a-bitch! He signed off curtly. The pain in the neck had a name now. Schropfer.

  John’s workstation chimed. There was Jen’s report, just in. Twelve lines long. She didn’t specify what did the damage. As if God or the impersonal universe had flicked something into the dish. She was very specific, though, about the extent of the damage. And the result. To function, the reflector had to have a perfect spherical curve. And now it didn’t. It sagged. He felt sick.

  John left the office. Rapidly he walked through the service tunnel toward Yuegong’s moonport. Residual moon dust rasped underfoot. Half-formed in his mind was the idea of quitting. Just like that. Give up and walk away. And let Schropfer have the whole mess.

  First he had to find out when the next shuttle to L-5 would be leaving Yuegong Base.

  * * *

  He happened to see the Port Director’s administrative assistant before she saw him. He disliked her: brightly blonde and polished, she always smiled too much, insincerely and in the context of explaining why it would not be possible for the Port to meet some need on the part of the Sand Lake project immediately, or according to the original schedule, or at all. He ducked into a hangar. Watching the woman walk by, he compared her to Ramona, very unfavorably.

  A casually uniformed man approached, wiping his hands with a towel. “May we help you?”

  “I’m — looking for one of the pilots.” John remembered the name stenciled on the blue jumpsuit. “Cantu.”

  “Over there in the moonhopper. Bang on the side.”

  John went that way, vaguely framing his inquiry about transportation to L-5. It ought to sound casual, he thought. A sharp smell of hot glue permeated the hangar. As he walked on the floor he felt traces of something underfoot, not gray moon grit, but slick plastic powder. The moonhopper had every service hatch and access panel wide open, and parts were lined up on the floor. When John banged as directed, Cantu popped out of a hatch. “Hi! Doin’ better? Did you know you almost had tons of company back at Sand Lake?”

  “We did?”

  “The observatory astronomers here. They went nuts. They would have gone right over to Sand Lake. Except it seems you don’t have room for them yet, or the power supply, or the connections for their instruments.”

  “Not until Phase II,” John murmured.

  “So they hauled out to L-5.”

  Mired in Earth’s tidal forces, always facing Earth, rotating on its own axis only once a month, it would take the Moon days to turn far enough for the supernova to be seen from Yuegong Base. That accounted for the lack of life in the observatory office.

  Cantu asked, “Ready to go back to study the supernova?”

  Going to L-5 meant running away from his work and bumping into other astronomers who had rushed to L-5 to follow theirs. So going to L-5 was not an option. Dislocated from the idea that brought him to the port, his thoughts tumbled.

  “In case you’re wondering, this vehicle isn’t deceased, just having preventative maintenance!” Cantu affectionately
whacked the hull of the hopper.

  John registered the hollow thump. “That’s not metal,” he said. “Come to think of it, metal doesn’t predominate in any of your spacecraft and vehicles. Composite materials do.”

  “Huh? Oh, heck yeah. Fiber, resin, glass and glue is where it’s at. The Rutan Voyager was the first aircraft,” Cantu enthused, “to really exploit composite construction — otherwise no way they could have done it. Now everything in aerospace is like that.”

  Thinking hard, John spoke slowly. “I’ve got a problem. My radio telescope was damaged yesterday. It’s not made of metal — here, that was neither necessary nor desirable. The understructure is a species of L-glass/thermoplastic composite.”

  “Sounds familiar.”