“I’ve got to get it fixed right away, and I have an idea, involving glue, but I need a professional opinion.”
“In that case, you were talking to the right guy in the first place!” Cantu whistled loudly. “Hey, Rod! That’s Sylvester Rodriquez. A master mechanic. Don’t call him grease monkey, more like glue monkey! Come into the break room and I’ll put on some coffee for us.”
* * *
Later that afternoon, he made a call to Ramona. She was unavailable, at work in the white room where she was a senior technician. So he left a message. He felt awkward. The accident had left a bruise on his chin, somehow banged against the helmet. “Hi, love,” he began. “I’m looking forward to meeting Admiral Bird. I’m in Yuegong Base right now because we had a problem with the dish yesterday. Right now — it’s Friday 3 p.m. — I’m on my way back to Sand Lake. I will make the dish work.” The last sentence came out with a vehemence that surprised him. Lamely he added, “I took a bit of a fall yesterday and — well, never mind, just a bruise or two. Have a good weekend up there. Bye.” He wanted to say more. But not to the L-5 Technical Support Division’s message machine.
* * *
Heavily laden this time, the moonhopper pitched up on the blast of its altitude jets. This time John rode shotgun, beside Cantu. He had a vertiginously good view of the lunar Apennine Mountains: a mosaic of intensely bright and dark shapes, geological chiaroscuro. Cantu flicked the jet controls. The hopper zoomed away toward the far side of the Moon.
Since yesterday, the terminator had moved further west, further from Sand Lake. Good. Temperatures would have settled down now, all cooled off, improving the chances of fixing the dish. “I really appreciate this,” he said aloud. “I’m sure you guys could find a more entertaining way to spend your weekend, even in Yuegong Base.”
Cantu laughed. “Supernovas don’t happen all the time, and everybody in Yuegong’s got the itch to see it. No way I’d pass up the chance to hear it.” These men weren’t European, Castilian, like Baltazar. Indian blood darkened their skin — reminding John of Ramona — and they had the kind of practical outlook that he had met in Mexican-American men before. “This job goes on my resume,” said Rodriguez, from the back seat.
The hopper made the transit from sunlight to night. Glaring gray moonscape turned to silver, a soft bluish silver: Earthlight graced the maria and the crater rims. Magnificent desolation, Aldrin had said. That was true, but only in the light of Earth. And the Earth was sinking into the horizon behind the hopper.
John thought about the Voyager and its long thin wings that flexed in flight. The two pilots had used biological metaphors to describe the experience. The plane porpoised. It felt like riding on the back of a pterodactyl. It flew like a great flapping seagull — around the Earth. Dick Rutan and Jeanna Yeager endured danger and discomfort, breaking-point emotional strain, nightmarish problems. He was no pilot, no derring-doer like those two. Like them, though, he had a machine made out of exotic materials, a dream, a dream machine that could frame a nightmare. Rutan and Yeager never gave up. He wasn’t going to either. And if the attempt to fix the dish failed, damaged it worse than ever, if everything hit the fan … he was not going to quit even then. Schropfer would have to fire him. His neck hurt. He ignored it.
Below the hopper was the far side of the Moon, alien land lit only by the cold white stars. “I gather that you radio astronomers prefer a quiet neighborhood,” Cantu commented. “But what do you do for fun?”
“The habitat is pretty basic. Most of it tucked into a lava tube, inhabited outbuildings radiation-shielded with bagged lunar regolith. No amenities. We read a lot. I work with an old hen who reads murder mysteries, and when I ran out of my own books I started on hers.” Did her penchant for mysteries point to a dark psychological angle — something about suppressed hostility in Jen’s character? Maybe it was just that too many hard weeks of being cooped up in the habitat, too closely with too few people, promoted homicidal fantasies. He had enjoyed the murder mysteries.
“That’s the only way I came to read War and Peace,” Cantu answered breezily. “Cause this guy in my bunkroom had it.”
Rodriguez was a different type, a slight and quiet man, all business. “That it down there?”
John replied, “That’s the Lunar Far-Side Very Low Frequency Array in the Sanduleak walled plain. Which was named for a twentieth-century astronomer and promptly if disrespectfully corrupted to Sand Lake. Look on the far edge of Sanduleak. See the bright dimple? That’s Bolton. And the reflector.”
“How does it work?”
“It sits there. It’s a photon bucket. The bucket reflects incident radiation to the center, where the antenna is. The antenna is what moves. There’s an older dish of this kind in Arecibo, Puerto Rico — a real workhorse in my field.” Reflectively, he added, “Bolton is to Arecibo as Voyager is to, oh, maybe a Cessna. Principles the same, materials radically new and different. Composite construction makes Bolton flexible — and fragile. Arecibo stood up to a major hurricane once, in 1989. Earth gravity alone would flatten Bolton.”
The reflector was eggshell-thin but not rigid, the pylons stiff yet resilient, the whole structure nonmetal-like, quirky to the extent that it was hard to know what to expect of the exotic materials. John did know. He had parsed the quirks of the machine for all of the months of its construction. A kibitzer like Schropfer could have Bolton’s specs strewn all over his desk, and still not know what to expect of the structure.
The hopper swerved over the shore of Sand Lake, braked and began a slow hovering descent toward Bolton. The habitat was tucked into crater Bell, right on the edge of Bolton. Little craters have lesser ones…. John radioed. “Anybody home?” Home sweet home, he thought. Cold showers and gritty floors. Close quarters in which your colleagues’ harmless traits got on your nerves. Jen’s chocolates, shedding oily brown particles on the pages of technical reports as well as murder mysteries. Zheng’s bad breath. And Edward’s mild-mannered, rational, relentless pessimism.
Jen’s voice replied. “Welcome back. Whatever is that load on top of the hopper?”
“Popsicle sticks,” said John. “And duct tape.” Rodriguez grinned briefly.
“Cantu, set us down close to the crater edge. Don’t worry, it’s reinforced, and will not crumble. There’s a crane down there that can handle the cargo under the dish. X marks the ideal spot.”
“Can do,” said the pilot, winking at the pun on his name. He put the hopper down neatly on the landing field’s X by the brink of Bolton.
John invited them into the control room. Jennifer seemed as shocked as a hausfrau that he had brought guests home unannounced.
The guests seemed genuinely interested in the instruments and computers, and the radio contour map tacked up on the wall. “I thought your instrument wasn’t working,” said Rodriguez.
“We have two radio telescopes at this facility,” Jen explained. “The Very Low Frequency Array has been operational for three months now.” Clicking into professor mode, she explained how her VLF Array was mapping the magnetosphere of Jupiter.
* * *
“Most stars are not single,” she was saying. “Binary systems are the norm. Our Sun was very nearly a double star, the other one being Jupiter, if Jupiter had been somewhat bigger. Jupiter is nearly a star, and it generates its own heat and an immense magnetic field…”
John glanced at his workstation’s inbox. There was a message for him, from Ramona, datelined Friday 5:14 p.m. YOU’RE IN PAIN AND I AM WORRIED! He stared at the message, unconsciously rubbing his neck.
“She’s right,” said Jennifer, behind him.
“None of your business,” he said brusquely.
Rodriquez had disappeared into the restroom, and Cantu was being introduced to the observatory’s main computer by Edward. Jennifer asked, “Why did you bring these people here?”
“They’re going to help us fix the dish.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “As easy as that?”
“Maybe not. It’s a long shot. An idea.”
“When?”
He shrugged past the crick in his neck. “No time like the present.”
* * *
From this side, the dish was the dim convex canopy of a forest of pylons. Anchored in the crater floor, the slim pylons rose up to branch at the top. The branches terminated in twigs, each attached to one segment of the dish. The position of each dish segment could be adjusted by the control computer. Sensors told the computer the precise position of every segment. Adding everything up, the computer had found the dish sagging. The human eye could not detect the sag, at least not now, with artificial lights shredding the lunar night under the dish.
It was the Moon’s slow midnight. But human affairs adhered to the twenty-four-hour artifice of Moon Mean Time. They had spent Friday night unloading the cargo from the hopper and getting ready. John had, again, slept badly. This time his neck hurt all night. And he was troubled by the kind of garish bad dreams that he had been having in recent weeks, the color-pandemonium with which his brain attempted to compensate for the monochromatic tedium of waking life on the Moon. Now it was Saturday morning, still early, 9 a.m. John circled around the site with an impatient mixture of gliding and skipping steps. He wanted to get this over with.
Floodlights illuminated one of the pylons. Twenty feet above the crater floor, it bent at an angle of some fifteen degrees. The hollow-cored pylon had buckled like a soda straw. Now a long cable descended from the crown of the pylon. The cable ended at a winch anchored on the crater floor, as far away from the pylon as possible.
Two ropes, shorter than the winch cable, dangled from the top of the pylon. John called, “Jennifer, you and Zheng on this one. You’ll back off and hold it taut. Out that way — right angles to the cable. Don’t actively pull unless you get the word.” Jen rapidly translated that into Chinese for Zheng. John continued, “You all know how hard it is to get good traction. So use the anchor posts. Cantu, you and me on the other rope. Edward operates the winch, and Rodriguez spots. He’ll tell us if the pylon sways one way or another.”
Rodriguez signaled assent.
The bulky moonsuited form of Edward fussed over the winch. Edward said, “This procedure still strikes me as illogical. The basic notion is to lift. Right?”
“Ever been to Easter Island?” John asked, “That’s how they got the stone heads up. A bunch of people on the ground, pulling on the longest ropes they had.”
“I hardly think that qualifies as a reliable precedent. And what about the stress on the points of attachment?”
“For the record,” said John, “I’m not 100 percent sure that this will work. I am sure it’s the thing to try. Ready, everybody? Let’s do it.”
Moonsuited forms shuffled to their places. At a signal from Rodriguez, Edward turned on the winch. It whirred soundlessly in the airlessness here. The cable oscillated, went taut.
Fifteen hundred feet across, the dim down side of the dish stretched away to the ends of the crater. John felt a sudden conviction of futility. Edward was right. They might as well have been insects, busy but ridiculous ants, trying to reshape this vast thing.
Rodriguez said rapidly, “Pylon’s starting to straighten out. Going true. Still true. It’s trying to lean to the right!” he waved an arm. “Left rope, pull!” Jennifer and Zheng pulled. The Chinese man had a foot propped on an anchor post, and pulled mightily.
“Let up! Left, let up! Right side pull!”
John pulled. His feet slipped and he skidded. Cantu stumbled. They got anchored again, then, and with their combined mass under the rope, pulled. John felt the rope come to them. Over their heads, the pylon and with it the filmy acres of dish had actually responded to their puny effort.
“That’s it! That’s it! Ropes, stop pulling! Just hold steady there. Slow the winch — that’s about right — Left! Pull, but not too hard! Good! Ease off that winch — anchor the side ropes — put the winch brake on. Not like that!” Rodriguez headed toward the winch with loping strides of a moon veteran making haste. “That’s not how the brake works!”
“Oh,” said Edward.
Now the pylon looked straight. Only, like a bent soda straw, it had one terribly weak point. Without the winch cable holding it, the pylon would keel back over.
Climbing into the driver’s seat, Rodriguez started the crane. It was a light, long-necked, mobile piece of machinery on treads. Using the crane, Rodriguez hoisted one end of a moonglass beam. The inside of the beam was reamed out to match the curvature of the pylon and coated with glue. With some help from the ground he placed the beam up against the pylon. Glued, it stuck. Then he positioned another beam on the other side of the pylon. “Popsicle sticks in place,” Rodriguez commented. With adroit operation of the crane and helpers scrambling on the crater floor, he wrapped the splinted pylon with a ninety-yard length of plastic fabric, stretching and wrapping it.
The glue had to cure. It was time for lunch anyway, though not as simple as knocking off and grabbing a sandwich on the spot: taking off the moonsuits was a chore in itself. After lunch, Rodriguez took a nap. Cantu helped himself to a murder mystery.
* * *
According to the computer, the dish sagged less now. So far, so good. John rubbed his neck, inflamed by the morning’s exertion in the spacesuit. The more damaged pylon was yet to come.
Jennifer came into the control room to check the accumulating data from her LFSVLFA. She asked, “How did you get that material? I didn’t know we had that much credit with the Yuegong warehouse.”
“We don’t. I faked an appropriation authorization that said something about a state of scientific emergency. And a facsimile of a fund transfer writ. The check’ll bounce Monday morning.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, Lord! This had better work!”
He shrugged around the pain in his neck. “My responsibility alone. I didn’t tell our two friends that I was fleecing the Port. Cantu probably has an idea, but he can plead innocence. If this fails, it’s my funeral.”
“Don’t say that! We didn’t tell you Thursday night— but one of the air valves in your suit jammed when you fell. If we hadn’t found you and taken the risk of moving you right away—!” She left the outcome unspoken. “It was the sound of your breathing. I was sure you couldn’t get enough air. I was right. When we took off the helmet you were turning purple!”
Not knowing quite what to say, John said, “Thank you.”
“I was overjoyed when you sat up and talked.” Jennifer added, quietly, “It haunts me. I could have lost a good colleague and a good friend.”
It went both ways, he thought, with or without chocolate crumbs. “You’re that for me too, and you have been for years,” he said. “I’m not handling everything so well. I’m sorry.”
“It’s half fixed,” she said briskly. “You brought good help. If we had the facilities, I’d bake cookies for those guys. Very handy people. Unlike somebody else we know of Spanish ancestry!”
John nodded ruefully. “Murphy’s Law and Baltazar’s Rule.”
She spelled out that old joke of theirs. “The better the theoretician, the more things go wrong when he lays his hands on the instruments. Lord, if he’d been here this morning the dish probably would have fallen down around our ears.”
They grinned at each other.
* * *
Rodriguez announced that the glue was 97 percent as hard as it was going to get. Cantu stretched and groaned. “Is this gonna be worth it?” He levered his feet into his spacesuit.
Struggling to squeeze into her own suit, Jennifer puffed, “Good question.” She used to be skinny as a rail. But since moving to the Moon and being form-fitted with a moonsuit, she had put on weight — enough to make it hard for her to don the suit. She decided to pause for a lecture. “Normally, radio astronomers don’t scramble to observe a supernova. Optical astronomers do.”
“Especially when they find themselves on the wrong side of the Moon.” Like an eel, Cantu wriggled in
to the top half of his own suit.
“It’s a truly cataclysmic event, a giant star dying, blowing most of its mass out in gusts of ionized matter. I would expect radio thermal emission, though not quite this soon. Heat noise. In science,” she continued, “it’s also important to check for that which one does not expect to detect, or not yet.”
“What’s that?” Cantu asked, carefully sealing his waist seam.
John said, “The corpse, spinning in its grave.”
“Doin’ what?”
Jennifer chuckled. “He means a neutron star. The core of the supernova radically collapses into a mass of neutrons, a neutron star, with all of the angular momentum — the rotating force — of the original star compressed into a much smaller package. So the neutron star spins rapidly. Several revolutions per second.”
“How do you know?” All suited up, Rodriguez waited, leaning against the airlock with his helmet tucked under one arm.
Diamonds in the Sky Page 21