Come In, Collins

by Bill Patterson

  “OK, so it's too much. When will it become feasible?”

  Sean started walking up and down the rows of the rooted, happily growing green things. He would occasionally reach in and clear out a dead branch, or wipe up a careless spill. “It will become feasible when you have a man who can hoe a row, particularly from the cab of a ground vehicle. Then you have to recruit your workers so that they could have a harvest. Then it gets combed, the seeds are forced out, and we finally have a bale of white cotton fiber.

  “Then the fun begins. We have to spin the fiber into thread, and the thread into spools. Some thread gets woven into bolts of cloth. Some of it gets diverted and ends up as sutures, floss, and other items best left in the medico's office. Once the cloth is made, someone has to cut it to make the shirt. Buttons are made, somehow. The concept of 'zipper' is going to die out. More thread to sew the buttons on. Then, if you are very lucky, the shirt doesn't shrink to a baby-sized jumper the first time it's washed. Then, at last, you finally have your shirt.”

  “You forget the law of the pencil,” said Sean.

  “Never heard of it,” said Jeremy.

  “I'm not surprised,” said Sean. “So, I'll give you the quick version. Think of all the things that go into making a simple pencil: the wood, glue, graphite, the metal thing on the top that holds the eraser, and finally the eraser itself. All of these things come from different manufacturers.”

  “OK, got it,” said Jeremy. “So?” He gazed out at the plants in the greenhouse.

  “So, none of these people are in the business of making pencils. The wood shows up at the pencil factory as boards, the glue in barrels, the erasers as big lumps of latex. The suppliers are in the business of making boards and barrels and blobs of latex. None of them can make a pencil, but the pencil maker can't make one without them.”

  Jeremy looked at the biologist. “What does that have to do with us?”

  “To make a shirt, we need a farmer, a comber, a baler, a spinner of thread, a weaver, a button-maker, a zipper maker, a dyer, a seamstress, and, finally, someone who can put all of the parts together. But to the average person, they just go down to the store and pick up a pencil or a shirt and think nothing of it.”

  “So, making a shirt is complicated. I still don't see what this law has to do with us.”

  Sean stopped his subconscious gardening and approached Jeremy. “The biggest problem Collins has is its centralized planning regime. Say we want to have a good supply of cotton. Right now, we're going to have to balance out the colony's greenhouse space in order to have both a sufficient supply of food and one of cotton. The colony, that is, McCrary, controls the allocation of land inside the greenhouse. That leads to all kinds of bad solutions. Suppose there's a face-off between the cotton grower and the carrot grower. The head of government right now decides. The only way to be really free would be to have greenhouse space that is privately owned, not government owned. Then the two growers would compete for the price of land in the greenhouse. If the land is too costly, then either shirts or carrot cake will be prohibitively expensive.”

  “Wait,” said Jeremy. “I thought we were getting away from a capitalist economy. Right now, I don't pay for food, or shirts, or medical care.”

  “Yes, but that's because McCrary would kick your ass if you weren't working. If you could eliminate the bottom ten percent of the slugs in this place, would you? Just to get a bit more to eat? What about if the calories were cut in half? Do you think Doctor Kumar should get more to eat than a loafing Moondog? There are all kinds of questions that you must answer if you're going to centrally plan. One of the only good things about this crew right now is that we are all motivated to survive. Everyone knows everyone else, so peer pressure is the primary means to keep order.

  “Let me ask you, Jeremy. Would you like to sleep in for a couple of days?”

  “Hell, yes! Who wouldn't?”

  “What if I tell you that you can have the day off, but we've got to manually unload the thorium hopper, and everyone else will be out there, getting a sievert or two of radiation from hand-loading ore. What then?”

  “Are you kidding? I'd be out there with bells on. Even the most radiation-phobic would. It's the way it is. Not even the biggest slug in the Moon would skip. We'd go find him and strap on a couple of ore chunks to his body if he tried that.”

  Sean smiled. “See? You are you own best enforcers. Now, tell me, would the same dynamic apply if the group was three times this size? Say, seven hundred people?”

  Jeremy frowned. “Not so much. Too many people to know all at once. Some would escape.”

  “You see what I mean, then.”

  “No. You've been talking about pencils and greenhouses and loading ore. I still don't know what you're trying to tell me.” Jeremy's irritation showed in his balled fists and wrinkled brow.

  Sean seemed to sag a little, but rallied. “Right now, we can create a project that would put everyone back on iron rations for a growing season, turn over all greenhouse space to cotton cultivation, maximize cloth production, then at the end of three months, go back to growing food.”

  “Oh, god! Back to gnawing on chow bricks again? The crew would revolt!”

  Sean agreed. “But it's the simplest way to solve the problem, isn't it?”

  “Yeah,” said Jeremy, grinding his hands together. “There's got to be a better way.”

  “That's what you get with central planning—simple solutions that are terrible, but would probably work in the short term. What are we going for, anyway?”

  “Cotton, remember?”

  Sean actually laughed out loud. “No, we're not. We're looking for something that can do what cotton does, only without having the state of Georgia sending us bales. Look deeper. Isn't what we're really after, merely some kind of organic fiber? Does it have to be cotton?”

  Jeremy stared at the biologist in surprise.

  ***

  The suggestion period eventually came to an end. The entries were broken out and listed in the cafeteria on the erasable board. Everyone logged on to the nearby terminals to vote, selecting their top three. Rounds of voting and elimination of the lowest candidates finally ended with ten projects vying for the colonists' votes.

  The top vote getter was the expansion of the greenhouse spaces.

  Second place was an aggressive push to find more water.

  Third place, oddly, was one of the more pie in the sky proposals.

  “Lasers? Really?” asked Irma. “What would we ever want lasers for?”

  Marcel looked up from where he was stirring reconstituted eggs into interesting patterns on his plate. “I don't know. What size?”

  “I think I heard 'gigawatts'.”

  “Gigawatt lasers?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Why, is there a problem?”

  “A gigawatt laser can fry you dead in no time. It will reach across and probably blind a small town on Earth,” he said. “I can't imagine what they'd want one of those for here on the Moon.”

  “The winner didn't say anything about just one laser. I got the impression they were building a lot of them.”

  Marcel shook his head. “I once accused McCrary of wanting to rule the Earth. With a bunch of these kinds of lasers, very little of the Earth's habitable surface will escape. He would de-facto own Earth. But he can't do much on the surface. What could he possibly want with them?”

  Irma was a whiz with applied human factors. She knew immediately what a wonderful gift had been handed to her.

  ***

  “Sir, you better get in here,” the duty officer inside Operations called over the intercom. McCrary, in one of his rare downtime moments, was doing his favorite activity: reading classic political works.

  “Is there a problem with the new greenhouse?” he asked. The project was leaping forward. So many people wanted to build something new rather than patch up something old that he had to forcibly limit the number of colonists allowed in the new structure.

  “N
o, sir,” said Fred Gilliam, the duty officer. “If I had to guess, it would be the lasers.”

  “Lasers, Fred?” McCrary asked. He put the tablet with the treatise aside. The image faded as the sensors recognized the tablet was face-down. “But they haven't been built yet. Hell, we haven't even started refining the KREEP material!”

  “Still sir, I believe this warrants your attention,” said Fred.

  “Well, if Fred Gilliam says I'm needed, I guess I am. You've never been wrong yet.” McCrary got up and slipped on his coverall. “Two minutes.”

  “Sir,” said Fred, and shelved the microphone.

  ***

  “A demonstration? Now? How did so many people happen to have all this time off?” asked McCrary, staring at the monitors in Operations. “I can understand a dozen or so, that many will go without sleep to flog their bugaboo. There's, what, thirty-forty out there?”

  “About, sir. I focused on a few of the chanters. Yes, they're pissed off about the lasers.”

  “Well, I better go out and talk with them,” McCrary said.

  “Sir, I don't think so,” said Gilliam. “They are not going to listen, and I think you'd set a bad precedent. Let them yell, then address the crew at the Sunrise Meeting. It's only three days away.”

  Three days might seem like a short time, but this was the Moon. Three days meant seventy-two hours of time crammed in a pressurized module with a bunch of hotheads who buttonholed anyone they could find about the lasers. By the time sunrise came about, the line in the sand was clearly drawn.

  ***

  “Now, it has come to my attention that a number of you are upset.”

  “Upset! King McCrary says!” shouted Irma. “Dictator of Space!”

  “Please. Everyone will get a chance to talk. You've had your say, Ms. Huertas, for the last three days,” said McCrary softly. “I am sure you're gracious enough to let me tell my side of the story.”

  Irma was startled by McCrary's reply. She was used to shouting and confrontation. This smooth appeal to her better nature badly confused her. “Sure,” she said, and sat down.

  “Thank you. Now. Let me go back a bit. Now that we are doing just slightly better than bare survival up here, I thought that several heads were better than one, and I proposed that everyone put forth their best ideas and the entire company vote on them. That has been done. The top vote getter was the new greenhouse. I don't think there is any serious disagreement with that one. Anyone?” He looked at Irma, who just as defiantly looked back, but declined to answer.

  “Good. The second one was an expanded water survey and exploitation program. Again, fairly non-controversial. True?” Silence greeted him.

  “Now for the last one. The suggestion was for the creation of twenty autonomous one-gigawatt lasers, with automatic aim and target following.”

  “Yeah, that's the one!” shouted Irma. “Your little mobile army, King McCrary.”

  He sighed visibly into the microphone. “Really, Ms. Huertas? After all we've been through?” He held her angry, defiant eyes until she subsided.

  “The purpose of the lasers was not put into the suggestion. Why, I don't know. I did not author any suggestion, nor did I induce others to author any in my place. I also was very careful not to indicate any preference for or against any suggestion. I still refuse to do so, for reasons that should be obvious. But I did seek out the suggester for this particular entry, the only one I so identified.

  “This person's reasons for the lasers surprised me. The reason for the lasers was left off on purpose. But now, I can reveal why.

  “We're going to use the lasers to clear out cis-lunar space.”

  The silence that greeted his words was profound. It took about fifteen seconds, but the Moondogs eventually saw why. One Moondog, Sam Pointier, a dozer driver, stood up and started clapping. Soon, the entire company, with the exception of the thirty die-hard obstructionists, was on their feet, roaring with applause. McCrary waved them to silence, but not before several growls were aimed at the dissidents.

  “Enough,” said McCrary. “I have said this many, many times. We will not force the unwilling to be quiet. In fact, I value their opposition. Ms. Huertas, please come here.”

  She stood, uncertainly. One of her lieutenants began clapping, and the thirty-some dissidents cheered her onto the dais.

  “Ms. Huertas, like Mr. Bossenhagen before her, is a brave soul. Imagine, to stand in opposition to the Acting Commander. Ladies and gentlemen, that takes courage. Now, Ms. Huertas, let me tell you and everyone else what we are going to do with the lasers, which we're not even going to be able to fabricate for several weeks.

  “In orbit somewhere between here and Earth are hundreds of thousands of fragments of the Moon. Some are huge, others are the size of your fist. Like most populations of the products of a random process, there's a logarithmic size distribution. That means that if there are ten items of size one thousand, there are one hundred items of size one hundred, and one thousand of size ten, and ten thousand of size one.

  “The actual size factors aren't important here. What it means is that in practice, nothing from Earth will be able to travel to the Moon before it is punctured many times by the debris from what we have been calling The Event. Without the lasers, there are only two ways to get home again: waiting for the debris to disperse enough for it to be safe to fly, but that will take decades, or using an extremely well-armored space vehicle. In practice, it's more of a combination of the two. We've done some fairly primitive calculations, and we believe that it will take on the order of ten years before we can even try a spacecraft launch—and the spacecraft would need three-meter-thick steel walls.

  “If you add the lasers, on the other hand, you can use them to vaporize the smaller debris or shove aside the larger debris, shortening the interval. We feel we can begin lunar orbital operations within two years if we could just clear out near Lunar orbit.”

  A rustle ran around the room. This was far better than any rumor had said. McCrary let the rumbling continue, then held up his hand.

  “There's no reason for you to believe me, of course. I know you are concerned that the Moon and those in charge could use the lasers for some kind of offensive operation against the Earth. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  “Why not?” she asked. “You could be as pure as the wind-driven snow, but what about your successor? How can you guarantee that they will act with the same restraint?”

  “Given that you are in the running, perhaps, of being my successor, your question is a good one. The answer, again, lies in physics. The lasers will operate at a wavelength that cannot penetrate the Earth's atmosphere, yet deliver significant energy to the debris object.”

  She looked dissatisfied, but subsided.

  “Again, Ms. Huertas, I don't expect you to believe me. But I ask the laser team to keep Ms. Huertas informed of all your progress, welcome her into your area, and ensure that you show her all of your technical specifications. In return, I expect Ms. Huertas to ask her followers to avoid confrontation with the laser team, at least until all controversies are brought to me. Do we have a deal?”

  Outmaneuvered, Irma could do nothing other than nod in agreement.

  ***

  Five weeks later, the laser team announced the completion of the first device. The team towed it out to the fields beyond the launching pads, and strung power cables from the pads' connectors that had previously serviced spacecraft. A group of observers were in the pad bunkers, originally positioned a kilometer from the launch pads for launch safety. With an actual laser, the bunkers offered protection in case the actual laser blew up. But if the gigawatt beam were to reflect off of something towards them, they would be killed without ever seeing that they were in danger.

  The voice of Ashley Boardman sounded in the audio channel from the bunker. “Remember, we're focusing on a small rock in Lunar orbit that we've had under observation for several orbits. This rock should be crossing above our heads at a range of som
e fifty kilometers in about three minutes. Aiming and firing are automatic, and slaved to both radar and optical scopes. The beam will never be aimed at the Earth, nor anywhere in the ecliptic. In fact, this rock was chosen for precisely that reason—stray laser light endangers nothing.” Ashley's voice carried authority. As the second in command at Lunar Operations, she was respected by everyone who worked with her as competent, thorough, and completely evidence-driven. She was out on the surface, operating the laser's fire control panel in the pad bunker.

  “We are at T-minus-two minutes and counting for target acquisition. Commander McCrary, permission to operate the laser?”

  McCrary was in the Operations with Ms. Huertas. He looked around at the other controllers, all displaying a thumbs up sign. He looked at Irma.

  “Ready?” he asked her. “If you need more time, this rock will be back here in another ten hours, but we would really like to do this test now.”

  Irma felt backed into a corner. Their logic was flawless. The Earth was safe from any laser attack. She had no reasonable basis to refuse.

  “I agree,” she said reluctantly.

  “Surface, permission granted to perform this single test.”

  Up on the surface, the observation group watched as Ashley keyed a sequence into the laser control panel and bunny hopped back to the safety bunker.

  The platform rapidly slewed around, and a small red LED lit above the aperture of the firing end. Everyone's head swiveled around and up to look for anything unusual in the sky.

  Down in Operations, a monitor on the bore-sighted telescope, riding atop the laser tube, showed a sudden bright glow as the rock fluoresced under the sudden onslaught of laser energy. There was a subdued sound, as if everyone aboard was giving a low cheer.

  If space were empty, there would be absolutely no sign of the laser operating, save for the burning target. But this was the debris-filled area around the Moon. The sky was filled with dust and debris that had been generated by The Event.