"No, sir. I don't want to scare people. But if—just if—Dr. Freede has detected something, then wouldn't we be in a better position to see it, and deal with it, if we already had one of the Institute's telescopes aligned and observing when the anomaly came over the horizon?"
"Deal with it! My goodness, boy! Do you seriously think anything is going to happen here? Kindly remember the inverse square law. The sun is a goodly distance away, one hundred and fifty million kilometers, and a lot of attenuation will take place at that distance… No, if there's going to be a global climate change or anything like that, I think we'll be able to detect it without running around cleaning up after Dr. Freede's botches."
"But I was talking about—!" Po broke off, deciding not to go around that course again. "Look, sir, is it so much to ask?" He could hear the wheedling desperation in his own voice. 'Just one series of observations?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact, it is a lot to ask. Solar astronomy is tricky stuff, as you well know. The operators have to work under a completely different set of protocols from nighttime work, with a lot of extra precautions to be taken. Otherwise you end up burning out your equipment and probably blinding your observer into the bargain. No one here is used to that. Mistakes can be made—will be made. Damn it, lives can be lost! So, no, we won't break off our current program of observations and go to daylight viewing. Not over a lot of jumbled mush from that man Freede."
"I see, sir. Then is that your final recommendation, Dean Withers?"
"Yes." The man picked up his electric pencil and slashed a glowing mark across the document that was displayed on his desktop screen. He was putting the matter officially in writing, as it were.
"Request denied."
Chapter 6
Typhoon Warning
Warning!
Danger!
Storm!
Warning!
The plasmote runs ahead of the virulent bundle of magnetic forces, which are strong enough to tear his being apart, wild enough to reach out and catch him up in his slithery passage. As he moves between the demarcated flows of the convective zone, the plasmote puffs out and shrieks his message ahead of the maelstrom's own husking, grumbling voice.
The granular mosaic of the photosphere, the thermal structure of up-and downdrafts which shape the world the plasmotes move in, is beginning to cool and drift, sag and fragment in the cold shadows that surround the storm. The plasmote has to approach this unsettled boundary in order to make an accurate assessment of the disturbance it is causing. He risks having his own magnetic structure absorbed in the central spot, either lashed apart or snuffed out cold by it. But these are the risks of the caller's job.
At other and more normal times, he might call the plasmotes in surrounding area to come and play on the edges of the advancing storm. Then they could ride its wavefront, pushed by the advancing column of still gases, for distances and to places it would exhaust them to reach under their own power. The latent energy from the tornado winds that peel off the central disturbance would pump up their membranes and brighten their awareness. Such a storm can be joyous sport to a plasmote.
But not this time.
Make way!
Clear out!
Veer off!
Stay away!
From his own personally encoded memories, the caller cannot recollect a storm so big as this one. He has never heard of one that moved so quickly, that covered such a span across the middle regions, or that came so completely out of sequence.
The usual pattern was, first, the gathering of little whorls, the dancing bundles, up in the still, slow-moving gases near the poles. Then, the tugging outward into faster-moving territory, the looping over, and the spinning away. Next, the following of bigger whorls, the rising tide of violence. Finally, the crescendo and the falling off… Always that pattern.
But not this time. This is a freak. This is out-of-pattern. Behind the first little whorls now come the great doubled spot. It originated low, in the fastest arenas near the equator, cutting across space and time, bringing the greater ferocity without the preparation of the lesser storms—This is bad.
Go!
Fly!
Run!
Flee!
Ahead of the plasmote, others of its kind scurry off on widening vectors or at simple right angles. They give themselves plenty of maneuvering distance in advance of the freak storm.
The storm's doubling up and folding over have already occurred. And now the spot group, as it sweeps through the churning plasma of the fast-moving regions, is building up its own internal energies. The flux. The potential. The readiness to do violence beyond the understanding of all plasmotes. The flash that is an ending of all charges, positive and negative, leaving only an unbroken nothing.
When that comes about, all plasmotes must be far away, for it is death. So all of them flee, except he, the caller, the beacon, the one who measures and warns.
In order that he might know the course of the storm, he travels slowly, keeping just out of the spot's deadly reach. If he runs too far ahead, he might take a wrong turning, lose the storm, wander somewhere off to its side, and thus fail in his task. So he travels only a beat, two beats out from its howling edge, almost letting it push him on with its wavefront of magnetic moment.
This is his undoing, of course, as it has undone callers before him.
In an instant of hesitation, unsure whether the next turn of the gaping vortex will take it left or right across the gaseous, glowing plain, the plasmote slips in too close. The whirling energies draw on his fabric of knit charges, breaking their hold on the surrounding plasma. Like a silver fish reeled in on a million-pound test line, he soars skyward, into the darkness above the photosphere, beyond the reach of spicule and domed granulation.
The plasmote's senses waver in passing through the cool penumbra, where the storm drains away the surrounding heat and offers too little free energy for him to survive for long.
He is spared the dark center of the umbra, dense shadow. Its relative coldness would force his very fabric to shed its charge and dissolve into the ambient sacrifice. By the time he reaches that geographic region, however, the plasmote has been kicked far above the spot, the storm center, and is riding a bridge of hot gases into the superheated corona.
Lying dazed on this outcropping, this prominence of gaseous fire, he is able to sense after a fashion the complex, braided magnetic fields that form the top of the storm's loop.
Aloft in this prominence he is thermally insulated from the two-million-degree, howling energies of the corona. He judges his surroundings to be at something over 10,000 degrees—to use the measures of the little green world he knows nothing about—and that is almost twice the heat of his accustomed climate down in the photosphere. Harsh, but still bearable.
So the arching prominence, with its richness of thermal and magnetic energy, will support him in life for a while. But, in the meantime, he has failed in his duty as caller. His voice no longer tracks and predicts the storm's angry path.
Now another plasmote, self-selected from among those who once fled the raging disruption, will step up to the wall of darkness, hesitate on the very edge of eternity, try to guess the storm's next turn, left or right, and begin screaming out his own warning.
Chapter 7
Life and the Memory of It
Chug!
Chug!
Chuff!
Chooof!
Tranquility Shores, Luna Colony, March 9, 2081
The main compressors chugged and wheezed as they brought partial pressure in the garage down to about three kilopascals. Gina Tochman could feel the reinforced polyester fiber of her pressure suit stiffen and clamp to the long muscles of her arms and legs. The fabric's tight weave, tailored to Tochman's body shape at her current weight, supported her epidermis against the near-vacuum yet permitted her sweat glands to pass their moisture off normally.
The suit was as close to disposable as the resort's management could arrange. An optic scanne
r had taken the dimensions of her body, and laser cutters shaped and heat-seamed the fabric into a sturdy second skin for her. It covered every square centimeter of her except the fiber-resin bubble over her head and the plastic-reinforced gauntlets across her palms and fingers. In terms of light weight and disposability, Tochman's working suit was no different from the one-offs that were issued to the paying guests.
Wearing it still took some getting used to, even for a staff member. As the garage's atmosphere dropped toward zero pressure, Tochman could feel her own skin begin to tug and creep, reaching for hollow, unsupported spaces like the insides of her elbows, at the backs of her knees, along the zippered seams that arched up on either side of her ribcage and under her arms, or in the fork between her legs. After a moment, however, her body found equilibrium with the new ambient pressure.
When the door's broad aluminum panels finally sagged inward, releasing the last traces of breathable air, solenoids clicked and a chain drive pulled the loose plates up into the ceiling. Tochman looked out on a dulled gray landscape glowing blue-green under a nearly full Earth. This was about as dark as the lunar surface ever got. She knew it would be cold out there, with no sun to warm her.
Gina pulled the rest of her gear from the garment bin. This was standardized stuff, one size fits all. The inner layer was a thermal jumper with a sandwiched film of heated gel that would warm her body on contact. Its exposed surface was padded with dense silicon mesh that was supposed to stop micrometeorites of up to point-oh-two milligrams. Next, she weighed a cape of reflective film that would shade her body from ambient infrared, but she rejected this garment; there was not a lot of infrared outside in the long lunar night. Finally, she slipped on clogs that would protect her polyester-stockinged feet against the sharp stones and rocks.
Suited up at last, Gina Tochman turned again toward the wide doorway.
Normally, the company frowned on depressurizing such a huge space as the garage for just one person, because even at a pressure of less than two hundred grams per, its ten thousand cubic meters added up to a lot of wasted moles. So employees were sternly instructed to use the manual locks—and then debited for the lost pressure. But today Gina had a professional reason for opening the big lock. She stepped up on the sideplate of the nearest electric buggy, swung one leg stiffly over the saddle, and keyed it.
The paying customers of Tranquility Shores, Inc., had to know this was the resort's main garage and loading port. After all, they entered this space through the Quartermaster's Stores and got suited up next to the line of buggies. So, intellectually, they understood that this was a working area and that their fifteen-minute Moon Walk was going to cover pretty thoroughly beaten ground.
But Tranquility Shores was a competitive business, like any other vacation resort. The management listened to the customers and paid attention to the courtesy cards they filed at the end of their stay. And one of the recurring themes was disappointment with the walk. "Not what I expected," they wrote. "Could have been the Jersey Flats," they wrote. "Reminded me of Cocoa Beach," they wrote.
Selective in-depth interviews revealed that people who came to the Moon had this persistent image of barren rock, smooth gravel, soft sands. Even when they came upon it from a working garage, they expected something wild and untamed. The original Moon, like the astronauts had discovered. They wanted to be the first—or make believe they were—to plant their footprints in its crusty soil.
If Tranquility Shores had been a beachfront resort, like Hawaii or Bermuda, the management could simply wait for the next tropical cyclone to blow through. One day of gale-force winds, and the grounds would be as clean and fresh as nature made. Then the next guest to step off the patio could pretend he was Robinson Crusoe to his heart's content. But no gales blew on the Moon. No summer rains came down to wash away the litter and oil. No cresting waves patterned the sand.
So Gina Tochman had to do it.
Before she rolled the buggy with its giant klopklop wheels out into the gentle, greenish dawnlight, she backed it up to accessory rigs arranged against the inner wall and dropped the electrostatic rake onto the rear coupling. As the vehicle crossed the doorseals and rolled down the concrete apron, she switched on the polarizer field and glanced over her shoulder.
Electromagnetic fingers stroked and pulsed the sand and gravel across a four-meter-wide swath, obliterating tire tracks, bootprints, scuffs, and drag marks. Sheared bolt ends, broken pieces of brightly colored nylon tie-down, and scraps of wrapper fabric spun and danced into the trash screens. Traces of spilled lubricants—the metallic solids which remained after the volatiles had boiled off—also went into the screens.
Tochman drove the rig out four hundred meters along the main overland road, then crisscrossed her way back over a widening triangular area with a base forty meters across back at the garage entrance. Her pattern covered up everything unnatural, including the buggy's own tread marks.
Experience had taught Tochman there was no need to go farther. Even the most agile of customers would soon tire of bounding around in the sand and climbing on the rocks near the garage door. Although the Moon pulled only one-sixth gee, the stretch-fit vac suits were cloying, pulling some long muscles the wrong way. The thermal jumpers were bulky and clumsy. People got tired fast, and no one was likely to light out cross-country toward the mountains or go far along the road toward the landing fields.
When Gina brought her Moon Walkers up an hour from now, they would mill around, do a few broad jumps, land on their asses, and think this little rock garden, which was regularly raked and tended, was the wild black yonder. Then someone would notice it was getting on for the cocktail hour, their suits would start chafing in unaccustomed places, and everyone—having seen too much of nothing—would want to go back inside. They would all be feeling vaguely disappointed, but it wouldn't have any obvious cause, like unsightly boot tracks and service discards in the gray sand. Instead, they would just be feeling the deflation of their own inflated expectations. The paying customers would have nothing to gripe about to the management
Tochman made the last turning swirl in the lunar dust and drove up on the garage's apron of shotcrete. The show would go on.
16:04:22
16:04:23
16:04:24
16:04:25
Connor Transfer Station, March 10, 2081
Peter Spivak stared at his watch, counting off the seconds, his head almost nodding in time with the digital counter. There were thirty-five seconds to go before the crew closed and sealed the hatchway; at that point only the dockmaster could recall the flight. An urgent beamfax from a Ms. Cheryl Hastings just wouldn't do it.
Four days ago, he and Cheryl had parted from each other in anger. Peter was to begin an eighteen-month assignment with the Mars Survey; Cheryl would stay in New York City and paint out her medieval fantasies of woodland elves and scaly dragons. And the trouble between them was in part—no, let's be truthful, it was entirely due to this trip of his.
Eighteen months on-planet, plus more than nine months getting there and nine months coming back—that was thirty-six months in all. Three years apart, with only video transmissions to bridge the gap, suffering under a timelag at Mars orbit of never less than four minutes and sometimes as much as sixteen. They would be closer if they were locked in adjoining prison cells, with only taps on the wall for communication. Not to mention the fact that this trip was dangerous… Yeah, not to mention that. Peter might freeze his ass off on Mars. Or, only slightly less probable, Cheryl could get hers cut on Earth. It happened in that city. All the time.
Spivak at first had thought their relationship was strong enough to take the separation. And the positives were just too good to turn down. Considering what service rating his geotechnical knowledge could pull, and piling on the offworld bonuses, interorbital flight pay, special medical allowances, plus R-and-R recoupage—not to mention the fact that for three years he would have no expenses or even much chance for any kind of personal spending—Pet
er Spivak's bank balance would be halfway to retirement when he returned to Earth. Then he and Cheryl could live anywhere they wanted, and she paint anything she liked, for the rest of their lives. He thought it was an opportunity too good to miss.
"Carpe diem!" Peter had told Cheryl gaily, when he learned that the Areopolitan Foundation had accepted his application. "Take the chance!"
"What your old adage really means is 'seize the day,' " she had observed dryly, when she understood exactly what he was telling her. "You're supposed to live each day to the fullest, it says. And that's not what you're trying to do. Instead, you want to throw today away by putting yourself in the big deepfreeze so that sometime in the far future you can live on easy street—if you come back at all. And if you don't bring back some mutated virus, or get crippled up in microgravity and spend the rest of your life in a power chair with the bone sickness. Yeah, 'seize the day,' my foot."
When Peter had shyly explained that the Foundation had offered to pay Cheryl's way, too, and would provide almost the same level of compensation for her to work as a technical illustrator, she had laughed out loud. Right in his face.
The conversation never got any better after that. He went ahead with his plans, taking the requisite skills tests, physical examinations, personality co-patterning, and all the Foundation's other paperwork. Cheryl had done her painting each morning and afternoon, made quietly passionless love to him each evening, and kept her thoughts to herself. She never said, "Please don't go." She never said, "I'll be waiting for you."
When Peter had left for the airport, to take the SCramjet on the first leg of his 430-million-mile journey, she had bade him a formal goodbye and immediately changed the locks and billing on their condo.
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