by Ben Bova
“And what about her plans to use all the power capacity of all the solar collector systems on the Moon? Plus all the sunsats in cislunar space?”
“I only need their output for one minute,” Delia said.
“What happens if there’s an emergency during that one minute?” Flagg demanded, almost angrily. “What happens if the backups fail at Clavius, or Copernicus, or even here in Selene? Do you have any idea of how much the emergency backup capacity has lagged behind actual power demand?”
“I have those figures,” Alpha One said. “There is a point-zero-four probability that the backup system at Selene will be unable to meet all the demands made on it during that one minute that the solar generators are taken off-line. There is a point-zero-two probability that the backup system at Copernicus—”
“All right, all right,” Flagg interrupted impatiently. “What do we do if there’s a failure of the backup system while the main power grid is off-line?”
“Put the solar generators back on-line immediately. The switching can be accomplished in six to ten milliseconds.”
Delia felt suddenly alarmed. “But that would ruin the experiment! It could blow up!”
“That would be unfortunate, but unavoidable. It is a risk that you must assume.”
Delia thought it over for all of half a second, then gritted her teeth and nodded. “Okay, I accept the risk.”
“Wait a minute,” Flagg said to the robot. “You’re missing the point. Why does she need all that power?”
“To generate antiprotons, of course,” Delia answered. Marty knew that, she told herself. Why is he asking the obvious?
“But you already have the energy equivalent of more than a hundred megatons worth of antiprotons, don’t you?”
“Sure, but I need thirty tons of them.”
“Thirty tons?” Marty’s voice jumped an octave. “Of antiprotons? Thirty tons by mass?”
Delia nodded nonchalantly while Alpha One restarted its risk assessment calculations. Thirty tons of antiprotons was a new data point, never revealed to the Council before.
“Why do you need thirty tons of antiprotons?” Alpha One asked, even while its new risk assessment was proceeding.
“To drive the starship to Alpha Centauri and back,” Delia replied, as if it were the most obvious fact in the universe.
“You intend to fly to Alpha Centauri on a ship that has never been tested?” Alpha One asked. “The antimatter propulsion system alone—”
“We’ve done all the calculations,” Delia interrupted, annoyance knitting her brows. “The simulations all check out fine.”
If Alpha One could have felt dismay or irritation at its own limitations, it would have at that moment. Shockley intended to fly her father’s ship to Alpha Centauri. This was new data, but it should have been anticipated. Why else would she have been amassing antimatter? A subroutine in its intricate programming pointed out that it was reasonable to assume that she would want to test the antimatter-propulsion system first, to see that it actually performed as calculated before risking the flight. After all, no one had operated an antimatter drive as yet. No one has tried for the stars.
“What’s thirty tons of antiprotons equal to in energy potential?” Flagg asked.
Instantly, Alpha One calculated, “Approximately one million megatons of energy.”
“And if that much energy explodes?”
Alpha One was incapable of showing emotion, of course. But it hesitated, just for a fraction of a second. The silence was awesome. Then the robot’s head swivelled slowly toward Delia, levelling its dark glassy optical sensors at her.
“An explosion of that magnitude could perturb the orbit of the Moon.”
“It could cause a moonquake that would destroy Clavius, at the very least,” Flagg said. “Smash Selene and even Copernicus, wouldn’t it?”
“Indeed,” said Alpha One. The single word stung Delia like a whip.
“Now do you see why she’s got to be stopped?”
“Indeed,” the robot repeated.
Delia shook her head, as if to clear away the pain. “But there won’t be any explosion,” she insisted. “I know what I’m doing. All the calculations show—”
“The risk is not allowable,” Alpha One said firmly. “You must stop your experiment.”
“I will not!” Delia snapped.
It took Alpha One less than three milliseconds to check this new data once again, and then compare it against the safety regulations that ruled every decision-making tree, and still again check it against the consequences of Delia’s project if it should be successful. Yet although it weighed the probabilities and made its decision that swiftly, it did not speak.
Alpha One had learned one thing in its years of dealing with humans: the less they are told, the less they have to argue about.
And the two humans already had plenty to argue over.
Running a hand through the flowing waves of his golden hair, Flagg grumbled, “You’re not fit to be a triumvir.”
“I was elected just the same as you were,” Delia replied tartly.
“Your father bought votes. Everybody knows it.” Delia’s own temper surged. Leaning across the triangular table to within inches of Flagg’s nose, she said, “Then everybody’s wrong! Daddy wouldn’t spend a penny on a vote.”
“No,” he snarled, “he spent all his money on this crazy starship, and you’re spending still more on an experiment that could kill everybody on the Moon!”
“It’s my experiment, and I’m going to go ahead with it. It’ll be finished tomorrow.”
“It is finished now,” said the robot. “Your permission to tap power from the lunar grid is hereby revoked. Safety considerations outweigh all other factors. Although the risk of an explosion is small, the consequences are so great that the risk is not allowable.”
All the breath seemed to gush out of Delia’s lungs. She sank back in her chair and stared at the unmoving robot for a long, silent moment. Then she turned to Flagg.
“I hate you!”
“You’re not fit to be a triumvir,” Flagg repeated, scowling at her. “There ought to be a sanity requirement for the position.”
Delia wanted to leap across the table and slap his face. Instead, she turned to Alpha One’s robotic avatar.
“He’s being vindictive,” she said. “He’s acting out of personal malice.”
The robot said impassively, “Triumvir Flagg has brought to the attention of the Council the safety hazards of your experiment. That is within his rights and responsibilities. The only personal malice that has been expressed at this meeting has come from you, Triumvir Shockley.”
Flagg laughed out loud.
Delia couldn’t control herself any longer. She jumped to her feet and didn’t just slap Marty, she socked him as hard as she could with her clenched fist, right between the eyes. In the gentle gravity of the Moon, he tilted backward in his chair and tumb led to the floor ever so slowly, arms weakly flailing. She could watch his eyes roll up into his head as he slowly tumbled ass over teakettle and slumped to the floor.
Satisfied, Delia stomped out of the conference chamber and headed back to Newton and her work.
Then she realized that the work was finished. It was going to be aborted, and she would probably be kicked off the triumvirate for assaulting a fellow Council member.
If she let Marty have his way.
Delia stood naked and alone on the dark airless floor of the crater Newton. Even though she was there only in virtual reality, while her real body rested snugly in the VR chamber of her laboratory, she revelled in the freedom of her solitude. She could virtually feel the shimmering energy of the antiprotons as they raced along the circular track she had built around the base of the crater’s steep mountains.
More than 350 kilometers in circumference, the track ran past the short lunar horizon, its faint glow scintillating like a giant luminescent snake that circled Delia’s naked presence.
The track was shielded
by a torus of pure diamond. Even in the deep vacuum of the lunar surface there were stray atoms of gases that could collide with the circling antiprotons and set off a flash of annihilative energy. And cosmic particles raining down from the Sun and deep space. She had to protect her antiprotons, hoard them, save them for the moment when they would be needed.
She looked up, toward the cold and distant stars that stared down at her out of the dark circle of sky, unwavering, solemn, like the unblinking eyes of some wary beast watching her. The rim of the deep crater was ringed with rectennas, waiting to drink in the energy beamed from the Moon’s own solar-power farms and from the sunsats orbiting between the Earth and the Moon. Energy that Marty and Alfie had denied her.
In the exact center of the crater floor stood the ungainly bulk of the starship, her father’s masterpiece, glittering softly in the light of the stars it was intended to reach.
But it will never get off the ground unless I produce enough antiprotons, Delia told herself. For the thousandth time.
The crater Newton was not merely far from any other human settlement. It was cold. Close to the lunar south pole, nearly ten kilometers deep, Newton’s floor never saw sunlight. Early explorers had broken their hearts searching Newton and the surrounding region for water ice. There was none to be found, and the lunar pioneers had to manufacture their water out of oxygen from the regolith and hydrogen imported from Earth.
But even though any ice originally trapped in Newton had evaporated eons ago, the crater was still perpetually cold, cryogenically cold all the time, cold enough so that when Delia built the ring of superconducting magnets for the racetrack she did not have to worry about cooling them.
Now the racetrack held enough antiprotons, endlessly circling, to blow up all the rocky, barren landscape for hundreds of kilometers. If all went well with her experiment, it would hold enough antiprotons to send the starship to Alpha Centauri. Or rock the Moon out of its orbit.
The experiment was scheduled for midnight, Greenwich Mean Time. The time when the sunsats providing power to Europe and North America were at their lowest demand and could most easily squirt a minute’s worth of their output to Delia’s rectennas at Newton. The Moon kept GMT, too, so it would have been easy for the lunar grid to be shunted to Newton for a minute, also. If not for Marty.
Midnight was only six hours away.
Delia’s father, Cordell Thomas Shockley, scion of a brilliant and infamous family, had taken it into his stubborn head to build the first starship. Earth’s government would not do it. The Lunar Council, just getting started in his days, could not afford it. So Shockley decided to use his own family fortune to build the first starship himself.
He hired the best designers and scientists. Using nanomachines, they built his ship out of pure diamond. But the ship sat, gleaming faintly in the starlight, in the middle of Newton’s frigid floor, unable to move until some thirty tons of antiprotons were manufactured to propel it.
Delia was born to her father’s purpose, raised to make his dream come true, trained and educated in particle physics and space propulsion. Her first toys were model spacecraft; her first video games were lessons in physics. When Delia was five years old her mother fled back to Earth, unable to compete with her husband’s monomania, unwilling to live in the spartan underground warrens that the Lunatics called home. She divorced C. T. Shockley and took half his fortune away. But left her daughter.
Shockley was unperturbed. He could work better without a wife to bother him. He had a daughter to train, and the two of them were as inseparable as quarks in a baryon. Delia built the antiproton storage ring, then patiently began to buy electrical energy from the Lunar Council, from the sunsats orbiting in cislunar space, from anyone and everyone she could find. The energy was converted into antiprotons; the antiprotons were stored in the racetrack ring. She was young, time was on her side.
Then her father was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and she realized that both her time and her money were running out. The old man was frozen cryonically and interred in a Dewar in his own starship. The instructions in his will said he was to be revived at Alpha Centauri, even if he lived only for a few minutes.
So now Delia’s virtual presence walked across the frozen floor of Newton, up to the diamond starship gleaming faintly in the dim light of the distant stars. She peered through its crystal hull, toward the dewar where her father rested.
“I’ll do it, Daddy,” she whispered. “I’ll succeed tomorrow, one way or the other.”
Grimly she thought that if Marty was right and the antimatter exploded, the explosion would turn Newton and its environs into a vast cloud of plasma. Most of the ionized gas would be blasted dear of the Moon’s gravity, blown out into interplanetary space. Some of it, she supposed, would eventually waft beyond the solar system. In time, millions of years, billions, a few of their atoms might even reach Alpha Centauri.
“One way or the other,” she repeated.
Delia stirred in the VR chamber. Enough self-pity, she told herself. You’ve got to do something.
She pulled the helmet off, shook her auburn hair annoyedly, and then peeled herself out of the skin-tight VR suit. She marched straight to her bathroom and stepped into the shower, where she always did her best thinking. Delia’s father had always thought of water as a luxury, which it had been when he had first come to the Moon. His training still impressed Delia’s attitudes. As the hot water sluiced along her skin, she luxuriated in the warmth and let her thoughts run free.
They ran straight to the one implacable obstacle that loomed before her. Martin Flagg. The man she thought she had loved. The man she knew that she hated.
In childhood Delia had no human playmates. In fact, for long years her father was the only human companion she knew. Otherwise, her human acquaintances were all holographic or VR presences.
She first met Martin Flagg when they were elected to the triumvirate. Contrary to Marty’s nasty aspersions, Delia had not lifted a finger to get herself elected. She had not wanted the position, the responsibility would interfere with her work. But her father, without telling her, had apparently moved heaven and Earth—well, the Moon, at least—to make her a triumvir.
“You need some human companionship,” he told her gruffly. “You’re getting to an age where you ought to be meeting other people. Serving on the Council for a few years will encourage you to . . . well, meet people.”
Delia thought she was too young to serve on the Council, but once she realized that handsome Martin Flagg was also running, she consented to all the testing and interviewing that passed for a political campaign on the Moon. Most of the Lunatics cared little about politics and did their best to avoid serving on the Council. The only reason for having two human members on the triumvirate was to allay the ancient fears that Alpha One might someday run amok.
Once she was elected, C. T. Shockley explained his real reason for making her run for the office. “The Council won’t be able to interfere with our work if you’re on the triumvirate. You’re in a position now to head off any attempts to stop us.”
So she had accepted the additional responsibility. And it did eat into her time outrageously. The triumvirate had to deal with everything from people whining about their water allotments to deciding how and when to enlarge the underground cities of the Moon.
And the irony of it all was that nobody cared about Shockley’s crazy starship project or Delia’s work to generate enough antiprotons to propel the ship to Alpha Centauri. Nobody except her fellow triumvir, Marty Flagg. If Delia hadn’t been elected to the triumvirate with him, if they hadn’t begun this love-hate relationship that neither of them knew how to handle, she could have worked in blissful isolation at Newton without hindrance of any sort.
But Marty made Delia’s heart quiver whenever he turned those blue eyes of his upon her. Sometimes she quivered with love. More often with fury. But she could never look at Marty without being stirred. And he cared about her. She knew he did. Why else would he
try to stop her? He was worried that she would kill herself.
Really? she asked herself. He’s really scared that I’m going to kill him, and everybody else on the Moon.
Delia’s only experience with love had come from VR romance novels, where the heroine always gets her man, no matter what perils she must face along the way. But she did not want Marty Flagg. She hated him. He had stopped her work.
A grimace of determination twisted Delia’s lips as she turned off the shower and let the air blowers dry her. Marty may think he’s stopped me. But I’m not stopped yet.
She slipped into a comfortable set of coveralls and strode down the bare corridor toward her control center. Alpha One won’t let me tap the lunar grid, she thought, but I still have all the sunsats. The Council doesn’t control them. As long as I can pay for their power, they’ll beam it to me. Unless Alpha One’s tried to stop them.
It wouldn’t be enough, she knew. As she slid into her desk chair and ordered her private computer to show her the figures, she knew that a full minute of power from all the sunsats between the Earth and the Moon would not provide the energy she needed.
She checked the Council’s communications log. Sure enough, Alpha One had already notified the various power companies that they should renege on their contracts to provide power to her. Delia told her computer to activate its law program and notify the power companies that if they failed to live up to their contracts with her, the penalties would bankrupt them.
She knew they would rather sell the power and avoid the legal battle. Only a minute’s worth of power, yet she was paying a premium price for it. They had five and a half hours to make up their minds. Delia figured that the companies’ legal computer programs needed only a few minutes’ deliberation to make their recommendations, one way or the other. But then they would turn their recommendations over to their human counterparts, who would be sleeping or partying or doing whatever lawyers do at night on Earth. It would be hours before they saw their computers’ recommendations.
She smiled. By the time they saw their computers’ recommendations, she would have her power.