Moon Dreams

by M.A. Harris

Just Waiting

  A little more than two weeks later Paul found himself sitting on one of the benches under the cover of a small stand of trees near the Hollow’s cafeteria come company store. It was two o’clock Tuesday afternoon, and given that he’d been in his office at seven o’clock after getting up and doing his normal running circuit and an hour in the gym he was feeling like it had been a long day already, one in a long string of such days.

  Sipping on a diet coke he thought about the meetings with his design and manufacturing teams this morning. Running the two efforts concurrently was a potential, and at times very real, nightmare, but it was the only way they had any chance of meeting Aristide’s challenge. At first Paul had expected the whole thing to be called off when the real costs began to hit. But he’d been surprised; it often seemed as if the financial group was expecting him to spend more, not less. It would be easy to get spoiled, one of the reasons that he kept a fairly tight leash on his teams, more was not always better.

  Things were going surprisingly well with the design and build tasks, and with the endurance testing. They had had another minor disaster and lost a Stack to a burn out when a gasket failed, but it hadn’t caused an explosion and, like any failure, it had taught them more than an uneventful run would have. Paul was pretty sure that their production designs were going to work and work well. He was also fairly sure that they would be more powerful than the initial estimates had predicted, a good thing since the Moonships were getting heavier, and the lift manifests as well.

  Thinking about the Moonships and manifests Paul checked the clock on his tablet. He had an appointment to go over some of the equipment with Cliff at two thirty. After that they were again going to go over the schedule with the principle team leads - and after that they were going to have a meeting to discuss the Moonship crews and training with the people Cliff had had working on that for some time.

  As Paul strolled back towards the construction shed he passed men and women coming and going about their work. The frequent “hello Paul’s”, and “Howdy Mr. Richards” left him smiling. He’d never worked with a more dedicated crew and if he found the fact that a lot of them were members of the religious sect that made its home here strange, he couldn’t complain, they were good people. He hadn’t quite got a handle on who was in the sect and who wasn’t, or where everyone lived, though he knew that quite a few bachelors, male and female, were living in the hostel, but a lot more lived in the general area and Primus Junction.

  In the past two weeks he’d gone into Primus Junction three times and eaten at Betsy’s Upstairs twice. He’d also made friends with Fred Spragg, the head of the three-person history department at the Tech. Fred had been trolling for a fourth bridge player the first night Paul had visited the Tech and they had found a lot of interests in common, so Paul had been playing bridge with Fred and his regulars, which was a nice change from the work at the Hollow.

  As far as he could tell there weren’t even rumors circulating about what was going on at the Hollow, at least not among the middle levels of the local society. That was surprising in some ways but Aristide Industries’ security was intimidating and ever present, enough so that no one was likely to talk without thinking about it first. There was also the fact that what was going on was so fantastical that most people would dismiss it as the next worst thing to UFOlogy.

  What he had found was that the town had deep feelings of gratitude and respect for Aristide Industries that were strongly tinged with irony. There was also a healthy and growing worry about what was going to happen next. That last concern was apparently intensified by the fact that the locals detected a slowdown in the Canal project. Something was slowing progress at both the upper end, near Lake of the Sky, where the canal started, and at the end where it linked to the irrigation system in New Valley.

  As Paul walked up the armed guard at the side door that led straight into the shed glanced at her little display and waved him through. The display showed Paul’s face and his permissions, the guards always checked, even though they had to know who he was these days.

  Walking out through the door into the shed he glanced at the Alexis. She was beginning to change quite radically from the simple skeleton he had seen the first time. To maintain ‘operational security’ Aristide had insisted that she be given a stealth treatment to avoid being spotted on radar during ascent and descent. So now her bones and organs were being covered with a black shell. Only two sides were currently covered and the bottom plating was half installed. That included big hatches that would close over the landing pads after they had been retracted a couple of feet.

  Right now she looked rather miserable and incomplete, the CAD renderings of the completed ship looked like an avant-garde artists rendition of an Incan pyramid done in dead black. It wasn’t really difficult to put the stealth shell on the Alexis; the technologies were pretty well understood these days. The Moonship design team had used basically off the shelf materials and, given that the Alexis was hardly aerodynamic to begin with, they had simply sheathed her in six flat plates. It was an effective stealth design against conventional radar, there were only six reflection lobes and with the radar absorbent materials on the shell those returns would be much muted. Modern static, over the horizon and ultra wide band radars were hard to fool but they were either deployed overseas or on the coast looking outwards, not inwards.

  Work on the Alexis was fairly slow since the power and propulsion systems were still months from installation. Right now the focus was on the rest of the story, spacesuits, crew and cargo.

  He walked towards the back of the assembly shed; Cliff had been working with the space suit team back there. Paul came around a temporary partition and came to a stop, there were two men and a woman wearing the suits, one of the men was Cliff.

  The woman was Patsy Finnegan, the eldest daughter of one of the church families and a good CAD designer; she’d taken a two year course at the Tech and was currently working on her degree at the Tech and over the Internet. She was a good kid but the tease in her seemed to take delight in making Paul’s ears burn

  Patsy was a good looking, well built red head, and Paul had a very hard time pulling his eyes away from her. The skintight single suit outlined her in rather spectacular ways. Even the ‘space diaper’ looked erotic on her, rather like a padded bikini bottom. She grinned wickedly at him as she slowly pulled up and fastened the lightweight Kevlar over suit she had been getting into when he arrived.

  Cliff looked around, “Hey Paul, glad you could make it; we’re just doing the initial fittings on the second set. Yours should be coming out tomorrow.” Paul had gone in to have himself measured the week before. It had been an interesting experience. He’d stepped naked into a whole body laser scanner that had taken a very accurate map of his body to convert into the pattern for his space suit; it was a strange thought that he, Paul Richards, boy from the Indiana sticks, would soon have his very own spacesuit.

  “Thanks Cliff, you said you’d give me the briefing?” He’d not had time to really focus on the suits before, even when he got measured; it had been more an inconvenience than anything else. Paul nodded at the outfit, “Not much like what I see the station astronauts wearing, this is more like something out of a sci-fi movie?”

  Cliff grinned, he was very proud of what the suit team had been doing, “Yeah, well you know all the space powers, NASA and the Air Force have been working on new tech for a long time but progress is slow because everyone’s more interested in covering their behind than making breakthroughs.” He shook his head, “Most of that work’s in the public domain and we’ve been collecting it for years and we could take all the best ideas and put them together without anyone looking over our shoulders.”

  He waved down at the white suit he was wearing, “Of course the biggest breakthrough was Ultra Spandex, developed for one of the suit programs and then commercialized for skiing and skydiving suits, anything that needed to be skin t
ight and insulated. It’s a thermal insulator, but breathes and lets the body regulate heat for itself, pretty tough, even stiffens under shock load to support the body and soften blows”

  Paul sighed, “I actually know the woman who’s program paid for the development, she’s still a GS14 tech rep in the Air Force, should be a millionaire.” He shook his head in disgust. Most of the innovative ideas had been hers’, the contractor had simply implemented them, their upper managers were all now rolling in it and Ginger was still slogging away, hoping her civil service pension would cover her retirement.

  Cliff grimaced at the unfairness of the world but was more interested in his own story, “Anyway we took the material and the ideas and put them together, essentially the basic suit’s a sheath of the ultra spandex, you put it on and when your body heats it up it tightens. With an air tight outer shell it provides the support and basic insulation you need. Sweat and body oils are all taken up in the inner layer and there is airflow in the first and second layer so you can wear it comfortably for days - been a couple of volunteers wearing prototypes for weeks now with no problems.”

  Patsy was fully suited up except she had a heavy looking helmet under her arm. Her red hair was pulled back off her light skinned, freckled face. She was listening attentively while still giving Paul the eye.

  Cliff indicated the overalls, “The outer shells are Kevlar overalls with insulation, we have four different versions from a light weight design intended for general wear, to a heavy weight version intended for construction work on the moon. Patsy’s wearing the next version down, has the shoulder hoop for the heavy working helmet but it’s only a couple of layers of material and the boots are light weight.

  Cliff touched his own neck, he was wearing what looked a little like a neck ruff out of the renaissance “This is the emergency helmet we discussed the other day. It’s attached to the body suit but you can wear it buck naked,” Patsy made a rude noise though there was a glimmer in her eyes. Cliff tried to look serious but his enthusiasm got the better of him and he grinned and shrugged, “or over regular clothes, when the air pressure drops it deploys itself. It feels a bit like it’s trying to strangle you but it and the top seal airtight. It’s tough polycarbonate and there’s a little recuperator at the back, it and a tiny oxygen cell have enough air for about ten minutes, more if you’re careful.”

  Paul took the unit Cliff handed him, “I don’t imagine you’d be comfortable?”

  Cliff shook his head, “Not very but you’ll live and we have a rescue blister in every room or corridor. So, if you can get to one or get dragged to one in time you’re safe, or as safe as you’re gonna get.” He shrugged expressively, anything that breached the ship or the base was going to cause a mess and air would not be the only problem.

  The small helmet Cliff picked up next looked like something out of the sixties, “This is the ship helmet, crash helmet as well,” he tapped the side and a glare visor slid down, again and the visor and the front piece of the helmet slid up. “It’s really pretty similar to the Russian’s latest, nothing fancy. It’s more of an emergency thing, normally you’ll wear it open, but it can be worn outside if necessary, it’s light weight and tough as blazes.” He tapped it, “It also has a recuperator and oxygen cell and it can actually keep you going for an hour or more without external connections.”

  Next Cliff flipped a tiny but tough looking cable that stuck out of the shoulder of the suit, it was about the diameter of a thick finger, “Make up air comes in and carbon dioxide goes out at several times atmospheric through here, and power for the helmet as well. It’s the same for this helmet and the working helmet. The lines are buried in the outer liner of the suit and connect up to the life support pack. The line hooks into the helmet recuperator by a valve, keeps it fully charged in case something goes wrong.” He picked up the relatively small life support unit, handed to Paul, it was about the same size as a medium size backpack and about as heavy as a well packed one. “Everything you need to stay alive for a couple of days comes from this,” he showed three lines, “one’s the air line, and the other two are water and a nutrient drink from a tank, no recycling of body fluids yet.” Cliff grinned over at Patsy, who grimaced at him. “People get really grossed out over that and it’s not practical. We’ll do it in the base but at the suit level it’s just not there yet, my bet is it won’t be for a long time.”

  Cliff held out his hand and Patsy tossed him her big helmet, “This is the ‘working helmet,’ it is bigger and heavier, intended to be carried on the support ring of the overalls.” It was big, the face plate was big and faceted, flat transparencies sloping down and back from a shading beak, “It’s fixed on the shoulder, you turn your head inside, it’s not the greatest but we needed to put in suit displays and make it ultra workable and this was the only design that works. To be honest it still doesn’t make me happy but it’s the best we, or rather NASA and ESA could come up with,” he shrugged again. “There’s a projector on the inside of this helmet that can display a number of things, there’s a wrist mounted controller, and belt mounted computer and comm modules that hook in.”

  “You’ve been working on this for a long time,” Paul said quietly.

  Chuck Rhingold, the other man, laughed, “Me and Patsy have been working with Cliff on this ever since Patsy got out of tech school, what is it Patsy?”

  The tall girl frowned, “four and a half years though we only got to build some simple protos’s of some of this up to now. And some of the stuff came to us pretty much finished.” She waved at the backpack, “That’s mostly Swiss, their part of the European space thrust they started about five years ago, we bought the design and the components and put them together. Pretty cool stuff but no big deal.” She smiled at Paul who couldn’t help smiling back.

  “A lot of the technology is bought - NASA, DASA, ESA, JASA - they’ve been working on this stuff for decades but so much of it got dropped because no one wanted to take a risk, or the program got cut at the end, or the administration changed - a thousand reasons.” Cliff shook his head in disgust, but then smiled, “But it did get used in the end, a lot of it will, we’ve got a couple of reference librarians employed full time digging through data bases of this type of stuff, buying reports, getting copies of papers and memo’s. All of it will have to be shipped up eventually, to make sure Luna Haven has the root material for future development.”

  Cliff pulled up his overalls, “Going to wear these for a while to see how comfortable they are after all.” He smiled.

  Patsy grimaced, “I understand that but this diaper thing’s kinda disgusting. It’s alright for you guys but the plumbing’s not exactly great for the ladies.” Her light southwestern accent put some interesting emphasis on her complaint.

  “It’s not exactly the world’s greatest for us either Patsy, part of it’s no different for male or female users.” Cliff wriggled uncomfortably.

  Paul had seen some pictures of the ‘plumbing’ involved and had to agree with both of them, but there was little choice for long duration suit operations, at least there was no common interior cavity to the suit so the smell shouldn’t get awful. The little team working on it had even come up with a design that could essentially allow the waste system to be evacuated without removal though that hadn’t been built in yet.

  Paul went over the various piece of equipment in detail with Cliff and the others, becoming more and more amazed as they explained more and more. Not only at what they had done but what had been available. In some ways it seemed almost as if this had been ordained, everything had been ready for the Paaly Stack to come along and break mankind free of the Earth’s gravitational shackles. It was obvious from the way Cliff and the others talked about the equipment that they thought that God had been playing a very strong hand in all this. Paul kept his own counsel on that, though he could see their point.

  -o-

  The senior-level planning meeting was short as usual. They all sp
ent a lot of time getting ready for the meeting so that mundane issues were already dealt with. The topics were all problems, presented with the plans and schedules to overcome them. A few times the biweekly meeting had gone on for hours but today it was over in half an hour. Not that there weren’t a lot of problems - but they all appeared to be under some kind of control. By Friday most would be part of the program plan, a few might have turned into special items that would have to be dealt with on an individual basis. Fortunately, nothing to date had been a real ‘show stopper’ though they had had to find design-arounds for some issues.

  One of the problems of the day had been one of the pieces of construction equipment for Luna Haven. The design was too big to fit on the Moonships cargo deck and no one wanted to break it down and ship it in parts. It hadn’t been designed for that and putting it together on the lunar surface was asking for all sorts of problems.

  Paul and Cliff sat on the deck next to the offices that were attached to the construction shed, sipping coffee. The sun was ‘down’ in the Hollow but the sky was still bright, the air was cool and desert crisp, this was often a great time of day.

  Glancing over at Cliff, Paul let a stray thought surface, “Cliff, you know I still feel like I’m working blind at times.” He waved Cliff’s distressed look aside, “No, not because of you or your people, it’s because I’m so focused on the Stacks and the Moonship…or Moonships….really. I kind of blank out when anything else is being discussed. It’s so bad I’ve no real idea what the prefab sections we’ll be building Luna Haven out of look like. Till today I hardly had a clear idea of what the suits looked like and they startled the heck out of me. So what else is going to startle me? I guess I know they’re pretty big since the ship has to haul them and that damned excavator we were talking about today is bloody huge.”

  Cliff grimaced and shook his head, “I don’t know how we overlooked that problem until today, a simple stupid oversight like that, found by a twenty something clerk when she was doing the loading manifest. How did we miss it?”

  Paul shrugged and grinned, “Simple, people were busy and excited! Anyway I don’t think it’s a big deal, I came up with a solution while you guys were talking about the oxygen distribution network. I think we’ll just sling the thing under the Alexis and lift it like people do heavy equipment under a cargo chopper. Same issues and same solutions, easier really since we are essentially going straight up and straight down, not trying to accelerate and decelerate laterally. We’ll need to pick a calm night to do it, but I’d guess it should be simple enough, and we can probably carry quite a bit of other lightweight but bulky equipment on the cargo deck on the same flight.”

  Cliff stared at Paul, then “Of course, an obvious solution to an obvious problem. Thanks!”

  “The operational logistics crew are pretty good and I think a couple probably have experience with big cargo choppers, they’d have seen the same solution,” Paul pointed out.

  “Yes, I suppose so,” Cliff looked doubtful. Then his frown deepened, “But your earlier comment about not really knowing about how we’re going to build Luna Haven, that’s not good. I guess I see your point about being focused but as we start planning the actual operational part you need to understand more than the basics.”

  “I suppose you’ll have to run me through the drawings sometime soon. Conti probably should but he’s not scheduled back here for another month.”

  Cliff shook his head, “You’re a very hands on person Paul, like me, let’s go look at the real stuff, we can even take a peek at the excavator, I think one of them’s stored in shed three.” This last was almost under his breath as he stood up.

  Paul simply found he couldn’t stand up at first, “What do you mean? I thought the stuff was still being built?”

  The other engineer shook his head, “Lots of specialty bits are, but the basic core elements were done before you arrived.” He hesitated then shrugged and grinned, “Some bits, like the excavator were built a long, long time ago, some bits won’t be useful because they were built for a very different build campaign, but they’re here.” Cliff smiled at Paul’s slack jawed shock, “Mr. Aristides’ been very confident that he was going to get to the Moon somehow for a long time Paul. God apparently agreed with him”

  He held out his hand and Paul took it, though he felt a bit weak kneed as he stood. Cliff led off with Paul following; they hopped into one of the little ZEVs parked behind the operations center and glided quietly back towards the sheds that would soon store the small fleet of Moonships they were building.

  The main shed was a simple, steel framed metal clad structure, with a square floor plan and big sliding doors, but behind the main hangar was a long open sided bay. Cliff pulled around the back and stopped, Paul felt frozen in place. The bay was at least forty feet high, some of it had floor trusses between the upright posts, and some sections were open from floor to roof. Under the cover shapes waited, some very ordinary, some bizarre. The ordinary were three high stacks of ordinary looking shipping containers. Further down was a stack of three big cylinders that had to be housing units, heavily ribbed with a couple of heavy looking windows and airlocks, a little further along Paul recognized the bulk of the excavator, airtight cabin and all.

  “Jesus Christ, Cliff.” This had to have been started long before Aristide had any idea about Paaly’s invention.

  Cliff stiffened, “Paul, please! You know that’s offensive to me.”

  Paul glanced over at his glowering friend, “Sorry Cliff, but damn it all this has to represent hundreds of millions of dollars! More! And you say Aristide started this years before he heard about the Paaly Effect?”

  Cliff relaxed, his face uncertain, “I don’t know how or why but Mr. Aristide started this project a long time ago. When I joined the program almost seven years ago some of this equipment was already here. He’s had his futurists designing and building this stuff for the better part of twenty years, Paul. Some of it is designed for use in the Antarctic or underwater, as well as on the Moon, but some of it is really only useable on the Moon. I’d have to guess that it was almost like a hobby at first but it’s been a passion as long as I’ve been here. There were designs for chemical boosters and nuclear Moonships floating around when I first arrived.” Cliff hesitated then continued, “About five years ago the Moonship designs suddenly changed to use much smaller power plants and three years ago we started designing the Alexis.”

  Cliff’s voice was quiet; Paul realized it made sense, “Aristide and Paaly must have been communicating for a long time.”

  Cliff nodded, “Though I am not sure why or how much. Dr. Paaly and Mr. Aristide don’t like each other, they quarrel almost every time they meet. But Mr. Aristide has almost always given Dr. Paaly what he wants, I don’t understand their relationship.”

  Paul wanted to sigh; he didn’t understand his relationship with Paaly, especially not right now. From the day he had contradicted Coop on how to move forward on the Moonship project he’d hardly been able to get a word out of the stubborn old bastard. There was still a connection between them but Cooper thought Paul had stabbed him in the back and was cutting him out of the ongoing research. In some ways that was no big deal, Paul hardly had the time and he was much more of a practical implementer and project manager than theorist anyway, but it hurt at times. Particularly since the tall gawky physicist’s health was so visibly failing.

  The short red headed man waved his hand, “Anyway, we have a lot of equipment ready to set up the working base and get it going. You should be able to have the construction team installed in about five lifts and after that you just start delivering tubes and connectors.”

  “You have some of them as well?”

  “We have the units for the core of the village stockpiled in one of the sheds and under cover nearby, let’s go.” Cliff waved Paul out of the shed.

  As they drove towards one of the other two sheds Cliff continued. “When
it became obvious that the Moonships would be able to lift immense weights easily we took a step back from all the design work we’d been doing for years. One of the guys had done some work on the canal project and had always thought it was a great pity we couldn’t use them.” Cliff grinned, “Took him almost two weeks to get up the guts to suggest it, but once suggested it was obvious. We modified the canal tubes a little to make them more suitable, they’re a little narrower and taller than they were originally but now when we do a tube we examine it for flaws, the perfect ones are pulled aside to be modified for Luna Haven.”

  Paul frowned, “How big are they? It seems hard to believe people will be willing to live in what are little more than sewer pipes. I drive past the staging yard at the plant, I know the pipes are rectangular but how big are they?

  “The ones you can see from the road today are the smaller ones used in the irrigation system. They’re ‘only’ about twenty wide by ten high. The big ones we’re using are almost twenty-seven feet tall at the crown and thirty-five feet wide. The clear interior’s almost exactly twenty by thirty and fifty feet long. All of the early units are the standard two-unit housing cells though other housing unit designs are possible and it isn’t hard to move the interior walls around. They’re set up with a two story living section twenty five by twenty five foot on the top level and twenty-five by twenty on the lower, enough room for a small but comfortable three-bedroom home. On the upper level there’s a five-foot service passageway for all the services like water, air, power and telecommunications. On the lower level there’s a ten-foot wide walkway, wide enough for small electric carts. There were other designs for public service areas, shops, offices, a food court, even a theater, though none of them have been fabbed up and stockpiled yet. We may just send blank tubes and the fittings for those.”

  They pulled behind the second shed; under this bay were stacks of the huge tubes. Paul saw that the ends of the tubes had a complex joint, he pointed, “That to allow for moonquakes?”

  “Yes, and general shifting, but mainly for safety and to allow for less than perfect installation. If we had to do it to a tenth of an inch it takes a hundred times as long as if we can be off a couple of inches and a tenth of a degree or so.”

  That made a lot of sense, the joint looked massive but simple, probably not even terribly expensive, if mass had been a problem you’d never have done it that way, but within reason that was no longer an issue.

  The ends of these tubes had a concrete insert in them, sealing the end except for the two passageways. Cliff pointed at it, “Each cell is sealable if there is a breach, those doors swing closed under a pressure differential and seal it off with an expanding gasket joint. As a backup there we have what are essentially big airbags that explode and expand to seal the tunnels with an adhesive foam seal. That’s the principle system for sealing the service tube. It’s a bit messy to clean up afterwards but a whole lot better than having people die.”

  Paul shook his head in admiration, the concepts all sounded brilliant, also simple and redundant, just what you needed when living in a hostile environment. They also took advantage of the physics of the situation, another thing that tended to make a solution elegant and workable.

  “Paul, this way are the connectors,” Cliff waved towards the end and Paul realized that though the face he could see was similar, would mate with the end of the tube, the rest of the structure was much different. As they drove up he saw that it had tube interfaces on all four sides.

  Cliff pointed up, “These are the ‘intersections’ to the ‘streets’ the tubes will form. They’re forty feet square and double decked. The lower deck is the crossroads though there’s also room for stores. The upper deck is open, except for a small ring tunnel interconnecting the service tunnels. The early ones will be taken up by offices, later I imagine there will be stores, schools, daycares, that sort of thing.”

  The mention of schools and daycares brought up safety again, “What’s the level of radiation protection Cliff, the concrete’s thick but it can get pretty rough without a magnetic field and atmosphere?”

  “That’s why the excavator’s so important. They’ll dig down as deep as necessary, probably about twenty feet or so and we’ll bury the units under about ten feet of rubble, should be more than enough protection from radiation and micrometeorites. We’re looking at reveted windows in some areas but the early units and those deeply buried won’t have them. We’re using a lot of interior decoration tricks to make the insides livable.”

  They walked into the big shed and Cliff pointed at a set of containers stacked five high. “Those contain the materials for the domes Paul, the gardens and farms will be inside them. The domes are inflatable structures, double layered. The shells are a quad layer of liquid crystal plastic that doesn’t deteriorate under UV or radiation like normal ones, another gift from NASA and the DoE, the stuff’s used for marquees and temporary signs these days. The outer dome is at a lower pressure than the inner so we can detect puncture damage quickly and if both go there’s a good chance that the inner layer will fold up and plug the hole in the upper shell thus increasing the time to clear the dome.”

  “The radiation is still going to be a problem surely? And the two week day night cycle?”

  “Yeah, radiation wise we are going to use a motorized sun shade with a blocker using one of the new radiation stopping plastics to damp it down and a reflector to distribute the light. We can open and close the reflector to mimic a normal day night cycle. During the two weeks of night the same track will support a set of powerful sunlamps. Testing in a cavern seems to show it works.”

  It was stunning, “How close to self supporting will it be Cliff?”

  “If the Lunar polar water supply is what we think it is it should be close to totally self supporting Paul, obviously there’ll be things we need to import like drugs and luxury items. Also obviously, most of the high tech stuff will have to be purchased at first but we have the designs for a lot of it and can start producing it quickly. We’ve got a lot of the equipment necessary to start our own tech base stockpiled and waiting.”

  As they walked out of the big shed Paul’s mind was still trying to cope with the billions of dollars that had been sunk into all of this. He wondered where all that money had come from.