Moon Dreams

by M.A. Harris

November

  Paul walked between the rings of Paaly Stacks. With the disaster sleeves, tubes of steel stiffened Kevlar armor, there wasn’t a lot to see but there was certainly a lot to hear. They’d installed the last unit of the ten in the outer ring this morning and been running all of them ever since. The blowers and the odd tone the Stacks put out when operating near full power combined to make the engine room noisy. The air conditioning in here was not working quite right either so the room was almost ninety degrees, something one of the other technicians was working on.

  Raoul Spinoza was working on one of the gimbaled units, in the inner ring. The disaster sleeve was up and he had the power electronics rack open; the wiry Mexican glanced at Paul, “Hey Mr. Richards, could you pass me that converter module over there?”

  The technician’s chin pointed at a plastic and metal object sitting on a utility stool a few feet away. It was about the size of an old laptop computer but with five heavy copper tongues sticking out the back along with a fiber optic connector and two dripless water connectors. The unit was surprisingly heavy, packed with heat sinks, silicon and silicon carbide devices and a sophisticated computer; it was one of the latest generation modular converters like those used in many electric cars and industrial power systems. Paul got a kick out of the fact that the unit had the name BladePower embossed in its aluminum shell. “What happened Raoul?” The Stack had been balking at synchronizing with rest of the ship’s power grid.

  “Software, always software with these units, and I couldn’t get the damned thing to accept a remote rewrite so I had to pull it and hard reset, now it’s working fine.”

  “Think it’s safe to reinstall?”

  “If it goes again we’ll have a better idea of what’s wrong and we can simply cut this converter out of the loop, we can still output full power with one gone, the waveform just won’t look quite so nice and we’ll take some hours off the theoretical operating life.” Though he worked as, and enjoyed being, a technician Raoul was a trained engineer, a graduate of Virginia Tech.

  Paul nodded as the unit went in next to a bank of three others. The four units in each Stack assembly could provide almost a megawatt of industrial three phase, four eighty volt, sixty cycle power, enough for the whole ship. A pure power Stack could easily output four megawatts but that was infinite overkill for the Alexis, even this was but they had done it anyway.

  “Then what do you think about a little test lift this evening Raoul?” Paul asked, his stomach had the bottomless feeling of pure excitement.

  The teeth gleamed in his swarthy face, brown eyes sparkling with excitement, “You ready to call the big drags Mr. Richards?”

  “Patsy’s been ready for a week.” Paul laughed, Patsy had spent most of the last three weeks high as a kite after her final selection as the copilot and had seemed to get even more excited when Paul had gotten his unstated wish and the committee picked Raoul as the third member of the Alexis’ crew.

  “Then by all means we should let Miss Finnegan have her way, don’t you think?” Raoul laughed.

  “Done,” Paul tapped the utility tablet strapped to his arm like a huge wristwatch and tapped an icon, “Patsy?”

  “Yeah boss?” Excitement made her voice squeaky.

  “Tell Cliff to get the tug and drags out Patsy, we’re go for tonight.”

  The inarticulate scream that came over his earboom made Paul laugh, he looked at Raoul whose eyebrow had risen, “She’s a bit excited.”

  “Always is our Patsy a little excited, well I still have things to check off. How’s your list, and for that matter, how’s Patsy’s?” Raoul asked.

  “Patsy’s is going well; she’s checked all the basic loads and the space survival equipment. Mine is doing OK, I’ve checked all the backup systems and the disc based software libraries to make sure we could rewrite the guidance and control system if we had the time and desire. I’m most of the way through the hardware spares and that’s looking good. The only deficiencies are either being fixed or green lines.” Green lines were nice to have, not critical items, most of them were second backups for systems that would not cause catastrophic failure if they went out.

  “You talk to the design team about the next generation ship design Mr. Richards?” Raoul and Paul had worked up a long list of changes they would like to see in the second and third designs.

  “Yeah, Chuck just about went through the roof when I showed him the flat deck concept.” Paul sighed.

  Raoul shrugged, “It is what the Architect is supposed to do when the user and engineers give them the real requirements.” The three man crew of the Alexis loved ‘their’ ship but they could see that the design had been driven by the requirement to put the load deck as near the ground as possible - which was possible but not necessarily sensible - since when fully loaded the Alexis was a little difficult to control, one of the reasons the people with flying experience had done poorly with the simulator.

  “You think we have enough spares onboard for the Stacks?” Paul knew he was obsessing a bit but couldn’t stop himself.

  “Mr. Richards we have what? Over fifteen thousand operational hours on the Stacks now? With two failures in the latest design, only one of which took longer than twenty minutes to fix. And that one I fixed in twenty hours, complete blower strip out and all. I think we will do fine. How are the latest strip-down units looking?”

  “As you’d expect, the Rootes Blowers are the wear items and it looks like the predicted thirty thousand hours mean time between failures was a good number. I figure we’re not going to do much better till we come up with some kind of solid-state compressor design. Only other problems are still to do with hydrogen embrittlement in some of the plumbing, nothing we hadn’t predicted but still worrying. I’d say after forty or fifty thousand hours they’ll be bombs waiting to go off. So, at about twenty thousand hours, we’ll strip units out and rebuild with all new structure, shell and plumbing.”

  “Doesn’t sound too bad I guess, the electronics should last a lot longer than that so we can recycle a lot of the Stack hardware? And twenty thousand hours is what? Better than two years continuous operation right?”

  “Yeah, and we should do better in the future, all the way around.” Raoul had buttoned the Stack up and dropped the sleeve down from the ceiling and locked it down. They watched a little remote panel as the unit came on line. It started generating thrust and power without a single hiccup.

  -o-

  As Paul walked into the construction shed he stopped and glanced around. The Alexis had been lifted onto what were essentially four large dollies after they had buttoned up the engineering module and before they had replaced the stealth sheathing over the outside. The two hundred ton gantry had simply lifted the ship off the floor and a forklift had located the massive four-wheel platforms under the feet. The ground crew had then made sure that the wheels were all aligned so the tug wouldn’t have too much trouble hauling the eighty tons of steel and aluminum out and onto the takeoff and landing pad.

  The tug was one of those massive diesel machines used at airports to shove airliners away from the gate. It was sunset and the high bay doors on the north face of the assembly shed slid open for the first time in Paul’s memory. It was already dusk in the hollow as the big tug rumbled up from its storage shed.

  They all walked out into the rapidly cooling evening as the Alexis rolled out; there was something primeval about the heavy rumble of the diesel and the stink of its exhaust. They were moving towards the most distant of the three hangar sheds. A design detail Paul had missed about the sheds was that they were built on a rail system, which allowed them to be rolled onto the launch pad so the Moonships didn’t need to be rolled in and out. It was not a difficult design, it had been used many times for rocket boosters, but it once more indicated how much thought and effort had gone into this program.

  It took twenty minutes at a steady walking pace to get to the pad that would be the Alexis�
�� home from now on. The shed had been pushed back out of the way earlier. The dolly wheels were locked, the riggers hopped on the tug with waves and it rumbled into the darkness beyond the ring of lights on the pad. Now there were only a few people here, not far away was Cooper Paaly, tall and almost skeletal, as silent now as he had been for most of the last six months. Cliff Samson and Samuel Smythes, the Church of the Stars pastor, were close by as were Patsy’s parents and younger brother. Paul wished he could have had his parents here but they weren’t in on the secret. Neither were Raoul’s, they had to make do with talking to their parents on the phone.

  Paul, Patsy and Raoul were all wearing their spacesuits, with the light weight ‘pilot’s shell’ each had their helmet hanging from a belt clip. Paul still found the suit a little disconcerting, a little constricting, but oddly comfortable; it wasn’t hot or cold, it wasn’t clammy, slick or chafing, it was as if he were embedded in faintly warm, soft but firm foam. The capillary action of the suit and the air passages kept it at body temperature even if the outside was hot or cold. He could understand why all the extreme sports types wore ultra spandex these days.

  “Well Paul, it looks like you get your dream.” Cooper’s voice was a little cracked and old.

  Paul wanted to cry when he looked into his friend’s age and disease ravaged face, “And yours as well Cooper - we did it! I looked at the figures and I think we could build a practical starship with Paaly Stacks today. One that wouldn’t take forever to get to Alpha Centauri - we have the stars in our hands!”

  Cooper laughed, his voice a little creaky, “What, no Stockholm Paul?”

  “As you so graphically put it Coop - screw Stockholm! If I have the moon and the stars what do I need money for?” Paul tried to smile up into the hooded blue eyes.

  “Good, good, I’m sorry we haven’t talked much in the last few months Paul. I was angry at first about your siding with Aristide.” He hesitated, “One day you’ll probably realize why, but it’s not important now.” The old sparkle glinted through, “And it drove me to look at some things in much more detail,” A real grin, “I even looked at the design issues of the integrated Stack and I think you were being generous when you said it wasn’t ready. I don’t think it will be practical for decades, if at all. It also let me sit back and do a lot of thinking, I have some interesting toys to show you one of these days. Lots of fun, lots and lots of fun.”

  Paul reached out to touch the other mans shoulder, “Good for you Cooper, and Cooper, thanks for coming out tonight, thanks for everything.”

  The old man’s hand reached out, “Thanks for believing in me Paul, and pushing and helping. You never seem to realize that we’d not be here, except for you.”

  Paul shrugged uncomfortably, “I’m just a grunt Cooper, I’m glad you think I helped, but you’d have figured it out without me. I was just lucky.”

  “Just lucky! That we could all have such luck Paul!” His hand patted gently, “Have a good flight; I’m afraid I haven’t kept up with the plans, what’s the itinerary for tonight?”

  “Nothing much, system checks, light off the APU and start up the Stacks from the APU. Lift off and hover for a while, hopefully we can do a little maneuvering. We probably won’t lift over the lip of the hollow. Tomorrow night we go for an orbital flight, no point really in pulling punches, we’ll exercise the navigation system and the Stacks to see how they perform. Next night we probably go for a Luna flyby. After that we’ll have to see, probably go for the first Luna landing in a week or less.” His heart raced as he said that, feeling like he was in some kind of sci-fi movie all over again.

  The big hand patted again, “You be careful Paul, be careful.”

  “I plan on it Cooper, but I plan on having the time of my life as well.”

  Five minutes later Paul climbed up through the personnel hatch in the plating and then up the ladder mounted to one of the main structural beams. The ladder stopped on the catwalk, next to the cabin. The Alexis’ cabin was actually very spacious, about the same total area as a small airliner. It was made up of three cylindrical pressure vessels placed side-by-side and cross-connected by two hatchways. One cylinder was mostly dedicated to life support. It had oxygen tanks, oxygen scrubbers, food and potable water. It also contained the ships auxiliary power unit or APU, two Cummins diesels, either one of which could provide enough power to start a power Stack and keep the crew alive at the same time.

  The center cylinder contained the ship’s bridge or cockpit, depending on your background. What Paul thought of as the bridge had no direct view of the outside, windows would have been expensive and compromised the Alexis’ stealth, so they made do with big, high resolution display panels, which did a better job in most cases anyway. Behind the bridge was an electronics bay containing most of the ship’s navigation and control systems. Behind that was living space made up of a small kitchen, sitting room, sleeping compartment and bathroom. The third cylinder was flexible space with a dual bathroom. Most of the space was currently filled with recording and test equipment

  Below the flat decks in each compartment were storage bays, accessible through trap doors, for spares and infrequently needed equipment. There was also a ‘safe haven’ area in each compartment, with a water tank below it to protect against solar radiation should they be trapped in space in a solar storm. The haven was under the bridge and electronics room in the center module but was in the center section of the other two cylinders.

  The three cylinders of the cabin provided the three-man crew with living space for weeks in space; it could also be set up to carry thirty people at a time to the Moon base. The design was not particularly oriented for weightlessness, with the Paaly drive they would accelerate all the way, only spending a few minutes in free fall on most trips.

  Paul glanced at his displays, checking his crew’s status. Raoul was checking the propulsion and life support systems while Patsy was giving the hull and structure a once over. Paul settled into the command seat and buckled in. He’d done his own check on the way up here. They each had a formal checklist and a personal informal one that made sure the other two were on the ball. There was nothing that Paul could see wrong at this time, but then the Alexis had been gone over with a fine tooth comb for the past couple of weeks.

  Paul started checking systems, he was on battery power, the big cell stacks were hardly showing a drain but he didn’t like using that energy if he didn’t have too. “Raoul, the APU’s show ready, what’s your read?”

  “Go for start boss.” The Mexican sounded almost calm over his earboom.

  The rumble of the diesels starting was rather anachronistic in a spaceship. Paul watched the power meters on the ship’s power bus flicker and stabilize. He brought the life support systems up and shut the valves that pulled in air from the outside. He snapped the safety cover down over those toggles leaving the diesels’ valves uncovered for now.

  The first Paaly Stack came to life, and started to warm up, it had only been shut down an hour before so it would only take a few minutes. From a cold condition it could take as long as thirty minutes for the Stack to warm up to a safe starting temperature. He started two others on the start cycle, all that the diesels could power, even in startup mode.

  Having done that, he started running down the rest of his check list. Monitoring systems, basic control systems, navigation systems, and display and recording functions, it was a startlingly long list. About five minutes into the list the first Paaly Stack reached safe start temperature; Paul switched it on and watched as the meter showed it generating power then started the warm up on ten more Stacks. By that time the other two were online and he quickly brought the remaining seven Stacks to startup and shut down the APU, flicking their valves shut.

  Turning back to his main check list he quickly completed it. Patsy slipped into her seat next to him, putting her helmet on the rack behind her head and fastening the harness. She was looking very tens
e; there was a faint sheen of sweat on her forehead.

  “How’re you doing Patsy?” Paul reached over and touched her arm.

  She looked at him almost as if startled that he was there, but then a brilliant smile burst forth, “I feel like the world is resting on my shoulders Commander, but it feels so damned good I keep on expecting to wake up from some kind of crazy dream.”

  Paul laughed, “Join the club Patsy, anything for the Fix List yet?”

  “No Commander.” There was a rustle behind them as Raoul slipped into the flight engineer’s seat. Paul noted with an internal grin the wide-eyed excited look Patsy flashed at Raoul. She thought she was being discrete about it but the three of them spent too much time together to make it possible to hide the fact that she was deeply in love with the slender young Mexican. Raoul was pretty obviously smitten with her - but afraid of the reaction of the almost pure Anglo church community she lived in. Paul figured that young love would find a way. He just hoped the two of them wouldn’t be too blatant about it onboard.

  The Stacks were all up now, producing low levels of thrust and a little power for the ship systems. The big tanks of ice on the load deck were beginning to thaw pretty quickly. They’d had no other solution to the waste heat problem. The Alexis had two large thermal wings that would be unfolded in space so cooling, once space borne and away from prying eyes, was not an issue. In atmosphere the plan had been to use large air-cooled heat sinks but they would blaze like an infrared searchlight when the ship was at full power and that would defeat the stealth system, so they had developed a system where the coolant lines passed through a couple of huge tanks of frozen water that could sink the heat for almost an hour, enough time for the ship to cover the distance from ground to orbit. The big thermal wings could freeze the water once the ship was in space and thus provide heat sinking for landing. It was heavy, almost two tons of water ice, but it was simple, elegant and predictable.

  Overall, the stealthing of the ship had added almost seven tons to the already massive seventy two tons, but the twenty Paaly Stacks could put out two hundred and thirty tons of lift, which meant that they could accelerate the basic hull at something like three gravities. They could accelerate the maximum planned cargo at almost one and a half G. With a basic load of liquid hydrogen they could easily accelerate all the way out to Jupiter and back in a few days, a thought that still boggled the mind, and one that set the dreamer behind his workaday persona to spinning wild imaginings.

  The Stacks were putting out about twenty tons of lift and the ship’s systems were totally nominal. Paul glanced at the small flat panel monitor that showed the interior of the command center, full of people. Unlike the space program, the command center had not said a thing during the whole start up procedure. The Alexis had to be totally autonomous, unlike NASA’s scientific vessels. The command center was designed to control the preparation and loading of cargo when the base construction was underway.

  “Command center, we are commencing flight test.”

  Cliff’s voice was tense, “Go with God Alexis!”

  Paul selected manual mode and pushed the thrust control smoothly forward. Through the structure they could hear the Stacks picking up power. Patsy spoke softly, “Thirty tons, forty tons, fifty tons, sixty tons, seventy tons, eighty, zero on the jacks, we have lift off.” There were cheers in the command center.

  Paul rolled the thrust back to the indent at seventy-nine tons and the ship held in the hover. The laser altimeter showed that they were only a foot or so further off the ground than they had started. He had the control mode in x-y lock so the ship was automatically trying to keep them over the same spot. There was no drift that any of the sensors could detect.

  With a faint singing roar almost eighty tons of spacecraft hung in the air as still as if she had been planted on the ground.

  “We did it, we did it, God bless, God bless.” Patsy was whispering to herself as she checked her instruments.

  Paul rolled the theta control and the ship pivoted on her axis, still held in x-y lock, she swung around, her massive landing pads scything the air, “Patsy retract the jacks.”

  A flick of a switch on the center console and they all felt the faint rumble and thump as the gear came up and sealing plates slid into position, “Gear up and stealth complete, cross check?”

  Raoul spoke softly, “I have confirmation on all four positions Commander, Pilot. I also have confirmation of all external vents and seals set at ascent and or space.”

  Paul had brought the slow spin to a stop and put the theta lock on. Now he pushed the side stick controller and the hull began to move slowly towards the center of the hollow. He let it go and the ship came to a smooth stop, locked in position once more.

  “Cliff, the response is nominal so far, I am going to lift to the max hollow altitude and do a couple more checks. Copilot, dial in a hundred feet AGL please.”

  “Commander has asked for one hundred feet AGL.” Patsy said calmly and rolled the thumbwheel that controlled altitude. The Alexis floated up gently and then stopped almost imperceptibly.

  Paul rolled the hull and pulled the side stick controller and the ship pirouetted and swooped to the side. For the next forty minutes eighty tons of spacecraft danced almost silently in the air over the hollow’s floor. First under Paul’s control then Patsy’s, even Raoul got a couple of minutes. The water in the coolant tanks was beginning to simmer by the time Paul reluctantly decided to call it a day.

  The landing jacks came out with smooth precision as they came to a halt over the exact center of the pad, controlled by a GPS receiver. Paul rolled the altimeter control down with a maximum drop rate set at a foot per second and the Alexis dropped silently towards the concrete. The riggers had cleared the dollies off the pad while they’d been out over the center of the hollow.

  Touchdown was smooth and precise, the three laser altimeters making sure that the landing jacks touched down at almost the same instant. Paul waited for a few seconds then flicked the Stacks to shutdown mode and the battery took up the internal loads. Paul flipped the shields over the vents and valves and a red light and a buzzer lit up. Raoul spoke “I’m disarming the warning, Commander.”

  “Thank you, Engineer.” The light went out and they ran down the shut down list. The ground crew had opened the access hatch and was already attaching the coolant lines to the almost boiling water tanks. On the power board the external power light came on and the batteries started to charge up again.

  Paul looked over a Patsy, “How’d you like your first flight?” The three of them had in fact been flying every few days in one of Aristide Industries’ light airplanes. Paul still found it very odd that he would be piloting a spacecraft to the moon before he got his private pilot’s ticket. On thinking about it he had to wonder if he’d ever get his ticket. The ex-Air Force types and the Doctor on the selection committee had insisted on the flight training but in truth there was really no similarity between the behavior of the little Beechcraft and the Alexis Aurora. The ‘feel’ was utterly different and Paul had to wonder if it wasn’t pointless, as well as being something he didn’t have the time for.

  Patsy was sitting back wide eyed, staring up at the overhead display showing the systems shutting down, “I can’t say Commander, I don’t know. I feel almost let down right now but I feel like I’m going to float away and thinking about tomorrow just about blows my mind.”

  “Commander, you know every system and response, right down the line, was what the simulations and tests said they would be. I don’t see any reason to delay going for an orbital flight tomorrow.” Raoul’s voice was very level and firm. Paul grinned to himself, very happy with his choice of engineers.

  “You and me both Raoul, how do you feel Patsy?” Paul asked almost rhetorically.

  “I’m with you, orbital testing or more?”

  “My thought is we may have been way too conservative. What about checking the solar
weather report, if it looks good I say we do a direct ascent and establish our orbit out of the normal orbital planes outside the radiation belt. Do our initial orbital tests and see how we do in zero g. Stay in orbit all day, and if it still looks good go for a Luna fly by the second day and a landing on the third night?” Paul said quietly.

  “Oh wow, boss! You don’t go half way do you?” There was almost reverence in his young copilot’s voice.

  “It sounds reasonable Commander; do a quick stop in low orbit to check systems before going up to the ten thousand mile orbit?” asked Raoul.

  Paul nodded, “Makes sense, I guess if things went completely to hell we might be able to rendezvous with the space station. You never can tell.”

  The link to the Command center was reestablished, Cliff’s grinning face was in the screen, “Hey guys, fantastic, how did it feel?”

  “Like we were meant to be there,” Paul smiled back.