And the unscheduled delivery of Erika Trace down to the moonbase had thrown things completely out of whack. Chu had spoken to Celeste McConnell, and she assured him that she did not expect things to remain unchanged with all that had happened.
But Bernard Chu set his own goals, regardless of how lax others might be. He had learned lessons the hard way, and he had become a hard man.
A tech switched off his link. "Zimmerman has come through the hatch.
Everything is ship-shape. Teams are removing the resource canisters."
Chu nodded and set his lips in a straight line. Resource canisters. If it wasn't for the containers of solar cells, rare minerals, and geological specimens, there wouldn't be a need to export anything from the Moon. Within the next few years, if the regolith mining operation was successful, these canisters would contain the fusion fuel helium-3, and then the whole damned lunar colony would really start paying for itself. Chu remembered all too well how the moonbase people sweated for the day when they could finally start pulling their weight.
"I'll go to meet Captain Zimmerman," Chu said. "Page me if anything happens."
"Yes," the tech said, then turned back to his work, logging in the canisters and hooking up the auto-scanner. The scanner would record each canister as it was moved through the LTV hatch into the Collins. Once set into the loading pod, they would be coupled to the Japanese Inter-Orbital Transfer Vehicle for passage back to Earth.
Bernard Chu had commanded Moonbase Columbus for a year and a half --
the longest anyone had ever supervised the base. He had made great strides with improving conditions there. In fact, he took credit for converting the place from an experimental outpost to a permanent human presence on the Moon.
Then Jason Dvorak had come up to do much more than that, and Celeste McConnell -- Chu's good friend -- had herself told him that Dvorak would replace him. Grudgingly, wondering what she saw in the young architect, Chu had done his best to help introduce Dvorak to the rigors of command, the million and one things he would have to watch over just to keep day-to-day living from killing everyone.
Dvorak. Chu had no reason to dislike him. The man was an intelligent, softspoken, reasonably competent and enthusiastic person. But he was only an architect! What business did he have there? As a visiting project manager, maybe, but certainly not as a moonbase commander. That made no sense.
Granted, Dvorak had proven himself to be a skilled manager on Earth, cultivating his own multi-million-dollar corporation, just like some of the computer geniuses who had formed software companies and had stumbled onto more money than they knew how to manage. Dvorak was a wunderkind, no doubt about it. But a moonbase commander? His assignment still seemed odd to Chu.
McConnell, though, had based her career on many of these seemingly random, surprising decisions that no one could predict, intuitions that seemed completely nonsensical, that could not possibly work ... yet somehow always did. Chu couldn't understand it. Yet how could he argue after surviving the Grissom disaster? Chu pursed his lips again as he pulled himself through one of the airlock doors toward Docking Port B.
Bryan Zed waited for him in the corridor. His uniform was a crisp medium-blue; somehow he had not wrinkled it on the flight from the lunar surface. Clean-shaven, his hair combed, his gaze forward -- had the man actually groomed himself before docking?
Chu grabbed a rung with one hand and extended his other in a handshake.
"Welcome back, Bryan."
Zimmerman was an enigma -- someone with no apparent personality, no sense of humor, square-jawed and built like a rock. He added "sir" or "ma'am"
to the end of every sentence. One of the techs on the Collins had mentioned Zimmerman's wife Gloria, whom none of them had ever seen, wondering if she was as detached and robotic as he. "Hey, imagine them making love," the tech had said, dropping his voice into a robotic monotone. "Was-it-good-for-you?
Yes-it-was-good-for-me."
As Zimmerman pushed along the corridor wall, Chu said, "Would you join me for a break? You must need to relax a bit."
"Yes sir," Zimmerman said. Tacked onto the end of that seemed to be an implicit, "if you insist."
Chu worked his way toward the observation module where the astronomy setups automatically scanned the stars, compensating for the slow rotation of the Collins. Behind them at the docking port a team slipped through the airlock sleeve, hurrying to remove the resource canisters for loading onto transport pods.
As he slid from one module to another, Chu recalled that last scramble when Celeste had sounded the alarm on the Grissom, getting to the one place on the entire station that would survive the collision. Hurrying, not knowing what would happen....
Being on the moonbase and firm ground had made him forget for a while, had let him grow accustomed to a solid surface under his feet. But up here, the Collins reminded him how treacherous life in orbit could be.
Of all the Grissom survivors, only Chu had remained in space, working his way up through gift promotions, sympathy assignments, and PR spots.
Celeste McConnell had returned to Earth, but she had excelled in the United Space Agency, shooting to the top. All of the others had dropped out of sight.
Somehow, Chu thought that if anything were about to go wrong with the Collins, Celeste would find a way to warn him again.
Bryan Zimmerman said nothing as the two of them drifted into the observation module. Chu floated to a vacant chair, sat down, and strapped himself in for comfort.
Below them, the Moon rose like a great hulk of beaten bronze reflecting sunlight in its gibbous shape. Directly behind, in its shadowed rear, stood the Daedalus artifact, the great alien construction that continued assembling itself.
He supposed Celeste had done him a favor by pulling him off the moonbase before that thing was discovered, before he himself had to worry about an alien infestation. There didn't seem to be any clear-cut answers. But it didn't matter -- Jason Dvorak had to handle that now. It was in his lap.
Sink or swim, Dvorak!
Chu found himself smiling. Beside him, Bryan Zed sat stony-faced. As Chu stared down at the Moon and thought of the voracious extraterrestrial nanomachines, he was glad to be up at L-1 -- where it was safe.
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PART III
"Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject -- the actual enemy is the unknown."
-- Thomas Mann.
"To store information as much as possible in a small space, the structural element in the machine must be made small. To make computation as fast as possible, the machine must be small. People are now trying to make an element of molecular size and a machine of cellular size. As the size becomes smaller, however, the thermal noise becomes larger in comparison with the signal. Consequently, the machine must be isolated or insulated from the environment to remove the influence of noise in the environment. Moreover, the machine must be cooled to decrease the internal noise. This is a usual way of technology."
-- Fumio Oosawa in X-Ray Microscopy in Biology and Medicine (1990).
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CHAPTER 12
MOONBASE COLUMBUS
Even after running for three-quarters of an hour, Jason Dvorak did not feel exhausted. The sheen of sweat dampening his exercise suit soaked into the carbon-sandwich layer in the cloth. Thirty-four laps around the eighth-kilometer underground track, but his feet were too light, his legs too powerful in the low gravity. After eleven months, he still couldn't get used to it.
Optical fibers spilled sunlight across the track, bathing the exercise area in a cool yellow-white. As he ran around the compacted-regolith track, he thought he must look like a ballet dancer, with each delicate and graceful step taking too long to fall back to the surface. He panted through the filter mask, listening to his muffled breathing. Inhaling too much of the ever-present lunar dust could cause bronchitis.
Jason liked to exert himself and take his mind off other burdens. On Earth, he had often gone j
ogging to clear mental blocks for construction designs, to brainstorm with himself. It was as if his mind tried to keep pace with his body's exertion.
Everyone at the moonbase knew where to find him at times like this, though few others were using the equipment now. He would have to emphasize that the crew couldn't shirk their mandated exercise routines just because they were fascinated with Erika's "nanocritter" studies. Two men were on the weight machines -- a system of pulleys counterbalanced by lunar rocks; a woman pumped on the exercycle as she hummed along with a music ROM on her conduction earphones.
Jason split off from the track and headed to the lockers. He needed a sponge bath, but decided just to towel himself off for now. The allotment of carbonated cleansing water was rationed, but that would change when Cyndi Salito's mining machine geared up to full capacity. He would be in even greater need of a cool rinse after the conversation he was dreading.
It was that time of the week again. He had jogged seventeen kilometers, but he could not run away from everything.
Jason stood in the private communications booth with the door closed and the windows opaqued. Each member of the moonbase crew got their weekly call home, rigidly scheduled by the United Space Agency. Brawls had broken out because some people tried to preempt other scheduled calls, so the rules allowed for no flexibility except under extreme emergencies.
Unfortunately for Jason, the Agency frowned just as much on anyone skipping their scheduled calls. Crewmembers must keep up the morale of the people on Earth as well as on the Moon.
Jason swallowed a lump in his throat as he watched the RINGING
designator at the bottom of the screen. It flashed five times before Margaret bothered to come to the phone.
Jason knew what to expect, but he always held a ridiculous, naive hope that she would appear pleased to see him, that she would begin the conversation with a smile and a "Hi Jason!" That was how he imagined most homebound conversations went, though he knew that many long-distance relationships were badly strained. Several marriages had already snapped --
including his own.
Margaret's face was scowling as her image came into focus. She knew the calling schedule as well as he did, but she had not yet gotten up the nerve to refuse to answer. That would come soon.
"I can only talk a minute," she said.
He couldn't see his children in the focal hemisphere. Margaret should have had them available, ready to greet their father. Now, she would probably make him waste some of his calling time while she rounded them up. "Can't you start out by saying hello?"
She heaved a big sigh. "Hello."
Okay, she was making this difficult. He decided not to play her game by getting angry at her. "Where are the kids?"
Pause. "Outside."
"Could I at least see my children?"
Pause. "I'll get them."
Arguments transmitted across cislunar space carried their own checks and balances, with forced pauses to catch a breath and to cool heated exclamations. Margaret's image walked off the screen, leaving him to stare at the large sunken drawing room he had designed. He had spent years dabbling, developing the architecture of his perfect house. It had been a special sanctuary for him, though Margaret had already changed many of his favorite things.
He wondered if he would ever set foot in his home again.
Margaret had filed for divorce. It would be final by the time he returned to Earth. The judge would probably award her possession of the house and enough alimony to support a small Third World country. Sometimes the Moon just wasn't far enough away.
He had first met Margaret at a ritzy grand opening of one of his new buildings in New York. With Jason's success and money, he had to spend a lot of time at social functions he usually didn't enjoy. Margaret, who came from a wealthy, upper-class family in the city, admired his work and his status. She had been rather aloof, but he fell in love with her anyway. She had insisted on a huge wedding -- destined to be the "social event of the year" -- and she had gotten it. Jason never worried about the cost of things, and he thought it would keep her happy, start everything off on the right foot.
He had been a workaholic all his life -- Margaret knew that, and he assumed she knew what to expect. She valued her high-class lifestyle so much that he had never considered she would begrudge him the time required to earn that kind of income. Perhaps he had been stupid to ignore the possibilities.
Margaret never seemed satisfied, even with a nanny to watch after the kids. He had offered her every opportunity to do what she wanted, to go where she liked, do volunteer activities, get her own job, take classes, attend meetings. Anything she wanted. But Margaret never even knew what she wanted --
except, perhaps, that she wanted to be disappointed in him.
Offscreen, he heard the kids coming, and Margaret ushered them into view. She had wasted a full two minutes of his five-minute allotment. Good job, Peggy! She hated to be called Peggy as much as he hated to be called Jase.
Lacy clung to her mother's arm while Lawrence scowled; the boy looked tough and protective. The twins had only a vague idea who this man was who called them every week. Children forget quickly. To them, they had no Daddy.
"Say hello to your father," Margaret said, nudging them forward.
"Hi," Lacy said, then averted her eyes.
Jason remembered holding them as babies in the hospital, mouthing astonishment to himself. These are mine! I'm their father! Did we do this all by ourselves? But he wasn't a particularly good father, and he knew it.
Always gone, always busy, he had been a quarter of a million miles away from them for over a year.
Lawrence tugged on his mother's sleeve. "Is Perry coming over today?"
"Yes, honey. He's going to take you to the park."
Jason felt a pain in his chest, not really from any surprise but just that it was out in the open. An odd flatness in Lawrence's voice made him suspect that Margaret had told the boy to recite exactly those words. It was her way of twisting the knife from across the gulf of space.
"Perry, huh?" Jason amazed himself by the coldness in his voice.
"That's good. Perry and Peggy -- what a cute-sounding couple. Or is he just a fling to occupy you during those long and boring days when you never bother to do anything else?"
She glared and pushed the children away from his view. "Shut up, Jase!
How dare you be judgmental! After what you've done to me, to my life? I'm not a widow and I'm damned tired of living like one."
But over the transmission delay he began talking before she finished her sentence. "After what I've done to you? What the hell are you talking about?" Now he did feel astonished. What could she possibly be thinking of?
How could she twist it around and make her weakness his fault? What ever happened to sticking together during the bad times as well as the good?
Out of sight, Lacy started to cry. He wanted to reach out across space and hold his little girl. But the gulf of time separated them as much as distance.
Margaret's doorbell chime rang in the background. Jason had designed the system so that the soft bells could be heard in every room of the house.
Now they were working against him. Before she could say anything to him, the red box appeared on the transmission window, ticking down the remaining seconds before his allotted personal call would be terminated.
"I've got to go," she said.
He decided that she must have made sure Perry would come over during his call, just to sting him even more. Such perfect timing could not have happened by accident.
She ran a hand through her hair. "There's no use arguing about it. You can rewrite history in your mind all you want. It won't make any difference to me." She turned to Lacy and Lawrence. "Say goodbye." Then she reached forward to switch off her receiver before the children managed to utter the words.
Alone in the booth, Jason found he was shaking.
Alexandre Gustave Eiffel stared down at Jason from a holographic representat
ion in his office wall. Jason had always admired the French architect for his breathtaking bridges and viaduct designs in Portugal and France, the record-breaking 84-meter cupola of the Nice observatory, the inner ironwork structure of the Statue of Liberty ... and of course the monumental tower in Paris that bore his name.
Eiffel's unconventional successes had been an inspiration in Jason's own career, the way Eiffel pushed his knowledge of materials to their limits and proved that a clever design could surmount nearly every obstacle. Jason certainly needed that inspiration now, if he was to make any progress in deciphering the Daedalus structure.
By burying himself in his work, by studying the nanotech threat, he could purge all thoughts of Margaret, of his lost children, of the choices he had made.
He called up a simulation of the Daedalus construction in the center of his slate holo-dais. The device was designed to digitize schematics of buildings and then build three-dimensional models from them. It allowed architects a hands-on view of blueprints as they modified various parameters.
Now Jason had the computer pull together all the images taken of the alien construction, commanding it to map the entire artifact to the best of its ability.
Staring down at the changing form, the arches, the gossamer strands and support structures, he hoped he could figure out what this thing was about.
What were the nanocritters building out there? That was his expertise in reverse -- instead of seeing a problem and conceptualizing a structure to solve it, Jason needed to complete the Farside artifact from sketchy lines and then extrapolate what it was for.
These blueprints had come from a mind not of Earth, based on preconceptions about planetary gravity, climate, and temperature that were different from everything he worked under. I just have to make a paradigm shift. Simple.
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