Diamonds in the Sky (26 page)

John piled up the broken dish segments, then swept the crater floor clean of glass fragments. You make a mess, you clean it up. He probably cut a funny figure, a spacesuit pushing a broom.

Edward radioed from the control room. “It’s better, but not quite better enough. However, with some reprogramming the computer may be able to compensate for that by adjusting individual segments. I can’t promise anything, of course, but I’ll do my best.”

“How about breaks in the dish?” John asked quickly. He had sweat that needed wiping off his brow. Not possible with a spacesuit on. “Stress fractures—?”

“Not indicated, though the computer isn’t really programmed to detect stress fractures of the kind that might have been caused by today’s activities. It’s geared to analyze micrometeorite impact damage.”

“Never mind. It sounds good enough to go with.”

Within an hour, exhausted snores could be heard in the habitat. It was Sunday now. 12:17 a.m.

Past mere exhaustion, John felt morbidly sleepless. Sitting in bed, he read the supernova report again. Then somebody knocked on the door. “Come in,” he said peevishly.

Without preamble, Jennifer told him, “It looked to me like you had a sore neck all day,”

“Yeah. A crick or something.”

“How is the crick tonight?”

“It’s in fine fettle,” he said sourly. “A really great crick.”

She probed his neck with her fingers.

“Ouch!”

“Let’s try this on it. It’s my arthritis liniment.”

“I didn’t know you had arthritis.”

“That is my darkest little secret,” she replied.

The liniment went on cool with a wintergreen reek. Then it started to feel warm. Jennifer massaged the neck. To his gratification, the knot of muscles loosened up under her fingertips. Satisfied, Jennifer told him to call it a night, and she departed. He intended to read for a while longer. But he fell asleep with the pages of the report scattered over his bunk.

And dreamed about falling toward the dish.

This time he did not jerk awake. He crashed through the dish, with bright glass panes of it spinning away. Then the dreamer lightly landed in a forest — a tropical forest, improbably situated below the Bolton dish. Color surrounded him, but not the lurid colors of his bad dreams. Lush greens, blossoming bold reds, wild purples and pinks, colors of Puerto Rico. In Technicolor. The dreamer was pleased with himself.

A glossy black toucan perched on a branch, bobbing its head with the great yellow bill. Then he saw the hummingbird. Green as a June bug, it hovered near him. The tiny bird hummed. A beam of golden light illuminated the humming bird. The dreamer looked up. The sky was a convex blue dome with a hole in it. Golden light spilled in through the hole.

The reading light was shining into his upturned face. 7:03 a.m. Sunday morning, by the clock, and he had slept, not long, but well.

Out of force of habit, John checked his email. The doctor in Yuegong Hospital crisply pointed out that he had NOT given John Clay permission to return to work. Two news services and an internet tabloid wanted to interview Dr. Clay about his death-defying fall from a telescope on the Moon. Finally, Schropfer had messaged, RECEIVED CONFIRMATION OF APPROPRIATION REQUEST FILLED. **WHAT** REQUEST?

John erased all of the messages.

Another habit, instilled over almost a year of being project manager here, was that of counting noses. Could everybody be accounted for — was anybody missing, out in the lunar environment, in trouble? So he immediately noticed the absence of Rodriguez from the group.

“Checking the repair job,” Cantu informed him.

“The shape of the dish is just inside the acceptable parameters,” said Edward, proudly, “now that the computer has made more than six hundred coordinated adjustments to the segments.” Disheveled, Edward appeared to have fussed over the computer most of the night, maybe sacked out on the control room cot for a bare hour or two.

“We’re ready,” said Jennifer, significantly.

John shook his head. “I just remembered something,” he said. “A problem up in the equipment house. That’s why I went up in the first place.”

Instantly Edward volunteered to go up the catwalk and attend to whatever it was. But Jennifer said, “No. He needs to get back up on the horse.”

This time he was trembling inside the spacesuit, probably pale as a piece of chalk, glad that the suit concealed those facts so well. “You’re three-fourths of the way up!” Jennifer encouraged over the radio. He glanced back toward the gaggle of spacesuits at the base of the catwalk. Jen and Edward and Cantu and Zheng — the last all encouraging waves in the absence of knowing what to say in English. John waved back. Without looking down, he registered the gleam of the dish, photons reflected toward where he was going now.

When he stepped onto the antenna platform, his knees buckled. He sat down with an undignified little bounce.

“That’s it!” Jen cheered. “Take a breather! Look up,” she suggested.

“Where is it?” asked Cantu.

“There, in the Small Magellanic Cloud, but the supernova is still too faint to see with the naked eye,” Jennifer answered. “Bear in mind that the Cloud is a galaxy of stars. A few weeks from now the supernova will be outshining the rest of that galaxy.”

Incalescent — one hundred and sixty thousand years ago and away — SN 2019C was the signal flare of a vast cataclysm, in which a giant star blew up hot as hell. No: it was hot, all right, but not infernal. Hot as heaven, hot as the forges of heaven. Heavy elements were being created in the supernova, iron and gold, carbon and oxygen, the atoms of which Moons and moonsuits, future Earths and living things were made.

He picked his own personal collection of atoms up and walked to the equipment housing. Carefully he lifted the broad aluminum lid and locked it into an open position.

Jennifer asked, “What
is
the problem?”

Thumb to forefinger, he plucked sheets of clear plastic off the circuitry. “The contractors left the protective sheathing on.”

Jennifer transmitted an unladylike curse having to do with the contractors, and what else they might have been capable of forgetting to do.

“Oh, my,” said Edward, “I don’t think those gentlemen would forget
that
.”

John had removed all of the plastic, and the equipment looked sharp and clean, solid-state of the art. He glanced at the gleam beneath the grated floor. “Rodriguez?” he radioed. “You down there?”

“I take it you won’t be dropping in.”

“Not today. How’s it look?”

“The job’ll hold for a few years, minimum.”

“By that time, it’ll be time for the Phase II enhancements,” John said, with satisfaction. He closed the lid and, returning to the catwalk, hurried down to
Luna firma.
When he reached the bottom, the other spacesuits clapped for him. “It’s ready now,” John said.

* * *

“But is your photon bucket going to work with a hole in it?” asked Cantu.

“Sure. Remember
Voyager’s
takeoff? The plane flew OK anyway. Something like that.” Cantu might not have been born yet then, but John remembered watching it on TV, in December of 1986, the end of the year that began, disastrously, with
Challenge
r. The experimental plane rolled down the California runway, loaded to the gills with fuel, and its long, fuel-laden wings flexed down, scraping the ground. The
Voyager
took off with wires hanging out of ragged wingtips where winglets had been scraped off. And the plane did not touch Earth again before it had circled the planet. It had not really needed the winglets.

Bolton did not really need the few segments that had been knocked out of it. John felt a stirring of euphoria, the old anticipation of having a dream machine to work with. It had been a long time since he last felt that way: for months, he had stared at the diggings in the crater, thinking how little it all resembled the first grand idea. Now, Bolton was ready to meet the ancient voyage of radio waves from the universe.

Edward said, “I haven’t finished checking out the computer and its interactivity with the rest of the system.” Edward had a fresh contribution of rain for the parade. “I can’t guarantee that there aren’t any bugs lurking, and in fact by departing from the trial timetable—”

“Forget it!” John said shortly. “The time to try is now.” And he started down the path to the control room, stirring up puffs of moondust.

* * *

“A radio interferometer — a chain of dishes strung across a continent, or an ocean, or even from Earth across space — can resolve finer detail. None have this aperture.” He opened the window shutters. The control room was perched on the rim of Bolton, below one of the cable towers. He let his eyes follow the cables out over the expanse of the dish. Fifty acres. The antenna hung over the dish like a spider on a tricornered web fifteen hundred feet across. Behind the other two cable towers, the Sanduleak plain stretched away for gray miles. Starlight faintly reflected from LFSVLFA like a metallic hint of waves in Sand Lake.

“Human activities on Earth generate an incredible amount of radio noise, swamping the faint signals from the universe. Located here, the dish and the Very Low Frequency Array are shielded from the radio noise of Earth, by the bulk of the Moon. I might add that the Moon itself is dead quiet apart from very rare rock electric discharges. No weather — no lightning, no seismic activity. For radio astronomy, there is no better place than this. Here goes.” Displacing Edward from the controls, John entered a right ascension and declination.

The red lights flashed at the corners of the distant antenna platform. John flashed back to being there, to the panicked realization that the platform was slewing out from under him. Arms crossed, John watched the antenna move. Unlike Arecibo, there was no whir and vibration from the machine. This one repositioned silently.

“First off, not the supernova,” John explained. “Instead we’ll scan something called Centaurus A. It’s a radio galaxy, a blazing strong source in the radio sky. This is to verify that the receiver’s working. Like making sure your new home stereo can pick up the local pop-around-the-clock music station before you go for the university radio station, the one with a weak and unreliable transmitter located ten miles away.” He had an afterthought. “Edward, can you convert the signal to sound?”

“Whatever for?” Jen said.

“Show and tell for our company.” John explained, “Radio astronomers never listen to the stars. It’s not informative for scientific purposes.”

Methodically, Edward made the arrangements, hitching this circuit to that.

The antenna slid slowly now, smooth as silk on glass, gliding past the point where the radio waves from Centarus A were focused by the reflector, for a drift scan. On the display screen, the signal came in with what looked like the lift of a bell curve. Converted by Edward’s arrangements to sound waves, the signal hissed.

“Static,” Cantu remarked.

“Sweetest static I’ve ever heard!” John replied fervently. The hiss crescendoed as the bell curve tipped over on the display screen. “Jen, just look at that curve! It’s classic.” The computer brain of the observatory, buried deep under the lunar ground, analyzed the signal. Data windows lined the top and bottom of the display screen. He tapped a window, opened it to read out the red shift of the radio galaxy. “This is great. This is instant gratification. The machine works! Jen, let’s break out the champagne!”

“Coming!” She opened the locker with a cheerful rattle.

Then John entered the coordinates of SN 2019C and changed the control settings. “This time, no drifting. The signal, if any, will be too faint to catch unless we sit on it. We’ll be looking for thermal radio emissions at a likely wavelength, six centimeters. Don’t be surprised if we register, and hear, nothing.”

“Cannot be much yet!” Zheng said. “But is good this working!”

“Absolutely, and we’re going to celebrate. Champagne, anyone?”

Outside, the antenna slewed to its new position. Sitting in the master chair, John ran a hand lightly over the controls. User-friendly, he thought with approval, lucid, thanks in part to design changes that he had insisted on. “We’re in position. We’ll give it some settle-down time.”

Poured into plastic glasses, the champagne fizzed. The sound conversion hissed just as faintly, pale noise that originated in the circuitry.

“Nada,” remarked Cantu, not too worried. Champagne in one hand, he accepted a piece of the chocolate that Jen was offering around in the other.

John thumbed through the supernova report. Thirty hours old, SN 2013C should be brightening rapidly as it began to expand, on the verge of blowing its outer layers off, but still, in fact, intact. Realistically, there was no radio signal to be expected yet. At least not from 2013C.

* * *

“This machine has state-of-the art timing,” John said. “Routinely, the receiver averages out any fluctuations in the signal. But a signal can be too faint to detect when it’s averaged like that. So I’m going to delete the averaging, in order to search for a coherent, pulsed signal with a period of one to ten milliseconds between pulses.”

Jennifer raised an eyebrow.

“Do you still want it converted to sound?” Edward asked.

“Yes. If we get anything.”

“What’s going on?” asked Cantu. “Making sure the corpse isn’t spinning in its grave yet?”

“Actually, we don’t have the resolution to distinguish a pulsar at the exact location of SN 2013C from one in the vicinity.” John watched the bubbles in his glass. They rose slowly, just as things on the Moon fell slowly, giving you time to think. “Most stars aren’t solitary. There’s no reason for the supernova not to be in a binary star system — with a pulsar left over from a supernova ages ago, maybe even a millisecond pulsar.”

“Unlikely,” Jennifer commented.

“But very desirable,” he countered. “Millisecond pulsars are the most accurate clocks in all creation. If we had one in the vicinity of a supernova in progress, we could observe what happened to the timing as the pulsar got hit by gravity waves, radiation, maybe plasma from the supernova. Also, the amount of mass lost in the supernova — and whether or not it breaks up into more than one body — that would register in the signal from a pulsar in the right location. And Bolton is better equipped to read such a signal than any other facility on the Earth or off it. Right, Jen?”