Moonrise (60 page)

Dark and empty, Doug thought.

But as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Doug realized that there was a faint glow rising above the tired old mountain that poked its head up in the middle of the giant crater. Out beyond the brutally close horizon, the sky was slowly brightening.

They’re wrong! Doug told himself. They’re all wrong! It’s not darkest just before the dawn. Not on the Moon, at least.

For out in the star-flecked blackness beyond the weary mountains, a pale hazy glow was beginning to light the predawn hours. The zodiacal light, Doug knew. Sunlight reflected off dust particles floating in space, the leftovers from the creation of the solar system. Here in the airless sky of Moonbase they light up the heavens long before the Sun comes into view.

Doug raised his arms to the ancient motes of dust that brightened the predawn hours. They’re like friendly little
fireflies out there in space, he told himself. They bring us the message, the promise that the light is on its way, the Sun will rise, a new day will dawn. Have hope. The darkness will end. It’s a good omen.

Feeling excited again, energized, he said to himself, I’ve got to talk with Brudnoy. And Bianca. Maybe they can get me together with a few people who can get Operation Bootstrap started.

And Mom? Doug wondered about that as he started trudging back toward the main airlock. No, Mom will side with Greg. She’s a businesswoman, and Greg can make a stronger case for the bottom line than I can.

Still, Doug broke into a broad grin as he hurried back toward Moonbase. Greg’s got profit-and-loss statements and projections of inventories and all that puke. All I’ve got is a broken-down former cosmonaut and maybe a few other people who might want to help me with Operation Bootstrap.

And a vision for the future.

He began to leap across the barren dusty ground, soaring in twenty-yard strides across the crater floor.

“Hey, where you goin’ in such a hurry?” a construction worker’s voice called in his earphones.

“Into the future!” Doug sang back.

“All right, quiet down!” Bianca Rhee shouted.

They all stopped talking and looked at her expectantly. Doug counted fourteen people crammed into Bianca’s quarters, five of them squeezed on the bunk, the others crowded on the floor. Most of them were long-termers, men and women on year-long work contracts. Several had been working at Moonbase for many years, shuttling back and forth to Earth.

Lev Brudnoy had appropriated the desk chair and placed
one of the female student-workers on his lap. He sat there with a satisfied smile on his grizzled face, one long arm around the young woman’s waist, his other hand grasping an insulated flask of rocket juice. The others clutched a motley assortment of cups, glasses, bottles, even zero-gee squeeze bulbs. It was a BYOB party.

The ostensible reason for the party was to show off the new wallscreen that Doug had bought for Bianca. It almost filled the wall opposite her bunk, turning the blank stone into a window that could look out on the world, wherever vidcams could go. For the first hour of the party they had hooted and catcalled through a production of a Masterson Corporation-sponsored drama set on a corporate space station where romance and intrigue flourished in zero gravity.

Now the video was finished and the Windowall showed a satellite view of the great rift valley of Mars. Bianca perched herself on the desktop, her legs too short to reach the floor. She asked Doug to come up and sit beside her. They all wore workers’ coveralls. Doug saw mostly the pumpkin orange of the research department and the olive green of mining, although there were a couple of medical whites in the crowd; one of the women medics wore hers unbuttoned almost to the waist, showing plenty of cleavage. He wore the only management blue.

Seeing that she had their attention, Bianca said more softly, “Doug’s got something important to tell you.” And with that, she turned to him, grinning.

“Thanks for the glowing introduction,” Doug joked weakly. A few chuckles from the people looking up at him. He knew most of them, at least the long-termers. Of course, each coverall carried a nametag.

“I need your help,” Doug began. “I want to start moving Moonbase along the road to self-sufficiency as rapidly as we can manage it.”

As he began to outline his plans for Operation Bootstrap, Doug studied their faces. At first they looked amused, as if they expected this to be an elaborate joke of some kind. But then they started getting interested and began asking questions.

“You really expect us to modify an LTV in our spare time?”

Doug answered, “A couple of extra hours a day from five technicians who know what they’re doing can get the job done in ten weeks, from what the computer estimates tell me.”

“But we won’t get paid for the extra work.”

“No, it’ll be strictly voluntary. Your pay will come as a share of the profit we make from the asteroid ore.”

“Work first, pay later. Huh!”

Bianca said, “Hey, you’re always complaining there’s nothing to do up here except drink and screw around.”

“What’s wrong with that?” one of the guys piped up.

Everyone laughed.

But Doug went on seriously, “I know it’s a lot to ask, and you might put in a lot of work for nothing if the mission isn’t successful. But if we do succeed …”

“How much money we talking about?”

“The calculations work out to about five times your hourly wage, if we get the amount of ore we’re hoping for.”

“And the corporation’ll give us this money as a bonus?”

“Right.”

“But the corporation doesn’t even know we’re doing this … this Bootstrap thing? How does that work?”

Doug replied, “We’re all taking a chance. You’re risking your time. Once we’ve got the ore from the asteroid, though, the corporation will pay you a bonus along the lines I’ve calculated.”

“How can we be sure of that?”

“You have my word on it,” Doug said.

“No offense, pal, but how much weight does your word have with the management?”

Doug smiled. “Good question. Let me put it this way: If the corporation won’t come up with the money, then I will. Personally.”

“Or we can sell the ore to Yamagata,” one of the women said.

No one laughed.

Lev Brudnoy said, “I hate to be the bearer of evil tidings, but there is a rumor that the base will be shut down at the end of this director’s term.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that buzz.”

Several others nodded.

Doug had to admit it. “That’s the director’s current plan. I’m hoping we can make him change his mind.”

“He’s your brother, isn’t he?”

“My half-brother.”

“Does that mean he’s only half as heavy?” asked one of the women. “You know, ‘He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.’ ”

Doug made a rueful grin for her. “He’s twice as heavy, believe me.”

“So you want us to stick our necks out when the base director’s ready to shut down the whole humpin’ operation?”

“I want to save Moonbase,” Doug replied.

“Wait a minute. Where are you going to get an LTV to modify?”

“I’ll handle that,” said Doug. “None of you has to do a thing or commit yourselves to a minute of extra work unless and until I get an LTV for us.”

They glanced at each other, muttering.

“Whatever happens,” Bianca said, without waiting for them to come to a group decision, “this little meeting here ought to be kept secret for the time being.”

“Secret? From who?”

“Whom,” corrected one of the students.

“From management,” said Doug. “I want to present this as a fait accompli before my brother knows what we’re doing.”

Someone whistled softly.

“Look,” Doug said, “we can’t expect any support from the corporation. That’s why we’ve got to do this on a volunteer basis and hope to get our payback at the end of the asteroid mission.”

“Sounds awfully risky.”

“Sounds like a good way to get fired.”

“You can’t be fired for working overtime on a voluntary basis,” Doug said. “Read your employment contracts.”

“Well,” said Bianca, “I don’t know about the rest of you turkeys, but I’m ready to put in a couple of extra hours for this.”

Brudnoy said, “It should be more interesting than spending your spare time in the Cave, waiting for the menu to change.”

They all laughed. Doug thought maybe half of them would
actually volunteer to work on their own time. But this meeting would never be kept a secret. The word about Operation Bootstrap would spread through Moonbase with the speed of sound.

Which was what he was counting on.

“I’ve never been out this far before,” said Brudnoy.

His voice sounded strange in Doug’s helmet earphones. Subdued. Almost reverent.

“I hardly ever come out here myself,” Rhee said. “Just for these regular maintenance checks.”

The astronomical observatory was on the opposite side of Alphonsus’s central peak from Moonbase. It had been placed out there to shield it from any stray light or dust or chemical pollution from the spacecraft landing and taking off at the rocket port. This meant a two-hour tractor ride across the crater floor, but Doug and Brudnoy had decided to accompany Rhee to see the instruments she used to track near-Earth asteroids.

Now Rhee led them through a jungle of metal shapes, all pointed skyward. Wide-angle telescopes, spectrometers, infrared and ultraviolet and even gamma-ray detectors. Doug easily recognized the wide dishes of the four radio telescopes off in the distance, but one shape puzzled him: it looked like a huge but stubby wide tub mounted on tracked pivots. It was easily twenty yards across.

“The light bucket?” Rhee said when he asked. “That’s the Shapley Telescope, two-thousand-centimeter reflector. The most powerful telescope in the solar system.”

“You use it for deep space observations?”

Rhee replied cheerfully, “I don’t use it at all. It’s reserved for the Big Boys back Earthside. But yes, they use it for cosmological work. Quasars and redshifts, stuff like that.”

Brudnoy asked, “Wasn’t there talk of building an even bigger ‘light bucket,’ using liquid mercury instead of a glass mirror?”

“The Shapley’s mirror is aluminum,” Rhee answered. “No need for glass in this gravity.”

“But the mercury telescope?”

“Maybe someday. Probably be easier to make really big mirrors with mercury, but it tends to vaporize into the vacuum.”

Doug watched their two spacesuited figures as they spoke: Brudnoy taller than Rhee by more than a helmet’s worth.

“Couldn’t it be covered with a protective coating?” the Russian asked.

“Sure, but that cuts down on its reflectivity.”

“Ah.”

Doug asked, “Which ones do you use for tracking the asteroids?”

“Over here.” Rhee pointed, and Doug followed her outstretched gloved hand with his eyes.

“The two big ones are Schmidts,” she explained. “Wide field ’scopes. Schmidt-Mendells, actually; they’ve been specially built for lunar work. And those over there are tracking individual asteroids, getting spectrographic data on their compositions.”

“For your thesis,” Doug realized.

“Right.”

“Don’t you use radar to detect asteroids?” Brudnoy asked.

Doug could sense her nodding inside her helmet. “Sure. One of the radio telescopes converts to radar sweeps twice a day. When we pick up something new, we track it long enough to determine its orbit and then turn one of the spectrographic ’scopes on it.”

“What happens to all this equipment if Moonbase shuts down?” Doug asked.

“The university consortium will keep them running as long as they can, I guess,” Rhee answered. “The data get piped back Earthside automatically, as it is. Maybe they’ll be able to send a maintenance crew up here every six months or so, keep it all going.”

“It would be a shame to lose all this,” Brudnoy muttered.

Doug nodded agreement even though they couldn’t see him do it.

It took three hours for Rhee to complete all her maintenance checks and make the necessary adjustments in the instruments. Then they climbed back into the open tractor and trundled toward Moonbase. Brudnoy and Doug got off at the rocket port and Rhee drove alone back to the main airlock and the garage inside it.

“So this is the one you want to buy,” Brudnoy said as
they walked slowly to the lunar transfer vehicle sitting on one of the smoothed rock pads.

“It’s been in service for ten years,” Doug said, looking up at the ungainly spacecraft. “The corporation would sell it for about twice its scrap value, I think.”

The LTV looked rather like a pyramidal-shaped skeleton. It squatted on four bent, flimsy-looking legs that supported a metal mesh platform. From the platform rose gold-foiled propellant tanks, darker odd-shaped cargo containers, pipes and plumbing with gray electronics boxes wedged in, it seemed, wherever they could be fitted. Up at the top, some thirty feet above Doug’s head, was the empty plastiglass bubble of a passenger/crew compartment.

“Well,” Brudnoy said, sighing, “we won’t need the passenger bubble.”

“Replace it with more cargo holds,” said Doug.

“No, I think the mining equipment should go there.”

“Oh, right,” Doug agreed hastily. “I almost forgot we’ll need that.”

For nearly an hour they clambered over the aging LTV, awkward in their cumbersome surface suits. The spacecraft stood stoically on the pad, like a dignified old gutted building being inspected by skeptical prospective buyers.

“Metal fatigue,” Brudnoy muttered time and again. “This whole section must be replaced.”

Doug took notes on his hand-held computer.

Finally the Russian was satisfied. “Not as good as I wanted,” he said as he and Doug climbed back down onto the scoured ground again. “But not as bad as I feared.”

“Can we get it into shape?” Doug asked.

“Of course,” Brudnoy answered. Then he added, “The question is, how much will it cost to get it into shape?”

“We’ve got some homework to do,” Doug said as they headed for the main airlock.

Once inside, and out of their suits, Doug said, “Come on down to my quarters and we’ll start figuring out the cost numbers.”