Moonrise (7 page)

The vibration eased off a good deal, but the bellowing thunder of the rocket engines still shook his innards. Then a sharp
bang!
and the noise abruptly ceased.

Paul felt all sensation of weight disappear. One instant he was flattened against the chair, weighing three times normal, the next he was floating lightly against the restraining seat harness.

Joanna’s arms had lifted off her seat’s rests. Her gray-green eyes were wide open now, looking startled.

Paul grinned at her. “We’re coasting now. Zero gee.”

She smiled back at him, weakly.

Within fifteen minutes the Clippership made its rendezvous with the space station. The ship lurched slightly once, twice, a third time. Then the co-pilot opened the cockpit hatch and announced, “We’re docked. They’re attaching the access tube to the main hatch.”

“Can I come up and take a look?” Paul asked, unstrapping his seat harness.

“Sure, we’re all finished here,” said the co-pilot.

Paul floated up into the ladderway aisle. The other passengers were unbuckling their harnesses, bobbing up out of their
chairs, opening the overhead luggage bins to haul out their gear. Straps snaked weightlessly, as if alive; travel bags and equipment boxes hung in mid-air.

Looking down at Joanna, still firmly strapped into her seat, he said, “I’ll be right back.”

She tried to smile again.

The cockpit was cramped with two seats for the astronauts shoehorned into wall-to-wall instrumentation. But there was a wide transparent port for Paul to look through.

The space station was still unfinished. Paul could see a spacesuited construction team hauling girders and curved sheets of alloy into place along the station’s outermost section, so far distant that they looked like little toy figures. A welding laser flashed briefly. The construction workers all wore maneuvering backpacks so they would not need tethers to keep them from drifting off into space.

The Earth hung off to one side, huge and bright blue with parades of pure white clouds marching across the face of the broad ocean. Paul could see specks of islands and, off at the curving horizon, the wrinkled brown stretch of California’s rugged coastline swinging into view.

The station was built in three concentric wheels with a docking area at the hub. Once the construction was finished the station would be spun up so that people in the widest, outermost wheel would feel a normal Earth gravity. The inner wheels would provide one-third and one-sixth gee, while the docking hub would be effectively in zero gravity all the time. For now, though, the entire huge structure hung motionless against the utterly black sky. It was all in zero gee.

“They’re making good progress,” Paul said.

“Had an accident yesterday,” the pilot told him. “Boom operator got pinned between one of the girders and a new section of flooring they were installing.”

“Was he hurt bad?”

“She,” said the co-pilot. “Ruptured her suit. She was dead before they could get to her.”

Paul shook his head. “How many does that make?”

“Four this year. Six, altogether.”

“Christ, you think they’d be more careful.”

“It’s the new guys, every time. They start hauling big girders around and they’re weightless so they forget they still
got mass. And momentum. Get hit by one and it can still cave in your ribs.”

“There hasn’t been much publicity about it back on the ground,” Paul said.

The co-pilot smiled grimly. “Rockledge has a damned tight public relations operation. No reporters up here at all.”

“Still … you’d think they’d be screaming about it.”

“Nah,” said the pilot. “Rockledge insures the workers, pays off the family plenty. Nobody complains.”

“Not yet,” the co-pilot countered.

“The work’s getting done on schedule and within budget, from what I hear.”

Paul asked, “Even with the insurance costs factored in?”

The pilot nodded. “Rockledge must’ve factored in a casualty rate when they decided to build this wheel.”

Yeah, Paul thought, and our rental of space in the station must be helping to pay off their insurance premiums.

“It’s a tradeoff,” the co-pilot said, as if he could read Paul’s face. “The sooner they get this station finished and operating, the sooner they can rent out all its space. They must’ve figured that the insurance costs are worth it if they can get the job done fast enough.”

“Pretty damned cold-blooded,” Paul muttered. “I don’t think I’d push an operation that way.”

The pilot grinned at him. “That’s why we work for you, boss, instead of Rockledge.”

Masterson Corporation’s space operations division—Paul’s former bailiwick—had rented half the innermost wheel of the space station for research laboratories and an experimental zero-gee manufacturing facility. Once the station was completed and spun up, that innermost wheel would rotate at one-sixth gee: the gravity of the Moon’s surface. The labs would shift from zero-gee to a lunar environment. The manufacturing facility would be removed from the station and hung outside as a “free floater,” where it could remain in the weightless mode.

Part of Masterson’s rented space was living quarters for its employees. Spartan at best, they were meant to house people who would spend no more than a few months aboard the station.

“It’s not exactly the Ritz,” Paul said to Joanna as he slid back the accordion-fold door to their designated quarters.

It was a cubicle about the size of a generous telephone booth. No window, but a small computer terminal built into one bulkhead. Otherwise the walls, floor and ceiling were covered with Velcro and loops for tethering one’s feet. A mesh sleeping bag was stuck to one wall.

“At least we’re close to the toilet and washroom,” Paul said, pointing along the corridor that sloped upward conspicuously in both directions.

Hanging onto the doorjamb while her feet barely touched the deck, Joanna looked bleary-eyed at her honeymoon suite and said wretchedly, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“It’s not that bad, is it?”

“No, Paul,” she said, her face pasty-white. “I’m really going—” She clutched at her middle.

Paul grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her toward the toilet area. Joanna moaned and gagged. Pushing her weightlessly down the short length of the corridor, their feet barely touching the deck, Paul slid Joanna sideways through the open doorway. She bumped gently against the wall inside.

“Just let go,” he said to her, leaning over her bowed back to start the toiler’s air suction flow. “This happens to almost everybody. I should’ve realized it’d hit you. I’m sorry, I just didn’t think …”

He kept on talking while Joanna puked her guts into the zero-gravity toilet.

“It’s all my fault,” he kept saying. “I’m so damned sorry. I never stopped to think that you’d be sick.” As he spoke and Joanna vomited, Paul fought to hold down the bile rising in his own throat.

Some honeymoon, Paul said to himself. Two days in orbit, two days sick as a dog. Joanna had tried to be brave, tried to fight down the nausea that assailed her, but whenever she moved her head it overpowered her.

I should have known, Paul berated himself over and over. She’s never been up here before. It gets everybody, one way or another. Damned idiot! You did your thinking with your balls. Honeymoon in zero gravity. Upchuck city.

He spent the entire first day alternating between Joanna,
miserably sick in their cubicle, and the research labs and manufacturing facility. The experiments on fabricating thin-film video screens and special alloys in zero gravity and the high vacuum of space were going well.

The director of the manufacturing facility was a sandy-haired bespectacled Australian with degrees in metallurgy and management from the University of Sydney. He patiently took Paul through every step of the zero-gravity smelting and refining system they had built.

There were hardly any other people in the area. The facility took up more than a third of the space station’s inner wheel, but Paul saw only a handful of technicians and other personnel, all in coveralls of one color or another, all of them busily ignoring them as the facility director conducted the mandatory tour for the new CEO.

“The board’s very interested in the Windowall development,” Paul told the director.

“That’s good, I suppose.”

Paul went on, “Better than good. If we can manufacture wall-sized screens on a scale big enough for the TV market, it’ll make this operation very profitable.”

The younger man shrugged. “Thin-film manufacturing is no great problem. Give us the raw materials and we’ll make flat screens the size of Ayers Rock, if you want.”

Paul laughed. “Ten feet across should do, for now.”

The director remained quite serious. “We can do that. But what I really wanted to show you …” He led Paul to an apparatus that looked something like an oversized clothes drier.

Peering through a thick, tinted observation port, Paul saw an array of fist-sized molten metal droplets glowing red-hot as they hung weightlessly inside a capacious oven heated by concentrated sunlight. Tentatively, he touched the glass with his fingertips. It was hardly warm.

“The vacuum is a fine insulator,” the younger man said, with just a hint of an Aussie accent. “Just open the far side of the oven to space and we don’t have to worry about heat transfer much at all.”

Still, Paul thought it looked damned hot in there. The place
smelled
hot, like a foundry or a steel mill. Paul realized it was all in his imagination; his brain was linking what he was seeing to memories associated with blast furnaces and smelting forges. Yet imaginary or not, he felt beads of perspiration trickling down his ribs.

The director looked youthfully cool. No perspiration stained his light tan coveralls.

“By focusing the incoming solar energy,” he was explaining, “we can generate temperatures close to the black-body theoretical limit—better than five thousand kelvins.”

Paul already knew that, but he let himself look impressed. “I’m surprised that you keep the droplets so small. I always pictured a big ball of red-hot metal hanging in the vacuum chamber.”

The youngster smiled tolerantly and nudged his rimless glasses back up his nose. “It’s a lot easier to handle a bunch of small spherules than one big glob. We can spin them up quicker, make them flatten out into sheets.”

“How do you spin them?” Paul asked.

“Magnetic fields. Dope the molten mix with a little iron and we spin the spherules, flatten them out into sheets, meld them together. It’s straightforward and it doesn’t take all that much energy.”

“So you’re using centrifugal force to produce sheets of alloy.”

The kid nodded and his glasses slid slightly down his nose again. “Then we turn off the heat and let the sheets outgas in vacuum. That drives out all the impurities while the alloy’s hardening.”

“All the impurities?” Paul asked.

The director gave him a lopsided grin. “Enough,” he said. “Come on over here, I’ll show you.”

He pushed off the oven wall with one foot and glided past a trio of workers bent over a piece of equipment that Paul did not recognize. Its access hatch was open and one of the workers—a slim Asian woman—was reaching into its innards while the two men with her muttered in low, exasperated tones. Paul didn’t understand what they were saying, but he knew the tone of voice: something had broken down and they were trying to figure out how to fix it.

“Here’s the final product,” the young director said, coasting to a stop in front of a long workbench. He slid his feet into the restraining loops set into the floor and pulled a thin
sheet of metal, about a foot square, from a stack that was tied to the workbench with Velcro straps.

Paul flexed the thin sheet of shining metal in his hands. It bent almost double with ease.

“Higher tensile strength than the best steel alloys made on Earth,” said the director proudly, “yet it weighs less than half of the Earth-manufactured alloys.”

Paul felt impressed. “Detroit’s going to like this,” he said. “With an alloy like this they can make cars that are half the weight of the competition, so their energy efficiency will be double anything else on the road.”

“And the cars will be safer, too,” the youngster said, “because this alloy’s stronger than anything else available.”

“Good,” said Paul, smiling with genuine satisfaction. “Damned good.”

“But there’s a problem.”

Paul’s smile evaporated. “Cost?”

The kid nodded. “When you figure the cost of bringing the raw materials up here to orbit, this alloy costs ten times what groundbased alloys cost.”

Paul looked around the facility. It’s all here, he thought. We’ve got a new industrial base within our grasp. Almost. We can make billions. If …

Turning back to the earnest young director, he said, “Suppose I could provide you with the raw materials at a cost twenty times lower than they cost now?”

The youngster’s eyes widened behind his rimless glasses. “Twenty times cheaper? How?”

“From the Moon.”

The kid looked as if Paul had just offered to put the Tooth Fairy to work for him. “Sure. From the Moon.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know, Mr. Stavenger. Everybody knows you’ve been pushing to set up a mining operation at Moonbase. But that’s
years
away, at best.”

Paul smiled tightly. “It wasn’t all that long ago that people said we were
years
away from zero-gee manufacturing.”

“Well, yeah, maybe. But—”

Stopping him with an upraised hand, Paul said, “Orbital manufacturing doesn’t make economic sense if you have to lift the raw materials from Earth. We both know that. But if
we can provide the raw materials from the Moon it’ll reduce your costs by a factor of twenty or more.”

The kid made a half-hearted nod. “Okay, so the Moon’s got low gravity and no air and you can shoot payloads off its surface with an electric catapult. That makes it real cheap.”

“And the raw materials are there. Aluminum, silicon, titanium, iron …”

“But how much will it cost to set up a mining operation on the Moon?” the youngster asked. “How long will it take? How much will that electric catapult cost and how soon can you have it in operation?”