Farside (18 page)

“Sure,” he said. “Real soon.”

CRATER MENDELEEV

The weeks zipped past before Grant realized it. Palmquist returned to Selene, with Uhlrich falling all over himself to please the Swede and promising to send him the first images of New Earth that the Farside Observatory obtained.

Grant’s days were long and busy, juggling the road-building work with planning the construction jobs that were needed at the three crater sites and coordinating Cardenas’s work on the sample mirror that her nanomachines were making at Selene.

One of the tasks facing his team of engineers and technicians was to transport the materials for a protective roof to the Crater Mendeleev, 750 kilometers from the Farside facility. The load was too much for one of the short-range rocket hoppers that Farside kept on hand, and not big enough to warrant calling for a lobber mission from Selene. So Grant decided to send a tractor out to Mendeleev. And he decided to make the run himself.

He was driving the tractor up the slumped, gentle slope of the mountains ringing Mendeleev crater, with one of his team, Sherrod Phillips, sitting beside him. They had driven continuously for more than twenty-six hours, taking turns sleeping in their space suits inside the tractor’s cramped cab.

The road they had built here at Mendeleev had only a few switchbacks in it because the area Grant had picked to cross the ringwall was relatively low with an easy grade. We could have gotten that damned mirror up this mountain with no sweat, Grant told himself as he steered the tractor slowly along the smoothed road. If it hadn’t slid off the road back at Farside we could’ve gotten it up here and into Mendeleev okay.

Yeah, a mocking voice in his head sneered. And if you’d put wings on the mirror you could’ve flown it here, wiseass.

The two men were in their space suits even though the tractor’s cab was pressurized. It was enclosed with a thin metal roof and glassteel sides that gave them a layer of protection against the radiation out there in the lunar vacuum. Safety regulations insisted that they wear the protective suits, even though they could have ridden inside the cab in their shirtsleeves—in theory.

It was still night, and would be for another week. The universe hung up in the dark sky, uncountable myriads of stars, hard cold points of light, unblinking. No Earth up there, no warmth or familiar comfort. The horizon was brutally near, a slash where the hard familiar world of lunar rock and dust ended like the edge of a cliff plunging into the infinite uncaring expanse of stars.

Grant topped the ringwall mountain and started down the interior slope. In the distance, almost at the horizon, he could see the square, flat concrete foundation that had been laid out for the telescope mirror. It was his imagination, he knew, but the low slabs already looked old, worn, covered with lunar dust.

Sherry Phillips was sitting in the tractor’s right-hand seat, encased in a bulky space suit. Grant couldn’t see his face through the tinted glassteel of his bubble helmet, but he heard the engineer say:

“So whattaya think of this new kid?”

“New kid?” Grant asked.

“Yeah. The Ulcer’s new assistant. Trudy.”

“She’s an astronomer.”

“She’s a good-looker. Cute.”

Grant knew that Phillips was married, but his wife was back Earthside with their two children. Phillips was a sharp engineer, a reliable man in the field, but possessed of a roving eye. Farside gossip claimed that he and Josie Rivera had had a fling several months back.

“Forget it,” he told Phillips. “The Ulcer would have a stroke if you came on to her.”

In his helmet speakers, he heard Phillips chuckle. “Hell, Grant, I wouldn’t tell the Ulcer about it. Or ask his permission, for that matter.”

Grant shook his head. “Better stay clear of her. Don’t cause problems.”

“Yeah. Maybe you’re right.” But Phillips didn’t sound convinced.

Grant drove the tractor across the crater’s wide floor to the telescope site, then he and Phillips stepped out onto the dusty, rock-strewn ground. The tractor was carrying sheets of honeycomb metal that they would erect to form a roof over the foundation. It also carried a pair of slim, cylindrical-shaped robots that were supposed to do the actual construction work.

“I’ll activate Mike and Ike,” said Phillips, walking around to the rear of the tractor. He was the robotics expert on Grant’s little team of engineers and technicians. Like almost all humans, he anthropomorphized the machines he worked with.

Mike and Ike, Grant thought. What’ll he call the other pair, the ones we’re going to bring to Korolev? Punch and Judy?

Using a handheld remote controller, Phillips stirred the robots to life and began checking them out while Grant set up the ramp they would roll down once they were ready to go to work.

“Got a bad fuse on Ike,” Phillips muttered.

Grant looked up at the tractor bed, where Phillips stood between the two shoulder-tall robots.

“Dammit, those machines were checked out at Farside. How can they have a bad fuse?”

He sensed Phillips trying to shrug inside his bulky space suit. “It happens, Grant. Murphy’s Law.”

“Who did the checkout?” Grant demanded.

“Dunno. You want to call back and get the file?”

“Might as well.”

While Phillips replaced the faulty fuse from the supply of spares they had carried with them, Grant called up the documentation on the robots’ checkout. The checkout had been done by Nate Oberman, filling in for the injured Harvey Henderson. Grant seethed. Who the hell let him do the checkout? That dumbass can’t even do a simple job without screwing it up. He just doesn’t care. He could get somebody killed and he just doesn’t give a damn about it. He can’t leave Farside soon enough.

Phillips got both robots working and they rolled on their sturdy little trunions down the ramp, kicking up lazy clouds of dust as they moved to the tractor’s side and began unloading the honeycomb sheets with their long, spindly, many-jointed arms.

Grant walked over to the concrete slabs of the foundation and began examining them with a handheld radar probe. Looks okay, he thought as he peered at the tiny screen’s display. No major cracks, everything within tolerances.

“I’m putting them on their own,” Phillips reported.

“Wait a minute,” said Grant. “Let me set up the linkage.”

Using the keypad on the left wrist of his suit, Grant contacted Josie, back at Farside’s teleoperations center.

“We’ve activated the robots,” he reported. “Putting them on autonomous mode now.”

There was a barely noticeable half-second’s delay while his message was relayed from one of the communications satellites in low orbit.

“Gotcha,” said Josie. “Signal’s coming in loud and clear.”

Grant nodded inside his bubble helmet. “Okay, Jo. They’re your responsibility now. Anything exceeds nominal limits—”

“I’ll shut them down and initiate the failure analysis program,” Josie said. “Don’t worry about it, boss. I’ve got ’em on my screen.”

“Good.”

The two men stepped away from the tractor and watched the robots methodically unload the honeycomb sheets and supporting aluminum beams. Then they began to assemble them into a gracefully curving roof that covered the foundation.

“Ol’ man river…” Phillips began to sing, in a wavering baritone. Despite himself, Grant laughed at the guy’s sense of humor. Slave labor.

But while they watched the robots patiently, efficiently, erect the roof, Grant’s thoughts wandered to the radiation invisibly sleeting down from all those distant stars. How much damage is it doing to us? he wondered. Phillips hadn’t been outside in two weeks, he knew. Safety regulations. You were only allowed so much time out on the surface per month. Grant regularly bent those rules, while Dr. Kapstein sold him the medications he needed to keep going.

Well, he said to himself, we’ll see if Cardenas’s little bugs do their job. Just like Mike and Ike: do your work and don’t complain.

What if the nanos don’t work? Grant asked himself.

The answer came to him immediately. If they don’t work I’m a dead man.

ON THE ROAD

“We oughtta start back,” Phillips said.

Grant lifted his arm and peered at the watch set into the pad on his wrist. Christ, we’ve been out here more than six hours, he realized. The roof was half finished and the robots were working away industriously.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Looks like the ’bots are working okay.”

“Josie’s keeping an eye on them,” said Phillips as he headed for the tractor.

Josie’s off-shift now, Grant knew. He tried to remember who was next on the duty roster for the monitoring task. Not Oberman, he told himself. I don’t care how shorthanded we are, I won’t let Nate get his hands on anything important. Keep him on the administrative side; let him do a clerk’s job.

“You coming, or you gonna stay out here permanently?” Phillips called.

“I’m coming.”

Grant turned away from the busy robots. From here on they would be operated remotely, from the teleoperations center. Once the roof was finished their next task would be to erect a shelter for humans who visited the site and then construct a frame for the mirror that the nanos would build. There would be no need for humans to come to Mendeleev for many weeks. Unless something went wrong.

Phillips was in the driver’s seat as Grant climbed into the tractor’s cab and sealed its hatch. Together they went through the tractor’s abbreviated checklist, then Phillips leaned a gloved finger on the start button. Grant heard nothing in the lunar vacuum, of course, but he felt the vibration of the tractor’s electric motor starting up.

“We should’ve flown out here on a hopper,” Phillips said as the vehicle lurched into motion. “Make it in less than an hour instead of a frickin’ two-day trip, one way.”

Grant knew that the flimsy little rocket hoppers couldn’t carry the cargo that they’d just delivered to the site, and he knew that Phillips knew. He was just griping for the sake of something to gripe about.

Over the ringwall they trundled, then out onto the pockmarked plain, heading back to the Sea of Moscow and the Farside facility. After four days out in the open, Farside’s bare-bones accommodations would look like a five-star hotel, Grant thought.

They followed the smoothed road across the barren plain. Grant thought the undulating ground looked like the waves of an ocean, only frozen solid. It was liquid once, he reminded himself. Molten lava, a few billion years ago. Now it was an empty expanse of dust-covered rock, pockmarked by craters of all sizes, from fingerpokes to depressions so deep and rugged that you didn’t dare drive a tractor into them.

Half dozing, Grant recalled that some of those deeper craters were partially filled with dust. Drive into one of them and you sink into the dust, like a ship sinking in the sea. He remembered reading a story once about a place in India where a guy got himself stuck in a dust-covered depression and couldn’t crawl out. Was it by Kipling? he asked himself.

Phillips’s voice jarred him into wakefulness.

“Yeah, we’re moving along, no sweat,” Phillips was saying. Grant realized he was talking to the excursion monitor, back at Farside. “Gonna stop for a meal in a few minutes.”

“Copy you stopping for meal,” came the voice of one of the technicians. Grant recognized Harvey Henderson’s sweet, almost girlish tenor.

“What’re you doing on the monitor console, Harvey?” Grant asked.

“Just filling in for a few minutes while Rava takes a leak, boss.”

“How’s the foot?”

“Just fine. I’m gonna take the new kid out dancing later tonight.”

Grant knew Harvey was joking, but he also knew that “the new kid” he mentioned was Trudy Yost and his brows knitted at the idea.

“Time to stop and get something to eat,” Phillips said, tapping a gloved finger on the mission schedule displayed on the control console’s central screen.

Grant nodded, then realized that Phillips couldn’t see it inside his helmet and said, “Right.”

Phillips actually pulled the tractor over to one side of the road. Grant smiled inwardly. Sherry doesn’t want to block traffic, he thought.

They double-checked the seals of the cab’s hatches before removing their helmets. Grant’s nose wrinkled at the body odors. God, we smell like a couple of cesspools, he thought. But he said nothing as he turned awkwardly in his seat and reached into the storage bin at the back of the cab. They ate prepackaged sandwiches, chilled and soggy from refrigeration, and drank an energy-enriched fruit drink.

Then Phillips said, “I’ve gotta take a crap.”

Grant dreaded using the toilets built into the cab’s seats. In their space suits, it was a laborious and degrading ordeal: sealing the suit’s bottom to the toilet hatch, opening both, checking the readouts to make certain the connection was secure, and then finally doing your business. With your crewmate sitting beside you. Grant took the diphenoxylate pills that Kapstein offered and tried to avoid the whole ugly business. The pills made him thirsty as hell, but using the relief tube was a lot easier and much less humiliating than working the trapdoor.

Once he was finished and buttoned up again, Phillips said, “I’m gonna flake out, Grant.” He started to crank his seat back as far as it would go.

“Change your air tank first and then put the helmet back on,” Grant said.

“I got enough air—”

“Do it now,” Grant said.

Phillips looked unhappy about it, but he gave in without a complaint. It was awkward sitting in the tractor’s seats, but they helped each other to replace the air tanks on their backpacks, then fastened their helmets back in place.

“Now you can sleep in peace and the safety police will be happy with us,” Grant said.

“By the book,” Phillips grumbled.

“By the book,” Grant echoed. It’s always best to go by the book, he thought. But then he added, Almost always.

Phillips slept like a dead man for more than five hours while Grant drove the tractor across the empty lunar wasteland. Rocks, rocks, and more rocks, some as big as a house, most of them the size of pebbles. Sinuous rilles snaking across the dusty ground. Craters. He thought about putting the tractor on autopilot and taking a quick nap, but fought off his drowsiness and doggedly kept control of the vehicle. Phillips woke up at last, popped his helmet to take a few sips from the thermos of coffee they’d brought with them, then took over the driving and allowed Grant to nod off.