4
moonbase columbus
The nightside of the Moon was so cold that the extra seven degrees of heat around Daedalus showed up like a spotlight in infrared. The IR trace was a perfect circle glowing scarlet in false-color intensity.
Centered exactly on the gaping pit, the residual heat in the ground extended three kilometers out. On the holoscreen, black data points showed where Lasserman had landed his hopper, where Waite had driven his rover, where the telepresent hopper had landed. All of them fell right inside the red circle.
“We need a sample of regolith from inside that hot zone, but anything we send there gets eaten up,” Jason said. He raised his eyes to the other people in the control center. “Suggestions anyone?”
He glanced over at Big Daddy Newellen. The man shook his meaty head; behind him, Salito stared into the holotank. Nobody met Jason’s eyes. “Come on, people!”
“Well,” Newellen said, twisting his lower lip with two fingers, “that all depends on the answer to another question. What’s really going on? Is there a disintegrator ray out there, zapping anything that happens to trespass on the construction site? Or is the regolith itself impregnated with acid or infested with some kind of bug that’s taking our stuff apart? Either way, how do we get hold of a specimen to look at?”
“How do you pick up a universal solvent?” Cyndi Salito asked.
Jason raised his hand. “Okay, we went over the readings from both hoppers already. No sign of any kind of energy surge at all. No zap ray.”
“At least nothing we could detect,” said Salito.
“We need a regolith sample, just like McConnell told us.” Newellen’s eyes got a faraway look. “What about storing it in a magnetic bottle? That way the sample wouldn’t touch anything.”
“Dirt?” said Salito. “You gotta be kidding. Regolith isn’t affected by magnetic fields.”
“But iron is,” said Big Daddy Newellen, “and regolith contains ilmenite, which has iron in it. If we had a high enough B field, we might be able to isolate a sample of regolith. We could put a magnetic bottle on the container. The core-sample javelins penetrate into the dirt, grab a chunk, then launch the container back to the pickup point, leaving their outer shell behind. If we move fast and get a small sample, maybe we can hold a specimen long enough to get it into Sim-Mars, use the isolation lab there.”
Jason felt enormous relief at finally hearing something that sounded reasonable. Built over the past three years, “Sim-Mars” was intended to serve as a simulated Mars base for the final dress rehearsal of the Mars mission. The outpost was fifty kilometers away from Columbus Base, far enough so that when manned, the Mars mission members would have their semblance of isolation—yet close enough that the astronauts could be helped in an emergency. The self-contained labs at Sim-Mars would be the perfect place to remotely investigate the Farside regolith.
“Sounds like a plan,” he said.
In the stuffy closeness of the control room, Jason closed his eyes and tried to slow his breathing. The javelin probe seemed to take forever to reach the other side of the Moon and shoot back. Right now he wanted to take an hour around the Columbus exercise track, where he often did his best thinking.
Before this, his career on Earth had been easy—designing exotic structures using the new alloys and fibers made possible through microgravity engineering, playing around with CAD systems, and pushing the new material properties to their limits.
He could still hear Margaret’s voice as he left Earth, telling him that this job was more than he could handle, that he should just stay home with her. What more do you want? she had asked. We already have more money than we can possibly spend.
Margaret had never understood him at all.
Jason wet his lips. The manufactured air was so dry that he frequently suffered from a nagging cough and chapped lips. He swiveled his chair back to the group in the control center, his people. Red and green lights from the panels reflected from the sheen of sweat on their faces. The control center was heavy with the smell of close-packed bodies.
They all waited for the core-sample javelin to do its work. It had already landed, grabbed a minuscule sample in the magnetic bottle, then rocketed the container back toward Sim-Mars. Now they waited to see if it would remain intact long enough to reach its target, or if the chunk of regolith would eat the container from the inside out
“Big Daddy, get a teleop rover over to Sim-Mars,” Jason said after clearing his throat. “We’ll use it to manipulate the sample into the automated lab.”
“That’ll take one away from Disneyland, Jase. Think of the kids crying.”
Jason kept forgetting about so many things, so many details. How had Bernard Chu kept track of it all when he had been the base commander? “I think this is a bit more important,” he said.
“Big meanie.”
Jason ignored the comment. Looking up, he glanced at the digital clocks flashing the time from points on Earth: WASHINGTON D.C., JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, STAR CITY, PARIS, TOKYO, MILLER. No matter what the various times showed, it hadn’t been more than twenty-four hours since the remote hopper had dissolved at Daedalus, two days since the alien construction had been discovered . . . since three of his people had died.
“Heads up,” Newellen said. “Sample’s coming in.” He grinned. “And it’s intact.”
Cyndi Salito called up another image in the crowded holotank. It showed a dim, cramped room filled with lab equipment that looked too clean, too new. She brought up the lights. “Sim-Mars is on line,” she said. “Remote ops.”
Newellen hunched over the virtual controls, driving the teleoperated rover vehicle. Reaching the expected impact point, the rover’s camera swiveled back and forth, its stereochip scanning for the incoming javelin package.
The telerobot waited, ready to hurry to the javelin and remove the shielded sample as soon as it landed. Back at Sim-Mars, another 3-D receiver also kept watch for the projectile.
Jason wet his lips again. He would have to request some lip balm in the next shipment from Earth.
A splash of dust appeared at the corner of the viewing cube, and the telerobot’s camera lurched over to fix the position. Since the Moon had no atmosphere, incoming projectiles did not streak across the sky like meteors.
“Got it,” Newellen said. He worked the virtual controls in front of him, as if he himself were in the driver’s seat, rolling across the lunar terrain to fetch the package.
He followed the long furrow in the regolith until he came upon the heavily shielded canister surrounded by ejecta. Using robotic manipulator arms, he reached into the impact site.
“Bingo!” Big Daddy held up the specimen canister with the rover’s arms. 3-D high-definition television gave viewers back at Columbus the sense that they were actually present. “A real flags-and-footprint mission.”
“Off to Sim-Mars,” Jason said.
As the telepresent rover approached the isolated training habitat, a quad-armed robot detached itself from the Sim-Mars expedition module and rolled out to receive the sample. Specially designed by Hitachi-Spudis for conducting detailed geological surveys, the robot extracted and deposited its shielded core of regolith into a delivery station, then rolled back toward Sim-Mars.
Newellen peeled off with the telepresent rover, roaring away from the lab. “I’m going to Disneyland!” he shouted.
“Cyndi,” Jason said, “let him get twenty klicks away from Sim-Mars, then give control back to the kids.” He looked at Newellen, grinning. “The other kids, I mean.”
A razor-sharp shadow extended in front of the quad-armed robot as it returned to the Sim-Mars bay. Fine powder covered the robot as dust from the rover’s tires fell back to the surface.
The robot rolled around to the service-module entrance and worked the controls to gain access. Through high-definition eyes, they viewed the entry room as it passed through the double doors. Newellen switched over to teleoperating the quad-armed robot just as it finished its preprogrammed sample-recovery procedure.
“We’re recording all this, right?” Jason asked.
“Yes,” Salito answered. “Agency Mission Control is probably piping it through the newsnets, too.”
“Would you guys be quiet?” Newellen said. “I’m trying to concentrate here.”
Gingerly, Newellen worked with the quad-armed robot. Lifting the canister recovered from the Daedalus hot zone, he had the robot place it inside a thick lead vault. After the vault was sealed, the robot turned to the center of the room, powered down, and stood dormant as it waited for further orders.
“Ready for external decontamination,” Newellen said.
“I’m running it,” Salito called from the back of the control room.
At the center of the Sim-Mars isolation chamber, a meter-thick tube ran from floor to ceiling. In vacuum, low-inductance capacitors made no sound as they charged to thirty million volts. An instant later, a milligram ring of xenon boiled into a plasma and accelerated to the ceiling. When the plasma ring impacted the high-Z plate on the roof, megajoules of x rays sprayed through the entire lab room, sterilizing any organism that might have been on the outside of the sample container.
A minute passed. Satisfied that nothing could have survived outside the lead-shielded vault, Newellen powered up the telepresent robot again. Its circuits were heavily shielded against cosmic-ray bursts and hard solar radiation.
The quad-armed robot approached the sample. “Time to open our package,” Newellen said.
Jason swallowed a nervous lump in his throat. Daedalus Crater seemed a long distance away, but Sim-Mars was right in their backyard. What if they were about to open Pandora’s Box?
Lon Newellen shook his head. Sweat dripped from his forehead, soaking his dark hair. Damn! Manipulating the waldoes took getting used to, but he had never been this clumsy before.
“Want me to take over, Big Daddy?” Salito asked.
“Shut up.”
Newellen flexed his telepresent waldoes and tried to “touch” the contained sample again. The term “butterfingers” popped into his mind for the fifth time.
“You sure Director McConnell is watching all this?” he asked.
“Yes I am.” McConnell’s voice responded in two seconds.
“I won’t make any mistakes then.”
Newellen pushed his hand forward and tried to use the waldoes to pinch the largest chunk of rock in the sample, but it slipped from his grasp again. Double damn! Beside it, the opened outer shell of the sample container lay in two pieces.
He ran a sweaty hand across his forehead again, then squinted at the rock. The thing seemed to be growing smaller. And how could it possibly be slippery? The metal walls of the javelin’s sample container also seemed to be melting.
“Hey, the temperature’s rising inside the vault,” Salito said. “A lot more than I can account for by the x-ray burst.”
Newellen grunted. “Just let me get my hands on this sucker.” He had already completed a third of the standard Extraterrestrial Examination Procedure. So far, except for this problem of holding on to the rock, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
He dropped the rock a third time. Too many people were crowding around him.
Cyndi Salito leaned into the high-definition hologram, blurring its edges. “Say, what did you spill on the sample?”
“Nothing.” Newellen debated unscrewing Cyndi’s head from her body, but decided Jason might get upset.
“No, really. Take a look.” Cyndi dodged Newellen’s elbow and stuck a finger into the hologram. “Here. It looks like some kind of goo.”
“Goo? Move your head, dammit!” Newellen couldn’t see with all the people in the way. “Well I’ll be dipped. There is something on that rock. Let me play that back, get a closer look.” He pulled back from the waldoes and punched up the recorder. The holotank blinked, then showed in reverse motion Newellen’s analysis effort. In backward time, the goo disappeared and the rock grew larger again.
Newellen stopped the playback. The surface of the sample foamed and seethed. “I think we’ve brought back something very nasty.”