7
to the moon
Erika wasn’t in orbit for more than three revolutions before her single-stage-to-orbit Delta Clipper rendezvoused with the shuttle-tug. Earth wheeled above her as if it were about to drop down on her head, making her dizzy as the vessels approached each other. Coming out of the black backdrop of space, the spindly shuttle-tug reminded her of a Tinkertoy model she had once built. Her brother Dick had broken it.
Once docked, the crew handed her off to the Japanese-contracted tug. Everyone seemed rushed—from the moment she had left Star City, to launching in the Delta Clipper that took her to low-Earth orbit, or LEO. If she had gone the usual route, the trip to the Moon would have taken ten times as long. But the Agency was in a hurry to get her to work.
Combining aerospace technology and solar-electric tugs yielded an efficient and affordable option for frequent trips to the lunar surface. But this route also required a month-long spiraling trip from LEO to L-1, the Lagrange staging area to the Moon’s surface. Director McConnell at the United Space Agency couldn’t afford to wait that long. It had already taken Erika two weeks just to get the barebones preparations for her assignment.
So a specially fitted Japanese tug had been brought on duty at L-1 to get Erika to the Moon in the shortest time possible. Outfitted with relatively inefficient but fast nuclear-thermal propulsion, the tug would haul Erika to L-l within seventy-two hours.
Numbed by the whirlwind of events, Erika did nothing more than follow instructions, allowing herself to be handed from person to person, strapped into her couch, checked over for safety glitches. She had been too busy to feel terrified, but she knew it would hit her during the three-day journey in which she would have nothing to do. Grudgingly she let her uneasiness about leaving Parvu fade to be replaced by a growing enthusiasm for the challenge.
All those training sessions in Star City still seemed a jumble to her—a mishmash of safety demonstrations, spacesuit fittings, survival techniques, breathing exercises, anabolic procedures, lectures on zero-G and low-G hygiene. A crash survival course instead of the full complement of astronaut-certification training. It had been like taking a drink out of a firehose.
She longed for the peace and isolation of Antarctica, where Jordan Parvu now had the NIL all to himself. Was that how he wanted it? She didn’t think so. No matter what, she was still going to need a lot of Parvu’s assistance to figure out the nanomachine infestation. A good way to test whether long distance really was the next best thing to being there, she thought.
Erika spent the three days in transit studying tapes of the Daedalus events. Events—not deaths. She couldn’t bring herself to keep thinking that three people had died just by getting too close to the gigantic construction. If she got too hung up on the people, the loss of life, she couldn’t study it with the proper objectivity. She couldn’t let herself feel a grudge against the tiny machines.
Waite and Lasserman and Snow could not be living beings to her, not warm flesh with pasts, and lovers, and some sort of future in mind. Seeing the uproar on the newsnets hadn’t helped much: interviews with people the three of them had left behind, hometown funerals, grade-school classrooms decorated with crayon-drawn posters portraying them as heroes.
No. They were simply data points—W, L, and S—complex organisms that had been disassembled, just as the regolith sample had been. Erika had always known that nanotechnology was dangerous, hence all of Parvu’s incredible sterilization precautions back at the NIL. But these mysterious nanomachines went far beyond anything she and Parvu had attempted. Or imagined.
She felt like a butterfly collector who had always studied mounted specimens, suddenly thrust into the middle of a dense and uncharted jungle.
Webbed into place in her cramped cabin, Erika called up her stored data on the portable computer. Staring at the virtual display, she slowed down every portion of the regolith disassembly process in the Sim-Mars vault. Frame by frame she observed the sequence, zeroing in each 3-D pixel as the sample disappeared from view.
She went over Waite’s last transmission. She saw the moonbase control center images of the telepresent hopper being disassembled at the Daedalus construction site. There seemed so much to study, but it was not enough to keep her mind completely occupied. She understood Director McConnell’s need to placate millions of uneasy citizens. When someone wanted an answer fast, the easiest way was to grab a local expert and keep the pressure on until a solution was found. Erika had been dropped smack into the middle of the problem, like being given a hand grenade with the pin pulled and told to fix it.
For three days she pored over the events. The other crewmembers, busy with their own tasks, left her alone. That suited Erika just fine.
She turned her thoughts again to Jordan Parvu. Why hadn’t he wanted to come to the Moon? If he wanted to study functional nanotechnology so badly, why didn’t he jump at the chance? She couldn’t believe he didn’t want to take the risk. After all, Antarctica was perhaps the most savage spot left on Earth. And the Sim-Mars isolation lab on the Moon certainly could be no more dangerous than the NIL.
No, there had to be something more to it. Jordan did not want to step into the spotlight, but to focus things on her.
She felt a warm lump in her throat and tears welling in her eyes. That was the real reason. She knew it to the core. He had always spoken about how much he wanted her to succeed. Now she had to live up to his expectations. This was different from trying to meet her mother’s demands; she wanted Jordan Parvu to beam with pride over her successes. But that didn’t make the monumental pressure feel any less.
“Hello, Dr. Trace, I’m Bernard Chu, commander of Moonbase—” The wiry, intense man seemed flustered, then smiled thinly. “Excuse me, I’m sorry. With so many things going on, I can’t even remember my own title! I’m the Lagrange way station director—welcome to the Collins.”
Erika shook the Asian man’s hand. “Thank you. And please, call me Erika. ‘Doctor’ sounds too formal.” Her soft South Carolina drawl usually made new acquaintances feel comfortable.
Chu nodded and held on to Erika’s elbow to help her float out of the chamber. Webbed netting held boxes, ropes, toilet paper, silvery packaging film, and a hundred other things she couldn’t identify, nor could she determine any sort of organization scheme. Since she couldn’t tell “up” from “down” in the weightlessness, storing material in the netting made sense.
“Since the shuttle-tug normally takes nearly a month to get here, everyone becomes accustomed to zero-G by the time they arrive,” Chu said. “But you have not had time to adjust. Are you feeling all right? Space whoops?”
She did not want to be reminded about the queasiness. “I’ve managed to keep my food down for the past day.”
Chu nodded. “No problem then. You’ll be heading to the lunar surface within the hour. We have the shuttle outfitted and waiting, pilot ready to go. Celeste—ah—Director McConnell told us not to waste any time.”
“An hour?” Erika blinked her eyes as sudden nervousness rushed up on her again.
“That’s the nice thing about being at L-1—we’re always in position for a lunar rendezvous. Captain Zed—I mean Zimmerman—is the shuttle pilot taking you down.” Chu nodded to a lanky, square-jawed man floating upside down at the rear of the room.
Erika started to greet him, but Zimmerman interrupted her, “If I were you I’d take a shower,” he said. “A quick one.” Zimmerman pushed himself out of the chamber.
“He isn’t very big on explaining things,” Chu said. Erika thought Captain Zimmerman’s silence would be a wonderful change after enduring Kent Woodward in Antarctica. “He means for the dust.”
“Dust?”
Chu set his mouth and got a faraway look on his face. Suddenly Erika remembered that he had been the moonbase commander until a few weeks before. “Yes, the moondust gets into everything—even the water supplies, no matter how much they try to filter it. So if you want to feel clean for one last time, take a shower here before you go. Our water is limited, but for Celeste’s special guest, we can spare some.”
The words brought back a vision of Kent Woodward and his sidekick Gunther, anxious to take a shower at the NIL. Is it something to do with these astronauts? she thought. “No wonder nobody wants to stay down there for long.”
She looked up at Bernard Chu, expecting the man to nod in agreement; but he looked serious, as if something else were on his mind. “Yes, you must be right.”
“Fifty kilometers above the ground. Check your straps one more time.”
Zimmerman’s voice startled her; he had broken the quietness only a few times during the transfer orbit from L-1 to the lunar surface. The dip from the Collins had been one continuous silence, with Zimmerman grunting answers to her questions until she had finally decided to be quiet.
On the interior wall of his craft, Bryan Zed had painted GLORIA—his wife’s name. He had told Erika, using only about three sentences, how it was tradition to paint the name of one’s wife on the outside of a special aircraft—Glamorous Glennis, Enola Gay—but since he had no way to reach the exterior hull of his shuttle, the cabin wall would have to do.
He displayed several images of Gloria on the flight deck next to a plaque given to him by his graduating class at astronaut training. They had awarded him “Mr. Personality,” but it must have been some sort of a joke. Erika wasn’t sure if Bryan Zed realized that.
She fumbled at her straps, but they were already as tight as they could be. Erika felt her face flush with excitement and a bit of fear as she tried to see the televised view of their approach. Below, the lunar surface looked like flash-frozen meringue. Gray and black shapes filled the high-definition screen. Craters, tips of craggy mountains, and vast plains of hardened lava slipped past the screen as the shuttle descended. But the shadow of lunar night masked most of the details.
She spotted a lit-up array of half-buried cylinders in the distance, similar to the Mars training camp in Antarctica. All too quickly the view narrowed to a smoothed landing area.
“Five kilometers.” Zimmerman was really on a roll. This must have been twice as many words as he had spoken on the whole journey down from L-l. Erika couldn’t see his face as he concentrated on the landing, but he continued, “We usually deliver supply pods by remote piloting, but a human in the loop gives a much greater sense of security.” He placed his hands over the override controls.
“I guess it must.” Erika forced the words, then closed her eyes.
“Two kilometers—we’re down to fifty meters a second.”
The lunar shuttle vibrated as the stern engines ignited for a few seconds. The viewscreen showed nothing but a landing pad in the distance. Red concentric circles spread out from the middle of the zone. Set into the ground at a ninety-degree angle, a string of strobe lights intersected the circles, bright on the dark plain.
“Looking good.” To Erika’s relief, Zimmerman didn’t turn around, but he kept up the chatter. “If our angle was wrong, the strobes would look red because of prisms in the rim. We’re right on path. Relax.”
The ground swelled toward them. The shuttle began vibrating as the engines kicked on, this time to stay. The landing pad’s strobe lights disappeared from the screen as dust boiled up, spoiling the view.
“Twenty . . . ten . . . five . . . bingo!” Zimmerman slapped at the controls just as the engines cut off. Erika had never imagined he could sound so delighted.
Erika felt dizzy as she sat up. “The Moon. One small step for mankind, and all that.”
Zimmerman gave her a blank stare and turned back to the control panel to switch the view from the landing zone to the lunar horizon. The image jumped from an unbroken plain to the brilliant headlights of an approaching rover, glimmering off plumes of dust kicked up from the shuttle’s landing. From the other side of the landing pad a gantry rolled up to Zimmerman’s lander. As it approached and made contact, Erika heard a faint thunk.
Erika pulled out her lunar EVA suit, ready to go through all the motions she had rehearsed back in Star City. But Zimmerman made no move to secure his own suit. She hesitated. “Aren’t you coming with us?”
“No,” he said in his flat voice. She expected him to say something like “Just the facts, ma’am.” “Not in my purview. It’s dangerous out there.”
The light above the airlock switched from amber to green as she waited with helmet in hands. Air hissed and Erika smelled the tang of ozone. As the airlock door unseated its seals and pushed open, she felt her hair fly up at the edges; a chill ran down her back as she heard the faint popping of sparks.
A spacesuited man with namepatch DVORAK stepped out of the chamber. The suit looked freshly cleaned, which seemed strange since she had just seen him driving across the dusty lunar landscape.
A voice came over the control panel radio, not from the suit. “Hello, Erika Trace?”
Zimmerman nodded to the stranger. “Mr. Dvorak is the commander of Moonbase Columbus. He’s patched through the radio.”
“Oh.” Erika glanced at the spacesuit but spoke toward the transmitter on the control panel. “Uh, yes, sir, Mr. Dvorak.”
“Please, call me Jason unless it makes you uncomfortable.” He moved his arms, but his voice coming from the other side of the chamber made her feel disoriented. “We can leave for Columbus once you’ve finished suiting up.”
Erika turned and picked up her helmet. Bryan Zed led her to a cubbyhole across from the airlock. “You know the drill?”
“Yeah. I’ve practiced this enough.”
“Have you? Let me help anyway. There’s a big difference between stepping into hard vacuum versus the tub of water they use for simulating space back on Earth. Difference in viscosity, for one.”
For a moment, Erika felt a flash of defensive anger again, but from the way Zimmerman went about helping her, she realized that he would have acted the same way no matter who it had been. But Erika was so accustomed to doing doings herself, working alone or with no one but Parvu for company, she knew she would have to make a conscious effort to fit in. Otherwise her time spent here would be even more miserable than she feared.
She stood in front of the cubbyhole that held the life-support pack and spent the next fifteen minutes letting Zimmerman secure her connections. Once he tightened the last zipper, he powered up her suit.
She felt a surge of hot liquid run through her suit’s inner liner. “I can feel the heater.” She jerked her neck to bump the chin control, trying to remember all the memorized checklists. “Everything seems okay. I’m ready for the helmet.”
With the helmet on she could suddenly hear Dvorak’s breathing over the suit radio. “Mr. Dvorak?”
“Ready?” He struggled up from a mesh net that had served as a chair for the enormous bulk of his suited form.
“As much as I’ll ever be.” Consciously, she made herself smile to look relaxed, but no one could see her through the helmet anyway.
“Let’s do it.” Dvorak turned his faceless helmet to Zimmerman. “Thanks, Bryan.”
Zimmerman grunted, back to his old ways.
“Let’s go, Dr. Trace.” Dvorak turned for the airlock.
Erika stepped across the shuttle deck and followed him, immediately surprised at the ease with which she could move. The augmented servos that functioned as the suit’s muscles made everything simple. In the crash course she had taken back on Earth, the suit and life-support pack had weighed nearly a hundred pounds; even in the water simulation tank she had not gotten a true feel for what it was like to move around in low gravity.
She squeezed into the airlock and waited for the air to cycle out back into the shuttle’s reserve tanks. Dvorak pushed against her suit and motioned with his hand.
“Try not to move too quickly, and keep your center of gravity over your feet. If you start to fall, it’ll feel like you’re sinking in a bowl of molasses and there’s nothing you can do about it. So if you drop anything, either let it be or call for help—but don’t bend over. That’s an acquired skill.”
She felt a little more relaxed with Dvorak’s conversation. It was a pleasant change from Bryan Zed’s impenetrability. She found herself putting a light tone in her voice. “Sounds like how to survive on the Moon in two easy lessons.”
“That’s about all that you’ll need to know for now. But the main thing is that if you’ve got any questions, don’t be afraid to ask. Believe me, the only dumb question here is, why did she have to die?”
Erika kept her mouth shut. If there really was anything to this nanotech threat that existed on the other side of the Moon, she had a lot more to worry about than learning how to walk in low gravity.
The airlock opened, and Erika felt like Dorothy opening the farmhouse door in The Wizard of Oz. The view sprawled in front of her, the same as had appeared on the high-definition screen inside the lander.
They stepped out onto a gantry platform encircled by safety wires. Above, a shower of stars lit the distant crags in pearly relief. As the platform lowered them to the lunar surface, Erika felt no sensation of movement.
Dvorak helped her into the rover, which looked like someone had added balloon tires to the stripped-down chassis of a junked car. Behind them, the gantry withdrew from the landing pad.
Dvorak moved around to the other side, climbing in behind the controls. He powered on the headlights. “We’ve got about a ten-kilometer ride to the base, half an hour.”
“When can I see the nanotech specimens?”
“We’re preparing another sample-return mission as soon as you’ve been acclimated, Dr. Trace—”
“Okay, please stop calling me Dr. Trace. It’s Erika, all right?”
“Fine. But in return you have to promise never to call me Jase. Jason is fine, but I hate nicknames.”
She found herself smiling behind the faceplate. “A deal. When will we get a new sample? I’ve been going a thousand miles an hour for the past two weeks preparing for this. So as soon as you can get me to the lab and have the samples ready, the sooner I can do my job here.” And the sooner I can go home, she thought.
The rover rolled away from Zimmerman’s lander. Erika caught a support strut as the vehicle began to bounce on the rough ground after leaving the compressed landing area. “Am I going to be stationed out at Sim-Mars? How far is that from Columbus Base?”
“Just over fifty kilometers, on the other side of the landing zone. We don’t have all the specialized tools for you to use the lab telerobotically, so you’ll have to go there in person.”
“I never thought I’d get there before the Mars crew.”
Dvorak sighed. “We didn’t think it would be used so soon either.”
Erika fell silent, losing herself in the stark, exotic scenery as they bounced along. The grayness of the entire nightside world looked foreboding. She had been on the surface for only a couple of hours and she already wished she could see some color, smell something other than the antiseptic inside her suit. How about the high desert of New Mexico, or the lush woods of South Carolina? Even the sharp snow of Antarctica and the stench of a crowded penguin rookery?
The silhouetted horizon seemed oddly near, as if she could throw a stone all the way to the edge. As the rover bumped along, she picked out a spot on the horizon and imagined how long it would take to reach it.
Approaching the moonbase, Dvorak pointed out the distant astronomical facilities, the enormous dangling box of the gamma-ray observatory, the sprawling radio telescope, the high-energy cosmic-ray observatory, and the solar telescope. The broad proton-beam collector lay off to the left, ready to receive a burst from the Nevada Test Site on Earth.
She couldn’t comprehend the effort it must have taken to assemble and distribute the massive equipment. By starlight, Erika could make out tracks in the regolith, indicating that more activity had occurred here. It made her think of the gigantic Daedalus construction.
Dvorak said, “We’re almost there.” She saw rounded mounds at the starlit horizon. Erika suddenly felt good about being here.
Moonbase Columbus looked as if a giant had strewn empty beer cans on the ground, then kicked dirt over them. In the center of the base a regolith-covered hemispherical dome—the control center—towered over the buried modules. Other cylinders lay like spokes radiating from the dome. The remaining buildings sat above ground in a random arrangement with connections running from cylinder to cylinder.
Dvorak said, “The original base is the pretty-looking stuff in the center. Everything else is temporary storage for Phase II until we can dig below the original structure.”
“An anthill on the Moon!” She suddenly giggled.
“Well, the dirt is for radiation protection from solar flares and galactic cosmic rays.”
“Wow cosmic!” She laughed again. Why was everything silly? She felt punchy, wonderful. She hadn’t felt so good in . . . a long time. She wondered what it would be like to dance in low gravity.
Dvorak abruptly turned to her. She couldn’t see his face through the mirrored faceplate, but she could imagine the look he was giving her. She wanted to stick her tongue out at him, teach him a lesson, call him ‘Jase’ over and over again until he got really upset . . . .
Dvorak’s voice burst over her helmet radio. “Erika! Check your CO2.”
“See oh two? See you too. See you later!”
He leaned over to check the diagnostic readings on the front of her suit. “Decrease your oxygen supply.”
Oxygen. Erika kicked up the reading on her chin display and glanced at the colored lights dancing on the front of her helmet. Most of the lights were green, but two flashed red. She seemed to remember something at Star City about this—
She felt pressure at the front of her suit. Dvorak had one hand on the wheel and the other groping at her chest. Wow, bodice-ripping romance on the Moon! “Hey!” She tried to knock his hand away.
The thought of necking in a parked lunar rover, both of them in bulky spacesuits, sent her into another fit of laughter, but suddenly she realized it didn’t sound funny anymore. She frowned and glanced at her heads-up display. The red lights had turned to amber.
CO2 partial pressure—1 psi: increasing
O2 partial pressure—3 psi: decreasing
“Hey, I was hyperventilating!”
Dvorak grunted. “You might want to keep your voice alert on to catch that next time. Bitchin’ Betsy, we call it. Zimmerman didn’t have you switch it on.”
Erika flipped up the suit options and keyed it in. “Thanks.” She felt incredibly stupid. Hyperventilating! What a way to make a first impression—and with the moonbase commander yet.
“No problem. Happens to everyone.” He turned the rover and headed toward what looked like a tent in a plowed-level area. “Well, a few people anyway.”
As they approached, Erika made out four other rovers parked underneath the deeper shadow of a silvery awning. “Easiest garage in the world,” Dvorak said. “Since there’s no weather, all we have to do is keep the sunlight off them during the daytime.”
Erika climbed down from the rover after he brought it to a stop. Dvorak led her to the moonbase airlock. “Step up and wait inside for me.”
The inside of the chamber was lined with several air vents. The metal walls had a control panel embedded near each corner. The multilingual instruction placard described them as emergency manual backups, in case the control center links malfunctioned.
When they were both inside the lock, Dvorak said, “Stand back from the wall and raise your hands.”
Erika took an uneven step backward and placed her hands over her head. She heard a rapid whoosh through her helmet, then a sharp snap.
“That’s our dust buster. An electric charge polarizes the dust, pops it off your suit, and the air carries it out. Between that and the floor suction we manage to get most of it. But you’ll find the grittiness will still drive you crazy.”
The airlock slid open. An enormous man wearing only a powder-blue jumpsuit stood inside the entrance. He was so large that it looked as if he might not have been able to get into the airlock. He helped Erika take her helmet off, letting Dvorak handle his own undressing. With a burst of air from the inside, the first thing she noticed was a musty, humid smell that reminded her of a room packed full of people on a hot day.
“Hello, Dr. Trace? I’m Lon Newellen. I’ll be driving you right out to Sim-Mars, after you’ve taken a breather here.” He started helping her with her suit fastenings.
“Thanks.” Erika allowed the beefy man to disengage the life support unit from her back as she looked around. The habitat was a long cylinder packed with supplies. Boxes stamped FREEZE DRIED on the side were stacked all through the room. Nets hung from the ceiling, bulging with additional boxes. At the end of the module, looking like the opposite end of a craggy tunnel, was an airlock.
Dvorak moved around in front of her; he tossed his helmet to the side. A middle-aged woman caught it and gave the base commander a thumbs-up. Other people came to the doorway.
Newellen finished unfastening the unit from Erika’s back. “That should give you a little more mobility. Feel free to take off the rest of the suit—we’re in double-hulled chambers now. All the comforts of home.” Erika thought of her austere NIL quarters and realized he wasn’t far off.
Erika turned to Dvorak. Finally, she was able to put a face to the voice that had come over the radio: dark curly hair, brown eyes, narrow features. He stood about six feet tall. His lips curved upward in what seemed to be a perpetual shy smile.
“Welcome to Columbus, Erika.” He nodded toward the middle-aged woman. “Dr. Salito is our mining expert; you can share her quarters whenever you’re not out at the Sim-Mars lab.”
“Call me Cyndi,” said Salito, shaking Erika’s hand. “We’re anxious for you to solve all our problems at Daedalus.”
“Sure.” She felt overwhelmed already.
“We’ve got you scheduled to go out to Sim-Mars tomorrow,” Dvorak said. “Big Daddy has a break in his duties then.”
“When he says tomorrow, he means twenty-four hours,” Newellen said. “Since the lunar day is fourteen Earth days long, ‘tomorrow’ would literally mean about ten days from now—”
“Thanks for explaining that, Lon,” interrupted Salito. She took his arm and ushered him toward the airlock at the far end of the tunnel, shaking her head.
Dvorak waited for them to leave before breaking into a smile. “Big Daddy gets a little too helpful at times, but he means well.”
“I thought you said you hated nicknames?” Erika said.
“On me, but not on anybody else. They’re inevitable up here. After living with these people for months in close quarters, they become a little more than neighbors. The flip side of the coin is that you tend to forget how to interact with new people.”
Erika nodded. She could identify with that after being isolated for months, seeing no one but Jordan, unless she counted the rare visits from the Mars trainees. It had been nice—peace and quiet with no one around to disturb her research. And the technical papers she and Parvu had published could speak for themselves.
She started to push back her hair when she realized that she still had the rest of her spacesuit on. She held up the thick glove that enclosed her hand and laughed.
Dvorak looked at her curiously, then shrugged. “Go ahead and get out of that thing. I’ll introduce you to the crew.”