5
YOU have frequently referred to this "Lederman antimatter factory," but its exact nature and purpose are not understood, nor is it known why such an apparently dangerous establishment is tolerated. Please explain.
Well, all right, but where do I start?
Let's see. You already know that no one lives in the factory itself; when you need to get there—and you really have to need to, because nobody can get inside without a damn good reason—you take the subway through the crater rim from Lederman Town to the works inside.
I think I've also already told you that the lunar antimatter factory is the biggest single industrial complex in the solar system—in the universe, I guess, unless there's some other high-tech race out there somewhere that we just haven't found out about yet. It's big because it has to be big—you can't make antimatter in your hall bedroom. Also, there can be only one installation like the Lederman factory anywhere in the solar system. That's a law. Some people think it's a dumb law, because if we can have one antimatter factory on the Moon, what would be wrong with having a couple of spares somewhere else, even farther from civilization? Well, we probably could. There are only two reasons we don't. One is that the Moon is a good place to get the immense amounts of electrical power the factory needs—I'll tell you about that in a minute. The other reason we don't is that the Congresses are so scared of antimatter that they damn near wanted to close Lederman itself down in the early days. But they couldn't. The human race needs antimatter.
Most of the antimatter we manufacture goes to fuel spaceships, but there are plenty of other customers. The habitats around Jupiter's moons and in the asteroid-mining stations need antimatter, too, for survival; they're too far from the Sun for solar power to give them all the energy they need, and we can sell antimatter to them cheaper, megawatt for megawatt, than nukes or anything else they might consider. It would be nice if we could sell to Earth, too, of course, but of course we can't. Antimatter is not allowed within a thousand kilometers of the outermost reaches of the Earth's atmosphere. For obvious reasons.
The reason we can do it so cheaply is, as I say, that we have our own solar power, which we get in copious amount, from the photovoltaic belt that goes all around the Moon.
I know you don't know what "photovoltaic power" is. Maybe you don't really need to, except that you should understand that electricity is so important to human beings that we're willing to do a lot of damaging things to get it—as you know. Photovoltaics happen to be among the least damaging. What "photovoltaic" means is a way of changing light into electricity. Any kind of light. Sunlight is the best kind of all, because there's so much of it. The way it works, when a particle of light—it's called a "photon"—strikes a photovoltaic cell it knocks an electron loose from one of the atoms in the cell. An electron is a particle of electricity, you see, and when you have enough of them knocked loose you have an electric current.
So that's what the belt around the Moon is for. It's a continuous ribbon of photovoltaic cells that goes completely around the Moon. The belt is not handicapped by a day and night sequence; it girdles the whole Moon. That means half of it is always in direct sunlight.
Why put it on the Moon? Partly to get it as far as possible from nervous neighbors, of course, but also because the Moon has no air. The energy from the Sun doesn't lose anything to Rayleigh scattering or cloudy days. (I know you don't know what Rayleigh scattering is either, but anyway.) And every point on the belt is connected to every other point by the superconductor cables that underlie the photovoltaic belt itself.
The effect is that we can tap all that power at any point. The biggest power draw is at the Lederman antimatter works, where every minute of every day we have several billion megawatts to draw on.
We draw on them pretty heavily, too. We use that power to run the giant accelerator rings that go all around the crater wall; they're a hundred kilometers in circumference. We smash particles into each other and collect the fragments, and the important part of the fragments that we get out of the rings are antimatter. Antiprotons. Which we convert and chill down to solid antihydrogen; and then we package the antihydrogen and ship it out and get rich.
Well—the owners get richest of all, of course. But the people who work there, like me, get paid pretty well, too. Hazard pay, you could call it. After all, if anything went wrong we would be the first ones to go.
The packaging of the antimatter is the hard part—well, one of the hard parts; there aren't any easy ones. Each little lump of antimatter is smaller than the meat of a walnut, but those walnuts have very large shells. The shells have to keep it away from any normal matter, you see, because if any bit of antimatter ever touches any bit of normal matter you get a hell of a big explosion. (These controlled explosions are what make our spaceships run.) So the shells are made up of magnets and vacuum pumps and motors that keep the little nugget of antimatter in suspension; and at the same time they have to be so constructed that the antimatter can be bled off to enter the combustion chambers of the spaceships in just the right measured amounts, with zero leakage at all times. The antimatter is measured in grams, but each shell masses more than six tons.
Do you get the idea that the Lederman factory was big, expensive, complicated and dangerous? Then you've got it right. It is. But it gives us power—and, you know, power is what makes our world go round. We aren't like you.
Captain Garold Tscharka wanted to know what the inside of the factory was like, too. I found that out a few days after the drill. I was getting off the shuttle after refueling a Belt transport and he was arriving from Earth, and we met at the Lederman lander pad. We waited for the subway to Lederman Central together. "Well, di Hoa," he said genially, "I've just checked Corsair. We'll be loading soon."
"I heard. They must like you in the Budget Congress."
He laughed. "As long as they decided to let the colony live awhile, there wasn't any reason not to finance our supplies fully."
"Ah," I said, admiring the man's brass. I didn't know Tscharka that well at the time, or I wouldn't have been surprised at his ability to turn defeat into triumph. Later on, of course, it was different.
By then we were in the Lederman town station, and when I headed for the cars that went through the crater wall he followed me. "Listen," I said, thinking to spare him embarrassment, "you know you can't go inside the factory."
"Oh, but I can, di Hoa," he said, and proceeded to prove it. When the guards checked our IDs they didn't stop him. In fact, they pinned him with a blue badge, as good as my own.
"But nobody's allowed to enter but trained technicians," I protested.
He gave me a look of good-humored tolerance. "I know that. That's why I've been on Earth taking the course. I'm going to inspect the pods that are ready for loading, and I'm going to stay with you and your crew every minute that you're stowing them on my ship."
"You think we don't know our business?"
"I want to know your business too." Then he unbent enough to offer a reason—a lying one, as it turned out, but I had no way of knowing that. "When we get to the colony we're going to have to fuel the short-rangers ourselves, aren't we? I want to make sure we do it right."
It was a plausible explanation, and I let it go at that. By then we were at the main door, and when it opened for us Tscharka looked surprised. "Wait a minute, di Hoa. Aren't we going to put spacesuits on?"
"Why would we do that?"
"Don't you keep the area in vacuum? In case some air should penetrate the pods?"
"Oh, right," I said, trying not to laugh; his course obviously hadn't taught him everything. I shook my head. "There's no point. Even what we have on the Moon's surface isn't a perfect vacuum. There isn't a perfect enough vacuum to be allowed to contact antimatter anywhere in the universe, not even in interstellar space."
I looked at my watch. I had a little time before I had to sign off, and besides I was still in the stage of thinking that Captain Tscharka was probably a pretty decent guy, underneath it all.
So I showed him around, first to the fuel-insertion room. No fuel was being inserted at the moment, but next to it was the storage chamber where the prepared pods waited to be filled. And there they were, his first hundred pods, looking like giant steel watermelons, each one already hooked up to the power leads that would run its coolers and magnets when the antimatter was inserted.
"They're empty," he said, frowning.
"Of course they're empty. As soon as a pod is full it's out of here; we don't keep antimatter around. As soon as they start filling them for you, we'll shoot them up to the catchers so we can start loading."
"And when are you going to load?"
"When I tell them to start filling," I told him.
He didn't look as though he liked that, but he wasn't looking at me anymore. He was staring at the pods, and the expression on his face surprised me. It seemed to reflect a kind of emotion I didn't really associate with Millenarists. If I'd had to put a name to it, I would have called it . . . well . . . love.
He made me uncomfortable. I said, "I'll probably have the refueling order tomorrow, so you'll be leaving pretty soon."
He looked up at me, as though I'd interrupted a precious thought. "I suppose so. All the supplies are in, and the personnel list is all set. Not everybody is as hostile to the extrasolar colonies as you, di Hoa. We've had more volunteer colonists than we could carry, with all that load of antimatter."
I mentioned, "I know one of your volunteers. A man named Rannulf Enderman."
He thought for a moment, then nodded. "Enderman, yes. A deeply religious young man. You would be a happier man, di Hoa, if you had his faith."
I didn't know what to say to that. I couldn't tell whether Tscharka really believed what he said about Rannulf—"deeply religious," for God's sake!—or whether he actually remembered Rannulf at all. I took refuge in what my old shrink had told me.
"A man named Benjamin Franklin said something that makes sense to me," I said. "Franklin said, 'In the affairs of this world men are saved, not by faith, but by the lack of it.'"
I don't know what I expected from him. Maybe a thundering condemnation of Franklin's blasphemy, maybe a supercilious dismissal of his ignorance. What I got surprised me. Tscharka mulled that over for a moment, and then said, "Why, di Hoa, that is a very penetrating observation, for a secular. I must admit that this man, Franklin, is partly right."
I blinked at him for that.
"You see, in this world," he explained, "you really can't be saved by faith. You can't be saved at all, except by getting out of it."