Bolor-Erdene urged Dinah to address her as Bo. She was obviously of Far Eastern stock, and yet there was something in her eyes and cheekbones that did not look precisely Chinese. Dinah’s preliminary googling had already told her that Bo was Mongolian.
Yuri and Maxim were coming to ISS for their third and fourth times, respectively. Vyacheslav seemed to be a last-minute substitution for a younger cosmonaut who would have been making his first trip to the ISS. Vyacheslav had done two previous stints. So, all the Russians except for Bo were old hands at this, and once they had exchanged brief greetings with Dinah they glided through the middle of the Hub, looking about curiously since some of them hadn’t seen it before, and then through the hatch into the Zvezda module, which was like home to them. They exchanged clipped remarks in Russian of which Dinah understood about 50 percent. Everyone who worked on Izzy had to have at least working knowledge of Russian.
Rhys Aitken was an engineer who had made a career of building strange new constructs, usually for wealthy clients. Until seventeen days ago, his mission had been to lay groundwork for the addition of a second, larger torus, built around a newer Hub aft of the existing one and intended for space tourists. This was part of a public-private partnership between NASA and Rhys’s employer, a British billionaire who had been one of the early movers in the space tourism industry. Rhys had a new mission now, but he was still a perfect fit for the job.
Dinah went back through the orbital module and peered through the hatch at him, lying there patiently motionless in his couch.
“First time in space?” Dinah asked him, though she already knew the answer.
“Don’t you have Google up here?” he responded. From an American it would have been simply obnoxious, but Dinah had spent enough time around Brits to take it as intended.
“You just don’t seem very eager to explore your new home.”
“I’m stretching it out. The process of discovery. Besides, I was warned not to move my head.”
“To avoid nausea. Yeah, that’s good advice,” Dinah said. “But you have to move it eventually.” A loose packet of cucumber seeds, stenciled in Cyrillic, floated past her head. She plucked it carefully out of the air. Finding herself in range, she stuck out her hand. “Dinah,” she said.
“Rhys.” He extended his hand while gazing rigidly ahead, as he’d been instructed. But in the time-honored manner of most human males, he allowed his eyeballs to swivel her way so that he could check her out, then turned his head so that he could check her out better.
“You’re going to regret that,” she said.
“Oh, my goodness,” he exclaimed.
“You have a few minutes before it all comes up. Come on out, I’ll get you a bag.”
DURING ONE OF MANY RECENT SLEEPLESS “NIGHTS,” DINAH HAD found herself worrying about transistors. Modern semiconductor technology had found a way to make them very small. So small that they could be destroyed by a single hit from a cosmic ray. This didn’t much matter down on the ground, because the stakes were lower and cosmic rays were mostly blocked by the atmosphere. But electronics that had to work in space were a different matter. The world’s military-industrial complexes had put a lot of money and brainpower into making “rad-hard” electronics, more resistant to cosmic ray strikes. The resulting chips and circuit boards were, by and large, clunkier than the sleek consumer electronics that earthbound customers had come to expect. A lot more expensive too. So much so that Dinah had avoided using them at all in her robots. She used cheap, tiny off-the-shelf electronics in the expectation that a certain number of her robots would be found dead every week. A functional robot could carry a dead one back to the little airlock between Dinah’s workshop and the pitted surface of Amalthea, and Dinah could swap its fried circuit board out for a new one. Sometimes the new one would already be dead, struck by a cosmic ray while it was just sitting there in storage. But the vitamins shipped up on the ISS supply missions always had more of them.
The only shielding from cosmic rays was matter. A thick atmosphere such as Earth’s would do the trick, or a much thinner bulwark of solid heavy material. Of course, Dinah happened to have one in the form of Amalthea itself. Any object nestled up against Amalthea’s surface would be shielded from cosmic rays coming from roughly half of the universe—the half blocked from view by the asteroid. For the same reason, the ISS was always shielded by the Earth from any cosmic rays approaching from that direction. So there was a sweet spot, on the side of Dinah’s shop that faced toward Earth but was “under” the bulk of Amalthea, where cosmic rays could only squirt in from a relatively narrow band of space. Dinah stored her spare chips and circuit boards in that general area, just to improve their odds, and she limited the amount of time that her robots spent roaming about on the side of Amalthea that faced deep space.