BROKEN MIRROR
Grant felt tired and irritable as he pulled the hard-shell torso of his space suit over his head and slid his arms through the flexible sleeves.
Frigging suit smells like old sweat socks, he grumbled to himself. It’s time to requisition a new one. The Ulcer’ll hit the ceiling; I bet he hired McClintock to help keep the program’s costs down.
It was an hour after his meeting with McClintock. You do the work, and I’ll take the credit, the man had said. Great, thought Grant. What choice do I have? Well, anyway, I ought to get a new suit out of it.
The woman who was going outside with him was already suited up, helmet and all. She checked out his suit, then Grant checked out hers. The old buddy system. Never go out on the surface alone. Good rule. Except there were times when you had to. Rules are made to be broken, or at least bent.
“Let’s make this quick,” the woman said as Grant fastened his fishbowl helmet to his suit’s neck ring. “I’ve got a date for dinner.”
With their highly tinted helmets over their heads, neither person could make out the face of the other. Together they clomped heavily to the airlock, got the go-ahead from the excursion controller, snug and happy in her booth deep inside, and finally stepped out onto the surface of Mare Moscoviense.
It was still daylight out there, although the Sun was dipping down toward the slumped old ringwall mountains. Long shadows were stretching across the dusty undulating floor of the Sea of Moscow.
Grant took it all in with a glance, then stepped out of the airlock and headed toward the cracked mirror.
“Into the valley of death,” muttered his companion, “rode the six hundred.”
Grant shook his head inside his helmet. “We’re missing five hundred and ninety-eight guys.”
“Yeah. I know.”
The damned mirror was sitting out there, next to the big airlock of the mirror lab, slightly tilted on the uneven ground. Its delicately figured glass was covered by a thin sheet of metal that was obviously warped.
Grant stared at the damaged mirror inside its protective casing. Not protective enough, he knew.
Why’d you have to crack? he asked the impassive mirror. Why’d you have to ruin all our work?
“How’re we gonna get this puppy back into the lab?” his companion asked.
Grant had to concentrate for a moment to remember which of his crew was with him. The bulky space suits removed all traces of individuality; if you weren’t close enough to read the name stenciled on the torso, you couldn’t recognize who was inside the suit.
She checked you out in your suit, for chrissakes, Grant berated himself. Are you getting early onset Alzheimer’s? Then he remembered: Josie Rivera. Smokey Jo. Good-looking Latina, sharp engineer, bosomy and friendly, especially after a couple of drinks. With a pang, Grant realized that it had been months since he’d gotten laid. He hadn’t even thought much about sex lately. A side effect of his medications? he wondered.
“It doesn’t go back into the lab,” Grant replied. “Not yet. Not until we finish the mirror we’re working on now.”
“So we just leave it out here?”
Shaking his head inside the helmet, Grant said, “We build a roof over it, protect it from temperature swings and micrometeorite abrasion. I’ll have to requisition the honeycomb sheets, then you and Harvey Henderson’s gang can put ’em up.”
“Hurry-up Harvey.” Josie sounded a little resentful, Grant thought. Nobody likes working outside unless they really have to. He knew what was going through her mind: The damned mirror’s ruined; what’s the sense of putting up a protective roof when we’re just going to melt the thing down and start all over again with it?
He said to her, “The Ulcer’s thinking about using nanomachines to build a new mirror.”
“Nanos? Really?”
“That administrator of his—McClintock—he’s talking about it with Dr. Cardenas back at Selene.”
“Could it work?” Josie asked.
Grant knew better than to try to shrug inside the bulky suit. “Cardenas seems to think so.”
“Well, she would, wouldn’t she?”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Grant started pacing around the mirror’s edge. It was still mounted on the transporter, clamped rigidly in place. Not rigidly enough, he told himself. Otherwise it wouldn’t have cracked.
To Josie, he said, “I want you to take snaps of the ground along the perimeter of the mirror, so Henderson and his guys have a full picture of the ground out here. They’ll need to build a foundation for the roof.”
“I’ll have to go in and get a camera,” she said.
Shaking his head, Grant said, “I’ll tell the controller to get somebody to put a camera in the airlock. All you’ll have to do is step in and pick it up.”
“Okay.”
Still pacing along the edges of the mirror, Grant called in to the controller for a camera. Once the controller told him that the camera had been placed on the airlock’s floor, he told Josie to pop in and get it.
She came back with the credit-card-sized camera engulfed in one gloved hand. “You want me to take your picture, boss?” Before Grant could reply, Josie added, “Give the guys inside an idea of the scale.”
“Sure,” he said. “Why the hell not?”
So he stood beside the mirror while Josie snapped several images of him.
“Better take shots of the transporter’s wheels, too,” he suggested. “Get close enough to see if any of ’em cracked or bent.”
Josie got busy and Grant felt unneeded, but he hesitated to go inside and leave her alone. He knew that subatomic particles from the distant stars were machine-gunning him. His suit protected him from most of them, but there were always some extra-energetic ones that got through and burrowed into the atoms of his body, killing cells or mutating them. He started to feel almost naked beneath their constant, deadly, invisible rain.
“Whattaya think of the Ulcer’s assistant?” Josie asked as she made her way slowly around the mirror’s perimeter.
“You mean McClintock?”
“Yeah. He’s good-looking, don’t you think?”
Sourly, Grant answered, “Another layer of management. The Ulcer’s enlarging his domain.”
“He’s supposed to be some kind of efficiency expert, isn’t he?”
“Management specialist, I think. He’s like a consultant. You know, a guy who doesn’t know anything more than you do, but he comes from more than fifty klicks away and carries a briefcase.”
She didn’t laugh. “Why’d the Ulcer hire him?”
“Somebody else to blame when we hit a problem,” Grant snapped. Then he relented a bit. “The Ulcer’s hell-bent on getting the first imagery from New Earth. He wants to beat the IAA and get a Nobel Prize.”
“You think?”
“What else?”
“Well, I hope the guy knows what he’s doing.”
“He talked the Ulcer into considering nanotechnology,” Grant admitted. “McClintock talked to him for five minutes and now we’re working with Cardenas and the nanotech lab.”
He heard Josie chuckle. “The Ulcer’s willing to take any shortcuts he can find, isn’t he?”
“Could be,” Grant agreed. “Could damned well be.”
The excursion controller’s voice sounded in his helmet speakers. “Grant, we have an urgent call for you. I’m patching it through. On freak two.”
Grant raised his left arm and tapped the keyboard on his wrist for frequency number two. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Josie doing the same. She wants to hear what’s going on, he realized.
McClintock’s voice snapped, “Grant, what are you doing out there?”
Cripes! Grant thought. Has he been listening to our chatter?
“We’re checking out the damaged mirror. Have to build a shield over it until we can get it back inside the lab.” He suppressed an impulse to add, “Sir.”
“Well, I need you to get over to Selene and confer with Dr. Cardenas. A resupply lobber’s on its way here and I want you on it when it heads back to Selene.”
“Okay. As soon as we’re finished here—”
“Now, Simpson. Now. That lobber will be landing in half an hour and it’s not going to wait for you.”
“But—”
“Get somebody else to finish your little excursion. You get yourself ready for a shot back to Selene.”
“Right,” said Grant.