CAFETERIA
Once they were outside Uhlrich’s office, in the drab rock-walled corridor, Trudy asked McClintock, “Do you really think Mrs. Halleck is after nanotechnology?”
McClintock smiled down at her. “It was your suggestion, remember?”
“I know, but do you think that’s why she’s coming here?”
McClintock started down the corridor and Trudy followed beside him, hurrying slightly to keep pace with his longer strides.
“It’s a reasonable assumption,” he said. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”
They walked along in silence for a few moments. McClintock thought the corridor was depressingly gloomy. With the pipes and conduits running along the ceiling it reminded him of the basement in some dreary public building. This entire Farside facility looks more like a prison than a research center, he thought. I may be the warden’s special overseer, but I’m still in jail here just like the rest of them.
He noticed that Trudy was looking up at him.
“Where are you heading?” he asked her.
“Oh!” She looked startled. “I … I was just following you. I thought … I guess I wasn’t really thinking.” She smiled sheepishly.
With a knowing nod, McClintock said, “Let’s take a bite of lunch.”
“It’s kind of early for lunch,” she said.
“I know. I like it better when the cafeteria isn’t crowded, don’t you?”
“Uh, sure.”
Farside’s cafeteria was nothing more than another man-made cave, carved into the lunar rock with plasma torches. It was a dismally small, square chamber. McClintock felt as if its low ceiling were squeezing down on him. Two of the cafeteria’s walls were lined with food- and drink-dispensing machines; the plastic-tiled floor was covered by three rows of long tables and hard, uncomfortable benches. No one can accuse Uhlrich of wasting money on luxuries, McClintock thought.
The place was empty when they entered it. Good, thought McClintock. Nothing worse than having to eat cheek-by-jowl with a gang of these techie bores.
Trudy followed him like a puppy as he selected a sandwich that purported to be soyburger with lettuce grown in Selene’s hydroponics farm. The drink selection was limited to lunar water, fruit juices, and ersatz coffee or tea that McClintock suspected would be miserably weak.
The limited fare didn’t seem to bother Trudy at all. She picked a limp salad, a bowl of fresh berries, and a glass of tea.
As they sat side by side at one of the long empty tables, McClintock muttered, “I’ll have to take you to a real restaurant one of these days.”
She fairly glowed. “Like the Earthview? Over at Selene?”
“Have you been there?”
“No, but I heard about it. Saw it in the orientation vid.”
He nodded, then took a bite of his flavorless burger.
“You’re not happy here?” Trudy asked, picking at her salad.
Be careful! McClintock warned himself. Choose your words prudently.
He gave her a forlorn look. “I feel as if I’m in some frontier outpost, far from civilization.”
“Well, you are!” she said.
With a faint smile he admitted, “I guess I am.”
“Why’d you come here if you don’t like the place?” Trudy asked.
“Oh … family responsibilities.”
“Really?”
“You see, in my family one is expected to do some form of public service before one can inherit his share of the family fortune.”
Her eyes went wide. “Fortune?”
“The McClintock clan is quite wealthy,” he explained. “But very stern. My great-grandfather was apparently afraid that inheriting great wealth would turn his progeny into wastrels. So he made it a provision of his will that every one of us has to work at least two years in public service before we can inherit.”
Trudy chewed thoughtfully on her greens for a few heartbeats. Then, “There’s a lot of public service to be done, isn’t there? I mean, with the greenhouse floods and the droughts and all those monster storms and everything. Lots of people need help.”
McClintock got a mental picture of the massive waves of miserable migrants, poor, starving, trekking across the land seeking a job, a living, some hope for the future, a spark of opportunity for their crying, squalling, sick and frail children. He shuddered.
“I decided to do my public service here, on the Moon,” he said, stretching the truth considerably. “My goal is to help humankind to extend its habitat beyond the Earth. Quite lofty, don’t you think?”
Trudy nodded, wordless.
He failed to mention what his real goal was. Instead, he asked her, “And what brings you to Farside?”
“Sirius C, of course,” she said.
“Of course.”
Almost quivering with eagerness, Trudy enthused, “I mean, it’s the biggest thing to hit astronomy since … since, well, glory, since Hubble discovered the red shift.”
McClintock suppressed an impulse to ask what she meant by that.
“Y’see,” she went on, “the planet shouldn’t be there at all. The Pup blew up eons ago and—”
“The Pup?”
She bobbed her head up and down. “Sirius has been called the Dog Star since ancient times. It’s the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major, the Big Dog.”
“I see,” McClintock said.
“Well, when its dwarf companion was discovered, back in the nineteenth century, naturally people started calling it the Pup.”
“And it blew up?”
“Nova,” she replied. “Probably blew off its outer shell more than once.”
“I see,” he repeated.
“Which makes it hard to believe there’s an Earthlike planet in the Sirius system. It would’ve been fried by those nova burps. Boiled down to a cinder. An Earth-sized planet is hard enough to believe, but it can’t possibly be Earthlike.”
“Yet there it is,” McClintock murmured. “And Uhlrich is hell-bent to get imagery of it.”
“You know,” Trudy went on, “the first extrasolar planets ever discovered were orbiting around a pulsar. That’s a star that underwent a supernova explosion. Nothing left of the original star except a tiny core, smaller than Earth. And yet there were a couple of planets around it.”
“The planets should have been destroyed in the explosion?”
Nodding again, Trudy said, “But they weren’t. Or maybe they formed out of the debris cloud after the supernova popped.” She jabbed her fork into the salad again. “We’ve got a lot to learn.”
“Yes, I suppose we do.” But McClintock’s mind wasn’t on astronomy. He was wondering if this little waif of a woman might go to bed with him. Without screaming for a lawyer afterward.