VISITS
While they waited for Cardenas to confirm that she could build Farside’s mirrors with nanomachines, for nearly a week Grant found himself buried in paperwork. There was little work going on outside, but now that he was head of the tech staff, Grant found that there was plenty of record-keeping, schedule fixing, workshift adjusting to be done. Once he had dismissed such tasks as nothing more than paper shuffling. Not that they used paper; everything was done digitally. But Grant began to understand that without the paperwork, the real work could not be done.
And then there were the personnel problems. Personality problems, really. Harvey Henderson returned from Selene but his foot was still on the mend; he couldn’t work outside. Josie Rivera was flirting with several guys at the same time, causing lots of resentment. Grant remembered the days when he had first started taking hefty doses of steroids, and his chemically induced aggression had led him into roaring arguments and even battering brawls.
And while he sweated over records and schedules, the damned cracked mirror just lay there on the dusty ground, absorbing hard radiation from the Sun and stars, and being slowly abraded by the constant hail of dust-mote-sized micrometeorites falling to the Moon’s surface.
The Sun was touching the ringwall mountains of Mare Moscoviense; Grant knew that once the two-week-long lunar night settled across the giant crater’s floor, the mirror’s glass would begin to contract in the cold and its crack would worsen. He tried to get Uhlrich to okay building a roof over the mirror to protect it from the meteoroid infall, but the professor kept delaying that decision.
When Grant complained to McClintock that nothing was being done, he told Grant to be patient.
“Your job here is safe as long as you keep your nose clean,” McClintock said daily. “Don’t antagonize Uhlrich. And follow my orders.”
Grant said nothing, but he thought that it was more important to get the job done, and done right, than to p-ssyfoot around the Ulcer or wait for this playboy to make decisions that were clearly beyond his understanding.
He spoke several times with Kristine Cardenas, back at Selene, checking on the progress of her effort to build the telescope mirror with nanomachines. He had another motive for keeping in touch with her: he desperately wanted Dr. Cardenas to inject him with a set of nanomachines tailored to repair his damaged liver and protect him from radiation effects once he began working out on the surface again.
He was growing more impatient, more apprehensive, with each passing day. The dull ache in the small of his back seemed to be getting worse. Grant knew he faced an increasingly desperate conundrum: he needed the steroids he’d been taking so that he could work out on the surface, but those steroids were damaging his liver, perhaps permanently. And god knows what else, he thought.
He pressed McClintock for permission to fly back to Selene, but McClintock evaded the issue with a brittle smile and a vague, “Not yet. Soon, but not just right now.”
So Grant was pleasantly surprised one morning when McClintock woke him with a phone call.
“Grant, there’s a resupply lobber coming in later this morning. I want some of your people to help the crew offload its cargo and then you ride back to Selene with them.”
Sitting up in his wrinkled bed, Grant said eagerly, “I’ll call Kris Cardenas, tell her I’m coming.”
In the phone’s small display screen, McClintock’s face took on a pensive expression. “Yes, I suppose you might as well touch base with her while you’re in Selene, but the reason I want you there is to meet a Dr. Frederic Palmquist, who’s visiting from Earth. He’s asked for a tour of Farside.”
Frowning with puzzlement, Grant said, “There’s nothing much here to show a visitor.”
Almost smirking, McClintock replied, “You know that and I know that, but Professor Uhlrich’s in a sweat to get this fellow here and impress him. Woke me up at five this morning, all excited about Palmquist.”
“What’s so damned exciting about the man?”
“He’s from Stockholm.”
“A Swede?” Then it hit Grant. “The Nobel committee?”
McClintock nodded solemnly. “It’s nothing official. Palmquist isn’t even on the committee. But Uhlrich’s in a lather. You’d think Jesus Christ and all twelve Apostles were coming to town.”
Grant couldn’t help grinning. “Yeah, I’ll bet the Ulcer is salivating.”
“Like Pavlov’s dogs.”
“Okay,” Grant said, pulling his legs free of the tangled sheets. “What time’s the lobber due to land?”
“Between ten thirty and eleven.”
“I’ll have a crew there, suited up and ready to help.”
As soon as McClintock hung up, Grant put in a call to Dr. Cardenas.
* * *
It took more than an hour to unload the supplies that the lobber carried: mostly food, with some replacements for pieces of laboratory equipment. Grant worked with the lobber’s crew and two of his regular Farside team.
He was worming his arms out of his space suit, feeling tired and smelly, when he saw Trudy Yost step into the locker area.
Surprised, Grant asked her, “What brings you down here?”
She wrinkled her nose slightly, caught herself, and put on a smile instead. “Professor Uhlrich wants me to go to Selene to meet this Swedish visitor and bring him here.”
“That’s what I’m supposed to be doing,” Grant blurted.
“The professor thought it would be best if an astronomer met the man.”
Leaning over to unfasten his boots, Grant muttered, “Instead of a lousy engineer, huh?”
Trudy looked confused. “What do you mean?”
“McClintock told me to go pick up the Swede.”
“The professor told me,” said Trudy.
Grant thought it over for all of six seconds. “Looks like we’re both going.”
“I don’t think the professor would want both of us to go.”
Standing up in his thick-stockinged feet, Grant said, “McClintock told me to go. Nobody’s told me not to.”
“But the professor…” Trudy’s voice tailed off.
With a shake of his head, Grant said, “McClintock and the Ulcer screwed up. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.”
“I’ll phone Professor Uhlrich,” Trudy said.
“No!” Grant snapped. “We’ll both go. Why not?”
“Because the professor will pop his cork when he finds out, that’s why not.”
“Let him,” said Grant. “He can argue it out with McClintock. In the meantime, you and I can go visit Selene together.”
Trudy looked apprehensive, but slowly a mischievous grin dimpled her cheeks. At last she said, “Sounds good to me.” Then she added, “But there’ll be hell to pay when we get back.”
“We’ll be bringing the Swede with us. The Ulcer won’t dare show his temper in front of him.”
Besides, Grant thought, I’ll get my chance to see Cardenas and get injected with her nanomachines while Trudy’s making nice-nice to our Swedish visitor.