CRATER MENDELEEV
The weeks zipped past before Grant realized it. Palmquist returned to Selene, with Uhlrich falling all over himself to please the Swede and promising to send him the first images of New Earth that the Farside Observatory obtained.
Grant’s days were long and busy, juggling the road-building work with planning the construction jobs that were needed at the three crater sites and coordinating Cardenas’s work on the sample mirror that her nanomachines were making at Selene.
One of the tasks facing his team of engineers and technicians was to transport the materials for a protective roof to the Crater Mendeleev, 750 kilometers from the Farside facility. The load was too much for one of the short-range rocket hoppers that Farside kept on hand, and not big enough to warrant calling for a lobber mission from Selene. So Grant decided to send a tractor out to Mendeleev. And he decided to make the run himself.
He was driving the tractor up the slumped, gentle slope of the mountains ringing Mendeleev crater, with one of his team, Sherrod Phillips, sitting beside him. They had driven continuously for more than twenty-six hours, taking turns sleeping in their space suits inside the tractor’s cramped cab.
The road they had built here at Mendeleev had only a few switchbacks in it because the area Grant had picked to cross the ringwall was relatively low with an easy grade. We could have gotten that damned mirror up this mountain with no sweat, Grant told himself as he steered the tractor slowly along the smoothed road. If it hadn’t slid off the road back at Farside we could’ve gotten it up here and into Mendeleev okay.
Yeah, a mocking voice in his head sneered. And if you’d put wings on the mirror you could’ve flown it here, wiseass.
The two men were in their space suits even though the tractor’s cab was pressurized. It was enclosed with a thin metal roof and glassteel sides that gave them a layer of protection against the radiation out there in the lunar vacuum. Safety regulations insisted that they wear the protective suits, even though they could have ridden inside the cab in their shirtsleeves—in theory.
It was still night, and would be for another week. The universe hung up in the dark sky, uncountable myriads of stars, hard cold points of light, unblinking. No Earth up there, no warmth or familiar comfort. The horizon was brutally near, a slash where the hard familiar world of lunar rock and dust ended like the edge of a cliff plunging into the infinite uncaring expanse of stars.
Grant topped the ringwall mountain and started down the interior slope. In the distance, almost at the horizon, he could see the square, flat concrete foundation that had been laid out for the telescope mirror. It was his imagination, he knew, but the low slabs already looked old, worn, covered with lunar dust.
Sherry Phillips was sitting in the tractor’s right-hand seat, encased in a bulky space suit. Grant couldn’t see his face through the tinted glassteel of his bubble helmet, but he heard the engineer say:
“So whattaya think of this new kid?”
“New kid?” Grant asked.
“Yeah. The Ulcer’s new assistant. Trudy.”
“She’s an astronomer.”
“She’s a good-looker. Cute.”
Grant knew that Phillips was married, but his wife was back Earthside with their two children. Phillips was a sharp engineer, a reliable man in the field, but possessed of a roving eye. Farside gossip claimed that he and Josie Rivera had had a fling several months back.
“Forget it,” he told Phillips. “The Ulcer would have a stroke if you came on to her.”
In his helmet speakers, he heard Phillips chuckle. “Hell, Grant, I wouldn’t tell the Ulcer about it. Or ask his permission, for that matter.”
Grant shook his head. “Better stay clear of her. Don’t cause problems.”
“Yeah. Maybe you’re right.” But Phillips didn’t sound convinced.
Grant drove the tractor across the crater’s wide floor to the telescope site, then he and Phillips stepped out onto the dusty, rock-strewn ground. The tractor was carrying sheets of honeycomb metal that they would erect to form a roof over the foundation. It also carried a pair of slim, cylindrical-shaped robots that were supposed to do the actual construction work.
“I’ll activate Mike and Ike,” said Phillips, walking around to the rear of the tractor. He was the robotics expert on Grant’s little team of engineers and technicians. Like almost all humans, he anthropomorphized the machines he worked with.
Mike and Ike, Grant thought. What’ll he call the other pair, the ones we’re going to bring to Korolev? Punch and Judy?
Using a handheld remote controller, Phillips stirred the robots to life and began checking them out while Grant set up the ramp they would roll down once they were ready to go to work.
“Got a bad fuse on Ike,” Phillips muttered.
Grant looked up at the tractor bed, where Phillips stood between the two shoulder-tall robots.
“Dammit, those machines were checked out at Farside. How can they have a bad fuse?”
He sensed Phillips trying to shrug inside his bulky space suit. “It happens, Grant. Murphy’s Law.”
“Who did the checkout?” Grant demanded.
“Dunno. You want to call back and get the file?”
“Might as well.”
While Phillips replaced the faulty fuse from the supply of spares they had carried with them, Grant called up the documentation on the robots’ checkout. The checkout had been done by Nate Oberman, filling in for the injured Harvey Henderson. Grant seethed. Who the hell let him do the checkout? That dumbass can’t even do a simple job without screwing it up. He just doesn’t care. He could get somebody killed and he just doesn’t give a damn about it. He can’t leave Farside soon enough.
Phillips got both robots working and they rolled on their sturdy little trunions down the ramp, kicking up lazy clouds of dust as they moved to the tractor’s side and began unloading the honeycomb sheets with their long, spindly, many-jointed arms.
Grant walked over to the concrete slabs of the foundation and began examining them with a handheld radar probe. Looks okay, he thought as he peered at the tiny screen’s display. No major cracks, everything within tolerances.
“I’m putting them on their own,” Phillips reported.
“Wait a minute,” said Grant. “Let me set up the linkage.”
Using the keypad on the left wrist of his suit, Grant contacted Josie, back at Farside’s teleoperations center.
“We’ve activated the robots,” he reported. “Putting them on autonomous mode now.”
There was a barely noticeable half-second’s delay while his message was relayed from one of the communications satellites in low orbit.
“Gotcha,” said Josie. “Signal’s coming in loud and clear.”
Grant nodded inside his bubble helmet. “Okay, Jo. They’re your responsibility now. Anything exceeds nominal limits—”
“I’ll shut them down and initiate the failure analysis program,” Josie said. “Don’t worry about it, boss. I’ve got ’em on my screen.”
“Good.”
The two men stepped away from the tractor and watched the robots methodically unload the honeycomb sheets and supporting aluminum beams. Then they began to assemble them into a gracefully curving roof that covered the foundation.
“Ol’ man river…” Phillips began to sing, in a wavering baritone. Despite himself, Grant laughed at the guy’s sense of humor. Slave labor.
But while they watched the robots patiently, efficiently, erect the roof, Grant’s thoughts wandered to the radiation invisibly sleeting down from all those distant stars. How much damage is it doing to us? he wondered. Phillips hadn’t been outside in two weeks, he knew. Safety regulations. You were only allowed so much time out on the surface per month. Grant regularly bent those rules, while Dr. Kapstein sold him the medications he needed to keep going.
Well, he said to himself, we’ll see if Cardenas’s little bugs do their job. Just like Mike and Ike: do your work and don’t complain.
What if the nanos don’t work? Grant asked himself.
The answer came to him immediately. If they don’t work I’m a dead man.