April 5: A Depth of Understanding (41 page)

"Have you ever really known a
stupid
person?" Barak asked. "You said you'd never been down to Earth. When we were down there on vacation we spent parts of two days on Tonga. We had breakfast at a place where the young woman who served us couldn't get our order right, even writing it down on a pad. And she was trying to multi-task filling salt and pepper shakers while running to the kitchen window for orders as they came up. She just got all befuddled and couldn't remember which table a plate was for without looking at the ticket again and then she sat Gunny's stuff in front of me. She couldn't run plates and take orders and go back and fill shakers without losing all sense of time and forgetting to make a circuit and fill everybody's coffee up. It was kind of sad to see. Her job was just slightly beyond her abilities."

"How many tables or people to serve?"

"Oh, five or six tables, about twenty people."

"That doesn't seem like much to keep track of and if you need to mark the table on the order ticket, why not the seat too? I'd hate to see her at a piloting board."

"See? You not only could do it, but if you had trouble you would immediately start devising a way to deal with it. I'm guessing the average IQ on Home is probably around 135 or 145, even the sweepers and cooks and maintenance people. You are spoiled by people around you who can do their jobs well and when a problem comes up they have the smarts to deal with that too. Down below they commonly don't and you see it all the time. You would not believe some of the warning labels on things. I mean, my hotel room had an electric hair dryer hard wired into the wall. It had a big placard telling you not to take it in the shower or cover it with towels while it was running."

Deloris looked askance at him, like he might be pulling her leg. "IQ is a very rough measure," she assured him.

"Yes it is. And I would argue it can be off twenty points either way because of cultural bias or test anxiety, but the fact is they have to make things work down there with a lot of people like that. We don't, at least right now."

"Why
now
?" she demanded, a little worried. "Why would that change?"

"How much of intelligence is hereditary?" he asked. "My understanding is sometimes very bright couples have just average children and sometimes parents that appear quite average have absolute geniuses. So I expect we will have people born off Earth who would not normally pass the various selection processes to come up."

"We'll have to find things for them to do," she said, thoughtfully.

"Yes...this next is interesting," Barak said scrolling down. "After Jeff tells me all the horror stories about dealing with China and people falsely accusing him of bombarding them, he speaks of ideas for expanding out in the solar system. Just like
we
are doing," he said pointedly.

"He says since I am getting experience with long voyages he'd like my take on what is difficult and what would ease the problems from the view of a crewman and...he asks I keep a record of who I serve with who seem suitable for longer voyages."

"Let me see that, so I know you are not yanking my chain," Deloris demanded. Barak kept a tight grip on his pad when she tried to turn it around.

"Distrustful, paranoid, aggressive people don't make the list," Barak chided her.

"I'd rather crew with a paranoid than a sucker," Deloris countered.

"I'm so hurt. Here read it," he said, turning the pad around. "You should trust me by now."

"I trust you, as much as I trust anybody. I turn my back on you or leave the cabin and still finish my food that I left with you. I sleep locked in the same room with you. What do you
want
?" she said exasperated.

"You must have had a horrible childhood," Barak observed, then was astonished when she burst into tears and turned to face the bulkhead. It took her a long time to stop crying and she didn't seem to want to turn back to him.

"I'm going to tell you a story," Barak said, "I told you I'd relate this. It's about your puppy remark. Then I want you to forget I said anything that hurtful to you. I don't want to make you relive anything that upsetting." He told the whole story of setting April up with the threat of a puppy and then gifting her with breakfast and his teasing
woof!,
as well as Gunny's hilariously accurate remark the next morning. He got a quiet laugh at least.

"Can you stand to look at me now?" He asked after.

"Not yet, but if you'd turn the lights out?"

"Lights off," he commanded, which she could have done as easily, but it was his cabin. After it was dark she turned back to him and after a ragged deep sigh, settled her head on his shoulder.

He never asked her about her childhood again.

* * *

"This is the prototype. It's 88% native materials, runs on sunlight and is as close to being a general purpose mining robot as we could build, so when we have the crater filled back in we'll have them for other things." Mo stopped and waited to see what Heather's reaction would be. It was a small robot, built low to the ground, only about waist high, narrow and delicate looking.

"Are those joints going to stand up to moon dust? The damn stuff is insidious."

"So the old hands here told me. Yes, the joints are nano-textured on the bearing surfaces and a slight charge kept on them. The really destructive small particles are repelled from the joint and collect on a couple oppositely charged pads. Every so many minutes a solenoid gives the pad a tap from inside. It's designed to flex such that the collected dust flies off away from the joint."

"How many taps before it cracks?" Heather asked skeptically.

"According to the engineering literature several hundred thousand. But if you laser anneal it occasionally they have no idea how long it will last."

"It seems well thought out," Heather admitted. "Can you zoom the camera in and let me see that tread design?"

Mo did so, just happy Heather didn't ask him to wait until she got back to the moon to finalize any design details.

"That's interesting. It doesn't look like any of the sole patterns for space suit boots."

"It has much less loading and greater area. The thing it is really optimized to do, is not raise dust. Not only for the other robots, although their solar collectors and sensors don't need dusted, but so people in suits don't have to avoid coming close."

"I wish I could run it all past Jeff, but he is distracted with other things."

"We know. We're following the Earth news about China, which doesn't tell us much about why it is happening or who is doing it, but we can at least be aware
something
is going on. We all figured the first reports blaming him were stupid lies. The hardware was all wrong and not his style at all. Now most of them are making excuses and trying to wipe egg off their faces."

"Yeah, it's basically a civil war. We don't know the names of the actors either. As Jeff said, he doesn't care who ends up running China, as long as they understand to leave us alone."

"If that mess settles down and he has time to look at the design later, it's not like we can't change things. There can be second and third generation machines, because we will be making a
lot
of them and they are so simple we can likely upgrade older ones as we need to service them. Things will wear out, like the tracks and loading scoops. We aren't going to put a human hand to any of these, what we'll be doing is building an assembly factory to make the smaller automated factories to actually build the bots. Each automated factory will be about the size of two rovers. And a lot of the first 'bots are going to be bringing material to make more 'bots instead of dumping it all in the crater. At first we'll be extracting about a quarter of the mass to make more 'bots and then dumping the waste in the crater."

"Go ahead and start making a prototype assembly device. I'm anxious to get started. I'd like to see the crater filled and Jeff's beanstalk up, in my lifetime."

"I'll have the prime factory built and tuned in six months max, I'm pretty sure. It'll make a smaller 'bot factory every three days and each of those should be able to make six 'bots a day. You'll be surprised how fast it goes then."

"Could you make a prime factory that reproduces
itself
?" Heather wondered.

"I'm sorry, that's much harder to do than the tech we have now allows. We might make a general purpose factory, of modular parts, to make just about anything, robots, rovers, ground cars, small jump bugs for local traffic, machine tools and shelter components, but I'd say that would be something that would take five to ten years and only be suitable for a raw lunar environment with lots of virgin regolith available. It would have to be completely redesigned if you wanted one for someplace out-system later. Because it would be different soil, different solar flux and temperatures."

"And yet it seems to me it would be worth doing," Heather insisted. "We have a
lot
of regolith to run through. Let's talk to Jeff about it later. If it takes that long to do you'd have good job security. And I bet we'd learn a great deal we could apply to similar systems, as you said, in other environments."

"Don't forget, I'm a
mining
engineer. I'm drawing on a lot of practical experience the Armstrong people have, but working outside my specialty. For something this ambitious you need a mechanical engineer familiar with large scale automation and somebody who knows nano materials and advanced sintering tech."

"We can hire skills, but you'll still be administrator."

"Why me?" Mo asked.

"Your biggest qualification is that we trust you."

* * *

Lindsey finished the drawing and decided it wasn't something she'd offer for sale. It seemed too personal and emotional to sell, even though it happened in public. It seemed invasive of Dakota somehow. She'd viewed it and drew it, from the side, so both faces were visible in profile. Dakota was leaning back slightly, taken aback literally, not with an open mouth in shock, but lips parted and headed that way. Mr. Muños had a strong face in profile and she showed him holding a single digit aloft to restrain Dakota from leaving. His finger was not straight up, but tilted pointing toward Dakota, almost like an accusing gesture. His stern expression was powerful and unusual to anyone who knew the man. He was well known for being mild in manner most of the time. Lindsey would have never imagined him challenging someone to a duel. It seemed a significant event to her, but she didn't want to make a few dollars on the back of Dakota's discomfort. This would go in her portfolio and not be issued unless she did an illustrated historic narrative of Home, an idea she was still forming.

* * *

"So you
were
running from something," Helen said at work.

"Yes, everybody knows my business now," John said with a grimace. "If anybody else hates me enough to challenge me I'm exposed to them too. I doubt I'm worth the expense to the North Americans to assassinate. I'm sort of a remnant from the previous administration, so I shouldn't be too great an embarrassment anyway, but somebody may still resent me as a personal matter."

Helen laughed freely, which shocked John. It didn't seem humorous to him at all. His face must have said all that to her, because she seemed a little embarrassed and explained.

"You are too close to the problem to see how unlikely that is. You should have seen Ms. Benton's face when you told Muños your choice of weapons. The duel has this noble image of stern men in fancy period dress, standing their ground and one falling with a neat little hole drilled in him. Most folks had a much different, messier image in their head of what your duel would be like than the historic ideal. I'm sure most people figure you'll keep your weapons in case somebody else challenges you and you have
long
arms and mass what?"

"Uh, usually around ninety-six kilo, sometimes a little more, but I always lose it when it starts to creep up. I just like my mashed potatoes and hot buttered rolls way too much."

"Yeah, guy your size, very few sane people are going to want to give you a chance to beat on them with a heavy length of pipe. I think you are pretty safe."

"I hope so. It wasn't anything I wanted to do and I hope whatever demons are chasing you are under control too."

"Maybe I'll tell you that story some time. For now the people I worried about are less and less a concern. They have bigger game to chase," she said and smiled.

* * *

Jason wept openly. Jeff and Chen and Louis let him get it out of his system. Chen particularly felt bad for him, because it was his homeland too.

The display was horrific. There was war everywhere, much worse than any invader striking at the borders. It cut clear through the heartland where peasants had never known a disturbance for generations while their Emperors built and merged distant walls against the barbarians. Suddenly it was all around them in every town and village.

Some news leaked out, despite efforts to keep internal matters secret. There were too many cameras and sat phones to ever isolate a country again. The rest of the world watched in horror as civil servants and police were lined up by pits and shot mercilessly. When their pistols got too hot to hold, or they ran low on ammunition, the troops went back to bayonets and bludgeons. Nobody who depended on the state for their living was spared. The rebels had learned the lesson of the previous insurrection well. The symbols of the state were torn down, government offices and police stations burned and looted. At least nobody tried to blame any of this on Jeff or Home.

"What are they going to put in place once they have control?" Jeff asked.

"I don't know. The old system was so bad I was willing to try anything. I wasn't at a level where they really discussed the details of such plans with me. Just little things my commander would drop in conversation. I know they felt confrontation with Home was inevitable with the old government and my superior at least, said that would be a disaster. A lot of people are dying down there, but from our viewpoint at least they are the right ones. If we'd have suffered your bombardment the people who provoked it would have been largely protected, safe in tunnels and bunkers and the common people would have borne the brunt of it. I'm sure they will put a military government in control at first, at least nationally and start with civilian control at the village level. But I bet the local officials will limit corruption for a long time, because the memory of this will be strong for the next couple generations."