Farside (4 page)

The kid chuckled and nodded. “Not as many parties, though. The prof doesn’t like fooling around.”

“Nose to the grindstone, huh?”

“And then some,” he said fervently.

“Okay, where to now?” Trudy asked.

“The only really interesting thing to show you is the mirror lab. The rest is just offices and workrooms and living spaces.”

“So let’s see the mirror lab.”

As they went to the door, Trudy pointed to the name tag on the guide’s coveralls. “Winston, huh? What’s your first name?”

He reddened slightly. “Winston. I’m Winston squared.” Then he added, “My father’s sense of humor.”

“Do people call you Winnie?”

Shaking his head, Winston replied, “Not unless they want to fight.”

She smiled at him. “Okay, Winston. My name’s Trudy, and it isn’t short for Gertrude. Just plain Trudy.”

“Okay. Trudy it is.”

Winston told Trudy that he was an electronics engineer. His nominal job was wiring the hundreds of antennas of the Cyclops facility as they were erected.

“When I’m not running errands for Professor Uhlrich,” he said. Then he quickly amended, “Not that I mind showing you around; this is fun.”

The mirror lab was the largest space in the underground complex, a natural cave in the ringwall mountain that had been smoothed and filled with the equipment for making hundred-meter-wide telescope mirrors. No frills, Trudy saw. This was a working area. A half-dozen technicians hunched over workstations on a balcony that overlooked a huge, slowly spinning turntable.

“That’s the oven where the glass chunks are melted down,” Winston explained. “Then the molten glass is spun slowly so it flows over the superstructure and takes on the exact curvature of the mirror. Once that’s done, the mirror’s allowed to cool, then the final polishing is done.”

Trudy stared down from the balcony’s railing at the slowly revolving turntable. It looked well used, strictly functional, utterly utilitarian.

“A hundred meters in diameter,” she breathed. “Wow.”

“You couldn’t build a mirror that big on Earth,” Winston said. “It’d crack under its own weight.”

“Where’s the glass come from?”

“From Selene. They scoop silicon from the ground. The regolith has plenty of silicon in it. And oxygen and all the other elements you need to make high-quality optical glass.”

“Strictly a local operation,” Trudy murmured, still staring down at the turntable as it moved at its stately, unhurried pace.

“Oh, we have to bring in boron and some of the other exotic elements up from Earth,” Winston said. “But those’re minor ingredients. The bulk of the material comes from the regolith.”

One of the technicians got up from her workstation and walked past Trudy and Winston, heading for the dispensing machines at the far end of the balcony.

“Hi, Win,” she said as she passed.

He nodded to her. “Lunch break?”

“Kinda.”

“You heard they’re bringing the Mendeleev mirror back?” Winston asked her.

She stopped and turned toward him. “That’s gonna screw up our schedule, for sure. Gotta start all over again, from scratch.”

Winston shrugged and the technician headed for the dispensing machines.

Trudy felt her brow knitting as she asked, “When you set up the mirror in its mount, what about the temperature swings between daylight and dark? How’s that affect the glass?”

“Doesn’t,” said Winston. “The mirror’s kept inside an insulated tube. Never gets direct sunlight. It’s always at a low temperature, so it won’t expand or contract very much.”

She nodded. “Figures.”

There really wasn’t much to see, but the mirror lab fascinated Trudy. The biggest telescope mirrors ever made were being manufactured here. The place was quietly spectacular, she thought. The thousand-meter telescopes that the IAA wanted to place in space were composed of smaller segments: None of their sections were as big as the mirrors being built here at Farside.

After nearly an hour of staring at the turntable and talking to the monitoring technicians, Winston led Trudy back out to the central corridor. She left with reluctance, but Winston seemed to have something more to show her.

“Where are we going now?” she asked.

He pointed down the corridor to a closed steel hatch. Above it was a lighted red sign:
AIRLOCK
.

“Outside,” said Winston.

“Outside?” A shiver of alarm flared through Trudy.

“If you’re up to it.”

OUTSIDE

Winston slid back the corridor door and led Trudy into a locker room, where empty space suits were hanging in a row, like a museum display of medieval armor. A hard plastic bench ran along the front of the lockers. Beyond its end, Trudy could see the heavy steel inner hatch of the airlock.

This is an initiation ritual, Trudy told herself as she slowly wormed her arms through the ribbed sleeves of the thermal undergarment for the space suit that Winston had picked out for her. Like hazing at a sorority or buying a round of beers first day on a new job, she thought. Here they take you out on the bare, airless surface of the Moon to see if you’ve got the guts to do it. That’s how you become one of them.

“You need a small size,” Winston said, leading her past several lockers, each containing an empty suit.

You can do this, Trudy told herself, trying to keep her fear from showing. You went outside at Selene and it was okay. Yeah, a sneering voice in her head countered. Outside. In a tour bus. A nice, comfortable, safe bus with twenty-some tourists. And even then you didn’t have the nerve to get out of the bus and walk on the surface, you just looked through the glass ceiling and focused on the Earth shining up there nice and bright.

It was dangerous outside, she knew. You could go through four-hundred-degree temperature swings just by stepping from sunlight into shadow. Hard radiation poured out of the sky. And meteors peppered the surface. I could get shot out there!

“Here,” said Winston, stopping at one of the lockers, “this one ought to fit you okay.”

Reluctant or not, she wriggled into the pants of the space suit and allowed Winston to help her slide the hard-shell torso over her head. Several other Farside employees had mysteriously shown up, grins on their faces, witnesses to the newbie’s initiation.

As Winston settled the life-support pack on her back and plugged in its connections to the suit, he asked mildly, “Trudy, are you sure you want to do this?”

“Sure,” she snapped, with a certainty that she didn’t feel at all. “Why not?”

“Okay.”

He pulled down a suit with his own name stenciled on its chest while a couple of the technicians who were standing nearby stepped up to check out Trudy’s space suit. Boots and gloves sealed. Backpack connected. One of them started to take the clear glassteel helmet off the shelf atop the locker, but Trudy pulled it out of his hands and lowered it over her own head. I can do that much for myself, she thought.

One of the bystanders, a sturdily built older woman, watched intently as Trudy turned the helmet on its neck ring until it clicked into place.

“Locked and loaded,” she murmured with an approving nod.

The woman seemed to be in charge. She carefully checked the suit’s radio reception, the servomotors that helped to bend the joints, the air circulation fans and heater. Trudy heard the faint gurgle of water circulating through the undergarment.

“Good to go,” the female technician said.

Winston was ready, too. He clumped in his suit’s heavy boots to the airlock hatch. Trudy followed a step behind him.

The big heavy hatch swung open and they stepped over its coaming into the airlock itself: a metal-walled chamber scarcely big enough for the two of them in their cumbersome suits. To Trudy it felt comfortably snug, safe, like a protective womb.

“Closing the inner hatch,” Winston said. Trudy heard his voice in her helmet speakers.

Once the hatch shut, the older woman’s voice said, “Pumping down.”

A pump started chugging away, but the sound quickly faded as the air was sucked out of the chamber. Trudy felt the vibration of the pump through the soles of her boots. We’re in vacuum now, she knew, her breath quickening. They’re pumping all the air out.

The vibration stopped and the display pad beside the outer hatch turned from amber to red.

“Ready for excursion,” Winston said.

Trudy nodded inside her helmet as she sucked in a deep breath. The air felt cold, dry.

“You’re clear for excursion,” said the woman’s voice.

“Opening outer hatch,” Winston said, as he reached a gloved hand to the display pad.

“Copy opening outer hatch.”

The hatch swung slowly, noiselessly open. Trudy saw an expanse of open, uneven bare ground. Not a bush or a blade of grass. Nothing can live out there, she told herself. Not unless you’re in a suit.

Winston stepped out onto the dusty ground and extended his arm, inviting Trudy to follow him.

Sealed inside the helmet, it was hard for Trudy to see her own booted feet. She tried to bend at the waist, but the suit’s joints were stiff, even with the servomotors assisting them. Carefully, she stepped over the hatch’s coaming and out onto the lunar regolith.

“You’re doing fine,” Winston encouraged.

I’m walking on the Moon! Trudy felt excited and scared all at the same time, like the first time she had done a parachute jump, back in California.

She kept her eyes on the ground. It was uneven, pockmarked with little craterlets and strewn with rocks from the size of pebbles to boulders as big as an automobile. Looking up warily, she saw that the horizon seemed strangely close, a hard slash across the ground where the world ended and the infinity of space began. No haze in the distance, she realized. No air.

This isn’t so bad, she told herself. Then she saw a structure a couple of dozen meters away. It looked like a shed made of thin honeycomb metal.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“The garage. We park the tractors in there. They’re both out now, towing the mirror across the mountains.”

Looking up cautiously, Trudy asked, “But where are the mountains? I thought we were surrounded by ringwall mountains.”

Winston’s radio voice answered, “They’re over the horizon in the direction you’re facing. You can’t see them from here—unless you turn around.”

She did, a slow full one-eighty turn, and saw the ringwall mountains rising over the airlock hatch. They looked tired, worn, their slopes gentle. Bunny slopes, she thought, if they had any snow on them. There seemed to be a road of sorts carved into the bare rock: switchbacking from the summit to the floor on which they stood.

“Those mountains have been eroded by several billion years of micrometeorite infall,” Winston was saying. “Sandpapered by those little dust motes flying in from space.”

“Yeah,” Trudy replied. No water to erode them. No rain or wind. But if a bullet-sized micrometeorite happened to hit me …

She tried to shake off her worries and at last worked up the courage to look up at the stars. There were thousands of them! Millions! Billions! Even through the heavy tinting of her helmet, Trudy could see them spangling the blackness of space, stretching out to infinity, staring down at her with ominous unblinking solemnity. So many stars! Trudy couldn’t make out any of the constellations she was so familiar with back on Earth: the profusion of stars blotted them out.

Then it hit her. The sky was empty! No Earth appeared up there, bright and friendly, the way it hung in the sky over Selene. Suddenly she was seven years old again, all alone, very frightened, all alone in the universe, staring at the cold empty sky, feeling as if she were falling
upward
into that unfeeling, remorseless infinite wilderness.

She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to fight down the panic that was surging through her.

RECOVERY

“You okay?” Winston’s voice made Trudy’s eyes snap open. He sounded concerned, worried.

“Me?” she squeaked. “Yeah. I’m okay. I’m fine.”

“You sounded like you were puffing, gasping.”

“I’m okay,” she insisted, concentrating on looking at him, not the sky.

She couldn’t see his face through the tinting of his helmet, but she heard him say, “Some people get a jolt when they first come out here. Guys from Selene, they’re used to seeing Earth overhead. It bothers them here.”

“That’s what the farside is all about, isn’t it?” Trudy replied, desperately trying to keep her voice from shaking. “I mean, this side of the Moon is always pointed away from Earth. You never see Earth from here.”

“Right,” said Winston.

“Is that a road?” she asked, pointing with one gloved hand.

“Yeah. Simpson’s Highway, we call it. That’s where they took the mirror off to Mendeleev.”

“And now they’re bringing it back.”

Winston didn’t reply, but Trudy got the sense that he was nodding his head.

“Not much to see, is there?” she said, keeping her eyes on her companion. Not the stars. Not the stars.

“Most of the base is underground. Those are the solar farms, out there.” He pointed. “That’s how we generate our electricity.”

Trudy followed his pointing arm and saw an area of dark solar cells spread across the floor of the plain, silently drinking in sunlight.

“Daylight for fourteen days straight, just about,” said Winston.

“And fourteen straight days of night,” Trudy added.

“Yeah. We generate twice the power the base needs and store the excess in superconducting coils for the night. We’ve also got a nuclear generator buried out there, as a backup.”

“Just like Selene.”

“Uh-huh.” Winston hesitated a moment, then said, “Well, that’s about it. You want to go in now?”

I passed the test! Trudy exulted. I got through the initiation. As nonchalantly as she could manage, she replied, “I guess.”

As they turned toward the airlock hatch, set into the slope of the ringwall mountain, Trudy’s eye caught a glint of something halfway up the distant twisting road.

“What’s that?”

Winston said, “Oh, that’s Simpson’s gang toting the mirror back.”

An enormous rig was laboriously inching along the winding road, bearing a huge flat load that gleamed in the sunlight.