The Next Continent (38 page)

“I'd like to taste your cooking.” Tae smiled playfully.

Kashiwabara took a step closer and squinted at her, puzzled.

“All we have is pouch food and freeze-dried.”

“Yes, I know. I also know what a great chef you are. You're ex-Ichinose, right? The restaurant in Shimonoseki.”

He grunted, “You know about that, huh? If that's why you came all the way to this godforsaken place, then we'd better get on with it. I'll give you a meal you won't forget.”

Reika still looked doubtful. Tae grabbed her arm and started off after him.

EVEN AFTER THE
Falcon transport reached cruising altitude, Reika kept her palms against her reddened cheeks. “That was unbelievable. Everything started out frozen, but I've never had better sushi.”

“Ichinose is a fugu restaurant. One slip of the knife and someone could die of poisoning. Of course he's good. With skills like that he can do anything from French to Indian.”

“But why is he in Antarctica?”

“Because he's good.” Tae began tapping at her pendant wearcom. She seemed pleased. “When you live with the same people in a closed environment for a long time, it's stressful. People get on each other's nerves. That's how it was at Kunlun. The same thing happened at Biosphere 2 in the 1990s. It happens on submarines and ships at sea. The best way to deal with it is with delicious food. Kashiwabara was chosen for Dome Fuji because of his culinary skills. He's there to help people get along.”

“That makes sense,” said Reika. “But why him? Why not some other chef?”

“You saw how he stopped the others from bothering us. He's fearless.” Tae glanced at the pile of résumés. “Not many chefs would've been as bold as that. He has the patience to work exclusively with frozen and preserved foods. He creates meals no one can fault. He has the imagination to develop a culinary repertoire out of a limited range of ingredients. Don't you think those skills would be very useful for a base on the moon?”

Reika nodded. So this was what Tae had been seeking. The man had attributes one wouldn't expect to find in a chef from a top city restaurant.

“Now I understand. It's like he's already in training for Sixth Continent.”

Tae nodded and looked at her wearcom. The display showed a template for a list of names, but at the moment it was empty.

It was a staffing list for Sixth Continent. The Bridal Department required a head chef, a sous chef, three banquet servers, a minister, a beautician, and a photographer: eight staff to conduct the weddings and serve at the banquet.

Sending eight people to the moon would cost more than a billion yen, but this was the minimum feasible number of staff. In fact, it really wasn't enough. To service a wedding on Earth with eighty guests would require at least twenty kitchen staff just for the banquet. Add a host, attendants for each set of in-laws, a train bearer, a drink server, four food servers, a manager and an assistant, and perhaps six people to act as receptionists and in backup roles. That meant something like forty staff members.

Weddings at Sixth Continent would have twenty guests, including the bride and groom. Much of the food preparation would be standardized. Still, eight staff was the bare minimum. The same people would also have to serve in hotel and housekeeping roles. They would be extremely busy.

But Sixth Continent would require more than just a bridal crew. Keeping the base functioning would require specialists in multiple disciplines—building and machine maintenance, hospitality, medicine, transport, communications, climate control, electric power. These specialists would be on call 24/7, so backup would be a must. Tae was planning for seventeen nonwedding staff.

The base would have a total of twenty-five staff. Add twenty wedding guests, a pilot, and four backup staff, and the base's occupancy would be maxed out.

Sixth Continent would be a specialized environment without precedent. Problems were inevitable. Each staff member had to be a trained professional—not only as a member of a lunar base but in terms of customer service. Visitors would be paying a fortune to make the journey. Justifying the fee based on hardware and transport costs alone would not be acceptable. Tae's guests would expect to be pampered.

Even with the right staff, intensive training would be needed before the facility was launched. Pulling this all together was Tae's job.

“This just keeps getting bigger…” she whispered.

In the beginning, it had been just her and her grandfather. Since then it had grown far beyond that—Sohya, then Takumichi Gotoba, Ryuichi Yaenami, and the employees of three companies; people throughout Japan, throughout the world, had extended a hand to help. By now the number had grown too large to count.

None of these people were the kind of friends who would call her as she lay awake at night, unable to sleep. Even Sohya was different. But on some basic level, relationships with all these individuals brought Tae satisfaction. Being the driving force behind large numbers of people building a huge pyramid—this brought her pleasure. It helped ease her loneliness.

“Do your best, everyone.”

She smiled and input the first name to her list.

“
DR. TAI, WAKE
up. Dr. Tai!”

Shinji was curled up on a sofa under a thin blanket. Someone was shaking his shoulder. He opened his eyes, groped around and found his glasses. He sat up and shivered.

“It's chilly in here.”

“It's getting to where one blanket isn't enough. Look there.”

The controller threw back the curtains. Shinji squinted against the sunlight flooding the Gotenba Ground Support staff lounge.

“First snow of the year, they say.”

Mount Fuji loomed above them in the thin blue of sunrise. The volcano's summit was dusted with a crown of white that had not been there the day before.

Sixth Continent's Gotenba Ground Support complex, an expansion of the Multidozer Command Center, had started operating the previous summer. In the early years of the project, spacecraft tracking had been handled by TGT's Tsukuba Space Center, but eventually they would have to track multiple spacecraft in addition to supporting Sixth Continent itself. Tsukuba clearly would not be able to cope with all that traffic. GGS would be responsible for ground-based tracking and serve as Earth's link with the base.

Shinji rarely had a chance to return home. He was too busy shuttling between GGS and TGT headquarters in Nagoya. He swung his feet to the floor and put his arms through the sleeves of the lab coat he wore every day. He looked again at Fuji with its cap of snow.

“Did you get me up to show me this?”

“Of course not. Actually, there's good news and bad news. What do you want to hear first?”

“Give me the bad news. I always eat the stuff I don't like first.”

“Dozer 6 is down. It's not responding to commands.”

“Uh-oh. Let's get to the control room.”

“Wait, we should wake up the others too.”

“Let them sleep. The dozer isn't going anywhere.”

There were half a dozen staff sacked out in the lounge. Shinji hushed the young controller and guided him into the corridor.

The center was quiet at this hour. Once the base was manned, these halls would be humming round the clock, but for now there were few personnel. The men's steps echoed as they traversed the long corridor.

“Dozer 6…That's the unit laying cable from the far side of the crater.”

“Right, Dr. Tai. That will give us nearside power throughout the sun cycle.”

“So what's the good news?”

“We connected the cable to the farside array before we lost the signal. It happened when number 6 was on its way back through the crater.”

“Interesting.”

The three controllers on watch at their monitors looked up as Shinji walked into the room. Nothing critical was in progress, so younger technicians from TGT and Gotoba were manning the stations. These three did not yet have much experience. They seemed relieved to see Shinji.

“Sorry to roust you out so early, Dr. Tai. We thought about contacting Tsukuba, but we weren't sure if this was important enough to disturb the flight director.”

“When you're not sure, that's the time to contact the most senior person you can. But let me take a look. What's the problem?”

Shinji was a materials specialist, not an aerospace engineer, but his invention of TROPHY had made his genius widely known. One of the young controllers began explaining the problem.

“Dozer 6 didn't send an emergency signal. If its power cable had broken, it should still be responding with power from its fuel cell. One minute the signal was there, the next it was just gone.”

“What about frequency displacement?”

“Frequency displacement?” The controllers looked at each other, caught off guard.

“The transmitter is potted in a block of acrylic. You could drop a dump truck on it and it wouldn't stop working,” said one of the controllers.

“Yes, but what about temperature? If the chips are subjected to a drastic ambient temperature change, the transmission frequency could shift. It's 220 below in the shadow zone.” Shinji looked around at the blank faces staring back at him. “You didn't think of that, did you? Try a recovery based on that assumption. The signals go through a repeater at the top of the nearside crater rim. Try tuning the repeater to find the dozer.”

Somewhat doubtfully, the controllers began varying the repeater frequency. After a few minutes one of them shouted, “Got it! There's number 6's status signal!”

“Great,” said Shinji. “How's it doing?”

“Green straight across. The AI's already guiding it to the near side.”

“Then it didn't even need your help, did it?”

The controllers sighed with relief. “Sorry,” one of them said to Shinji, looking apologetic. “This was such a minor problem. But how did you figure it out so quickly? This isn't your specialty.”

“NASA ran into the same thing with Mars Pathfinder. It's not so unusual—hold on. Maybe there is a bigger problem.” Shinji scratched his head. “The dozers are designed for that kind of environment. A transmission issue must mean the insulating shield is damaged.”

“What can we do about it?”

“Not much. Dozer 6's generation doesn't have sensors to pinpoint an insulation breach. The only thing you can do is keep that dozer out of the shadow zone. The temperature outside the crater's only fifty below.”

The controllers exchanged nervous glances, as if they expected to be held responsible for the damage.

“I wouldn't get too concerned,” said Shinji philosophically. “We assumed we'd lose one or two machines during Phase One. Phase Two will start in plenty of time to get people on scene. Then we can do all the repairs we need.” Shinji smiled. “Listen, why don't we get some breakfast? It's on me.”

The controllers looked sheepish as Shinji touched the commissary's extension. “You got the farside array hooked up. Now we can operate throughout the month. Let's celebrate. Hello? Yes, can we get steak and eggs in the control room? For five. Yes, charge it to me.”

In a few minutes, the room was filled with the aroma of hot coffee and Kobe beef. Shinji distributed the plates himself—the controllers had been up all night.

“We've got at least five years ahead of us. We should celebrate every little milestone.”

We've got a long way to go
, he thought as he poured himself some coffee. There were a huge number of challenges to meet before Phase One would be complete.

More solar panels to install. GPS satellites to put into lunar orbit for more precise positioning. Further spacecraft development and testing, including translunar injection, landing, and return to Earth. Electrolysis of water from permafrost. Generation, liquefaction, and storage of hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel. Space suit development and delivery of temporary habitats. Only after these hurdles were cleared could people begin living and working on the moon—the start of Phase Two.