Chapter Eight

Things Are Already Starting to Break

Friday, 24 November 2034

Lunar Setup Mission II, Day 24

Van whistled a little of “The Minstrel Boy” as he pulled into his pressure suit. And he scratched.

The worst thing about being in the suit for the next six hours was not being able to scratch very well. The few times he had worn hazardous chemical gear he had been dexterous enough to pull one arm at a time into the body of the suit if he really needed to dig, even though it left him cramped and was even harder to get unkinked and back into position. But the stiffeners, cross-weaved fabrics, and expandable safety baffles in a pressure suit made that kind of interior mobility impossible. So, he scratched everywhere he could reach as he got ready.

In the two and a half weeks since the laydown of what Grace called the “ice farm,” the schedule had been redrawn at least two dozen times. The Consortium work schedule they’d started with was still theoretically intact, but it had devolved into a never-ending, ever-changing task list. Thank you, Mr. Murphy.

None of the other shelters they’d set up had been iced-in, so far, but problems seemed to multiply and mutate with every step in the setup plan. In one shelter, the straps came loose from an equipment stack and in the ensuing tumbles the crates broke lights, interior partitions, and even some of the ductwork; in another, a number ten can of tomatoes froze, split, and deposited a film of icy tomato juice that, thankfully, covered only a small volume.

The real problem was the lunar terrain itself: as the laydown grid got closer to the wall of Mercator Crater, it took much more time to dig trenches for the prefabs even when blasting wasn’t needed. The next step, after all the prefabs were in place, would be to expand the colony infrastructure by tunneling into the crater wall—until they figured out the ins and outs of building domes.

But that would be a job for another day. For now Van whistled, and scratched. Some places he scratched more than once.

“Keep it in your cabin, will you, Van?” Jovelyn Nguyen said from across the corridor.

“Corridor” was a generous term. At the moment it was still stacked with consumables and small equipment containers, mostly left strapped and netted so they wouldn’t fall if someone bumped against them. The stacks ballooned out of the compartments and left the passage not even a meter across—not that it would be much wider when it was eventually cleared. This prefab ran north from Grand Central, away from Mercator Crater, to the junction containing the main exit locks and the lock that connected to the garage.

Jovelyn was already suited, holding her helmet in one hand and trying to look stern. It wasn’t in her nature, though, and after a second her smile lit up her brown face.

“Sorry, Jovie, but I’ve got to scratch now or I won’t get the chance.” Even with the scratching, which he did curtail a little, it took only a few more minutes for him to seal his suit. They started checking each other over.

The hatch at the far end of the habitat opened and Henry Crafts stepped through from Grand Central. “Good, you two are still here,” he said. His voice echoed a little off the crates and cases that crammed the tunnel. He glided down the thin passageway, his slippers making gentle swishes across the floor.

“What’s up?” Van asked. “You taking this shift?”

“You wish. Change in your task list. Once you’re outside you’ll need to download the latest when you do your radio check.”

“Why not just call us over the intercom?” Jovelyn asked. “We can jack in from here.”

Henry waved off the question. “Telly’s got one of the comm panels open, jiggering with something. Meanwhile, no voice or data north of the Pimple. She should have it back up by the time you get done.”

Van chuckled. “Just because you call the dome ‘the Pimple’ doesn’t mean Grace will let you get away with calling her ‘Telly.’”

“Why not? She loves me.”

“Yeah, you say that when the intercom’s down. Maybe I should ask her when we do our radio check.”

Henry backed up a step and raised his hands in surrender. “That’s okay, no need to put her on the spot.”

“Cut it out, you two,” Jovelyn said. “What’s the new gig?”

Henry grinned. “Should be an easy enough survey. Our new celebrity here has to be fresh for his debut.”

Damn bad luck of the draw. Van made a grab for him but Henry slid another step backward out of his reach.

“Alright,” Van said, “let’s get it over with.”

Van took a few deep, deep breaths as the airlock cycled; no sense in being all uptight and jittery as soon as he stepped outside. Somebody had to brief the new colony candidates on how the setup was going. The obvious choice would’ve been Shay, but Shay had decreed that everyone should have a chance and insisted they all draw straws. Of course, Oskar and Scooter were on another foray down south so they weren’t eligible. The rest drew straws—actually, cable ties—and Van drew short. He would give the would-be colonists the word from on high, as it were. Maybe, though, he could bribe one of the others to do it for him.

No time to think about that now.

Van stepped out of the airlock into as stark a desert as must exist in the universe. The Sun was angled about forty-five degrees off the horizon, off to the right, and cast crisp shadows from the equipment and the shelters, but the dead expanse of Mare Nubium stretched to infinity where it met the inky veil of space. Where Van grew up, on the edge of the Mojave Desert near Riverside, the barren expanse nearly teemed with life: tarantulas, roadrunners, desert tortoises. Among the desert plant life, even the carcasses of dead cacti attested to life that once was: but here, nothing. Van resolved to bring a cactus or baby Joshua tree when he came back as a colonist, and when it got too big to keep in a cabin he would bring it outside, sacrifice it to the lunar desert, and leave it as a reminder of life that once was.

“Radio check, take two,” Jovelyn said.

“Loud and clear, just like inside,” Van said. “Me?”

“Loud and clear also. Control?”

“Read you both loud and clear.” Grace Teliopolous’s voice came through the same, and Van answered back with the five-by-five.

“You got new orders for us, Grace?” Jovelyn asked.

“Oh, yes. Shay worked around a couple of things on the schedule. Again.”

Van nodded inside his helmet. “It won’t be the last time.”

“No, but it’ll all work out in the end,” Grace said. “I’m feeding you your new checklists on channel two right … now.”

Van split the view on his head-up display, and opened the new checklist in the left panel. “Wait a minute. Henry said surveying, but he didn’t say what. This is supposed to be easy?”

Jovelyn spoke up, “Here I thought Shay was going to take it easy on you, so you’d be fresh for your show later. Looks like he wants you to work off some mass, since the camera adds five kilos.”

“Ha, ha. It’s ten pounds, no matter what the metric police say. And I’m sticking out my tongue at you.”

“If you do, you’d better be prepared to use it.”

“That’ll be the day,” Van said. “You and Datu may have that kind of arrangement going, but Barbara would skin me alive.”

“Enough, you two,” Grace said. “Clock’s ticking, you’re breathing, let’s keep it that way. Get to work.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Van. “And hey, if briefers always get work details like this, I want out of the next drawing.”

“Me, too,” said Jovelyn.

Make that the next two drawings, Van thought a few hours later, as sweat tickled his spine and no amount of wriggling could alleviate the itch. It was still better than sweating in zero gee, where droplets could float anywhere, but the gravity was weak enough that surface tension and capillary action usually kept sweat from moving very much at all.

Their task had been worded innocuously enough in the checklist overview: “Survey and mark the westernmost end supports for the launch rail system, the transfer crane assembly, and as much of the landing pad areas and accessways as possible in the allotted time.” Sure, it sounded easier than splitting down the next prefab units, but the former required a lot of moving around on the surface and the latter was mostly a matter of manipulating the machines that did the work.

Van would much rather be splitting and planting a habitat. Even with the site prep and the moving into position and the connecting, it was a breeze compared to hopping around outside, sighting in the coordinates and setting in the markers for the acceleration rail system that would stretch northeast across Mare Nubium. There was as yet no lunar equivalent of GPS to guide them, and he’d been a gentleman and let Jovelyn run the EDM transit, so he was the one hopping around with the prism pole. None of the team were licensed surveyors, and they knew only enough to be dangerous, but he was sure if they were surveying anything on Earth she would’ve had to move the electromagnetic distance measurement equipment at least once, if only to sight around some natural obstacles like trees. Here, where no atmosphere diffused the laser and the whole open plain was a cut line, she just stayed at the benchmark and had him range about to each new survey point.

Deep inside, he was just as happy that he didn’t have to futz with the electronic gear. But most all the other surface work was machine-assisted, and this task was about to wear him down almost frictionless. He hadn’t sweated so much since the summer before he and Barbara got married, when he agreed to help out for a week on her dad’s ranch. He hated that ranch.

“Okay, Van, got it,” Jovelyn radioed. “Need you to move fifty meters out on heading zero-three-zero.”

Easy shift, my ass.

* * *

“Ready for your close-up, Mr. Richards?” Henry asked.

“Shut up,” Van said. “Just sit there and don’t let anybody bother me.”

They were in the two-by-two-and-a-half-meter cabin that was the main Operations Center for the growing complex. That is, Van was in the cabin while Henry sat on a stool in the corridor, just outside the view of the console-mounted camera. One of the monitor screens was split into four quadrants, each of which showed a similar view: a small conference or classroom with tiny, almost indistinguishable faces. Everyone wore casual clothes, so the only way he could tell the corporate types from the colonist candidates was by the digital labels on each quadrant: “Long Beach” was the Consortium corporate office, “San Diego” was the preselection and processing center, and “Utah-1” and “Utah-2” were rooms in the underground training complex.

“Okay, I think everybody’s on,” someone said from Long Beach—the label momentarily turned green. “We have the feed from Mercator and the other video sites, and we have audio feeds from the candidates who are scheduled for the next session in the mountain. I’m Roger Ellsworth, chief of training, and we’ve arranged this briefing so our trainees can get a first-hand account of how the setup mission is proceeding. Our briefer today is Van Richards, who I understand spent six of the last eight hours out on the surface.” Ellsworth prattled on for another minute or so, reminding everyone about the protocol for questions given the time delay, then asked Van to begin.

Van had read through the briefing script Shay had written, which was displayed in big letters on another monitor near the camera even though he had no intention of following it. He glanced down at his notes for what he was really going to say—they were on real paper, propped up between the top two rows of a keyboard. He wasn’t going to toe the party line for Shay and say all was well in their lunar paradise. It would serve Shay right for not doing the briefing himself.

In a stage whisper, Henry asked, “Still going to go through with your little plan?”

“Absolutely,” Van said.

“Have fun, buddy.” Henry slid closed the partition.

Van transmitted the first slide before he even began speaking, and kept it up like a shield; he’d rather let all those people look at the plan view of the colony than at him. The slide showed a draftsman’s ideal view of Grand Central and the array of prefab habitats.

“Ladies and gentlemen, greetings from the closest dirtball to dear old mother Earth,” Van said, “where your best friend is the low-bid pressure suit with the broken oxygen gauge and cross-wired power system that you hope will hold together for another day in the sunlight. Or another night under the stars.

“Now, before I get into the prepared briefing, is Gary Needham still in the program? All your faces are too small on my monitor to pick him out. Over.” Gary Needham had commanded the first lunar setup mission. He was back in the pipeline as a trainer while his wife Beverly went through as a trainee: not only would he be among the first colonists, but eventually he would be the colony administrator. Van’s acquaintance with him went back to their days in the service, but he wouldn’t waste transmission time to go into that.

Van waited while the signal traversed the distance, and then a hand went up in the third row of the crowded “Utah-2” screen. Van leaned in and squinted, but it didn’t help. “Hello, Van,” Gary said. Van waited a few seconds to see if he would say anything else, but he didn’t.

“Howdy, Colonel,” Van said. “I’ll assume you’ve already given your cohorts a detailed account of your setup mission, including everything you left undone. We’ve been giving Roy a hard time about that—he says hello, by the way. Over.”

After the requisite pause, Gary said, “Yeah, sorry about that. Quit picking on Roy about it, though. He doesn’t deserve it. Next time I see you, I’ll buy you a beer to make up for it. Over.” Needham hadn’t changed a bit: he still accepted responsibility for whatever went wrong on his watch, and Van guessed he was probably still as quick to share the praise for whatever went right.

“Oh, that’s okay. I think we’ll be buying each other a beer, at the rate we’re going. And you did a good job with that first farm unit—Sondstrom’s plants are growing on schedule, which is a little surprising to me since he’s primarily a mechanic. Anyway, we got most of your ‘punch list’ done, but our schedule’s all hosed up. You’re going to have a lot more work than you bargained for when you get up here.” Van switched to the next slide, which was labeled Mercator Colony—Actual Progress to Date. Almost half the habitat modules were greyed out, and several others were visibly askew from the idealized version.

“Now, let me tell you what we have gotten done, and some problems we’ve run into. I want you to know full well what you’ll be up against when you get here.”

Van’s version of the briefing lasted about five minutes before Shay was outside the closed partition, arguing with Henry. Van had already run down the worst of their problems, prioritized based on the time it had taken to fix them—or, in a few especially unfortunate cases, the time it was going to take.

Now, warmed up to his task, he switched the view and let the camera pick up his face. Behind him, Henry told Shay, “Just listen—he’s getting to the good part.” Van smiled.

“I told you all that so you wouldn’t have any illusions,” he said. “It’s not my job to give you warm, fuzzy feelings. But it ain’t all bad. Even though I’ve never worked harder at anything in my life, even though the gear is balky and the air reeks, and even though I feel like we’re never going to get done, I don’t want to be anyplace else.

“Some people talk like life is supposed to be safe and you’re not supposed to take any risks, but I say you may as well climb in your coffin if that’s the case. And you sure as hell don’t want to come up here. But that’s okay, ’cause better you back out now than you get up here and find out you can’t hack it. Life is hard sometimes. Get over it. Making it through the hard parts is what makes life worthwhile.

“I read somewhere that back when Arctic explorers were planning an expedition, they ran ads in the paper asking for people to sign up and said, big and bold, that the chance of survival was slim. A certainty of adventure, a possibility of glory, and a good chance of death. Sound appealing? People signed up, they came out of the woodwork to sign up for a chance to do something monumental. Because a chance of survival is still a chance, and worth taking the risk. So even though this is hard, by damn I think it’s a chance worth taking. Dream big and dare big, I say. Take the chance.

“In a few weeks, we’ll have as much done as we can do, and y’all are gonna have to pick up where we left off. You might be mad when you see how much we’ve left for you, and I’m sorry about that. We’re all working hard to make sure this place is ready for you to arrive, but things are already starting to break and we’re having to put them back together. It’s slowing us down, but it ain’t stopping us. And here’s the kicker: it ain’t chasing us away, either. Some of us are coming back, just like Gary Needham is coming back.

“As soon as we can, my wife and I will push ourselves through the training you’re going through right now, and we’ll join you up here. Jovelyn Nguyen will be along one of these days—her husband probably gave most of you your medical clearance, but it’ll be a while before they get up here, before there’s enough people here to justify a full-time doctor. We’ll see Henry Crafts and some of the others, too, ’cause they’ll be piloting cargo carriers or off working the asteroid mine. We’re signing up for the long haul—and you better be ready for the duration, too.

“That’s all I have to say. If you like, I can give you the party line briefing now, or I can answer some questions or we can shut this down and I can go to sleep. Just remember: I told you beforehand that we weren’t going to get everything done, and things up here are harder than you might think. So when you get up here you’re going to work your asses off. If you’re still mad at me about that when I get up here, you can punch me in the face. Or tell me ahead of time, and I’ll smuggle up a case of beer and let you have one. Over.”

Van muted his microphone and reached back to tap twice on the partition. Shay slid it open and said, “What was that?”

Van grinned. “That was the truth,” he said. “And it was fun.”