Mike Moscoe: A Day's Work on the Moon

Jer made me a picture of Rocket Girl and hung it on our kopy kitten. His “Rocket Girl” was a redhead.

Everything was going totally great. So how come, after my Friday shift, I find a message to call the woman in Personnel on Monday after school?

“I haven’t done anything wrong.”

Jer nodded agreement.

“They couldn’t have found out about your downloads.”

Jer really shook his head at that.”

“Well, then why do they want to talk with me?”

“Maybe they want to promote you again. Maybe you busted something. Maybe they want a real picture of you so they can do Rocket Girl right.”

I slugged him for that one.

It was a long weekend, and Monday at school went forever. I wanted to run home. Jer reminded me that I didn’t want to sound breathless on my call. Our walk took us by the Teddy Bear Factory.

When I was a kid, I used to walk in the paw prints some big black bear had left on the sidewalk. Or so my Dad said. I’d walk in them and they’d make me laugh. Now, they were so close together, my shoes reached from one to the next. I walked in them, but they didn’t make me laugh.

Jer tried to tickle me. I slugged him. He dodged, and came right back in to tickle me. Between swinging at Jer, and dodging tickles, and not always dodging them, I found a giggle. We ended up laughing together. Oh, Jer’s fingers could make me feel good, and not just where he tickled me. I guess we were growing up, closer to that honeymoon suite than the little girl walking in the bear footprints. We headed home, his arm around my shoulder. He was good to lean on. “Everything will be fine,” he kept telling me. Most of the time his voice didn’t break and I could believe him.

I sat in my kopy kitten for a couple of minutes after I got home, breathing slowly, reminding myself I was a high school student who worked on the Moon. Jer slumped into his chair and pulled out a reader, but I don’t think he did any studying.

I dialed. The woman came on immediately. “I’m glad you returned my call so quickly. How would you like to work outside on the Moon?”

I sat there, staring at her, suddenly needing to catch my breath all over again. Jer leaped up from his chair, did a little victory dance ending in a shouted, silent “Yes!”

“Ye… Yes,” I stammered.

“Good. I thought you would. Your supervisor hates to lose you, but, she figures with all you’ve been investing in your system, you could use the raise. We’re opening up a new dig. It’s further out from the base. The regolith is rich in aluminum and titanium. You’ll be getting a new dozer. Can you start tomorrow?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Can you, or the boy next door, give me a new download of your system? We have to make sure there’re no incompatibility problems.”

Jer raced over to help me. That brought him in view of the woman. “Hi. You are?” she asked.

Jer introduced himself. I was glad he was with me; his enhancements of the standard codes raised a red flag. “Normally, we prefer you to reinstall the original software. That’s what we qualified for the equipment. But I know a couple of guys at the lab who’ll probably take it as an honor to double-check Rocket Girl and her faithful sidekick’s mods. We should have it checked out by the time you get home tomorrow.”

She signed off, and Jer and I started dancing around the room. Dad’s alarm when off. It shouldn’t have. We were close, but we were moving all the time. We bolted for downstairs, to tell Dad the good news and have him reset the alarm system. Dad was still in his shop in what had never been the garage, hunched over a new chip layout.

“Dad, I got a new job. I’m driving a dozer. I’m out on the Moon,” I shouted, laughing.

“I knew you would, hon.” He looked up, frowned, listened for a second. “The alarm’s gone off. Would you go reset it, Nikki. You know the code.”

Jer and I headed for the hall closet. The door to Mom’s office was closed. I edged it open and slipped my head in. Mom was on the phone. “Dear, could you reset the alarm?”

I did. Maybe my folks do trust me.

Driving a dozer on the Moon is totally ace, not at all like driving a delivery bot. Dozers are the biggest, heaviest, most massive piece of equipment that we’ve shipped to the Moon. You do not take one of them around a corner on two wheels, or more correctly, one tread. Dozers push, pull, drag, drill and mangle regolith. But, since we don’t ship anything to the Moon that is any heavier than it has to be, you have to be careful how you push, pull or mangle that regolith, because even a dozer has limits.

Rocket Girl needed a whole new set of sensor feedback subroutines if she was going to be Rock Girl, or Rock Woman, or Rocks-in-her-Head, as Jer suggested, which got him punched. He didn’t see that one coming, so for once I did bang him good. So I kissed it to make it well and that took a while, but we got out of the clinch before the alarm went off.

I got busy learning my new machine, and Jer got busy making our kopy kitten better. The big worry for the dozers was pushing or lifting too much in the Moon’s weak gravity. If you weren’t careful, you could put your dozer on its back. It took time to right you, and your solar collectors usually got damaged. I would be working further out than most, until a second dozer of the D-4 series arrived. Having the first of the D-4’s on the Moon was a surprise. I asked why they didn’t give it to someone experienced; all of us on the D-4 were new. “Why retrain someone who’d been doing great with the C-3? You might as well learn dozers and the D-4 at the same time.” So a couple of dozen of us got the newest toy on the Moon. We also got a full time supervisor to kibitz us for the first week.

Jer didn’t mind. He was working on improved feedback loops, something to warn me ahead of time that I was biting off more rock than I could chew. The Moon is close, but when you’re lifting too much into a hopper, a two-and-a-half-second delay can do a lot of damage.

But there were benefits to working outside. Have you ever seen a shuttle take off from the Moon? That was something that a wandering rover never caught. I was right under the path for takeoff. Jer cut me into the traffic control channel as soon as I accidentally spotted a shuttle on takeoff. After that, we’d monitor takeoffs and landings; Jer even set up a plot that showed me where to look.

That’s how we knew something was wrong even as it was happening.

Nothing on the Moon is silent. My dozer has to talk to me, not just for go right or lift that load, but to tell me what the wear is on the tread so I can call for maintenance before it breaks down. There’s a lot of telemetry buzzing around the Moon from anything that’s moving. A lander sends an encyclopedia every second. When one quits, the silence is deafening.

“Shuttle five-oh-three, say your status,” was not an unusual call. Jer and I factored it into the background. “Shuttle five-oh-three, say your status, we have lost your signal,” brought both of our heads around to the comm monitor, me dimming my helmet so I could see the monitor as well as the chunk of Moon I was pushing toward a hopper.

Jer tapped his board several times and most of the communication data disappeared. Traffic Control stood out like a skate-board with three wheels. Three lines crackled with data from lifting and approaching landers. One line wasn’t straight. It just wasn’t there.

“Did it crash?”

Jer tapped a few times, then shook his head. “No recorded seismic activity. It’s still up there, just no signal.”

“That’s impossible. There’s got to be some kind of signal.” Dozers and delivery bots might be cheap hunks of dumb metal, but everything man-rated had backups for the backups for the backups. And even those had redundancies built in. A shuttle couldn’t just go silent.