Ben Bova - Moonwar

Falcone’s frowning, swarthy face relaxed slightly. “Maybe three tons’ll do.”

The chemist shook her head. “Still, that’s impossible to produce in two days. We don’t have any time to lose.”

“Can you come close?” Doug asked.

She was a petite wisp of a woman, her orange coveralls stained and faded from hard use. “We generate the foamgel as part of the process for making the insulation tiles we use for flooring and wall covering and all.”

The insulating tiles were a small but consistent export to the space stations in Earth orbit, Doug knew. Moonbase also exported an even smaller but growing trickle of them to building contracting firms on Earth.

“We’ll have to shut down the back end of the production line,” the chemist was musing, “and rev up the foamgel production end.”

She looked up at Falcone again. To Doug they seemed like a dark lumpy storm cloud and a light graceful swirl of cirrus.

“I can put all the raw stock we have on hand into producing foamgel, but I’ll need more raw materials. Every tractor you can get scooping regolith.”

“You got it!” Falcone promised.

Doug left them huddled together over her phone console and hurried down the corridor to Zimmerman’s nanolab. One of the base’s best tractor teleoperators, Nick O’Malley, had been assigned to work with the professor. But if we need every tractor scooping outside, I’ll have to shift Nick back to his regular job.

He could hear their arguing voices from fifty meters down the corridor. Zimmerman’s heavy rumbling and O’Malley’s higher-pitched yells. Nick’s not taking any guff from the professor, Doug thought as he pushed through the door marked NANOTECHNOLOGY LABORATORY—PROF. ZIMMERMAN—AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

“So you are the expert here and not me?” Zimmerman was bellowing angrily.

“I know more about it than you do, damned right I do!” shouted O’Malley, red-faced.

“Stop it!” Doug commanded. “Shut up, both of you!”

Zimmerman whirled on Doug, his loose jacket and vest flapping like sails with the wind taken out of them.

“An assistant you gave me? A führer you gave me! A dictator!”

“What’s the problem?” Doug asked as calmly as he could.

“He thinks he is the professor and I am his student!” Zimmerman complained loudly.

“I only said—”

“You are not to say! ” Zimmerman roared. “You are to do. You are my assistant, not my colleague!”

“Professor, please!” Doug insisted. “What is the problem?”

Gesturing with both hands, Zimmerman grumbled, “He thinks to tell me what I should do. He thinks he is the expert here.”

“All right, all right,” Doug said, trying to be soothing. He turned toward O’Malley. “Nick?”

“I just said that if he needs nanobugs to act like dust, why doesn’t he just use the flaming dust itself?”

“You see!” Zimmerman snapped.

“Wait a minute,” said Doug. “Nick, what do you mean?”

O’Malley sucked in a deep, deep breath. Doug realized he was trying to hold onto his own temper. He was a big man, and if he got truly angry there could be real trouble.

“What I mean,” he said slowly, “is that we don’t need to invent nanomachines that behave like dust particles. We can pump the corridor sections full of regular lunar dust. Run ’em through an electrostatic grid so they’ll stick to the Peacekeepers’ suits and visors just like you want ’em to.”

“An electrostatic grid?”

“We can rig that up easy; just need to connect some electricity to the air filter screens in the corridors.”

“ We , he keeps saying,” Zimmerman muttered.

Doug put a hand on the old man’s shoulder. “Professor, I think he’s right.”

“And I am wrong?”

Forcing a smile, Doug said, “No, but we don’t have time to produce your specialized nanomachines. Nick’s worked out on the surface; he knows how the dust clings to suits.”

“So I must sit back and retire like a useless old man?”

“No, not at all,” Doug said. “You can work with Kris Cardenas on the medical side. We’re going to need your nanomachines to take care of the injured and wounded.”

Zimmerman huffed out an enormous sigh. “You expect injured and wounded? How many?”

“I have no idea,” Doug answered truthfully.

The professor turned away and walked a few steps deeper into his lab. Then he spun around and pointed a trembling finger at O’Malley. “Very well! Go play with your verdammt dust! I will stay here and do important work!”

O’Malley started to reply, but one glance at Doug and he shut his mouth with an audible click of teeth.

“We need you, professor,” Doug said softly. “You know that. I need you. Moonbase needs you.”

“Yah. While you and this young lummox here go out to fight, I sit here like a dreamer.”

“It’s your dreams that we’re fighting for,” said Doug. Then he took O’Malley by the arm and led him out of the nanotechnology laboratory.

Harry Clemens seldom showed tension. Word around Moon-base was that he didn’t have any bones, that’s why he always looked so relaxed.

But he was sitting rigidly in one of the little swivel chairs in front of a console in the control center, eyes riveted on the screen that showed the little tubular rocket vehicle, as the launch computer counted aloud: “…four… three… two… one… zero.”

Clemens saw a flash of smoke and dust. The rocket was gone when it cleared.

“Radar track on the line,” said the technician sitting to his right. He saw the radar display on the screen just above his view of the now empty launch pad.

“Looks good.”

He swivelled slightly to see Jinny Anson standing behind him.

“Now we’ll see if they try to shoot it down,” Anson said tightly.

“L-1’s painting it,” the radar tech called out.

“I launched it retrograde,” Clemens said to Anson,’so L-1 won’t have more than a few minutes to calculate its trajectory.”

The Moon rotates on its axis so slowly that very little momentum was lost by launching a rocket in the direction opposite to its spin. On Earth, a launch westward could cost four kilometers per second of precious velocity, or more, depending on the launch site’s latitude.

“They won’t need more than a few seconds to nail your orbit,” Anson said flatly. “Besides, they know goddamned well it’s gonna pass over Copernicus. They got lots of time to focus a laser on it.”

Clemens’ high forehead wrinkled. “You think they’ll zap it?”

“If the Peacekeepers’ve put a big enough laser at L-1, yeah, they will.”

“Do you think they’ve put weapons-strength lasers in Nippon One?”

Anson gripped Clemens’ shoulders and grinned down at him. “We’ll find out pretty soon, won’t we?”

Edith was reviewing her day’s shooting in the video editing booth at the lunar university’s studio facility. The studio itself was dark and empty; no lectures or demonstrations, no interactions with Earthside students had taken place since the U.N. had cut off regular communications. The editing booth felt almost like home to Edith, though. Even though she was alone in it, she enjoyed working the big control console. When she had first started in television news, sitting at the console with all its switches and keypads made her feel like the captain of a starship in some futuristic drama. Now it just felt like a familiar, comfortable place where she could edit her work until it was a finished, polished piece of TV journalism. The fact that she was doing the work on the Moon no longer impressed her.

She was splicing together scenes from three separate shoots, trying to put together a coherent report on the preparations that Moonbase was undertaking to face the impending Peacekeeper attack—without betraying any of the steps that might tip off the U.N. about what to expect. Her footage dealt almost entirely with the human side of the coming battle: the tiny medical staff getting ready to handle wounded men and women; the highly-trained technicians and engineers and scientists moping in The Cave, their work, their careers, their lives in limbo until this war was settled one way or the other; the silent emptiness of the construction pit where the grand plaza was going to be built. Nothing was moving there now, not even a teleoperated tractor. All work on Moonbase’s future had been stopped.