Stephen Baxter - Space

But, swept along by his energy and ambition, she found it hard to focus on such questions.

Bathed in blue-water light, pacing his stage, Frank J. Paulis was a solid ball of terrestrial energy and aggression, out of place on the small, delicate Moon. “You got to beat the future, or it will beat you! I believed that before I went to the stars, and I believe it now. I’m here to tell you how…”

To launch his new project, Frank, feverish with enthusiasm, had hired the Grand Auditorium, the heart of Landsberg. The crater’s dome was a blue ceiling above Xenia, a thick double sheet of quasiglass, cable-stayed by engineered spiderweb, filled with water. The water shielded Landsberg’s inhabitants from radiation and served to scatter the raw sunlight. During the long lunar day, here in Landsberg, the sky was royal blue and full of fish: goldfish and carp. After five years, Xenia still couldn’t get used to it.

Frank was standing before a huge three-dimensional cartoon, a Moon globe sliced open to reveal arid, uninteresting geological layers. Beside him sat Mariko Kashiwazaki, the young academic type whose paper had fired Frank off in this new direction. She looked slim and uncertain in the expensive new suit Frank had bought for her.

Xenia was sitting at the back of the audience, watching rows of cool faces: politicians, business types. They were impassive. Well, they were here, and they were listening, and that was all Frank cared about right now.

“Here on the Moon, we need volatiles,” Frank was saying. “Not just to survive, but to expand. To grow, economically. Water. Hydrogen. Helium. Carbon dioxide. Nitrogen. Maybe nitrates and phosphates to supplement the bio cycles.

“But the Moon is deficient in every essential of life. A molecule of water, out there on the surface, lasts a few hours before it’s broken up by the sunlight and lost forever. The Moon’s atmosphere is so thin some of the molecules are actually in orbit. Frankly, it’s no damn use.”

It was true. All this had been well known from the moment the first Apollo astronaut had picked up the first lump of unprepossessing Moon rock and found it dry as a bone — drier, in fact.

For a time there had been hope that deep, shadowed craters near the Moon’s poles might serve as stores for water ice, brought there by cometary impacts. But to the intense disappointment of some dreamers, no more than a trace of such ice had been found. As the Fracastorius impact had demonstrated, such impacts deposited little volatile material anyhow. And even if any ice was trapped it wouldn’t be there forever; the Moon’s axis turned out to be unstable, and the Moon tipped this way and that over a period of hundreds of millions of years — a long time, but short enough that no crater remained in shadow forever.

Dry or not, Moon rock wasn’t useless. In fact, it was about 40 percent oxygen by weight. There were other useful elements: silicon, which could be used to make glass, fiberglass, polymers; aluminum, magnesium, and titanium for machinery, cables, coatings; chromium and magnesium for metal alloys.

But Frank was essentially right. If a mine on Earth had turned up the highest-grade lunar ore, you’d throw it out as slag.

And that was why Frank had initiated Project Prometheus, his scheme for importing volatiles and spinning up the Moon by hitting it with a series of comets or asteroids. But it hadn’t worked.

“So where do we turn next?” He eyed his audience, as always in command, even before these wary, slightly bemused Lunar Japanese. “Believe me, we need to find something. The Moon, your Moon, is dying. We didn’t come to the Moon so our children could live in a box. We came to live as humans, with freedom and dignity.” He threw back his arms and breathed the recycled air. “Let me tell you my dream. One day, before I die, I want to throw open the damn doors and walk out of the dome. And I want to breathe the air of the Moon. The air we put there.” He began to pace back and forth, like a preacher — or a huckster. “I want to see a terraformed Moon. I want to see a Moon where breathable air blankets the planet, where there is so much water the deep maria will become the seas they were named for, where plants and trees grow out in the open, and every crater will glisten with a circular lake… It’s a dream. Maybe I won’t live to see it all. But I know it’s the only way forward for us. Only a world — stable, with deep biological reservoirs of water and carbon and air — is going to be big enough to sustain human life, here on the Moon, over the coming centuries, the millennia. Hell, we’re here for the long haul, people, and we got to learn to think that way. Because nobody is going to help us — not Earth, not the Gaijin. None of them care if we live or die. We’re stuck in this trench, in the middle of the battleground, and we have to help ourselves.

“But to make the Moon a twin of Earth we’ll need volatiles, principally water. The Moon has no volatiles, and so we must import them. Correct?”

Now he leaned forward, intimidating, a crude but effective trick, Xenia thought dryly.

“Dead wrong. I’m here today to offer you a new paradigm. I’m here to tell you that the Moon itself is rich in volatiles, almost unimaginably so, enough to sustain us and our families, hell, for millennia. And, incidentally, to make us rich as Croesus in the process…”

It was the climax, the punch line, Frank’s big shock. But there was barely a flicker of interest in the audience, Xenia saw. Three centuries and a planetary relocation hadn’t changed the Japanese much, and cultural barriers hadn’t dropped; they were still suspicious of the noisy foreigner who stood before them, breaking into the subtle alliances and protocols that ruled their lives.

Frank stood back. “Tell ’em, Mariko.”

The slim Lunar Japanese scientist got up, evidently nervous, and bowed deeply to the audience.

Earth-Moon and the other planets, Mariko said, supported by smooth softscreen images, had condensed, almost five billion years ago, from a swirling cloud of dust and gases. That primordial cloud had been rich in volatiles: 3 percent of it was water, for instance. You could tell that was so from the composition of asteroids, which were leftover fragments of the cloud.

But there was an anomaly. All the water on Earth, in the oceans and atmosphere and the ice sheets, added to less than a tenth of that 3-percent fraction. Where had the rest of the water gone?

Conventional wisdom held that it had been baked out by the intense heat of Earth’s formation. But Mariko believed much of it was still there, that water and other volatiles were trapped deep within the Earth: perhaps four hundred kilometers down, deep in the mantle. The water wouldn’t be present as a series of immense buried oceans. Rather it would be scattered as droplets, some as small as a single molecule, trapped inside crystal lattices of the minerals with names like wadsleyite and hydrous-D. These special forms could trap water within their structure, essentially exploiting the high pressure to overcome the tendency of the rising temperature to bake the water out.

Some estimates said there should be as much as five times as much water buried within the Earth as in all its oceans and atmosphere and ice caps.

And what was true of Earth might be true of the Moon.

According to Mariko, the Moon was mostly made of material like Earth’s mantle. This was because the Moon was believed to have been budded off the Earth itself, ripped loose after a giant primordial collision popularly called the “big whack.” The Moon was smaller than the Earth, cooler and more rigid, so that the center of the Moon was analogous to the Earth’s mantle layers a few hundred kilometers deep. And it was precisely at such depths, on Earth, that you found such water-bearing minerals…