Stephen Baxter - Space

Frank watched his audience like a hawk.

His cartoon Moon globe suddenly lit up. The onion-skin geological layers were supplemented by a vivid blue ocean, lapping in unlikely fashion at the center of the Moon. Xenia smiled. It was typical Frank: inaccurate, but compelling.

“Listen up,” he said. “What if Mariko is right? What if even one tenth of one percent of the Moon’s mass by weight is water? That’s the same order as five percent of Earth’s surface water. A hidden ocean indeed.

“And that’s not all. Where there is water there will be other volatiles: carbon dioxide, ammonia, methane, even hydrocarbons. All we have to do is go down there and find it.

“And it’s ours. We don’t own the sky; with the Gaijin around, maybe humans never will. But we inhabitants of the Moon do own the rocks beneath our feet.

“Folks, I’m calling this new enterprise Roughneck. If you want to know why, go look up the word. I’m asking you to invest in me. Sure it’s a risk. But if it works it’s a way past the resource bottleneck we’re facing, here on the Moon. And it will make you rich beyond your wildest dreams.” He grinned. “There’s a fucking ocean down there, folks, and it’s time to go skinnydipping.”

There was a frozen silence, which Frank milked expertly.

After the session, Xenia took a walk.

The Moon’s surface, beneath the dome, was like a park. Grass covered the ground, much of it growing out of bare lunar regolith. There was even a stand of mature palms, thirty meters tall, and a scattering of cherries. People lived in the dome’s support towers: thick central cores with platforms of lunar concrete slung from them. The lower levels were given over to factories, workshops, schools, shops, and other public places.

Far above her head, Xenia could see a little flock of schoolchildren in their white-and-black uniforms, flapping back and forth on Leonardo wings, squabbling like so many chickens. It was beautiful. But it served to remind her there were no birds here, outside pressurized cages. Birds tired too quickly in the thin air; on the Moon, against intuition, birds couldn’t fly.

Water flowed in streams and fountains and pools, moistening the air.

She passed Landsberg’s famous water-sculpture park. Water tumbled slowly from a tall fountainhead in great shimmering spheres held together by surface tension. The spheres were caught by flickering mechanical fingers, to be teased out like taffy and turned and spun into rope and transformed, briefly, into transient, beautiful sculptures, no two ever alike. It was entrancing, she admitted, a one-sixth gravity art form that would have been impossible on the Earth, and it had immediately captivated her on her arrival here. As she watched, a gaggle of children — eight or ten years old, Moon legs as long as giraffes’ — ran across the surface of the pond in the park’s basin, Jesuslike, their slapping footsteps sufficient to keep them from sinking as long as they ran fast enough.

Water was everywhere here; it did not feel dry, a shelter in a scorched desert. But overhead, huge fans turned continually, extracting every drop of moisture from the air to be cleansed, stored, and reused. She was surrounded by subtle noises: the bangs and whirrs of fans and pumps, the bubbling of aerators. And, when the children had gone, she saw tiny shimmering robots whiz through the air, fielding scattered water droplets as if catching butterflies, not letting a drop go to waste.

Landsberg, a giant machine, had to be constantly run, managed, maintained. Landsberg was no long-term solution. The various recycling processes were extraordinarily efficient — they had gotten to the level of counting molecules — but there were always losses; the laws of thermodynamics saw to that. And there was no way to make good those losses.

It didn’t feel like a dying world. In fact it was beginning to feel like home to her, this small, delicate, slow-motion world. But the human Moon was, slowly but surely, running down. Already some of the smaller habitations had been abandoned; smaller ecospheres had been too expensive. There was rationing. Fewer children were being born than a generation ago, as humanity huddled in the remaining, shriveling lunar bubbles.

And there was nowhere else to go.

Xenia had an intuition about the rightness of Frank’s vision, whatever his methods. At least he was fighting back: trying to find a way for humans to survive, here in the system that had birthed them. Somebody had to. It seemed clear that the aliens, the all-powerful Gaijin, weren’t here to help; they were standing by in their silent ships, witnessing as human history unfolded and Earth fell apart.

If humans couldn’t figure out how to save themselves soon, they might not have another chance.

And if Frank could make a little profit along the way to achieving that goal, she wasn’t about to begrudge him.

Well, Frank convinced enough people to get together his seedcorn investment; jubilantly, he went to work.

But getting the money turned out to be the easy part.

There never had been a true mining industry here on the Moon. All anybody had ever done was strip-mine the regolith, the shattered and desiccated outer layers of the Moon, already pulverized by meteorites and so not requiring crushing and grinding. And nobody had attempted — save for occasional science surveys — to dig any deeper than a few tens of meters.

So Frank and Xenia were forced to start from scratch, inventing afresh not just an industrial process but the human roles that went with it. They were going to need a petrophysicist and a geological engineer to figure out the most likely places they would find their imagined reservoirs of volatiles; they needed reservoir engineers and drilling engineers and production engineers for the brute work of the borehole itself; they needed construction engineers for the surface operations and support. And so on. They had to figure out job descriptions, and recruit and train to fill them as best they could.

All the equipment had to be reinvented. There was no air to convect away heat, so their equipment needed huge radiator fins. Even beneficiation — concentrating ungraded material into higher-quality ore — was difficult, as they couldn’t use traditional methods like froth flotation and gravity concentration; they had to experiment with methods based on electrostatic forces. There was of course no water — a paradox, for it turned out that most mining techniques refined over centuries on Earth depended highly on the use of water, for cooling, lubrication, the movement and separation of materials, and the solution and precipitation of metals. It was circular, a cruel trap.

They hit more problems as soon as they started to trial heavy equipment in the ultrahard vacuum that coated the Moon.

Friction was a killer. In an atmosphere, every surface accreted a thin layer of water vapor and oxides that reduced drag. But that didn’t apply here. They even suffered vacuum welds. Not only that, the ubiquitous dust — the glass-sharp remains of ancient, shattered rocks — stuck to everything it could, scouring and abrading. Stuff wore out fast on the silent surface of the Moon.

But they persisted, solving the problems, finding old references to how it had been done in the past, when the Lunar Japanese had worked more freely beyond their domed cities. They learned to build in a modular fashion, with parts that could be replaced easily by someone in a space suit. They learned to cover all their working joints with sleeves of a flexible plastic, to keep out the dust. After much experimentation they settled on a lubricant approach, coating their working surfaces with a substance the Lunar Japanese engineers called quasiglass, hard and dense and very smooth; conventional lubricants just boiled or froze off.