Stephen Baxter - Space

“I don’t understand how you can live here.”

“The Moon is a whole world,” he said gently. “It can support one man.”

Takomi, she learned, used the lunar soil for simple radiation shielding. He baked it in crude microwave ovens to make ceramic and glass. He extracted oxygen from the lunar soil by magma electrolysis: melting the soil with focused sunlight, then passing an electric current through it to liberate the oh-two. The magma plant, lashed up from decades-old salvage, was slow and power-intensive, but the electrolysis process was efficient in its use of soil; Takomi said he wasn’t short of sunlight, but the less haulage he had to do the better.

He operated what he called a grizzly, an automated vehicle already a century old, so caked with dust it was the same color as the Moon. The grizzly toiled patiently across the surface of the Moon, powered by sunlight. It scraped up loose surface material and pumped out glass sheeting and solar cells, just a couple of square meters a day. Over time, the grizzly had built a solar farm covering square kilometers and producing megawatts of electric power.

“It is astonishing, Takomi.”

He cackled. “If one is modest in one’s request, the Moon is generous.”

“But even so, you lack essentials. It’s the eternal story of the Moon. Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen—”

He smiled at her. “I admit I cheat. The concrete of this abandoned town is replete with water.”

“You mine concrete?”

“It is better than paying water tax.”

“But how many humans could the Moon support this way?”

“Ah. Not many. But how many humans does the Moon need? Thus, I am entrenched.”

It struck her as another strange choice of word. There was much about this hermit she did not understand, she realized.

She asked him about the contrails she had seen, their convergence on this place. He evaded her questions and began to talk about something else.

“I conduct research, you know, of a sort. There is a science station, not far from here, which was once equipped by Nishizaki Heavy Industries. Now abandoned, of course. It is — was — an infrared study station. It was there that a Japanese researcher called Nemoto first discovered evidence of Gaijin activity in the Solar System, and so changed history.”

She wasn’t interested in Takomi’s hobby work in some old observatory. But there was something in his voice that made her keep listening.

“So you use the equipment,” she prompted.

“I watched the approach of the comet. From here, some aspects of it were apparent that were not visible from Nearside stations. The geometry of the approach orbit, for example. And something else.”

“What?”

“I saw evidence of methane burning,” he said. “Close to the nucleus.”

“Methane?”

“A jet of combustion products.”

A rocket. She saw the implications immediately. Somebody had stuck a methane rocket on the side of the comet nucleus, burned the comet’s own chemicals, to divert its course.

Away from the Moon? Or toward it?

And in either case, who?

“Why are you telling me this?”

But he would not reply, and a cold, hard lump of suspicion began to gather in her gut.

Takomi provided a bed for her: a thin mattress in an abandoned schoolhouse. Children’s paintings adorned the walls, preserved under a layer of glass. The pictures showed flowers and rocks and people, all floating in a black sky.

In the middle of the night, Frank called her. He was excited.

“It’s going better than we expected. We’re just sinking in. Anyhow the pictures are great. Smartest thing I ever did was to insist we dump the magnesium alloy piping, make the walls transparent so you can see the rocks. We have the best geologists on the Moon down that fucking well, Xenia. Seismic surveys, geochemistry, geophysics, the works. The sooner we find some ore lode to generate payback, the better…”

The Roughneck bore had passed the crust’s lower layers and was in the mantle. The mantle of the Moon: sixty kilometers deep, a place unlike any other reached by humans before.

The Moon was turning out to be much easier to deep-mine than the Earth, for it was old and silent and still. There was a temperature rise of maybe ten degrees per kilometer of depth, compared to four times as much on Earth. The pressure scaled similarly; even now Frank’s equipment was subject to only a few thousand atmospheres, less than could be replicated in the laboratory. Strangely, the density of the Moon hardly varied across its whole interior.

But Xenia knew the project had barely begun. If Frank was to find the water and other volatiles he sought, if he was to reach the conditions of temperature and pressure that would allow the water-trapping minerals to form, it could only be at enormous depths — probably beneath the rigid mantle, a thousand kilometers deep, just a few hundred kilometers from the center of the Moon itself.

She tried to ask him technical questions, about how they were planning to cope with the more extreme pressures and temperatures they would soon encounter. She knew that at first, in the impact-shattered upper regolith, he had been able to deploy comparatively primitive mechanical drilling techniques like percussion and rotary. But faced by the stubborn, hard, fine-grained rocks of the mantle, he had had to try out more advanced techniques — lasers, electric arcs, magnetic-induction techniques. Stretching the bounds of possibility.

But he wouldn’t discuss such issues.

“Xenia, it doesn’t matter. You know me. I can’t figure any machine more complicated than a screwdriver. And neither can our investors. I don’t need to know. I just have to find the right technical guys, give them a challenge they can’t resist, and point them downward.”

“Paying them peanuts the while.”

He grinned. “That’s the beauty of those vocational types. Christ, we could even get those guys to pay to work here. No, the technical stuff is piss-easy. It’s the other stuff that’s the challenge. We have to make the project appeal to more than just the fat financiers and the big corporations. Xenia, this is the greatest lunar adventure since Neil and Buzz. That party when we first made hole was just the start. I want everybody involved, and everybody paying. Now we’re in the mantle we can market the TV rights—”

“Frank, they don’t have TV any more.”

“Whatever. I want the kids involved, all those little dark-eyed kids I see flapping around the palm trees the whole time with nothing to do. I want games. Educational stuff. Clubs to join, where you pay a couple of yen for a badge and get some kind of share certificate. I want little toy derricks in cereal packets.”

“They don’t have cereal packets any more.”

He eyed her. “Work with me here, Xenia. And I want their parents paying too. Tours down the well, at least the upper levels. Xenia, for the first time the folks on this damn Moon are going to see some hint of an expansive future. A frontier, beneath their feet. They have to want it. Including the kids.” He nodded. “Especially the kids.”

“But the Grays—”

“Screw the Grays. All they have is rocks. We have the kids.”

And so on, on and on, his insect voice buzzing with plans, in the ancient stillness of Farside.

The next day Takomi walked her back to her tractor, by the Zen garden.

She had been here twenty-four hours. The Sun had dipped closer to the horizon, and the shadows were long, the land starker, more inhospitable. Comet-ice clouds glimmered high above.

“I have something for you,” Takomi said. And he handed her what looked like a sheet of glass. It was oval shaped, maybe half a meter long. Its edges were blunt, as if melted, and it was covered with bristles. Some kind of lunar geologic formation, she thought, a relic of some impact event. A cute souvenir; Frank might like it for the office.