Encounter With Tiber Read online

  During the two weeks of dark, lunar rocks become so cold that any water molecule that hits them will stick to them; if there is any water around it will freeze to those rocks, forming frost. During the two weeks of light, the same rocks grow hot enough to throw the water molecules off, with speeds high enough so that the water molecules don’t quite go into orbit, but do bound for hundreds of kilometers. If it happens that they come down and hit a lighted, hot rock, they will gain still more energy, and bounce higher the next time; after anywhere from four to ten bounces off rocks in daylight, the water molecules will bounce right off the Moon and be lost forever.

  But if they hit a dark rock, they will stick. Usually they only stick until the sun comes up on that part of the Moon, and then begin the process of bouncing again, until they either hit and stick on the dark side, or bounce off the Moon from the light side. As years go by and lunar day follows lunar night, less and less water is left at the end of each lunar day, and the Moon becomes bone dry.

  But that is only what usually happens. The deep craters at the south pole never receive sunlight; the rocks in them are always dark. Thus when a water molecule bounces into one of those craters, it hits, sticks, and stays—forever.

  And though such events are rare, water does come to the Moon—often in the form of a comet. Comets, in Fred Hoyle’s immortal phrase, are “dirty snowballs”—a scattering of big rocks in a mountain-sized ball of water ice. As millennia pass, now and again a comet strikes the Moon, bursting apart as it digs a new crater and sets millions or billions of tons of water loose on the surface. Most of it disappears quickly in the eternal game of freeze and bounce—but some happens into the craters at the south pole, and it remains there to this day. As the millions of years slide by, eventually it gets to be an immense amount of water.

  There were many tons of ice there; ice is made of hydrogen and oxygen—and oxygen is heavy stuff, eighty-nine percent of the weight of water. Not only would it provide water for various uses on Tiber Base, but it would also provide a source of oxygen that didn’t involve hauling it a quarter of a million miles into the sky, and later might well provide liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuel for the Pigeons as well. Oxygen gotten in that fashion was dubbed “lunox” to differentiate it from the stuff hauled up from Earth.

  With enough stayovers, there would be a substantial base there, using pressurized rovers—big slow-moving land vehicles that looked a bit like milk trucks with room enough for crews to sleep and eat in them—to carry on a search.

  Whenever the Encyclopedia was found, the next lander coming out would be sent unmanned to the Encyclopedia site, a crew would go out from the base at Tiber Base (unless, of course, the Encyclopedia was already there), and that crew would bring the Encyclopedia home.

  The primary crew cabin for the missions would be the Aerospatiale/Rockwell Pigeon. (By now everyone was calling it that, and “Apollo II” survived only in official company literature.) Habitats and other construction would be built around Big Cans and Starbird drop tanks, since both were already proven-successful pressure vessels. The Japanese undertook to develop the rover; as was rapidly becoming traditional, it was the big Russian boosters, primarily the Energiya, that would supply the thrust to get to the Moon.

  The Chinese contribution, more than anything else, was to not try for the Encyclopedia on their own. In exchange for that they got one half of the crew slots; the Four Powers knew which way things went and put up with it, despite the grumbling of the space crews themselves.

  “There’s another part of the deal,” Dad said to me, as we sat outside having ice cream that warm summer night in late 2008. “Not yet made public. Your, uh, mother’s husband—” that was usually how he designated Sig to me “—well, he’s got an idea. An old idea, really, but he’s going to try to make it work. And if he does, then we might be on better terms with the Chinese. It was part of what got them to take the deal.”

  “So what’s the idea?” I asked.

  “Well, hmm. It’s like this. A lot of China’s problems would be solved if they got a decent cheap source of energy, because then they could stop burning coal and making the air over Japan dirty, and they could also raise the standard of living for their people by quite a lot. So one idea that’s been around since the 1960s is that if you put a solar power plant in space—where the Sun shines all the time and there’s never any clouds—you can beam the power down to Earth using microwaves in a tight beam. You catch the microwaves on an antenna, which converts them back to electricity, and presto, you have cheap power. Much more efficient than ground-based solar.”

  “What happens if the beam gets pointed in the wrong direction?” I asked.

  “If the antenna detects the beam moving at all, it sends a signal up to the satellite to shut off until the problem is fixed. Anyway, uh, Sig, has a contract with the Chinese to build them a power station like that, since his Starbirds are going to make space travel cheaper and he’s been able to hire different contractors with a lot of experience building in space. Basically he’s doing it for a lot less than cost, and we and the Japanese are picking up the tab and labeling it research—but what it is, is a disguised bribe to the Chinese to get them aboard on this. And since the bribe is flowing through Sig’s hands, I guess he’ll make a pretty good chunk of money on it.

  “Another thing it does is delay the issue of helium-3 mining on the Moon; the Encyclopedia is a bad enough tangle without putting that in.”

  “Helium-3 is the stuff they run the new fusion reactors on?” I asked. I knew, but I hadn’t been seeing much of Dad lately, and I wanted him to keep talking.

  He looked up at the darkening cloudless sky, set down his empty ice cream bowl, and said, “Yeah. Once they figured out that you needed the colliding-beam technology to make it work—the only way to get a high enough effective temperature in the stuff you were fusing was to run atoms of it head-on into each other—they were able to figure out what the maximum collision velocities they could get were, and from that they knew that only the light isotope of helium was workable in it. If you remember, Sig’s research division was the one that figured out there’s enough of it in deep ocean vents so that going to the Moon to extract it from the soil wasn’t viable. But now that we’re going to have regular traffic, at least for a while, between Earth and Moon—” He sighed. “We just get a frontier opened up again, and already people are figuring out how to make it cluttered and corrupt and a mess. We’ve never learned a thing, you know?”

  I had no idea what he meant, but I was glad to have him there, so I said, “Maybe I don’t understand.”

  “Well, like, think about the American West, in, oh, say, 1848, right after we’d grabbed it from Mexico. Neither the Spanish nor the Mexicans had been able to do much of anything with any parts of it except Texas and California. So you have this whole huge area, the Great Basin and all the surrounding mountain ranges, full of all kinds of species in abundance, and with all kinds of different people for the anthropologists to talk to, and an immense array of interesting things for geologists—and what did we do with it? Dammed the rivers, grazed cattle all over it, killed off most of the big predators, destroyed all the cultures that weren’t ours, and covered it with trashy places for trashy people—whole towns full of hoodlums like Tombstone and Deadwood, get-rich-quick places for bums and dreamers like Bozeman and Cripple Creek, and later on, of course, tourist traps like Vegas and Aspen. We had this whole big beautiful place for discovery, and all we could think of to do with it was wipe out everything that made it worth discovering.

  “Well, I look at the way space is going, and I find myself thinking, it’s pretty similar. More than half the Starbirds that have flown so far have been for your mother’s husband’s ShareSpace Global, taking people up joyriding. Most of them don’t do a lick of real science. Now we’re going to make electricity in space, but you can’t get a dime for the Hubble III or Hubble IV to see deeper into the universe. We’re going to the Moon, but only to go treasure hu
nting, and once we’re there it probably won’t be long before we’re taking soil that hasn’t been disturbed for four billion years, bulldozing it up in carloads, and pumping it through helium extractors. I wonder when they’ll open the first casino up there. Probably within my lifetime.”

  He sat there in the dark so quietly for so long that I started just looking around at the summer stars, something he’d taught me to do. Vega, overhead, seemed very bright tonight. As I often did, I pretended I was on my way to the star directly above me and imagined myself to be falling toward it in the last part of the journey … any moment now the point of light would expand to a tiny disk, and then the disk would swell as I fell into the new solar system. …

  “No one wants to go to space for any important reason,” my father said, “but that’s not what I needed to talk to you about. I’ve got another mission coming up, Jason.”

  “Will I be staying with Mom or with Aunt Lori?”

  “With your mother. This could be a long one, longer than the time I went to ISS three years ago, when the message came in.” He stretched and then slapped himself. “Houston, the perfect place to relax if you’re a mosquito. Not that you’ll see any fewer of them in D.C. Here’s the story: they’ve put me on the second manned mission, along with a Chinese woman pilot who’s supposed to be kind of a hotshot. Her name is X-I-A-O-B-E, and they pronounce that ‘showe bay,’ like to rhyme with ‘cow day’ or ‘now pay.’ I talked to her on the phone just yesterday and she seemed like an okay person. Peter Denisov is going, too, so at least I’ll have a friend on the mission, and François Raymond’s in the backup team. Lori’s a pilot for mission nine, if they ever get that high.”

  “Isn’t there a fourth on your mission?”

  “Another Chinese. Jiang Wu. He doesn’t have any real obvious specialties or skills that they’ve told us about, so we think he’s with the secret police, deadheading on this ride so that even on the Moon they’ll always have someone watching every PRC citizen.” He yawned. “Hope he doesn’t distract Xiao Be in all this; there’s a lot to get done, and since we won’t get much work out of him, she’s going to have to pick up the slack. Anyway, it’ll be nice to fly with that Russian grump again. But the important thing is, Xiao Be and I are the stayovers—which means I might not be back for months, maybe not till after Lori leaves. So you’re going up to stay with Sig and your mother for a while. I guess I should say the usual stuff—behave yourself and don’t let me hear that you were any trouble.”

  7

  MOM AND SIG’S PLACE was large and comfortable, and there was a room already set up for me there; the biggest problem I’d had with going up to Washington for sixth and seventh grade was that I wouldn’t have as many friends on my Little League or Pop Warner teams. Times before, when I had stayed with Mom and Sig in Reston, I had sometimes attended school there, so I did know some kids from Aldrin Elementary, and I liked them well enough. On the other hand, where I was in Texas, you had to be in seventh grade before you got out of elementary school and into junior high; in Washington there was a middle school, and I would be going to sixth grade there. So I never did get a year of being a “big kid.”

  The biggest difference, I discovered, was that what was cool and what was passé changed drastically. Around Houston, there were plenty of astronaut brats, and plenty of kids whose parents worked at NASA. So my dad being who he was was no big deal. In Sig’s neighborhood there were plenty of congressional brats and kids of rich people, but an astronaut’s son was a rarity. It meant a certain amount of teasing and a certain amount of strange second-hand hero worship; I ignored both. I had already learned that there were a lot of occasions when the best thing to do was to shut up and excel other people.

  That got more useful, because where in the Houston area the rumor mill revolves around the personal lives of people in the astronaut corps, in Washington it turns around power, who has it and who gets to keep it—and around the art of the deal, who gave up what for what. Consequently, trying to come up with some way or other to relate to me, a surprising number of kids went out of their way to pass on whatever they heard from their parents, who tended to be congresspeople, Washington lawyers, and top-level bureaucrats.

  The favorite one seemed to be that there was a lot of tension with the Chinese about the expedition to recover the Encyclopedia. They were said to be hard to deal with and constantly making demands, and every so often there was a rumor that safety was being compromised over this or that Chinese demand.

  I could have told them more about it than they were telling me; Sig was up to his neck in dealing with the Chinese, and not happy about any of it. There seemed to be an infinite number of additional nice things to which the Chinese were entitled without further payment, because they were “implied” in the contract. Since the U.S. government was making up the difference between what Sig was losing in building orbiting solar power stations for China and what he could have been making with the same resources used as he normally would, NASA officials didn’t hesitate to get involved in deciding which of these demands was valid and which wasn’t, thus which ones they would pay for and which they wouldn’t. The trouble was that when the Chinese didn’t get their way, it was Sig’s crews and equipment rather than NASA’s that tended to get held (discreetly, of course) as hostages. So every couple of days I’d hear Sig snarling into the phone as he tried to disentangle some problem or other and get one more step farther toward completion.

  The whole system at the new house took a little bit of getting used to, too; Sig was home almost every evening, and Mom worked regular hours as well. That meant I was subject to a lot more routine adult supervision than I was used to; besides, the woods were too far away and the parks were kind of scary. I turned into a somewhat better student, just out of boredom.

  About once a month Dad would get enough time off to come up and visit. Sig and Mom would have been perfectly happy to have him stay in the house, but he stayed at a hotel anyway. We’d go to a ball game or take a couple of long walks or something. Every now and then he’d bring along Grandma, and that was fun, too.

  Even so, I was perfectly happy going back to school on Monday. I had heard plenty of horror stories from other kids about their divorced parents, and I knew Dad and Sig weren’t crazy about each other, but the fact was that everybody involved did a pretty decent job of taking care of me and I didn’t have to worry much about who was going to look after me. That let me concentrate on important issues, like model rocketry, sports, and my gradually increasing awareness that there was another gender out there and that I approved of the fact. Probably the biggest trauma I can remember from the time when Dad was away in training (first learning the Starbird at Sig’s launch site near Edwards AFB, then learning the modified Pigeon lunar lander, and finally off to China to cross-train with Xiao Be, Peter, and Jiang Wu) was that I couldn’t quite get up the nerve to ask a girl to the seventh-grade Valentine dance, and I didn’t make the starting team in cadet basketball—too many other guys were getting their growth ahead of me. On the whole, it was a quiet time of life—and speaking as a quiet guy, I was already learning to appreciate that.

  I don’t know when it happened—it must have been one of the times my father got to Washington while I was still in school and therefore had an afternoon in the city—but I know it did, partly by what happened later and mostly because, when I was much older, Sig told me about it. I think he thought I would feel good knowing about it, and I guess he was right.

  Anyway, my father got off the plane, made his way to Sig’s office, and met Sig for lunch, a “special appointment” that neither Mom nor I knew anything about at the time. They sat on a sunny balcony at a pricey place, where no one would be so gauche as to recognize a celebrity, and chatted politely until the food came; then, after some silent eating, my father said, abruptly, “This is going to sound very strange, but I just don’t feel lucky about this trip.”

  “Oh?” Sig said, setting down his fork and looking intently at Dad. He
was good at just letting people say what they were thinking.

  “Well, it’s going to be my fifth trip up. It is the first trip on one of your Starbirds, but I don’t think that’s what I’m nervous about. And Xiao Be’s a good sort and I’d trust her with anything. And we’re using a good old proven-out Pigeon to go there. I’m sure I shouldn’t feel this way, but for some strange reason I do; I’m just plain convinced that I’m not coming back. It’s dumb and I want a chance to laugh about it later, but there it is. I never felt this way before, certainly not before the Endeavour mission, and I’m hoping it’s just some weird phase.”

  Sig nodded and said, “Go on.”

  “Well, it’s something for Jason. I took out an additional life insurance policy—just a cheap term life policy that will pay enough, in the event of my death, for one ride into orbit on a Starbird, so that he can go see what it’s like up there. I don’t want him to think of space as that black void that killed his old man, if you see what I mean. I don’t want him to be unnecessarily afraid of anything, and if I were to die on this trip … well. A kid could get ideas. He might not realize at his age that crossing the street is dangerous, too, and you can’t let fear run your life. So I’d like to have him have that ride … and I’m all paid up on the policy, and put all that in the will, but I wanted you to know about it so that if anything happens, you can tell Jason and explain it to him.” Then Chris looked down at his plate and took a couple of large bites; this was probably as near to being embarrassed as he ever came in his life.