Encounter With Tiber Read online

  Sig nodded. “Of course I’ll carry out your wishes in this matter. I’m sure you know Jason’s college and so forth are taken care of, too—one of the advantages of my having this pile of money is that I can use it for things like that. But let’s not bury you before you’re dead; perhaps your premonition is only a premonition, without any foundation at all.”

  “I can hope so,” Chris said. “And to tell you the truth, it’s a bizarre experience for me; I’ve never felt anything like it before and I’ve always prided myself on my rationality.”

  Sig nodded, topped up the wineglass for both of them, and said, “Well, if I may venture a thought—?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think you know I’m about as cold-blooded a businessman as they make. I have to be—if you’re in a visionary-game like space exploitation, you have to think in terms of justifying each little step. The thing that used to kill a lot of start-up space ventures was that they were trying to launch some kind of ‘Universal Space Lines with Service to Six Planets Daily,’ right off the bat, or they had figured out something that they were sure people would pay for and they thought all they’d have to do was offer it. But figuring out how to stay in business once you’ve got decent suppliers and an adequate customer base—that’s always the easy part. Once a business is taking in more than it has to pay out, week to week or year to year, all you have to do is maintain. What’s hard is to get to that point.

  “And speaking of getting to the point, listen to me. Babbling on. All I meant to say was, I have to be very rational and think pretty hard about the micro-level things, what we have to do this week to be where we want to be in a year, that sort of stuff. And I have hunches all the time and I never ignore them. I don’t always follow them—a lot of times I dismiss them—but I never ignore them. I give them my thought and attention and decide to follow them or dismiss them. Figure it this way, Dr. Terence: maybe you don’t always remember everything you know. Maybe there’s a thing or two bothering the back of your head that you won’t or can’t say to yourself. So since it can’t come to you in words, it sends you a hunch. That can be like an inside tip from your subconscious. You have to at least look at it. So, no, I don’t think there’s anything silly about your taking your hunches seriously.”

  Chris sipped the wine and said, “Uh—and these hunches of yours—how often are they right?”

  “Oh, about what you’d expect from chance,” Sig said, grinning. “But the ones I follow are right more often. Seriously, I think you’re wise to pay attention to it, and I think if this is important to you, then by god I’ll make sure that Jason gets that opportunity. You could have just asked, you know, and I might’ve just done it anyway, no charge and so forth. Any son of any wife of mine who needs a ride into space to get his confidence back …”

  Chris looked down and said, “Um, well, you can imagine I wouldn’t have liked coming here cap in hand. And besides it’s a cheap thing to do—fifty grand of coverage for a couple of years, just to cover an unlikely accident in space, isn’t all that expensive. I could probably have gotten it cheaper by taking out a bet with a bookie that I was going to die.”

  “And bookies are less hassle than insurance companies,” Sig agreed, “not to mention that when they don’t pay, they lose business, unlike the insurance companies. Still and all, I’d have to say that … hmm. Tell you what. I’ll make you a bet: if you come back alive, you let me chip in toward Jason’s maintenance while he’s with you, like I’ve always wanted to do. Not to spoil him, but if he wants to try a sport or take lessons in something, a little extra so it doesn’t come out of your life. And if you don’t, I’ll not only send Jason to space to get a taste of it, I’ll also start insuring all our astronauts on the same terms: if they die out there, a free ride for their kids.”

  Chris laughed. “Kind of a Gomez Addams bet, isn’t it? If you win, you pay more money, and if you lose, you pay more money.”

  “Ah, but it’s a bet because I’d a lot rather buy Jason a hockey stick or piano lessons than I would help him get over your death. I still have one side that I hope wins.”

  Chris nodded. “Well, call it a bet, then. I’ll take the terms. How’s he doing up here, anyway? His grades are looking better.”

  “We don’t have as many distractions—or rather, we don’t have any we can safely let him get into. The poor kid is probably bored. Unfortunately, the kind of excitement we have up here is not what I want for him.”

  “Me either,” Chris agreed. “Is he making friends?”

  “In his own way. Not like you or his mother would make friends, a roomful at a time. But enough for Jason.”

  They chatted about me for a couple of hours, according to Sig, but he never talked much about the particulars. I’ve had a life full of miracles, I guess you could say, but there’s one that few people would notice: my father, who thought business was dirty and grubby when it wasn’t just plain crooked, and my mother’s husband, who thought of science as an amusing hobby for people who couldn’t do anything serious, were perfectly capable of sitting down with each other over lunch and a couple of drinks and making sure that I was getting what I needed. I guess things like that aren’t in most people’s definition of love. They’re in mine, though.

  It’s been a strange feature of the age of spaceflight that two successful crewed launches in a row seems to make everyone assume that spaceflight is perfectly safe and routine—until the next disaster. The crew for the Tiber Base stayover expedition (officially called “Tiber Two”) was in danger for a long time before the accident actually happened, just because they were in space and riding on rockets, but because things went so smoothly, there was little news coverage. I have watched the little bit of film of my smiling father getting into the Starbird, as mission commander; I have seen the way that he and Xiao Be worked together, and it looks flawless to me.

  Whatever the reality, the Starbird, assisted off the pad by a Starbooster, made a perfectly uneventful journey to ISS, which was being used as a marshaling point because with its highly inclined orbit it was relatively easy to work into a polar approach to the Moon.

  The Pigeons for this mission were known universally as Pigeon Racks, because they flew lying on their sides, supported in a steel framework which was fitted with thrusters, with a Starbird drop tank filled with hydrogen in the same framework directly behind them. It made them ungainly looking, but it also gave them a major advantage for this mission: unmanned versions could be parked permanently on the Moon’s surface, and once their liquid hydrogen was drained off, they could easily be modified into surface habitats, living quarters for the Moon. They were awkward and ungainly to watch in flight—like metal squids shooting backward through space—but they did the job.

  The transfer to the Pigeon Rack at ISS took only a few hours; a returning pilot from ISS would then take the Starbird back to base. Less than ten hours after the launch from Earth, the Tiber Two crew were given the go-ahead for translunar injection, and with a burst of fire from the main engine that squatted between the steel legs of the platform, sticking sideways from the HT, the Pigeon Rack was on its way to the Moon.

  It took about three days, just as it always did; as long as we were using chemical rockets, the efficient thing to do was a hard boost to get out of Earth orbit at a point where instead of falling on around the curve of the Earth, as it had been doing in LEO, the ship would instead be on a high trajectory, rising away from the Earth until, as it slowed from Earth’s pull behind it, it reached a point where it would fall toward the Moon and another deceleration thrust would slow it into orbit around the Moon. The time taken for those long falls would be three days in all, and until you had an engine that could boost you the whole way—a solar-electric or nuclear-electric rocket—the length of those falls would determine your schedule.

  There were occasional news reports featuring interviews with the crew of the Pigeon Rack, but not many, and they played only on the more obscure channels. There had been a great deal
of excitement, of course, when Tiber One had explored the South Pole Base, but now that everyone had seen all the pictures of dead Tiberians and of the still, silent equipment that had sat there for millennia, and then of the crew crawling all over the site looking for the Encyclopedia, the viewers, in their usual way, had decided that enough was enough. We could call them again when we brought back the Encyclopedia and held the parade.

  So I don’t know a great deal about how Dad spent those days; the official reports were kind of terse and dry, the news reports scanty, and nothing much got said in them. Peter said it was a fairly happy crew, “as much as could be expected given that our pilot, while a great person, was constantly being spied on by a fellow who never talked,” he added. “Chris and I had gotten to like Xiao Be a lot, you know, while we were in China—her approach to things worked so well with our own—but as soon as Jiang was around she’d clam up.”

  So I imagine that on the long trip out they mostly did what the mission plan called for them to do: conducted a few small-scale experiments that one agency or another had dreamed up, ran some drills, and practiced their maneuvers on simulators.

  Chris and Xiao Be would be on the moon for some months. Peter and Jiang were to return on the next ship, but there was already another Chinese astronaut, suspiciously short on technical qualifications or duties, slated to arrive on that one. The other powers might fume, but it was the deal they had been able to get. As far as they could tell, the Chinese intention was only to maintain one political officer at all times on the Moon, keeping an eye on their nationals and making sure that their allies didn’t steal anything. If you looked at it that way, at least the percentage of deadheaders would go down over time.

  At last, after taking one setting-up orbit for position that incidentally let them sail over both poles of the Moon, Xiao Be fired the main engine and brought the Pigeon Rack slowly down to the landing site, in a broken crater two kilometers from Tiber Base. On the airless world, the descent was simply a fall until it was time to power up the engine, and then a slow, gentle ride down on the rocket until finally they hovered for a split instant on their exhaust before the metal feet settled onto the Moon, only about sixty meters from the scoured-bare spot where the first expedition had landed and departed.

  That triggered a real flurry of activity; as soon as they had landed, they suited up, drained the air from the Pigeon capsule into storage, opened the EVA hatch on its upper surface, and climbed out onto the steel skeleton that surrounded the ship, and from there down to the lunar surface.

  In one of his calls to me, Dad told me there was a funny sense of completion he got at that moment. The place where they had landed was invisible forever to the Earth, down in the crater, and thus they could not see Earth, either. For the first time, what he had dreamed of since he was a small boy had happened: his boots were planted on the soil of another world, and when he looked up he saw, not home, but only stars. He might have been anywhere in the universe at that moment, for every galaxy must be full of small, stony, airless worlds, and for some reason I never really understood, that was important to him.

  They found that the four other steel frameworks that dotted the small plain had landed as they were supposed to and contained the appropriate things in their cargo pods, which were simply Pigeons with the life-support systems pulled out to make more room for cargo. (Because they were never intended to fly back, these were “double Pigeon Racks”—two Pigeons with a DT tank between them graced each steel frame.) The slightly more distant fifth framework, which was the emergency return lander that had been brought there under robot control before anything else came, also checked out as it was supposed to, as the first expedition had confirmed. “Well,” Chris said, “We’ve still got two hours left on our EVA time, and we’ve accomplished everything we were supposed to do—confirming that it’s all here. Would anyone like to return to the Pigeon via Tiber Base?”

  Jiang spoke, which was so rare that everyone jumped a little when they heard his voice in their helmet radios. “We are not authorized for such an expedition.”

  “I can get us authorized in about ten, I think,” Chris pointed out. “It’ll get them a little news coverage which they haven’t had for a while, and it will give us the chance to do some exploring before we settle into routine.”

  “I would like to see Tiber Base myself,” Peter said, backing Chris.

  “You won’t get authorization if I protest, and I will,” Jiang said. “We are here to find the Encyclopedia, and then get off this godforsaken rock. If we are ahead of schedule at the moment, then we need to use that time to drain the HT on robot lander two and move the racks into it to create a habitat. It’s clearly stated in the manual of procedures and policies that time gained against the schedule should always be maintained and used to accelerate the working process—not for sight-seeing.”

  Chris shrugged—not that anyone could tell, he knew, in his pressure suit, but old habits are hard to break. He looked from one space traveler to another: Peter standing with his arms wrapped in front of himself, Xiao Be carefully neutral, and Jiang with arms slightly akimbo and feet wide and planted, as if daring Chris to defy him.

  The International Commission had ordered them to cooperate. NASA had ordered Chris not to let the Chinese run the show. And Chris had long ago decided that he didn’t like Jiang. So he said, very calmly, “Well, if we’ve invoked the rules and procedures, it would seem to me that the EVA mission is completed, and we need to radio home for further instructions. And I am required not to compromise your rest. The obvious thing to do is to return to the Pigeon, get a meal and a scrub, and radio Mission Control for further instructions.”

  “But—” Jiang’s protest died in his ears as Chris turned and headed back toward their lander. He didn’t listen for more, but kept moving in light, easy bounds, something like a kangaroo and a bit like a squirrel. Around him the lunar surface was a dim gray, lit only by starlight and by reflected Earthshine and sunlight from the bright distant peaks. He knew without looking that Peter would be right behind him, but he was pleased to see Xiao Be come up on his right; Jiang would have no choice but to follow.

  The next work period was mostly spent outside. They opened the DT space and let the little puff of hydrogen vanish from it, leaving it clean and dry inside. Next they unloaded the pressurized rover, with its awkward-looking crane on the back end for construction work and various other jobs (most importantly, getting the Encyclopedia into a lander). It had to come out via the nose hatch in one of the cargo Pigeons, and that meant it came out in several large pieces which they then had to assemble, working with thick-gloved hands that, despite all their practice, fumbled the tools and often struggled to get things into their right places.

  With the crane they could start moving the racks—the internal structures—into the DT that was to become their permanent home at moonbase. As they shoved a load of material in through the side hatch that they had opened, Peter said to Chris, “You start to wonder if the whole universe is going to be covered with DTs. This one, four more on the other robot landers, one on ours, one at the International Space Station, your country is putting up another one next year in orbit, and then one at the L1 point, and … well, there will be a lot of them.”

  “Mobile homes of space,” Chris agreed. “It’s even about the same size as a single-wide mobile home with one extra room. Not elegant, but we can afford them—even if they do kind of make everywhere look alike after a while.”

  “Still,” Xiao Be pointed out, “this one will have a genuine bathroom. I don’t suppose you gentlemen will refuse to use that for aesthetic reasons?”

  As each rack was loaded in and bolted into place, the interior looked less and less like an old pressure tank and more and more like home. When they had gotten all the racks into place and all the materials that were to be unpacked inside, they finally replaced the three hatches with Plexiglas windows, attached the airlock, and filled it with air. It was at full pressure in ten minutes,
and when it had held pressure for twenty, they gingerly removed their pressure suits and got to work on the job of unpacking. After five hours outside, the first thing they wanted to unpack was the food, and the second thing they wanted was to get the bathroom working. It was late in the shift when they had finally made sure that they would be able to stay in the newly-equipped habitat for the duration of their stay; only then, despite occasional grumbling from Jiang, did Peter get around to setting up the radio and trying to raise Mission Control.

  They came in loud and clear, almost at once. “Tiber Base, we have great news for you. One of our robot rovers has identified a site as the Encyclopedia landing site. And a camera on a polar orbiter satellite has confirmed it. We will be dispatching the Tiber Prize lander under robot control within a few days; as soon as it arrives, we’ll send you after the Encyclopedia.” Then the voice of Mission Control—an old friend who was temporarily out of the astronaut rotation due to minor surgery—added, “Hope you weren’t getting to like the Moon too much, Chris, because chances are you’ll be back here within two weeks.”

  Chris looked out one of the windows they had installed at the sharp, ragged edge of the crater illuminated by brilliant sunlight. Its lines uneroded by air or water, and able to stand at a steeper angle than you ever saw on Earth, lit in the harsh glare of the Sun in perfect relief in that vacuum, the crater wall looked as if it had been made that morning, but it was billions of years old. Beyond it the stars shone with a light steadier than any ever seen on Earth. “To tell you the truth, I was kind of getting to like it up here,” Chris said. “Well, I hope it’s a nice day for a drive when the lander finally gets here.”

  8

  THE MAPS CAME THROUGH the next day, scrolling slowly out of the small fax in the main lunar habitat. Chris and Xiao Be sat down to pore over it. “Well,” he said, “we certainly get to see Tiber Base—we’ll have to drive through there anyway. After that … well, I’m not sure I like doing this with just the radar and optical maps.”