Back to the Moon (3 page)

Jack ignored the comment. He didn't want to get off into a discussion of WET. The acronym stood for the World Energy Treaty, a United Nations agreement that had been drafted after the breeder reactor disaster in Sorkiyov, Russia. Hundreds of Russians had died, thousands more were going to get cancer, livestock devastated by the score, trees, grass, everything contaminated and dying. An antinuclear frenzy had swept the planet. WET banned all “power plants utilizing fissile and radioactive materials.” The treaty had been ratified by every country in the world except France and the United States. President Edwards had signed WET but the Senate, as yet, hadn't approved it.

Jack had known Perlman for five years. The physicist had just turned up on Cedar Key one day, introduced himself in Jack's office, and tried to start an argument. “Do you know what the most important product of our civilization is?” he had demanded.

“No, Dr. Perlman,” Jack had replied, amused, “what is the most important product?”

Perlman had raised his finger, his habit when he pontificated. “It's not cars, not television sets, not even computers. It's energy! Without energy Western civilization would not exist. A good portion of the earth—the so-called Third World—struggles in misery and degradation. Those poor people think what they need is money, or a different political or economic system, to rise up out of their poverty, but what they really need is energy!”

To Perlman's disappointment Jack had not seen fit to argue. “Okay, Doc. Energy. What does that have to do with me?”

Perlman had looked out Jack's office window, to the ocean tide that lapped the nearby shore. “Mr. Medaris, did you know that in a gallon of seawater there is the equivalent energy content of three hundred gallons of gasoline? That's because ordinary water contains deuterium—heavy hydrogen. If deuterium is fused with an isotope known as helium-3, the result is nearly limitless energy. Did you know that?”

Jack remembered Perlman spreading his hands in that effusive way he would come to know so well. “I have come up with a way to use inertial confinement of a quantity of deuterium and helium-3, subject it to the heat and pressure of a rather large laser beam, and release all that energy. Fusion, Jack. Energy from fusion is within my grasp.”

Energy from fusion: the commercial application of the same physics as the sun and the hydrogen bomb. It had been the dream of scientists, engineers, and researchers for six decades. The little man had leaned forward. “But I need help, Jack. You are my only hope!”

Sally Littleton caught Jack's eye, releasing him from his reflections. Her eyebrows were raised. She was ready to complete the final test. Jack nodded and his lead
Prometheus
engineer began to call out the next steps.

“If it fails...” Perlman worried.

“It's not going to fail.”

“There's so little time.”

“There's plenty of time. Everything I read says the Senate won't pass WET until July. That's six months away. When we finish tonight, we'll disassemble
Prometheus,
ship him off to Shiharakota. The Indians have already mounted our dog engine to their
Shiva
launcher. Once this payload is stacked, we launch. We'll have your dirt back to you in three weeks.”

“It isn't dirt,” Perlman grunted, ever sensitive. He could call it that but he didn't like anybody else doing it.

Jack nodded. “Fire beads, then.”

“And it's not quite true that I will have it three weeks after launch.” Perlman clucked. “It'll still be on a ship.”

Jack had explained it to the physicist a half-dozen times. “We could speed things up if we had the freighter dock in Hawaii, lease a jet there. Probably save you a week.”

“I'll ask my benefactors,” Perlman said doubtfully.

Jack shrugged. It was ever thus, even with a group of heavy-hitting investors like the January Group. Jack assumed at least one of the members of the organization was a bean counter, worrying about spending thousands when they'd already spent millions—hundreds of millions, in fact—to build Perlman's pilot fusion plant in Montana. “Penny wise and pound foolish, eh, Doc?” Jack gently gibed.

“The men and women of the January Group are cautious with their money in their own audacious way,” Perlman answered stiffly. “Thank the good Lord for them or I'd not be as far as I am. You wouldn't either.”

“Do you even know who they are, Isaac? I know you work through their attorney.”

“I do not,” he said primly. “It is none of my business. But I've been told they are the movers and shakers in this country.”

Jack looked Perlman over. “You haven't told them about me, have you?”

“You asked me not to.”

“You didn't answer my question.”

Perlman changed the subject, not fooling Jack for a moment. “I still can't believe WET will make fusion energy a crime. It will all be done in the name of the children, of course—what reckless activity in the last decade hasn't? And what is the world going to do for energy? Keep burning fossil fuel! Oil and coal, Jack! Can you imagine the pollution? The degradation to the environment? My technology is clean, cheap, and limitless!”

Sally gave Jack a thumbs-up on the sensor readings, and also a pert smile. She was a handsome woman, that Sally. Perlman was still rattling on, extolling the advantages of his technology. “Doc, everybody's going to see that,” Jack interrupted. “We've still got time. You'll get your dirt—fire beads—in a month or so and you'll be able to fire up your plant, show it to the media, demonstrate how safe it is too. After that I guarantee you they'll make an exception in WET for fusion.”

Perlman shook his head. “I don't want that damned treaty modified. I want it killed. If we approve it, we might as well pack it in. In fifty years, maybe less, this tired old polluted planet is going to go dark.”

“We're doing the best we can, Doc.”

Perlman was into it. He stabbed his index finger at the roof. “I don't care about fission energy, Jack. They can shut down every nuclear reactor in the world and I wouldn't give a flying fig. But fusion is not fission.”

Jack took a deep breath. “You told them about me, didn't you?”

Perlman slowly lowered his hand. “I had to. The January Group wasn't going to give me seventy million dollars to hire someone they didn't know.”

Jack looked at Perlman. “What did they say? I'm sure they dug up everything they could find on me.”

“Nothing.” When he saw Jack's doubtful expression, he added: “I swear, Jack. They cut the check within two weeks after I told them your plan.”

Sally had rolled a computer up to
Prometheus,
plugged it into an interface panel. A graphic display, a thick red horizontal line on a blue background, formed on the monitor. “Ascent stage sim, plus ten,” she announced, keying in the parameters of the final stage of the mission.

“Reentry activation, nominal readout,” Virgil Judd said, watching the numbers come up on the computer. Judd had been a Cape Ape, laid off by the decimation of the workforce there over the last two years. He was a big, gentle man with a lovely wife and a very sick daughter suffering from the advanced stages of cystic fibrosis. Jack had done everything he could to help Virgil, including arranging for tests at the Mayo Clinic.
We happy few.

“Vector all balls, deceleration nominal,” Virgil said. Then, “Bingo deceleration. Switching to reentry mode.”

A few minutes later another layer of numbers slid across the computer screen. “Simulating reentry, checking azimuth, bingo envelope,” Sally said. “Readouts on volume.” The music, provided by a CD player outside and piped in through speakers in the four corners of the bay, switched to Orff's
Carmine Burana,
placing a triumphant caste on the already exciting moment. “Nominal targeting.
Prometheus
has landed,” she concluded, peering at the screen. She looked over at Medaris, her eyes twinkling with excitement. “On the money, Jack.
Prometheus
is ready to rocket and roll!”

Jack joined in the spontaneous applause of the engineers, muffled by their latex gloves. He approached the moon miner, looked over the numbers still running down the computer screen. “Let's pack him up, children. Our boy is ready to go to India.” His people crowded in, clapping him and each other on the back. Virgil picked a protesting Perlman up bodily and waltzed him around the room. The CD switched to “Jailhouse Rock.” The dozen engineers in the room joined them in an impromptu shag.
Prometheus
seemed to be thoughtfully watching.

It was several hours later, well past midnight, when Jack finally got to his office to catch up on some paperwork. Virgil was the only other person still in the plant, detailed to finish the inventory of
Prometheus
components, and to initial out the procedures manuals. Since there were only thirty full-time employees at MEC, everyone pulled double, even triple, duty. Jack scanned his desk, determined to make a dent in the piled-up documents, mostly purchase orders for the myriad of hardware required to build such an exacting machine as
Prometheus.
He walked over to the interior window in his office that looked down into the clean room and admired the robotic spacecraft, resting in a cone of light from an overhead lamp. He especially admired the arm with the claw. That had been his addition to the spec. Perlman had asked him about it and Jack had explained that
Prometheus
might need to move a few rocks to get at the fire beads at Shorty Crater. It was an explanation that could be defended but it wasn't its real purpose. That purpose he kept to himself.

Virgil spotted Jack and walked to the squawk box. “Hey, boss, I'm nearly finished down here. How about you?”

Jack looked over his shoulder at the purchase orders and gave in to his fatigue. They could wait until the morning. “Yeah, Virg. I'm ready to pull the plug too. Go ahead. I'll lock up.” Virgil, Jack knew, wanted to know who was going to be the last out of the building. The MEC burglar alarm system was cranky, requiring a complicated code to be entered into a box at the exterior door and again at the parking lot gate. It was a time consuming process and about half the time it didn't take and had to be reset and reentered. Everybody hated it. The system had been installed, the cheapest available, when MEC first moved into the facility. Jack depended, more than anything, on the remoteness of the site to protect the company. Trooper Buck, the Cedar Key constable, made routine swing-bys during the few hours the plant was unoccupied at night. Still, having a burglar alarm that might not even work was foolish and Jack knew it. One of the purchase orders on his desk was for a new security system, but there had just been so much to do.

“See you tomorrow, boss,” Virgil called.

“Okay, Virg. I'm right behind you.”

Jack took a moment to savor
Prometheus,
but memories of his wife flooded him as they often did when he was tired. Looking out over the moon miner reminded him of the time when he had found Kate in their mountain-home sunroom, pensively gazing down on the city of Huntsville and, on the distant horizon, the big rocket test stands of Marshall Space Flight Center. When he'd asked her what she was thinking, she had said, “Jack, if I die, will you forget how much I love you?” He hadn't known what to say. It was such a preposterous idea. She was younger than he, the very picture of health. “Please tell me you won't ever forget.” He'd knelt before her, taken her hands, and promised. They'd ended up making love, passionately clinging to each other as if they only had a few hours left together rather than a lifetime. Five months later she and their unborn child were dead. NASA had determined that it had been his arrogance that had killed them. Soon after, he had resigned and left the agency. Ever since, it had seemed that he lived in a different world, one of shadows and pain.

Jack shuddered, pushed away the memory that was beginning to creep into his thoughts, of the bitter night on the test stand, when he had lost all that he loved. What good did it do to think of it now? A lump in his throat, Jack turned from the window, found his briefcase, and was nearly through the door when the telephone rang. It was Sally Littleton, calling from what sounded in the background like a party. “We're getting down here at the Pelican, Jack,” Sally yelled over the din. “You got to come on by and live a little, boy. You deserve it.”

He felt drained. “It's been a long day, Sally.”

“Jack Medaris, you get on over here. Isn't that right, everybody?” Jack heard a chorus of shouted agreement in the background. Sally came back on. “Your people are celebrating and they want you with them!”

Jack looked at
Prometheus,
saw his own reflection in the window. He had been a solitary man for years. He was lonely. There would never be, couldn't ever be, another Kate. Yet he needed the touch and the warmth of a woman in his arms, her breath in his ear, her perfume.. . . ”All right, Sally,” he said quietly. “Tell them I'm on my way.”

“I'll be waiting, Jack,” she replied with the emphasis on
I.

Jack clumped down the wooden steps of the old hangar, set the alarm on the clean room, then moved through the two outer dressing chambers. The old hangar was plunged into darkness except for an emergency light mounted above the main door. He went outside, turning to set the exterior alarm. Compared to the crisp, sanitized air in the plant, the breeze coming off the lapping ocean nearby was rich, heady. Jack took a deep breath. He loved Cedar Key, a bountiful treasure of nature. He had chosen the remote Florida island as the site for his plant because of its isolation. He could hear in the distance the plaintive call of a loon. The Key was a nature preserve, only the old airport where he'd built his company zoned for industrial commerce. Bird watchers the world over came to the island. Fishermen crowded in for saltwater fishing at its best, at all times of the year. A single narrow bridge was all that connected Cedar Key to the Florida mainland.