Moonrise (59 page)

“It’s not a crazy idea,” Doug said.

“Come on, now …”

“I’ve worked out the numbers, Greg. We can build Clipperships that’ll outperform anything that’s ever flown. And that’s just the beginning. There’s aircraft, automobiles—we can transform the whole world!”

Greg frowned at his half-brother. “Pie in the sky. Nothing but pipedreams.”

“Look at the numbers!” Doug urged. “I can bring them up on your computer.”

“I’m sure you can put numbers on a screen that say anything you want them to say,” Greg replied acidly. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to get as crazy as you are.”

“It’s not crazy!”

“Operation Shoelace,” Greg sneered.

Doug jolted to his feet and strode up to the curving desk. Greg had to look up at his younger half-brother, leaning both fists on the desktop menacingly.

“Operation Bootstrap will not only save Moonbase, Greg,” Doug said, as calm and implacable as a brick wall, “it’ll make Masterson Aerospace the most powerful corporation on Earth.”

“Sit down,” Greg snapped.

Doug pulled up the nearest webbed chair and sat in it.

“Now listen to the realities,” Greg said, tapping a fingernail on his desktop.

Doug smiled slightly. “Okay, I’m listening.”

“I’ve spent the past six months searching for a way to keep this base afloat—”

“Operation Bootstrap is the way to do it!”

“All that you’ll accomplish,” Greg countered annoyedly, “is to push Moonbase into the red deeper and faster. It’s nonsense! Absolute nonsense!”

“But it’s not—”

“For chrissake, Doug, we can’t even get the mass driver finished!”

“I know that.”

“It’s taking every bit of energy and manpower that I can spare. I’ve got to get the mass driver built and still show a profit every quarter. Do you know how tough that is? Do you have any idea of the pressures I’m under?”

“Okay,” Doug said, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Forget everything I just said, then.”

“Good.”

“But we’ve got to do Operation Bootstrap if we’re going to keep Moonbase alive.”

“Moonbase is a continuing drain on the corporation’s finances.”

“Greg, this isn’t about money! It’s much more—”

“Don’t be childish,” Greg snapped. “It’s always about money. There isn’t anything else.”

“But—”

“But nothing! If I don’t show a profit the board will shut us down, just like that.” Greg snapped his fingers. “Is that what you want?”

“No,” said Doug quietly. “But it’s what you want, isn’t it?”

Greg stared at him.

“You didn’t take the directorship here to save us, Greg. You came up here to kill Moonbase.”

Doug saw his brother flinch at the word “kill.” I shouldn’t have said it, he told himself. But it’s too late now.

“Moonbase is Mom’s pet project,” Greg said slowly, his voice low and trembling. “She’s been nursing it along for
more than twenty years now. But there’s no rationale to keep it going. It’s a drain on the corporation.”

With a shake of his head, Doug replied, “There’s more involved here than the quarterly profit-and-loss statement, Greg.”

“You
still
don’t see—”

“No,
you
don’t see,” Doug said, raising his voice slightly. “Moonbase has been tottering on the brink of extinction ever since it started. I know that. I also know that if we’re limited to supplying raw materials for the orbital factories we’ll always be on the ragged edge. Always!”

“What do you mean, limited?”

“We’ve got to expand our operations! We’ve got to make ourselves self-sufficient and move beyond just being a mining operation. Being self-sufficient means more than just having enough water to go around, Greg. We’ve got to be able to manufacture everything we need, right here at Moonbase, without needing imports from Earthside.”

“In your dreams,” Greg muttered.

“We can do it! I know we can! But we’ve got to start now. We’ve all got to work together on this.”

Is he really that naïve, Greg wondered, or is he just trying to manipulate me?

Taking a deep breath and sitting up straighter, Greg said firmly, “When my term here is over, I’m going to recommend to the board that Moonbase be shut down.”

“But we can turn things around,” Doug urged.

Exasperated, Greg burst out, “Do you have any idea of what you’d need to mine an asteroid? This isn’t some game! Get real!”

Strangely, instead of getting angry, Doug smiled. “Greg, I’ve calculated every detail of the job. I’ve run it through our logistics and engineering programs. I can even tell you the exact date on which we’ll make rendezvous with 2015-eta.”

“With what?”

“That’s the best asteroid for our purposes. When you trade off its nearest-approach distance against the eccentricity and inclination of its orbit—”

Doug blathered on about the asteroid while Greg sat, seething. I didn’t want Mom here, he reminded himself, because
she’d side with him and not me. I wanted to confront him face-to-face, all by ourselves. But now he’s pulling out all this technical garbage to show how much more he knows than I do.

“Hold it!” Greg snapped.

Doug stopped in mid-sentence.

“Now listen to this and believe it: Nothing new is getting started at this base. I’m willing to let the mass driver job continue, but that’s just because we might be able to sell the facility to the Japanese once it’s finished.”

“Sell it?”

“Or sell the know-how. Yamagata could buy the nanobugs and build their own mass driver for themselves.”

“Maybe Yamagata will want to buy Moonbase,” Doug thought aloud. “The whole base.”

“Maybe,” Greg agreed, with a cold smile. “I hadn’t thought of that possibility. They just might be fanatic enough.”

“But otherwise you’ll shut down Moonbase.”

“What choice do we have? The U.N.’s nanotech treaty will wipe out the base anyway.”

“So the deal with Kiribati is just a fake?” Doug asked.

“I’ll take care of the Kiribati deal. You don’t have to worry about it.”

“You’re just doing it to keep Mom happy.”

“I’m doing it,” Greg said icily, “so that we’ll have a place to continue nanotech work, despite the U.N. treaty.” Before Doug could reply he added, “We don’t need Moonbase or even space stations to use nanotechnology. I can make Kiribati a very wealthy nation, using nanotechnology.”

“If the U.N. doesn’t pressure them into quitting,” Doug said, “or the New Morality doesn’t bomb the islands.”

Greg glared at him.

“So you’re really going to shut down Moonbase,” said Doug.

“That’s right. And you can run to Mom and tell her all about it. I don’t care. My mind’s made up.”

“You’re making a mistake, Greg. A horrible mistake.”

Raising his voice nearly to a shout, Greg insisted, “Doug, I won’t have it! Stop this crap here and now! Moonbase is history! It’s dead!”

Doug looked shocked. For the first time since he’d sauntered into the office, he looked upset, almost fearful. Greg nodded, satisfied. That wiped the self-satisfied smile off his face.

“I’ve made my decision and that’s it,” Greg said. “Moonbase is history and there’s nothing you or Mom or anyone else can do to save it.”

Doug studied his older brother’s face for several silent moments. There’s no sense arguing with him, he realized. His mind’s made up. He’s in no mood to consider the facts.

“All right.” Slowly, Doug got up from the web chair. “You’re the boss.”

Greg’s smile widened slightly. “I’m glad you understand that.”

Doug walked to the door. He knew he shouldn’t, but he turned back and said, “But if Moonbase is dead, it’s because you’ve murdered it.”

Greg wanted to scream at the impudent young snot, but for just a flash of a second he thought he saw Paul Stavenger standing at the door and not his son. Looking at him accusingly. Greg blinked and it was Doug again. With the same accusing stare.

Before Greg could reply, Doug opened the door and stepped through.

“It’s always darkest just before the dawn,” Doug muttered to himself. It didn’t cheer him one bit.

Surprised and stung by Greg’s stubborn refusal to listen to reason, Doug did what he often did when he felt troubled. He went to the main airlock, pulled on a space suit, and went out for a walk on the crater floor.

The Sun was down; dawn would not come for another several hours, but it was never truly dark at Alphonsus’s latitude. The Earth hung up in the sky, glowing warm and bright, deep blue oceans and swirls of clean white clouds. Doug saw that Earth was nearly at its full phase. He could clearly see the southwestern U.S. desert and the cloud-shaded California coast. On the other side of the Pacific the tight spiral of a powerful typhoon was approaching the Philippines.

Greg’s acting like he’s brain-dead, Doug told himself. He’s
made up his mind and he doesn’t want to be bothered with the facts.

A tractor trundled past him, kicking up dust.

“Need a lift?” Doug heard in his helmet earphones.

“Thanks, no.”

The tractor lumbered past him, on its way out to the mass driver site. Doug walked slowly in that direction, thinking that up until a few months ago you could walk almost anywhere you wanted to out here on the crater floor and be happily alone. Except for the rocket port, of course, but you could avoid that easily enough if you wanted to.

Not anymore, he saw. The mass driver project was turning this part of the crater floor into a busy, bustling conglomeration of tractors and nanotech crews in dust-spattered spacesuits.

The mass driver. An electric catapult more than two miles long that accelerates packets of lunar ore to more than a hundred gees in a few seconds. With luck, they’ll finish it just in time to close down the whole base.

Tractors with bulldozer blades on their fronts were smoothing a road between the main airlock and the mass driver site, scraping aside the dark top layer of the regolith to reveal the bright, new-looking stuff beneath. Doug followed the churned-up turmoil of their tracks until he could clearly see the driver itself rising from the dusty, pockmarked ground like a low metal finger pointed at the horizon.

They were having trouble with the nanomachines, Doug knew. Not enough iron in the regolith to process into the structural steel they needed. And every atom imported from Earth raised hell with Greg’s quarterly profit-and-loss figures.

What a waste, Doug thought sadly. Finish the job so we can sell it to Yamagata. What would the men and women working on this mass driver think if I told them Greg’s going to close the base? That all their work is for nothing. That the best they can hope for is to sell the fruit of their labor to Yamagata.

It’s not right, he knew. It’s just not right. We ought to be building for the future, reaching out to the asteroids, the other planets, eventually to the stars. Not retreating, not slinking back to Earth as if we can’t meet the challenges out here.

Briefly Doug wondered what it’d be like to be launched
off the Moon by the mass driver. A hundred gees. He laughed to himself. In the first second you’d be smeared into a thin bloody pulp. Take the nice slow rocket; it’s safer.

He could see the driver clearly now, its dark metal bulk marching straight as an arrow off into the distance while machines and spacesuited figures crawled over and around it like mechanical acolytes at some vast alien altar.

Greg doesn’t have the vision, Doug knew. He just doesn’t see the future at all. To him, tomorrow’s just like today. He’s making the deal with Kiribati so the corporation can become more profitable by using nanotechnology on Earth. He doesn’t even see the forces down there that’ll try to crush him and nanotechnology, together.

Okay, Doug said to himself. Do you see the future? Are you so dead certain that you know what’s right?

He answered himself immediately. Yes. I know what we’ve got to do. I can see the path the human race has to take. Grow or die. It’s that simple, that stark. If we don’t grow beyond the confines of Earth, we’re going to sink into an overcrowded, overpolluted fishbowl of a world without freedom, without hope, a world of poverty and despair and global dictatorship.

As he trudged along the dusty crater floor, Doug tapped a gloved finger into the palm of his other hand, ticking off the points he wanted to make.

The mass driver’s important. It can lower our launch costs and make us profitable. But only if the factories in Earth orbit can build products that we can sell.

We’ve got to get out to that asteroid. We’ve got to show them that we can make Clipperships of diamond and revolutionize the aerospace industry. More than that, we’ll be producing a product with nanotechnology that everyone on Earth will want. We’ll be striking a blow against the nanoluddites and the New Morality. And even more than
that,
we’ll be moving Moonbase from a mining operation to a manufacturing center. From a marginal town to a growing city. That’s the most important thing.

That’s what we’ve got to do! We’ve got to! And we’ve got less than six months to do it.

Doug stared off into the dark endless sky. I can’t let Greg shut down Moonbase. I’ve got to get Operation Bootstrap
going despite him. Behind his back, over his head, any way I can. We’ve got to push Operation Bootstrap whether Greg likes it or not.

But how? How can I mobilize the people here when Greg’s dead set against it? How can I move us toward the asteroid mining effort if the base director won’t permit anyone to work on the program? It’ll be a direct challenge to Greg, almost a mutiny.

Can I really fight him? Mom wants us to work together, but Greg doesn’t want that. He just doesn’t see what we have to do. He doesn’t have the vision. He’s acting as if he’s still sitting in Savannah or New York. That’s where his mind is. That’s where his attitudes are.

Doug turned away from the busy work scene stretching out along the miles-long track of the mass driver, turned his back to all that and looked across the emptiness of the pockmarked crater floor toward the softly rounded old mountains of the ringwall.

“It’s always darkest before the dawn,” he repeated to himself. Scant consolation, he thought.

It certainly was dark out there. With the Earth behind him, the airless sky looked black as infinity, specked here and there by a few stars bright enough to see through the heavy tinting of his helmet visor.