Read The Voices of Heaven Online

Authors: Frederik Pohl

Tags: #Science Fiction, #Space Colonies, #General, #Fiction

The Voices of Heaven (7 page)

BOOK: The Voices of Heaven
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She shrugged. That was even more displeasing; I wondered how much Millenarism was still in the back of her mind. "What I'm looking for, hon, is some kind of meaning. The way life was in the old days, when work meant something, and people got together and had babies and—listen, Barry, don't be shocked, but the other day I even thought of having the contraceptive implant taken out."

That straightened me right up. And that, at last, made her smile. In fact, she laughed out loud. "Oh, hon," she said, "don't be silly. I wasn't serious."

But maybe she was, I thought. And maybe that was my cue to ask the question that had been on the tip of my tongue to ask for weeks now, and maybe I would have. But I didn't get the chance, because just then the factory emergency alarms went off—beepity-beepity-
beeeeep
, over and over again, coming out of every audio point in the Lederman works and community.

 

When you live and work in the Lederman colony that is a sound that freezes your blood. I knew it was only a drill this time—I could be pretty sure of that, because both Alma and I were still alive—but the rules are that you have to act as though the drill is real, and both of us were very faithful in following those rules. We both snapped our pocket screen on and began to search our dedicated bands for data and instructions.

Any operation that's as critical as the antimatter factory at Lederman needs to keep its damage-control procedures up to speed. To make sure of that, the master controls are programmed to invent a simulated emergency at random intervals—they average fifteen or twenty a year—and when those beepers go off every one of us drops whatever he's doing and gets to work trying to deal with whatever that day's simulation had chosen to simulate.

As a fuelmaster crew chief my criticality-zone damage-control job was to make an eyeball inspection of potential danger areas. If I had been in the factory area, I would have grabbed my radiation readers and run to my first checkpoint. Since I wasn't, I simply logged on to the duty chief, Warren Bellick, and watched to make sure he was doing what I would have done.

He was. The beeping had stopped by the time he got there and the computer voice was identifying the problem. It told us that the exercise the computer had devised to entertain us this day was a (make-believe) misalignment of the particle beam, so that antimatter was being formed outside the target area. That wasn't a frighteningly big emergency, even if it had been real instead of something the computer made up to keep us on our toes. But it did mean that every operation everywhere in the complex had to be safed until it was dealt with.

Of course, the real fear we all had to live with is that sometime—anytime, maybe within the next second—there would be a big emergency—say, the magnetic field failing to hold an actual lump of antimatter in position, so that it somehow contacted real matter and blew . . . and thus compromised the containment shells of all the other little nuggets of antimatter, so they all blew at once.

Once in a while the computer decided to give us a really serious problem of that kind, but I never could see the point. If that happened there was no way we could cope with it. That was why all the workings of the factory were on the surface of the Moon, instead of deep down in old lava tubes like the residential sectors—and why the Lederman factory had been sited within the walls of a crater on the Moon's limb in the first place. The hope of the planners was that if the factory ever did blow, the walls would force most of the explosion to go straight up and out into space. "Up" from the factory crater was well away from Earth itself. Thus, a maximum accident would certainly destroy everything inside the walls. That would put a terrible crimp in space travel for lack of fuel for a long time to come, and any people who happened to be inside the crater wall at that moment would become instant plasma. So, I was pretty sure, would most of what was outside the walls, too, no matter what they said. But the accident would be only a frightful catastrophe instead of, well, the Millenarists' yearning dream of the end of the world.

Although just about everything that goes on inside the crater walls is critical, some parts are more critical than others. That makes a difference in people's working conditions. It's only the teams that do the actual insertion of antimatter into the pods that can't afford to have any distraction at all; those rooms are as sterile and concentrated as any surgical operating theater. Most of the other workers at least are allowed to play music, and some of them—in the assembly rooms for the pods themselves, for instance, or the coil-winding rooms for the magnetic containment—even are allowed to have news screens. Not that what they do isn't critical; but after they've finished their work it gets very thoroughly tested before it moves on to the next step, so mistakes can be caught. Where actual antimatter is present, there's no test. It either behaves quietly as it should. Or it doesn't, and that's all she wrote.

Since this time the "emergency" was only a practice alert the check was over in ten minutes, and the beepers were replaced with the gentle drone of the "all clear." By then Warren was already at his last stop, in the launch room. Naturally there was no antimatter there—we don't keep the stuff around; as soon as a pod is filled and ready, it's launched to one of the orbital catchers to wait for its customer—and Warren turned and grinned into the camera. "False alarm, fellows," he told us silent overseers, and blanked off.

By then Alma had been cleared, too. I suppose that I could have gone back to the subject we'd been talking about. But I didn't; and another opportunity to change my life went down the drain.

5

 

 

YOU have frequently referred to this "Lederman antimatter factory," but its exact nature and purpose are not understood, nor is it known why such an apparently dangerous establishment is tolerated. Please explain.

 

Well, all right, but where do I start?

Let's see. You already know that no one lives in the factory itself; when you need to get there—and you really have to need to, because nobody can get inside without a damn good reason—you take the subway through the crater rim from Lederman Town to the works inside.

I think I've also already told you that the lunar antimatter factory is the biggest single industrial complex in the solar system—in the universe, I guess, unless there's some other high-tech race out there somewhere that we just haven't found out about yet. It's big because it has to be big—you can't make antimatter in your hall bedroom. Also, there can be only one installation like the Lederman factory anywhere in the solar system. That's a law. Some people think it's a dumb law, because if we can have one antimatter factory on the Moon, what would be wrong with having a couple of spares somewhere else, even farther from civilization? Well, we probably could. There are only two reasons we don't. One is that the Moon is a good place to get the immense amounts of electrical power the factory needs—I'll tell you about that in a minute. The other reason we don't is that the Congresses are so scared of antimatter that they damn near wanted to close Lederman itself down in the early days. But they couldn't. The human race needs antimatter.

Most of the antimatter we manufacture goes to fuel spaceships, but there are plenty of other customers. The habitats around Jupiter's moons and in the asteroid-mining stations need antimatter, too, for survival; they're too far from the Sun for solar power to give them all the energy they need, and we can sell antimatter to them cheaper, megawatt for megawatt, than nukes or anything else they might consider. It would be nice if we could sell to Earth, too, of course, but of course we can't. Antimatter is not allowed within a thousand kilometers of the outermost reaches of the Earth's atmosphere. For obvious reasons.

The reason we can do it so cheaply is, as I say, that we have our own solar power, which we get in copious amount, from the photovoltaic belt that goes all around the Moon.

I know you don't know what "photovoltaic power" is. Maybe you don't really need to, except that you should understand that electricity is so important to human beings that we're willing to do a lot of damaging things to get it—as you know. Photovoltaics happen to be among the least damaging. What "photovoltaic" means is a way of changing light into electricity. Any kind of light. Sunlight is the best kind of all, because there's so much of it. The way it works, when a particle of light—it's called a "photon"—strikes a photovoltaic cell it knocks an electron loose from one of the atoms in the cell. An electron is a particle of electricity, you see, and when you have enough of them knocked loose you have an electric current.

So that's what the belt around the Moon is for. It's a continuous ribbon of photovoltaic cells that goes completely around the Moon. The belt is not handicapped by a day and night sequence; it girdles the whole Moon. That means half of it is always in direct sunlight.

Why put it on the Moon? Partly to get it as far as possible from nervous neighbors, of course, but also because the Moon has no air. The energy from the Sun doesn't lose anything to Rayleigh scattering or cloudy days. (I know you don't know what Rayleigh scattering is either, but anyway.) And every point on the belt is connected to every other point by the superconductor cables that underlie the photovoltaic belt itself.

The effect is that we can tap all that power at any point. The biggest power draw is at the Lederman antimatter works, where every minute of every day we have several billion megawatts to draw on.

We draw on them pretty heavily, too. We use that power to run the giant accelerator rings that go all around the crater wall; they're a hundred kilometers in circumference. We smash particles into each other and collect the fragments, and the important part of the fragments that we get out of the rings are antimatter. Antiprotons. Which we convert and chill down to solid antihydrogen; and then we package the antihydrogen and ship it out and get rich.

Well—the owners get richest of all, of course. But the people who work there, like me, get paid pretty well, too. Hazard pay, you could call it. After all, if anything went wrong we would be the first ones to go.

The packaging of the antimatter is the hard part—well, one of the hard parts; there aren't any easy ones. Each little lump of antimatter is smaller than the meat of a walnut, but those walnuts have very large shells. The shells have to keep it away from any normal matter, you see, because if any bit of antimatter ever touches any bit of normal matter you get a hell of a big explosion. (These controlled explosions are what make our spaceships run.) So the shells are made up of magnets and vacuum pumps and motors that keep the little nugget of antimatter in suspension; and at the same time they have to be so constructed that the antimatter can be bled off to enter the combustion chambers of the spaceships in just the right measured amounts, with zero leakage at all times. The antimatter is measured in grams, but each shell masses more than six tons.

Do you get the idea that the Lederman factory was big, expensive, complicated and dangerous? Then you've got it right. It is. But it gives us power—and, you know, power is what makes our world go round. We aren't like you.

 

Captain Garold Tscharka wanted to know what the inside of the factory was like, too. I found that out a few days after the drill. I was getting off the shuttle after refueling a Belt transport and he was arriving from Earth, and we met at the Lederman lander pad. We waited for the subway to Lederman Central together. "Well, di Hoa," he said genially, "I've just checked
Corsair
. We'll be loading soon."

"I heard. They must like you in the Budget Congress."

He laughed. "As long as they decided to let the colony live awhile, there wasn't any reason not to finance our supplies fully."

"Ah," I said, admiring the man's brass. I didn't know Tscharka that well at the time, or I wouldn't have been surprised at his ability to turn defeat into triumph. Later on, of course, it was different.

By then we were in the Lederman town station, and when I headed for the cars that went through the crater wall he followed me. "Listen," I said, thinking to spare him embarrassment, "you know you can't go inside the factory."

"Oh, but I can, di Hoa," he said, and proceeded to prove it. When the guards checked our IDs they didn't stop him. In fact, they pinned him with a blue badge, as good as my own.

"But nobody's allowed to enter but trained technicians," I protested.

He gave me a look of good-humored tolerance. "I know that. That's why I've been on Earth taking the course. I'm going to inspect the pods that are ready for loading, and I'm going to stay with you and your crew every minute that you're stowing them on my ship."

"You think we don't know our business?"

"
I
want to know your business too." Then he unbent enough to offer a reason—a lying one, as it turned out, but I had no way of knowing that. "When we get to the colony we're going to have to fuel the short-rangers ourselves, aren't we? I want to make sure we do it right."

It was a plausible explanation, and I let it go at that. By then we were at the main door, and when it opened for us Tscharka looked surprised. "Wait a minute, di Hoa. Aren't we going to put spacesuits on?"

"Why would we do that?"

"Don't you keep the area in vacuum? In case some air should penetrate the pods?"

"Oh, right," I said, trying not to laugh; his course obviously hadn't taught him
everything
. I shook my head. "There's no point. Even what we have on the Moon's surface isn't a perfect vacuum. There isn't a perfect enough vacuum to be allowed to contact antimatter anywhere in the universe, not even in interstellar space."

I looked at my watch. I had a little time before I had to sign off, and besides I was still in the stage of thinking that Captain Tscharka was probably a pretty decent guy, underneath it all.

So I showed him around, first to the fuel-insertion room. No fuel was being inserted at the moment, but next to it was the storage chamber where the prepared pods waited to be filled. And there they were, his first hundred pods, looking like giant steel watermelons, each one already hooked up to the power leads that would run its coolers and magnets when the antimatter was inserted.

BOOK: The Voices of Heaven
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