Diamonds in the Sky (23 page)

Colliding with the housing, he failed to secure a handhold on the slick box, and ricocheted off. The platform dropped underneath him. He could not find stopping traction as he skidded toward the far edge of the platform. Desperately he grabbed at the guardrail, with the full force of his Earth-powered muscles, misdirected. He reached too high and jackknifed over the rail. He flailed. Then he started falling.

The azimuth arm wheeled around. It went by at the limits of his desperate reach; his glove brushed the metal frame. The arm moved away. He tumbled. Across his sight swung the azimuth arm’s wheel, stars, the silver chasm of dish.

He fell slowly and realized it. A hammer and a feather have the same acceleration on the Moon and so does a man falling to his death. He had time to think. Not necessarily death. If the dish stopped him cold, it would definitely kill him. If the dish broke instantly, it would barely slow him down, and hitting the crater floor would kill him. But if the dish broke slowly it might actually break his fall.

The sides of the dish rose up with the ominous leisure of a mounting tidal wave. Just before the wave broke, he tried to fold the bulky spacesuit, cannonball, as though he were falling into a net.

His swaddled shoulder took the impact. The shocked dish gave way, slowly. Then it tore, letting him drop to the crater floor. He hit the floor bone-bruisingly hard, bounced, and finally sprawled on his back.

To his surprise, he was not dead. But he had the wind knocked out of him. He gasped for air. From the jagged hole in the dish above him, fragments drifted down, tumbling. He couldn’t breathe. Darkness with red veins closed in on him. Faintly he heard a clamor in his suit radio. “John! John!” Somebody sounded hysterical. He tried to answer. All he could get out was a broken wheeze.

* * *

The ongoing clamor in his ears bothered John. Garbled words. Verbal static. Finally, something intelligible. “ETA twenty minutes. Keep the victim immobile.”

“Roger, Yuegong Base, hurry!”

He took inventory of his body. Dull pain here and there. He rolled over with a pained grunt.

A young man jumped in front of John and he recognized Edward. The computer engineer. Edward waved his hands. “Don’t move!”

There was a woman whirling away from the radio station where she had been standing. He knew her too. Jennifer said, “Good Lord!”

“Good morning,” he said thickly. “Tell ‘em to turn back. I’m all right.” With an effort, John sat up.

Edward pleaded, “Please don’t move!”

John tried an exaggerated shrug, then rolled his head. Didn’t feel too bad, considering. If this had been Earth and Earth’s weighty gravity, he would have been dead.

Jennifer hurried over. “Lie back down! You’re hurt even if you don’t have enough sense to know it!”

“I want to know who moved the antenna,” he said.

“I’m terribly sorry!” Edward blurted. “Your colleague sent a message saying that it was very important to look at the supernova right away without even waiting for tomorrow morning, so I entered the coordinates, I didn’t know you were up there!”

“What colleague?”

“Baltazar,” said Jennifer. “Just what were you doing up there?”

“What supernova?” John asked.

“You forgot to put the safety on.”

John frowned. “I put it on.”

“The antenna won’t move with the safety on.”

“I put it on! Edward, check the safety switch!”

“Yes sir.” Edward scuttled to the control panel. He called back, “It’s on!” A very young, very honest man, he went on to say, “This is my fault too — I never once thought to test the safety switch circuit!”

“Not your job,” John said.

“Oh, but I should have—”

“No, not you.” Jennifer shook her head. “So it’s faulty. What a way to find out.”

Vindicated, John swung his feet around. They had deposited him on the overnight cot here in the control room. His moonsuit lay in the corner, sadly dirty and disassembled. Jennifer’s Chinese colleague, Zheng, crouched there, staring at the suit. The drift of his thoughts was easy to guess. Scuffs and scrapes marred the moonsuit’s outer fabric. The cranium of the helmet had a terrible dent in it. John felt a strange internal quiver that must have been a shudder. Anxiously he inventoried his body once more. All dull pains, except one tiny sharp one needling the base of his head. “I’m OK,” he said shakily. “You can all go to bed or whatever.”

“Not after having the living daylights scared out of us like this!” Jen retorted, and she added, “This isn’t some hotel to go sauntering around alone at night, you old fool!”

That wasn’t fair. He hadn’t been sauntering. And she had as many gray hairs as he did.

She refused to tell the medical rescue team from Yuegong Base to turn back.

The team, two men, thundered in through the airlock with a medivac cocoon, ready to stuff an unconscious victim into it and bundle him away. John pointed out that he could move all of his limbs and digits and felt basically intact.

The doctor, with the red cross on the arm of his coverall, frowned. “Internal injuries are very deceptive under conditions of low gravity. You need to be examined in the hospital.”

“Take him!” Jennifer said emphatically.

* * *

At least they let him sit up, belted into a cramped seat behind the pilot. Moondust sprayed past the porthole at his shoulder as the moonhopper took off. The dust cleared as the hopper gained altitude. Then he could see Sand Lake with its rim wall around a wide pale plain. There lay a patch of silver threads, an incongruous cross-stitch on the hoop of lunar plain: the Lunar Far-Side Very Low Frequency Array, LFSVLFA, Jennifer’s project.

The hopper looped around to its intended course. John glimpsed the radio dish, filling the crater Bolton on the edge of Sand Lake. He ought to have been inspecting the damage instead of going to the hospital at Yuegong Base.

Sure he was sick. Sick of Sand Lake, sick of the hardscrabble living conditions here. Sick of the Bolton dish. It had been a mistake on his part to move up into management. A big mistake to take over the project manager’s job when Phil Taylor was disqualified by a heart condition. If it had been Phil today, taking that heart-stopping fall, the hopper would be ferrying a corpse back to Yuegong Base.

Less busy now, the pilot called back, hospitably, “Anybody want a Lifesaver?”

“Bad for your teeth,” the doctor disapproved.

“Good for the dustmouth,” the pilot rejoined, amiably.

“Thanks.” Carefully John extracted one piece from the battered roll. Cherry. He welcomed it to mask the bitter tang of failure in his mouth.

The giant crater Schrödinger rolled under the moonhopper. Sand Lake was a detail in the rough rim of Schrödinger, just as Bolton pocked the edge of Sand Lake. The far side of the Moon: big holes have little ones cratered in to blight them, little ones have lesser ones, and so ad infinitum. A short while later, the hopper passed the unmistakable ringed plain Humboldt. Something flashed in Humboldt like pale green heat lightning. A moonflash, lunar rock that sparked as it cooled off after the long hot day.

Below and ahead of the hopper, the terminator, the edge of the day, threw the moonscape into vivid relief, craters dark, rims bright. The crawling terminator would take four weeks to make it around the Moon back to this place. The hopper easily overtook and left it behind. The sun glared in John’s porthole. He pulled down the sun filter. In the hopper’s wide cockpit window, the airless sky was black as ever over the sunlit horizon. The arc of horizon featured a wide shallow depression, the profile of the Sea of Crises.

“There she blows!” the pilot sang out. And then the Earth rose out of Crisium. The edge of night bowed from pole to pole; day was a crescent of brilliant, glazed blue. The home planet hung on the Moon’s stars as lightly as a Christmas ornament in a tree. John started to cry.

The other two men had fallen silent. Fingers pressed to the corners of his eyes, John squelched the tears. He heard a pen scratching on paper. The doctor. Making notes.

The pilot took it upon himself to dispel the awkward silence. “Ever read the book
Voyager?
About the first plane to fly around the world?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” John managed to answer in an even tone.

“That’s my all-time favorite book,” said the pilot. They were traversing the Sea of Crises now, with the beautiful blue globe of Earth ascendant in the cockpit window. “I always think about that when I see the Earth up there. They flew around the world — around that!” The pilot waved a hand at the Earth. “Nine days, one tank of gas, no stopping, right by one typhoon and over the mountains of Africa, and everything — I see a typhoon up there now.”

The hopper skirted Serenity, and then began the final approach to its destination. Skillfully the pilot swooped over the rill and the mountain both named Hadley. A glint of sunlight marked the Apollo 15 Memorial. It was a very long way down. Fear of falling clenched John’s stomach with a vengeance.

The radio crackled on with the information that a squad of paramedics would meet the hopper at the port. What was the status of the victim?

“Not to worry,” the pilot replied. “There’s nothing really wrong with him that a few days of Earthshine won’t cure.”

“They want my opinion, not yours,” said the doctor, icily.

“Hey, I know what I’m talking about. I been on the Moon for two years and you just got here!” said the pilot, and nodded to John. “See ya around.”

The doctor ordered a complete physical examination. John felt tired. He just wanted to rest. Instead he was stripped and prodded and sampled, while his examiners talked in grave undertones about multiple contusions. Meaning bruises.

John had to argue for permission to make a call out. This is like jail, he thought grimly, one phone call if you insist. Finally they let him use the hospital uplink. He got a connection to Washington, DC, USA, Earth, with the bill for it to be sent to the Space Radio Astronomy Consortium. SPARAC’s budget was tight, and the call would have to be held to a few minutes, no more. No problem. What he had to tell the Consortium’s executive director was short and not sweet.

* * *

“I don’t believe this!” was Schropfer’s initial reaction. “There’s only one manmade structure on the Moon more than three hundred feet high, and you fall off it?!”

“I didn’t expect the antenna to move under me!”

“Why didn’t you just hang on?”

“I panicked,” John grated. “What’s this crap about a supernova, anyway?”

“There’s a brand new one in the Magellanic clouds. Baltazar was beside himself with curiosity, and it occurred to him to try the Bolton dish on it.”

John swore.

“He had my approval,” Schropfer said mildly. “Would have been good PR, a nice headline. NEW LUNAR RADIO TELESCOPE STUDIES SUPERNOVA.”

“What for?” John asked coldly.

“Good question. Baltazar prevailed upon VLBA America to take a look. But at a declination of minus 73 degrees, only the dishes in Hawaii and the Virgin Islands could pick it up at all, just over their southern horizon. The data was noisy.

“The Australia Telescope happens to be committed to a configuration incompatible with investigating the supernova. And VLBA Pacifica is all buttoned up because of a typhoon bearing down on Easter Island. That leaves Bolton. Which is in just the right place and ready for its first trial run.”

“I’d like a full report on all this.”

“I take it you haven’t checked your email,” said Schropfer.

“They won’t let me out of the hospital tonight! They’re wasting my time and theirs, because I feel fine—”

“A 591-foot fall is not trivial, my friend. Not even on the Moon.”

“The dish absorbed most of the impact.”

With a delay of two and a half seconds, the signal traveled to Earth and Schropfer’s reply came back. Schropfer seemed to pause longer than that, though, before John finally heard him say, “That’s too bad.”

* * *

Being in the hospital offered one single advantage: hot showers. John rubbed a clear spot in the fogged bathroom mirror and inspected his contusions. Dark bruises blotched his back, with smaller and more painful yellow spots.

It was well past midnight, Moon Mean Time. That left just enough night for it to be a very bad one. He dozed off, felt himself falling, and jerked awake in a sweat, his heart fluttering. With a loud scuff of shoe soles on a floor with a high coefficient of friction, the nurse walked in to check on him. Finally, in the last hour or two, he slept. He dreamed about moon-gray dust spattered with the vivid red of blood.

In the morning they let him go. Still wearing the despicable plastic bracelet on his wrist, he left the hospital building. The skylight over Dave Scott Plaza framed the crescent Earth. He paused to admire Earth, and another pedestrian, presumably late and rushing to work, promptly ran into him. Suddenly John wondered whether his idiotic fall had been publicized. Did people here in Yuegong Base know all about it? The prospect mortified him. Breaking into a hot sweat, he hurried toward his office.

The office was an out-of-the-way cube of space shared with the staff of the Yuegong Sino-American Observatory. None of them had arrived for the day yet. He checked the clock. 8:13 a.m. Typical, he thought: astronomers tend not to exist at that hour of the morning. He found the report from Schropfer in his email inbox, and a video file from Ramona. Remembering one last roll of wintergreen candy, somewhere in his desk, he rummaged to find it. Then he viewed the video. He sat down and sucked on a piece of candy as he watched his wife’s image.

Her backdrop was recognizable girderwork, the bolted-together but unfinished interior of the big space station under construction at Earth-Moon Lagrange Point Five. “Hi. I’m in the center of L-5 Station.” She placed a pen in the air in front of her. It hovered with a slight slow drift. “No gravity. So I’m not going to be saying anything too serious!” She smiled, not with her lips but rather with her brown eyes. She had secured her long brown hair in Apache braids. Very much his Ramona. She retrieved the pen before it drifted away. “I have a friend I want to introduce you to. He’s very nice.”