Diamonds in the Sky (24 page)

Instantly, John felt a pang of jealousy.

Ramona whistled softly, “C’mere, sweetie!” Something fluttered into the picture. A bunch of highly active feathers. It attached itself to Ramona’s proffered finger, and resolved into a parakeet, perched upside down relative to her. “This is my little friend Admiral. Admiral Bird!” Ramona declared. So much for jealousy. The bird wasn’t even green, it was blue. Ramona gently turned her hand and the parakeet upright. “People thought birds would freak out in zero gravity. Not Admiral! He’s learned how to fly here.” The bird preened the feathers of one wing. “Humans can fly in zero g too….” She finished with a shy glance and a curl of a smile.

He understood, and he longed for her. The last time he visited Ramona in L-5, she had taken him to a special corridor of the space station. Not finished or furnished, the management intended it to be a weightless art gallery at a future date. It had a picture window full of stars and Moon and shining Earth. Quite unofficially, it served the inhabitants of L-5 as Lover’s Lane in zero g. Where, as Ramona put it, you could make love like the birds called white-throated swifts, which mate in the air, tumbling together as they fly in the canyons of the West.

She ended the video by saying, “I wish it wasn’t three more weeks before you come to L-5 again. I love you and honor what you’re doing. Make it work.”

* * *

It was very quiet in the office. The resident astronomers had yet to appear. Odd. Enjoying the privacy, he read the report on the supernova.

Right ascension one hour, six minutes; declination minus seventy-three degrees. That put the supernova in the Small Magellanic Cloud and closer than any supernova since the 1987 event in the Large Magellanic Cloud. OK. An interesting object. But supernovas weren’t great radio sources, not until well after the catastrophic fact.

In the case of SN 1987A (appended) the neutrino blast came first, then ultraviolet. Then the balefire blaze of visible light. Satellite observatories picked up x-radiation six months later and gamma rays right after that. Eleven years later came the first whisper of synchrotron radio emission, and the first radiograph of the supernova remnant was produced by the VLA, a blurry image of the clotted shell of matter thrown into space when the giant blue star exploded.

The detection of a pulsar had been announced in 1989. And retracted in 1990. The “pulsar” turned out to have been a fluke in the observing equipment at Cerro Tololo. The real thing had yet to be confirmed: thirty years and still no pulsar, though theory predicted that the supernova should have left one to mark its place.

Baltazar knew all of this, yet hadn’t been able to wait even a day to have a look at this newest supernova!

The VLBA data was interesting in a Rorschach way — the human brain could imagine something significant in it. Much less imaginative, the VLBA supercomputer had not managed to massage the data into anything recognizable. Schropfer had been in management, fund-raising, begging for bucks, so long that he couldn’t even make a sound scientific judgment anymore, John thought disgustedly. He rubbed his neck. There was a nagging twinge, a crick in his neck. It bothered him more than the soreness and stiffness of the remainder of his body.

Dec -73. Solidly in the Bolton reflector’s observing swath on the celestial sphere. And RA 0106. The supernova had appeared near Bolton’s zenith. Ironic: right now Bolton was in a great position to register the radio data that might take months and years to show up.

John called Schropfer again. “For what it’s worth to look at the supernova, we can repair the dish,” he said, without preamble. “Some segments fell out. But we have spares in case of micrometeorite hits.”

Schropfer shook his head grimly. “Jen did a damage assessment, which I just got. It’s worse than a hole. Two of the support pylons are buckled and the whole dish is sagging. As in, out of round. As in, inoperable!”

“Oh, no!”

“What did you expect? You’re two hundred pounds on Earth, the suit’s just about that much more, and I’m too upset right now to convert to newtons of force that hit the dish! How in the name of perdition am I going to meet the cost of replacing pylons?”

In shock, John shook his head. The Space Radio Consortium subsisted on whatever money its member universities could spare. Plus funding that Schropfer elicited from government and the private sector. Building the Bolton dish had blown the seams of SPARAC’s budget and, furthermore, had put SPARAC embarrassingly in debt to the SETI Society. Schropfer continued, “Yuegong Hospital sent me a report on you, too. I conclude that the worst damage to you is your ego. Too bad. It would have been cheaper to fix your bones than the bones of the dish!”

Thanks for the sympathy, John thought, you little son-of-a-bitch! He signed off curtly. The pain in the neck had a name now. Schropfer.

John’s workstation chimed. There was Jen’s report, just in. Twelve lines long. She didn’t specify what did the damage. As if God or the impersonal universe had flicked something into the dish. She was very specific, though, about the extent of the damage. And the result. To function, the reflector had to have a perfect spherical curve. And now it didn’t. It sagged. He felt sick.

John left the office. Rapidly he walked through the service tunnel toward Yuegong’s moonport. Residual moon dust rasped underfoot. Half-formed in his mind was the idea of quitting. Just like that. Give up and walk away. And let Schropfer have the whole mess.

First he had to find out when the next shuttle to L-5 would be leaving Yuegong Base.

* * *

He happened to see the Port Director’s administrative assistant before she saw him. He disliked her: brightly blonde and polished, she always smiled too much, insincerely and in the context of explaining why it would not be possible for the Port to meet some need on the part of the Sand Lake project immediately, or according to the original schedule, or at all. He ducked into a hangar. Watching the woman walk by, he compared her to Ramona, very unfavorably.

A casually uniformed man approached, wiping his hands with a towel. “May we help you?”

“I’m — looking for one of the pilots.” John remembered the name stenciled on the blue jumpsuit. “Cantu.”

“Over there in the moonhopper. Bang on the side.”

John went that way, vaguely framing his inquiry about transportation to L-5. It ought to sound casual, he thought. A sharp smell of hot glue permeated the hangar. As he walked on the floor he felt traces of something underfoot, not gray moon grit, but slick plastic powder. The moonhopper had every service hatch and access panel wide open, and parts were lined up on the floor. When John banged as directed, Cantu popped out of a hatch. “Hi! Doin’ better? Did you know you almost had tons of company back at Sand Lake?”

“We did?”

“The observatory astronomers here. They went nuts. They would have gone right over to Sand Lake. Except it seems you don’t have room for them yet, or the power supply, or the connections for their instruments.”

“Not until Phase II,” John murmured.

“So they hauled out to L-5.”

Mired in Earth’s tidal forces, always facing Earth, rotating on its own axis only once a month, it would take the Moon days to turn far enough for the supernova to be seen from Yuegong Base. That accounted for the lack of life in the observatory office.

Cantu asked, “Ready to go back to study the supernova?”

Going to L-5 meant running away from his work and bumping into other astronomers who had rushed to L-5 to follow theirs. So going to L-5 was not an option. Dislocated from the idea that brought him to the port, his thoughts tumbled.

“In case you’re wondering, this vehicle isn’t deceased, just having preventative maintenance!” Cantu affectionately whacked the hull of the hopper.

John registered the hollow thump. “That’s not metal,” he said. “Come to think of it, metal doesn’t predominate in any of your spacecraft and vehicles. Composite materials do.”

“Huh? Oh, heck yeah. Fiber, resin, glass and glue is where it’s at. The Rutan
Voyage
r was the first aircraft,” Cantu enthused, “to really exploit composite construction — otherwise no way they could have done it. Now everything in aerospace is like that.”

Thinking hard, John spoke slowly. “I’ve got a problem. My radio telescope was damaged yesterday. It’s not made of metal — here, that was neither necessary nor desirable. The understructure is a species of L-glass/thermoplastic composite.”

“Sounds familiar.”

“I’ve got to get it fixed right away, and I have an idea, involving glue, but I need a professional opinion.”

“In that case, you were talking to the right guy in the first place!” Cantu whistled loudly. “Hey, Rod! That’s Sylvester Rodriquez. A master mechanic. Don’t call him grease monkey, more like glue monkey! Come into the break room and I’ll put on some coffee for us.”

* * *

Later that afternoon, he made a call to Ramona. She was unavailable, at work in the white room where she was a senior technician. So he left a message. He felt awkward. The accident had left a bruise on his chin, somehow banged against the helmet. “Hi, love,” he began. “I’m looking forward to meeting Admiral Bird. I’m in Yuegong Base right now because we had a problem with the dish yesterday. Right now — it’s Friday 3 p.m. — I’m on my way back to Sand Lake. I will make the dish work.” The last sentence came out with a vehemence that surprised him. Lamely he added, “I took a bit of a fall yesterday and — well, never mind, just a bruise or two. Have a good weekend up there. Bye.” He wanted to say more. But not to the L-5 Technical Support Division’s message machine.

* * *

Heavily laden this time, the moonhopper pitched up on the blast of its altitude jets. This time John rode shotgun, beside Cantu. He had a vertiginously good view of the lunar Apennine Mountains: a mosaic of intensely bright and dark shapes, geological chiaroscuro. Cantu flicked the jet controls. The hopper zoomed away toward the far side of the Moon.

Since yesterday, the terminator had moved further west, further from Sand Lake. Good. Temperatures would have settled down now, all cooled off, improving the chances of fixing the dish. “I really appreciate this,” he said aloud. “I’m sure you guys could find a more entertaining way to spend your weekend, even in Yuegong Base.”

Cantu laughed. “Supernovas don’t happen all the time, and everybody in Yuegong’s got the itch to see it. No way I’d pass up the chance to hear it.” These men weren’t European, Castilian, like Baltazar. Indian blood darkened their skin — reminding John of Ramona — and they had the kind of practical outlook that he had met in Mexican-American men before. “This job goes on my resume,” said Rodriguez, from the back seat.

The hopper made the transit from sunlight to night. Glaring gray moonscape turned to silver, a soft bluish silver: Earthlight graced the maria and the crater rims. Magnificent desolation, Aldrin had said. That was true, but only in the light of Earth. And the Earth was sinking into the horizon behind the hopper.

John thought about the
Voyager
and its long thin wings that flexed in flight. The two pilots had used biological metaphors to describe the experience. The plane porpoised. It felt like riding on the back of a pterodactyl. It flew like a great flapping seagull — around the Earth. Dick Rutan and Jeanna Yeager endured danger and discomfort, breaking-point emotional strain, nightmarish problems. He was no pilot, no derring-doer like those two. Like them, though, he had a machine made out of exotic materials, a dream, a dream machine that could frame a nightmare. Rutan and Yeager never gave up. He wasn’t going to either. And if the attempt to fix the dish failed, damaged it worse than ever, if everything hit the fan … he was not going to quit even then. Schropfer would have to fire him. His neck hurt. He ignored it.

Below the hopper was the far side of the Moon, alien land lit only by the cold white stars. “I gather that you radio astronomers prefer a quiet neighborhood,” Cantu commented. “But what do you do for fun?”

“The habitat is pretty basic. Most of it tucked into a lava tube, inhabited outbuildings radiation-shielded with bagged lunar regolith. No amenities. We read a lot. I work with an old hen who reads murder mysteries, and when I ran out of my own books I started on hers.” Did her penchant for mysteries point to a dark psychological angle — something about suppressed hostility in Jen’s character? Maybe it was just that too many hard weeks of being cooped up in the habitat, too closely with too few people, promoted homicidal fantasies. He had enjoyed the murder mysteries.

“That’s the only way I came to read
War and Peace,
” Cantu answered breezily. “Cause this guy in my bunkroom had it.”

Rodriguez was a different type, a slight and quiet man, all business. “That it down there?”

John replied, “That’s the Lunar Far-Side Very Low Frequency Array in the Sanduleak walled plain. Which was named for a twentieth-century astronomer and promptly if disrespectfully corrupted to Sand Lake. Look on the far edge of Sanduleak. See the bright dimple? That’s Bolton. And the reflector.”

“How does it work?”

“It sits there. It’s a photon bucket. The bucket reflects incident radiation to the center, where the antenna is. The antenna is what moves. There’s an older dish of this kind in Arecibo, Puerto Rico — a real workhorse in my field.” Reflectively, he added, “Bolton is to Arecibo as Voyager is to, oh, maybe a Cessna. Principles the same, materials radically new and different. Composite construction makes Bolton flexible — and fragile. Arecibo stood up to a major hurricane once, in 1989. Earth gravity alone would flatten Bolton.”

The reflector was eggshell-thin but not rigid, the pylons stiff yet resilient, the whole structure nonmetal-like, quirky to the extent that it was hard to know what to expect of the exotic materials. John did know. He had parsed the quirks of the machine for all of the months of its construction. A kibitzer like Schropfer could have Bolton’s specs strewn all over his desk, and still not know what to expect of the structure.

The hopper swerved over the shore of Sand Lake, braked and began a slow hovering descent toward Bolton. The habitat was tucked into crater Bell, right on the edge of Bolton. Little craters have lesser ones…. John radioed. “Anybody home?” Home sweet home, he thought. Cold showers and gritty floors. Close quarters in which your colleagues’ harmless traits got on your nerves. Jen’s chocolates, shedding oily brown particles on the pages of technical reports as well as murder mysteries. Zheng’s bad breath. And Edward’s mild-mannered, rational, relentless pessimism.