Diamonds in the Sky (25 page)

Jen’s voice replied. “Welcome back. Whatever is that load on top of the hopper?”

“Popsicle sticks,” said John. “And duct tape.” Rodriguez grinned briefly.

“Cantu, set us down close to the crater edge. Don’t worry, it’s reinforced, and will not crumble. There’s a crane down there that can handle the cargo under the dish. X marks the ideal spot.”

“Can do,” said the pilot, winking at the pun on his name. He put the hopper down neatly on the landing field’s X by the brink of Bolton.

John invited them into the control room. Jennifer seemed as shocked as a hausfrau that he had brought guests home unannounced.

The guests seemed genuinely interested in the instruments and computers, and the radio contour map tacked up on the wall. “I thought your instrument wasn’t working,” said Rodriguez.

“We have two radio telescopes at this facility,” Jen explained. “The Very Low Frequency Array has been operational for three months now.” Clicking into professor mode, she explained how her VLF Array was mapping the magnetosphere of Jupiter.

* * *

“Most stars are not single,” she was saying. “Binary systems are the norm. Our Sun was very nearly a double star, the other one being Jupiter, if Jupiter had been somewhat bigger. Jupiter is nearly a star, and it generates its own heat and an immense magnetic field…”

John glanced at his workstation’s inbox. There was a message for him, from Ramona, datelined Friday 5:14 p.m. YOU’RE IN PAIN AND I AM WORRIED! He stared at the message, unconsciously rubbing his neck.

“She’s right,” said Jennifer, behind him.

“None of your business,” he said brusquely.

Rodriquez had disappeared into the restroom, and Cantu was being introduced to the observatory’s main computer by Edward. Jennifer asked, “Why did you bring these people here?”

“They’re going to help us fix the dish.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “As easy as that?”

“Maybe not. It’s a long shot. An idea.”

“When?”

He shrugged past the crick in his neck. “No time like the present.”

* * *

From this side, the dish was the dim convex canopy of a forest of pylons. Anchored in the crater floor, the slim pylons rose up to branch at the top. The branches terminated in twigs, each attached to one segment of the dish. The position of each dish segment could be adjusted by the control computer. Sensors told the computer the precise position of every segment. Adding everything up, the computer had found the dish sagging. The human eye could not detect the sag, at least not now, with artificial lights shredding the lunar night under the dish.

It was the Moon’s slow midnight. But human affairs adhered to the twenty-four-hour artifice of Moon Mean Time. They had spent Friday night unloading the cargo from the hopper and getting ready. John had, again, slept badly. This time his neck hurt all night. And he was troubled by the kind of garish bad dreams that he had been having in recent weeks, the color-pandemonium with which his brain attempted to compensate for the monochromatic tedium of waking life on the Moon. Now it was Saturday morning, still early, 9 a.m. John circled around the site with an impatient mixture of gliding and skipping steps. He wanted to get this over with.

Floodlights illuminated one of the pylons. Twenty feet above the crater floor, it bent at an angle of some fifteen degrees. The hollow-cored pylon had buckled like a soda straw. Now a long cable descended from the crown of the pylon. The cable ended at a winch anchored on the crater floor, as far away from the pylon as possible.

Two ropes, shorter than the winch cable, dangled from the top of the pylon. John called, “Jennifer, you and Zheng on this one. You’ll back off and hold it taut. Out that way — right angles to the cable. Don’t actively pull unless you get the word.” Jen rapidly translated that into Chinese for Zheng. John continued, “You all know how hard it is to get good traction. So use the anchor posts. Cantu, you and me on the other rope. Edward operates the winch, and Rodriguez spots. He’ll tell us if the pylon sways one way or another.”

Rodriguez signaled assent.

The bulky moonsuited form of Edward fussed over the winch. Edward said, “This procedure still strikes me as illogical. The basic notion is to
lift.
Right?”

“Ever been to Easter Island?” John asked, “That’s how they got the stone heads up. A bunch of people on the ground, pulling on the longest ropes they had.”

“I hardly think that qualifies as a reliable precedent. And what about the stress on the points of attachment?”

“For the record,” said John, “I’m not 100 percent sure that this will work. I
am
sure it’s the thing to try. Ready, everybody? Let’s do it.”

Moonsuited forms shuffled to their places. At a signal from Rodriguez, Edward turned on the winch. It whirred soundlessly in the airlessness here. The cable oscillated, went taut.

Fifteen hundred feet across, the dim down side of the dish stretched away to the ends of the crater. John felt a sudden conviction of futility. Edward was right. They might as well have been insects, busy but ridiculous ants, trying to reshape this vast thing.

Rodriguez said rapidly, “Pylon’s starting to straighten out. Going true. Still true. It’s trying to lean to the right!” he waved an arm. “Left rope, pull!” Jennifer and Zheng pulled. The Chinese man had a foot propped on an anchor post, and pulled mightily.

“Let up! Left, let up! Right side pull!”

John pulled. His feet slipped and he skidded. Cantu stumbled. They got anchored again, then, and with their combined mass under the rope, pulled. John felt the rope come to them. Over their heads, the pylon and with it the filmy acres of dish had actually responded to their puny effort.

“That’s it! That’s it! Ropes, stop pulling! Just hold steady there. Slow the winch — that’s about right — Left! Pull, but not too hard! Good! Ease off that winch — anchor the side ropes — put the winch brake on. Not like that!” Rodriguez headed toward the winch with loping strides of a moon veteran making haste. “That’s not how the brake works!”

“Oh,” said Edward.

Now the pylon looked straight. Only, like a bent soda straw, it had one terribly weak point. Without the winch cable holding it, the pylon would keel back over.

Climbing into the driver’s seat, Rodriguez started the crane. It was a light, long-necked, mobile piece of machinery on treads. Using the crane, Rodriguez hoisted one end of a moonglass beam. The inside of the beam was reamed out to match the curvature of the pylon and coated with glue. With some help from the ground he placed the beam up against the pylon. Glued, it stuck. Then he positioned another beam on the other side of the pylon. “Popsicle sticks in place,” Rodriguez commented. With adroit operation of the crane and helpers scrambling on the crater floor, he wrapped the splinted pylon with a ninety-yard length of plastic fabric, stretching and wrapping it.

The glue had to cure. It was time for lunch anyway, though not as simple as knocking off and grabbing a sandwich on the spot: taking off the moonsuits was a chore in itself. After lunch, Rodriguez took a nap. Cantu helped himself to a murder mystery.

* * *

According to the computer, the dish sagged less now. So far, so good. John rubbed his neck, inflamed by the morning’s exertion in the spacesuit. The more damaged pylon was yet to come.

Jennifer came into the control room to check the accumulating data from her LFSVLFA. She asked, “How did you get that material? I didn’t know we had that much credit with the Yuegong warehouse.”

“We don’t. I faked an appropriation authorization that said something about a state of scientific emergency. And a facsimile of a fund transfer writ. The check’ll bounce Monday morning.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, Lord! This had better work!”

He shrugged around the pain in his neck. “My responsibility alone. I didn’t tell our two friends that I was fleecing the Port. Cantu probably has an idea, but he can plead innocence. If this fails, it’s my funeral.”

“Don’t say that! We didn’t tell you Thursday night— but one of the air valves in your suit jammed when you fell. If we hadn’t found you and taken the risk of moving you right away—!” She left the outcome unspoken. “It was the sound of your breathing. I was sure you couldn’t get enough air. I was right. When we took off the helmet you were turning purple!”

Not knowing quite what to say, John said, “Thank you.”

“I was overjoyed when you sat up and talked.” Jennifer added, quietly, “It haunts me. I could have lost a good colleague and a good friend.”

It went both ways, he thought, with or without chocolate crumbs. “You’re that for me too, and you have been for years,” he said. “I’m not handling everything so well. I’m sorry.”

“It’s half fixed,” she said briskly. “You brought good help. If we had the facilities, I’d bake cookies for those guys. Very handy people. Unlike somebody else we know of Spanish ancestry!”

John nodded ruefully. “Murphy’s Law and Baltazar’s Rule.”

She spelled out that old joke of theirs. “The better the theoretician, the more things go wrong when he lays his hands on the instruments. Lord, if he’d been here this morning the dish probably would have fallen down around our ears.”

They grinned at each other.

* * *

Rodriguez announced that the glue was 97 percent as hard as it was going to get. Cantu stretched and groaned. “Is this gonna be worth it?” He levered his feet into his spacesuit.

Struggling to squeeze into her own suit, Jennifer puffed, “Good question.” She used to be skinny as a rail. But since moving to the Moon and being form-fitted with a moonsuit, she had put on weight — enough to make it hard for her to don the suit. She decided to pause for a lecture. “Normally, radio astronomers don’t scramble to observe a supernova. Optical astronomers do.”

“Especially when they find themselves on the wrong side of the Moon.” Like an eel, Cantu wriggled into the top half of his own suit.

“It’s a truly cataclysmic event, a giant star dying, blowing most of its mass out in gusts of ionized matter. I would expect radio thermal emission, though not quite this soon. Heat noise. In science,” she continued, “it’s also important to check for that which one does not expect to detect, or not yet.”

“What’s that?” Cantu asked, carefully sealing his waist seam.

John said, “The corpse, spinning in its grave.”

“Doin’
what?
”

Jennifer chuckled. “He means a neutron star. The core of the supernova radically collapses into a mass of neutrons, a neutron star, with all of the angular momentum — the rotating force — of the original star compressed into a much smaller package. So the neutron star spins rapidly. Several revolutions per second.”

“How do you know?” All suited up, Rodriguez waited, leaning against the airlock with his helmet tucked under one arm.

“It also has a strong magnetic field inherited from the original star. This generates powerful beams of radiation which rotate as fast as the neutron star spins. Like the beam of a lighthouse. Our Solar System may or may not be in the path of the beam. If it is, we identify the source as a pulsar, and it can be quite a lovely radio object,” said Jen. “The pulsar takes time to crystallize, though.” John pushed down on the shoulders of her suit. The suit settled and her head emerged from the neckhole. “Thanks. No, right now — unless all of our theories are wrong — the neutron star at the core of that supernova is buried in fire and fury. It isn’t a pulsar yet.”

John checked his air supply. Zheng had fixed the jammed valve, Jen said. It seemed to function perfectly. He took a deep breath. They had in-suit air for six to eight hours. Enough time for the rest of the repair job to make it or break it.

This pylon was more bent than the first one because John had hit the dish closer to it. Rodriguez made a close inspection. Everybody else stood there and watched passively. They were all tired.

Pieces of dish lay on the crater floor. John picked one up. He turned the shard over in his glove. Thin, light glass manufactured from the lunar regolith, it had a shiny metallic coating on one side. With a chill, he remembered falling toward the shiny dish, expecting to die. He would have died, had not the flexing pylons absorbed the impact; had not the matrix of glass segments sagged like a safety net before breaking under him. Looking up, he saw stars through the jagged hole in the dish.

“I’m concerned,” said Edward, “that our efforts will damage the dish. It would be very unfortunate if we overstressed the points of attachment of the pylon to the dish. Look, the angle of the bent portion is more extreme than the other one was. The branches are sharply counter-bent. Can they take the strain?”

“I think so,” John said shortly.

“The pylon might even break there where it’s bent,” Edward persisted. “Of course, the opportunity to study the supernova may be worth taking considerable risk, scientifically speaking. I don’t know about that.”

Jennifer put her helmet against John’s, using sound conduction to speak privately. “I do know.”

“I want to fix it,” he said.

“You’re doing this just because you’re a stubborn coot who’s got his back up. And the rest of us like you enough to work our tails off for you.”

Like winter rain, Edward did not let up. “Shouldn’t you run this by the project engineers, or possibly Mr. Schropfer, before attempting—”

On the in-suit radio, Jennifer snapped, “Edward, your point is valid but your timing stinks. Go to that winch and get ready.”

Rodriguez had an announcement to make. At least five-sixths of the pylon’s branches were still securely attached to the dish. “Good enough for government work!” The bent section of pylon was unlikely to break and fall off. If it did, he’d holler. And everybody should run like hell.

The winch pulled. The kink in the pylon straightened out by degrees. John imagined what he would have heard if there had been air to carry the sounds: the groan of the pylon material and squeaks from the mosaic of glass segments. Maybe reports of glass breaking. Not that, he hoped to God.

With one alarm when it keeled to the left, and those on the right side had to scrape and haul, the pylon was jacked upright, the winch cable braked. Then Rodriguez and his helpers swarmed around the pylon to put on the glue, the splints and the cloth. Edward vanished into the control room.