“I’ll go get the van,” Nikki said and bounded out of the room and down the dark hallway behind us.
“Let’s try to use this model,” I told Jake. ” It will be easiest to charge since I know how it operates. Unfortunately, the van’s too big to back down here where the bots are.”
“Nothing’s easy.” Jake came over and grabbed one side of the bot and I took the other.
Through a series of spastic hops, we finally got it coordinated in our movements and rapidly brought it to the entrance to the storage area as Nikki brought the van down as far as it would fit in the narrow passageway.
“You know,” Nikki said as she stepped out of the van, “if you could recharge a couple of these units, we could program them to drag the other bots to the entrance. It’d save a lot of work in the long run.”
“Good idea,” I said. I hated taking the time to program a bot, but the task was fairly simple and I hated carrying bots even more than programming them.
I pulled up the hood of the van and removed the coiled electrical cable that I had stored there.
Setting the voltage regulator (that had come to us thanks to Jake’s surplus gear) to the correct setting, I plugged one end of the cable into the bot’s recharge panel and the other to the regulator.
In five minutes, the bot was functional.
“Either of you know how to program one of these?” I asked.
“No.”
“’Fraid not.”
So while Nikki and Jake played explorer, I got to play nursemaid to some very dimwitted machines. About a half hour later, the bot was finally dragging another bot out of the storage area and setting it by the van. I was relieved to see that it hadn’t smashed its brother in the process.
By transferring the program from the first bot to the second, I was able to have two bots bringing out the others. I could have programmed several more, but found that with just the two working, I was able to charge a bot by the time they dragged out a new bot. I decided having a bot recharge the others was a little more risk than I wanted to take since the voltage regulator seemed to vary a lot and had to be constantly watched.
Eventually I choose three models of bots to take with us after double checking to be sure I could recharge all of them as needed. One type was the cylinder-looking lab bot that I was familiar with. The two other models looked like they’d probably both been designed for the low gravity of the Moon since they had spidery legs. One was about the size of a small dog and had
“Go-4” ("Gopher,” get it?) stenciled on the side of it while the other had a body the size of a man’s with eight meter-long appendages which it could use as feet or hands or which could have power tools mounted on it. The crazy things could move on two appendages like a man or—if they had a heavy load—on four or more legs which gave them a real bug look. In my mind at least, it looked like a spider.
After two hours of charging bots, I was finally finished. The bots stood beside the van waiting for more instructions. During that time I had been listening to Jake and Nikki on the radio. They’d managed to get the computer running in the control room and pulled out a list of what was in the storage area. Now they were making sounds that you’d expect from two kids in a candy store as they inspected the manifest of the storage area.
“I’m finished up out here if you two want to help load up,” I said.
Moments later, Nikki bounced up to me, “Look at this.” She handed me a computer print out.
I read some of the list. “Food, tools, medicine… Looks like we could be set up for quite some time. My only question is, will we be endangering some upcoming expedition if we use any of this?”
“Yeah, that’s an angle we haven’t really considered,” Jake said. ” I’d hate to move this out and cause some group to starve to death. I really think it’s only an outside chance that anyone’s planning on ever coming back, though. They’ve dismantled the space development and exploration.”
“Even if a group came up from Earth that wouldn’t be a problem,” Nikki said. ” If we can start up the mining operation, and make some rods, we’ll be able to transport food and equipment up from Earth like there’s no tomorrow. The need of a storage dump like this will be a thing of the past.”
“Catering service. There’s an angle.” I handed the list to Nikki. “At any rate, we won’t be needing these supplies for a while given what’s in the other site. But it’ll be good to know that they’re here if we should need them.”
“It’s hard to believe that they abandoned all this.”
“That’s the problem with chemical rockets,” Jake said. “They’re too expensive. It was cheaper to leave all this stuff here than take it back. Just think of how things are going to change when the rods become available. A jump to the Moon will be as easy as a rocket flight to another part of the Earth.”
“It is hard to imagine the effect the rods would have if we ever get enough made to make them available,” I agreed.
“And once the public knows about them, we’ll be out of danger,” Nikki said.
“I don’t know. If someone wanted to kill me—us—before, they’ll be interested in silencing us rather than letting the public find that they tried to keep the rods under raps. I suspect we’ll steal be on someone’s hit parade.”
“Phil, you always manage to look on the dark side, don’t you?”
“A pessimist is never disappointed.”
Chapter 14
Though the sun had hardly changed position, the Earth above us had rotated almost a half turn and our muscles were starting to complain even with the reduced gravity of the Moon. My stomach rumbled from time to time since I’d avoided trying to use the liquid garbage from the eating tubes in my space suit.
Eventually the van was crammed full of bots. The little gophers filled in the spaces between the larger bots and the “spiders” were stored end wise with all their legs folded. Added to this were the four cylindrical lab bots lashed to each side of the van with four more strapped to the top, along with a case of “brains” for the units back at what had become our home base.
It’ll never fly, I thought, though I knew better. Lifting off was not going to be a problem.
Taking the full crew of humans was. And I knew that no one would take seriously my suggestion of strapping Jake to the hood of the van.
We finally all got scrunched into our seats. Little gophers were fitted in all around each of us.
I felt like a mother Saint Bernard. “You know, this is pretty dangerous,” I warned. “One impact and they’ll never sort the meat from the metal.”
“Don’t worry,” Nikki said. “The computers will handle the whole thing.”
As I tried my best to forget how often my lab computers froze during calculations, we lifted off on yet another terror express journey. Once I got the van over the rim of the crater, the computer locked onto our home beacon and we whisked over the jagged mountain range at almost as great a speed as we’d traveled with before.
“You know, we could program a bot to fly this route and free us up to work at the base,”
Nikki said.
“I don’t know… What if something broke down. There we’d be without a way to travel to repair it. It’s a long walk back to the Earth.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right. But once we get to manufacturing the rods, we’d be able to do something like that. Use some of the gear back in the warehouse.”
“We could even build a bot/computer vehicle that could be used just for such tasks.”
“Like the rocket expresses on Earth,” Jake said from behind a pile of bots in the back.
“Don’t remind me of the automated rockets on Earth,” Nikki said, ” I’m still bitter.”