They were having trouble with the nanomachines, Doug knew. Not enough iron in the regolith to process into the structural steel they needed. And every atom imported from Earth raised hell with Greg’s quarterly profit-and-loss figures.
What a waste, Doug thought sadly. Finish the job so we can sell it to Yamagata. What would the men and women working on this mass driver think if I told them Greg’s going to close the base? That all their work is for nothing. That the best they can hope for is to sell the fruit of their labor to Yamagata.
It’s not right, he knew. It’s just not right. We ought to be building for the future, reaching out to the asteroids, the other planets, eventually to the stars. Not retreating, not slinking back to Earth as if we can’t meet the challenges out here.
Briefly Doug wondered what it’d be like to be launched off the Moon by the mass driver. A hundred gees. He laughed to himself. In the first second you’d be smeared into a thin bloody pulp. Take the nice slow rocket; it’s safer.
He could see the driver clearly now, its dark metal bulk marching straight as an arrow off into the distance while machines and spacesuited figures crawled over and around it like mechanical acolytes at some vast alien altar.
Greg doesn’t have the vision, Doug knew. He just doesn’t see the future at all. To him, tomorrow’s just like today. He’s making the deal with Kiribati so the corporation can become more profitable by using nanotechnology on Earth. He doesn’t even see the forces down there that’ll try to crush him and nanotechnology, together.
Okay, Doug said to himself. Do you see the future? Are you so dead-certain that you know what’s right?
He answered himself immediately. Yes. I know what we’ve got to do. I can see the path the human race has to take. Grow or die. It’s that simple, that stark. If we don’t grow beyond the confines of Earth we’re going to’sink into an overcrowded, overpolluted fishbowl of a world without freedom, without hope, a world of poverty and despair and global dictatorship.
As he trudged along the dusty crater floor, Doug tapped a gloved finger into the palm of his other hand, ticking off the points he wanted to make.
The mass driver’s important. It can lower our launch costs and make us profitable. But only if the factories in Earth orbit can build products that we can sell.
We’ve got to get out to that asteroid. We’ve got to show them that we can make Clipperships of diamond and revolutionize the aerospace industry. More than that, we’ll be producing a product with nanotechnology that everyone on Earth will want. We’ll be striking a blow against the nanoluddites and the New Morality. And even more than that, we’ll be moving Moonbase from a mining operation to a manufacturing center. From a marginal town to a growing city. That’s the most important thing.
That’s what we’ve got to do! We’ve got to! And we’ve got less than six months to do it.
Doug stared off into the dark endless sky. I can’t let Greg shut down Moonbase. I’ve got to get Operation Bootstrap going despite him. Behind his back, over his head, any way I can. We’ve got to push Operation Bootstrap whether Greg likes it or not.
But how? How can I mobilize the people here when Greg’s dead-set against it? How can I move us toward the asteroid mining effort if the base director won’t permit anyone to work on the program? It’ll be a direct challenge to Greg, almost a mutiny.
Can I really fight him? Mom wants us to work together, but Greg doesn’t want that. He just doesn’t see what we have to do. He doesn’t have the visions He’s acting as if he’s still sitting in Savannah or New York. That’s where his mind is. That’s where his attitudes are.
Doug turned away from the busy work scene stretching out along the miles-long track of the mass driver, turned his back to all that and looked across the emptiness of the pockmarked crater floor toward the softly rounded old mountains of the ringwall.
“It’s always darkest before the dawn,” he repeated to himself. Scant consolation, he thought.
It certainly was dark out there. With the Earth behind him, the airless sky looked black as infinity, specked here and there by a few stars bright enough to see through the heavy tinting of his helmet visor.
Dark and empty, Doug thought.
But as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Doug realized that there was a faint glow rising above the tired old mountain that poked its head up in the middle of the giant crater. Out beyond the brutally close horizon, the sky was slowly brightening.
They’re wrong! Doug told himself. They’re all wrong! It’s not darkest just before the dawn. Not on the Moon, at least.
For out in the star-flecked blackness beyond the weary mountains, a pale hazy glow was beginning to light the predawn hours. The zodiacal light, Doug knew. Sunlight reflected off dust particles floating in space, the leftovers from the creation of the solar system. Here in the airless sky of Moonbase they light up the heavens long before the Sun comes into view.
Doug raised his arms to the ancient motes of dust that brightened the predawn hours. They’re like friendly little fireflies out there in space, he told himself. They bring us the message, the promise that the light is on its way, the Sun will rise, a new day will dawn. Have hope. The darkness will end. It’s a good omen.
Feeling excited again, energized, he said to himself, I’ve got to talk with Brudnoy again. And Bianca. Maybe they can get me together with a few people who can get Operation Bootstrap started.
And Mom? Doug wondered about that as he started trudging back toward the main airlock. No, Mom will side with Greg. She’s a businesswoman, and Greg can make a stronger case for the bottom line than I can.
Still, Doug broke into a broad grin as he hurried back toward Moonbase. Greg’s got profit-and-loss statements and projections of inventories and all that puke. All I’ve got is a broken-down former cosmonaut and maybe a few other people who might want to help me with Operation Bootstrap.
And a vision for the future.
He began to leap across the barren dusty ground, soaring in twenty-yard strides across the crater floor.
“Hey, where you goin’ in such a hurry?” a construction worker’s voice called in his earphones.
“Into the future!” Doug sang back.
BIANCA’S QUARTERS
“All right, quiet down!” Bianca Rhee shouted.
They all stopped talking and looked at her expectantly. Doug counted fourteen people crammed into Bianca’s quarters, five of them squeezed on the bunk, the others crowded on the floor. Most of them were long-termers, men and women on year-long work contracts. Several had been working at Moonbase for many years, shuttling back and forth to Earth.
Lev Brudnoy had appropriated the desk chair and placed one of the female student-workers on his lap. He sat there with a satisfied smile on his grizzled face, one long arm around the young woman’s waist, his other hand grasping an insulated flask of rocket juice. The others clutched a motley assortment of cups, glasses, bottles, even zero-gee squeeze bulbs. It was a BYOB party.
The ostensible reason for the party was to show off the new wallscreen that Doug had bought for Bianca. It almost filled the wall opposite her bunk, turning the blank stone into a window that could look out on the world, wherever vidcams could go. For the first hour of the party they had hooted and catcalled through a production of a Masterson Corporation-sponsored drama set on a corporate space station where romance and intrigue flourished in zero gravity.
Now the video was finished and the Windowall showed a satellite view of the great rift valley of Mars. Bianca perched herself on the desktop, her legs too short to reach the floor. She asked Doug to come up and sit beside her. They all wore workers’ coveralls, color-coded to show their departments. Doug saw mostly the pumpkin orange of the research department and the olive green of mining, although there were a couple of medical whites in the crowd; one of the women medics wore hers unbuttoned almost to the waist, showing plenty of cleavage. He wore the only management blue.