Seeing that she had their attention, Bianca said more softly, “Doug’s got something important to tell you.” And with that, she turned to him, grinning.
“Thanks for the glowing introduction,” Doug joked weakly. A few chuckles from the people looking up at him. He knew most of them, at least the long-termers. Of course, each coverall carried a nametag.
“I need your help,” Doug began. “I want to start moving Moonbase along the road to self-sufficiency as rapidly as we can manage it.”
As he began to outline his plans for Operation Bootstrap, Doug studied their faces. At first they looked amused, as if they expected this to be an elaborate joke of some kind. But then they started getting interested, and began asking questions.
“You really expect us to modify an LTV in our spare time?”
Doug answered, “A couple of extra hours a day from five technicians who know what they’re doing can get the job done in ten weeks, from what the computer estimates tell me.”
“But we won’t get paid for the extra work.”
“No, it’ll be strictly voluntary. Your pay will come as a share of the profit we make from the asteroid ore.”
“Work first, pay later. Huh!”
Bianca said, “Hey, you’re always complaining there’s nothing to do up here except drink and screw around.”
“What’s wrong with that?” one of the guys piped up.
Everyone laughed.
But Doug went on seriously, “I know it’s a lot to ask, and you might put in a lot of work for nothing if the mission isn’t successful. But if we do succeed…”
“How much money we talking about?”
“The calculations work out to about five times your hourly wage, if we get the amount of ore we’re hoping for.”
“And the corporation’ll give us this money as a bonus?”
“Right.”
“But the corporation doesn’t even know we’re doing this… this Bootstrap thing? How does that work?”
Doug replied, “We’re all taking a chance. You’re risking your time. Once we’ve got the ore from the asteroid, though, the corporation will pay you a bonus along the lines I’ve calculated.”
“How can we be sure of that?”
“You have my word on it,” Doug said.
“No offense, pal, but how much weight does your word have with the management?”
Doug smiled. “Good question. Let me put it this way: If the corporation won’t come up with the money, then I will. Personally.”
“Or we can sell the ore to Yamagata,” one of the women said.
No one laughed.
Lev Brudnoy said, “I hate to be the bearer of evil tidings, but there is a rumor that the base will be shut down at the end of this director’s term.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that buzz.”
Several others nodded.
Doug had to admit it. “That’s the director’s current plan. I’m hoping we can make him change his mind.”
“He’s your brother, isn’t he?”
“My half-brother.”
“Does that mean he’s only half as heavy?” asked one of the women. “You know, “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.”
Doug made a rueful grin for her. “He’s twice as heavy, believe me.”
“So you want us to stick our necks out when the base director’s ready to shut down the whole humpin’ operation?”
“I want to save Moonbase,” Doug replied.
“Wait a minute. Where are you going to get an LTV to modify?”
I’ll handle that,” said Doug. “None of you has to do a thing or commit yourselves to a minute of extra work unless and until I get an LTV for us.”
They glanced at each other, muttering.
“Whatever happens,” Biaьca said, without waiting for them to come to a group decision, “this little meeting here ought to be kept secret for the time being.”
“Secret? From who?”
“Whom,” corrected one of the students.
“From management,” said Doug. “I want to present this as a fait accompli before my brother knows what we’re doing.”
Someone whistled softly.
“Look,” Doug said, “we can’t expect any support from the corporation. That’s why we’ve got to do this on a volunteer basis and hope to get our payback at the end of the asteroid mission.”
“Sounds awfully risky.”
“Sounds like a good way to get fired.”
“You can’t be fired for working overtime on a voluntary basis,” Doug said. “Read your employment contracts.”
“Well,” said Bianca, “I don’t know about the rest of you turkeys, but I’m ready to put in a couple of extra hours for this.”
Brudnoy said, “It should be more interesting than spending your spare time in The Cave, waiting for the menu to change.”
They all laughed. Doug thought maybe half of them would actually volunteer to work on their own time. But this meeting would never be kept a secret. The word about Operation Bootstrap would spread through Moonbase with the speed of sound.
Which was what he was counting on.
“I’ve never been out this far before,” said Brudnoy.
His voice sounded strange in Doug’s helmet earphones. Subdued. Almost reverent.
“I hardly ever come out here myself,” Rhee said. “Just for these regular maintenance checks.”
The astronomical observatory was on the opposite side of Alphonsus’ central peak from Moonbase. It had been placed out there to shield it from any stray light or dust or chemical pollution from the spacecraft landing and taking off at the rocket port. This meant a two-hour doctor ride across the crater floor, but Doug and Brudnoy had decided to accompany Rhee to see the instruments she used to track near-Earth asteroids.
Now Rhee led them through a jungle of metal shapes, all pointed skyward. Wide-angle telescopes, spectrometers, infrared and ultraviolet and even gamma-ray detectors. Doug easily recognized the wide dishes of the four radio telescopes off in the distance, but one shape puzzled him: it looked like a huge but stubby wide tub mounted on tracked pivots. It was easily twenty yards across.
“The light bucket?” Rhee said when he asked. “That’s the Shapley Telescope, two-thousand-centimeter reflector. The most powerful telescope in the solar system.”
“You use it for deep space observations?”
Rhee replied cheerfully, “I don’t use it all. It’s reserved for the Big Boys back Earthside. But yes, they use it for cosmological work. Quasars and redshifts, stuff like that”
Brudnoy asked, “Wasn’t there talk of building an even bigger “light bucket,” using liquid mercury instead of a glass mirror?”
“The Shapley’s mirror is aluminum,” Rhee answered. “No need for glass in this gravity.”
“But the mercury telescope?”
“Maybe someday. Probably be easier to make really big mirrors with mercury, but it tends to vaporize into the vacuum.”
Doug watched their two spacesuited figures as they spoke: Brudnoy taller than Rhee by more than a helmet’s worth.
“Couldn’t it be covered with a protective coating?” the Russian asked.
“Sure, but that cuts down on its reflectivity.”
“Ah.”
Doug asked, “Which ones do you use for tracking the asteroids?
“Over here.” Rhee pointed and Doug followed her outstretched gloved hand with his eyes.
“The two big ones are Schmidts,” she explained. “Wide field’scopes. Schmidt-Mendells, actually; they’ve been specially built for lunar work. And those over there are tracking individual asteroids, getting spectrographic data on their compositions.”
“For your thesis,” Doug realized.