“How did it start?”
Tosca sighed. “The US abruptly deployed their squadron of the High Skies Fleet to correct what they described as an “intolerable situation” on Luna Three. Turi John Ramos was, all of a sudden, an out of control berserker.”
“Oh, come on! Turi John was always a loose cannon. They put the man on Lunar Three to keep him out of trouble.”
“Yes, yes, Doctor Kerry. Only something happened. From the timing, I’d guess that our shipment of water might have been what tossed the match into the fireworks factory.”
“That might have been the hidden why,” agreed Colonel Levsky. “How about the stupid what?”
“Things were driven by unauthorized military actions on both sides, and then the politicians running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to play catch-up. What did they end up doing?”
“What the military wanted?”
“Very good, Pavel Ivanovitch. That’s exactly what they ended up doing. Depend on it, if the disarmament people try to start up the starship program again, it will be found that awful things have happened to the Lunar infrastructure when nobody was looking.”
“What’s the chances of launching the starship from here, then?” asked Colonel Levsky.
“Small and none,” said Winslow. “It ain’t going to happen.”
“We couldn’t make ourselves a reactor and separate out the Pu-239?”
“Oh, we could make the fuel, I suppose, Pavel Ivanovitch, but it would be a full time job for more people than we have available.”
“I’m not even sure we could make the fuel,” added Dr. Kerry. “At least not in the quantity needed for a trip to the stars. Right now we’re in good shape to survive, but that’ll be a full time job for the foreseeable future.”
Madeline Tosca nodded her agreement. “We could—no, the fuel could be made, eventually. But we wouldn’t be making it. It would be our children, or grandchildren.”
“You know, I really hate to give up on the starship,” said Colonel Levsky at last. “Isn’t there some way we could entice poor old Earth to look towards the stars again?”
Sioux Kerry nodded. “It has to be worth thinking about,” she conceded. “If anybody comes up with anything, we surely ought to give it our best shot.”
Time passed, and the drone cargo ship with 1,200 tons of water approached perihelion under remote control from Diomedes Station. The mass drivers, powered by the photovoltaic panels on the ship were entirely sufficient to bring the ship to rest with respect to the abandoned Lunar Three, a fact that did not go unnoticed on Earth.
On the “MacArthur/Levine News Hour,” Morton Levine looked impassively into the camera as the disclaimer that this interview had been scripted to accommodate the long time lag between questions scrolled across the bottom of the screen. “After several months, the starship was once again back in the news this evening as a drone cargo ship out of Diomedes Station matched velocities with Lunar Three where the hulk of the Dyson’s Dream remains docked. We now bring you a newsmaker interview with Professor Madeline Tosca, from Diomedes Station. Professor Tosca, what cargo is that drone of yours carrying?”
“Water in the form of ice, Mister Levine, twelve hundred tons of it,” said the extremely photogenic Madeline Tosca. “And you may call me Madeline.”
“Thank you, Madeline, and you may call me Morton if you would like. You people out at Diomedes Station aren’t exactly having an easy time of it. Why did you try to help us out with that shipment of water?”
“Well, Morton, you have to remember that all of us here are very much interested in the possibility of going to the stars. When we dispatched our ship’s boat, we thought the water it carried was going to help get the starship off to a good start.”
“Not an unreasonable assumption, but in any event it didn’t happen. How do you feel about there being nobody on Luna to take delivery?”
“Chagrined. Upset.” Madeline Tosca laughed, belying her words. “But after you think about it a little, it’s kind of funny.”
Levine looked sternly into the camera. “Be serious.That ship’s boat was your way home. How can being stuck out in the asteroids be funny?”
“We aren’t stuck. You are the ones who are stuck, stuck on Earth with all those nuclear weapons.”
Her host nodded in pained agreement. “Eh, well, I’ll admit they gave us a few bad moments back there. But how do you figure that you aren’t up the creek without a paddle, if I may muddle a metaphor?”
“We could build another boat eventually, Morton. It would take us awhile, is all. The thing is, right now we’re busy building other stuff.” She smiled, showing her strong white teeth. “Go on, ask me what we’re building.”
“What are you building?”
“I’m glad you asked. We’ve enlarged Diomedes Electric, and scrapped the plans for Diomedes Three.”
“I assume that you have something in mind as a replacement?”
“Oh, yes, Morton. This is a shot of the model of the new Turi John Ramos Station, which is set beside a model of Lunar Three for comparison.” The camera panned around both models, showing them from different angles. Both were tube and casing structures, but the TJR Station was much larger.
“Are they done to the same scale, Madeline?”
“Yes, of course. The other big difference is that the TJR Station will have all the water it can use. The TJR biosphere could easily support three or four thousand people. Lunar Three was laboring to support two-hundred.”
“To put that in context for our viewers, your crew is only 113 people, with no additions any time soon—” Madeline Tosca interrupted him.
“No additions is simply mistaken, Morton. Doctor Sioux Kerry and Colonel Pavel Ivanovitch Levsky are expecting a baby in a few months, so they got married.” A pause. “I phrased that lousily, but they aren’t the only ones, either.”
“Well, good luck and congratulations to all concerned, I suppose. How long before the TJR Station is completed?”
“We were originally supposed to be coming home by next Christmas,” she said, considering the question. “This, this is pretty ambitious. It will take at least another couple of years to complete the tube and the casing, and I don’t know how long the rigging will take. TJR Station won’t really be complete until the biosphere is supporting a shirtsleeves environment. Four, maybe five years, at a guess.”
“Well, at least you seem to be enjoying your work. Then will you build a boat to come home on?”
“You weren’t listening, Morton. Right now, Diomedes Station is home, in spite of everything. TJR Station also looks to be shaping up as home; you work on building something like that, you do form an attachment to it.”
Levine nodded. “Yes, yes, I concede the point. I could never sell that summer cottage I built, even though it came in a kit. But what are you all going to do once the TJR Station is finished and done with?”
“That,” she said with her most dazzling smile, “will depend on what needs to be done, won’t it, Morton?”
“We re almost out of time here, Madeline, but tell me, what do you think will need to be done?”
“Get work started on the starship, again. What else?”
“Hopeless, Madeline, utterly hopeless. As the man said: ‘Starships is dead.’ What makes you think you can resurrect them?”
“Mysticism, Morton. As the voice of God said: ‘If you build it, they will come.’ ”
One of the advantages of a long time delay is that it gives you a chance to do research. “That was the Kevin Costner movie, Field Of Dreams,” he said easily. “But how does baseball connect with building a starship?”