She, he decided, was deliberately picking a nit, maybe for psychological impact. Finally, enough time passed so that Dolph hoped he could just ignore the discourtesy.
“Any equipment you’d like to take down with you?” he asked.
“Did you hear what I said about the stator magnet?” she barked. “It’s out of spec. Fix it!”
Damned if she didn’t seem serious, he thought. This was not good. “I’ll get on it as soon as we have you settled,” he temporized.
“Now, Wigner. I don’t want my ship torqued away if the bearing seizes.”
Dolph opened his mouth to protest, thought better of it, and shut it hard enough that he heard his teeth click. Very well, he’d fix the damn thing. A quick check with Hopper identified the lower bearing as the problem, and he told Hopper to bring him the spare—a pair of thick nested hoops two meters in diameter.
“My wife, Sasha, is in the ship down-tether, waiting for you,” he told the inspector. “I’ll be done in twenty minutes or so.”
“My ship’s at risk and I want to stay here and watch this,” McCarthy told him. “Get to it.”
He looked up and saw her jet from her air lock to about ten meters out from where he was working, and take up a position with her back to the Sun. She crossed her arms and floated there, motionless on her backpack gyros. He assumed she was staring at him.
“Roger,” he replied, trying to keep the irritation from his voice, nodded to her and got to work. The job wasn’t that big, actually. One of Hopper’s spiders had brought the new bearing as they’d talked, and with smart fasteners decoupling themselves from the telescoping joint, all he had to do was ease out the old bearing and ease in the new one before light pressure on the solar collector pushed the mast out of alignment by more than a centimeter.
He had it done in fifteen minutes.
“Can we go in now?” he asked. “Sasha’s holding lunch.”
“She’ll have to hold a bit longer.” McCarthy jetted over to the mast and held her helmet against it for a long time, then seemed to be satisfied. Dolph told Hopper to feed their conversation to Sasha so she’d know what was going on.
“Twenty-first century?” McCarthy asked at length.
“Early twenty-second,” he replied evenly. “It’s an old Cislunar Republic mining survey station for the twenty-fourth Kirkwood association, last inhabited in 2123. The CLR left when Mercury opened up.”
“I know all that,” McCarthy snapped. “I date things by when they were built, not when the last people left. That shaft is a hundred years old if it’s a day. No later than 2092, I’d say; it’s titanium, probably lunar. They punched out hundreds of these setups back then. Anything after that would have been local glass, because that’s when the rock chewers got smart and fast enough to make it cheaper. You did the joint yourself?”
“Yes. The original bearing is down on the crater floor. Wouldn’t move.”
“Vacuum welded. They used glazed rollers—OK for a few years, but you have to keep them moving. I won’t redline your job, but that magnet going sour was a symptom that the thing’s been wowing a bit. You put a large mirror on that shaft.”
“We’re going to grow grapes, so we got as big a mirror as the specs allowed—”
“And, to save money, the smallest bearings,” McCarthy interrupted. “And on top of that, you put it as far up as you could. Everything away from the direction of goodness. Maximum stress: not smart.”
“It computed, Inspector.”
“Tell me about it,” she sniffed. “Artificial intelligences lack both art and intelligence. Look, I said I won’t red-line your provisional on that alone, but you’ll need to fix it, understand? I know an outfit at Chao Dome—”
“Mercury!”—I’ll bet you do, Dolph seethed. But he said: “Yes, Inspector. Why Mercury? Mercury is as far in to the Sun from here as you can go!” She wasn’t even inside yet, hadn’t much more than glanced at the habitat, now they were already looking at nine months for a shipment from the South Pole of Mercury, and paying probably another EU to get free and clear of the IPA bureaucracy. Damn! They could have lived for a year on Mars for an EU.
“Mercury is the nearest solid thing to the center of the asteroid belt,” she said. “Think about it. With their electromagnetic launchers, delta-v is beside the point, and Mercury revolves around the Sun so fast that it’s never more than ninety days for a launch to any place in the belt. Now, what’s your problem with Mercury? You don’t like their connections?”
What the hell? Dolph thought. Was she reading his mind, or had she just been through this with so many newcomers that the question was second nature? He considered the question rhetorical and acknowledged the lecture with a negative grunt.
McCarthy gestured to the crater below. “Standard turn of the century habitat down there?”
“Not any more,” Dolph snapped, then stared at the habitat as he counted to ten.
The crater was four hundred meters across and almost precisely on the asteroid’s spin axis. The habitat centrifugal frame, an open lattice box of cables and tubes as long as a football field and half as wide, could rotate in the crater like the spinner on a child’s game, giving them lunar normal acceleration at the tips. It was static now, though, to make their work easier; the asteroid’s minuscule gravity was enough to hold tools and supplies on the habitat walls. He and Sasha had spent the last two months turning living quarters originally meant as spartan accommodations for a dozen survey personnel into a comfortable home for three, following the requirements stored in Hopper’s cybernetic brain to the bit.
“Hmmpf. I suppose not. I see it has the old-fashioned gas retention vestibules outside of the inboard air locks.”
She meant, Dolph realized after a vocabulary-searching second or two, the enclosed porch around the main air locks; the ones that would be on “top” of the two habitat modules when the frame rotated, i.e., toward the center.
“That’s a good feature,” she added, almost inaudibly. Then she cleared her throat and asked, clear and loud: “Did you restress the angular momentum neutralizer?”
“Huh?” How, Dolph wondered, did you neutralize angular momentum? Wasn’t it conserved? What kind of state-of-the-art electronic device would he have to buy now? “What the—”
“That’s the big stone wheel under the frame that turns in the opposite direction. It cancels your habitat’s angular momentum, so your habitat rotation doesn’t cause the asteroid to precess and swing your mast around and wreck your new bearing. Now, did you tighten the cables that hold it together?”
“Hopper, what about it?” Dolph asked, thoroughly confused. The floor under the habitat was a circle of smooth solid rock—he hadn’t realized it could turn.
“My IPA download,” Hopper replied, “makes no mention of reviving the momentum neutralizer, nor of this procedure.”
“Idiot bureaucrats!” McCarthy huffed. “I filed that requirement two years ago!”
“Uh, is that wheel really necessary?” Dolph asked. Maybe there was a reason it wasn’t in the book, the reason being an opportunity for selective enforcement. He supposed the next thing he’d find out was it would cost another EU to fix. “I mean, if the mast alignment is accurate enough—”