Van Haas was taller and thinner than his pictures indicated, and he looked far older and more worn than Haller had expected. Still, he had a pleasant baritone voice that sounded friendly and reassuring, and carried an undercurrent of passion in it when the project was discussed—and that was about all Rembrandt van Haas ever discussed.
“Sir? Something big break today?”
The director nodded, giving a slight smile. “Very big. It will be the talk of the day, and perhaps the year, around here when news gets out. A big day in human history, my boy. Today we have sent humans into Flux—two of them anyway— and brought them back whole, sane, and none the worse for wear.”
That was stunning news. “Then—we’re really going?”
Van Haas gestured to a plush chair, then took his own high-backed chair behind his large executive desk. “Does that excite you—or disturb you?”
Haller frowned. “Beg pardon, sir, but everybody here seems bloody intent on proving that I really want to turn tail and run away.”
“And you’ll get more of that,” the director warned him. “Especially now. We don’t have more than one shot at this, Haller. We do it, or we don’t, and if we don’t, we shall most probably be dead. You’ll find yourself doing it to others, by and by. Everyone who goes must be committed, almost like a religious crusade. We don’t have sufficient room for those we absolutely must have, so we don’t want to get to the last moment, or, worse, even out there, and discover that we brought someone along we regret and thereby left someone behind we needed. Can you accept that?”
“I suppose. But I hope I shan’t be doing it to others. I have a feeling that those who shouldn’t go will weed themselves out when push comes to shove before we pack off for the universal bush, as it were.”
Van Haas sighed. “I wish I had your confidence in that. However, let’s see what it is we’re really talking about.” He reached down to a control panel below desk height and pushed some buttons. The office lights went down to off, but the globe became eerily illuminated from within. It was a startling effect.
“Seven Gates to Heaven or Hell,” said the director. “We’ll be placing them quite carefully above and below the equatorial region. Three would be sufficient for temperature and atmospheric maintenance, we feel, but the rest will provide backup in case of failures and excess with which to work. It’s your medium, Haller. What will you design?”
“I only just arrived, sir. Still, it’ll be a team effort all the way. To turn a lifeless lump like that into a balanced, well-maintained world of its own will take a lot of coordination. Water and atmospherics will take precedence over everything, and they are global phenomena.”
“The computer model you proposed in your application was most ingenious,” van Haas noted. “Why so many large seas when we can adjust the water forms to suit?”
“For the same reason we’re taking farmers and handcrafts folk. We are kidding ourselves that we can ever be independent of our machines there—we are too far from the sun to sustain life in a natural state—but assuming that temperature gradients are maintained, everything else should be natural. We’re working with less surface area and a bit less mass than Earth, so seas are more appropriate than oceans, but natural runoff should be allowed for. Our weather and climate should be self-generating and self-renewing, accepting that temperatures are maintained.”
“There are some that believe we are insane to even take those farmers and carpenters, you know. They’d make it another Titan, only on a full global scale, and use hydroponics and eventually I suppose transmutation to get whatever they needed. Just scientists—no common folk to get in the way.”
“But this isn’t a private project! It’s a new world we’re talking about!”
Van Haas nodded. He really liked the look of this one. “God knows, we are bleeding the people dry for this as it is. We must give them something, some romance, some identification, or the revolts will be quick and bloody. Most of our colleagues don’t see it that way. I admit, though, I don’t like to sell this as pie in the sky—sacrifice now and we’ll turn the Earth into paradise, all that rot. We’re lying through our teeth and gambling as it is, and our only allies among the people are poverty, misery, hopelessness, and despair. It’s a hell of a way to sell a railroad.”
“Still, it might just pay off for them.”
“It might, but you should be very clear as to why those farmers and craftspeople are really coming along. There are no immediate payoffs, no instant dividends. When this becomes apparent, funding will be reduced, perhaps cut to the bone. There will be moves to close the project, even perhaps just cut us off and starve us out. I couldn’t grow a tomato from a hole in the ground. I haven’t more than the vaguest notion of how to plow and reap and sow unless it’s programming robots to do it from knowledge furnished me by farmers. I wouldn’t know how to butcher a cow, or even if I managed to shear a sheep how to make it into a wool suit I could wear. What we got out there fast will be all that there is. I want us self-sufficient in food, clothing, all the basics of life as quickly as possible. We technocrats don’t know how to do that without our machines, and out there we’ll first have to make the land in order to grow things on it.”
Rembrandt van Haas sighed and got up, the lights coming on at the same time. “You will design that land, and I will oversee the entire project, but they will keep us in food and shoes and underwear. Come on with me. I’m going over to the Flux Transfer Section and see just what we have here. That is, if you wish.”
Toby Haller felt newly invigorated, and his excitement was hard to contain. This was not the cold, austere van Haas everyone pictured or feared, the dreaded administrator without heart, but a dreamer like himself, and a visionary too. He wanted to see and know it all.
Suzi Watanabe was a small, plain, diminutive woman, less than 150 centimeters tall and thin enough to pose for a starvation charity poster. She seemed to chain-smoke cigarettes and always have one in her mouth and one in an ashtray, even though the things were considered unsafe and antisocial almost everywhere. She wore big round glasses with lenses as thick as the bottoms of beer bottles, and judging from her overall appearance she hadn’t slept in a week and had last slept in the clothes she still wore. She darted nervously around, this way and that, a coiled spring that released itself in every movement, then wound tight once more.
She greeted the director with a perfunctory nod and didn’t even seem to notice Haller.
“Well, we’ve got it,” she said flatly. “No problems, checks out every time. The failure before was in the shipping medium.”
“Shipping medium?” Haller repeated, puzzled.
“Yeah. We always knew we needed as close to immobility as possible for the computers to get a precise digitized reading, but you can’t shut down the human body entirely. You can’t even kill it and expect all the processes to halt at once. Hair, fingernails, that kind of thing, keep on. Every time we tried some sort of suspension, it was impossible to keep the liquid or gas from co-mingling with the subject and causing problems in the rebuilding.”
Van Haas broke in. “Haller, you remember Edison and the light bulb? He had the whole thing worked out, but he couldn’t find the filament that would burn for long periods without exploding or consuming itself faster than a candle wick. We’ve known how to do this for some time, but there was apparently only one liquid that would both not interfere with the reassembly of the human subject and also wouldn’t kill the subject.”
“A little more complicated a problem than old Edison had,” Watanabe responded. “Anyway, it’s a muitistep process. First we sedate, using conventional cryogenic gasses, but then we flush it all out using a high-density energy plasma that is slightly altered Flux energy, and that stuff maintains the suspension for a sufficient time to digitize the subject. The computer treats it as Flux—which means it ignores it—so the stuff simply remains in Flux during reassembly and rapidly reverts to its original state. No foreign substances.”
“You make it sound so simple,” the director noted. “Now— can we adapt our existing ship designs to this method, and how long would that take?”
“A matter of months,” she responded. “After all, we knew what we had to have. We just had to have the formula to make it work. I’d like to run as many tests as possible, but I think we might be able to try our first distance jump in three months, no more.”
Van Haas looked at Haller. “It’s the most frustrating thing we have here, even when we have it. As an administrator, I’d love to order them to rush it, but this is one area where no mistakes can be tolerated.”
Haller nodded. “I’m not sure I want to go on something that’ll do that to me when it hasn’t been jumped through hoops. Just where does this set the timetable though?” He was already feeling like one of the team.
“I’ve given orders to the remote stations in orbit to being the robotized placement of the Gates and preliminary testing. That’ll eat up our three months. Then we’ll have to begin the bleeds”—allowing Flux to come into the world—”and that will take quite some time. When sufficient Flux is formed to create a physical atmosphere, we will begin to ship and put in place the network of twenty-eight master-computer stations. We’ll have to anchor and test them, create the proper atmospheric balance and study what it does—quite a lot. Our current estimate is seven years, but I hope we will be able to shorten it.”
Haller was dumbstruck, his romantic vision rapidly fading away. “Seven years . . .”
The orders went out from Borelli Station through Flux and were received by the already awaiting units in orbit around the tiny world, all of them dwarfed by the gigantic planet the moon orbited.
The robotized stations were gigantic, although modular in construction, having assembled themselves from pieces sent through one by one. Now they would have a better and surer way to transmit and receive. The earliest ones had created a small automated counterpart to Borelli Station in orbit themselves; now they began to receive what they needed.
Every square millimeter of the moon’s surface had been scanned and mapped, and calculations made. Modules now detached from the orbiting mothers and descended to the surface, where crawlers had already checked and double-checked the terrain, the surface and underlying composition of the ground; made seismic estimates; even bored with strong lasers for several kilometers into the very heart of the place.