He laughed again. Randolph thinks he’s so fricking smart, sneaking Pancho’s sister out of the catacombs. Afraid I’ll terminate her? Or does he want to keep Pancho under his thumb? I won’t be able to use her anymore, but so what, who needs her now? I’ll be building a second fusion drive and he doesn’t even know it!
SPACEPORT ARMSTRONG
Pancho stared across the desolate, blast-scarred expanse of the launch center and wrinkled her nose unhappily. “It sure looks like a kludge.”
Standing beside her in the little observation bubble, Dan had to agree. The fusion drive looked like the work of a drunken plumber: bulbous spheres of diamond that sparkled in the harsh unfiltered sunlight drenching the lunar surface, the odd shapes of the MHD channel, the pumps that fed the fuel to the reactor chamber, radiator panels and the multiple rocket nozzles, all connected by a surrealistic maze of pipes and conduits. The entire contraption was mounted on the platform-like deck of an ungainly, spraddle-legged booster that stood squat and silent on the circular launch pad of smoothed lunar concrete. The observation chamber was nothing more than a bubble of glassteel poking up above the barren floor of Alphonsus’s giant ringwall. Barely big enough for two people to stand in, the chamber was connected by a tunnel to the control center of the launch complex.
“We didn’t build her for beauty,” Dan said. “Besides, she’ll look better once we’ve mated her with the other modules.”
Subdued voices crackled from the intercom speaker set into the smoothed wall of the chamber just below the rim of the transparent blister.
“Pan Asia oh-one-niner on final descent,” said the pilot of an incoming shuttle.
“We have you on final, oh-one-niner,” answered the calm female voice of a flight controller. “Pad four.”
“Pad four, copy.”
Dan looked up into the star-flecked sky and saw a fleeting glint of light.
“Retrorockets,” Pancho muttered.
“On the curve,” said the flight controller.
Another quick burst. Dan could make out the shuttle now, a dark angular shape falling slowly out of the sky, slim landing legs extended.
“Down the pipe, oh-one-niner,” said the woman controller. She sounded almost bored.
It all seemed to be happening in slow motion. Dan watched the shuttle come down and settle on the pad farthest away from the one on which the fusion rocket was sitting, waiting for clearance to take off. The shuttle pilot announced, “Oh-one-niner is down. All thrusters off.”
Pancho let out a puff of pent-up breath.
Surprised, Dan asked, “White knuckles? You?”
She grinned, embarrassed. “I always get torqued up, unless I’m driving the buggy.”
Glancing at his wristwatch, Dan said, “Well, we ought to get clearance to launch as soon as they offload the shuttle.”
With a nod, Pancho said, “I’d better get suited up.”
“Right,” said Dan.
The fusion system itself was the last part of their spacecraft to be launched into orbit around the Moon. The propellant tanks and the crew and logistics modules were already circling a hundred kilometers overhead. Pancho would supervise the assembly robots that would link all the pieces together.
Dan went with her along the tunnel and into the locker room where the astronauts donned their spacesuits. Amanda was already there, ready to help check her out. Dan realized it had been a long time since he’d checked out anyone or donned a spacesuit himself. Spaceflight is so routine nowadays that you can come and go from the Earth to the Moon just like you ride a plane or a bus, he thought. But another voice in his head said, you’re too old to be working in space. Over the years you’ve taken as big a radiation dose as you’re allowed… and then some.
He felt old and pretty useless as he watched Pancho worm into the spacesuit while Amanda hovered beside her, checking the seals and connections. Like Pancho, Amanda was wearing light tan flight coveralls. Dan noticed how nicely she filled them out.
Well, he sighed to himself, at least you’re not too old to appreciate a good-looking woman.
But he turned and headed for the tunnel that connected the space-port to Selene proper, feeling useless, wondering if Humphries was right and he was butting his head against a stone wall.