“I’m Bernie James. I retired from the nanotech lab last year. I’m only a technician, but I’ll work with you on this.”
A few rows farther back, a taller man, blond hair cropped short, got to his feet. “Rolf Uhrquest, Space Transportation Department,” he said, in a clear tenor voice. “I would be willing to take my accumulated vacation time to work on this fusion project.”
Dan smiled at them both. “Thank you.”
“And I believe,” Uhrquest continued, “that Dr. Cardenas would be interested also.” Turning slightly, he called, “Dr. Cardenas, are you here?”
No one answered.
“I will find her,” Uhrquest said, very seriously. “It is a shame she is not present today.”
Dan looked expectantly out at the audience, but no one else stood up. At last he said, “Thank you,” and stepped away from the podium, back into the wings of the stage. Stavenger gave him a quick thumbs-up signal and returned to the podium for the final item on the meeting’s agenda: a request from a retired couple to enlarge their living quarters so they could have enough space to start a new business for themselves.
Once the meeting broke up, Stavenger said, “If Kris Cardenas had been anywhere in Selene I would have introduced you to her. Unfortunately, she’s in a space station in near-Earth orbit, working on developing nanomachines to bring down the costs of the Mars exploration centers.”
“Which station?” Dan asked.
“The one over South America.”
Dan grinned at him. “Nueva Venezuela. I helped build that sucker. Maybe it’s time for me to pay a visit there.”
ALPHONSUS
Pancho watched the safety demonstration very carefully. No matter that she had put on a spacesuit and done EVA work dozens of times; she paid patient attention to every word of the demo. This was going to be on the surface of the Moon, and the differences between orbital EVAs and a moonwalk were enough to worry about.
The tourists in the bus didn’t seem to give a damn. Hell, Pancho thought, if they’re stinky-rich enough to afford a vacation jaunt to the Moon, they must have the attitude that nothing bad’ll happen to them, and if it does they’ll get their lawyers to sue the hell out of everybody between here and Mars.
They had all suited up in the garage at Selene before getting onto the bus. It was easier that way; the bus was way too tight for fourteen tourists to wriggle and squeeze into their spacesuits. They rode out to the Ranger 9 site in the hard-shell suits, their helmets in their laps.
After all these years, Pancho thought, they still haven’t come up with anything better than these hard-shell suits. The science guys keep talking about softsuits and even nanomachine skins, but it’s still nothing more’n talk.
Even the teenagers went quiet once they cleared the garage airlock and drove out onto the cracked, pockmarked surface of Alphonsus. A hundred and eight kilometers across, the crater floor went clear over the horizon. The ringwall mountains looked old and weary, slumped smooth from eons of being sandpapered by the constant infall of meteoric dust. It was the dust that worried Pancho. In orbital space you were floating in vacuum. On the surface of the Moon you had to walk on the powdery regolith, sort of like walking on beach sand. Except that the “sand” billowed up and covered your boots with fine gray dust. Not just your boots, either, Pancho reminded herself. She’d heard tales about lunar dust getting into a suit’s joints and even into the life-support backpack. The dust was electrostatically charged from the incoming solar wind, too, and this made the freaking stuff cling like mad. If it got on your visor it could blind you; try to wipe it off with your gloves and you just smeared it worse.
They’d had some trouble finding Pancho a suit that would fit her comfortably; in the end they had to break out a brand new one, sized long. It smelled new, like pristine plastic. When the bus stopped and the guide told the tourists to put on their helmets, Pancho sort of missed the familiar scents of old sweat and machine oil that permeated the working suits she’d worn. Even the air blowing gently across her face tasted new, unused.