“—satisfactory progress in general,” Packer was saying. “However, we’ve got a decision to make. This past nightwatch, over at the northwest corner of the Complex Three site, they hit a pretty huge boulder. It’s evidently got more or less the same composition as the surrounding rock, so it didn’t register on the ground-wave probe, but Pedro Noguchi says we’ll have to get it out, and that’ll leave a hole in the side, plus a lot of cracks that must be due to it. I told him to hold off there till you called in.” His smile flashed, vivid white against the chocolate skin. “Don’t worry, I found plenty other things to keep him and his gang out of mischief.”
“You would,” Dagny agreed. Packer was every bit as competent as she was, slated to succeed her when she moved into general administration. For that reason, as well as to give him added experience, she felt free occasionally to accompany Edmond on his field trips—adventure, family life, helping out in his research. Still badly undermanned, the work was as basic to engineering and future habitation as H was to pure science. Building the structures for the University of Luna ought not to pose any extraordinary problems anyway.
But of course no project on the Moon failed to spring its surprises, and the ultimate responsibility was hers. Even ten years ago, she’d have -been tied to the spot. Telepresence capability’was like having another avatar.
Yes, flitted through her, history in space moved headlong, ever faster, like a comet plunging sunward. Not only-here. An L-5 under construction, spaceport, industrialcenter, home for Terrans where they could bear children wholly Terran. The wealth of the asteroids in gathered. Ice from the deeps of space, soon water in abundance wherever humans wanted it. Not too many years later, antimatter produced so copiously that ships could burn it to accelerate through an entire voyage, bisecting Pluto’s orbit in a trio of weeks. But when that liberation was won, Guthrie said, Fireball would first launch probes to the nearer stars …
Her mind sprang back to business. “Muy bien, let’s have a look.”
Packer spoke a command. The computer shifted the viewpoint. Dagny beheld rubble, the rough-hewn angle of a pit, a mass suggestive of a clenched fist partlyprotruding, broken-off pieces of it scattered below. Packer turned the scanning over to her. She made the camera move in and out and around, illuminate murky recesses, magnify, induce fluorescence.
“M-hm,” she murmured at length. “It’s what I thought, and I imagine you guessed.” She, though, had learned from Edmond Beynac. “A meteorite, ancient, buried in later lava flow. The plutonic character—unusual, to say the least. My husband will be most interested.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Didn’t you know? He studies meteoritics, besides what’s under his feet. Believes we won’t understand the basics of how the planets formed till we understand the asteroids better.” Dagny clicked her tongue. “Swears that one of these years he’ll get out into the Belt and fossick around personally.” Her heart stumbled. Too many had already perished in yonder distances. “This rock will be evidence for his idea, his minority opinion, that there was once a body in that region big enough to get really hot before it cooled off again. He thinks the nickel-iron object that gave us the Tycho mines was a piece of its core.” Dagny shook herself. “But I’m wandering. Pedro’s right, we’ll have to remove this thing. The hole, and the fissures where the lava congealed around it, will be a potential weakness in the foundation. We can’t simply fill in and feel safe.” Not after the Rudolph strike, or the more recent, similar but worse disaster at the Struve Criswell.
“What, then?” Packer asked.
“Got any idea? A couple occur to me, but you’ve had longer to think. Between us, we ought to come up with something worth pursuing.” A cry interrupted. “Oh, damn. The joys of motherhood. ‘Scuse a mo’. I’ll be right back, I hope.”
Rising, Dagny slipped from the office compartment and aft through the outsize, purely household van she had dubbed her kidmobile. The family often traveling in it—recreation, mainly, with friends along, though this was not their first serious expedition together—it was well furnished, from the pilot house in front to her and Edmond’s bed cubicle at the rear. Beyond the pantry, kitchenette, and dinette, she found the main room and her children.