Assemblers of Infinity Read online

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  Assemblers of Infinity

  by Kevin J. Anderson

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  Copyright (c)1993 by Kevin J. Anderson

  Fictionwise

  www.Fictionwise.com

  Science Fiction

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  PART I

  GRISSOM MEMORIAL PROPOSED

  A space activist group, "The Future Today," has presented the Newsnet Access Service with seven different concepts for a memorial to be erected in honor of the Grissom station, which was destroyed on 17 October 2007. All seven of the designs in some way incorporate either the names or the likenesses of the two astronauts killed in the disaster that shocked the nation.

  Ramona Gonzales, spokesperson for The Future Today, claims that her organization has already selected several candidate sites for the proposed memorial, including the Challenger Foundation; the Johnson Space Museum in Houston, TX; the International Space Museum in Alamogordo, NM; or the Tourist Center in Cape Canaveral, FL.

  "This tragedy affected our public mindset more deeply than anything since the Challenger explosion," Gonzales said. "It hasn't been hard for us to obtain donations. People want to erect such a memorial. It means a lot to them."

  United Space Agency Director Celeste McConnell, whose husband was killed in the accident, appeared lukewarm about the idea, however. McConnell said, "What we should get out of this disaster is a lesson, not a statue."

  -- FINAL FRONTIER, on-line access date April 2014.

  SIMULATED MARS MISSION MARKS 300-DAY ANNIVERSARY

  The "practice" mission for a manned voyage to Mars passed the halfway point of its Antarctic isolation yesterday. Crewmembers opened special packages of treats and celebrated by sending a general message to the people of Earth.

  Bingham Grace, commander of the practice mission, gave his assurances that everything was going according to schedule, though he admitted that "my people are starting to get a little anxious for the real thing."

  After orbiting Earth for three months to simulate a trip to the red planet, the crewmembers landed at an isolated base camp in Antarctica, where they are required to survive using only the equipment available to them on Mars. In another 300 days, after successful completion of their Antarctic simulation, the crew will blast off again for another three months in Earth orbit, to simulate the return trip to Earth.

  The crew will use the Mars Simulation facility on the Moon in two years, to refine training in the much harsher lunar environment. The thirty day lunar stay is intended to be the final training mission before the expedition to Mars.

  Though the tedious-sounding practice schedule has received attacks from critics who claim it takes too long and costs too much, United Space Agency officials insist that "it is the safest and most cost-effective way to ensure a successful mission to Mars." A high-ranking official said, "It's like practicing in a swimming pool before diving to the bottom of the ocean."

  -- freelance space agency newsrelease, picked up by AP, UPI, and CNN

  Associated Newsnets

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  CHAPTER 1

  moonbase columbus

  The helium-3 processing plant looked like a lunar rover thrown together by a committee of abstract artists.

  Standing two hundred meters away, Jason Dvorak recognized the large wheels and the heavily shielded nuclear power unit. Triangular heat radiators the size of old ship sails jutted up and out at an angle, giving the impression of a stegosaurus lumbering across the crater floor.

  The front of the He-3 processor opened up in a cylinder of diamond-tipped teeth used for scooping and grinding the top layer of moon dirt, or regolith; at the opposite end, a jumble of hot debris was deposited like excrement.

  As the leviathan crawled along the surface, swallowing regolith, Jason felt pressure on his spacesuited arm. He turned and, in a habit he could not seem to shake, looked at the reflectorized spacesuit visor of his companion before glancing down to the namepatch. Never look at the face to recognize someone outside, he kept telling himself. After a year, you'd think he'd be used to it.

  Cyndi Salito's contralto voice came over his speaker. "You haven't moved for minutes, Jase."

  "Can't help it." Jason turned back to the mobile processor. "I can't believe it's finally working. You beat your deadline by a week. This'll really look good for us. Especially for me -- two weeks in command and already I have a major milestone to show off." And it's a miracle the base hasn't fallen apart, he added to himself. He still couldn't figure out why the space agency director, Celeste McConnell, had named him -- an architect, of all people --

  commander. He was still getting used to the title.

  "If it's working," corrected Cyndi. "The ten metric tons of dirt it's processing should yield a hundred milligrams of He-3. If the wizards back dirtside keep their part of the bargain, we could have a working fusion plant by early next year. We're due to receive another proton transmission from the Nevada Test Site next month."

  "I'll turn this place into a resort yet." Jason laughed.

  "That's why you're up here, Jase," Salito said. Jason hated to be called by the nickname, but he never bothered to correct people. She nudged him back to their rover. "Come on, demonstration's over. If I was ten years younger, I'd take you out to dinner."

  "You're just trying to make points with the boss," he said.

  Salito made a sound like static on the suit radio. "Won't need to after next month."

  "Columbus won't be the same without you all," he said. "I'm going to miss the crew."

  "You'll have sixty other people to keep you company."

  Jason stepped over a rock as he climbed onto the rover's passenger seat, trying not to grip anything. Even at 4.5 psi suit pressure, the gloves still bit into his flesh. It was a common complaint. Fifty years of spaceflight and you'd think they could solve a simple problem of constant-volume suits, he thought. For months he'd put up with rubbing his hands raw each time he pulled off his gloves.

  Salito started the rover and turned for Moonbase Columbus. "Aren't you looking forward to getting back to your wife? Seeing your twins?"

  "Of course," he said. That's what Salito expected him to say. But Jason's wife Margaret had filed for separation a month ago, before he had even been gone a year. Some devotion! Talk about twisting in a knife 240,000 miles away. And his children Lacy and Lawrence hadn't seen him except on video transmissions since they were a year old. He was not looking forward to returning home. Being so far away put a little distance on the pain.

  He tried to sound upbeat, for Salito's sake. "Hey, someone's got to put in that second level of habitation modules and make this base liveable, not a crummy boot camp. Can't trust a bunch of physicists and astronomers to get their hands dirty, digging tunnels and piling regolith. I watched how much trouble Bernard Chu had getting you all to put together the Sim-Mars base!"

  Salito grunted over the radio; Jason had the frightening feeling that she saw right through his small talk.

  Four groups made up the sixty person base, and everyone worked and socialized within their own group. Every six months a group rotated off the Moon, and a new one came on. After a six-month apprenticeship under Bernard Chu, who had transferred up to the Collins station at L-1, Jason had suddenly found himself the new commander of Moonbase Columbus. The change in assignmen
t had surprised him as much as it had Chu....

  As the rover continued, Mare Smythi unfolded to reveal Columbus Base.

  The Earth hung low over the crater wall, like a big blue drop teaming with life. The tip of the base's 16-meter telescope was barely visible behind the embankments of the buried living modules. From this vantage point, Jason couldn't see the optical interferometer, the gamma-ray telescope, and other astronomical equipment.

  One of his first troubles as commander had been to placate the Earthbound astronomical community by assuring them that the seismic vibrations from the wandering He-3 processing plants would not disturb any of the sensitive astronomical devices. No one using a Disneyland telepresence link would be driving these monstrosities; the amusement parks used only little robotic rovers in a compound hundreds of kilometers away.

  Jason had done that himself once, before he told anybody his dream to come up here. He remembered sitting behind the controls after waiting five hours in line at Disneyland, marveling at how he could be driving a real lunar rover almost a quarter million miles away, just for the fun of it. He smiled as Cyndi Salito continued to drive to the moonbase.

  As if a switch had been thrown, radio chatter filled Jason's helmet as they came into line-of-sight. " -- not sure what happened. We lost contact with the hopper just before Waite's signal ended." "Get a hold of Dvorak yet?"

  "Still trying! L-1 can't raise him -- "

  Salito turned toward him, but Jason was already using his chinmike to break into the discussions. "Columbus, this is Dvorak. Big Daddy, what's going on?"

  "Jason, am I glad to hear you! We were just going to send someone out to find you -- "

  Jason cut Lon Newellen off. "Okay, I'm back. What's going on?" He barely noticed Salito increasing the rover's speed.

  "Trevor Waite's hopper -- we haven't been able to raise it."

  "Did the communication link fail?"

  "No, that's not it. They ... they were broadcasting from the VLF. Waite had gone with Becky Snow down into Daedalus crater and Lasserman was relaying the information from the hopper -- " Newellen fell into an uncomfortable silence. Jason was about to press him, when Newellen spoke again.

  "There's something more. You'd better get in here and see the visuals yourself."

  Jason stood just outside the holotank in the control center. Two meters in diameter, the transparent cylinder took up the center of the hemispherical room. He placed a hand on the shimmering image and let out his breath. "Whoa.

  What in the hell is that?"

  Translucent spindly arms grew up from an impossibly deep hole next to the crater wall. A faint shimmer could be seen between the arms; two of them met in an arch half a kilometer up from the hole. The rest of the object seemed to be under construction.

  The enormity of the scale made Jason take a step back when he caught a glimpse of the hopper landing zone, outside the crater. The hopper itself was destroyed. Trevor Waite, Becky Snow, and Siegfried Lasserman were dead. The first deaths on the Moon in years. And they were his responsibility.

  But the mystery of the artifact kept grabbing his attention. The thing was huge -- and no one had even suspected its presence.

  "Flash up the most recent orbiter picture of that site." A cube dilated in the holotank, rotated. It showed the identical scene -- without the hole and ghostly infrastructure. "When was this picture made?"

  "That's from LO-3. That orbiter went down two years ago. Those pictures were taken just after the VLF went operational."

  Jason stepped close and squinted at the images Waite had transmitted, but the tank's resolution got no better. "I can't make out any vehicle marks, except for Waite's rover."

  "There weren't any."

  Newellen pulled up his powder-blue jumpsuit and moved with ballet-like grace in the low gravity toward the holotank. The heavyset man seemed out of place in the lunar environment; but Newellen's beefy frame was held up by some of the largest bones Jason had ever seen. People didn't appreciate the nickname of "Big Daddy" until they met the man up close.

  Newellen jabbed a chubby finger into the shimmering 3-D image. "Way over here you can see plenty of places with rover tracks -- here, here, and even here. These are all from when the VLF array was built years ago. You can even tell where some of the folks went off joy riding. But except for this isolated spot by the ... the thing," he outlined the volume with a chubby finger, "the regolith is undisturbed. See." He punched at the holotank and the entire view collapsed to the spot he had outlined some seconds before.

  Cyndi Salito pushed closer to the image, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Jason and Newellen. "How come we didn't detect any of this before? What could have built that thing in the past two years without leaving any footprints? Has the regolith around the hole been swept back to cover tracks?"

  "No way." Newellen magnified the image even more, and the ground took on a jumbled appearance. "We already ran a Mandelbrodt simulation -- we got the same distribution as what you're seeing here. The ground is essentially undisturbed."

  No one spoke as he pulled the view back to encompass the entire structure. Jason kept staring at the image. "So what you're saying is that something the size of a football stadium just appeared out there, without any sign of construction, no by-products? That doesn't explain a damned thing!"

  Newellen just shrugged. "Abracadabra."

  "And Hopper-1 -- no idea of what happened? Or that last transmission from Trevor Waite?" Jason scowled and ran a hand through his dark curly hair.

  "Come on, dammit! Skyscrapers don't just start growing on the lunar surface!"

  When nobody spoke for several moments, Newellen reran Lasserman's video transmission, relayed from Waite's stereochip. He stopped at the closeups of the gossamer structure rising up from the pit.

  Cyndi Salito finally broke the silence. "I'm not going to be the first to say the "A" word."

  Newellen rolled his eyes. "Right. Alien construction corps invades Moon. That'll rank right up with that statue of Elvis we're supposed to find on Mars."

  Jason looked around to the other people in the control center and narrowed his eyes. "I'm not going to be a laughingstock. But three people are dead, and we'll damn well find out why. Put me through to Director McConnell on Earth."

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  CHAPTER 2

  UNITED SPACE AGENCY: WASHINGTON, D.C.

  The general was in his element. Celeste McConnell could tell by his animated gestures, the emotion on his face as he strode in front of the sprawling holographic tank. He focused Celeste's attention on images of the asteroid as it tumbled toward Earth, an unstoppable island of rock nearly a mile across.

  "Icarus is on an intercept course," said Major General Simon Pritchard.

  "It hasn't come this close to Earth orbit since 1968. These views are from the wide-field-of-view cameras on the orbiting Leansats." The window showed a potato-shaped Icarus rotating as it approached. It grew larger as the frames changed.

  A picture of Earth filled another window as the general moved his fingers over the computer's controls. A moving bull's-eye scanned the Earth as the asteroid approached. Right then, the point of impact crossed Brazil.

  "If we use the SpaceGuard orbiting defense system -- " Just at the edge of the screen, Celeste could see a missile, streamlined and coasting outward, with the insignia of the United Space Agency perhaps too bright and prominent on its nuclear tip. The proposed SpaceGuard missiles were intended to be directed against space-borne threats.

  Celeste smoothed her business suit. She still found it uncomfortable, even after all these years. But Washington, D.C. demanded a strict dress code.

  People wore ties and three-piece suits while relaxing in front of a fire. She had never gotten used to it. She preferred the comfortable zero-g jumpsuits she had worn as an astronaut, seven years ago now, while on the Grissom....

  Pritchard didn't look up as he reviewed the simulation. Two stars were prominent on each of his shoulders. She wondered what he would hav
e been like as a college professor, like most of the other PhDs she knew. Celeste suspected he had groomed himself specifically for her visit. He had set up the meeting weeks in advance.

  Pritchard remained focused in total concentration. On the primary screen, Celeste watched a crater the size of a shopping mall appear over the asteroid's terminator as Icarus tumbled on its axis. The SpaceGuard missiles streaked toward the craggy rock.

  The situation here seemed surrealistic to her, a two-star general and the director of the United Space Agency alone in this control room. Pritchard had chased the techs and his aide away. He wanted to run the simulation himself; he had spent enough time training on the system.

  "Missiles are incoming." Pritchard nodded at the image of Icarus. She could see the rock moving, changing, tugged by the steep gravity well of Earth. The nose of one of the SpaceGuard missiles tilted, and a targeting cross appeared on the surface of the asteroid. On the third viewing window, Earth rotated, placidly unaware of the approaching threat.

  "Course correction." Propulsion systems kicked in with a blast of silver-white vapor.

  Pritchard's eyes were wide, enraptured by the events. Celeste tore her attention away from the screens to look at him, maintaining a professional expression on her own face. His medium-brown hair was tousled, a thin film of sweat holding it to his forehead. Wiry and sharp, Simon Pritchard did not look like a "Blood n' Guts" general.

  "Ready, ready ... impact."

  Brilliant orange and yellow flared up on the screen showing Icarus as the missiles detonated. "Now, we've got two scenarios. Either the yield will be small enough to deflect the asteroid's orbit -- " On another screen an orbital diagram appeared, showing the old orbit in red, intersecting Earth's position with an ominous X; then a new path in blue projected a more elongated ellipse that carried Icarus safely out of the bounds of Earth.

  " -- or it will be larger than the asteroid's tensile strength and fragment the asteroid into smaller pieces. And that's the problem. A lot of tiny chunks could hurt us more than the whole asteroid. So the trick is to have the missiles diagnose the asteroid while in flight, then change their yield so that the asteroid is only deflected."