But she’s older than I am and she’s got her own life back Earthside. Probably boyfriends or lovers. Maybe her family’s already picked out a husband for her. She’s never brought up the subject and it’s none of my business. We’re friends and that’s fine; no sense getting it all tangled up with sex.
Doug was not a virgin, but he was far from experienced. He had dated now and then during his year on the Caltech campus. Despite the so-called New Morality that the politicians, the media, and even the university administration constantly drummed on, several times his dates had ended in bed. He had never had to push it, he just went along with the tide. He never considered that being good-looking, athletic, easy-going — and extremely wealthy — made him attractive to young women. Doug simply did what came naturally.
At Moonbase it was the same, yet different. There was a core of some two hundred long-term Moonbase employees, plus a couple of permanent residents such as Lev Brudnoy and his mother. The long-term Lunatics tended to form solid, long-term relationships, for the most part, although there were a couple of loose cannons of both genders. Rumor had it that Brudnoy himself was quite a Romeo, or had once been.
It was among the short-timers, the men and women who visited Moonbase for a month or so at a time, that most of the action took place. Doug had enjoyed a couple of flings, nothing major, nothing more than fun and games.
“So what’s your thesis about?” he asked.
“Well, originally I was going to do it on brown dwarfs; you know, superlarge planets that’re almost real stars. With the equipment up here I’ve been able to do a real thorough search for them.”
“Have you found any?”
“I’ve got six candidates, but I’d need some ultrasensitive infrared equipment to definitely identify them as brown dwarfs. They’ve got to be radiating at the wavelengths predicted by Chartrand’s theory.”
“Sounds heavy,” said Doug.
She grinned again. Too heavy. Too big a subject My thesis advisor wouldn’t let me tackle it”
“So?”
She took a quick breath arid then said, delightedly, “So I’m going to analyze the chemical compositions of the Earth-crossing asteroids, using the observatory here at Moonbase.”
Doug was immediately interested. “Now that’s something we can use right here. One of these days we’re going to want to go out and grab an asteroid that’s rich in carbon—”
“I remember you talking about mat last time I was up here,” Rhee said. “That’s one of the reasons I picked that topic. I thought it might help you.”
“It’d be a terrific help, Bianca. When we actually start the project, you could be part of our team.”
She beamed at him.
“If we ever start it,” he added, more soberly.
“If?”
“I’m learning economics the hard way,” Doug said. “I want to get an asteroid and mine it so we can use nanomachines to build Clipperships from asteroid carbon, make them out of pure diamond.”
“Diamond?”
Nodding eagerly, Doug said, “Diamond’s got a strength-to-density ratio fifty times better than the aluminum alloys we make at the space stations.”
“And nanobugs can produce pure diamond?”
“Out of the carbon we mine from the asteroid, sure: atom by atom.”
“Wow!” Rhee said. “That’s brutal!”
“But it takes money to get started. Capital investment And Moonbase isn’t making enough profits to swing it”
“Won’t the corporation—”
Doug interrupted, “The board of directors won’t sink any risk capital into Moonbase, not with the U.N. working up an international treaty that’ll ban nanotechnology completely.”
“That would shut Moonbase down!” Rhee said, alarmed.
“Maybe,” Doug replied. “But whether it does or not, the corporation isn’t going to provide the capital we need for the asteroid project.”
Rhee stared glumly at her half-finished drink. “And I was ready to come up here full time.”
“Full time? Really?” Doug asked. “I mean, I know you’ve got family and school and everything back Earthside.”
“There aren’t that many jobs for astronomers back there,” she said. “I couldn’t even get a teaching assistant’s position this semester.”
“Well, I’m sure we could fit you in here.” Then he added, “If this flipping nanotech treaty doesn’t shut us down completely.”
“You don’t think that could happen, do you?”
Doug smiled reassuringly. “No way. We’ll keep Moonbase going and we’ll use our nanomachines no matter what laws they pass down there.” Then he added, “I hope.”
“It’s really getting sick back home, you know,” she said, suddenly glum. “The New Morality people keep passing new laws and the Supreme Court lets them get away with it. They’ve even shut down the national art museum in Washington!”
But Doug’s mind was looking outward. “If only we could start the asteroid program now. If there was only some way I could get Greg to go for it.”
“I could stay here,” Bianca said. “I wouldn’t mind staying here with you indefinitely.”
“You want to become a real Lunatic?”
“Why not?”
“You’re sure?”
She nodded gravely. I’m positive.”
Again Doug caught a hint of something more going on than her words revealed. But he pushed that out of his thoughts. How can we can get the asteroid-grabbing program started right now? he asked himself.
Looking up, he saw that people were filing into The Cave, lining up at the food dispensers for their evening meals. He spotted Lev Brudnoy’s tall, gangly form meandering through the rapidly-filling tables, a tray of food in his hands and a bemused, almost puzzled look on his grizzled face.
“Mr. Brudnoy,” Doug called out, getting to his feet. “Would you care to join us?”
“Why? Are you falling apart?”
“Huh?’”
Brudnoy smiled sheepishly as he approached their table. “Forgive me. It’s an gld Groucho Marx line and it’s become something of a conditioned reflex in my silly little brain.”
Doug didn’t quite understand. “Marx? Like, with Lenin?”
With a sigh, Brudnoy said, “Please ignore my foolishness. And, yes, I would like to join you. I hate to eat alone.”
“You were an astronaut, weren’t you?” Doug asked as Brudnoy put his tray down on the table and folded his lanky frame into the chair between himself and Rhee.
“A cosmonaut,” Brudnoy corrected. “The same thing, but in Russian.”
“What do you think of the possibilities of going out and finding a carbonaceous asteroid and moving it into an orbit around the Moon?”
Brudnoy slumped back in his chair and puffed out his cheeks, then let out a long, slow whistle. “Ambitious. It would take a lot of delta vee.”
“Change in velocity,” Doug explained before Rhee could ask.
“I know that!” she hissed.
“Even for the Earth-crossing asteroids,” Brudnoy said, half musing, “you would need a tremendous expenditure of propellant to change their momentum into a lunar orbit”
“Suppose we use the asteroid’s own materials as propellant?” Doug challenged.
Brudnoy’s shaggy brows went up. “It would have oxygen, wouldn’t it.”
Rhee said, “Carbonaceous chondrites contain water.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Hydrates,” she said, “chemically linked to the rock.”
“It would take energy to get the water from the rock.”
“There’s plenty of solar energy,” Doug said. “And we can use nanomachines to do the separation.”
“I see. Once you have water, of course, you have hydrogen and oxygen for rocket propellants.”
“Right.” Doug nodded eagerly.
“Of course, the trick is not to use up all the asteroid’s valuable chemicals merely to get it into an orbit around the Moon. You want its water for us to use here, don’t you?”
“And its carbon,” said Doug.
“Carbon?” Brudnoy’s shaggy brows rose. “For life support?”
“For making spacecraft out of diamond, using nanomachines,” Doug said.
“Diamond,” Brudnoy whispered.