Someone whistled softly.

“Look,” Doug said, “we can’t expect any support from the corporation. That’s why we’ve got to do this on a volunteer basis and hope to get our payback at the end of the asteroid mission.”

“Sounds awfully risky.”

“Sounds like a good way to get fired.”

“You can’t be fired for working overtime on a voluntary basis,” Doug said. “Read your employment contracts.”

“Well,” said Bianca, “I don’t know about the rest of you turkeys, but I’m ready to put in a couple of extra hours for this.”

Brudnoy said, “It should be more interesting than spending your spare time in The Cave, waiting for the menu to change.”

They all laughed. Doug thought maybe half of them would actually volunteer to work on their own time. But this meeting would never be kept a secret. The word about Operation Bootstrap would spread through Moonbase with the speed of sound.

Which was what he was counting on.

“I’ve never been out this far before,” said Brudnoy.

His voice sounded strange in Doug’s helmet earphones. Subdued. Almost reverent.

“I hardly ever come out here myself,” Rhee said. “Just for these regular maintenance checks.”

The astronomical observatory was on the opposite side of Alphonsus’ central peak from Moonbase. It had been placed out there to shield it from any stray light or dust or chemical pollution from the spacecraft landing and taking off at the rocket port. This meant a two-hour doctor ride across the crater floor, but Doug and Brudnoy had decided to accompany Rhee to see the instruments she used to track near-Earth asteroids.

Now Rhee led them through a jungle of metal shapes, all pointed skyward. Wide-angle telescopes, spectrometers, infrared and ultraviolet and even gamma-ray detectors. Doug easily recognized the wide dishes of the four radio telescopes off in the distance, but one shape puzzled him: it looked like a huge but stubby wide tub mounted on tracked pivots. It was easily twenty yards across.

“The light bucket?” Rhee said when he asked. “That’s the Shapley Telescope, two-thousand-centimeter reflector. The most powerful telescope in the solar system.”

“You use it for deep space observations?”

Rhee replied cheerfully, “I don’t use it all. It’s reserved for the Big Boys back Earthside. But yes, they use it for cosmological work. Quasars and redshifts, stuff like that”

Brudnoy asked, “Wasn’t there talk of building an even bigger “light bucket,” using liquid mercury instead of a glass mirror?”

“The Shapley’s mirror is aluminum,” Rhee answered. “No need for glass in this gravity.”

“But the mercury telescope?”

“Maybe someday. Probably be easier to make really big mirrors with mercury, but it tends to vaporize into the vacuum.”

Doug watched their two spacesuited figures as they spoke: Brudnoy taller than Rhee by more than a helmet’s worth.

“Couldn’t it be covered with a protective coating?” the Russian asked.

“Sure, but that cuts down on its reflectivity.”

“Ah.”

Doug asked, “Which ones do you use for tracking the asteroids?

“Over here.” Rhee pointed and Doug followed her outstretched gloved hand with his eyes.

“The two big ones are Schmidts,” she explained. “Wide field’scopes. Schmidt-Mendells, actually; they’ve been specially built for lunar work. And those over there are tracking individual asteroids, getting spectrographic data on their compositions.”

“For your thesis,” Doug realized.

“Right.”

“Don’t you use radar to detect asteroids?” Brudnoy asked.

Doug could sense her nodding inside her helmet. “Sure. One of the radio telescopes converts to radar sweeps twice a day. When we pick up something new we track it long enough to determine its orbit and then turn one of the spectrographic’scopes on it.”

“What happens to all this equipment if Moonbase shuts down?” Doug asked.

“The university consortium will keep them running as long as they can, I guess,” Rhee answered. “The data gets piped back Earthside automatically, as it is. Maybe they’ll be able to send a maintenance crew up here every six months or so, keep it all going.”

“It would be a shame to lose all this,” Brudnoy muttered.

Doug nodded agreement even though they couldn’t see him do it.

It took three hours for Rhee to complete all her maintenance checks and make the necessary adjustments in the instruments. Then they climbed back into the open tractor and trundled toward Moonbase. Brudnoy and Doug got off at the rocket port and Rhee drove alone back to the main airlock and the garage inside it.

“So this is the one you want to buy,” Brudnoy said as they walked slowly to the lunar transfer vehicle sitting on one of the smoothed rock pads.

“It’s been in service for ten years,” Doug said, looking up at the ungainly spacecraft. “The corporation would sell it for about twice its scrap value, I think.”

The LTV looked rather like a pyramidal shaped skeleton. It squatted on four bent, flimsy-looking legs that supported a metal mesh platform. From the platform rose gold-foiled propellant tanks, darker odd-shaped cargo containers, pipes and plumbing with gray electronics boxes wedged in, it seemed, wherever they could-be fitted. Up at the top, some thirty feet above Doug’s head, was the empty plastiglass bubble of a passenger/crew compartment.

“Well,” Brudnoy said, sighing, “we won’t need the passenger bubble.”

“Replace it with more cargo holds,” said Doug.

“No, I think the mining equipment should go there.”

“Oh, right,” Doug agreed hastily. “I almost forgot we’ll need that.”

For nearly an hour they clambered over the aging LTV, awkward in their cumbersome surface suits. The spacecraft stood stoically on the pad, like a dignified old gutted building being inspected by skeptical prospective buyers.

“Metal fatigue,” Brudnoy muttered time and again. “This whole section must be replaced.”

Doug took notes on his hand-held computer.

Finally the Russian was satisfied. “Not as good as I wanted,” he said as he and Doug climbed back down onto the scoured ground again. “But not as bad as I feared.”

“Can we get into shape?” Doug asked.

“Of course,” Brudnoy answered. Then he added, “The question is, how much will it cost to get it into shape?”

“We’ve got some homework to do,” Doug said as they headed for the main airlock.

Once inside, and out of their suits, Doug said, “Come on down to my quarters and we’ll start figuring out the cost numbers.”

He started striding down the tunnel. Brudnoy lagged behind him.

“I could use a good night’s sleep,” the Russian said.

Doug saw that Brudnoy’s pouchy eyes had dark circles under them. He glanced at his wristwatch. It was nearly midnight.

“Oh. Okay,” Doug said as they approached the double-sized hatch of the farm. “Actually, I’ve got a few hours of studying to do; got an exam tomorrow.”

“On what subject?”

“European architecture. I’ll have to build either a classical Greco-Roman temple or a Gothic cathedral.”

“With your bare hands?” Brudnoy asked.

Grinning, Doug replied, “They’ll let me use a computer.”

“Very kind of them.”

“I’ve still got to put in a few hours at the screen, though,” said Doug.

Brudnoy stopped a moment at the farm’s entrance. The airtight hatch was closed, as usual.

“I should check on my rabbits,” he said, yawning. “The automatic feeder has been cranky lately.”

I’ll help you,” Doug offered.

“No, not now. I’m too tired. Tomorrow will be good enough.” And he started walking down the tunnel again.

Doug slowed his own pace to keep in step with the Russian.

“You never get tired, do you?” Brudnoy asked.

“I don’t feel tired, no.”

“Is it the natural buoyancy of youth, I wonder? Or do the nanomachines in you give you this preternatural endurance?”