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Authors: Arthur C. Clarke
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be adapted for the peculiar conditions here: the low gravity, pressure and temperature sensitivity, radiation levels.” As he spoke of agricultural matters his voice took on a stronger accent; she thought it sounded like Iowa, the voice of a farm boy a long way from home.
She gazed at the innocent-looking plants. “I imagine some people are squeamish.”
“You get over it,” Bud said. “If not, you ship out. And anyhow, it’s better than the early days when we grew nothing but algae. Even I had trouble chomping on a bright blue burger. Of course we’re vulnerable to solar events in here.”
On June 9, partly thanks to Eugene Mangle’s warnings, the lunar colonists had been able to dive into their storm shelters and ride out the worst of it. Spacecraft and other systems had taken a battering, but not a single human life had been lost away from planet Earth. These empty hydroponic beds, however, showed that the living things that had accompanied humans on their first hesitant steps away from Earth had not been so lucky.
They walked on.
The third dome, Artemis, was given over to industry.
Bud, with parental pride, showed her a bank of transformers. “Power from the sun,” he said. “Free, plentiful, and not a cloud in the sky.”
“I guess the downside is two weeks of darkness in every month.”
“Sure. Right now we depend on storage cells. But we’re looking to establish major power farms at the poles, where you get sunlight most of the month; then we’ll only need a fraction of our current storage capacity.”
He walked her around a plant of primitive, though lightweight-looking, chemical processing equipment. “Resources from the Moon,” he said. “We take oxygen from ilmenite, a mineral you find in mare basalts. Just scoop it up, crush it, and heat it. We’re learning to make glass from the same stuff. We can also extract aluminum from plagioclase, which is a kind of feldspar you find in the highlands.”
He outlined future plans. The plant she saw here was actually pilot gear, meant to establish industrial techniques in lunar conditions. The operational plants would be huge robot factories out in the hard vacuum of the surface. Aluminum was the big dream: the Sling, the big electromagnetic launching rail to be powered by sunlight, was being constructed almost entirely of lunar aluminum.
Bud dreamed of the day when lunar resources, suitably processed, would be slingshot to construction projects in Earth orbit, or even the home world itself. “I would hope to see the Moon start to punch its weight in trade, and become part of a unified and prosperous Earth–Moon economic system. And all the time, of course, we’re beginning to learn how to live off the land away from Earth, lessons we can apply to Mars, the asteroids—hell, anywhere else we choose to live.
“But we’ve a long way to go. Conditions are
different
here—the vacuum, the dust, the radiation, the low gravity that plays hell with convection processes and such. We’re having to reinvent centuries-old techniques from scratch.” But Bud sounded as if he relished the challenge. Siobhan saw Moon dirt crusted under his fingernails; this was a man who got stuck in.
He walked her back to Hecate, the accommodation dome.
Bud said, “Of the two-hundred-plus people on the Moon, about ten percent are support staff, including the likes of yours truly. The rest are technicians, technologists, biologists, with forty percent devoted to pure science, including your pals at the South Pole. Oh, and about a dozen kids, by the way. We’re multidisciplinary, multinational, multiethnic, multi-you-name-it.
“Of course the Moon has always been culturally complex, even before humans got here. Christopher Clavius was a contemporary of Galileo, but he was actually a Jesuit. He thought the Moon was a smooth sphere. Ironic that one of the Moon’s biggest craters was named for him! In my own tradition we are the guardians of the
She gazed at the innocent-looking plants. “I imagine some people are squeamish.”
“You get over it,” Bud said. “If not, you ship out. And anyhow, it’s better than the early days when we grew nothing but algae. Even I had trouble chomping on a bright blue burger. Of course we’re vulnerable to solar events in here.”
On June 9, partly thanks to Eugene Mangle’s warnings, the lunar colonists had been able to dive into their storm shelters and ride out the worst of it. Spacecraft and other systems had taken a battering, but not a single human life had been lost away from planet Earth. These empty hydroponic beds, however, showed that the living things that had accompanied humans on their first hesitant steps away from Earth had not been so lucky.
They walked on.
The third dome, Artemis, was given over to industry.
Bud, with parental pride, showed her a bank of transformers. “Power from the sun,” he said. “Free, plentiful, and not a cloud in the sky.”
“I guess the downside is two weeks of darkness in every month.”
“Sure. Right now we depend on storage cells. But we’re looking to establish major power farms at the poles, where you get sunlight most of the month; then we’ll only need a fraction of our current storage capacity.”
He walked her around a plant of primitive, though lightweight-looking, chemical processing equipment. “Resources from the Moon,” he said. “We take oxygen from ilmenite, a mineral you find in mare basalts. Just scoop it up, crush it, and heat it. We’re learning to make glass from the same stuff. We can also extract aluminum from plagioclase, which is a kind of feldspar you find in the highlands.”
He outlined future plans. The plant she saw here was actually pilot gear, meant to establish industrial techniques in lunar conditions. The operational plants would be huge robot factories out in the hard vacuum of the surface. Aluminum was the big dream: the Sling, the big electromagnetic launching rail to be powered by sunlight, was being constructed almost entirely of lunar aluminum.
Bud dreamed of the day when lunar resources, suitably processed, would be slingshot to construction projects in Earth orbit, or even the home world itself. “I would hope to see the Moon start to punch its weight in trade, and become part of a unified and prosperous Earth–Moon economic system. And all the time, of course, we’re beginning to learn how to live off the land away from Earth, lessons we can apply to Mars, the asteroids—hell, anywhere else we choose to live.
“But we’ve a long way to go. Conditions are
different
here—the vacuum, the dust, the radiation, the low gravity that plays hell with convection processes and such. We’re having to reinvent centuries-old techniques from scratch.” But Bud sounded as if he relished the challenge. Siobhan saw Moon dirt crusted under his fingernails; this was a man who got stuck in.
He walked her back to Hecate, the accommodation dome.
Bud said, “Of the two-hundred-plus people on the Moon, about ten percent are support staff, including the likes of yours truly. The rest are technicians, technologists, biologists, with forty percent devoted to pure science, including your pals at the South Pole. Oh, and about a dozen kids, by the way. We’re multidisciplinary, multinational, multiethnic, multi-you-name-it.
“Of course the Moon has always been culturally complex, even before humans got here. Christopher Clavius was a contemporary of Galileo, but he was actually a Jesuit. He thought the Moon was a smooth sphere. Ironic that one of the Moon’s biggest craters was named for him! In my own tradition we are the guardians of the
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