CHAPTER THREE
“Dobro pozalovat v Valentinu Tereshkovu,” the Russian official said when they came to the front of the short line at one of the reception booths. There had been a baggage check when they transferred from the surface shuttle in Earth orbit. He peered at their badges and switched to English. “Welcome to Valentina Tereshkova.” Earnshaw handed him their two document holders. The Russian extracted a plastic card from Paula’s, passed it through a reader, checked the information and picture that appeared on a screen in front of him, and entered a code into a keyboard. Then he repeated the process with the other folder. “Ms. Shelmer and Mr. Earnshaw, both from Pacific News Services, Los Angeles, California.” He studied the screen again for a moment. “Yes, these are correct. What is the purpose of your visit?” His tone was one of personal curiosity rather than of officialdom.
“Special coverage for a consortium of West Coast agencies,” Paula replied. “We’ve scheduled a number of special-feature items on this for the next few weeks.”
“I see. Well, we must be sure to take good care of you. Can’t afford any bad publicity, eh? I’m sure that Americans know all about that.” The Russian passed across two preprepared ID badges in red frames. “Wear these at all times for your own convenience and safety, and remain within the designated visitor zones, which are clearly indicated. The stewards wearing red armbands are at your service if you have questions or need assistance.” He indicated the camera and other equipment that Earnshaw was holding. “Pictures are permitted anywhere within the visitor zones. Thank you, and enjoy your stay with us. Next, please.”
Still loping in bounds more than walking—because of their negligible weight near the spin axis—they followed a short ramp to a gate that led from the arrival area into the reception lounge. Groups of people were already forming around tables set, cocktail-party style, with assorted hors d’oeuvres, breads, meats, and cheeses. Earnshaw’s wrist unit, which looked like an ordinary computer-communicator, beeped almost inaudibly as they passed through the gate. He stopped a few feet into the lounge to press something on it and consult the readout.
“That Russian was quite civilized,” Paula said as she stopped along side him. “Are you sure we’re in the right place? I thought they were all supposed to be monsters.”
“Today, they’re all on their best behavior,” Earnshaw said. “Shop window to the world. Come on, let’s get a drink and eat.” They began moving toward the bar that had been set up by one wall. “Oh, incidentally”—he made it sound like an afterthought—”you’ve just been X-rayed.” Fortunately the special equipment they were carrying had been designed with that kind of possibility in mind, and would have shown nothing unusual.
For the next half hour or so, the guests munched on snacks and stretched their legs as guests of the Soviet press agency Novosti, while two speakers delivered a double act that alternated welcoming remarks and a preview of the coming tour with a lament for misunderstood Marxism. Then the party moved on out of the reception lounge into a large, brightly lit gallery with corridors leading off in all directions, railed catwalks above, machinery bays below, doorways everywhere, and a confusing geometry in which verticals converged overhead and the floor was visibly curved.
As they waited to board elevators for the half-mile “descent” to the rim, Paula looked around to reconcile the surroundings with the published construction plans that she and Earnshaw had spent hours memorizing. She wondered if it was significant that the tour didn’t take in any part of the hub system. The same thought seemed to have occurred also to a woman behind them, who was wearing a European Space Agency badge. “Excuse me,” the ESA woman said to the red-armbanded steward by the door as the group began shuffling forward into the elevator.
“Madam?”
“Are we going straight down to the ring now? We’re not going to see anything up here first?”
“There is really nothing of special interest to see up here.”
“Nothing? That’s surprising. What’s behind that far bulkhead, and the pipes back there, for instance—between here, where we’re standing, and the next spoke?”
“Only storage tanks—fuel for the Earth and lunar transporters, various agricultural and industrial chemicals, and water.
“You must store an enormous amount of everything. There’s nothing else?”
“Just storage tanks, madam.”
Earnshaw glanced at Paula and raised an eyebrow. That was where the launchers for some of the ejectable modules that Jonathan Watts had talked about were supposed to be located.
After the long flight up from Earth orbit, the return to normal bodyweight as the elevator moved out to the rim felt like a debilitating heaviness creeping through their bodies; but in another respect, it was reassuring to emerge walking naturally again.
Valentina Tereshkova contained three built-up urban zones inside its main torus, which in the official bureaucratese of the predistributed literature were designated, mind-bogglingly, “high-density residential-occupational social units.” The bureaucrats didn’t have to live there, however, and the Russian guides who accompanied the visitors down from the hub referred to them simply as “towns.” Each was clustered around the base of one of the major spokes, which formed a central tower disappearing through the roof to connect to the hub. Alternating with the three major spokes were three slimmer ones, which terminated in the middle of the agricultural zones between the towns at built-up transportation and processing complexes known simply as Agricultural Stations 1, 2, and 3.
The town that the party arrived in was called Turgenev, and constituted the administrative and social center. The tour began with a stop high up on the central tower above the main square, where the guides led the visitors through from the elevators onto an outside terrace for a general view of the colony. Paula judged the roof to be fifty to a hundred feet above where they were standing. The cross-section of the rim was not circular as in a true torus, but flattened like a wide automobile tire, with the roof stretching away horizontally for a distance on either side before it curved over and down to become the sides. Illumination came from two rows of what looked like immense, golden-glowing, venetian-blind slats receding upward and out of sight with the sweep of the roof—louvered reflectors that admitted light from an external mirror system. Power for the colony’s industries came from nuclear reactors located at the hub.
Below the terrace, a ribbonlike miniworld curved away and upward between enclosing walls a little under a sixth of a mile apart. The nearer buildings were higher, merging into a monolith of tiered plazas, ramps, pedestrian ways, and bridges around the tower to form the town’s center. Architectural styles were varied and followed light, airy, clean designs incorporating plenty of color and glass, intermixed with screens of natural greenery. The strangest thing was the geometry, or lack of it—for everywhere and on all levels, walls met at odd, asymmetrical angles, passages branched between buildings, roadways curved beneath underpasses to emerge in a different direction, and nothing seemed to run square to anything else, anywhere. Presumably the intention was to break up the underlying continuity and dissolve the sense of living inside a tube. If so, it worked.
“The architect who designed this must have had a fetish about rhomboids,” Paula remarked as they looked out from the terrace.
There were many figures moving about; below, a vehicle emerged from behind a building, moving along some kind of track. Farther away, the townscape gave way to a more open composition of public buildings and residential units, trees, and parks, with glints of water in several places. The terrain climbed on either side to form a roughly U-shaped valley about a central strip, with buildings giving way to terraces of crops and pasture strips for animals farther away in the agricultural zone. Due to unanticipated difficulties with maintaining the ecological balance, which the Russians freely admitted, the general scene was not as idyllic as their public-relations releases had enthusiastically promised when construction commenced. In some places the metal shoring walls stood bare between tiers of barren, grayish-looking soil formed from processed moondust, and in others the vegetation was yellowy and limp. Their official line now was that this was only the first phase, and aesthetics would be attended to later; and most reactions were to concede that that was what experimentation was all about. This was a prototype colony, after all.
“Conventional enclosed dwellings are not functionally necessary, of course, since the climate can be controlled at all times,” the Russian guide was saying. “As you can see, however, familiar styles and arrangements into neighborhood groupings are used, to give a feeling of normality as far as is practicable. The designers of Valentina Tereshkova took the view that the forms of houses which people have evolved on Earth over long periods of time best reflect the kinds of surroundings they prefer to live in. There seemed no reason to change it—at least, until much more is known about how people adapt to living in space.”
“What materials are used for construction?” somebody asked.
“Of the buildings? Mainly aluminum, titanium, and other light metals processed from lunar ores. Currently the ore is catapulted magnetically up from the lunar surface, but we are constructing an experimental facility on Mare Cognitum to test high-power lasers as a launch mechanism. The Moon is not rich in hydrogen or carbon. You will find many things fabricated from ceramics and metals here, but few plastics. That will change, of course, when technologies for transmutation of elements are developed on an industrial scale.”
“What’s outside the town?” someone else wanted to know.
“A recreation area that includes sports fields and a lake. Beyond that is the region called Ukraine: one of the agricultural sectors where we raise food and livestock to feed the colony. We will be taking a look at it when we leave Turgenev. Past Ukraine, at the bottom of the next major spoke, is the town of Landausk, Valentina Tereshkova’s scientific and industrial center. We will have dinner in Landausk, and accommodation will be provided there tonight before we tour the town in the morning. Now let me point out some of the more interesting things that are visible from where we are now . . .”
Paula tried to take her mind off the mission that had brought her here. She found herself envying the other people around her, wishing that she, like them, could enjoy the experience without apprehension. She went through the mission plan once again in her mind, mentally rehearsing every step as she had a hundred times, like a nervous, first-time actress muttering her lines while waiting backstage for her entry cue. She thought of the crew back in the lab in Massachusetts, secure in their familiar day-to-day routine. Her third mistake, she decided, had been rationalizing to herself that she could use a little more excitement in her life. If she ever got out of this, an occasional dabble in sin with the likes of Ed Sutton would be just about all the excitement she’d need.
“The six-sided building behind, with the glass frontage, is the university gymnasium, with courts for squash, tennis, and volleyball, a swimming pool, a weight-training room, and a general arena with seating for fifteen hundred people. The students come from . . .” The guide’s voice droned on interminably. Wouldn’t they ever get on with it?
She glanced at Earnshaw, who at that moment was doing a convincing job of panning slowly sideways to record the view with his camera. He lowered the instrument from his face to let the shoulder strap take the weight, and looked around casually, if anything seeming slightly bored, like someone passing a slow Sunday afternoon at the city museum. But as always, his eyes were constantly mobile, missing nothing, checking everything. She tried to tell herself that if there had been anything unsound about this mission, someone like him would never have let himself be talked into coming on it.
“. . . transportation around the ring, as we shall see later. Good. Well, if there are no further questions for the time being, we will board the elevators again and complete our descent to the central concourse, and from there come out into the central square of Turgenev. Actually it’s not square really, but an irregular polygon, as you’ll see. I suppose we call it that through convention. So, if you would follow the stewards at the back, ladies and gentlemen . . .”
And then they were all moving back inside the tower. One of the voices around her commented that the place was artistic as well as functional, showing spontaneity and individualism. Surprising. Not at all the staid, crushing conformity you came to expect from Russian bureaucracies. Another voice explained it was because the Russians had copied it from a Japanese design.
Despite her resolve, Paula found her chest thumping. Now it would be only a matter of minutes.