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Chapter 4

Keegan took his state-of-the-art PDE out of the cargo flap on the side of his jumpsuit trousers and aimed it at the main screen. The file he had selected transferred to the classroom server and loaded. The new girl, Barbara, stared at the spinning Bright Sparks logo with shining eyes. The others pulled up their notes from previous discussions, but they all looked eager to start. He was fond of the kids. Jan and Gary, his Munjojerry and Rumpleteazer, like twins from two different moms, nudged each other with their elbows. Dion, the big mother hen, glanced at all the others before turning his attention to the front of the room. Daya had the self-possession of a woman four times her age. She was a born doctor, just like her mother, and a good listener. Neil had to calm down a little, but he was going to be a great force for good in the science world one day. The teen knew how to get people’s attention, and he was passionate about the program.

This is why I love my job, Keegan thought. Everyone gets so excited about solving the hard problems. They’ll work themselves to death for the sake of it. And to top it off, we’re on the Moon! It’s their dream come true, but it’s mine, too.

“Okay, now,” he said aloud, tapping the PDE screen to open the file. “You can all read up on the background later, while you’re traveling. You’re going to have a lot of time for that, so don’t worry about it.

“Humanity has launched a number of telescopes into orbit over the years: Hubble, Chandra, Kepler, Webb, Darwin, Agile, INTEGRAL, Iris, Swift, Gaia, Aldebaran, Sagan, and so on; but all of them are around Earth. Two major problems with them: one, orbiters are vulnerable to damage from space debris, and two, they’re so close to Earth that the planetary atmosphere, radio waves and albedo interfere with their effectiveness. But all a telescope really needs is a dish, a power supply and a feedhorn. We have a grant to construct one right here on the Moon.”

“We’re going to launch a telescope into lunar orbit?” Barbara asked, eagerly.

“No,” Keegan said, watching her with anticipation. He’d had the fun of springing the surprise on the other five when the grant came through. Now he had a new audience, and the others were waiting to see how she reacted to the news. “No, we’re going to build one right here on the surface.”

“Build one?” Barbara echoed. Her expression of flat-out astonishment was everything that he would have hoped for. “How? Where?”

He pointed at the big monitor, where the architectural rendering of a lunar cityscape filled itself in. “On the far side of the Moon. We’re establishing a second research center there that we’re calling Aldrinville.

“We have all these readymade craters and we have identified one on the far side that’s the perfect size and almost the ideal shape to build a combination radar/radio telescope.”

He flicked the small device again, and the computer mockup of Project Moon Beam spread out across all three screens. The left screen showed a topographical map of that area of the Moon, rotating in three dimensions. With thumb and forefinger, he enlarged the center portion to fill the screen.

“Bright Ideas, my company, has obtained the grant from the National Science Foundation and some private investors to finish the excavation on this crater here in the Compton-Belkovich region of the far side of the Moon. All the way back in 1998—ancient history right?—NASA’s Lunar Prospector probe orbited the Moon and took detailed pictures of the area. The really cryo part is that the probe revealed a highly reflective plain lying between two ancient impact craters. This Compton-Belkovich region of the Moon contains thorium and other silicate rocks, and is actually much more reflective than the normal lunar regolith. If you look at this small unnamed crater here it’s a perfect candidate for a radio telescope dish. Our small imaging satellites orbiting the Moon have mapped it in fairly good detail and it’s already almost a perfect parabolic shape. It shouldn’t be hard to turn it into an ideally shaped spherical reflector dish using just small excavation equipment.” He paused for a breath and looked at the Sparks to make sure he wasn’t losing them. He wasn’t. They were all glued to every single word, even the ones who had heard it several times already.

“Hey, what’s that big dome-shaped thing not too far from the crater?” Barbara asked sheepishly, not sure if it was okay to interrupt.

“Aha, good eye.” Keegan smiled at her and was glad to see her relax a bit. “None of them caught that until I pointed it out. Would you be surprised if I told you it was an ancient alien moonbase?”

“What?” Barbara asked in shocked disbelief. “No, it isn’t.”

“Okay, okay, you’re right.” Keegan laughed. “It isn’t. It turns out that this region of the Moon was once very volcanic with special types of volcanos called silicic volcanoes. And that dome is what happened when they almost erupted but didn’t quite make it. The large dome formed from the pressure and then solidified as it cooled, but the fun part is that the silicic lava then receded back underground or to the basin. Voila! The Moon made us a dome habitat for free. That, my dear, is the future location of the main body of Aldrinville. It’s only about two hundred kilometers from the excavation site.”

“That’s so cryogenic!” Barbara almost cheered. Keegan could see thousand-watt light bulbs going off behind her eyes with all sorts of ideas. He was beginning to think he’d made the right choice in her. There had been so many to choose from.

“Very cryogenic. I agree. So, back to our project at hand, as we survey and excavate the one-hundred-thirty-meter diameter crater we’ll create very high resolution surface maps to overlay with the satellite maps. We’ll measure its reflectivity across a large portion of the radio spectrum, set up some infrastructure, and install this mechanism, a mobile feedhorn with state-of-the-art low-noise blockdown amplifiers and filters.” He tapped again, and the center screen showed the telescope completed and operating. A framework like a three-legged, albeit very bowlegged, spider arched over a perfectly smooth spherical dish. The feedhorn, a radio waveguide antenna sealed into a protective radome, traveled along one of the uprights. Simulated beams coming from or going to the feedhorn ricocheted off the spherical dish and bounced off into space.

“It looks kind of like a hula hoop, doesn’t it? But based upon the size of the crater, the transmitter/receiver has to be mounted high, at a proportion of the radius divided by two. Because the Moon revolves, the mechanism needs to be able to move freely, so we can keep it directed at its target. It will not only listen to the stars, but it will be able to beam data into deep space, as well as radar beams to map nearby space and the planets. And we’re on the far side of the Moon away from all the radio noise of Earth, thus making it a more versatile device than other Earth-based or orbiting telescopes. Not to mention the biggest in space!”

“Bigger is better when it comes to radio telescopes,” Neil grinned.

“Absolutely right, my good man.” Dr. Bright smiled at the young Spark.

The framework image enlarged, and the elements exploded outward to rotate individually. Keegan enjoyed the new animation program that kept everything in proportion and with metadata scrolling up alongside each piece. “We’ll mount the arches on spherical bases, kind of like beachballs. They’re inflatable, to keep them as lightweight as possible. They’ll move smoothly along the surface of the crater’s rim, powered by electric servo motors. The power will be supplied by solar power and, when it’s not on the dayside, stored battery power. The output will have feeds by lunar satellite and landline to both Aldrinville and Armstrong City as well as Earth. And you’ll be interested to know that I didn’t design this program, Barbara.” He pointed at the other Sparks. “They did.”

“Really?” Barbara asked, looking at her new colleagues with delight and surprise. The Sparks’ expressions varied between modesty and open pride.

“It was Gary’s idea,” Neil said, “but we’ve all been working on refining it.”

Barbara turned an admiring glance his way. Gary tried to look modest, and failed. He grinned instead.

“I suggested the inflatable spheres,” Jan said, pointing at the diagram. “We work with those a lot. It seemed like the obvious solution instead of installing heavy rollers. You can push the frame with one hand. That keeps the power requirements down. We’ve been researching every aspect for efficiency. That’s one of the reasons we were glad you were coming.”

“I thought you were directing us,” Barbara asked Keegan. “Aren’t you overseeing our education on this program?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way, no.” Keegan shook his head. “That’s a common misperception. I steer you, but you tell me what you want to study next. I’ll teach you and find you resources, but you direct me. This isn’t so much a classroom as it’s an incubator. I’m guiding you so you won’t fall off the edges, but you’re going to take the chances and reach out on your own. Maybe next time we’ll be working on one of your designs. I’m looking forward to that.” He raised his voice to include the others.

“Meanwhile, you’ll all be happy to know that the rest of the equipment we need to get started arrived on the shuttle with Barbara. The sections of the arches, plus the Lunar Bobcat for excavating are all waiting inside the loading dock for you. The Bobcat’s been adapted to run off battery and solar power instead of internal combustion, but it sucks a lot of electricity. You’ll be moving into the Sun side of the Moon as the Armstrong side begins to face away, so you’ll have to depend a bunch on your solar array.”

“Is the array already assembled?” Barbara asked.

“Not yet,” Gary said. He tapped at his computer keyboard, and the view on the big screen changed. “Here’s what’s on site at the moment. Not much.”

Not much was an understatement. Barbara saw a ridged crater, an irregular black blotch on the lunar landscape. She understood why it had been chosen. It was almost perfectly round. The perimeter had already been roughly smoothed down, but she couldn’t see anything else manmade.

“Wait a minute,” Barbara looked concerned. Keegan watched but kept silent. “That crater is a hundred thirty meters in diameter, right?”

“Yes.” Neil said triumphantly. Barbara frowned. Her gaze fixed on a point above the screen.

“So, doing all the excavation with a Bobcat will take forever. The surface area of the crater is, let me see pi times sixty five squared is . . .” She pulled out her PDE and opened a plotting calculator app. “That’s like thirteen thousand square meters. And if we assume we’re going on average ten centimeters deep in the crater,” the figures rose into the air in a column around a graph of an inverted empty hemisphere, “then we have to move one thousand three hundred twenty seven cubic meters of lunar regolith around.”

“So what?” Jan asked. Barbara held out the small device to her.

“Well, I watched my uncle dig a swimming pool with a small dozer like that and it took him all of a four-day weekend to do it. I’m guessing the swimming pool was only about two hundred cubic meters of dirt. So that’s two hundred cubic meters divided by four days which means you could move about fifty cubic meters of dirt per day. So, one thousand three hundred twenty seven cubic meters divided by fifty cubic meters per hour is, uh, twenty six and a half days. Are we going to be driving that thing around for three weeks?”

“That’s a very good seat-of-the-pants analysis, Barbara.” Keegan nodded. He was impressed by how fast she could calculate in her head. “But our initial analysis of the crater from our satellite imagery suggests that the crater shape is very close to what we need, so we will just be knocking down humps and filling in low spots. The team has simulated it and believes the crater can be smoothed out in ten days. Besides, they’ve all been practicing on the Bobcat simulator, and hopefully they’ll be more proficient than your uncle at driving the thing. No offense to your uncle.”

“Okay, I see. And no offense taken,” she said, with a sheepish grin. “He’d never driven one before he rented it. But what about recharging the Cat? How long will that take?”

“We can charge it overnight. Our plan is to use a power car,” Dion said. “It’s got stacked arrays of batteries underneath a series of expandable solar panels that fold up for transport, and we’ll be on the Sun side almost the whole time.” He brought up a list of equipment and showed it to Barbara. He pushed the holo for each device to one side as it popped up on his PDE until he was surrounded by hovering images. Barbara studied them all with curious eyes.

Keegan stood back with his arms folded, watching the others bring the newcomer up to date on the project. The more independent they were, the sooner they would be able to go out into the world and run their own experiments, gather their own groups of peers. It was becoming more important every year to expand the scientific reach of young minds. The motivated ones like the Sparks inspired the ones back home who never thought of themselves as leaders or innovators in the field. But, now, they were going off on a dozen tangents. He had to pull them back.

“So, here’s the list of tasks you’ll need to complete before you leave tomorrow morning. Hey!” Keegan said, shouting to be heard over the eager chatter. “Here’s your task list.”

The young people subsided and turned their attention back to him. He double-clicked on his PDE’s home button. The file went out to five of the Sparks, who began scrolling down their screens. Barbara looked at the others in bemusement, then at her old PDE in her hand, then up at him.

“Oh, yeah, I forgot,” Keegan said, with a smile. He reached into one of his many cargo pockets and came out with a new special-issue PDE, still in the box. He handed it to her. “This one’s yours. Maybe it has a little more versatility than the one you have now. Jan can show you how to beam your Per Dee’s persona, contacts, and files from the old one to this one. It’s actually not that difficult. Give it a password, something that’s hard for anyone else to guess, and change it often.” He aimed a thumb at the console. “Same goes for your desktop unit. I don’t want to see any stick-it notes on the side of the case, you hear me? We have too much classified material going around, most of it protected by nondisclosure agreements and government regulations.”

The tall girl opened her mouth to protest, then shut it again. Keegan was glad to see she wasn’t the kind who would lie to herself. Leaving your password around was the most common mistake in the book. He had already lost some valuable data in past years that cost him and the Sparks not only a contract, but a marvelous opportunity. That wasn’t going to happen again on his watch.

Barbara took the slim, blue-silver device out of the box and handled it with an air of reverence. At her touch, the screen lit up, and four emitters at each corner of the flat device created the hologram of a spinning nebula. Keegan watched closely as she followed its prompts for getting started, generating a tall white page of text. After sign-in, the little computer would automatically take her on a tour of its capabilities. Its simple appearance was deceptive. The power and capacity of the device was far beyond any other PDE made to date. The custom PDEs he and the Sparks used pushed Moore’s Law to its outermost edges. Less motivated youngsters would probably reduce them to overpowered gaming machines and selfie-generators, but these kids made use of their tools. They wouldn’t be in the program, otherwise.

Barbara made an involuntary intake of breath, telling him she had reached the page with the PDE’s stats. She tapped the two discreet buttons on the right edge, and became engrossed in what she saw on the screen. A grin spread across her face. She ran a finger up the resulting hologram to scroll it, her eyes moving rapidly over the text.

“You can play with it later,” Keegan said. His voice yanked her out of her reverie. “Let’s get to the tasks at hand. You have a lot to do before tomorrow morning. We’re kicking you in at the deep end, but I understand you’re a pretty good swimmer anyway. I believe that you can handle it. Take a look at the list.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, looking a little embarrassed, and pulled the correct file open. The roster popped off the screen and hovered in the air.

“We’ve gone over the schedule a bunch of times,” Keegan said, moving into the center of the circle of PDE access servers and beckoning the kids to turn and face him. “This should take you about two weeks. The site is two thousand four hundred nineteen kilometers from here along a continuously improving packed regolith road. At an average speed of ninety kilometers per hour it will take about twenty-seven hours of drive time to get there. You’ll stop halfway for a sleep cycle and take breaks as needed. That means two days out and two days back of hard driving. The team has estimated ten days for excavating the crater and setting up the equipment. That means surveying, roughing in the spherical shape, surveying some more, smoothing it, final survey, assembling the mechanism, testing and checking in with us back here in Armstrong City. Total of fourteen days. Still good with that?”

“I think so,” Gary said, concentrating on the file. Jan nodded, too. “If we have any schedule slip or unforeseen disruptions, it shouldn’t add more than a day or two. We’ll have enough supplies for even longer, if we need them.”

“We have redundancy on top of our redundancy,” Dion said.

Keegan clapped his hands together.

“So, who’s doing what?”

Neil, as usual, blustered his way through the organizational list. He gestured casually at the list hovering in midair.

“Daya and I have got this under control,” Neil said, dragging the smaller girl into the discussion even though she hadn’t said anything yet. He poked a finger toward the slim young man. “Gary, since it’s your project, you can run operations here and monitor our progress while we go out to the site.”

Dion waved a disapproving hand.

“Not you, little bro. You’re not allowed to go on construction missions yet,” he said, with an admonitory head shake at the younger boy. “You two get to stay here where it’s safe. You’re running Mission Control for us.”

“That’s not as important as helping with the construction!” Neil sputtered.

“You’ll be helping,” Dion said, his deep voice soothing. He leaned toward Neil and tapped the younger boy on the arm. “You’re overseeing construction via the comsats and imaging satellites to make sure we’re getting it right. And who else is going to disseminate the information to scientists on Earth? That’s you. The blog has your name all over it. Settle for it, little brother.”

Neil looked disappointed. Keegan would have been surprised if Neil hadn’t tried to get himself on the away team, but he didn’t qualify yet. Children under sixteen weren’t allowed in danger zones. The lower limit had originally been eighteen, but Keegan had argued with NASA and other bodies to allow well-trained, sensible sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds like Jan and Gary on operations as long as they were under his nominal supervision. In countries outside the U.S., the age of maturity was lower, and this was the Moon. Neil had a year to go yet; maybe longer if you counted emotional maturity.

That was the problem with this group. It was tough for them to get it together efficiently. He had had a lot of faith in his last candidate to help organize the Sparks, but Pam had been abrasive and dismissive. She hadn’t lasted three months. No one had been sorry to see her go. Keegan had been sorry for the wasted potential, but the Sparks needed to function as a unit. That wasn’t so easy with so many strong personalities. He sat on the edge of a desk and listened, and hoped.

“Oh, so you want to lead this operation?” Neil countered, his hands on his hips, looking like a flea challenging a big dog.

“I didn’t say that,” Dion said, raising his brows. “It’s Gary’s design. How about you, Gary? Do you want to be in charge of the project?”

“Me?” Gary looked flustered. “Uh, sure,” he said. He glanced at the list. “We’ll pack everything this afternoon, then we can check and see if we’re missing anything. I’ll, uh, I’ll drive the wide hauler with the framework. Dion can drive the cargo car. Jan, you want to take the power truck?”

“No way,” Jan said, tossing her braids. “The power truck fishtails all over the place! That regolith is like slush.”

“I ought to take the wide hauler,” Dion said. “One of the senior technicians told me that it tends to lose power when you drive it uphill. I’m strong enough to hold the wheel if it starts to slip. Jan should come with me. She and I can fix it if it breaks down.”

“That’s possible,” Daya said. “But what about the inflatable habitat and the water tanks? Four vehicles. You’ll need a fourth driver.”

Keegan watched the interplay between the Sparks, with an eye on Barbara. She had been reading through the list of things to do and items to go. He waited and watched the wheels turn in her head. She looked up from her PDE, her brow furrowed.

“I can drive the power truck, if someone will give me a quick lesson on the controls,” she said. “I learned to drive a car in Iowa in the winter, so I’ve been in slush plenty of times. Is all this stuff in the cargo bay with the new equipment?” She gestured at the list.

“I’m not sure,” Gary said, glancing at the others. Dion shrugged his huge shoulders.

Barbara glanced at Keegan. She looked tentative. He gave her an encouraging nod, waiting to see if she knew how to follow through.

“Why don’t we go and run down the inventory now?” she said. “It doesn’t make sense to load it until it’s all there in one place.”

“Right,” Jan said. By the smug look on her face, her newfound friend was living up to her expectations, too. “Then, we’ll have to pack our personal items.”

“I’m the newbie. I’m kind of at a loss.” Barbara’s eyes widened. “What am I going to need on a mission like this?”

“Stick with me, and don’t worry about it. It’s all figured out already.” Jan pulled Barbara’s arm toward her and scrolled down the project manifest with one thumb. “Take a look. There’s a checklist for personal items, too. You probably brought most of it with you. We’ll take what you don’t have out of general storage. And we’ll need to test your environment suit to make sure it’s spaceworthy.”

“It’s fine. I just got off the shuttle!”

“That’s a must.” Jan shook her head. “We always test every suit before every EVA. It can mean life or death. Better safe than frozen.”

“Or asphyxiated,” Neil said, darkly.

Barbara shivered.

“Right,” she said. “Will you help me put together my kit?”

“Of course, I will.” Jan grinned, her dark eyes full of humor. “Happy to help, roomie.”

“Thanks,” Barbara said, warmly.

Not a whit of jealousy or competitiveness there. Keegan cheered to himself. Looking promising, he thought.

Barbara looked down at the file again. The others gathered around her. “Okay, we got this. It makes more sense to get our own luggage together first, bring it down to the cargo bay, and start going down the checklist of everything else we need to assemble. You can show me how to test my suit in there. Neil and Daya, will you do a comm check to make sure that the satellite links are clear between here and Aldrinville? I’ll need to see how to get in touch with you to give you updates. How does that sound?”

Keegan’s smile broadened. His hunch about Barbara was dead on. Looked like the Sparks had a leader.

They had pretty much forgotten his presence. On his PDE screen, he switched on the audio pickup so he could keep on monitoring their conversation in the lab and on the hidden app on their handhelds, then slipped out of the room.

The project was in good hands.

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