I stirred to keep her from going on forever. "Then what?"
"Then it's simple. If the gene is absent, we reimplant the rest of the cluster and pregnancy goes on normally. But if the bad gene's there. well, then we discard the cluster and you try again next month. We do it all the time—oh," she said, having switched back to my chart. "Sorry. I didn't notice you were Orthodox."
"Western Orthodox. And not very."
"Then you don't have a problem, Barry. Unless your fiancée—?"
"She isn't my fiancée yet. I haven't asked her."
"Well," she said, "I guess it wouldn't be your classic, romantic, on-bended-knee proposal, but when you do you'd better tell her all this stuff. You can send her to me for more information, if you want to. Some denominations don't like the idea of discarding a fertilized ovum, and then, too, some people think it's dangerous. It isn't, though. At that stage all the cells are still undifferentiated. The embryo won't notice that we've taken one to look at. You'll have a healthy baby. If your own parents had done that—"
"I know. I wouldn't have this problem. On the other hand, I wouldn't ever have been born, either, would I?"
She didn't respond to that. She mulled for a second, then said, "I should mention that there are other ways of going about it."
"Like what?"
"Complete genetic suppression. You go in for twenty-four hours, they destroy your spermatophiles—"
"Hey!"
"It doesn't hurt, Barry. And it's reversible. But that means you're sterile; then they give you an implant and you're in business again. Only the implant is tailored to suppress your bad genes." She saw the face I was making and laughed. "Men," she said. "Trust me. It doesn't affect your sex life at all."
I thought that over. "You said it only takes twenty-four hours?"
"That's all—except, of course, we don't do that here. You'd have to go to one of the big clinics on Earth."
I got up. "Thanks," I said, not meaning it, and left.
On the way out I played back some of the things Helge had said. It seemed to me that Helge was right. The only way I could find out how Alma would feel about these questions would be to ask her.
Right after that I began to wonder how I myself really felt about that other big question, the one that comes with the word "commitment."
If I asked Alma questions about how she felt about dealing with my genetic problems, there would then be only one way the conversation could go from there. That would be to propose marriage to her.
I didn't know if I was ready.
I don't know what would have happened to my life if I had got my courage together and taken that next step. My life would have been different, all right. But would it have been better?
I don't think I've succeeded even yet in giving you a very accurate idea of what our lives were like, back on the Moon. They were very different from what we have now. They were certainly a lot more comfortable.
It's true that they weren't perfect, though. When I think back to those carefree days on the Moon I have a tendency to forget that at the time I didn't think they were really carefree at all. What I remember is that the only real cares I had were the personal worries I made up for myself. Like what it meant when Alma called me by the wrong name. Like whether or not I would lose her—and whether I could somehow figure out a way to both keep her and simultaneously keep open the option to lose her, painlessly and without recrimination, if I ever decided that that was what I wanted to do.
Apart from those self-inflicted wounds—and, well, yes, apart from the faint but real worry nobody on the Moon was ever completely without, namely, that someday somebody might accidentally push the wrong button inside the crater and the whole Lederman antimatter factory would go up in a ball of plasma, of which I would myself be a tiny part—apart from that sort of thing, I mean to say, we didn't have any worries. The Moon was rich. We all had jobs. Anybody who didn't have one was shipped instantly back to Earth, and the jobs at Lederman were both interesting and paid well. The factory did everything possible to make our lives palatable because that was good business for them; they didn't want any disgruntled workers doing anything terminally stupid. Everything that state-of-the-art technology could provide, the lunar authorities had bought for us. They were clearing and lining additional lava tubes all the time. That meant that there were new housing units, bigger and more comfortable, appearing on the market regularly. One tube was even being half-filled with expensively manufactured water to make a swimming pool. Even the Lederman management couldn't give us solitude, of course. But we could get something close to it by taking a stroll through the farm tubes, steamy and warm with their crop racks green and sweet-smelling all around us and only a rare glimpse of a distant farm worker to disturb our privacy; Alma and I had made love two or three times in those jungly recesses. We had the best of medical care, and the best of food, and all the entertainment the networks could provide. We were spoiled rotten, in fact. I loved it.
The next day I had a date with Alma to go down to the grand concourse to watch the Taoist New Year celebration. It was kind of a personal anniversary for us—we'd met at the same event the year before. Besides, the Taoists put on a great show. They all get dressed up in red and gold, with dancing and chanting, firing off their acoustic poppers and electronic flares.
Alma loved all that kind of thing. She was flushed and happy, but something was bothering her. She kept giving me looks out of the corner of her eye until she finally said, "Barry? Have you got something on your mind?"
I leaned over to kiss her ear. "Just you," I said. That was true, it just wasn't specific. The specific thing on my mind was that I was wondering whether, when we got back to her room, I should start on that line of conversation that would end up with "Will you marry me?" It was a warming kind of thought, and an appropriate time to pop the question—our anniversary, after all. And then I began to wonder why I wanted to wait until we got to her room. And then I actually opened my mouth to say something—I'm not sure what, but I had the feeling it was going to be a step along that road. . . .
And then, "Watch it," she said, pulling me out of the way as three or four lion dancers pranced by. One of them lifted up the skirt of his lion suit to toss a handful of sticky poppyseed candies at us.
"Oh, great," Alma said, putting a couple in her pouch. "Rannulf loves these things."
That stopped me cold.
I hadn't wanted to think about Rannulf just then. After a moment, chewing happily, Alma gave me another of those looks. "Were you going to say something?"
"Right," I said. "I was going to say it's winding down here. Let's go back to your place." We did; and then it was easy enough to stop talking and start making love.
Yes, I know I shouldn't have been so easily put off. On the other hand, Alma could have been a little more tactful, too. Faults on both sides, I suppose.
Then we didn't have much chance to talk for a few days, because I got real busy. One of the orbiter pod-catchers began to leak propellant and had to be replaced. The catchers are where the antimatter goes to be transshipped to the customers, and they're part of a fuelmaster's responsibility—in this case, mine.
While I was busy at that, another interstellar ship, the Jean Bart, came in from the Alpha Draconis colony with a load of returnees. The quitters had been dropped off at the Skyhook to Earth before we ever saw them, of course. By the time the ship got to lunar orbit for deluding, the crew had had plenty of time to adjust to the fact that their colony had been almost terminated and then given a new lease on life; I wondered what they made of it, but didn't ask.
Then that second ship appeared from Pava, the one called Buccaneer. I didn't board it myself—another fuelmaster was servicing it—but I caught a glimpse of its captain at the landing pad, a man named Bennetton. He didn't stay on the Moon. He took right off for Earth to join Garold Tscharka at whatever Tscharka was doing while he waited for Corsair to be refitted.
Then I got a surprise. Two ships that s
erviced the Martian colonies were in orbit, and when I defueled mine I expected to be right back within a day or two for refueling—the short-run solar-system ships don't usually need repairs or anything much in the way of refitting between voyages. But its captain told me they were going to be delayed in getting fuel for a week because a big new two-hundred-pod order for antimatter fuel was coming through.
Naturally I checked it out. It was what I guessed. Captain Tscharka had got his wish, and the destination for all those extra pods was Pava.
That night Alma and I watched an operetta on the screen. Neither of us was enjoying it much. Alma seemed unusually thoughtful, and I was making up my mind about whether I wanted to discuss Tscharka, the Corsair, the fuel pods—and Rannulf Enderman—with her. As we were drinking a nightcap after the show she brought it up herself.
"I guess Corsair will be leaving soon," she said, meaning that she wanted to know if I'd heard anything.
I hadn't; it wasn't yet on my worklog. "Kept you busy making the stuff, has it?" I asked; that was Alma's job at Lederman, guiding the particle beams through the accelerator rings, and she knew better than I how much antimatter was being manufactured for what purpose.
She didn't answer the question, except with another question—a trait I've never approved of. "I wonder what they want with all that antimatter."
Well, Tscharka had told me his answer to that—true or not, I didn't know—so I repeated it for her. She didn't look impressed. "They're going to do more exploration around Delta Pavonis? What for? So they can set up more colonies? I don't see the point."
That was another trait in Alma Vendette that I hadn't entirely enjoyed in recent days. She'd seemed down. I don't mean clinically depressed—no, that was my own specialty—but more abstracted than I liked. I didn't want to think that it was because Rannulf was on his way to another star, but I took the chance of asking. "What's the matter? Is something worrying you?"
She considered. "Nothing specific, I think," she said at last. "It's just that nothing we do seems to be particularly important."
"You mean here at Lederman? But we are important. If we didn't make the fuel the colonies would just die."
She shrugged. That was even more displeasing; I wondered how much Millenarism was still in the back of her mind. "What I'm looking for, hon, is some kind of meaning. The way life was in the old days, when work meant something, and people got together and had babies and—listen, Barry, don't be shocked, but the other day I even thought of having the contraceptive implant taken out."
That straightened me right up. And that, at last, made her smile. In fact, she laughed out loud. "Oh, hon," she said, "don't be silly. I wasn't serious."
But maybe she was, I thought. And maybe that was my cue to ask the question that had been on the tip of my tongue to ask for weeks now, and maybe I would have. But I didn't get the chance, because just then the factory emergency alarms went off—beepity-beepity-beeeeep, over and over again, coming out of every audio point in the Lederman works and community.
When you live and work in the Lederman colony that is a sound that freezes your blood. I knew it was only a drill this time—I could be pretty sure of that, because both Alma and I were still alive—but the rules are that you have to act as though the drill is real, and both of us were very faithful in following those rules. We both snapped our pocket screen on and began to search our dedicated bands for data and instructions.
Any operation that's as critical as the antimatter factory at Lederman needs to keep its damage-control procedures up to speed. To make sure of that, the master controls are programmed to invent a simulated emergency at random intervals—they average fifteen or twenty a year—and when those beepers go off every one of us drops whatever he's doing and gets to work trying to deal with whatever that day's simulation had chosen to simulate.
As a fuelmaster crew chief my criticality-zone damage-control job was to make an eyeball inspection of potential danger areas. If I had been in the factory area, I would have grabbed my radiation readers and run to my first checkpoint. Since I wasn't, I simply logged on to the duty chief, Warren Bellick, and watched to make sure he was doing what I would have done.
He was. The beeping had stopped by the time he got there and the computer voice was identifying the problem. It told us that the exercise the computer had devised to entertain us this day was a (make-believe) misalignment of the particle beam, so that antimatter was being formed outside the target area. That wasn't a frighteningly big emergency, even if it had been real instead of something the computer made up to keep us on our toes. But it did mean that every operation everywhere in the complex had to be safed until it was dealt with.
Of course, the real fear we all had to live with is that sometime—anytime, maybe within the next second—there would be a big emergency—say, the magnetic field failing to hold an actual lump of antimatter in position, so that it somehow contacted real matter and blew . . . and thus compromised the containment shells of all the other little nuggets of antimatter, so they all blew at once.
Once in a while the computer decided to give us a really serious problem of that kind, but I never could see the point. If that happened there was no way we could cope with it. That was why all the workings of the factory were on the surface of the Moon, instead of deep down in old lava tubes like the residential sectors—and why the Lederman factory had been sited within the walls of a crater on the Moon's limb in the first place. The hope of the planners was that if the factory ever did blow, the walls would force most of the explosion to go straight up and out into space. "Up" from the factory crater was well away from Earth itself. Thus, a maximum accident would certainly destroy everything inside the walls. That would put a terrible crimp in space travel for lack of fuel for a long time to come, and any people who happened to be inside the crater wall at that moment would become instant plasma. So, I was pretty sure, would most of what was outside the walls, too, no matter what they said. But the accident would be only a frightful catastrophe instead of, well, the Millenarists' yearning dream of the end of the world.
Although just about everything that goes on inside the crater walls is critical, some parts are more critical than others. That makes a difference in people's working conditions. It's only the teams that do the actual insertion of antimatter into the pods that can't afford to have any distraction at all; those rooms are as sterile and concentrated as any surgical operating theater. Most of the other workers at least are allowed to play music, and some of them—in the assembly rooms for the pods themselves, for instance, or the coil-winding rooms for the magnetic containment—even are allowed to have news screens. Not that what they do isn't critical; but after they've finished their work it gets very thoroughly tested before it moves on to the next step, so mistakes can be caught. Where actual antimatter is present, there's no test. It either behaves quietly as it should. Or it doesn't, and that's all she wrote.
Since this time the "emergency" was only a practice alert the check was over in ten minutes, and the beepers were replaced with the gentle drone of the "all clear." By then Warren was already at his last stop, in the launch room. Naturally there was no antimatter there—we don't keep the stuff around; as soon as a pod is filled and ready, it's launched to one of the orbital catchers to wait for its customer—and Warren turned and grinned into the camera. "False alarm, fellows," he told us silent overseers, and blanked off.
By then Alma had been cleared, too. I suppose that I could have gone back to the subject we'd been talking about. But I didn't; and another opportunity to change my life went down the drain.
5
YOU have frequently referred to this "Lederman antimatter factory," but its exact nature and purpose are not understood, nor is it known why such an apparently dangerous establishment is tolerated. Please explain.
Well, all right, but where do I start?
Let's see. You already know that no one lives in the factory itself; when you need to get there—and you really have t
o need to, because nobody can get inside without a damn good reason—you take the subway through the crater rim from Lederman Town to the works inside.
I think I've also already told you that the lunar antimatter factory is the biggest single industrial complex in the solar system—in the universe, I guess, unless there's some other high-tech race out there somewhere that we just haven't found out about yet. It's big because it has to be big—you can't make antimatter in your hall bedroom. Also, there can be only one installation like the Lederman factory anywhere in the solar system. That's a law. Some people think it's a dumb law, because if we can have one antimatter factory on the Moon, what would be wrong with having a couple of spares somewhere else, even farther from civilization? Well, we probably could. There are only two reasons we don't. One is that the Moon is a good place to get the immense amounts of electrical power the factory needs—I'll tell you about that in a minute. The other reason we don't is that the Congresses are so scared of antimatter that they damn near wanted to close Lederman itself down in the early days. But they couldn't. The human race needs antimatter.
Most of the antimatter we manufacture goes to fuel spaceships, but there are plenty of other customers. The habitats around Jupiter's moons and in the asteroid-mining stations need antimatter, too, for survival; they're too far from the Sun for solar power to give them all the energy they need, and we can sell antimatter to them cheaper, megawatt for megawatt, than nukes or anything else they might consider. It would be nice if we could sell to Earth, too, of course, but of course we can't. Antimatter is not allowed within a thousand kilometers of the outermost reaches of the Earth's atmosphere. For obvious reasons.