Lifeline

Clancy nodded to himself, which of course she couldn’t see behind the polarized golden visor. “It’s Orbitech 1 I’m worried about. We’re so close to Clavius Base—what if some celestial mechanic desperate to earn ‘efficiency points’ miscalculates the orbit, trying to plant the harness too close, and misses? Imagine a kilometer per second projectile hitting us.”

“The Aguinaldo didn’t have any problem. The wall-kelp package they sent us was right on the money.”

“They hit Longomontanus. They couldn’t have missed that with their eyes closed. This is different. No one can be this accurate—not with a ballistic trajectory.”

“So, what’s the chance of the weavewire package hitting us standing here? Pretty darned small, I’ll bet. My grandma once told me about how paranoid people on Earth were when Skylab burned up in the atmosphere. And we laughed at how ridiculous they all were. We have a better chance of killing ourselves by falling up here.”

“Well, Skylab wasn’t aimed right at us,” Clancy muttered, but said nothing more. Shen had a point—the terrain was rugged where they were standing, and the canister shot from Orbitech 1 couldn’t be too far off. But standing still and waiting in the middle of the crater for the canister to hit would be a lot tougher on the nerves than trying to find it after it landed. He cleared his throat. “We’ll have a better view up here, that’s all. We can see where the package hits.”

“Oh, give me a break, Cliffy. I won’t tell anyone you’re chicken. Now I’ll have something to hang over you. You’re going to have to ask me out or I’ll tattle.”

Thanks a lot, he thought, not sure if she was joking. He decided to ignore it. “We’re already here, so let’s stay put. As soon as the canister lands we’ll get back down.”

“Fair enough.” Shen twisted a backpack off her shoulders, looking graceful in her bulky suit. He realized it was just his imagination filling in details. Rummaging through the pack, Shen withdrew a tripod and set it up, extending the telescopic legs to their full length.

Clancy followed her lead, but he had trouble slipping his own backpack off over his air bottles. When he finally broke out the charge-coupled diode, Shen was ready to mount the detector.

“Ready with the CCD?”

Clancy grunted. “As soon as it’s calibrated.” He ran the CCD through a self-test. With its enclosed iris slowly shutting out the light, the solid-state device verified sensing a light change down to a single photon.

Satisfied, Clancy pushed to his feet and handed the CCD to Shen. Since the Moon had no atmosphere, the harness streaking to impact would make no trail across the black backdrop of stars. But the CCD could find it.

They worked in silence setting up the detector, finishing with plenty of time to spare, according to the digital clock on Clancy’s heads-up display. Once Clancy ensured that the CCD’s view angle covered the entire crater floor, he positioned himself out of the detector’s field of view. Shen joined him, lounging back against the outcropping. They waited for the smooth ocean of rock and dust on the crater floor to be marred by another impact.

After some minutes Shen broke the silence. “You really think it’ll work—the yo-yo, I mean?”

Clancy chewed on the question as he continued to scan the crater floor. “If everything cooperates.”

“You mean, like Orbitech 1?”

“How about celestial mechanics itself? We’ve got a lot of ‘ifs’ that have to be satisfied—if our part of the harness gets here; if we can finish the yo-yo; if the weavewire is really strong enough; if Orbitech 1 can land the wire and reel it back in.…”

Shen’s comment filled the inside of his helmet. “All we have to do is attach the weavewire to the harness and let Orbitech 1 pull the yo-yo up. I thought this had all been worked out by the Clavius and Orbitech eggheads.”

Clancy smiled to himself. Shen believed her practical experience as an engineer placed her far apart from the wild-eyed celestial mechanics.

“Well, Orbitech 1 can reel out a few hundred thousand miles of weavewire in a precise orbit, exact enough to land on the Moon—but even if the wire has a locator beacon on it, can you imagine how tough it’s going to be to find that sucker falling out of the sky? And remember, we won’t have much time to connect it, either—probably only an hour or so. Dr. Rockland and I were arguing this morning about what the speed of sound in the weavewire is.”

She turned toward him. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“That’s how fast one end of the wire knows what the other end is doing, which tells us how early Orbitech 1 has to start reeling it in. Rockland thinks sound would propagate mechanically through the fiber, which means they would have to start reeling it back almost a day before the end even gets here. But I think because of the binding potential and the chemical bonds in the weavewire, a signal will travel almost at c —probably a third the speed of light.