Flatlander - Larry Niven [137]
“I want a fresh look. I don’t want to deal with your tire prints.” I boarded the Mark Twenty-nine before she could object.
She made no move to stop me. I said, “Check the reception.”
She was into the lemmy’s cabin in a lovely graceful leap. She brought up the feed from my helmet camera. “You’re on, nice and … actually the picture’s jumping a little. Good enough, though.”
“Keep your eye on me. You can coach.” I kicked the Mark Twenty-nine into gear and rolled toward the rim.
I’d been wakened from a sound sleep by her call. They keep the same time over the whole moon, so it was the middle of the night for Hecate Bauer-Stanson, too.
Ah, well. I had time to shower and get some breakfast while she landed and refueled, and that’s never guaranteed. But it didn’t sound like the intruder in Del Rey Crater needed immediate justice.
During the flight I’d had a chance to read about Del Rey Crater.
Just before the turn of the millennium, Boeing, then more or less an aircraft company, had done a survey. What kind of customer would pay how much for easy access to orbit?
The answers it got depended heavily on the cost of launch. A hundred thirty years ago those costs were the stuff of fantasy. NASA’s weird political spacecraft, the Shuttle, launched for three thousand dollars per pound and up. At that price there would be no customers at all: nothing would fly without tax-financed kickbacks, and nothing did.
At two hundred dollars a pound—then considered marginally possible—the Net could afford to hold gladiatorial contests in orbit.
Intermediate prices would buy High Frontier antiweapons, orbiting solar power, high-end tourism, hazardous waste disposal, funerals …
Funerals. For five hundred dollars a pound, an urnful of ashes could be launched frozen in a block of ice for the solar wind to scatter to the stars. They launched from Florida in those days. Florida’s funeral lobby must have owned the state. Florida passed a state law. No funeral procedure could be licensed in Florida unless grieving relatives could visit the grave … via a paved road!
Boeing also considered disposal of hazardous waste from fission plants.
You wouldn’t just fire it off. First you’d separate the leftover uranium and/or plutonium, the fuel, to use again. Then you’d take out low-level radioactives and bury them in bricks. The truly noxious remainder, about three percent by mass, you would package to survive an unexpected reentry. Then you’d bomb a crater on the moon with them.
Power plant technology would improve over the decades to come. Our ancestors saw that far. In time that awful goo would once again be fuel. Future stockholders would want to find it.
Boeing had chosen Del Rey Crater with some care.
Del Rey was little but deep, just at the moon’s visible rim. Meteors massing 1.1 tonnes, slamming down at two kilometers per second, would raise dust plumes against the limb of the moon. An amateur’s telescope could find them. Lowell Observatory could get great pictures for the evening news: effective advertising, and free. The high rim would catch more of the dust … not all but most.
My search program had turned up a Lester del Rey with a half-century career in science fiction. The little crater had indeed been named for him. And he’d written an early story about an imaginary fission power plant: “Nerves.”
To a man used to moonscapes the view from the crater rim was quite strange. It’s not unusual for craters to overlap craters. But they clustered in the center, so that the central peak had been battered flat, and every crater was the same size. Yet more twenty-meter craters shaped the line that made Del Rey into one huge FORBIDDEN sign.
Everything around me was covered in pairs of tractor treadmarks a meter apart, often with a middle track as of something being dragged. A kilometer away, the tread marks thinned out and disappeared. There I began to see silvery beads at the center of every crater.
And one a little