There were ten women aboard out of ninety total. Nine were married, and the tenth was Dot Hoffman. My first impression of her was more than correct. Dot never would be married. Not only was she homely, but she thought she was homelier still. She was terrified of physical contact with men, and the blue wool stockings and blouse buttoned to the neck were the least of her defenses.
If I had to be in love—and at that age, maybe I did—I could choose among nine married women. Jill was certainly the prettiest of the lot. Pug nose, brown hair chopped off short, green eyes, and a compact muscular shape, very much the shape of a woman. She liked to talk, and I liked to listen.
She and Ty had stars in their eyes. Their talk was full of what space would do for mankind.
Jill was an ex-Fromate; she’d been an officer in the Friends of Man and the Earth. But while the Fromates down below were running around sabotaging industries and arcologies and nuclear plants and anything else they didn’t like, Jill went to space. Her heart bled no less than any for the baby fur seals and the three-spined stickleback and all the fish killed by mine tailings, but she’d thought of something to do about it all.
“We’ll put all the dirty industries into space,” she told me. “Throw the pollution into the solar wind and let it go out to the cometary halo. The Fromates think they can talk everyone into letting Kansas go back to buffalo grass—”
“You can’t make people want to be poor,” Ty put in.
“Right! If we want to clean up the Earth and save the wild things, we’ll have to give people a way to get rich without harming the environment. This is it! Someday we’ll send down enough power from space that we can tear down the dams and put the snail darter back where he came from.”
And more. Jill tended to do most of the talking. I wondered about Ty. He always seemed to have the words that would set her off again.
And one day, when we were clustered around McLeve’s house with, for a few restful hours, nothing to do, and Jill was well out of earshot flying around and among the chickens in her wonderfully graceful wingstyle, Ty said to me, “I don’t care if we turn the Earth into a park. I like space. I like flying, and I like free fall, and the look of stars with no air to cloud them. But don’t tell Jill.”
I learned fast. With Ty in charge of engineering, McLeve as chief administrator, and Dot Hoffman’s computers to simulate the construction and point up problems before they arose, the project went well. We didn’t get enough mass from the Moon, so that my smelter was always short of raw materials, and Congress didn’t give us enough money. There weren’t enough flights from down below and we were short of personnel and goods from Earth. But we got along.
Two hundred and forty thousand miles below us, everything was going to hell.
First, the senior senator from Wisconsin lived long enough to inherit a powerful committee chairmanship, and he’d been against the space industries from the start. Instead of money we got “Golden Fleece” awards. Funds already appropriated for flights we’d counted on got sliced, and our future budgets were completely in doubt.
Next, the administration tried to bail itself out of the tax revolt by running the printing presses. What money we could get appropriated wasn’t worth half as much by the time we got it.
Moonbase felt the pinch and cut down even more on the rock they flung out our way.
Ty’s answer was to work harder: get as much of the Shack finished as we could, so that we could start sending down power.
“Get it done,” he told us nightly. “Get a lot of it finished. Get so much done that even those idiots will see that we’re worth it. So much that it’ll cost them less to supply us than to bring us home.”
He worked himself harder than anyone else, and Jill was right out there with him. The first task was to get the mirrors operating.
We blew them all at once over a couple of months. They came in the shuttle that should have brought our additional crew; it wasn’t much of a choice, and we’d have to put off balancing out the sex ratio for another six months.
The mirrors were packages of fabric as thin as the cellophane on a package of cigarettes. We inflated them into great spheres, sprayed foam plastic on the outside for struts, and sprayed silver vapor inside where it would precipitate in a thin layer all over. Then we cut them apart to get spherical mirrors, and sliced a couple of those into wedges to mount behind the windows in the floor of the Shack.
They reflected sunlight in for additional crops. Jill had her crew out planting more wheat to cut down on the supplies we’d need from Earth.
Another of the mirrors was my concern. A hemisphere a quarter of a kilometer across can focus a lot of sunlight onto a small point. Put a rock at that point and it melts, fast. When we got that set up we were all frantically busy smelting iron for construction out of the rocks. Moonbase shipped up when they could. When Moonbase couldn’t fling us anything we dismounted rock we’d placed for shielding, smelted it, and plastered the slag back onto the sphere.
Days got longer and longer. There’s no day or night aboard the Shack anyway, of course: open the mirrors and you have sunlight, close them and you don’t. Still, habit dies hard, and we kept track of time by days and weeks; but our work schedules bore no relation to them. Sometimes we worked the clock around, quitting only when forced to by sheer exhaustion.
We
