MIRROR LAB
Trudy slid Professor Uhlrich’s door shut quietly. A few paces down the corridor, McClintock was already speaking into his pocketphone.
“Yes, Dr. Cardenas. I appreciate your cooperation. I’ll call you back as soon as I get to my quarters here at Farside and we can discuss this problem in detail.”
He clicked the phone shut and turned to Trudy. “I’ve got to run. See you later.”
And he actually started to sprint down the corridor, only to bounce and soar in the light lunar gravity. He thumped against a wall, skidded to a halt, and then—throwing an embarrassed grin in Trudy’s direction—he started along the corridor again, slower this time, more carefully. Trudy was left alone.
She hadn’t the faintest idea of which way to turn. No one else was in sight. Everybody’s busy working, she thought. Well, this rabbit’s warren can’t be all that big. I’ll find my way. First thing is to figure out where my quarters are.
Then she saw the same cute blond guy who had met her at the landing site hustling down the corridor toward her in his pumpkin-colored coveralls.
“Professor Uhlrich says I’m supposed to show you around the place,” he said, puffing slightly.
“Great,” said Trudy. “Maybe you could show me my quarters first.”
“Sure.”
As Trudy suspected, the underground facility wasn’t very large. One main corridor, with three side corridors branching from it. Trudy’s living quarters consisted of a single room, sparsely furnished with a bed, a desk, two chairs—one a recliner that looked like it had been salvaged from a Clipper rocket—and a wide display screen mounted on the wall above the desk. A compact kitchenette took up one corner. Accordion-fold doors opened onto a closet and a lavatory.
She saw that her soft-sided garment carrier and travelbag had been deposited on the bed, which looked big enough for two people.
“All the living spaces are small,” her guide explained, almost apologetically.
“This’ll do fine,” Trudy said. “It’ll be like living in a dorm again.”
The kid chuckled and nodded. “Not as many parties, though. The prof doesn’t like fooling around.”
“Nose to the grindstone, huh?”
“And then some,” he said fervently.
“Okay, where to now?” Trudy asked.
“The only really interesting thing to show you is the mirror lab. The rest is just offices and workrooms and living spaces.”
“So let’s see the mirror lab.”
As they went to the door, Trudy pointed to the name tag on the guide’s coveralls. “Winston, huh? What’s your first name?”
He reddened slightly. “Winston. I’m Winston squared.” Then he added, “My father’s sense of humor.”
“Do people call you Winnie?”
Shaking his head, Winston replied, “Not unless they want to fight.”
She smiled at him. “Okay, Winston. My name’s Trudy, and it isn’t short for Gertrude. Just plain Trudy.”
“Okay. Trudy it is.”
Winston told Trudy that he was an electronics engineer. His nominal job was wiring the hundreds of antennas of the Cyclops facility as they were erected.
“When I’m not running errands for Professor Uhlrich,” he said. Then he quickly amended, “Not that I mind showing you around; this is fun.”
The mirror lab was the largest space in the underground complex, a natural cave in the ringwall mountain that had been smoothed and filled with the equipment for making hundred-meter-wide telescope mirrors. No frills, Trudy saw. This was a working area. A half-dozen technicians hunched over workstations on a balcony that overlooked a huge, slowly spinning turntable.
“That’s the oven where the glass chunks are melted down,” Winston explained. “Then the molten glass is spun slowly so it flows over the superstructure and takes on the exact curvature of the mirror. Once that’s done, the mirror’s allowed to cool, then the final polishing is done.”
Trudy stared down from the balcony’s railing at the slowly revolving turntable. It looked well used, strictly functional, utterly utilitarian.
“A hundred meters in diameter,” she breathed. “Wow.”
“You couldn’t build a mirror that big on Earth,” Winston said. “It’d crack under its own weight.”
“Where’s the glass come from?”
“From Selene. They scoop silicon from the ground. The regolith has plenty of silicon in it. And oxygen and all the other elements you need to make high-quality optical glass.”
“Strictly a local operation,” Trudy murmured, still staring down at the turntable as it moved at its stately, unhurried pace.
“Oh, we have to bring in boron and some of the other exotic elements up from Earth,” Winston said. “But those’re minor ingredients. The bulk of the material comes from the regolith.”
One of the technicians got up from her workstation and walked past Trudy and Winston, heading for the dispensing machines at the far end of the balcony.
“Hi, Win,” she said as she passed.
He nodded to her. “Lunch break?”
“Kinda.”
“You heard they’re bringing the Mendeleev mirror back?” Winston asked her.
She stopped and turned toward him. “That’s gonna screw up our schedule, for sure. Gotta start all over again, from scratch.”
Winston shrugged and the technician headed for the dispensing machines.
Trudy felt her brow knitting as she asked, “When you set up the mirror in its mount, what about the temperature swings between daylight and dark? How’s that affect the glass?”
“Doesn’t,” said Winston. “The mirror’s kept inside an insulated tube. Never gets direct sunlight. It’s always at a low temperature, so it won’t expand or contract very much.”
She nodded. “Figures.”
There really wasn’t much to see, but the mirror lab fascinated Trudy. The biggest telescope mirrors ever made were being manufactured here. The place was quietly spectacular, she thought. The thousand-meter telescopes that the IAA wanted to place in space were composed of smaller segments: None of their sections were as big as the mirrors being built here at Farside.
After nearly an hour of staring at the turntable and talking to the monitoring technicians, Winston led Trudy back out to the central corridor. She left with reluctance, but Winston seemed to have something more to show her.
“Where are we going now?” she asked.
He pointed down the corridor to a closed steel hatch. Above it was a lighted red sign: AIRLOCK.
“Outside,” said Winston.
“Outside?” A shiver of alarm flared through Trudy.
“If you’re up to it.”