Farside Read Online Free PDF Page A

“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.”

 
    OUTSIDE
    Winston slid back the corridor door and led Trudy into a locker room, where empty space suits were hanging in a row, like a museum display of medieval armor. A hard plastic bench ran along the front of the lockers. Beyond its end, Trudy could see the heavy steel inner hatch of the airlock.
    This is an initiation ritual, Trudy told herself as she slowly wormed her arms through the ribbed sleeves of the thermal undergarment for the space suit that Winston had picked out for her. Like hazing at a sorority or buying a round of beers first day on a new job, she thought. Here they take you out on the bare, airless surface of the Moon to see if you’ve got the guts to do it. That’s how you become one of them.
    “You need a small size,” Winston said, leading her past several lockers, each containing an empty suit.
    You can do this, Trudy told herself, trying to keep her fear from showing. You went outside at Selene and it was okay. Yeah, a sneering voice in her head countered. Outside. In a tour bus. A nice, comfortable, safe bus with twenty-some tourists. And even then you didn’t have the nerve to get out of the bus and walk on the surface, you just looked through the glass ceiling and focused on the Earth shining up there nice and bright.
    It was dangerous outside, she knew. You could go through four-hundred-degree temperature swings just by stepping from sunlight into shadow. Hard radiation poured out of the sky. And meteors peppered the surface. I could get shot out there!
    “Here,” said Winston, stopping at one of the lockers, “this one ought to fit you okay.”
    Reluctant or not, she wriggled into the pants of the space suit and allowed Winston to help her slide the hard-shell torso over her head. Several other Farside employees had mysteriously shown up, grins on their faces, witnesses to the newbie’s initiation.
    As Winston settled the life-support pack on her back and plugged in its connections to the suit, he asked mildly, “Trudy, are you sure you want to do this?”
    “Sure,” she snapped, with a certainty that she didn’t feel at all. “Why not?”
    “Okay.”
    He pulled down a suit with his own name stenciled on its chest while a couple of the technicians who were standing nearby stepped up to check out Trudy’s space suit. Boots and gloves sealed. Backpack connected. One of them started to take the clear glassteel helmet off the shelf