Back to the Moon Read Online Free

Engineering Company, MEC for short. After the accident that had killed his wife, and the investigation that had resulted in his banishment from NASA, MEC had become the most important thing in Jack Medaris’s life. An invention of his called the sling pump, used in almost every liquid rocket tankage system in the world, had made Jack wealthy and MEC a very prosperous company. His people were paid accordingly. WE HAPPY FEW, read a banner over the entrance to the clean room. It reflected the fierce camaraderie of the company and the loyalty of its people to its founder.
    As the test neared its critical phase, Perlman became visibly nervous, not surprising since he had paid Jack and MEC over thirty-one million dollars to build
Prometheus.
“Is it looking good?” Perlman worried.
    â€œVery good, Doc,” Jack said, concentrating on the sensor data scrolling down a computer screen.
    â€œIt’s got to work,” Perlman breathed, his fingers covering his lips as if he was afraid to let his voice fall on the precious spacecraft.
    â€œEverything is fine,” Jack said distractedly. And it was too. Jack and MEC’s thirty engineers had spent a year carefully constructing
Prometheus,
borrowing liberally from the proven design of the old Soviet Union’s
Lunakhod
series of moon-sample return spacecraft.
    â€œI feel like WET’s coming at me like an unstoppable locomotive,” Perlman remarked with a groan. Every so often, it seemed, Perlman had to voice a little misery.
    Jack ignored the comment. He didn’t want to get off into a discussion of WET. The acronym stood for the World Energy Treaty, a United Nations agreement that had been drafted after the breeder reactor disaster in Sorkiyov, Russia. Hundreds of Russians had died, thousands more were going to get cancer, livestock devastated by the score, trees, grass, everything contaminated and dying. An antinuclear frenzy had swept the planet. WET banned all “power plants utilizing fissile and radioactive materials.” The treaty had been ratified by every country in the world except France and the United States. President Edwards had signed WET but the Senate, as yet, hadn’t approved it.
    Jack had known Perlman for five years. The physicist had just turned up on Cedar Key one day, introduced himself in Jack’s office, and tried to start an argument. “Do you know what the most important product of our civilization is?” he had demanded.
    â€œNo, Dr. Perlman,” Jack had replied, amused, “what is the most important product?”
    Perlman had raised his finger, his habit when he pontificated. “It’s not cars, not television sets, not even computers. It’s energy! Without energy Western civilization would not exist. A good portion of the earth—the so-called Third World—struggles in misery and degradation. Those poor people think what they need is money, or a different political or economic system, to rise up out of their poverty, but what they really need is energy!”
    To Perlman’s disappointment Jack had not seen fit to argue. “Okay, Doc. Energy. What does that have to do with me?”
    Perlman had looked out Jack’s office window, to the ocean tide that lapped the nearby shore. “Mr. Medaris, did you know that in a gallon of seawater there is the equivalent energy content of three hundred gallons of gasoline? That’s because ordinary water contains deuterium—heavy hydrogen. If deuterium is fused with an isotope known as helium-3, the result is nearly limitless energy. Did you know that?”
    Jack remembered Perlman spreading his hands in that effusive way he would come to know so well. “I have come up with a way to use inertial confinement of a quantity of deuterium and helium-3, subject it to the heat and pressure of a rather large laser beam, and release all that energy. Fusion, Jack. Energy from fusion is within my grasp.”
    Energy from