Moonliner: No Stone Unturned Read Online Free Page A

construction goes according to plan, commercial transportation to Mars could become available as early as 2090.  According to current astronautical protocol, however, an astronaut rating is still required for anyone leaving lower earth orbit for more than 14 days.
     
    “It may surprise you to know that Laser Retro-Reflectors placed on the moon in 1969 by Apollo 11 astronauts as part of the Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment are still being used today, one hundred years later, to determine the precise distance to the moon.”
     
    Cedric is too preoccupied with the news to see Pender, his young lab partner, standing next to his table, also staring at the news.
                  “I got your message,” Pender says as he sits down at Cedric’s table. “Was it a skip wave?”
                  “No, it was a narrow band,” Cedric answers.  “It was done with an old Taldom Transmitter.  I programmed a repeater node to run through an accelerator node to boost the speed of the signal, and it worked.”
                 
    Being considerably younger, Pender has always looked up to Cedric.  It’s not just the step or two ahead he always seems to be in their advanced laser-com courses, but life in general.  To Pender, Cedric seems to understand everything, not just the how but the why.  Cedric exudes a command of the theoretical or the philosophical as well as the applied, or the science.
     
                  “So how long was the signal?” Pender asks.
                  “Just a few seconds,” Cedric answers; “somewhere from twenty to twenty-five maybe.  I don’t know.”
                  “And you say it had no time stamp?” Pender asks.
                  “That’s right, nothing,” Cedric replies.  “It was a ghost message.”
                  “Damn, to be able to transmit messages through time, this is Nobel stuff,” Pender points out; “think of the potential.”
                  “I have been,” Cedric answers.  “I was imagining temporal, or time stations set up at various points in time rather than places in space.  Then, whenever a catastrophe occurs, a message could be sent back in time to a specific temporal station to warn of the inevitable, impending disaster so that it could then be prevented or averted.”
                  “But it still would have occurred the first time,” Pender points out.
                  “Yes, but never again,” Cedric adds.
                  “Imagine installing the first time station in history,” Pender conjects; “the earliest one.  You might immediately receive a warning of the imminent end of the human race; a tragedy so huge that future generations decide to send a warning all the way back to the first time station to allot as much time as possible for the human race to work on avoiding the crisis.”
                  “That does seem possible, doesn’t it?” Cedric responds.
                  “You may have just saved the planet,” Pender says with a laugh.
                  “Or destroyed the entire universe,” Cedric replies.
                  “Either way,” Pender says; “looks like you’ve got your PhD.  Your thesis is all but done, and with the results of your test I can’t imagine they wouldn’t award you your degree on the spot.”
                  “I don’t want the department to know about the results of my tests,” Cedric tells Pender as a serious look comes over his face.
                  “Why not?” Pender asks.
                  “Dr. Ridpath told me that Cygnus is interested in my work,” Cedric tells him.
                  “Cygnus, the company that supplies our lab beams?” Pender asks.
                  “Yes, and so much more,” Cedric says; “they sponsor our entire department.  And