Free Sunstorm by Arthur C. Clarke Page B

amphitheater wouldn’t do.
    So he deployed some of his scarce resources to knock through the walls of a few living quarters. The result was a cramped but serviceable room, dominated by a “conference table” made of several smaller bits of furniture jammed together. Bud installed Faraday cages and jamming devices to exclude electronic eavesdropping, and active noise generators to put a stop to the more conventional sort of listening. Even Thales would not be free to come and go: while the door was locked, only a cut-down clone of the Moon’s electronic ghost would be allowed to operate within the room, and later a suite of smart systems, independent of Thales himself, would scrutinize and censor the flow of information out of the room.
    Siobhan checked it over as best she could. “I’m no expert,” she said to Bud, “but this looks sufficient to me.”
    He said fervently, “I hope so. I don’t mind telling you I took a few punches over this meeting—and not just about the security.” He scratched his shaven scalp. “Me, I’m just a military man. I’m used to an unpredictable life. These scientists
hate
to be dragged away from their work.”
    “I can sympathize,” she said. “I’m a scientist too, remember. And right now all my own projects are probably running into the ground.”
    Bud knew about her work. “But for now the life and death of the universe can wait.”
    “Quite.” She smiled at him.
    Ten o’clock arrived. With Bud at her side she braced herself and walked into the crowded room. Bud quietly closed the door behind her, and she heard a security lock click into place.
             
    She stood at the head of the cobbled-together conference table. The twenty participants were already here with their softscreens spread out over the tabletop before them: twenty faces gazing back at her, with expressions varying from apathy to nervousness to blank hostility. The glow of the strip lights overhead was washed-out and harsh, and despite the noisy laboring of the air circulation systems this sealed box already smelled strongly of adrenaline and sweat. The people seemed alien too, their clothes, much recycled and patched, dark with use, and their gestures small and contained, conditioned by years in small spaces and a lethal environment. They made Siobhan feel gaudy, wispy, an outsider from sunny Earth out of place here in the cramped, dusty chambers of the Moon.
    This is going to be a nightmare, she thought.
    Most of the participants were geologists of one stripe or another, she knew; many of them had the big, practical, dust-stained hands of those used to working with rocks. Glancing around, she recognized two faces from the briefing material she had requested from Bud: Mikhail Martynov, the rather shy-looking Russian who was the lead scientist on solar weather here on the Moon—and Eugene Mangles, neutrino whiz kid.
    Eugene had a distracted air, and he seemed to have trouble making eye contact. But he was startlingly good looking, better even than the images had suggested, with the perfect skin and open, symmetrical face of a synth-star singer. Siobhan felt her crusty heart skip a beat. And from the glances that Mikhail occasionally cast his way, it seemed that it wasn’t just women who were drawn to Eugene’s looks.
    Bud, acting as chair, stood beside her. “Before we start, let me just say one thing,” he began. “Astronauts have a proud history in solar studies. It goes back to the
Skylab
guys who, in Earth orbit in 1973, operated an imaging spectrograph built for them by Harvard. Today we’re continuing that tradition. But we’re not just talking about science. Today we’re being asked for our help. As the commander of Clavius Base I consider it an honor to have Professor McGorran here—an honor that we on the Moon are seen as fit to be the focus of the response to this problem. Professor.” He nodded to Siobhan and sat down.
    After that pep talk, not entirely appropriate, Siobhan