Free 04. Birth of Flux and Anchor by Jack L. Chalker

complicated a problem than old Edison had," Watanabe responded. "Anyway, it's a muitistep process. First we sedate, using conventional cryogenic gasses, but then we flush it all out using a high-density energy plasma that is slightly altered Flux energy, and that stuff maintains the suspension for a sufficient time to digitize the subject. The computer treats it as Flux—which means it ignores it—so the stuff simply remains in Flux during reassembly and rapidly reverts to its original state. No foreign substances."
    "You make it sound so simple," the director noted. "Now— can we adapt our existing ship designs to this method, and how long would that take?"
    "A matter of months," she responded. "After all, we knew what we had to have. We just had to have the formula to make it work. I'd like to run as many tests as possible, but I think we might be able to try our first distance jump in three months, no more."
    Van Haas looked at Haller. "It's the most frustrating thing we have here, even when we have it. As an administrator, I'd love to order them to rush it, but this is one area where no mistakes can be tolerated."
    Haller nodded. "I'm not sure I want to go on something that'll do that to me when it hasn't been jumped through hoops. Just where does this set the timetable though?" He was already feeling like one of the team.
    "I've given orders to the remote stations in orbit to being the robotized placement of the Gates and preliminary testing. That'll eat up our three months. Then we'll have to begin the bleeds"—allowing Flux to come into the world—"and that will take quite some time. When sufficient Flux is formed to create a physical atmosphere, we will begin to ship and put in place the network of twenty-eight master-computer stations. We'll have to anchor and test them, create the proper atmospheric balance and study what it does—quite a lot. Our current estimate is seven years, but I hope we will be able to shorten it."
    Haller was dumbstruck, his romantic vision rapidly fading away. "Seven y ears . . ."
     
     
    The orders went out from Borelli Station through Flux and were received by the already awaiting units in orbit around the tiny world, all of them dwarfed by the gigantic planet the moon orbited.
    The robotized stations were gigantic, although modular in construction, having assembled themselves from pieces sent through one by one. Now they would have a better and surer way to transmit and receive. The earliest ones had created a small automated counterpart to Borelli Station in orbit themselves; now they began to receive what they needed.
    Every square millimeter of the moon's surface had been scanned and mapped, and calculations made. Modules now detached from the orbiting mothers and descended to the surface, where crawlers had already checked and double-checked the terrain, the surface and underlying composition of the ground; made seismic estimates; even bored with strong lasers for several kilometers into the very heart of the place.
    Cost was always a factor, even with the availability of Flux energy. To totally use the entire place, a network of twelve Borelli Points would be required, but they had to make do with seven. This would be sufficient to maintain temperature and atmosphere within tolerable limits, but it would create a life zone extending only from forty degrees north to thirty degrees south latitude, give or take a degree. Beyond that, Flux would begin to thin, sufficient for atmospheric maintenance but with rapidly declining heat as you went beyond the zone, and without sufficient Flux density to properly use it in transmutation.
    Now they dug out the holes for the Gates, first with crude explosives, then smoothed with powerful lasers, then they assembled the great dish-shaped depressions that would be the multipurpose, multifunction hearts and souls of the operation. With the precision that only computers could command, the fit was a perfect one.
    Now the feed tubes were blasted