Free Fundamental Force Episode One by Albert Sartison

water on
the Moon was too high to waste it by losses through leaky
pipes.
    A moving
walkway quickly brought them out of the tunnel and back under the
transparent dome with its view of open space. They were higher up
now, having left the waiting hall behind in a small crater. From
here they could see most of the Lunar Base: service buildings, gas
holders, lubricant stores, thermonuclear power stations,
communication antennae and telescopes.
    “Why are the
power stations switched off?” asked Clive.
    “The reactors
are on standby for emergencies, but the electricity we use comes
from the sphere. There is no sense in us generating more, since we
have so much free energy...”
    Something
flashed brightly above them, imparting a bright bluish light to
everything around, like a night-time flash of lightning. Steve and
Clive looked anxiously towards the flare. A thunderstorm on the
Moon?
    “That’s the
meteorite protection,” explained Gray. “We are now passing through
the tail of a comet; many small meteorites are falling on the
base.”
    “The Perseids,”
Clive muttered to himself.
    Gray turned his
face towards them without slackening pace.
    “You are
astrophysicists, aren’t you?”
    “Uh-huh,”
replied Steve.
    “It shows. Yes,
that’s what they are. The small ones are no danger, they just make
more work for the robots on the dome, but those larger than 100
micrometers have to be driven off by a laser beam. You are a little
late. This morning there was quite a show, the lasers intercepted
several of them per minute. My head’s beginning to throb from all
the flares. This way...”
    A spacious
elevator with a matt metal finish took them up rapidly and almost
silently.
    “Hang onto the
handrail or your head will fly up and hit the ceiling,” Gray warned
them and gestured upwards at several large marks on the
ceiling.
    “Newbies are
always getting bumps on the head, no matter how many times you warn
them. Someone is going to break their neck one of these days.”
    Steve and Clive
obediently grabbed the handrails painted in red and yellow stripes
that ran around the elevator wall. When the elevator began braking,
they really were pulled upwards. It felt strange to be pulled
towards the ceiling.
    The elevator
stopped. They were in the upper part of some sort of tower. Gray
left the elevator and approached a transparent wall. From here, the
whole base was laid out before them. He pointed to dark lines
beginning next to a massive, squat, windowless building and running
like gigantic iron rails into the distance and beyond the horizon
itself.
    “Here we have
the first cascade of the SM inductors,” said Gray in an unemotional
tone, pointing towards the rails. “Actually there is nothing new
here, if you are already acquainted with the technology of remote
manipulation. Until now we did not have enough energy to conduct
such experiments. Once the sphere was built, this problem
disappeared, so we started on what you might call untargeted
applications of the device. It proved not to be particularly
difficult. We only had to learn how to keep the wave stable...”
    “Just a
minute,” interrupted Clive. “Let’s keep it in order.”
    Gray
smiled.
    “Order is most
important in what we do, you won’t get anywhere without it. Remote
manipulation technology, as we know from the experiment with
Mercury, bends space-time, creating a gravity hole. The same thing
happens of its own accord close to massive bodies. That is how our
nature creates gravitational attraction.
    “In the past
few years, we have studied many different ideas of what else could
be done with this technology. It turned out that the most
interesting thing was not simply to create a local gravity hole,
but to generate a series of holes in space-time, forming something
like a wave.
    “Along the
vector of propagation of the wave, local regions of compression and
expansion formed, resulting in gaps in space-time. If we place an
object in one of these gaps,