The Rossem Project

Agitation

     Perris Protar clung desperately to the iron handhold, trying with every nerve and muscle to stop his legs from floating out from under him. Damned low gravity! he swore to himself. Places like this should be banned by law! Everywhere should be guaranteed a decent level of gravity, so that ordinary, decent people can get around without having to do acrobatics!

     The moon trog with him chuckled at his obvious discomfort. He was floating serenely a few feet below the ceiling of the huge chamber, needing only to hold onto a thin strand of vine to stop the smallest moon's feeble gravity from pulling him down.

     Except for the central part of the cavern's floor, which had been cleared by the human and moon trog workers who now laboured there, every available rock surface was covered by a layer of vegetation. Walls, floor and ceiling alike, since there wasn't enough gravity to make much of a difference between surfaces of different orientation. The air was damp and humid and a thin film of moisture clung to every available surface. On Tharia, or any decent sized world for that matter, gravity would have pulled the moisture down to form puddles of water in every lowest point, but here the gravity wasn't enough to overcome the water's surface tension, with the result that the life giving liquid spread itself thinly everywhere, so thinly that collecting enough of it to drink was extremely difficult. You could die of thirst here, Perris thought in disgusted amazement. How crazy is it that you can die of thirst in a place damp enough for mosses and ferns to grow?

     The thought prompted him to take a sip from the flexible tube that dangled near his mouth; the tube that was attached to a two gallon tank of water strapped to his back like a diver's air tank. On a planet, gravity dragged the body's water down into the legs and abdomen so that the body's water regulating system, which was located in the head, would make you feel thirsty whenever the amount of water in the head dropped below a certain level. Here, though, on Kronos, where the body's water was free to distribute itself equally all over, that system failed to work properly and a human wouldn't begin to feel thirsty until he was just hours away from death by dehydration. The inhabitants of Kronosia, the moon city, those few who hadn't gone back to Tharia the moment the Beltharans relaxed the restrictions on movement, called it float fever, and the only way of preventing it was to take regular sips of water throughout the day, whether you felt thirsty or not. For Perris, it was just another reason for him to hate the place.

     He and Mong-Tang, the moon trog, hung in silence for a few minutes, watching the hundred or so humans and moon trogs busily at work on the huge object under construction in the centre of the cave. It was a double sphere, one inside the other. Both little more than frameworks of steel and moonmetal at the moment. The outer sphere was twenty five yards across, the inner one twenty yards across. The top half of the inner sphere was empty, a hemisphere of open space, but the lower half was divided into decks and bulkheads. The whole thing sat in a huge cradle, like an egg in an eggcup. Its mass was so great, even at this early stage of its construction, that its own weight was enough to hold it securely in place even in Kronos’s feeble gravity.

     Perris directed the moon trog's attention to the bright flashes of light where other moon trogs were using the ends of optical fibre cables to weld struts and girders to the vast framework. "Are they magical?" he asked. "I thought your people couldn't use magic."

     Mong-Tang laughed. "Indeed we cannot," he agreed. "It is concentrated sunlight."

     "Sunlight?" exclaimed the human in astonishment. "But it's welding metal!"

     "There is no limit to what sunlight can do if you concentrate it enough," the moon trog replied. "Haven't you ever used a lens to burn your name into a piece of wood?"

     "I never even saw a lens until I was twenty five," replied the human thoughtfully. "Then I came into possession of a pair of field binoculars. I dismantled it one day, curious to see how it worked. It was all full of bits of glass. Dozens of them."