lived for the best part of two decades. Maura thought she couldn't stand it for more than a couple of hours.
There wasn't even anywhere to sit, aside from Nemoto's low pallet, Maura had immediately noticed, and both Sally and Maura had carefully avoided that. Fortunately the Moon's low gravity made the bare rock floor relatively forgiving, even for the thin flesh that now stretched over Maura's fragile bones. There were some concessions to humanity -- an ancient and worn scrap of tatami, a tokonoma alcove containing a jinja -- a small, lightweight Shinto shrine. But most of the floor and wall space, even here in Nemoto's living area, was taken up with science equipment: anonymous white boxes that might have been power sources or sensors or sample boxes, cables draped over the floor, a couple of small, old-fashioned softscreens.
As Sally spoke, Nemoto -- thin, gaunt, eyes invisible within dark hollows -- pottered about her own projects. Walking with tiny, cautious steps, she minutely adjusted her equipment -- or, bizarrely, watered the small plants that flourished on brackets on the walls, bathed by light from bright halide lamps.
Still, the languid flow of the water from Nemoto's can -- great fat droplets oscillating as they descended toward the tiny green leaves -- was oddly soothing.
Sally continued her analysis of the Gaijin's putative technology. "The ramjet was always seen as one way to meet the challenge of interstellar journeys. The enormous distances even to the nearest stars would require an immense amount of fuel. With a ramjet, you don't need to carry any fuel at all.
"Space, you see, isn't empty. Even between the stars there are tenuous clouds of gas, mostly hydrogen. Bussard, the concept originator, proposed drawing in this gas, concentrating it, and pushing it into a fusion reaction -- just as hydrogen is burned into helium at the heart of the Sun.
"The trouble is, those gas clouds are so thin your inlet scoop has to be gigantic. So Bussard suggested using magnetic fields to pull in gas from an immense volume, hundreds of thousands of kilometers around."
She brought up another picture: an imaginary starship startlingly like a marine creature -- a squid, perhaps, Maura thought -- a cylindrical body with giant outreaching magnetic arms, preceded by darting shafts of light.
"The interstellar gas would first have to be electrically charged, to be deflected by the magnetic scoops. So you would pepper it with laser beams, as you see here, to heat it to a plasma, as hot as the surface of the Sun. It's an exotic, difficult concept, but it's still easier than hauling along all your fuel."
"Except," Nemoto murmured, laboring at her gadgets, "that it could never work."
"Correct..."
Maura had been privy to similar breakdowns and extrapolations emanating from the Department of Defense and the U.S. Air and Space Force, and -- given that Sally's summary was based on no more than piecework by various space buff special-interest groups and NASA refugees in various corners of the Department of Agriculture -- Maura thought it hung together pretty well.
The problem with Bussard's design was that only a hundredth of all that incoming gas could actually be used as fuel. The rest would pile up before the accelerating craft, clogging its magnetic intakes; Bussard's beautiful ship would expend so much energy pushing through this logjam it could never achieve the kind of speeds essential for interstellar flight.
Sally presented various developments of the basic proposal to get around this fundamental limitation. The most promising was called RAIR -- pronounced "rare" -- for Ram-Augmented Interstellar Rocket. Here, the intake of interstellar hydrogen would be greatly reduced, and would be used only to top up a store of hydrogen fuel the starship was already carrying. It was thought that the RAIR design could perform two or three times better than the Bussard system, and achieve perhaps 10 or 20 percent of the speed of
There wasn't even anywhere to sit, aside from Nemoto's low pallet, Maura had immediately noticed, and both Sally and Maura had carefully avoided that. Fortunately the Moon's low gravity made the bare rock floor relatively forgiving, even for the thin flesh that now stretched over Maura's fragile bones. There were some concessions to humanity -- an ancient and worn scrap of tatami, a tokonoma alcove containing a jinja -- a small, lightweight Shinto shrine. But most of the floor and wall space, even here in Nemoto's living area, was taken up with science equipment: anonymous white boxes that might have been power sources or sensors or sample boxes, cables draped over the floor, a couple of small, old-fashioned softscreens.
As Sally spoke, Nemoto -- thin, gaunt, eyes invisible within dark hollows -- pottered about her own projects. Walking with tiny, cautious steps, she minutely adjusted her equipment -- or, bizarrely, watered the small plants that flourished on brackets on the walls, bathed by light from bright halide lamps.
Still, the languid flow of the water from Nemoto's can -- great fat droplets oscillating as they descended toward the tiny green leaves -- was oddly soothing.
Sally continued her analysis of the Gaijin's putative technology. "The ramjet was always seen as one way to meet the challenge of interstellar journeys. The enormous distances even to the nearest stars would require an immense amount of fuel. With a ramjet, you don't need to carry any fuel at all.
"Space, you see, isn't empty. Even between the stars there are tenuous clouds of gas, mostly hydrogen. Bussard, the concept originator, proposed drawing in this gas, concentrating it, and pushing it into a fusion reaction -- just as hydrogen is burned into helium at the heart of the Sun.
"The trouble is, those gas clouds are so thin your inlet scoop has to be gigantic. So Bussard suggested using magnetic fields to pull in gas from an immense volume, hundreds of thousands of kilometers around."
She brought up another picture: an imaginary starship startlingly like a marine creature -- a squid, perhaps, Maura thought -- a cylindrical body with giant outreaching magnetic arms, preceded by darting shafts of light.
"The interstellar gas would first have to be electrically charged, to be deflected by the magnetic scoops. So you would pepper it with laser beams, as you see here, to heat it to a plasma, as hot as the surface of the Sun. It's an exotic, difficult concept, but it's still easier than hauling along all your fuel."
"Except," Nemoto murmured, laboring at her gadgets, "that it could never work."
"Correct..."
Maura had been privy to similar breakdowns and extrapolations emanating from the Department of Defense and the U.S. Air and Space Force, and -- given that Sally's summary was based on no more than piecework by various space buff special-interest groups and NASA refugees in various corners of the Department of Agriculture -- Maura thought it hung together pretty well.
The problem with Bussard's design was that only a hundredth of all that incoming gas could actually be used as fuel. The rest would pile up before the accelerating craft, clogging its magnetic intakes; Bussard's beautiful ship would expend so much energy pushing through this logjam it could never achieve the kind of speeds essential for interstellar flight.
Sally presented various developments of the basic proposal to get around this fundamental limitation. The most promising was called RAIR -- pronounced "rare" -- for Ram-Augmented Interstellar Rocket. Here, the intake of interstellar hydrogen would be greatly reduced, and would be used only to top up a store of hydrogen fuel the starship was already carrying. It was thought that the RAIR design could perform two or three times better than the Bussard system, and achieve perhaps 10 or 20 percent of the speed of
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