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Apr. 24th, 2007 07:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
i_idMore Homework.
Beth Huffington
ENG 451
News Muse Scene
April 20th, 2007
Outer Space Treaty
Dennis Hope was about to set foot on the surface of the moon for the first time. He’d always imagined a grand moment, fanfare and the lights you see in science fiction movies, the deep thrum of an airlock and a greeting from a man in uniform.
The air in the shuttle was dry. He listened to the murmurings between the crew, picking at his harness, and licked his lips. It stung. He’d been in here for eighteen hours, breathing this dry air and listening to them. Not even a window, not where he could see one. Just him, the only passenger alongside seven other empty seats, and the grey, cable-festooned walls. And the men, the pilot and his gaggle of techs, wouldn’t speak to him.
Not the arrival Hope had imagined at all. The shuttle jostled, engines hissing louder in the way that had accompanied every minute course change between here and Houston, the only sound at all outside the murmuring crew, and then there was a louder, sharper jolt. He gripped the arms of his seat tightly, and resisted the urge to check his harness for the thousandth time. Space travel wasn’t the terrifying thing it had been when he was a young man, was it? Commonplace, every-day. No different than flying in a commercial airplane. But he’s acutely aware that if something goes wrong, there’s no chance of survival, or rescue. Just vacuum.
The pilot addressed him for the first time since they left the Earth’s atmosphere. “Hold on, docking.” The next jolt was hard enough to whip Hope’s head back against the rest, and he shut his eyes, digging his fingers in harder. Thump, clatter, and the screech of metal sliding against metal.
And then it was still. The whine of the engines cut out, and only a soft, electric ticking cut the silence of the cabin. Then the intercom snapped to life.
Sorry about the rough reception, Ferry. We’re half-staff here; all non-essential personal are in the shelter. There are two Russian satellites watching us more closely than we’d like, right now. Mr. Hope, they know you’re here.
The comm clicked off again as suddenly as it had activated, but the shuttle wasn’t silent now. The crew were murmuring again, damn them, and shooting looks through the door that separated the passengers from the cockpit at Hope. He couldn’t read the looks, too stunned by the announcement.
“D-does that matter?” he asked, stammering. He tried to laugh. “You’re making me sound like a diplomat or something.”
The pilot went through some sort of routine with his control panel, and something outside scraped against the hull again with a hollow sound. “Or something.”
That not-very-helpful answer was all he received. The next ten minutes, twenty, passed stiffly. The crew made the necessary motions and procedures to connect the small transport to the larger structure, and only then did one of them release Hope from his seat. He stood, and then reeled and sat back down. Simulations in free-fall had not prepared the businessman for the peculiar light-headedness that came from the Moon’s lighter gravity.
A tech offered him a hand, moving easily in a practiced glide that didn’t send him bouncing up against the ceiling of the cabin. They wanted him out, Hope could feel it. So he stood again, and ignored the man’s hand, stabilizing himself against the low ceiling, and moving back through the tube of the cabin towards the door in the rear, the airlock. His briefcase was in a net on the wall next to the small hatch. Once he’d climbed in, the tech handed it to him, and his duffle bag. “Enjoy your stay, Mr. Hope,” he said mechanically, and shut him in for the airlock to cycle, to release him from the ship into the larger outpost.
Hope’s lawyer was waiting when he got out. Derek Hart, the younger partner of Smith and Hart, was twenty-nine, darkly attractive, and has been born the same year Dennis Hope sold his first parcel of lunar property. But he was also the only lawyer Hope had been able to find willing to come to the surface of the moon to represent his interests here. Hart was a member of the new and experimental phalanx of lawyers rushing to fill the unique niche that the ongoing settlement of the moon provided. His colleagues these days worked for Hilton and Marriot and various governments, but Mr. Hart, esquire, worked for Dennis Hope, and had been living on the moon for nearly three years now.
“Mr. Hope,” he said, barely smiling. “I’d planned to give you the tour, but there’s no time right now. The shelter’s this way.”
Hope shivered in the cool, circulating air of the station. “Is it dangerous to be here?”
“Nothing’s flying yet,” Hart said, but this smile was even more stiff, and he took Hope’s duffle without asking, and headed down a corridor at a fast walk. The businessman was forced to lengthen his stride to keep up.
So this was the moon. After all his expectations, what he found were corridors, all the same shade of prefab grey and differentiated by the colors of their industrial carpet.
“How’s it been, staying up here?” he managed to ask Hart as they took turn after turn through this lunar habi-trail. Trying, desperately, to inject some casualness in the situation.
“Better when I was in the Hilton’s installation,” Hart answered. “The hearing was supposed to be tomorrow, but it’s been postponed until things are safer. Sorry,” he added as an afterthought, turning suddenly to lead Hope through a door.
Hope stopped on the threshold, staring. Above him was the Fetedome, which he’d read about, but never hoped to see. Visiting the moon, after all, was for younger men like Hart and the techs from the shuttle. Hope was too old for this. Seventy-four was too old to be standing on the surface of the moon, looking up through a ceiling of flexible, clear discs at the Earth looming so large above them.
Not hearing his footsteps anymore, Hart paused, looked back. “Mr. Hope? We- oh.” He halted too, looking up. The Earthlight through the discs gave off a sort of blue gleam, turning the planes of the younger man’s face to blued steel. “Something, isn’t it?”
“When I was a boy,” Hope said, softly. “I had a telescope. I knew all the features of the Moon by name. All the Mers, all the striations.”
Standing here, he searched the Earth for features he knew. There was North America, and the shape of Florida clear in the sea right now. Clouds hid the rest of the Gulf of Mexico, and night was encroaching. In the dark crescent, he could see the scintillating cities; London, Paris, Madrid.
“Imagine a boy growing up here,” he said quietly. There were no children on the moon, anymore at any rate. There had been an experiment at a complete settlement, by the French government, but they’d recalled their settlers less than a week after the first attacks. Personally, Hope thought that it had been the right choice.
The issue was land. The first outpost up here had been a research station, a US installation in 2019. The team of twelve selected to live there had all been scientists. Except for two. Two of the men were mining experts, sent all those thousands of miles to the moon for one reason; to ascertain how much the moon was worth.
The answer was staggering. Suspended in the dry, ashen soil was massive amounts of helium III, and it was valuable enough to justify the immense expense of mining the moon and shipping the element home.
The idea of strip-mining the moon, of course, met instant controversy. Factions all over the world scrambled to find a reason to deny the US the rights to mine the moon, and it was then that Hope’s role came in. NASA, publically, purchased nine thousand acres from George W. Bush, acres that Dennis Hope had sold him in the year 2005. He’d exploited the UN’s Outer Space Treaty to do it, and the laws were amended after the fact, but the sale was legit. Bush had owned that land, a long rectangle several miles off the Sea of Serenity, and now it belonged to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
The day the first shipment of helium 3 landed in Phoenix, Arizona, in the surface-to-surface shuttle Magellan II, was a day of public outcry. The two metric tons of gas it carried would provide enough energy to power a city. In fact, within a year, Washington D.C., modeling the new plan, had converted entirely to using helium III as an energy source.
Hope had seen gas prices across the country drop like a stone, and he’d been proud of himself. From nearly eight dollars a gallon, it began to sink slowly, then more rapidly as shipments from the moon’s surface became routine. But only in the US. Russia was trying to follow suit, but running into complication after complication, and China had yet to set foot on the moon’s surface.
Even though he could no longer sell lunar property, Hope had watched the developments above with avid interest. He watched space flight grow more and more mundane, as the men and women working to mine the moon became commuters. Civilians were hired, from cooks to doctors in physics and geology, and the outpost on the moon grew to house them.
In 2021, the first private manned flight made it to the moon. In 2022, they were building hotels up there, again on land that had passed through Dennis’s hands. Hilton’s Luna Resort opened in 2025, immediately becoming the trendy weekend retreat of the obscenely wealthy.
Hope still received offers for land, both above and below the table. He regretted having to turn them own, but he was still living quite comfortably. Nevada was as unexciting as ever, but he didn’t mind. Hart minded his affairs and Hope was left to himself and his nine million, carefully invested, grew quietly.
Until the lawsuits began.
And then the war.
Russia found an old treaty, an obsolete thing from the first World War, that gave them mineral rights to the Sea of Serenity. The US refused to acknowledge it, and one thing led to another.
Standing in the US outpost, looking up at the Earth, Bob took a deep, shuddering breathe.
“Let’s get to the shelter,” he said brusquely. Hart nodded, watching him obliquely, and they moved on.
The air in the shelter was thick, too many people crowded into too small a place. Hope’s ears popped as the heavy door shut them in with a thrum and a heavy change in the air pressure.
Everyone in here was sitting around small tables, many bent over handheld computers, typing messages to who-knows-where. Hart guided Hope to an alcove as-yet-unclaimed, and the two men sat down. Hart, Hope noticed, was sweating just slightly.
“Nervous?” he asked softly.
Not looking at him, the lawyer nodded. “You’ll get tired of the shelters fast,” he said, grimacing. “We’ve only been in here twelve hours and the miners keep brawling.” He nodded at a group of men on the far side of the room, all of them with their hair cut aggressively short and tempers apparently trimmed to match. They were arguing vociferously about something.
“Some of the miners are Russian,” explained Hart under his breath. “It’s touchy, here.”
Hope was about to ask him why there were Russians on the outpost while we were at war, when the lights flickered. The noise in the room took an upswing, and Hart stiffened. “Someone must be firing,” he whispered, gone ashen.
“I can’t hear anything,” Hope whispered back, straining to hear anything other than frightened voices and the uneasy motion of the crowded room.
“Just means they’re not bombing this section... Sound doesn’t carry.” Hart leaned on the wall, but his spine was stiff and his face uneasy. “Probably the mining equipment again.”
“Bombing.” Hope wrapped his arms around his briefcase, trying to emulate his lawyer’s facade, so calm compared to his own urge to hyperventilate and hide. He’d just stepped into a war zone. “This is crazy.”
“No argument here,” Hart muttered. “But the hearing... might help. Representatives from both sides will be there, whenever it happens. And the UN. Hopefully, some things will be cleared up.” He didn’t have to say how much depended on this. Even before Hope was summoned to the Moon, the death count reported in the newspapers (Every death a headline) was in the dozens, most of them civilian. Just last week, a construction site, the future Disney property, had been destroyed. The public was quick to split the blame. The Russians, of course, were awful, but so was the ambitious Dennis Hope, that presumptive fool who’d started this entire thing.
Hope stopped reading the paper a month ago.
“So, what do we do?” he asked Hart. “If there’s, if there’s a breach or something.”
Hart shook his head. “We drilled a few things, trying to maneuver a table to block it, anything we can, but really, nothing’s going to work. If we get breached, pray.” He looked back at Hope, and saw how grey the older man had gone. “But we won’t. We’re underground. We’re safe enough.”
Define ‘safe,’ Hope wanted to ask him, but didn’t. “Have you seen many... attacks?” he asked, keeping his voice low.
“Four,” said Hart, with a practiced off-handedness. “Five, now. I was in the Hilton when their shuttledock was bombed, and this place has been attacked once a week since got here.” He glanced over at the group of miners, who were louder now, and seemed to be debating the baser side of politics in growls. Hope began to listen for his name to come up, paranoid, and put his head in his hands.
“This is all my fault,” the businessman muttered.
“I didn’t hear you say that,” said his lawyer firmly. “This is no more your fault than the American Revolution was the fault of the person who stitched the flag that John Smith raised at Jamestown.”
The logic was there, but Hope was too tired to make sense of it right now. He just shook his head, and dropped it on his dufflebag. “Is there anywhere to sleep?” he asked, feeling deadened. Everything seemed to be at a distance now.
“Not really.”
There was a shout from the miners, and a thrown fist. Hope watched them without raising his head. Conflict. He almost wanted to go join them, to feel his fists against his frustration and know that he would either win or be overmatched and that would be the end of it, with a minimum of guilt or dread. It would be better, much better, than this airless waiting.
ENG 451
News Muse Scene
April 20th, 2007
Outer Space Treaty
Dennis Hope was about to set foot on the surface of the moon for the first time. He’d always imagined a grand moment, fanfare and the lights you see in science fiction movies, the deep thrum of an airlock and a greeting from a man in uniform.
The air in the shuttle was dry. He listened to the murmurings between the crew, picking at his harness, and licked his lips. It stung. He’d been in here for eighteen hours, breathing this dry air and listening to them. Not even a window, not where he could see one. Just him, the only passenger alongside seven other empty seats, and the grey, cable-festooned walls. And the men, the pilot and his gaggle of techs, wouldn’t speak to him.
Not the arrival Hope had imagined at all. The shuttle jostled, engines hissing louder in the way that had accompanied every minute course change between here and Houston, the only sound at all outside the murmuring crew, and then there was a louder, sharper jolt. He gripped the arms of his seat tightly, and resisted the urge to check his harness for the thousandth time. Space travel wasn’t the terrifying thing it had been when he was a young man, was it? Commonplace, every-day. No different than flying in a commercial airplane. But he’s acutely aware that if something goes wrong, there’s no chance of survival, or rescue. Just vacuum.
The pilot addressed him for the first time since they left the Earth’s atmosphere. “Hold on, docking.” The next jolt was hard enough to whip Hope’s head back against the rest, and he shut his eyes, digging his fingers in harder. Thump, clatter, and the screech of metal sliding against metal.
And then it was still. The whine of the engines cut out, and only a soft, electric ticking cut the silence of the cabin. Then the intercom snapped to life.
Sorry about the rough reception, Ferry. We’re half-staff here; all non-essential personal are in the shelter. There are two Russian satellites watching us more closely than we’d like, right now. Mr. Hope, they know you’re here.
The comm clicked off again as suddenly as it had activated, but the shuttle wasn’t silent now. The crew were murmuring again, damn them, and shooting looks through the door that separated the passengers from the cockpit at Hope. He couldn’t read the looks, too stunned by the announcement.
“D-does that matter?” he asked, stammering. He tried to laugh. “You’re making me sound like a diplomat or something.”
The pilot went through some sort of routine with his control panel, and something outside scraped against the hull again with a hollow sound. “Or something.”
That not-very-helpful answer was all he received. The next ten minutes, twenty, passed stiffly. The crew made the necessary motions and procedures to connect the small transport to the larger structure, and only then did one of them release Hope from his seat. He stood, and then reeled and sat back down. Simulations in free-fall had not prepared the businessman for the peculiar light-headedness that came from the Moon’s lighter gravity.
A tech offered him a hand, moving easily in a practiced glide that didn’t send him bouncing up against the ceiling of the cabin. They wanted him out, Hope could feel it. So he stood again, and ignored the man’s hand, stabilizing himself against the low ceiling, and moving back through the tube of the cabin towards the door in the rear, the airlock. His briefcase was in a net on the wall next to the small hatch. Once he’d climbed in, the tech handed it to him, and his duffle bag. “Enjoy your stay, Mr. Hope,” he said mechanically, and shut him in for the airlock to cycle, to release him from the ship into the larger outpost.
Hope’s lawyer was waiting when he got out. Derek Hart, the younger partner of Smith and Hart, was twenty-nine, darkly attractive, and has been born the same year Dennis Hope sold his first parcel of lunar property. But he was also the only lawyer Hope had been able to find willing to come to the surface of the moon to represent his interests here. Hart was a member of the new and experimental phalanx of lawyers rushing to fill the unique niche that the ongoing settlement of the moon provided. His colleagues these days worked for Hilton and Marriot and various governments, but Mr. Hart, esquire, worked for Dennis Hope, and had been living on the moon for nearly three years now.
“Mr. Hope,” he said, barely smiling. “I’d planned to give you the tour, but there’s no time right now. The shelter’s this way.”
Hope shivered in the cool, circulating air of the station. “Is it dangerous to be here?”
“Nothing’s flying yet,” Hart said, but this smile was even more stiff, and he took Hope’s duffle without asking, and headed down a corridor at a fast walk. The businessman was forced to lengthen his stride to keep up.
So this was the moon. After all his expectations, what he found were corridors, all the same shade of prefab grey and differentiated by the colors of their industrial carpet.
“How’s it been, staying up here?” he managed to ask Hart as they took turn after turn through this lunar habi-trail. Trying, desperately, to inject some casualness in the situation.
“Better when I was in the Hilton’s installation,” Hart answered. “The hearing was supposed to be tomorrow, but it’s been postponed until things are safer. Sorry,” he added as an afterthought, turning suddenly to lead Hope through a door.
Hope stopped on the threshold, staring. Above him was the Fetedome, which he’d read about, but never hoped to see. Visiting the moon, after all, was for younger men like Hart and the techs from the shuttle. Hope was too old for this. Seventy-four was too old to be standing on the surface of the moon, looking up through a ceiling of flexible, clear discs at the Earth looming so large above them.
Not hearing his footsteps anymore, Hart paused, looked back. “Mr. Hope? We- oh.” He halted too, looking up. The Earthlight through the discs gave off a sort of blue gleam, turning the planes of the younger man’s face to blued steel. “Something, isn’t it?”
“When I was a boy,” Hope said, softly. “I had a telescope. I knew all the features of the Moon by name. All the Mers, all the striations.”
Standing here, he searched the Earth for features he knew. There was North America, and the shape of Florida clear in the sea right now. Clouds hid the rest of the Gulf of Mexico, and night was encroaching. In the dark crescent, he could see the scintillating cities; London, Paris, Madrid.
“Imagine a boy growing up here,” he said quietly. There were no children on the moon, anymore at any rate. There had been an experiment at a complete settlement, by the French government, but they’d recalled their settlers less than a week after the first attacks. Personally, Hope thought that it had been the right choice.
The issue was land. The first outpost up here had been a research station, a US installation in 2019. The team of twelve selected to live there had all been scientists. Except for two. Two of the men were mining experts, sent all those thousands of miles to the moon for one reason; to ascertain how much the moon was worth.
The answer was staggering. Suspended in the dry, ashen soil was massive amounts of helium III, and it was valuable enough to justify the immense expense of mining the moon and shipping the element home.
The idea of strip-mining the moon, of course, met instant controversy. Factions all over the world scrambled to find a reason to deny the US the rights to mine the moon, and it was then that Hope’s role came in. NASA, publically, purchased nine thousand acres from George W. Bush, acres that Dennis Hope had sold him in the year 2005. He’d exploited the UN’s Outer Space Treaty to do it, and the laws were amended after the fact, but the sale was legit. Bush had owned that land, a long rectangle several miles off the Sea of Serenity, and now it belonged to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
The day the first shipment of helium 3 landed in Phoenix, Arizona, in the surface-to-surface shuttle Magellan II, was a day of public outcry. The two metric tons of gas it carried would provide enough energy to power a city. In fact, within a year, Washington D.C., modeling the new plan, had converted entirely to using helium III as an energy source.
Hope had seen gas prices across the country drop like a stone, and he’d been proud of himself. From nearly eight dollars a gallon, it began to sink slowly, then more rapidly as shipments from the moon’s surface became routine. But only in the US. Russia was trying to follow suit, but running into complication after complication, and China had yet to set foot on the moon’s surface.
Even though he could no longer sell lunar property, Hope had watched the developments above with avid interest. He watched space flight grow more and more mundane, as the men and women working to mine the moon became commuters. Civilians were hired, from cooks to doctors in physics and geology, and the outpost on the moon grew to house them.
In 2021, the first private manned flight made it to the moon. In 2022, they were building hotels up there, again on land that had passed through Dennis’s hands. Hilton’s Luna Resort opened in 2025, immediately becoming the trendy weekend retreat of the obscenely wealthy.
Hope still received offers for land, both above and below the table. He regretted having to turn them own, but he was still living quite comfortably. Nevada was as unexciting as ever, but he didn’t mind. Hart minded his affairs and Hope was left to himself and his nine million, carefully invested, grew quietly.
Until the lawsuits began.
And then the war.
Russia found an old treaty, an obsolete thing from the first World War, that gave them mineral rights to the Sea of Serenity. The US refused to acknowledge it, and one thing led to another.
Standing in the US outpost, looking up at the Earth, Bob took a deep, shuddering breathe.
“Let’s get to the shelter,” he said brusquely. Hart nodded, watching him obliquely, and they moved on.
The air in the shelter was thick, too many people crowded into too small a place. Hope’s ears popped as the heavy door shut them in with a thrum and a heavy change in the air pressure.
Everyone in here was sitting around small tables, many bent over handheld computers, typing messages to who-knows-where. Hart guided Hope to an alcove as-yet-unclaimed, and the two men sat down. Hart, Hope noticed, was sweating just slightly.
“Nervous?” he asked softly.
Not looking at him, the lawyer nodded. “You’ll get tired of the shelters fast,” he said, grimacing. “We’ve only been in here twelve hours and the miners keep brawling.” He nodded at a group of men on the far side of the room, all of them with their hair cut aggressively short and tempers apparently trimmed to match. They were arguing vociferously about something.
“Some of the miners are Russian,” explained Hart under his breath. “It’s touchy, here.”
Hope was about to ask him why there were Russians on the outpost while we were at war, when the lights flickered. The noise in the room took an upswing, and Hart stiffened. “Someone must be firing,” he whispered, gone ashen.
“I can’t hear anything,” Hope whispered back, straining to hear anything other than frightened voices and the uneasy motion of the crowded room.
“Just means they’re not bombing this section... Sound doesn’t carry.” Hart leaned on the wall, but his spine was stiff and his face uneasy. “Probably the mining equipment again.”
“Bombing.” Hope wrapped his arms around his briefcase, trying to emulate his lawyer’s facade, so calm compared to his own urge to hyperventilate and hide. He’d just stepped into a war zone. “This is crazy.”
“No argument here,” Hart muttered. “But the hearing... might help. Representatives from both sides will be there, whenever it happens. And the UN. Hopefully, some things will be cleared up.” He didn’t have to say how much depended on this. Even before Hope was summoned to the Moon, the death count reported in the newspapers (Every death a headline) was in the dozens, most of them civilian. Just last week, a construction site, the future Disney property, had been destroyed. The public was quick to split the blame. The Russians, of course, were awful, but so was the ambitious Dennis Hope, that presumptive fool who’d started this entire thing.
Hope stopped reading the paper a month ago.
“So, what do we do?” he asked Hart. “If there’s, if there’s a breach or something.”
Hart shook his head. “We drilled a few things, trying to maneuver a table to block it, anything we can, but really, nothing’s going to work. If we get breached, pray.” He looked back at Hope, and saw how grey the older man had gone. “But we won’t. We’re underground. We’re safe enough.”
Define ‘safe,’ Hope wanted to ask him, but didn’t. “Have you seen many... attacks?” he asked, keeping his voice low.
“Four,” said Hart, with a practiced off-handedness. “Five, now. I was in the Hilton when their shuttledock was bombed, and this place has been attacked once a week since got here.” He glanced over at the group of miners, who were louder now, and seemed to be debating the baser side of politics in growls. Hope began to listen for his name to come up, paranoid, and put his head in his hands.
“This is all my fault,” the businessman muttered.
“I didn’t hear you say that,” said his lawyer firmly. “This is no more your fault than the American Revolution was the fault of the person who stitched the flag that John Smith raised at Jamestown.”
The logic was there, but Hope was too tired to make sense of it right now. He just shook his head, and dropped it on his dufflebag. “Is there anywhere to sleep?” he asked, feeling deadened. Everything seemed to be at a distance now.
“Not really.”
There was a shout from the miners, and a thrown fist. Hope watched them without raising his head. Conflict. He almost wanted to go join them, to feel his fists against his frustration and know that he would either win or be overmatched and that would be the end of it, with a minimum of guilt or dread. It would be better, much better, than this airless waiting.
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Date: 2007-04-24 03:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-24 08:43 pm (UTC)