Angry Moon

Chapter 4b

     The Remote Operated Maintenance and InSpection unit, or ROMIS as it was better known, was a robot tele-operated by either one or two members of the space station crew, depending on the complexity of the task that it was being asked to undertake. It had four limbs, all of which ended with a dexterous hand that could do pretty much anything that a human hand could do. It usually used two hands to keep a firm grip on the space station while using the others to perform the job it had been sent out to do. At the moment, though, it was just inspecting the station, looking for damage, and that was a simple enough task that Paul usually did it by himself.

     With the virtual display goggles over his eyes and the data gloves transferring every movement of his hands and fingers to the robot, it almost felt to Paul as if he was actually out there! The gloves had advanced haptic feedback, so that it even felt as though he was touching the surfaces with his real hands. He could feel the coldness and hardness of the steel handholds he was using to move his way along the outside of the farm module. He could feel them vibrating ever so slightly as the pumps moved water and nutrients among the crops being grown inside, and every now and then came the coarser vibration as the hydroponic beds were moved, bringing each in turn to the front where Benny Svanberg, the European shuttle pilot who acted as their resident farmer while aboard the space station, could inspect them, treat them for various conditions as necessary and, in the fullness of time, harvest them.

     Everything looked good on the outside of the module, Paul was pleased to see. One new pit, a centimetre wide and about half that deep, had appeared in the outer hull; the result of a collision with a small piece of space junk. It might even have been a natural micro meteorite, a tiny piece of sand left behind by a comet. Even today, not all the junk circling the earth was man made. Whatever had made it, though, it wasn't deep enough to be of concern and so he just made a note of it and moved on.

     That completed his inspection of the inhabited modules. The solar panels were next. Having an area of over ten thousand square metres, they were by far the most prone to damage, but at the same time they were the most resilient. An impact with one of the pressurised modules severe enough to cause an air leak was a problem that had to be dealt with as a matter of urgency, but the solar panels were designed so that they could be riddled with holes and still deliver enough power for the station to function. A three percent loss of power, therefore, meant that something out of the ordinary had happened the day before, and so the systems manager was alert for whatever he might find.

     The ROMIS made its way along the support superstructure, moving hand over hand like a gibbon swinging through the branches of a forest. Paul had been using the robot for months now, and had practiced many times down on earth before coming up to the station, and he was able to move with considerable speed. Lauren tended to frown at this kind of haste. The robot had a small rocket pack that would allow Paul to guide it back to the station if he missed a handheld and sent it sailing off into space, but reaction mass was expensive to replace and he would find himself facing a severe dressing down from the commander if he wasted any.

     He reached the solar panels without mishap, though, and paused to give them a looking over from a distance before moving closer. From this distance they looked pristine, as if they had been assembled only yesterday. They gleamed like gold in the light of the sun, like a vast sheet of the precious metal, so huge that they seemed to form the surface of a planet, as if he could walk on them and never reach the horizon.

     Unable to resist the temptation, Paul moved the robot through the gap between the panels and the Heineman module, the module that served as the station's machine shop. Then, as he had done a hundred times before, he turned the robot's head so that its cameras were facing down, towards the earth. He could see it any time he wanted through one of the station's many viewing ports, of course, but they were small. Just little round portholes no more than fifteen centimetres across. The images displayed through the virtual reality goggles, though, transmitted by the robot's cameras, allowed him to see a wide panorama as though he were out there himself, seeing it with his own eyes.