Crescent

by Homer Hickam

  “Are we winning?” Maria asked.

  “I’m not even sure who we are, but the warpods are getting the worst of it.”

  Warpods are sent by the Unified Countries of the World, Crater’s gillie said, adding, I have penetrated their puters.

  Teach me, Maria’s gillie demanded.

  Perhaps, Crater’s gillie responded.

  Crater kept watching until the warpods and the silvery crafts wandered off, their jets flaring. “Whatever’s happening up there isn’t about us,” he said. “It’s good we’re out of it.”

  Maria nodded. “What about the ghosts the Apps saw?”

  “What about them?”

  “You were visited by your parents and two dead astronauts. I was visited by my mother. They were ghosts too.”

  “There’s no such thing as ghosts. There has to be a rational explanation.”

  “Why do we always have to be rational? For instance, were you rational when you told me you loved me?”

  “You said it first.”

  “Yes, I did. You never would have said it if I hadn’t. What is it about love you’re afraid of?”

  “I’m not afraid of love. I’m afraid of you!”

  Crater wished he could put his hand over his mouth but his helmet kept him from doing it. It was out there anyway. He was afraid of her. He had always been afraid of her.

  “Look, Crater, I’m a girl,” Maria said. “Some would say I’m a woman. In olden times, girls my age were getting married, having babies. But no matter what you call us, we females can say anything we like about love because in the end, we’re the ones who pay the price for it. Did you say you were afraid of me?”

  “I might have,” Crater allowed.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Maria frowned. “You know what I think your problem is? You don’t know what love is.”

  Crater didn’t want to talk anymore with Maria because she made everything he felt feel convoluted and wrong. “I hope they’ve got some extra fuel cells in the maintenance shed,” he said. “I’m afraid there may be a crack in the loader’s.”

  “You’re not going to change the subject!” Maria snapped. “You said you loved me and then you said you were afraid of me. Very well. We need to solve this!”

  Crater felt a trickle of sweat on his forehead. “We’re in the middle of a war, we’re staying at a dilapidated, abandoned town populated by ghosts, and you want to know what I intend to do about being in love with you?”

  “And afraid of me. Love is the most important thing in the universe. Fear shouldn’t enter into it.”

  Crater dug deep, then said, “I’ll think about it.”

  It clearly was not the answer Maria wanted to hear. Her face clouded over and she shook her head, then walked away, back to the dustlock.

  Crater wanted to shout after her, to tell her to come back, that he really was going to give it some thought. He loved her. He was afraid of her. It was all kind of the same.

  But he didn’t. After glancing up to make sure the sky was still clear, he headed to the maintenance shed where he hoped to find a fuel cell to replace the one on the loader.

  ::: FORTY-SEVEN

  A day passed, then another, and another, and before Crater could imagine it, an entire week had gone by. The time passed so quickly because there was so much to do. He rose each morning with a list of things to do in his head. He adjusted the biovats and refreshed their solutions, cured the balky environmental puters, showed the Apps how to change out the scrubbers on the air systems, and realigned the solar tower that provided energy to the underground tubes.

  On the scrapes, Crater soon had the crusher crushing, the loader loading, the shuttle shuttling, the scraper scraping, the conveyors conveying, and the solar dishes boiling the scrag. The dust piled up, and samples taken revealed a big percentage of Thorium and Titanium, just as the Apps had hoped. There was still a problem with the separators, but Crater had an idea how to fix them. Give it a month of refinement and Crater thought Endless Dust might actually have a product ready for market.

  If there was a market. Although he asked the gillie to keep checking, it was apparent all the comm-sats were down. There was no news from the outside at all.

  Although he provided most of the engineering, Crater hadn’t done everything alone. The Apps had worked hard to learn and so had Crescent. Maria, as befitted a Medaris, was especially strong in management skills and devised an efficient schedule matrix for the puters to process, which provided everyone their daily tasks. Crater was pleased she seemed happy in her work. The way she cheerfully engaged him in conversation made him hope she had forgotten all about her challenge to him to prove his love for her and explain why he was afraid of her and what he was going to do about it. She’d even developed an apparent affection for Crescent. In fact, they were tubemates, ate together at meals, and seemed often to be engaged in deep conversations. About what, Crater didn’t know, although sometimes he’d look up and find them both looking back at him. That seemed odd. Ike was adopted by the App women, who held him in high regard. He was at their beck and call. As for the ghosts, Crater was too busy to worry about them.

  Crater bunked in a tube by himself. Every night he was satisfyingly exhausted and crawled into his bed, eagerly looking forward to both sleep and waking up the next day with more tasks to be accomplished. One night, however, he woke to find someone standing beside his bunk. It proved to be Captain Jake Teller, the convoy commander who had mentored Crater the first time he’d crossed the moon. Crowhoppers had struck the captain down just before they’d reached Armstrong City and safety.

  But now here was Teller wearing a Medaris Convoy Company tunic with the MCC logo, the same one he’d been wearing the first time Crater had met him. He looked smart in his uniform, but he did not appear to be pleased. “So this is where you ended up,” he said. “In a nasty little town as a glorified mechanic. I hoped you’d do better.”

  Crater sat up in bed. “It’s not my fault, Captain. There’s a war on and I got chased over here. Maria’s with me too.”

  “You like it here, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Crater answered. “There’s always something to do and I’m needed.”

  “Needed! Maybe for a month or two and then what? Are you going to marry that little crowhopper girl? That’s about your only choice. Maria certainly isn’t going to stay here.”

  Teller waved his words aside before Crater could speak them. “You are such a disappointment,” he said before sighing. “I’m not really surprised. Deep at your core, young man, you’re soft as butter. Soft! I did everything I could to teach you to be tough and hard. I tried to teach you that if you want your dreams to come true, you have to fight and not let anything get in your way. Do you know what your biggest obstacle is?”

  “You just said I was soft,” Crater said resentfully, “so I guess that’s it.”

  “No, that’s not it. Your biggest obstacle is the fact that you’re satisfied with being less than you can be. You think helping these people is just as marvelous as being in charge of your own destiny. Don’t deny it!”

  “I want to help them. What’s wrong with that?”

  Teller laughed a mean laugh. “Nothing except you don’t care if you ever leave. This nasty place is fine with you. Maria is made for bigger things. If you want her, you’ve got to be willing to grow, to strive, to become a titan of industry.”

  “You’ve made your point, Captain,” Crater said, “but tell me this. You’re dead, yet here you are standing beside my bed acting like you’re alive. You were the most rational man I ever knew. How do you square that in your head?”

  The captain’s expression fell. After an apparent moment of confusion, he said, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

  “I didn’t know you read Shakespeare,” Crater said.

  “There are probably a lot of things you don’t know about me,” Teller said, then
vanished without walking into the shadows or fading away or anything. One second he was there, the next he was gone. If he could do that, he wasn’t real and Crater vowed to remember that. The next thing Crater knew, he was waking up and it was morning. He stared at the rough mooncrete walls of his tube and made a promise. “You’re right, Captain Teller,” he said, “there is much more here than is dreamt of in any of our philosophies and I’m going to find out what it is.”

  Crater had noticed a trail leading toward Alphonsus Crater. He took Maria aside. “I’m going up there,” he said.

  “But you’re supposed to show the Apps how to inspect and change out the rollers on the conveyor belt today.”

  “That can wait.”

  “If you expect me to go with you, I’m not. I’m teaching Trudelle how to operate my matrix program. If you insist on going, at least take Crescent.”

  “You and she seem to be getting along well,” Crater accused.

  “We’re women. I’m the spoiled granddaughter of the richest man on the moon. She’s the product of a Petri dish and trained to kill upon command. We have a lot in common.”

  ::: FORTY-EIGHT

  Crater and Crescent, armed with rifles, climbed along the worn path to Alphonsus. “What do you think they were doing up there?” Crescent asked.

  “Could be a number of things,” Crater answered. “Sightseeing or maybe prospecting or maybe they put their dead there. Lots of possibilities.”

  They remained silent as they continued to climb until Crescent said, “Look over there. We couldn’t see it because of the way the slope is folded, but there is another trail. It looks like it was for vehicles.”

  “Hauling something up or something down,” Crater said after using his helmet binoculars to inspect the trail. “Gillie, any readings so far?”

  Yes, but I can’t tell what it is. Not radio signals. Something just out of range.

  They continued to climb. Atop the lip of the crater, they beheld the floor of Alphonsus. It was much like the floor of any crater, a circle of dust, except there was a small, rectangular building at its center. All paths led to it. Crater sat down on the lip. “Let’s just watch it for a while.”

  Crescent sat beside him. After watching for a few minutes, Crater said, “Is it my imagination or is the dust in this crater slightly pink?”

  “I noticed that too,” Crescent said. “And over there, where the rim has collapsed, it looks almost red.”

  Crater led the way down into the crater, then around its edge to the collapsed rim. There, he discovered the soil wasn’t red at all. “There’s a thin layer of what appears to be a red gas here,” he said. “But that’s impossible. In this vacuum, it ought to be instantly dispersed.”

  Crater looked back toward the building. “It’s flowing from there. The crater’s tilted so gravity pulls it down here. Then it seems to fall through the gap.” Crater climbed up on the rubble of the collapsed rim. “There’s Endless Dust just below. This stuff’s flowing its way. I can see little pockets of it now that I know to look.”

  “How can a gas flow in a vacuum?” Crescent asked.

  “Normally, it can’t,” Crater said, going down on one knee and pushing his hand into the pinkish stuff. “So maybe it’s not a gas at all. Certainly, the way I can swish it around makes it appear to be more like a liquid. But it’s not sublimating. Gillie, any ideas what this stuff is?”

  Gillie believes this may be a type of extremely dense filamentation plasma with nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, and a variety of other complex components.

  Crater absorbed that, then asked, “Is there anything like it anywhere else?”

  Yes. The observed universe is mostly plasma. Stars are filled with it.

  “But like this?”

  The gillie frowned in concentration, although it couldn’t frown, then said, Gillie will hypothesize. This may be a naturally forming plasma unique to this place.

  “You mean something’s making it?”

  Yes. There is likely a heat source. Since there are no known heat sources in the interior of the moon, this is an unknown factor.

  Crater turned toward the building. “The answers seem to lie there. You don’t have to get any closer if you don’t want to, Crescent.”

  Crescent cradled her rifle. “Let’s go,” she said. “I’m as curious as you are.”

  They walked to the building, and along the way Crater noticed that their boots created swirls in the pinkish matter. “We kick it around but it still stays low to the ground,” he said. “Whatever it is, the gillie is correct. It’s extremely dense.”

  As they neared the building, Crater saw it was made of mooncrete. Several thin pipes protruded from its roof. He studied the pipes and realized the plasma, if that was what it was, was coming from them. There was a hatch with a key pad. “Gillie, what’s the code?” Crater asked.

  Gillie has already unlocked it, the gillie replied.

  Crescent pulled open the hatch and climbed into an airlock. Crater followed and closed the hatch. Immediately, they heard air hissing as automatic pressurization occurred. When it stopped, Crescent opened the inner hatch into a standard dustlock with a single shower. Crescent opened the next hatch that led into a dressing room.

  Air is good, the gillie said.

  They took off their helmets and breathed in. The air was indeed good and fresh.

  The next hatch led into an interior mooncrete tube but unlike one they’d ever seen. It was circular and on the inside circumference were portholes. Crater looked into one of them but saw only darkness.

  “There are stairs leading downward,” Crescent said.

  It was a circular staircase made of lunasteel. Crescent and Crater walked down it to another circular mooncrete tube with more portholes. This time when Crater looked into the porthole, he saw a pinkish glow.

  “Another set of stairs over here,” Crescent said.

  When they emerged from the next circular staircase, they were startled to arrive in what appeared to be a living tube. There was a bed, a small kitchen, and some overstuffed chairs. Even more startling, sitting in one of the chairs with his boots up on footstool and an old-fashioned book on his lap was a man who was apparently asleep. On second glance, Crater realized the man was an Umlap.

  Crescent warily approached the Umlap, then pushed his shoulder with the muzzle of her rifle. The Umlap jerked awake, saw Crescent, and dived behind his chair. “I surrender!”

  Crescent pointed her rifle at him. “Come out with your hands up!”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary, Crescent,” Crater said. “It’s all right, sir. We’re not here to hurt you. We’re here with a party that’s moving into Endless Dust.”

  The Umlap poked his head above the chair, looked at Crater, then at Crescent. “But is that not a crowhopper?”

  “I was a member of the Legion,” Crescent answered. “But now I’m not.”

  “Crowhoppers tell lies.”

  “Stand up, please,” Crater said. “I’m Crater and this is Crescent. I know General Nero and Perpetually Hopeful, his wife. You work for them, am I right?”

  The Umlap’s eyes narrowed. “You know Perpetually Hopeful? She is a most interesting woman.”

  “She is intelligent and beautiful,” Crater said.

  “For an Umlap, I would agree.” The Umlap smiled, which meant he was not happy with what he’d said, then added, “Umlap men have difficulty praising Umlap women.”

  “A weakness,” Crescent said.

  “I don’t mind praising other kinds of women,” the Umlap replied, “although I would have to think long and hard about you, sweetcakes.”

  When Crater saw Crescent tense, he stepped between her and the Umlap. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  The Umlap frowned, meaning he was pleased to answer. “I am Places Bad Bets,” he said.

  “Well, Places Bad Bets, why are you here?”

  “Because I placed a bad bet as usual. It was between me and another Umlap named So Often Wrong
to decide who took this job. We did rocks, paper, scissors and I lost. For once, So Often Wrong was right. Yes, I work for General Nero, although I haven’t had a signal from him in a very long time.”

  “There’s a war on,” Crater explained. “Signals have been disrupted.”

  “Pah! He’s just forgotten about me.” He nodded his head toward the portholes. “So what do you think of that?”

  “I don’t know what to think. What is it?”

  The Umlap waved Crater over for a closer look. He turned on a spotlight. “Life,” he said. “Moon critters.”

  Crater looked and saw rocks covered with brown scum. “What kind of moon critters?”

  “Bacteria, fed by the heat and gasses coming from below.”

  Crater was incredulous. “How can heat and gasses come up from the moon? The planet’s been dead for a very long time.”

  “According to the General’s scientists, at the bottom of this hole is a natural fusion reactor. Somehow a fault developed in this crater a long time ago. Maybe it’s a vertical lava tube. Nobody really knows. But enough Helium-3 dust fell into it that a low-grade fusion process got started. That created heat that caused the rock to heat up, gasses and a weird kind of plasma were released, and then bacteria began to grow.”

  “Where did the bacteria come from?”

  The Umlap scowled happily. “The chief scientist in Cleomedes said maybe from rocks tossed up here from asteroid impacts on Earth. Or maybe from rocks zipping in from just about anywhere. Anyway, I’m keeping watch on it for General Nero. He thinks if we can understand it, maybe every moon colony can have one and draw power from it. Maybe even a kind of atmosphere can be created where we won’t have to wear pressure suits. Who knows what might be done with it? We’re just keeping it secret for now.”

  Crater was always astonished to discover the secret ways of men like General Nero and Colonel Medaris. What had been discovered in Alphonsus crater would turn a lot of theories and beliefs on their heads. If fusion power on the moon was a natural process and life could live around one of its vents, then who knew how big a population the moon might support? And if his invention to recover water could be made to work on a large scale . . . Crater’s mind was racing with all kinds of possibilities. Was there a chance for terraforming? Was it possible with nearly unlimited energy and bacteria pumping out plasma that, given time, an Earth-like environment could form?