by Homer Hickam
The Scragline Pickers, as the band called themselves, mostly played Lunarian Country. Crater had formed the band, scheduled all the practices, and written nearly all the songs. His instruments were the electronic guitar and the fiddle, and he also sang. Petro played bass indifferently since he rarely practiced. There were two electric guitar pluckers and a fellow who played the trumpet. One of their recordings had even gotten play over the Armstrong City station. It was called “Moon Dust Girls,” and Crater was plenty proud of it. As he sang it that night, Crater discovered he was singing it for Maria, who sat up front with Captain Teller and some tough-looking truck drivers.
All I want is a moon dust girl,
Down in a crater waitin’ for love.
All I want is a moon dust girl,
Kissin’ me ’neath the world above.
All I need is a moon dust girl,
Makes workin’ in the dust almost fun.
All I need is a moon dust girl,
Scrapes heel-3 up by the megaton.
Now I have a moon dust girl,
Puts her helmet next to mine.
Now I have a moon dust girl,
She’s one-sixth gravity fine.
After their sets and some nice tips collected in an old moon boot from the regulars plus the Neroburg and Russian visitors, Crater headed for Maria’s table. He’d been practicing what he was going to say. “Hello, Maria. Thank you for coming. You’re looking pretty tonight.” He’d said the lines over and over in his head, but before he got to the table, Petro beat him to it, bringing Maria a soft drink. Maria smiled at Petro and turned her attention to him. Crater, his boots dragging, went back to the Dust Palace, there to stare into the darkness until Petro came home. It was after midnight. Crater, pretending to be asleep, heard him whistling “Moon Dust Girls.”
The next day after their shift was over, Q-Bess met Crater and Petro at the Dust Palace hatch. “Colonel wants to see you in one hour, Crater. You’ll see it on your reader. And, Petro?”
“Yes, Mum?”
“That granddaughter of the Colonel’s left you a message.
Said to meet her at the Earthrise.”
Crater gulped, but managed to say, “Have fun.”
Petro grinned. “I always do!”
A few seconds later it registered in Crater’s head that he was to meet with the Colonel. He looked to Q-Bess for an explanation but she shrugged. “No clue.”
Crater gulped. “I’m going to be fired for driving a shuttle without a permit!”
Q-Bess thought that over. “If that were so, Petro would be called in too. I swear, Crater, you could depress an army that just won a war. Maybe the Colonel’s gonna give you a medal.
Ever think of that? Now, get going.”
Crater, having no other choice, got going. On his bunk, Crater found Q-Bess had laid out his best tunic, a clean pair of leggings, and tube boots polished to a gleam. Crater headed for the administrative offices. When he passed the office with the sign that said Sherrif of Moontown, the sheriff waved him inside and leaned back in his chair, which protested in a rusty squawk. “I believe you are off to see the Colonel,” he said. “Do you know the topic?”
“No, sir.”
The sheriff took on a melancholy aspect and leaned forward, the chair squawking in the opposite direction. “Crater, the Colonel is not an ordinary man. He thinks at different levels and in different ways than you and I. Keep that in mind.”
Crater was anxious to get moving lest he be late, but the sheriff showed no interest in letting him go. “I’m not much for general conversation and I don’t usually give advice but . . . Bill and Annie Hawkins, your foster parents, were friends of mine.
Did you know that?”
“No, sir.”
“They came across on the same convoy as I did. You were in Annie’s arms and Bill was so proud. They adopted you from the Armstrong City hospital. That was kind of them, taking an infant of dead parents to raise. Bill and Annie went off to the scrapes, I got into the sheriffing business, but we were friends, like I said, and I guess I should have looked after you a little more than I’ve done over the years. At least I can now offer you some advice, and here it is. Don’t do anything unless you think you can handle it. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Crater scratched his head. “If I think I can’t handle something, I shouldn’t do it?”
“Very good,” the sheriff said, then added, “and it might be best if you left the gillie with me.”
The sheriff’s suggestion was not, of course, a suggestion, so Crater handed the gillie over in its holster and the sheriff put it in a cabinet and locked it. “You can pick it up after you’re done,” he said and waved Crater on his way.
Crater walked to the Colonel’s office, his thoughts turning to what he knew about how he’d come to Moontown. His parents had come from Earth, he knew that much, but their lander had crashed. That was before the moon elevator had been built. When Crater had been born at the hospital in Armstrong City and his mother had subsequently died, the nurses had started looking for some foster parents and found Bill and Annie Hawkins, a couple who had a contract to work in Moontown. Crater was handed over to them with a letter testifying who he was, made official since it was signed by the head nurse. Almost seventeen years later, here he was, orphan and ward of the company, off to see the Colonel, the greatest man in Moontown and probably the entire moon.
Crater didn’t know how he should feel, so he chose pride.
Pride goeth before a fall, he recalled somebody at the Dust Palace saying, but he didn’t care about that. He needed any emotion he could grab to cover up what kept exploding in his brain like a double-charged detpak: jealousy. It was awful, green-eyed, and purple-footed, and if he let it, the monster was going to overwhelm him. Somehow, even though he had only spent a few minutes in her presence, Crater had decided Maria Medaris was worthy of his complete and utter worship and adoration.
That she was allowing Petro, who could not understand her perfection, the favor of her presence and probably lots of kisses was tearing him up inside.
Tamping down his jealousy as best he could at least got him to the Colonel’s office, which required going past most of the company administrative offices. As Crater passed them, the employees within—the engineers, draftsmen, clerks, and such—stopped what they were doing to watch him go by. It wasn’t every day a scragline picker was invited into the bureaucratic palace. In the Colonel’s anteroom, Crater discovered a young woman sitting at a standard office desk. Her hair, the color of copper, flowed across her shoulders, and she was wearing an obviously very expensive amber silken tunic. When she looked up, Crater said, “I’m Crater Trueblood. I have an appointment to see the Colonel.”
The receptionist provided Crater with a tilt of her head and then told him to sit. This he did on one of the hard mooncrete chairs positioned around the tube wall while the receptionist proceeded to ignore him. It was deathly quiet, save the faint whisper of the ventilation system blowing the scent of something organic and sweet—Crater couldn’t identify it— through the hidden vents in the ceiling and floor, and the occasional click of the receptionist’s fingers on the keyboard of her puter.
After precisely one hour, the receptionist looked his way and said, “The Colonel will see you now.” She rose as Crater did, her duty apparently to open the ornate door to the great sanctum. “Colonel, he’s here,” she announced, followed by the Colonel’s parade-ground voice booming, “At last he’s arrived!
Send him in, Diana, send him in!”
The receptionist stepped aside to let Crater pass, the big door swinging shut behind him with a soft click. Crater was instantly in awe of the Colonel’s office. Paneled in a warm brown with patterned faux woods and a floor cushioned by a soft, green carpet, it was not like anything Crater had ever seen. Alongside a massive desk were enormous globes of the Earth and the moon, both set on stands made of what appeared to be bronze. There was also a gilded placard on the front of
the Colonel’s desk that said De inimico non loquaris sed cogites which Crater recognized as Latin and meant—if the instruction he had received from a former Latin professor turned heel-3 miner meant anything—Do not wish ill for your enemy; plan it.
The Colonel was seated on a stool in front of the moon globe. “Do you like maps, Crater?” he asked. “I have been contemplating the geologic map of the nearside northern hemisphere, which includes most of the present civilization of the moon. Come over here. I want you to have a better look.”
Crater came closer and peered at the gray globe. It had black letters on it identifying the craters, mountains, plains, rilles, and settlements. It was so beautiful Crater wanted to touch it, but he didn’t dare. “Our planet,” the Colonel said.
“Magnificent, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What do you know of it?”
There were many experts on the moon, and Crater had been taught by a few of them at the Dust Palace. “Well, the moon’s surface is about 14.6 million square miles, a little smaller than Asia on Earth,” he recited. “In terms of volume, about fifty moons could fit inside the Earth. It has a complex geologic structure including mountains, rilles, basins, all covered with a rubble of rock fragments and dust we call the regolith.”
“And your namesake, the craters,” the Colonel added.
“True is, sir. Craters represent the bombardment history of the inner solar system.”
“Very good. Now, tell me. What kinds of rocks are on our little planet?”
“Three kinds, sir. Basalts, anorthosites, and breccia. Basalts are the lava rocks that fill our basins, anorthosites are the bright rocks that make up our highlands, and breccia are composites, mostly caused by meteor, comet, and asteroid impacts.”
The Colonel’s eyes warmed. “You’ve learned your lessons well. I will have to compliment her royal highness Q-Bess for tending to your education. But what did she and her lodgers teach you of Earth?”
“Of its geology, sir?”
“I was thinking more of the history of the people who live on it.”
Crater formed his thoughts around the stories he’d been taught by various tutors over the years, then answered, “As far as what we call Western Civilization, I know the Egyptians seemed to get things started, then there were the Greeks who figured a lot of things out about math, and then the Romans who were ruthless but great organizers and engineers, and then there were the dark ages, which really weren’t all that dark because a lot of wonderful cathedrals got built. All that was followed by the Renaissance where people started to throw off superstition like their belief in witches and wizards and the evil eye and stuff, and then came the rise of European countries and then the United States and Russia too. The industrial revolution happened and then all the world wars and then people started flying into space. During all that time, China, Japan, and the Asian countries were working on their civilization, and Africans and the other nation states of the Americas were trying to figure out where they fit in, and then there were all the civil wars and little wars everywhere when the old nations began to fall apart and turn themselves into smaller countries. And then a lot changed when the moon started to be mined and settled. It’s complicated, isn’t it, sir?”
“Oh yes, Crater. Very complicated. But history is going somewhere, that much is apparent. Past is prologue as they say, so if we know history, we might predict where it will all end up. You’ve never lived anywhere other than the moon, have you?”
“No, sir.”
“Many people on Earth hate the way we live here amidst our ancient lava flows and rubble, Crater. Did you know that?”
“No, sir. Why would that be?”
“Jealousy, pure and simple. We live free. No one on Earth does. They are all controlled by governments, most of them with a very heavy hand. Oh, there’s been some improvements with the new countries, but even they have their tax man with his hand out.” He fondly studied the moon globe a little longer, then turned in Crater’s direction and asked, “Do you like living in Moontown?”
“I love living in Moontown, sir.” It was an honest admission.
“I believe you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Do you know why I’ve asked you to visit me?”
“Are you going to fire me for driving a shuttle without a permit?”
The Colonel stared at Crater for a long second, then laughed heartily. “No, no, Crater, not at all. I should give you a medal for that, and maybe I will someday when I have nothing better to do. After all, you saved me having to rebuild a maintenance shed and hire a bunch of new orangutans. No, I called you in because I want you to understand something.”
The Colonel tapped his finger on the globe at Armstrong City, which was the main settlement built near the first landing of humans on the moon, then trailed his finger northwestward. “I have in mind a great project, Crater. A monorail across our storied wayback. It will begin or end at Armstrong City, depending on your point of view, then travel northerly through the Sea of Tranquility, skirt the Plinius Crater, cut across the Sea of Serenity between the Aristillus and Autolycus Craters, then proceed to a depot a few miles from Moontown.
If constructed, it would be a true wonder and allow a safer and more economical delivery of Helium-3.”
Crater, who knew a great deal about engineering since he had been taught by the best ones to show up at the Dust Palace, thought it would be a difficult proposition to build anything as complex as a monorail through the wayback. But he supposed if anybody could do it, it would be the Colonel.
The Colonel moved to his desk and sat, then waved Crater to a leather upholstered chair in front of it. Crater had never sat in such a fine piece of furniture. He carefully lowered himself into it, feeling its softness form around his rump.
“Unfortunately,” the Colonel went on, “there are obstacles.
One of them is that the monorail would cross most of the Sea of Serenity, which is Russian territory. They don’t want it because they are in league with General Nero, I fear, who opposes my attempts to modernize lunar transportation. And without the Russians on board, the Earthian money men are loathe to fund it.”
“Why don’t the Russians want the monorail, sir?”
The Colonel took on an expression of distaste. “Because they are idiots, fools, misanthropes, vodka-swilling, nineteenthcentury nincompoops! Excepting the Czarina, of course, but she’s heavily influenced by the louts who purport to advise her, louts who are paid under the table by our dear General Nero.”
Colonel Medaris, after a brief period of contemplating his own words, continued with what Crater considered a most peculiar question. “Crater, how are you at subterfuge, lying, being underhanded, that kind of thing?”
Crater, believing the Colonel had a good reason for everything, thought the question over. “Not very good. Q-Bess always catches me every time I try to tell a fib.”
The Colonel nodded. “Not surprising since that lady’s been known to tell a fib or two herself. Nobody in Moontown can cook the books quite so well as our Q-Bess.” He chuckled. “I admire her majesty’s audacity, though. How about any of those misbegotten denizens of the Dust Palace? Any of them ever teach you to lie, cheat, that kind of thing?”
Crater decided not to mention Petro and replied, “Doom and Headsplitter taught me how to fight dirty, sneak up on people, knock them on the head, although I’ve never actually done it and I don’t really think it’s right to fight that way.”
“How about Asteroid Al?”
“As far as I know, nobody scrapes a straighter path than Asteroid Al.”
The Colonel shrugged. “A straight path, Crater, can also go through an unproductive field, but that’s a never mind. If someone asked you, what would you say you were good at?”
It was a hard question since Crater didn’t think he was particularly good at anything. Still, he needed to answer so he said, “I guess I’m a pretty good scragline picker, and I know fourteen l
anguages so I’m okay at that, and I can play a few musical instruments, and maybe I’m a fair mechanic too.”
“I’ve heard you’re better than fair when it comes to machines. Tell me, are you loyal to my company?”
“Why, yes, sir. I wouldn’t have a home or a job without it.”
The Colonel pretended to ponder Crater’s answer for a moment, then pointed at a display on his desk. It was a glass dome and within it was a gray splintered rock about the size of a man’s fist. “I collect artifacts of the movement into space.
That is my most treasured one, an actual rock picked up by Neil Armstrong after the first moon landing and carried back to Earth. It cost me a pretty penny. What do you think of it?”
Crater peered at the rock, which looked just like any one of the thousands of such rocks he’d popped out of conveyor rollers. He considered a pleasant lie, couldn’t manage it, and said, “It’s a rock, sir.”
The Colonel chuckled at Crater’s response but then his expression turned grave. “Crater, I have a proposal for you. It’s simple, really. I would like you to take a job as scout with the Medaris Convoy Company. You’ll work for Captain Teller and journey with the next heel-3 convoy to Armstrong City and, once there, go up on the Cycler and retrieve a package with a very important space artifact and bring it back to me. What do you say?”
Crater was startled by the Colonel’s proposal and didn’t know what to say. Seeing what he took as confusion, the Colonel said, “This artifact is more than a collectible. It has much to do with the future of Moontown or I wouldn’t ask you to do this job for me. You see, Crater, if I sent someone after this thing, someone clearly dispatched to the Cycler to pick it up, there might be some bad men who’d try to stop him. So here’s what I’m thinking. What if someone they didn’t suspect went after it? Do you understand?”
Crater didn’t understand. “I like working on the scrapes, sir,” he said.
“I know, Crater, but it’s a ruse. Do you understand what that is?”