by Ben Bova
“Oh, we wake them up, I guess. But the game moves past them so fast that by the time they’re really awake we’ve moved down the tunnel.”
“Nobody’s ever complained?”
“Oh, sure. But we don’t get up a game every night.”
They walked in silence for a while. “You’re an astrophysicist, you said?”
Bianca nodded. She had often used that ’beautiful Eurasian’ line to see what kind of reaction it would cause. In truth, her beauty was not physical. Short, thick-waisted, with a face as round and flat as a pie pan, Bianca was the daughter of a Korean-American father and Italian-American mother. She claimed that she grew up on sushi parmigiana.
She was bored with the astronomical work she was doing at Moonbase. It was strictly routine photometry, using the wide-field Schmidt telescope to make painstakingly accurate measurements of the positions of galaxies. Adding another decimal point or two to the details. The kind of work that they stick graduate students with, while the major players get to do the exciting stuff, like scoping out black holes in galactic cores or searching for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Her work was so routine that she had set up a computer program to run the telescope and catalogue the results, and began to spend her time calculating how to build a giant telescope using liquid mercury for its mirror. And — when she was sure no one else could see her — practicing ballet in the low lunar gravity.
But suddenly, with Douglas Stavenger walking beside her, she got another idea.
“You know,” she said, “I could use your help.”
“Mine?”
“I’d like to come along on Brennart’s expedition.”
Doug stopped walking and looked at her. “Why?” he asked. “Why should Brennart take an astrophysicist along? What good would that do for the expedition? Or for you, for that matter?”
Bianca answered with one word. “Farside.”
Before she could start to explain, he said, “You want to set up an astronomical observatory on the farside, and the expedition to the south pole can be a sort of training mission. Is that it?”
“Exactly!” She was impressed with how quickly he grasped the idea.
With a slow grin, Doug went on, “That’s a pretty flimsy excuse, don’t you think?”
Damn! she thought. He sees right through me. But she found herself grinning back and admitting, “True. But it’s the only one I could think of.”
By the time they reached her door Doug had promised he would speak to Brennart about her. Bianca wanted to kiss him, but decided it was too soon for that. Sternly, she reminded herself that this good-looking young man was five years her junior. She also remembered that men attain the peak of their sexual potency around the age of eighteen.
Doug did not seem to have any romantic intentions. So they merely shook hands, and then he headed down the tunnel toward his own quarters. She dreamed about him that night. She dreamed she was a slender and graceful ballerina and he was hopelessly in love with her.
Almost everyone in Moonbase wore utilitarian coveralls with nametags pinned to their chests. Yet even though Brennart wore a one-piece jumpsuit just as most others did, he needed no nametag. Although he belonged to the exploration and research group, he insisted on wearing pure white coveralls, clean and crisp as if they had just been laundered and pressed, and decorated with shoulder patches and chest emblems from the dozens of missions he had undertaken during his years as an astronaut and lunar explorer.
Doug Stavenger did not consciously think of Brennart as a father figure, but the older man’s single-minded drive to establish a working base in the south polar region of the Moon impressed Doug forcefully.
“Do you really think Yamagata’s planning an expedition to Aitkin Basin, too?” Doug asked.
“No doubt in my mind about that,” said Brennart, in his sweet tenor voice. “They’d be damned fools not to.”
It was the morning after the football game, and Doug’s meeting Bianca Rhee. He and Brennart were hunched over a display table in Brennart’s workshop/office, studying the latest satellite photos of the Mt. Wasser area.
“After all,” Brennart went on, “we’re going out there, aren’t we? The Japanese are just as smart as we are. That’s why we’ ve got to get there first Like the man said, the side that wins is the one that gets there firstest with the mostest.”
Doug nodded as he straightened up. Brennart’s office was one of the largest rooms in Moonbase, but still it felt hot and cramped. Most of the equipment that jammed the office was already crated and ready to be loaded on the ballistic Jobbers. Doug saw a tousled cot in one corner, and realized that Brennart was sleeping in this room, too.
Brennart tapped the satellite display with a fingernail. “This is where we’ll put down. Right here, at the foot of the mountain. Close as lovers in a spacesuit built for two.”
Doug looked down again. “It’s hard to make out details of that area. It’s too heavily shadowed. “It’s an ice field,” Brennart said.
Doug stepped over to the end of the table and worked the keyboard. False-color infrared imagery of the region appeared over the satellite picture.
“Not ice,” he murmured. “The spectrographic data shows anorthosite rock. Typical highlands profile.”
Brennart straightened up and stretched his arms over his head. His hands bumped the smoothed rock ceiling. “Been coming up here more than twenty years and I still can’t get used to how low the ceilings are,” he muttered.
“That area might be too rough for a landing,” Doug suggested. “But over here—”
“We want to be as close to the mountain as possible,” Brennart interrupted. “We land where I said we’ll land.”
Doug looked up at the older man. There was iron in his tone. Brennart seemed totally convinced of his decision and completely unwilling to consider any alternatives.
Then he smiled down at Doug. “I know you’re concerned about safety, son. So am I. Be a fool not to. Like the man said, there are old astronauts and bold astronauts, but there are no old, bold astronauts.”
“Uh-huh,” Doug mumbled, for lack of anything better to say.
“I’m an old astronaut, son. If the landing area looks too spooky as we approach it, I’ll simply goose the Jobber a bit and land in the clear field, a little further from our goal.”
Returning his smile, Doug said, “I see. Okay. I should have thought of that.”
“Nothing to worry about,” said Brennart. Then he added, “Except coming in second to the Japanese.”
A little later, Doug asked Brennart about taking Bianca Rhee along with them.
“An astrophysicist?” Brennart seemed startled at the suggestion. “Why on earth should I take an astrophysicist along? This isn’t a tourist excursion, you know.”
“We have room for her,” Doug said. “I’ve checked the logistics program and we could handle six more people, if we needed them.”
“Yes,” Brennart said, “but I need an astrophysicist like a nun needs condoms.”
“She could be useful,” Doug said.
“Doing what?”
“She’s a good technician. I’ve looked up her personnel profile and she’s qualified for electrical, electromechanical, and computer repairs and maintenance.”
“I already have all the technicians I need.”
“But think of the longer-range situation,” Doug said.
Brennart glanced down at him. “What longer-range situation?”
“Somebody’s going to build an astronomical center on the farside, sooner or later. She could help you get the experience you need to lead that mission, when the time comes.”
Brennart pursed his lips. “Farside.” His eyes looked off into the future.
“Farside,” Doug repeated, knowing he had won Bianca a spot on the team.
They celebrated that night with as festive a dinner as could be obtained at Moonbase: prepackaged turkey with holiday trimmings, microwaved somewhat short of perfection. Bianca
invited all her friends, and they pushed tables together in The Cave, careful not to tread on the semi-sacred grass.
Although there was talk around the table of a mysterious still that produced ’rocket juice,” the high spirits of the gang did not come from alcohol. When at last the crowd broke up, Doug escorted Bianca to her quarters. She gave him a peck on the cheek and then swiftly went inside and slid the accordion-fold door shut.
He’s too young, she told herself. Probably a virgin. No, she contradicted herself immediately. Not with those looks. But why should he be interested in you? He’s the son of the corporation’s chairwoman. He’s young and good-looking and rich and kind and…
She stared at her image in the full-length aluminum mirror on the rock wall of her room. You used him and he was kind enough to let you do it. He’s not interested in you sexually. Who would be?
Bianca did not cry. But she wanted to.
Doug was too keyed up to go back to his quarters and go to sleep. Instead, he jogged up the tunnel to the main garage and asked the security guard on duty for permission to go up to the surface.
The garage was quiet and shadowy, tractors parked in precise rows along the faded yellow lines painted on the rock floor, barely visible in the dim nighttime lighting.
The guard cocked a doubtful eye at him, then checked Doug’s record on his display screen.
“You’ve been here three days and you’ve already spent six hours on the surface?”
“Yes, that sounds about right,” said Doug.
“You some kind of scientist?”
Shaking his head, Doug said, “No. Not yet, at least.”
“Says here you’re okay to go out alone,” the guard said, still dubious. “But you stay inside camera range, understand? If I’ve gotta wake up a team to go out and find you, your ass is gonna be in deep glop. Understand?”
“Understood,” said Doug, grinning. Obviously the guard thinks I’m some kind of freak, going out alone in the middle of the night. Even though it’s full daylight outside.
Doug went down the row’of lockers where the surface suit hung like empty suits of armor, looking for one his size. Afte he got it all on, Doug spent an hour reading through the logistics list for the expedition on his hand computer whil he pre-breathed the suit’s low-pressure mix of oxygen and nitrogen. Finally the security guard came out of his cubicle long enough to check out the suit’s seals and connections.
“Your suit malfunctions, it’s my ass,” he muttered. Once he completed the checklist, though, he pointed Doug to the personnel airlock and said cheerfully, “Okay kid, now you’re on your own.”
Through the sealed visor of his helmet Doug said, “Thanks for your help.”
The guard simply shook his head, obviously convinced this strange young visitor was crazy, even though his record said he was qualified for solo excursions on the surface.
The massive steel hatch for the vehicles was tightly closed; Doug used the smaller personnel airlock set into the rock wall beside it and stepped into the brilliant glare of sunlight. The cracked, pockmarked floor of Alphonsus stretched out before him all the way to the strangely close horizon. The worn, rounded ringwall mountains slumped on both sides like tired old men basking in the sun.
Doug smiled. “Magnificent desolation,” he muttered, remembering Aldrin’s words. But he did not see desolation in this harsh lunar landscape. Doug saw unearthly beauty.
And more.
He paced out across the dusty crater floor, carefully counting his steps, knowing that the safety cameras were watching him. At one hundred paces he stopped and turned back to face the cameras, the airlock hatch, Moonbase.
Off to his left the ground was scoured bare and blasted by rocket exhausts. The expedition’s four ungainly-looking ballistic Jobbers stood on the base’s four landing pads, the most visible mark of human habitation. The base itself was barely discernible. Just a few humps of rubble marked the various airlocks. Most of the base was dug into the mountain wall, of course.
Mt. Yeager. Doug looked up to its summit, gleaming in the sunlight. More than twelve thousand feet to the top, Doug knew. I’ll have to climb it before I go back home.
He turned a full circle, there alone on the crater floor except for the automated tractors patiently scooping up regolith sand and the distant glistening slick of the tiny, invisible nanomachines quietly building new solar cells out of the regolith’s silicon and trace metals.
Doug saw the future.
Where I’m standing will be just about a tenth of the way along the main plaza, Doug said to himself. The plaza floor will be dug in below the surface, of course, but its dome will rise more than a hundred feet over my head. We’ll plant it with grass and trees, get it landscaped with walking lanes through the shrubbery and even a swimming pool.
It’ll be a real city, he thought. With permanent residents and families having babies and everything. We’ll set up a cable car system over Mt. Yeager, out to Mare Nubium. That’ll be easier than trying to tunnel through the mountain, especially in this gravity. We’ll have to move the rocket port further out, but we’ll connect it with tunnels.
For more than two hours Doug paced out the structures he visualized, the city that Moonbase could become. We can do it, he told himself. If I can get Mom to agree…
Then reality intruded on his dream. “Mr. Stavenger, this is security. You’ve been outside for two hours. Unless you have some specific duties to perform, standard regulations require that you return to the airlock.”
Doug nodded inside the helmet of his spacesuit. “Understood,” he said. I’m coming back in.”
But he brought his dream with him.
BRUDNOY
They had disconnected all the life-support tubes and wires. Lana Goodman knew she was dying and she was tired of fighting it. She was nothing but a shell of a creature now, fragile, shrivelled, each breath a labor.
Lev Brudnoy sat at her bedside in Moonbase’s tiny infirmary, his expressive face a picture of grief. Behind him stood Jinny Anson, gripping the back of Brudnoy’s chair with white-knuckled intensity.
“You know the one thing I regret?” Goodman’s voice was a harsh, labored whisper.
Brudnoy, tears in his eyes, shook his head.
“I regret that you never made a pass at me, Lev.”
For once in his life, Brudnoy was stunned into silence.
“You came on to just about every other woman in Moon-base,” Goodman wheezed, “except me.”
Brudnoy gulped once and found his voice, “Lovely woman,” he said softly, “I was too much afraid of being rejected. You have always been so far above me…”
Goodman smiled. “We could have had some times together.”
“Never in my wildest fantasies could I hope that you would be interested in a foolish dog like me,” Brudnoy muttered, letting his head sink low.
“You’re a good old dog, Lev. No fool.”
He spread his hands. “I’m nothing but a peasant I spend all my time in the farm now.”
“I know,” Goodman whispered. “The flowers… they cheered me up.”
“The least I could do.”
“I want you to bury me in your farm,” Goodman said.
“Not return to Earth?”
“This is my home. Bury me here. In the farm. Where what’s left of me can do some good.”
Brudnoy turned toward Jinny Anson. “Is that allowed? Is it legal?”
I’m a witness,” Anson said. “I’ll see that the forms are properly filled out.”
“In the farm.” Goodman’s voice was so faint now that Brudnoy had to bend over her emaciated form to hear her. “Always did believe in ecology. Recycle me.”
Then she sighed and closed her eyes. For a moment Brudnoy thought she had fallen asleep. But then the remote sensors started shrilling their single note.
A doctor appeared at the foot of her bed. Brudnoy struggled to his feet, a big lumbering man, weathered but still handsome, slightly paunchy, his shoulders slum
ped and his hair graying. There seemed to be new lines in his face every year; every day, he sometimes thought. A ragged gray beard covered his chin.
He felt Anson’s hand on his arm as he shambled out of the infirmary, leaving behind its odor of clean sheets and implacable death.
The tunnel was bright and cheerful, by contrast. People strode by as if nothing had happened on the other side of the infirmary’s doors. Young people, Brudnoy realized. All of them younger than I. Even Jinny.
“Well,” he said, trying to straighten up, “now I’m the oldest resident of Moonbase. I suppose I’ll be the next to go.”
Anson smiled up at him. “Not for another hundred years, at least.”
“At least,” Brudnoy murmured.
“Come on, let me buy you a drink. We could both use some rocket juice.”
“You?” Some of the old playfulness sparkled in Brudnoy’s sky-blue eyes. “You, the base director? You speak of illegal alcoholic drinks?”
Anson grinned wickedly at him. “What kind of a director would I be if I didn’t know about the still? Besides, I won’t be director much longer. My relief is due in another two weeks.”
She led Brudnoy to her own quarters, where she uncovered her stash of ’rocket juice’ a gallon-sized thermos jug she kept under her bunk. She and Brudnoy had shared that bunk more than once; but that was years ago.
Now, as they sat on the springy wire chairs that Anson had made from scrap metal, Brudnoy sipped the homebrew thoughtfully.
“Is it legal?” he asked.
“The booze? Of course not. But as long as people don’t drink during their work shifts, there’s no sense trying to find the still and knock it apart. Damn little else to do for entertainment around here.”
Brudnoy shook his head. “I meant Lana’s request to be buried in the farm.”
Anson said, “As long as I’m in charge here we’ll honor her last request. There’s probably some relatives back Earthside; if they want her they’ll have to get a court order.”
I’ll see to the burial, then,” Brudnoy said.