Moonfall

by Jack McDevitt

  A cool wind shook the trees. Somewhere a phone was ringing.

  Now night came. The sky filled with stars. She felt utterly alone in the world.

  The darkened Sun was in Pisces. She could see the Great Square of Pegasus just above the drugstore, Aldebaran up over Doc Edwards’s house, Deneb at the top of the elm, and Betelgeuse down near the intersection. Jupiter, white and brilliant, was east of the Sun; and Venus, west.

  Even Mercury was visible, riding its lonely arc.

  She went out onto the deck and sat down in one of her wicker chairs, crossed her arms on the guard railing, and rested her chin on the back of her left hand. Lights came on in Conroy’s kitchen.

  A few degrees south of the Sun, just on the edge of the corona where the glare faded into night, Tomiko noticed a bright star.

  What was that?

  She measured it with her eye against the surrounding constellations, frowned, and hurried inside to her computer. She logged into the USL Celestik program, and brought up a star diagram.

  Moonbase, Grissom, Country. 11:10 A.M.

  Rick Hailey appraised Charlie’s outfit, grinned at the Moonbase patch, and shook his head. “No,” he said. “Don’t do it.”

  “Why not?” Charlie thought it would be ideal for the situation.

  “Because politicians who try to look like something they aren’t inevitably come off looking dumb. You’re too young to remember Michael Dukakis and his tank. But how about Bill Worthy?” Worthy had been knocked out of his party’s nomination by Andrew Culpepper, then a relative unknown, after he’d tried on an astronaut’s uniform for the cameras. He’d succeeded only in convincing the electorate he was frail and near death.

  Charlie sighed. “Yeah,” he said.

  “I mean, I can see the editorial cartoons now. They’ll send you to Mars.”

  It was annoying. He looked so good in this outfit.

  “This is your day, Charlie,” Rick said. “This afternoon we’ll be creating our campaign theme. The future belongs to Haskell.” He drank off a glass of moon rum, which was nonalcoholic.

  “I’m a little uncomfortable about this,” said Charlie. “I keep thinking the president should be here. Or maybe it’s the low gravity.” He grinned uncertainly.

  “You’ll do fine. Like you always do.” Rick’s voice dropped an octave. “Don’t forget God,” he said.

  Charlie sighed.

  “It’s important. Out here, people expect you to notice creation. The blue Earth. The stars. The sense of human insignificance.” He stopped and thought about it. “No,” he continued, “not human insignificance. Your insignificance. Right? We don’t want the voters to get the idea you think they’re insignificant.”

  “I know.”

  Sometimes Charlie thought of his ascent to the vice presidency as some sort of cosmic joke. He couldn’t recall having set out to become a politician. It was something that had just happened to him. He’d been running a small electronics business in Amherst twelve years ago when a dustup began over school prayer, evolution, creation science, and The Catcher in the Rye. Charlie, who’d thought those battles fought and won during the last century, had shown up at a school board meeting where he’d intended only to lend visible support to the English and science departments. But he’d been outraged by a tall, dark-haired, brimstone-eyed preacher who’d informed the board what their duties were, and left no doubt he was speaking for a higher power. The preacher had brought his congregation, one of whom was waving a sign with the number 649 on it, supposedly the number of obscenities in Catcher. Unable to contain himself, Charlie had taken on the preacher.

  In hindsight, he hadn’t thought he’d done well. The preacher was louder and more practiced than he, but the small group of school supporters liked what they saw. They asked him to run in the fall election, and as Charlie saw it, next thing he knew he was vice president.

  He looked at his watch. “Give me a minute to change,” he said. “And then we better get started.”

  “Yeah. Listen, on second thought, wear the jacket. Okay? It’ll help you bond with these people. But the uniform’s too much.”

  Rick’s value lay in what Charlie liked to think of as an ability to see around corners. If there was a booby trap ahead, he could be counted on to find it before it exploded.

  Wearing only the jacket would be a halfway measure. A sign of weakness. When Charlie came out of the bedroom, he’d pulled on his own custom-made gray suit.

  Rick frowned. “I don’t know why you keep me on,” he said.

  Skyport, NASA/Smithsonian Orbital Laboratory. 12:13 P.M.

  The Orbital Lab at the Earth satellite Skyport served as a worldwide clearinghouse for astronomical data. New variable pulsar analyses, fresh information on large-structure configurations, the latest findings on extra-solar terrestrial worlds supporting oxygen atmospheres—all were funneled into the Orbital Lab, collated, cross-indexed, relayed to interested consumers, and made available on the Web for the general public.

  Tory Clark was watching the progress of the eclipse across North America on the overhead monitor while she looked through incoming reports. Although there was an enormous amount of activity connected with the event, nonrelated routine inputs did not slow down appreciably. She had, for example, a quasar update from Kitt Peak, a new report on R 136a in the Large Magellanic, and corrections to the velocity measurements for the runaway star 53 Arietis. She also had something else.

  “Windy?” She held up a hand to get the attention of her supervisor, Winfield Cross. “You want to take a look at this?”

  Cross was in his fifties, medium size, medium build, medium everything. People tended to have a hard time remembering who he was, or what his name was. He was African-American, had grown up in south Los Angeles, gone to Princeton on a scholarship, and now seemed worried only by the possibility that his age would catch up to him before he achieved his one ambition. The automated observatory at Farside, the hidden side of the Moon, was going to be expanded and provided with a human staff. Windy hoped to get the director’s job.

  He held up one hand to signal that he understood, finished writing on a clipboard, and turned to his own screen. She heard him inhale. “What is it? You check it yet?”

  They were looking at Tomiko’s splinter of light.

  “Don’t know.”

  “Sun-grazer, you think?”

  “I guess. Can’t imagine what else.”

  There was nothing new, of course, about sun-grazing comets. They approached from the far side of the Sun and returned the same way. Consequently, they were virtually impossible to see from Earth, unless they happened to show up during a total eclipse, as this one had.

  Windy’s fingertips drummed on the computer table. “Who’ve we got?”

  Tory was ready for the question. “Feinberg’s at Beaver Meadow for the show.” She was referring to the eclipse.

  “Feinberg. Well, no point monkeying with the small fry. Okay, try to get him and ask him to take a look.”

  Moonbase, Ranger Auditorium. 12:17 P.M.

  The place was named for the only ship lost during the second wave of lunar exploration. The second vessel to go back to the Moon after more than thirty years, the Ranger had been less than forty minutes from reentry when a fuel line blew. The explosion damaged the navigational guidance system and forced Frank Bellwether, its skipper, to try an eyeball insertion, a seat-of-the-pants reentry. But the procedure was exceedingly difficult, and he’d misjudged the approach, had come in at too wide an angle. Ranger had skimmed off the atmosphere, and without enough fuel to return, had drifted into solar orbit. It had been the most traumatic incident of the age of space exploration, far more painful than the Challenger loss, because Bellwether and his crew were able to communicate for several days afterward, until their air supply ran out.

  A plaque commemorating the captain was mounted in the auditorium. In addition, the five ferries that carried passengers between L1 and Skyport were named for the individual crewmembers.r />
  When Charlie entered, a wallscreen was keeping track of the scene in Clifton, Ohio, where the high school band was lined up on the stage of a gymnasium. Concurrently with the lunar ceremony, the institution was being renamed the Andrew Y. Culpepper Memorial High School. The gym was crowded with students, and the band was playing an old tune, “Moon Over Miami.” Well, it wasn’t Miami, but Charlie imagined nobody cared about details. At Moonbase, some six hundred people, constituting visitors and virtually the entire population of the station not then on duty, had crowded into the auditorium.

  Evelyn Hampton’s technicians had erected a temporary platform and set out a row of chairs across it. A pair of double doors off to one side led out into Main Plaza, and a wide silver ribbon had been draped across these. The double doors were being treated symbolically on this occasion as the front entrance to Moonbase. The platform was decked with white, green, and blue bunting, the colors of Moonbase International. Flags of all (or almost all) the world’s nations were mounted on the walls. A range of VIPs from international commerce, various governments, and the entertainment and academic worlds were seated on the platform. Prominent among these was Slade Elliott, known to millions of TV viewers as Captain Pierce on the immensely popular Arcturus Run. A recent poll had shown that Elliott had better name recognition than the president of the United States.

  Evelyn saw Charlie and joined him. “Well, Mr. Vice President,” she asked congenially. “Are you ready to do the honors? This is an historic moment. What you say here today, people will be quoting a thousand years from now.”

  “Thanks,” said Charlie. “I really needed a little more pressure.” He glanced toward the pool of journalists, many of whom he recognized. Rick had insisted that there was no more important skill for a politician than to remember the first names of the reporters. It was a habit Charlie had taken time to acquire. “Where are the TV cameras?” he asked.

  She pointed to the far end of the auditorium, where a cluster of black lenses jutted out of the rear wall. Other cameras were concealed on either side of the platform.

  Evelyn introduced him to the other guests, and Charlie was surprised when Elliott asked him to autograph a program.

  Then it was time to proceed. His seat was located immediately to the right of the lectern, the place of honor secured by the fact that the U.S. government was Moonbase International’s biggest shareholder. An attractive young woman in a Moonbase jumpsuit caught Evelyn’s eye and held up both hands twice, fingers spread, signifying twenty seconds. Evelyn went to the lectern. The crowd grew quiet.

  A display suspended from the ceiling acted as a monitor, and she glanced up to check her appearance. She looked pretty good for a CEO, Charlie thought.

  A red lamp blinked on at the far end of the auditorium, which meant they were using the rear camera. The young woman did a silent countdown, and when she reached zero, Evelyn leaned forward and welcomed everyone, the entire world, to Moonbase. “Before we go any farther,” she said, “I’d like to introduce our nondenominational chaplain, the Reverend Mark Pinnacle.”

  Pinnacle looked frail and ill at ease. He came forward clutching a sheet of paper, thanked Evelyn, put the paper on the lectern, and in a shaky voice began to read. He asked the blessings of the Almighty on this great effort and thanked him for past favors. One of the VIPs near Charlie whispered that if the chaplain hoped for results, he ought to speak up.

  Pinnacle never got away from his monotone, but fortunately, he had the good sense to keep his remarks short. With obvious relief, he turned the program back to Evelyn.

  She introduced several of the notables, each of whom spoke for a couple of minutes, with perhaps the most exhilarating moment coming when Slade Elliott strode to the microphone accompanied by the rousing strains of the theme from Arcturus Run. Slade contented himself with delivering a tag line from the show: “Borders exist only in the mind.”

  Charlie, the principal speaker, was of course last. His name was met with polite applause. “Thank you,” he said. He glanced back at Elliott and then looked at the cameras. “I want to thank you for inviting me. This is an hour I’ll never forget. And I suspect it’s one the human race will never forget.”

  Two Secret Service agents were seated unobtrusively, in Moonbase jumpsuits, in the front row. Sam Anderson, who headed the unit, and his lone female agent, Isabel Heyman, watched the wings. Rick Hailey, on the aisle, studied him intently. He would be keeping score, of course.

  “Moonbase is the future,” continued Charlie. “We’re taking our first tentative steps away from the home world, and you folks are showing the way.” Rick nodded, urging him on.

  Charlie looked into the cameras, speaking past the gathered “lunies,” addressing himself rather to the voters back home, and maybe to the vast audience beyond American shores. “Moonbase is expensive. We’ve lost people to get here, and we’ll lose others before we’re done. We’ve spent a lot of our national treasure. And sometimes we wonder whether the investment is worth it. Why are we here at all?

  “The simple truth is that the planet has become too small. Not for our populations, but for our dreams. We have a rendezvous with the stars. The seeds are already sown. They were sown when the first men and women looked up at the constellations. And they will come to flower in the fountains of the Moon.

  “Today people still visit the site of the Apollo landing, where they can see Neil Armstrong’s footprints.” Charlie looked down at his audience and knew he had them. “Our distant descendants will visit Moonbase,” he said, “or its equivalent in their age, and they will see the marks that we have made, you and I, and they will know that we too were here.” He allowed his emotions to show. “We’ve come to believe that we have a cosmic heritage. We’ve come to the Moon. Within a few weeks, we’ll launch the Percival Lowell for Mars.

  “Slade Elliott and his alter ego, Captain Tobias Pierce, are absolutely correct: Borders exist only in the mind.”

  He lifted his right hand to salute his audience, turned from the lectern, waited for Evelyn to join him, and started across the platform. A small ramp led to ground level. An aide appeared beside the beribboned door with a pair of golden shears.

  Charlie reached the ramp but decided instead to leap from the platform, forgetting he was at one-sixth g. Despite the weighted boats, he would have sailed out into space and ended in the front seats had Evelyn not seen it coming. She grabbed his jacket and pulled him back.

  “Careful,” she whispered.

  Charlie, grateful to have been saved from a clumsy fall in front of a couple of billion viewers, thanked her. “I owe you a drink,” he said.

  “At least,” she smiled.

  The guests flanked him and the aide gave the shears to Evelyn, who passed them to Charlie. Two others held the ribbon for him. “On this eighth day of April,” he said, “in the two-thousand and twenty-fourth year of our era, and the two hundred and forty-eighth of the independence of the United States, in the name of the United Nations, I declare this facility, Moonbase, to be operational.”

  He cut the ribbon. An electric motor in the wall hummed and the doors opened. Beyond, Main Plaza lay in darkness. But a spotlight mounted atop the administration building blinked on, highlighting a park, a cluster of elms, some benches, and a pool. Then the overhead solar panels brightened, and daylight came to the parks and shops and restaurants and overhead walkways.

  Applause began. At first it was restrained and polite. Almost perfunctory. But someone cheered, and it built and became a crescendo and went on and on and on.

  NEWSNET. 12:30 P.M. UPDATE

  (Click for details.)

  BUDDHA’S BIRTHDAY CELEBRATED BY ADHERENTS WORLDWIDE

  DID NASA CONSIDER ALL-WOMAN CREW FOR MARS?

  Leaked Report: Best Way To Ensure Psychological Stability

  Deny Politics Influenced Current Assignments

  TRANSGLOBAL GETS CHICKEN LITTLE PRIZE FOR WHITE PLAGUE COVERAGE

  Falsely Reported That Zambesi Virus Is Airborn
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  “Scared Wits Out Of Millions”

  34th Annual Award By National Anxiety Center

  Baseball:

  AARON BROKE RUTH CAREER HR MARK 50 YEARS AGO TODAY

  Hit 715th Against LA Dodgers In Atlanta

  Aaron’s Total of 755 Still Unsurpassed

  TOKYO FERRY CAPSIZES

  Hundreds Feared Lost

  Eyewitnesses Say Boat Was Overcrowded

  TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE TODAY

  Sky Spectacular Visible Across Much of U.S.

  VATICAN DENIES POPE SERIOUSLY ILL

  Innocent “Exhausted But Fit”

  MOONBASE OPENS TODAY; VP PRESIDES OVER CEREMONIES

  Beaver Meadow Observatory, North Java, New York. 12:38 P.M.

  Wesley Feinberg had twice won the Nobel Prize for his work in calculating the age of the universe and for establishing the relation between gravity and quantum effects. He was also director of Harvard’s AstroLab in central Massachusetts. He was respected by his peers, treated like a minor deity by the graduate students, and granted every perk by the institution, which was delighted to have him. The latest perk: temporary assignment to the Beaver Meadow Observatory in North Java, New York, which was in the path of the eclipse.

  Feinberg was happy to go. And not only because of the celestial event. He was a bachelor, a man who’d devoted his life to astronomy and discovered it wasn’t quite enough. The trip to Beaver Meadow got him out of the apartment he’d grown to detest, and threw him in with a new group of people. The reality of his existence puzzled him. He’d accomplished everything he’d ever wanted, had gone well beyond what he’d thought possible. Yet he sensed that something round and dark had moved across the essence of his own existence, blocking off the light.

  Beaver Meadow wasn’t a big facility. It had only three telescopes, the largest being a forty-five-inch Clayton-Braustein reflector, which would relay images onto an eighteen-foot wallscreen. The observatory had reserved a prime-location computer for him, overlooking the wallscreen. The director, Perry Hoxon, asked whether he required anything else.