by Garon Whited
We each paused as we stepped down to the surface.
We were on the Moon. We were standing on another heavenly body. It’s one thing to be in a ship—you could be anywhere in a ship. But here we were on our nearest neighbor, almost a planet in its own right. Standing on silver-grey concrete made from lunar soil, under the blazing light of a Sun unfiltered by gentle atmosphere, beneath the glow from our former home, the Earth. Both sides were glowing, the sunlit half and the night half, looking twice as big and three times and ominous as it had through the comforting glass of the ports.
I knew I wasn’t the first, but I realized I might well be one of the last men to put foot down on the lunar landscape. It was just… I had a sense of finality in my heart. We ruined the Earth; I could see the mess we’d made of our birth world. And we were stuck with the next-closest thing to it: The Moon, silver-grey and stark as Hell.
Maybe we deserved it for what we’d done. Maybe we didn’t even deserve it, but got it anyway. I felt a desire to kill someone—the fat-fingered fool that punched a launch button, probably. The bastard that exiled me to the Moon for the remainder of my life. Whoever it was that killed my planet.
We all stood there for a while, feeling the gravity of our new home and getting used to the idea of being here. Of this being home.
“All right, people, let’s not dawdle; the Sun’s still up and these suits aren’t bulletproof,” Carl said, over the radio. “Commander Hardy, make sure the base is live. Colonel Edwards, help Lieutenants Fleming and Lewis get the cargo ramp set up for offloading. Looks like we’ll be working in suits until we can give the life support a once-over.”
We moved. Anne looked okay; she wasn’t stumbling or fumbling, anyway. It’s hard to see into a suit in the sunlight—the visor polarizes. Julie seemed jittery; she wasn’t adjusting well to the low gravity. She kept bouncing when she walked, skidding when she landed. I couldn’t blame her; she was even lighter than I was.
The Copernicus crater is about sixty-five to seventy kilometers in diameter, with three mountains in the middle. The north half of the crater is flat as a bad note at a school recital, while the southern half is wavy, ridged, and broken. We landed just north of the central peak of the crater, right in front of the airlock to the base. It looked like an uninviting cave with a vault door at the back.
The airlock faced north and was under a concrete overhang to keep it out of direct sunlight. The base itself was tunneled into the central peak. Beyond the airlock was a long hallway into the solid rock of the mountain, mainly to get the maximum structural integrity for our pressured environment. The mountain also acted as a shield against the radiation from the Sun.
What little there was above the surface didn’t look very exciting. There were a couple of structures for the observatory, solar cell power grid, and other such junk—mainly just to let you work on the equipment inside without getting cooked in the sunlight. There were acres of solar panels spread out much further north, and a few antennae emplaced on all three mountains for communications and radar.
I stepped into the one-man airlock beside the main lock; it wasn’t too obvious in the shadow of the overhang. The small one was an armored cylinder with a quarter-circle bite taken out of one side, only a little larger than needed for a man in a suit. It rotated with me in it until it faced the inner door, and then the pressure started to equalize. When the pressure in the cylinder climbed to match the base pressure, I could push the inner door open against its springs. The feel of my suit alone told me pressure was okay, but there was no way to tell if it was a breathable mix.
Mission Control should have had the telemetry from the base. They should have already told us. But now they wouldn’t be telling us anything. It should be all right; it was all right when we launched or we would never have lifted…
I tried to get that off my mind as I lumbered down the corridor. With the standard-issue surface hardsuit I weighed in at nearly a hundred and forty kilos—on Earth. Here, I weighed less than twenty-five kilos—without changing my mass one whit. I learned to lean heavily into the turn shortly after I tried to make my first one; I did a wonderful, slow-motion skid-slide-tumble-slide-whump! It didn’t hurt much more than my pride; the suits we use whenever we’re on the surface are built tough, with lots of rigid outer plates. Still, I was glad no one was there to watch me flail like a kid on his first pair of skates.
I undogged the hatch to the hydroponics bay and checked the air. Over a kilometer of lights and racks and algae tubes stretched away from the main control panel, most of them empty. Only one algae tank was active, but a whole greenhouse row of sprouting plants had already been started. The hydroponics greenhouse was only there to prepare for six people, not the full base complement. We would have grown more green leaf from the seed stores as people arrived…
But what we had was all green, as were the gauges. I opened my helmet and kept an eye on my blood-oxygen indicator. I kept watching for three minutes; nothing changed.
“Captain?” I radioed.
“Go ahead,” crackled back. The signal was lousy; too much lunar rock between us. There was a repeater unit with an antenna lead on the surface, but I hadn’t thought to turn it on—or found it yet, for that matter.
“I’ve got positive on the life support, sir. Come on in; the air is fine.”
“Good! Thank you, commander. Would you do us the courtesy of opening the cargo lock? We’re about ready to take a load in.”
“Aye aye, Sir.” I headed back up to the cargo lock. The thing is at the end of a long hallway carved from the rock. The hallway, like the airlock, was huge; it had to be to accommodate the horde of robots that built the place.
The cargo lock was much more ponderous than the personal airlock. For one thing, it was much larger; for another, it had heavier, armored doors. The heavier doors were for safety, since it was impractical to have the more usual hinged-type affairs. Instead, the inner doors slid aside on grooved tracks to allow access to the airlock itself, closed again to seal it, all to the flashing of yellow warning lights. The outer doors do much the same thing, but with without the audible hiss of the hydraulic systems.
Depressurizing the cargo lock took a while; there was a lot of air to scavenge. I opened the heavy doors and they slid aside to open up the entire front wall. Cargo was already stacked near at hand; rollers and power equipment in one-sixth gravity make it easy. The lion’s share of the cargo was life-support oriented: ration packs, liquid nitrogen, carbon, and a lot of water. In theory, Lunar Base Alpha would recycle everything, but there would always be tiny losses to be made up—no airlock can get all the air out, for example.
We stacked and packed, hauled and humped; trip after trip, cycling the cargo lock over and over again. The Luna had a sizable cargo hold and it was full; we loaded our cargo at Heinlein Station when we refueled there. This was to be the last major supply run…
The Luna was designed for shuttling from the Earth to the Moon, given a refueling stop in orbit; she needed full tanks just to reach Earth orbit, and then only when she was empty. With cargo, she had to use a pair of boosters that mounted along her centerline; these dropped away when expended. Without cargo, she could fuel up on Earth, launch, then refuel in orbit to head to the Moon and back, land on Earth, and repeat.
We wouldn’t be refueling on Earth anytime soon. Until we got a replacement for the blown airlock door, we couldn’t even dare atmosphere; reentry would rip the Luna to pieces.
Altogether, it took nearly six hours to transfer everything; a lot of that was waiting for pressures to equalize. But we had everything in, checked, and stowed away inside of eight hours. Power equipment and low gravity make even the smallest astronaut a one-person moving crew.
It gave us something to focus on, and we desperately needed that.
After the inventory was finished, Carl had us going over the base with a fine-tooth comb; we were going to live here, and we had better by God make sure it was livable. So we checked everything from t
he air ducts to the Thorndyke solar panels. The engineers and robots had done good work; everything was running like a Swiss watch. Things looked different in person, of course. The layout looked good on paper and by video, but seemed a little off, somehow, once I actually saw it. Maybe that was just the effect of odd gravity, or the extra-large hallways and doors.
Then we all sat down in one of the lounge areas. We were all tired from the work and stress. Our muscles didn’t really need the rest, but we’d been running our brains, trying not to think about... things. Like how a single screw-up on our part could kill us all, to say nothing of making the human race extinct.
Trying not to wonder who might snap, like Gary, and maybe take us all along.
Captain Carl stood at the head of the table; the lounge could hold thirty people, but it was small compared to the messhall. Eventually, the base would hold—would have held—up to five hundred people, with more space than we could possibly need. Open space is cheap and easy when robots are digging and sealing the corridors and rooms, and all that open air doubles as temporary breathing mix in the event of a recycling failure.
“All right, listen up, please,” he began. “This is our situation. We have a working environment and a good shot at living out our normal lives here on the Moon. We may—and I stress this—we may be the last of our race.”
Julie put her face in her hands; her dark hair fell forward in a slow-motion curtain. Kathy’s lips compressed in a grim expression. Anne just nodded, cold-eyed and expressionless. I have no idea what I looked like, but my stomach did a nasty sort of flip-flop at the words. I wished I could blame the gravity.
“If that is so, then we are going to have to survive,” Captain Carl went on. “Not just because we are individuals and should struggle to live, but because we have something more important to live for. We have all of humanity to consider.”
“So we play the Eves to your Adams and send our kids back to Earth when it cools down?” Anne asked. Her tone wasn’t unpleasantly frosty or even zestfully eager; it was a cool, calculating question. “If that is your plan, then I might point out we are an exceptionally small gene pool.”
“But a very high-quality one,” Carl replied. “Besides, I am not certain we are the last of our race. There may be survivors on Earth. There are almost certainly survivors at the space habitats at ell-four and ell-five, as well as scattered among the other, smaller orbital stations.”
“So you do plan for us to be mothers to the new human race,” Anne said, and her eyes narrowed. “I don’t think I like being relegated to the status of breeding cow.”
Captain Carl sighed. “No. You can choose freely if you wish to take a man to your bed or not, to have children or not. There will be no attempt to coerce you or anyone else to have children. That’s for you to decide.
“But if we are all that’s left, we will have to face the fact that the only way our race will survive is through the three of you,” he added. “We can get by with one man; more would be better. But we absolutely cannot do without you three. Unless and until we can find more survivors, I want you to consider the possibility. That’s all.”
I swallowed. “Uh, Captain?”
“Yes, commander?”
“Do we have to discuss this now? I mean, I feel a lot of things, but I really don’t feel like making babies with anybody right this instant.”
Captain Carl blinked at me, then nodded. “Point taken. But it had to be said.”
“I guess it did.”
“So how do you feel, Max?” Kathy asked. She was sitting between Julie and I; she had one hand on Julie’s forearm, apparently steadying her. Julie was sitting very still and quiet, eyes closed, breathing in slow, deep breaths to keep calm. Anne was a lot better for having had her tranquilizer. Maybe Julie should have had one too.
I thought about her question. Nobody said anything, just waited and looked expectantly at me.
“I guess… I guess I’m feeling numb. More than anything. A little disgusted that we could come this close to killing ourselves. Scared, at least a little; I’d be a fool not to be. A little glad, too.”
“Glad?” Julie demanded, eyes snapping wide to stare at me. I was pleased at her reaction; I’d hate for her to zone out and go like Gary.
“A little,” I admitted, in the face of her glaring. “Glad I am alive. Glad that maybe the human race will go on.” I sighed. “Not at all glad the situation is like this. Glad we might have a second chance at being… well, a decent species. Someday.
“But, like I say, mostly I’m numb. It’s too big; it’s the whole world, the whole race. I can’t grasp that emotionally, at least not yet. Ask me again after I’ve had a hot meal and twelve hours in the sack. Then I’ll go to pieces and gibber quietly in a corner.”
“How can you think of food?” Anne asked. Captain Carl chuckled. It wasn’t a great chuckle, but it did show amusement and that made the whole room seem less like a tomb.
“When did we last eat?” he asked.
Kathy opened her mouth to answer, but Julie beat her to it: “Zero-eight-thirty. Twenty-three hours ago, give or take.”
“I haven’t been hungry,” Kathy added. “Too keyed up, I guess.” Anne nodded agreement.
“We will have dinner,” Carl decided. “After that, we can all use some rest. Commander Hardy, today you are cook. Stick some rations in the warmer.”
I fetched us some plastic-wrapped bricks and stuck them in the microwave. Inwardly, I wondered what we would do with the plastic wrap; it was a lot of polymer. How would we recycle it? It wasn’t really my department, but I was sure it would get recycled somehow.
Conversation lulled while the food was warming; it failed to pick up again while we ate. Fortunately, everyone did eat. Julie picked at her food at first, but discovered her appetite after the first couple of mouthfuls.
The only comment was from Captain Carl.
“You had to pick the teriyaki chicken?” he asked. “I hate the stuff.”
I examined the package. “It’s the barbequed beef, actually.”
Captain Carl sighed theatrically. “Everything in a quickie ration tastes like chicken.”
It lightened the mood a little, but nothing was going to bring out smiles.
After dinner, we retired to quarters; there were lots to choose from. Since I needed one, I took a shower; the hot water was working perfectly. Hours of labor in a space suit don’t do much for your personal hygiene.
One-sixth gravity, by the way, made even a thin foam mattress feel like a cross between a waterbed and free falling. I thought I would have trouble falling asleep; instead, I was out like a light.
Somewhen along the next few hours, I found that I needed two things: a trip to the head, and something more to eat. One ration goes fast when you’re strung out on stress, and I’m a big guy. So I made a brief stop at the toilet before zippering into a jumpsuit and bouncing out into the corridor toward the galley. Salmon in lemon sauce. Mmm. It didn’t even bother me that it was artificial protein molecules reconstituted to resemble fish. I was hungry, and it tasted nothing like chicken.
On the way back to my quarters, I heard something. I paused, listened. The sound was ongoing and faint. I tracked it down at one of the other chamber doors. They aren’t pressure doors, just privacy closures, and not very good ones; they were built in vacuum by robots that didn’t have ears. Beyond this one, someone was sobbing.
How long I stood there thinking, I don’t know. I couldn’t just barge in. What do you say? “Sorry, but I could hear you crying from the hall”? Hell, I didn’t even know whose quarters these were; we just picked some at random.
At a bet, it wasn’t Captain Carl.
Finally, I just knocked. The sobs choked off and there was a pause. Then someone inside asked, “Who is it?”
“It’s Max.”
“What do you want, Max?” asked the muffled voice behind the door.
“Can I come in for a minute?”
A longer pause. “Okay.�
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I went in. The room was dark except for the glow of red safety lights from the passageway. To the left, one of the ladies was sitting up in bed, hugging her knees. I stepped aside to let in more light and saw it was Kathy.
“Close the door, please.” I did that. Darkness like ink filled the room. “What is it, Max?”
I wanted to go to her, to hold her and comfort her and tell her it would all be all right. But I couldn’t. She had a husband down on Earth—a computer programmer for some civilian company. For all I knew, he might be alive. If he was, he probably wouldn’t be for long. How could I tell her that it would all come out okay?
“Kathy? Can I ask a favor?”
“Sure, Max.”
“Will you hold me and tell me that it’ll all be okay?”
There was a silence for the space of about six heartbeats.
“Come here,” she said. I went to her and she helped me into the bed. She took my head in her hands and pressed it to her breast. I put my arms around her body. She stroked my hair and crooned over me, rocking slightly.
I burst into tears, and so did she. We held each other, cried, and rocked until we both fell asleep.
* * *
She woke up when I squeezed her. Kathy smiled at me and squeezed me back, then released me and sat up.
“You know this is going to be complicated?” she asked.
I lay there and looked up at her. She looked good in a jumpsuit, even with her short hair all mussed. She turned a little to look at me.
“Why?” I asked. “Just because you outrank me?”
“Partly; I am a superior officer.”
“That you are. I know that you’re ahead of me by a grade—and one of the youngest to reach oh-five I’ve ever heard of. Won’t keep me from taking orders, boss lady.”
She smiled and nodded. “Okay. But there’s another problem.”