by Garon Whited
“Such as?”
“I might have trouble giving you an order that I need to.”
I thought about that one. If someone had to do something dangerous and possibly lethal… I looked at her; she was watching me think. I noticed that her eyes were green, like spring grass. I’d never noticed before.
“I see your point,” I conceded. “Do you want me to go?”
“No…” she trailed off.
I rubbed her back, gently. “But you think this may be a mistake.”
She lay down next to me and didn’t meet my eyes. “I don’t know, Max. Maybe. There are a lot of things I don’t know.”
“Okay,” I answered, and kissed her forehead. “I’ll go. You can’t really think about it while we’re so close. I know; I can’t think about it either. We each need someone to hold on to—and I’m glad I was there for you, and you for me. Friends, Kathy?”
She smiled a little. “Always, Max.”
“If you need me, you say so, okay?”
“I will. You, too.”
I got up and stretched; I couldn’t recall ever sleeping that well.
“What time is it?” Kathy asked. I looked at my wrist—no watch. I’d forgotten.
“Beats me. I haven’t heard reveille. Do you think the captain will be sounding it?”
She smiled. “He might.”
“Then I ought to get a jump on it. Do me a favor?”
“Maybe.”
“Kiss me goodbye before I go?”
She smiled and sat up on the bed, held out her arms. I moved to her and we embraced, then she kissed me soundly, and for good. She held me a moment longer, looking at my face.
“There’s no such thing as ‘goodbye,’ Max. Just ‘until we meet again’.”
“I look forward to it,” I replied. My head was spinning a little. She let go of me and I bounced out into the corridor.
One of the things the engineers in mission control missed was the installation of clocks. While they were building stuff with robots, they had timestamps on the telemetry from the robot cameras. Why look around for a clock? I had to go back to my quarters to get my wristwatch before I could find the time. It was a little after nine hundred hours—or nine in the morning—Greenwich Mean Time, our time zone. Made me wonder about the Captain and when he’d be up.
As I walked into the messhall, I discovered he was already up and dawdling over coffee. Anne and Julie were still in various stages of breakfast; Julie looked wrung out. Anne looked all right, as did Captain Carl. At a bet, Julie had a hard time sleeping last night. All three were in the dark blue crew jumpsuits we were issued for Luna Base.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Anne called. Captain Carl and Julie nodded at me as I got food. Anne continued with, “Did you sleep in your uniform, or did you get an early start on crawling through the access spaces?”
“Ha ha,” I replied. “If you must know, I was conducting a low-gravity fabric stress test.”
“You slept in your uniform,” she stated.
“Well, yes. And good morning to everyone. I’d have been here sooner but I was expecting a bugle call over the one-em-cee.”
Captain Carl chuckled. “Not today. We got a great deal done last night and we had a lot of stress before that. Sleep is good for you; we all needed the rest. We’ll break up into watches and schedules later today.”
I nodded. It made sense to have somebody awake and alert at all times, especially here—one disaster could kill us all. No matter how safe the building looked, it was still a lifeboat for humanity—a big lifeboat, but it was way under-crewed.
I felt a chill, ignored it, and ate.
Kathy came in last. She had showered and run a brush through her hair. I tried not to stare; I’d known she was beautiful—all three of the ladies are, at least to me—but I hadn’t felt much for her. Now, I felt closer. She wasn’t just someone I worked closely with; she was my friend. That’s hard for her; all through training, it was obvious she didn’t make friends easily. I do, though. It didn’t matter if she hated my taste in music or had weird ideas about religion. We had shared something—something that had nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with being human, so she seemed more beautiful this morning.
“Good morning,” I offered. “How’d you sleep?”
She smiled at us all; I thought I detected a slight increase in wattage when her eyes met mine.
“Very well, thank you. And the rest of you?”
“Like a baby,” I answered.
Anne smiled the smallest smile I’ve ever seen. “Okay.”
Julie shook her head. “Not so good. Nightmares.”
Captain Carl nodded at Julie. “I had a few bad dreams, myself. If they persist, I’ll authorize Lieutenant Fleming to issue us each a sleeping pill.” Julie didn’t argue, just nodded and looked unhappy. She had some dark circles under her eyes, and she hadn’t eaten much of her morning ration.
“What’ll you have?” I asked Kathy. I was seated at the end of the messhall table, close to the dispenser.
“Do we have anything resembling eggs and orange juice?”
“Yep. Fried or scrambled?”
“Scrambled.”
I punched buttons and handed her the plastic-wrapped tray. We fell to. As we were eating, Captain Carl gently nudged Julie and nodded at her plate. He did it subtly, even smoothly, but we were all sitting clustered together, possibly in a sort of defense against the vast, empty space that was meant for more people. I couldn’t even imagine ghosts in these seats. The seats were metallic, cold and hard and sterile. They had never felt the touch of human hands, never known the reverberations of a human voice, never even seen a human being.
Except us.
I found that my appetite wasn’t what I’d thought it was. I ate anyway, lest Captain Carl assign someone to kick me under the table—I was too far away to nudge. Julie also managed to eat.
When we finished breakfast, Captain Carl stood up.
“Ladies and gentleman, we will now come to order.” We all sat up a little straighter and watched Captain Carl. He was the captain of the ship and the commander of the base; things could be about to get interesting really quickly.
“I am Captain Carl Hughes of the naval branch of the North American Federation of States military, mission commander and copilot of the Luna. I want each of you to give your name and rank as we go around the table, then your mission specialty. Katherine?”
“I am lieutenant colonel Katherine Edwards, N.A.F.S. Air Force, second in command for the mission, primary pilot for the Luna, and the communications officer while on base.” Carl nodded at her and directed his attention to her right, to Anne.
“I’m Annette Fleming, ah, lieutenant in the N.A.F.S. Navy. I’m a staff officer; I’m a doctor. I’m also trained to handle the hydroponics department and the low-intensity life support systems… Is there anything else I need to say?”
“No, Anne; that’s fine,” Carl replied. “Thank you. Julie?”
“My name is Juliette Lewis, and I’m a lieutenant in the N.A.F.S. Army. I’m a chemical engineer. And a staff officer, too, I suppose I should say. I handle the high-intensity recycling and life support—mainly just recycling non-biodegradable stuff, but I deal with anything and everything the biofarms can’t handle.”
“Very good. Max?”
“Maxwell Hardy,” I rapped out in my best cadet-review tones, “lieutenant commander, N.A.F.S. Navy. Aboard the Luna, I’m chief damage control officer; here on base, I’m still damage control, as well as being the structural and mechanical engineer. I’m the handyman and space janitor,” I finished, smiling. Anne and Kathy grinned; Julie let out a short, sharp laugh out of surprise. Even Captain Carl smiled slightly.
“I will now note our casualty,” he said, folding his smile and putting it away. “Gary Lindgren, captain in the N.A.F.S. Air Force, and the chief electronics engineer for Lunar Base Alpha.”
There was a silence around the table.
“Services f
or captain Gary will be at twenty hours tonight,” Captain Carl went on, after the pause. “In the meantime, his duties will be divided between Katherine and Maxwell.
“So, the chain of command for the base is as follows: Myself, commanding. Katherine is my first officer, Max is second, followed by Anne and then Julie.
“Our schedule of watches is as follows. Lights-out is at twenty-two; lights-on will be at oh-six-hundred. Watches will be two hours long and will rotate night to night—we’ll all stand a night watch four nights out of five, I’m afraid. I want someone awake and keeping an eye on the base from the control center while everyone else is asleep.”
Anne stuck up a hand. “Sir?”
“Yes, Anne?”
“May I ask why we don’t just stagger our sleeping schedules so that we don’t have to get up in the middle of the night?”
“Yes, you may. The reason is I want the watcher in the central station; we can’t all do our jobs from there,” he answered. “If something goes wrong, I want to have someone with a hand on the klaxon and the other on the bulkhead door controls. I don’t want to have a meteorite hit crack our mountain and us not know it until our ears pop from the pressure drop.”
“Oh,” she replied, in a very small voice.
“It also occurs to me that if we stagger ourselves as you suggest, we may have conflicts when we need assistance from another human being. It also maximizes our ability to have social contact if we want it; we can’t crawl into our holes and hide, people.”
Nods from around the table. Julie shifted uncomfortably and folded her hands in her lap.
“Today, we need to look over our new home,” Carl went on. “The robots obviously did a good job, but I want a human opinion by eighteen hundred. We already gave it a once-over by looking at the readouts, but I want a serious evaluation of the place. Tackle your areas first, check everything over, make sure that it’s working right regardless of the gauges or idiot lights. We already know the place is functioning; look for things that need to be fixed, redesigned, or rearranged. Be proactive, people. I want details and suggestions for improvements. We’re going to be here for a while, so I want to have a nice, clean house to live in. Any questions?”
I stuck my hand up. “Sir?”
“Go ahead, Max.”
“Once I’m done checking the integrity of the base and making sure the toilets flush, do you want me to start on Gary’s list? Or should I wait for Kathy? Or vice versa, if she finishes before I do?”
“Wait for each other,” he decided. “None of us is fully qualified on captain Lindgren’s areas. Anything else?”
Nobody spoke up.
“Then let’s get cracking, people. I’ll let you know when lunch rolls around.”
Chapter Two
“The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star.”
—Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
I love my job. At least, I love doing my job. I don’t suppose I’m being paid for any of this now. After all, who is going to sign my check? The Secretary of Defense? NASA? I don’t think so. Where would I cash it? There isn’t a bank left—and the money wouldn’t mean much. Besides, it’s a long drive to the nearest ATM.
Speaking of things we don’t have, we don’t have cable. When I say there’s nothing on TV, I mean it; all we get is static. We don’t even get the program listing channel, and I thought for sure that would be the one thing to survive nuclear Armageddon. There’s literally nothing on. I’m just not used to that. The billions, trillions of bytes of data that used to bounce around the satellites like the thoughts of the planet are gone, silent, leaving only the hiss of the solar wind and the radioactive dust in the atmosphere.
Then again, there’s no income tax and no bills. Maybe this isn’t all bad. I’m trying really hard to see a bright side to this. But I’m really going to miss my cable TV.
We hustled off to take apart our new home and see how well it ticked. It kind of reminded me of the story about the farmer who cut open the goose that laid golden eggs… but we built this goose. I hope we know more about it than the typical farmer!
For my part, I started with the airlocks and the hardware of life support distribution. Anne was in charge of the hydroponics, the plants that were the low-power air recycling for the base; Julie deals with the high-power, mechanical methods. They produce air, I deliver it; I get to deal with the ductwork and the fans, as well as the water recirculation system. It looks like Anne has it fairly easy in that regard; if everything is green, all is well. How hard can it be?
Judging from her intense expression, pretty hard. I asked if she needed anything from me and she replied with a grunt. Some bedside manner. I left her alone.
From there I went on to the nuts-and-bolts of the base’s structure. That took a while. The base is big, and not just because tracked robots had to rumble through the corridors. The psychologists felt that it would be important to have a sense of space, since we’d be living in a hole. The halls are high and wide, the rooms are large—even the toilets are spacious. It’s a big place.
Too big. It echoes. Not just with the sounds I make, but it echoes the silence. There is no one here, not one living thing, except us. There is no life on the Moon that we didn’t bring here. Back on Earth, you could hear the wind, the rustle of trees, or you could listen to the hum of a city full of people. There was always something to tell you that life was all around you.
Not here. We’re living in a hole in the ground—a high-tech hole in the ground—and the ground is dead. If I close doors and hold my breath, I can hear my heart beating. The whisper of the air system doesn’t break the silence as much as it gives it a contrast, points it up. If I stop and listen, I can’t help but be reminded: The Moon is empty. Completely.
It gives me shivers. So I made very sure that our hole was very well-built.
“Now hear this… now hear this,” came over the one-em-cee. “Lunch call is in five minutes. I repeat, lunch call is in five minutes. There will be no further warning.” With that, the speaker fell silent.
I didn’t need to be told twice; the old hardcase would be just as like to send me to my room with no supper if I was late. I went to lunch. So did everyone else; we regrouped at our little corner of the messhall. Julie was handing out ration packs when I arrived.
“Welcome back, slowpoke,” she said. “You get the spaghetti.”
I caught the plastic package she lofted at me. It’s easy, once you get the hang of low gravity. You don’t have to toss it with much force, and the high, slow arc is easy to track. It takes a little getting used to—you expect things to fall a lot faster—but reflexes developed in full gravity can handle it easily.
“Thanks. I wonder if it’ll taste like chicken?”
“Everything in a quickie ration,” Captain Carl began, and the rest of us chorused with him, “tastes like chicken!” He suppressed a smile. “I’ll never hear the end of that.”
“Probably not,” Anne said. “Do we have to eat here in the messhall?”
“Where else?”
“Anywhere. I just…” she trailed off, looking around the huge, empty chamber. “I don’t think I want to be in here.”
We all fell silent for a moment, looking around with her, looking at the empty, silence-echoing chamber.
“Shall we move to one of the lounge areas?” Carl asked. Nobody said anything; we all picked up our meals and moved. The lounge areas are much smaller. This one felt almost cozy by comparison. I flumped down in a spring-cushioned reclining chair and bounced a little. Kathy did the same in one across from me and we shared a smile. Captain Carl, Anne, and Julie occupied three of the four sides of a card table.
“How are we doing?” Captain Carl asked, stirring his lunch with a fork. “Anyone?”
“Medical checks out, along with life support,” Anne replied.
“Our recycling plant is in the green,” Julie offered, “but it’s going to need some fiddling.”
Captain Carl put down his fork. “I don’t believe ‘fiddling’ is a proper military term,” he observed. “Care to explain, lieutenant?”
“It’s a rather complicated set of processes, sir.”
“Then dumb it down for me, lieutenant.”
Julie flushed a nice shade of pink. “Well, sir, it’s like this. The waste-processing facilities are designed to handle the output, if I may use the term, of a full complement of five hundred people. It’s a… a constant-flow sort of thing. Waste goes in one end in a constant stream and all sorts of things come out the other. It’s not built to save up a lot of waste, process it, and then be shut down repeatedly.”
“Wasn’t it designed for us to use?” Anne asked.
“Yes and no. For a six-month hitch, we probably won’t even need to fire it up—we’ve got lots of supplies. Once those start to dwindle, though, we’ll have to run it in batches, which is bad. You get buildup of crud in the system when you don’t have a steady stream flowing through it. It’ll mean taking apart some sizable pieces of the processing units and cleaning them out. Every six months? Every year? I don’t know exactly. Like the surgeon said, ‘Let’s operate and find out.’”
Anne shivered. “Please. That’s not a good joke.”
“Sorry.”
“Why didn’t they include a smaller unit?” Carl asked, cutting short the byplay.
Julie snorted. It wasn’t very flattering to her, but I recognized the contempt that prompted it.
“Two reasons. First, there’s a limit to the smallest practical size for such things. Second, this is designed and approved by a government committee. Sir.”
“I see.”
“So what’s the solution?” Kathy asked.
Julie sighed. “We wind up cleaning our toilet every few months. We can’t let buildup in the pipes rupture something when pressure hits.”
“How much time and effort are we talking about?” Carl wanted to know.
“A week, maybe, with everyone pitching in. The residues inside the pipes and tanks will have to be scraped out—and the scrapings saved; they’ll go back through with another batch.”