Moonrise (24 page)

It wasn’t merely the fact that he was extremely wealthy. Everyone he knew came from wealthy families and most of them were miserably unhappy, absolutely no fun to be with. Like his brother Greg. Half-brother, actually. No matter how hard Doug tried, ever since childhood Greg had been a dark,
sullen shadow across his life. He saw his half-brother only rarely, yet the room chilled when Greg was in it. Doug could feel the tension pulling between his mother and her other son. There seemed to be some deep, dreadful secret between them, a secret that neither of them chose to share with him.

Doug accepted it as a fact of his life, something that had always been there. Someday he would find out what it was, why his mother and half-brother were so guarded and uptight. In the meantime, he had his own life to live.

Doug got along well with almost everyone simply because he thought further ahead than the rest of them, and saw options that no one else considered. He was very bright and very adventurous. He had inherited his father’s compact, solid build and quick reflexes, his mother’s intelligence and endurance.

Captain of his prep school’s fencing team, shortstop on the baseball squad, Doug also discovered the thrills of jetbiking. When his mother objected, he smilingly turned his fancy to rocket-boosted gliders that surfed the stratosphere’s jet streams. He took risks, plenty of them, but only after he had calculated all the odds and convinced himself that the risks were survivable. He knew he sometimes worried his mother, but he did not think he was foolhardy.

Still he did well enough academically to win acceptance by the top universities. His mother chose the University of Vancouver, where Kris Cardenas now headed the nanotechnology department. He accepted her decision, with the proviso that she allow him to visit Moonbase.

“Just for a few days,” he urged. “A weekend, even.”

Reluctantly, she gave in.

Doug had visited Masterson’s factories in Earth orbit. He had experienced zero gravity before. But in preparation for his Moonbase jaunt he spent a week in Houston, at the corporation’s lunar simulator, teaching himself how to walk in one-sixth gee without stumbling and bouncing and making a fool of himself.

He was prepared for everything to be expected at Moon-base. Everything except meeting Foster Brennart.

His visit was something like a command performance. The son of the corporation’s board chairwoman was given a thorough tour of the base.

“Moonbase is built into the flank of the mountainous ring-wall of the crater Alphonsus,” his tour guide recited. She was a sloe-eyed brunette with a soft Savannah accent, an assistant to the base director. Like all the other base personnel, she wore a utilitarian one-piece zippered jumpsuit. The only differences in clothing Doug could see were the color codes that marked the four main departments. Her coveralls were sky blue, for management. So were his.

“The base consists of four parallel tunnels,” she continued as they walked along. “The tunnels have been carved out of the basaltic rock of the ringwall mountain by plasma torches—”

“You didn’t use nanomachines to dig out the tunnels?” Doug asked.

The young woman blinked at him as if coming out of a trance. “Nanomachines? Uh, no … nanobugs are only used out on the crater floor, to harvest hydrogen out of the regolith and, um, to process regolith silicon into solar cells for the energy farms.”

“Then these tunnels were burned out of the mountain by plasma torches? That must’ve been something to see!”

She nodded, frowning slightly as she tried to pick up her interrupted recitation. Once she remembered where she’d been stopped she resumed, “Living quarters, offices, laboratories and work stations have all been carved out of the rock …”

She walked Doug through each of the four tunnels, opening almost every door along the way. Junior technicians and engineers took time off from their normal duties to show him every laboratory, every control station, the intricate plumbing of the plant where water was manufactured out of lunar oxygen and hydrogen, the humming pumps of the environmental control center where oxygen was combined with nitrogen imported from Earth to make breathable air at normal pressure, the hydroponics farm where food crops—mostly rows of soybeans—were grown under precisely controlled conditions, even the waste processing center where precious organic chemicals were extracted from garbage and excrement for recycling.

“When do I go outside?” he asked his guide after several hours of trudging through the underground facilities.

“Outside?” She looked alarmed.

“Yes,” he said pleasantly. “I want to see what it’s like out on the surface.”

It took some doing. Apparently the word had been sent up from Savannah to be especially careful with their young visitor, to take no chances with his safety. But the word had also been to show him whatever he wanted to see and treat him with every courtesy. So his tour guide referred Doug’s request straight to Moonbase’s safety chief and the chief spent fifteen minutes trying to talk Doug out of a surface excursion.

“You can see anything you want to on the monitors at the control center,” the chief said. He looked quite old to Doug, a little gray mouse of a man who had once been a little dark mouse of an astronaut.

“I could do that back on Earth,” Doug replied gently, standing relaxed in front of the safety chiefs desk. “I’ve come a quarter of a million miles; I don’t want to go back home without putting my bootprints on the lunar surface.”

Wishing that the kid would go away, or at least sit down like a normal person, the chief answered, “Oh. I see.” He ran a hand through his thinning, close-cropped iron gray hair and took a deep sighing breath. At last he said, “Well, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to let you walk around a bit on the crater floor.”

Doug broke into a pleased grin.

“With somebody escorting you, of course,” added the chief.

The safety chief personally led Doug out to the garage where the tractors were housed and maintained. It looked like a big cave to Doug, which is what it had once been. The garage was fairly quiet; most of the tractors were out on the surface, working. Only off in a far corner was there a knot of technicians tinkering with a pair of the spindly-wheeled machines.

“That’s the main airlock.” The chief pointed to a massive steel hatch, big enough to drive a fully-loaded tractor through. Off to one side Doug saw a row of spacesuits hanging on a rack, with a row of gas cylinders standing behind a long bench. Somehow the bench didn’t look strong enough to support a man’s weight; its legs were frail and spaced too far
apart. Then Doug grinned to himself and realized that a two-hundred-pound man weighed only thirty-four pounds here.

They selected a spacesuit for Doug from the rack of suits waiting empty by the airlock. Although all the suits were white, they looked grimy and hard-used, their helmets scratched and pitted. It took an hour for Doug to suit up and then prebreathe the low-pressure mix of oxygen and nitrogen that the suits used. The safety chief explained the need for prebreathing in minute detail, eloquently describing the horrors of the bends, despite Doug’s telling him that he understood the situation.

A taller figure already suited up clumped toward them in thick-soled boots. His visor was up, so Doug could see the man’s’ face and piercing electric blue eyes. His spacesuit looked brand new, sparkling white with red stripes down the sleeves and legs, like a baseball uniform.

“Oh, Foster, there you are,” said the chief. “This is Douglas Stavenger.”

With the breathing mask still clamped over his lower face, Doug got up from the bench where he’d been sitting and extended his gloved hand. The spacesuited man was almost a full head taller than he.

“Foster Brennart,” he said, in a surprisingly high tenor voice. Then he turned to the safety chief. “Okay, Billy, I’ll take it from here.”

Foster Brennart! thought Doug. The greatest astronaut of them all! The first man to traverse Mare Nubium in a tractor; leader of the first mission across the rugged uplands to visit Apollo 11’s Tranquility Base; the man who rescued the European team that had gotten itself stranded inside the giant crater Copernicus.

“I’m pleased to meet you,” Doug managed to say from inside his breathing mask. It was like saying hello to a legend. Or a god.

Brennart shook Doug’s hand without smiling, then reached behind the bench to take one of the breathing masks resting atop the gas cylinders and held it to his face.

“It’s okay, Billy,” he said to the chief through the mask. “I’ll take him out as soon as we’re done prebreathing. You can go back to your office now.”

The little man nodded. “Right. See you in an hour or so.”

Doug realized it was the chiefs way of telling Brennart to make their surface excursion a short one.

“Or so,” said Brennart casually.

As the safety chief walked hurriedly toward the hatch that led back to the offices and living quarters, Brennart asked Doug, “How much longer do you have to go?”

Feeling confused, Doug asked, “Go where?”

“Prebreathing.”

“Oh!” Glancing at the watch set into the panel on his suit’s left forearm, Doug said, “Twelve minutes.”

Brennart nodded inside his helmet. “That ought to be enough for me, too.”

“Only twelve minutes?”

“I’ve been outside all day, kid. There’s not enough nitrogen in my blood to pump up a toy balloon.”

The time crawled by in silence with Doug wanting to ask a half-million questions and Brennart standing over him, holding the plastic breathing mask to his face, sucking in deep, impatient breaths.

At last Doug’s watch chimed. Brennart pulled his mask away and slid his visor down, then helped Doug to take off his mask and fasten his visor shut.

“Radio check,” Doug heard in his helmet earphones. He nodded, then realized that Brennart couldn’t see it behind the heavily tinted visor.

“I hear you loud and clear,” Doug said.

“Ditto,” said Brennart. Then he took Doug by the shoulder and turned him toward the personnel hatch set into the main airlock. “Let’s go outside,” he said.

Doug’s heart was racing so hard he worried that Brennart could hear it over the suit-to-suit radio.

The years had been kind to Joanna Masterson Stavenger. Eighteen years older, she still was a handsome, vibrant woman. Her hair had always been ash blonde, she joked, so the gray that came with chairing the board of directors of Masterson Aerospace Corporation hardly even showed. She had put on a few pounds, she had undergone a couple of tucks of cosmetic surgery, but otherwise she was as lithe and beautiful as she had been eighteen years earlier.

“I’m not ready for nanotherapy yet,” she often quipped, even when assured that exclusive spas in Switzerland were quietly using specialized nanomachines that could scrub plaque from her arteries and tighten sagging muscles without surgery. Such therapy was impossible almost anywhere else on Earth; public fear of nanomachines had led to strict government regulation.

Yet she remained close to Kris Cardenas, even after the former head of Masterson’s nanotech division had left the corporation in frustration at the red tape imposed by ignorant bureaucrats and the increasingly violent public demonstrations against nanotechnology. Cardenas had accepted an endowed chair at Vancouver and from there won her Nobel Prize.

Joanna’s office had changed much more than she in the eighteen years since she had become Masterson Aerospace’s board chairperson.

There was no desk, no computer, no display screen in sight. The office was furnished like a comfortable sitting room, with small Sheraton sofas and delicate armchairs grouped around Joanna’s reclinable easy chair of soft caramel brown. The windows in the corner looked out on the shops and piers of Savannah’s riverfront. The pictures on the walls
were a mix of ultramodern abstracts and photographs of Clipperships and astronomical scenes.

At the moment, the room’s decor was a cool neocolonial classicism: muted pastels and geometric patterns. At the touch of a button the hologram systems behind the walls could switch to bolder Caribbean colors or any of a half-dozen other decoration schemes stored in their computer memory. The pictures could be changed to any of hundreds catalogued in electronic storage, or be transformed into display screens. Even the room’s scent could be varied from piney forest to springtime flowers to salt sea tang, at Joanna’s whim.

Sitting comfortably in her chair, Joanna could be in touch with any part of the Masterson corporation, anywhere in the world or beyond.

But her mind was on her sons. Greg was getting along well enough, running the corporation’s Pacific division out in the island nation of Kiribati. It wasn’t exile so much as one more test to see if he really could function, really could build a halfway normal life for himself. So far, Greg was doing fine. But she always found herself using that term
so far
wherever Greg was concerned.

It was her younger son, Douglas, who worried her. Joanna realized that Doug was at the age where he sought a quest, a way of proving his manhood. Naturally enough, he looked to the Moon.

An adventurous eighteen-year-old never thinks that pain or injury or death can reach him. When she found that he was planning to jetbike all the way to Seattle she absolutely forbade it.

“Come on, Mom,” Doug replied with his father’s winning smile. “I’ll be all right. What can happen to me?”

During his first visit to Vancouver she learned that he had taken part in a power surfing jaunt to Victoria. “What could have happened to me?” he asked when she phoned, appalled at the risks he blithely took on.

She hoped that attending the university, under Cardenas’s tutelage, would calm Doug down. Lately he had taken to flying rocket-boosted soarplanes. “Riding the jet stream!” he chirped happily, all eagerness and enthusiasm. “What a blast!”

And now he was at Moonbase, celebrating his eighteenth birthday a quarter-million miles from home. From her.

How like his father Doug was, she thought. The same burning drive, the same restless urge to break new ground, to push the edges of the envelope. He had his father’s radiant smile and quick wit. His skin was lighter than Paul’s had been: a smooth olive complexion, with blue eyes that sparkled youthfully.