Moonrise (25 page)

Paul must have been just like that at eighteen, Joanna realized: impatient to prove himself. Willing to take on risks because he doesn’t think for an instant that he could be harmed. The impervious confidence of youth.

And now he’s on the Moon, just as Paul was. Why? she asked herself. What is it about that harsh unforgiving country that draws men like that?

Joanna had never told Doug all the details of his father’s death. Nor anyone else. As she pictured her younger son’s eagerly beaming face, she wondered again if she had been right to keep the truth from him.

The outer airlock hatch swung open at last and Doug stepped out onto another world.

He forgot about the pounding of his heart, forgot about Foster Brennart standing beside him, forgot about everything except the eerie grandeur that now stretched before his hungry eyes.

He forgot about making bootprints in the lunar dust. If Brennart said anything, he didn’t hear it. If he himself spoke, or made any sound at all, he was unaware of it. His whole being filled with the vision of the lunar landscape: stark, somber, silent. The ground before him was flat, pockmarked with little craters, glaring brightly in the unfiltered light of the Sun. The mountains that marched off to the sudden horizon on either side of him looked somehow soft, rounded, old and tired. Easy to climb, Doug thought. Their folds and slopes
made shadows that were impenetrably dark, utter blackness side-by-side with the bright glitter of their sunlit flanks.

The horizon was sharp as a knife edge, cutting off the world where it met the infinity of space. Gray and black, Doug saw. The Moon was a hundred shades of gray, from gleaming bright almost-white to the somber charcoal of the pitted ground beneath his booted feet. And black, shadows darker than the deepest pits of Earth, and the even blacker expanse of endless space. An uncompromising world, Doug thought: brilliantly bright in sunlight, or unconditionally dark in shadow, sharp and clear as the choice between good and evil.

The only touches of color Doug could see were the Day-Glo-painted tractors working silently at their tasks: bulldozers scraping up the regolith, backhoes piling the dirt into waiting trucks, which carried it to a small manmade hill. That’s where the nanomachines extract oxygen and hydrogen from the regolith, Doug told himself. On Earth they’d be roaring and grunting, their gears would be grinding away. Here on the Moon they do their jobs in perfect silence.

It’s quiet here, he thought. Peaceful. A man can hear himself think.

He turned and looked out toward the horizon once again, framed by the curving ringwall mountains and dimpled almost exactly in its middle by the tips of the crater’s central peaks, barely visible above the slash that separated sunlit ground from the endless void of space. Doug strained his eyes, but couldn’t see any stars at all.

“I thought there’d be stars even in the daytime,” he said.

“Slide up your outer visor,” Brennart told him, “but be careful not to look at the Sun.”

Doug did it, yet the sky remained dark and empty.

“Cup your hands around your eyes. Cut off the ground glare.”

Doug pressed his cupped hands to his visor, but nothing changed.

“Give it a few seconds …”

And there they were! Stars appeared out of the darkness, not merely the pinpoints of light that Doug was accustomed to, but swarms of stars, oceans of stars, stars strewn so thickly across the heavens that the darkness was banished. Doug
tottered as he stared out at the universe, felt himself getting dizzy.

“When I behold your heavens, O Lord,” he whispered, “the work of your fingers …”

“I know that one,” Brennart said. “Some psalm from the Bible, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Doug said.

“You’re Paul Stavenger’s son, aren’t you?”

“You knew my father?”

“Knew him?” Brennart laughed, a high-pitched giggle.

“Like the man says, we were practically hatched from the same egg. The times we had up here! And back Earthside!”

“What was he like?” Doug asked.

“You look a lot like him,” said Brennart. “Come on, I want to show you something.” And he took off in long, loping, low-gravity strides across the crater floor.

As Doug followed him, the two of them galloping along like a pair of tailless kangaroos, Brennart began happily relating tales of the days when he and Paul Stavenger and a handful of others were digging the first temporary shelters of Moonbase.

“Would you believe old Billy-boy was one of us, then? A real hell-raiser, too.”

“The safety chief?” Doug guessed.

“Yep. He changed an awful lot once they put him behind a desk. You’re never going to see
me
vegetate like that!”

They were skirting the edge of the solar energy farms now, where the ground gleamed with acre after acre of glassy solar cells. Along the far edge of the glittering field Doug could see a dark oily film; it looked alien, out of place, almost hostile. Nanomachines, he realized, working ceaselessly to convert lunar regolith into more solar cells.

“Up there …” Brennart was puffing; Doug could hear his labored breathing in his earphones.

Up ahead was a machine of some sort: a big, boxy, heavy metal contraption resting on what looked like caterpillar treads. It had once been painted white, Doug saw, but now it was streaked with smears of dusty dead gray.

“What is it?”

Brennart slowed to a walk as they approached the abandoned machine. He seemed to twist inside his suit, adjusting
the bulky life-support pack on his back. “Damned LSPs never stay in place like they should,” he muttered.

“What is this thing?” Doug asked again. Now that they were close enough to touch it, he saw that the machine was really massive, taller than even Brennart himself.

“This poor dumb beast,” said Brennart, “is what we used in the old days to make the solar farms, before we had nano-machines to do the work.”

“It must weigh fifty tons,” Doug said.

“Forty-two, on Earth.”

“That’s a lot to lift.”

“Yep. The nanobugs are a lot better. But once upon a time, my boy, this beast was the height of modern technology. A teleoperated, self-sufficient, solar-powered mechanical cow. Grazed on the regolith. Took in silicon, aluminum, et cetera in its front end, digested them and put them together, and shat solar cells out its backside.”

“And that’s how the first solar energy farms were made.”

“More or less. Damned dumb beasts kept breaking down, of course. Nobody knew how bad a problem the dust was, back then. We spent more time repairing these stupid cows than anything else.”

“Out here in the open?”

“Sure. Didn’t make any sense to trundle ’em all the way back to one of the tempos. Anyway, we didn’t have a garage in those days, so we’d have to work in the open one way or the other.”

“What about the radiation?”

“That’s why we’re all prematurely gray,” Brennart said.

“Even your dad, although on him it looked good. He was a handsome devil. The women flocked around him.”

“Really?” Doug had never heard that before.

“I could tell you stories …” Brennart broke into a low chuckle.

“What happened to the other cows?” Doug asked.

“Scrapped them. We left this one out here and converted it into an emergency shelter.”

Doug turned, frowning, and saw that the airlock in the ringwall mountains was hardly a half-mile away.

“We also use it for other purposes,” Brennart added, before
Doug could ask. “It’s fitted out with a double bunk inside and certain other, ah … amenities.”

Doug saw that someone had scrawled in luminescent red just above the machine’s hatch:
If this van’s rocking, don’t come knocking
.

“Oh!” he said, with sudden understanding. “This is the Moonbase Motel.”

Brennart guffawed. “Pree-cisely!”

He started walking again, out at an angle away from the carcass of the mechanical cow and the glittering solar farms.

“So what’re you doing up here, kid? Why’d you come to Moonbase?”

Doug almost shrugged, but the spacesuit made it too difficult. “I wanted to see it firsthand. All my life I’ve heard about Moonbase, and how my father worked to make it viable. He died here.”

“He let himself die in order to protect the base.”

“Yeah.” Doug was surprised at the lump in his throat. “So … I had to see the place.”

“Now that you’ve seen it, what do you think?”

“The inside’s a lot smaller than I thought it’d be,” Doug replied. “But the outside …” He stretched his arms out to the horizon. “This is—well, it’s terrific!”

“You like it out here, do you?”

“It’s like all my life I’ve waited to get here and now that I’m here, I’m home.”

For a moment Brennart did not reply. Then, “Are you running away from something, son, or running toward something?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you running away from your father’s ghost, or maybe trying to get away from your mother? Is that why you came here?”

Doug thought it over. “No, I don’t think it’s that.”

“Then what?”

He hesitated another moment, sorting out his feelings. “All my life I’ve heard about my father and Moonbase. Now that I’m here, I can see what he saw, I can understand why he’d give his life for it.”

“Why?”

Looking around at the barren landscape one more time,
Doug answered simply, “This is the future. My future. Our future. The whole human race. This is the frontier. This is where we grow.”

He could sense Brennart nodding approvingly inside his helmet. “That’s exactly how your dad felt.”

“This is where we grow,” Doug repeated, convinced of the truth of it.

Brennart said, “Now let me tell you about something even more exciting.”

“What?”

“The most valuable real estate on the Moon—in the whole solar system, in fact. It’s down by the south pole …”

They walked side by side farther out into the giant crater’s floor, out toward the area where sinuous rilles cracked the surface, Brennart talking nonstop.

“There’s a mountain down there that’s in sunlight all the time, twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year.”

“
That’s
the place for a solar farm!” Doug said excitedly.

“And there’s fields of ice down in the valleys between the mountains,” Brennart went on. “Water ice.”

Doug’s breath caught. He calmed himself, then asked, “That’s been confirmed?”

“It’s top secret corporate information, but, yes, it’s been confirmed.”

“Then we could—”

“Look out!”

Doug felt Brennart clutch at his shoulders and yank him backwards from the edge of the rille he was about to step over. As the two men staggered backward several steps Doug could see that the rille—a snaking crack in the ground—was crumbling along its edge, just where he was about to plant his boot.

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” Brennart muttered.

“What’s happening?”

“I’m not sure, it might— Look!”

Thousands of fireflies seemed to burst upward, out of the rille. Glittering coldly blue and bright green, the cloud of glistening light expanded in the sunlight, twinkling, gleaming, filling Doug’s vision with ghostly light. He was surrounded by the sparkling lights; it was like being inside a starry nebula or a heaven filled with angels.

Doug saw nothing but the lights, heard nothing but his own gasping breath. Tears filled his eyes.

“An eruption,” he heard Brennart say, his voice filled with awe.

“What is it?” Doug managed to whisper.

“Ammonia, methane. From down below. It seeps up through the rilles every now and then. Someday we’ll mine the stuff.”

The cloud grew and grew, enveloping them in its flickering light. Then it dissipated. As quickly as it had arisen it disappeared, wafted away into nothingness. The landscape went back to its dead grays and blacks.

“I’ve been coming up here more than twenty years,” said Brennart, his voice hollow, “and I’ve never seen an eruption before.”

Doug could not reply. He was thinking that it was an omen, a sign. My welcome to the Moon, he said to himself.

“You must lead a charmed life, kid.”

“It was … beautiful,” Doug said lamely.

“That it was. It certainly was.”

For long moments they stood in silence, each secretly hoping that another seepage of gas would envelope them in the colorful fireflies once again.

“I hope the monitoring cameras caught that,” Brennart said at last. “The science people’ll want spectra and all that.”

“The cameras run all the time?”

“Right.”

At last Doug gave it up. There would be no more. Strange, he thought, how sudden elation can give way to disappointment so quickly.

“Guess we should start back to the base,” Brennart said. He sounded dismayed, too.

“Tell me more about this south pole business,” Doug said, as much to cheer their conversation as any other reason.

“We’ve got to claim that territory,” Brennart said, his tone brightening immediately. “I want to lead an expedition down there and …”

“There’s ice down there at the pole!” Doug said, brimming with enthusiasm. “Water ice! Mr. Brennart wants to lead an expedition there and claim it for us.”

“I’ve seen his proposals,” Joanna said, feeling weary at her son’s insistence. She leaned back in her reclining chair. “Brennart’s deluged me with video presentations, reports, survey data.”

“I want to go with him,” Doug said.

Joanna had known he would. Of course he would. That was why she had hesitated, ever since her son had returned from his brief visit to Moonbase, bubbling with excitement about joining Brennart and trekking off to the south lunar pole. Now he sat in her office, facing her, burning with enthusiasm, hardly able to sit still as they waited for Brennart to show up. She saw Paul’s features in her son’s face, Paul’s boundless energy and drive. And she remembered that Paul had died on the Moon.

Brennart’s proposed expedition to the lunar south pole had worked its way up through the corporate chain of command and now sat on Joanna’s desk. She could approve it or kill it. She knew that if she approved it, her son would stop at nothing to be included in the mission.