To my puzzled look, he said, "You have never had to catch flying chicken, have you? Ha!–you didn't know chickens could fly? On Luna, they do. Not very well, but well enough. Very funny to see look of surprise on chicken's face. Have you ever seen wings and breasts with dark meat or drumsticks with white? If you do, that is Lunar chicken. Is exercise of muscles that turns meat dark; chickens fly, wings get dark, legs don't carry as much weight as on Earth, drumsticks stay white. Very strange to see, but delicious, just the same. Oh, they also raise rabbits at HoboCo. They don't fly at all. But they are just as tasty."
HoboCo didn't look like much from the road, just a distant clump of pods and domes, with a few scattered lights here and there. The whole thing was in shadow, of course. This was the place where the sun nevershines–and they meant it. There were solar panels on the nearby ridges.
While we watched, the two largest domes began to glow. Alexei explained that most farm domes were on an accelerated day‑night schedule. Two hours of light, thirty minutes of darkness; this made everything grow faster. There was a lot to learn about Lunar farming.
We rolled on for a while, we passed two other mines, and then the road got rougher, winding its way up the side of a steep crater wall. It was kind of like the access roads carved into the hills north of El Paso–only steeper. The one‑sixth gee of Luna made it possible for the truck to roll up hills that no Earth vehicle could have attempted. Coming down the other side was even more terrifying. The living pod of the Beagle was mounted on a leveling platform, so whenever the wheeled chassis started to angle too steeply, the platform tilted up at the lower end to keep us level inside. For some reason, that only made the ride scarier.
From the heights, especially when we crested a hill, we could see the scattered lights of individual settlements or monitor stations. It reminded me of the time when I was Stinky's age, the first time Dad took us on vacation, and we drove through the Southwest. There were places in New Mexico and Arizona, where there was nothing to see. And at night, when the faraway mountains loomed like walls around the edge of the world, there were distant lights huddled lonely under the vast starlit sky.
It was like that here. Only the stars were harder. They were bright and cold and merciless. And somehow that made them even more distant. The occasional clustered lights of humanity were desperate and desolate. No wind. No air. Back on Earth, the lights had felt like little havens against the night. I'd wanted to knock on the doors and rush into the warmth and hug the people, thank them for being alive. Here, the lights all seemed like signposts for claustrophobic little prisons. All shouting for attention. Here, I am. No, me. Over here. Me. Come see me. But why?Each one was like every other one. A couple of cargo pods and a cluster of inflatables, hiding in perpetual shadow.
There was no romance here. No glamour. Only endless gloom and imported despair, flavored with the perpetual hint of sunlight lurking everywhere. A blazing furnace circled like a hungry demon around and around the shadowed valleys. As the moon turned slowly on its axis, the hills were outlined with neon fire.
The house‑truck reached the crest of the ridge, and it was like coming up out of a deep black sea. Suddenly, the world was blasted by a dazzling sideways glare. Instinctively, I turned my back to the light–I looked out the wide windows to the west. A layer of shadow fell across the bottom half of the landscape, cloaking everything in inky darkness. Down therewas the ice. Up herewas the fire. There was no in‑between.
And then the truck rolled over the crest and dipped back down into shadow again. The roaring sun disappeared behind the rocky horizon, and we were safe in darkness again. "Is great view, da?"asked Alexei. "You will not have trip like this from travel agent. I show you sights no tourist ever sees from the safety of a tourist‑mobile. I give you trip of a lifetime, da?"
I thought about how far we'd come in less than twenty‑four hours. We'd crashed into the moon, bounced across the Lunar plain, climbed a crater wall, nearly baked to death in the endless sunlight … "The only thing we haven't done yet," I said, "is freeze to death."
"I am arranging that now," said Alexei, absolutely deadpan. "We go to my house carved in ice. My own private ice mine. You can freeze to death all you want. No problem."
The road etched its way down the steep side of a hill. I couldn't imagine how a construction crew had bulldozed it into place. Here, the road wasn't much more than a cut across an avalanche‑shaped tumble of rock and rubble. The steep slope to the left loomed aboveus; it scared me almost as much as the dropaway cliff belowus to the right. We were creeping along a narrow shelf of rock so light and powdery, we could feel it shifting skittishly beneath the wheels of the truck.
"Is not to worry," said Alexei. I really did want to hit him then, as hard as I could. "Remember angle of repose is steeper on Luna. We are perfectly safe. Besides, road and slope have both been sprayed with construction foam to hold everything in place. This road carries much traffic, it is still here, eh?"
"Um, Alexei … ?" That was Douglas. "The more traffic on a road, the heavier the load it carries, the sooner it wears out. You should see the pavement in front of the Babylon Hotel in Las Vegas. It's buckled so badly it has ruts. If this road gets as much traffic as you say–"
Alexei cut him off with a hand wave. "Is not to worry, I said. Remember, we are on Luna. If we build to one‑half of Earth standards, we are still three times stronger than we need to be." I would have felt a lot more reassured by his words if the Beagle hadn't chosen that moment to slip uneasily across a patch of loose gravel. Almost like we were skidding on ice.
"Rocks here are sometimes greasy," Alexei explained. "Ice–not like you know it, but black ice in rocks. Makes them clammy and changes friction quotient." Alexei helped himself to another beer, waving it aloft. "I have earned this today. I have always wondered if escape plan would work. Now I know how well I plan. Only now I have to make up new plan. Except I do not think I will ever go back to Line. So maybe I will not need one after all. I do not think I will be much welcome there for a long time, will I, Mikhail?"
Mickey ignored the question. "Alexei, how come we weren't apprehended at Wonderland Jumble? Surely they must have been watching for us. And our disguises weren't that good. The old lady spotted us."
Alexei snorted. "The old lady works for me. She is invisible. I put her on train to watch you. She did lousy job of being invisible, didn't she? She watch you too hard. I am sorry if she unnerved you. She only wanted to protect. But people who should have spotted you weren't looking at all. I cannot understand why. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that all of you were apprehended at Clavius a couple of hours ago."