MOONBASE
Douglas Stavenger visited Moonbase for the first time on his eighteenth birthday.
His mother had been against it. She would not say why, but Doug knew her reason. His father had died on the Moon before he had been born. It was an accident, as far as Doug knew, a freak accident involving nanomachines that had been improperly programmed.
“That was eighteen years ago,” Doug pleaded with his mother. “And besides, I won’t be using nanobugs. I just want to see Moonbase with my own eyes.”
Joanna offered him a trip around the world, instead. But Doug insisted on Moonbase.
Not that he had quarrelled with his mother. Doug never quarrelled. Since elementary school he had made his smiling way through bullies among the students and the faculty alike, never fighting, never raising his voice, never losing his temper. He seemed to lead a charmed life. Everything came his way, seemingly without his needing to raise even a finger. People wanted to please him.
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 hac always been there. Someday he would find out what it was why his mother add 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 farther 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 Moonbase. Everything except meeting Foster Brennar.
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 Ringwall 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 faculties.
“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 boot prints 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 comer 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 prebreath 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.