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.
SAVANNAH
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 river front. 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 neocolonia classicism: muted pastels and geometric patterns. At the toucl 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 tc 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.
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?