“He let himself die in order to protect the base.”
“Yeah.” Doug was surprised at the lump in his throat. “Sol … 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’sthe 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 a 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…”
SAVANNAH
“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.
Misunderstanding her silence, Doug said, “Mom, all my life I’ve heard about my father and Moonbase. I want to carry on in his footsteps. I’ve got to!”
“Your freshman classes start in September.”
“We’ll be back by then. It’s my legacy, Mom! All my life I’ve wanted to get to Moonbase and continue what he started.”
All his life Joanna, thought: All eighteen years of his life.
“It’s the frontier,” he told her Excitedly. “That’s where the action is.”
Joanna countered, “Moonbase is a dreary little cave that’s only barely paying its own way. I’ve come close to shutting it down a dozen times.”
“Shutting it down? You can’t shut it down, Mom! It’s the frontier! It’s the future!”
“It’s a drain on this corporation’s resources.”
Doug started to reply, then hesitated. With a slow smile he said, “Mom, if you won’t allow me to go to Moonbase, I’ll get a job with Yamagata Industries. They—”
“Yamagata!”
“They’re looking for construction workers,” Doug said evenly. “I’ll get to the Japanese base at Copernicus.”
That was when Joanna realized how utterly serious her son was. Behind the boyish enthusiasm was an iron-hard will. Despite his pleasant smiling way, he was just as intent as his father had been.
“Douglas,” she said, “there’s much more at stake here than you understand.”
He jumped to his feet, startling her. Pacing across the office, Doug replied, “Mom, if we can get water from the ice fields down at the south pole we can make Moonbase profitable. We can even sell water to Yamagata and the Europeans.”
“No one’s ever gone to the south pole. It’s mountainous, very dangerous—”
Doug grinned at her. “Come on, Mom. Foster Brennart’s going to head the expedition. Foster Brennart! He’s a living legend. He’s like Daniel Boone and Charles Lindbergh and Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins all wrapped up in one!”