The massive steel hatch for the vehicles was tightly closed; Doug used the smaller personnel airlock set into the rock wall beside it and stepped into the brilliant glare of sunlight. The cracked, pockmarked floor of Alphonsus stretched out before him all the way to the strangely close horizon. The worn, rounded ringwall mountains slumped on both sides like tired old men basking in the sun.
Doug smiled. “Magnificent desolation,” he muttered, remembering Aldrin’s words. But he did not see desolation in this harsh lunar landscape. Doug saw unearthly beauty.
And more.
He paced out across the dusty crater floor, carefully counting his steps, knowing that the safety cameras were watching him. At one hundred paces he stopped and turned back to face the cameras, the airlock hatch, Moonbase.
Off to his left the ground was scoured bare and blasted by rocket exhausts. The expedition’s four ungainly-looking ballistic Jobbers stood on the base’s four landing pads, the most visible mark of human habitation. The base itself was barely discernible. Just a few humps of rubble marked the various airlocks. Most of the base was dug into the mountain wall, of course.
Mt. Yeager. Doug looked up to its summit, gleaming in the sunlight. More than twelve thousand feet to the top, Doug knew. I’ll have to climb it before I go back home.
He turned a full circle, there alone on the crater floor except for the automated tractors patiently scooping up regolith sand and the distant glistening slick of the tiny, invisible nanomachines quietly building new solar cells out of the regolith’s silicon and trace metals.
Doug saw the future.
Where I’m standing will be just about a tenth of the way along the main plaza, Doug said to himself. The plaza floor will be dug in below the surface, of course, but its dome will rise more than a hundred feet over my head. We’ll plant it with grass and trees, get it landscaped with walking lanes through the shrubbery and even a swimming pool.
It’ll be a real city, he thought. With permanent residents and families having babies and everything. We’ll set up a cable car system over Mt. Yeager, out to Mare Nubium. That’ll be easier than trying to tunnel through the mountain, especially in this gravity. We’ll have to move the rocket port further out, but we’ll connect it with tunnels.
For more than two hours Doug paced out the structures he visualized, the city that Moonbase could become. We can do it, he told himself. If I can get Mom to agree…
Then reality intruded on his dream. “Mr. Stavenger, this is security. You’ve been outside for two hours. Unless you have some specific duties to perform, standard regulations require that you return to the airlock.”
Doug nodded inside the helmet of his spacesuit. “Understood,” he said. I’m coming back in.”
But he brought his dream with him.
BRUDNOY
They had disconnected all the life-support tubes and wires. Lana Goodman knew she was dying and she was tired of fighting it. She was nothing but a shell of a creature now, fragile, shrivelled, each breath a labor.
Lev Brudnoy sat at her bedside in Moonbase’s tiny infirmary, his expressive face a picture of grief. Behind him stood Jinny Anson, gripping the back of Brudnoy’s chair with white-knuckled intensity.
“You know the one thing I regret?” Goodman’s voice was a harsh, labored whisper.
Brudnoy, tears in his eyes, shook his head.
“I regret that you never made a pass at me, Lev.”
For once in his life, Brudnoy was stunned into silence.
“You came on to just about every other woman in Moon-base,” Goodman wheezed, “except me.”
Brudnoy gulped once and found his voice, “Lovely woman,” he said softly, “I was too much afraid of being rejected. You have always been so far above me…”
Goodman smiled. “We could have had some times together.”
“Never in my wildest fantasies could I hope that you would be interested in a foolish dog like me,” Brudnoy muttered, letting his head sink low.
“You’re a good old dog, Lev. No fool.”
He spread his hands. “I’m nothing but a peasant I spend all my time in the farm now.”
“I know,” Goodman whispered. “The flowers… they cheered me up.”
“The least I could do.”
“I want you to bury me in your farm,” Goodman said.
“Not return to Earth?”
“This is my home. Bury me here. In the farm. Where what’s left of me can do some good.”
Brudnoy turned toward Jinny Anson. “Is that allowed? Is it legal?”
I’m a witness,” Anson said. “I’ll see that the forms are properly filled out.”
“In the farm.” Goodman’s voice was so faint now that Brudnoy had to bend over her emaciated form to hear her. “Always did believe in ecology. Recycle me.”
Then she sighed and closed her eyes. For a moment Brudnoy thought she had fallen asleep. But then the remote sensors started shrilling their single note.
A doctor appeared at the foot of her bed. Brudnoy struggled to his feet, a big lumbering man, weathered but still handsome, slightly paunchy, his shoulders slumped and his hair graying. There seemed to be new lines in his face every year; every day, he sometimes thought. A ragged gray beard covered his chin.
He felt Anson’s hand on his arm as he shambled out of the infirmary, leaving behind its odor of clean sheets and implacable death.
The tunnel was bright and cheerful, by contrast. People strode by as if nothing had happened on the other side of the infirmary’s doors. Young people, Brudnoy realized. All of them younger than I. Even Jinny.
“Well,” he said, trying to straighten up, “now I’m the oldest resident of Moonbase. I suppose I’ll be the next to go.”
Anson smiled up at him. “Not for another hundred years, at least.”
“At least,” Brudnoy murmured.
“Come on, let me buy you a drink. We could both use some rocket juice.”
“You?” Some of the old playfulness sparkled in Brudnoy’s sky-blue eyes. “You, the base director? You speak of illegal alcoholic drinks?”
Anson grinned wickedly at him. “What kind of a director would I be if I didn’t know about the still? Besides, I won’t be director much longer. My relief is due in another two weeks.”
She led Brudnoy to her own quarters, where she uncovered her stash of ’rocket juice’ a gallon-sized thermos jug she kept under her bunk. She and Brudnoy had shared that bunk more than once; but that was years ago.
Now, as they sat on the springy wire chairs that Anson had made from scrap metal, Brudnoy sipped the homebrew thoughtfully.
“Is it legal?” he asked.
“The booze? Of course not. But as long as people don’t drink during their work shifts, there’s no sense trying to find the still and knock it apart. Damn little else to do for entertainment around here.”
Brudnoy shook his head. “I meant Lana’s request to be buried in the farm.”
Anson said, “As long as I’m in charge here we’ll honor her last request. There’s probably some relatives back Earthside; if they want her they’ll have to get a court order.”
I’ll see to the burial, then,” Brudnoy said.
“How soon?”
I’ll talk with the medical people. Tomorrow, I imagine, would be good enough.”
I’ll be there. I’ll get the word out, a lot of the old-timers will want to come.”
“Old-timers,” Brudnoy echoed. “Yes, that’s what we’ve become.”
Anson quickly changed the subject. “How’s the farm doing?”
“Lunar soil is very rich in nutrients,” Brudnoy said. “What we need is more earthworms and beetles.”
She took a sip of her drink, then replied slowly, “We’ve got to be very careful about introducing any kind of life forms here. That’s why I brought that team of biologists up here. I don’t want any runaway populations of any kind.”
Brudnoy sipped also. “Your biologists spend more time at my little farm than I do.”