He had spent an hour in the main airlock, big enough to accommodate full-sized tractors and dozens of people, prebreathing the oxygen-nitrogen mixture that they would be using throughout the expedition. Moonbase ran on ’normal’ air: almost eighty percent nitrogen and twenty oxygen, with traces of carbon dioxide and water vapor, all at 14.7 pounds per square inch, almost exactly like the clean dry atmosphere of a desert region on Earth. The surface suits still worked at five psi, with a 72/28 ratio of oxygen to nitrogen.
Moonbase safety regulations called for prebreathing the spacesuit mix for an hour before going outside, to get the excess nitrogen out of the blood stream and prevent the bends.
Now, strapped into the bare metal seat in the ballistic lobber, his suit buttoned up tight, Doug felt weird as the rocket engines blasted them off the floor of Alphonsus in almost total silence.
The lobbers were modified versions of the transfer spacecraft that shuttled passengers and freight from Earth orbit to the Moon. There was nothing aerodynamic about them, since they never flew in an atmosphere. They were utilitarian assemblies of silvered tankage, rocket engines, bulky cargo containers, pressurized personnel pods, and spindly legs that jutted out from the four corners of the spacecraft’s main platform.
Doug felt the rockets’ vibration through the metal frame of the vehicle; it was almost sound, like a thunder so distant and faint you wonder if you’ve heard anything at all. The spacecraft rose quickly enough; Doug could see through the transparent bubble of the passenger pod the slumped mountains of the ringwall whiz past and then nothing but the darkness of space. But there was hardly any palpable acceleration, none of the heavy forces that pushed you down in your seat when you lifted off from Earth.
And then all sense of thrust disappeared. The vibration ceased, too. Engines have cut off, Doug knew. We’re coasting on a ballistic trajectory now, like an artillery shell.
His suit helmet cut off his view of Bianca Rhee, sitting beside him. There were four others crowded into the plastiglass bubble of a passenger module, plus Brennart and Killifer up in the cockpit module. The eight other expedition members were in the second lobber. The other two rocket vehicles carried only cargo; unmanned, they were guided remotely.
“How do you like it?” he asked Bianca.
Her voice in his helmet earphones sounded strained. “If I could walk, I’d do it.”
Doug laughed. “This is a lot easier than walking. And safer.”
“It’s the free-fall,” said Bianca. “Makes my stomach want to turn inside out.”
“Well, try to relax. We’ll be back on the ground in about half an hour.”
“Can’t be too soon.”
The spacecraft tilted forward a few degrees, enough so that they could look down at the cratered mountains sliding below them, dwindling as the lobber headed for the peak of its ballistic trajectory. Bianca groaned aloud.
“Isn’t that Tycho?” Doug said, tapping a gloved finger against the plastiglass canopy. “Over there, near the horizon.”
The crater was unmistakable: big and sharp, with bright rays of debris streaking out of it for hundreds of miles. One of the newest big craters on the Moon, Doug said to himself. Not even a billion years old.
“Tycho,” Bianca said, awed. “Wow, I’ve never seen it so close.”
“It’ beautiful, isn’t it?” said Doug.
“Sure is.”
She leaned over until her helmet visor was touching the canopy’s plastiglass. Doug knew that Tycho marked the midpoint of their half-hour flight. He hoped it would keep Bianca fascinated long enough to make her forget about barfing.
Foster Brennart sat up in the Jobber’s cockpit, a separate and smaller bubble that projected out to one side of the lobber. Jack Killifer was in the co-pilot’s seat. Panels of instruments and controls surrounded them at waist height. Above the panel the bubble was clear plastiglass.
Killifer took a wire from one of the pouches in his spacesuit’s belt, plugged it into an access port in the side of his helmet, then plugged the other end into the similar port in Brennart’s helmet. Now they could talk to one another without using their suit radios, which might be overheard.
“Smooth liftoff,” Killifer said.
If Brennart was flattered by the praise, his tone failed to show it. “Check the other craft, see how their takeoffs went.”
“Right”
Killifer dutifully called the second ballistic craft as he checked the instrument readouts for the two unmanned vehicles.
“No problems. Just like four tennis balls,” Killifer said to the expedition commander.
“Tennis balls?” Brennart sounded puzzled.
“That’s where the term Lobber comes from, Foster. These ballistic birds go like a tennis ball that’s been lobbed up in the air.” He gestured with his gloved hand. “Up, up, up, and then down, down, down.”
Brennart was silent for a few moments. “Never played tennis,” he said at last. “Never had the time.”
“I used to, a little,” said Killifer. “Back when I was in California.”
The memory ached in his gut. Nanotechnology had not expanded much in the eighteen years since he’d been forced out of the field. Still, he told himself, I could’ ve been an executive, a rich man, a leader in the field. I could have taken Cardenas’ spot when she left the corporation. Instead, here I am, a quarter-million miles from anything worthwhile, second-in-command on a loony expedition to the ass end of nowhere. With Joanna Stavenger’s son stuck into the pecking order ahead of me.
Deftly, Brennart fired the attitude control jets, just a slight puff to tilt the craft enough so they could see the ground sliding by far below them. Rugged mountains, peppered with craters.
“No one’s ever set foot on that territory,” Brennart said. “Not yet.”
Killifer grunted. He was still thinking about his younger days in California.
“We’ve only begun to explore the Moon. There’s a whole world waiting for us to put our bootprints on it,” said Brennart.
Killifer smiled inside his helmet. “Wasn’t this expedition your idea?”
“It certainly was,” Brennart answered immediately. “It took the better part of two years to convince Mrs. Stavenger to let us go. It wasn’t until I showed her that Yamagata’s preparing an expedition that she finally gave her okay.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Brennart turned toward him. In the spacesuit it required him to move from the waist, torso and shoulders, so he could look at his second-in-command. What he saw was the reflection of his own helmet in Killifer’s visor.
“You know how hard I worked to convince her. Of course this expedition is my idea. Who else’s?”
“Nobody,” Killifer replied. “Only…”
“Only what?”
“Why’d she send her kid along?”
“Douglas?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s like a kid with a new toy, all excited about being on the Moon and working with me,” Brennart said happily.
“Oh,” said Killifer. “Yeah.”
It only took a couple of seconds for Brennart to ask, “Why, are you worried about the kid?”
“Not about him.” Killifer put just the slightest stress on the word him.
“Who, then?”
“Aw, nobody. Forget it. I’m just being a geek.”
“What do you mean?” Brennart insisted. “What’s eating you?”
“It’s just that — well, do you think the Stavenger woman would send her son up here just to do a job that any brain-dead clerk could do?”
Brennart did not answer for a while. Then, “Why else?”
Killifer took a breath, then, with apparent reluctance, he answered, “Well… maybe, I don’t know…”
“What?” Brennart demanded.
“Maybe she wants him to get the credit for your work. Her son, I mean.”
“Get the credit?”
“Once we’ve established legal priority and we set up the power tower and everything,” Killifer said in a rush, ’he’ll get all the credit with the board of directors. And the news media. You do the work but he’ll be the hero.”