«It wrecked my marriage. My kids are total strangers to me now. I don’t even have any friends down here anymore.»
«I’m… sorry.»
«Stuff it.»
«Listen…» The Senator licked his thin lips. «I… I’ve been thinking… maybe I won’t run for re-election next time around. Maybe… maybe I’ll come up and see what it’s like living up there for a while.»
Don stared at him for a long, hard moment. And saw that there was a single light-brown spot about the size of a dime on the back of one of the Senator’s hands.
«You want to live in the space station?»
Petty tried to make a nonchalant shrug. «I’ve… been thinking about it.»
«Afraid of old age?» Don asked coldly. «Or is it something more specific?»
Petty’s face went gray. «Heart,» he said. «The doctors tell me I’ll be in real trouble in another few years. Thanks to the technology you guys have developed, they can spot it coming that far in advance now.»
Don wanted to laugh. Instead, he said, «If that’s the case, you’d better spend your last year or two in the Senate pushing through enough funding to enlarge the living quarters in the space station.»
Petty nodded. Grimly.
«And you should introduce a resolution,» Don added, «to give the station an official name: the Senator Robert E. Buford Space Center.»
«Now that’s too much!»
Don grinned at him. «Tell it to your doctors.»
There was no reason for him to stay on Earth. Too many memories. Too few friends. He felt better in orbit. Even in the living sections of the Buford Space Center, where the spin-induced gee forces were close to Earth-normal gravity, Don felt more alive and happier. His friends were there, and so was his work.
Don had been wrong to think that his job was finished once the space station was officially opened. In reality, his work had merely begun.
A year after the station was officially opened, von Kluge came aboard as a retiree. His secretary, Alma Tucker, still lithe and wonderful despite the added years, came up to work for Don. They were married, a year later. Among the witnesses was Senator Petty, the latest permanent arrival.
The Buford Space Center grew and grew and grew. Its official name was forgotten after a few decades. It was known everywhere as Sky City.
Sky City became the commercial hub of the thriving space industries that reached out across the solar system. Sky City’s biomedical labs became system-famous as they took the lead in producing cures for the various genetic diseases known collectively as cancer.
Ex-Senator Petty organized the first zero-gee Olympics, and participated personally in the Sky City-Tranquility Base yacht race.
Von Kluge, restless with retirement, became an industrial magnate and acquired huge holdings in the asteroid belt: a Junker land baron at last.
Alma Tucker Arnold became a mother—and a prominent low-gravity ballerina.
Don stayed in administration and eventually became the first mayor of Sky City. The election was held on his ninety-ninth birthday, and he celebrated it by leading a bicycle race all around the city’s perimeter.
The next morning, his first official act as mayor was to order the thawing of Senator Buford. The two of them spent their declining centuries in fast friendship.
MOON RACE
It matters not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.
Yeah, maybe.
«Moon Race» is set on the Moon, at a time when that airless, barren little world is the frontier of human expansion beyond Earth.
It’s a hard and dangerous frontier. As one insightful man once put it, «Pioneering boils down to inventing new ways to get yourself killed.»
But even on the most arduous and demanding of frontiers, the human spirit will invent new forms of entertainment, too. No human community has ever been all work and no play.
Each form of entertainment has its own particular rules. Breaking the rules, even bending them, can get a player disqualified.
It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose? The hell it doesn’t!
John Henry said to his Captain,
«A man ain’t nothin’ but a man,
And before I’ll let your steam drill beat me down
I’ll die with this hammer in my hand, Lord, Lord
I’ll die with this hammer in my hand.»
Usually, gazing out across the crater floor to the weary old ringwall mountains with the big, blue, beautiful Earth hanging in the black sky above—usually it fills my heart with peace and calm.
But not today.
My palms are sweaty while I wait for the «go» signal. There are six of us lined up in our lunar buggies, ready to race out to the old Ranger 9 site and back again to Selene’s main airlock. Two hundred and some kilometers, round trip. If I follow the path the race officials have laid out.
I’m sitting at the controls of a five-meter-tall, six-legged lunar vehicle that we’ve nicknamed Stomper. We designed it to haul freight and carry cargo over rough ground, not for racing. The five other racers are also converted from working lunar vehicles, but they’re either wheeled or tracked: they can zip along at speeds up to thirty klicks per hour, if you push them.
I’ve got to win this race or get sent back to dirty, dangerous, overcrowded Earth.
See, Harry Walker and I started this design company, Walker’s Walkers, while I was still his student at Selene University. Put every penny we had into it. Now we’ve built our prototype, Stomper, and we’ve got to prove to everybody that a legged vehicle can work out on the Moon’s surface as well or better than anything with wheels or tracks.
So we entered the race. Harry’s a paraplegic. If we win, he’ll be able to afford stem cell therapy to rebuild his legs. If we don’t win, Walker’s Walkers goes bust, he stays in his wheelchair, and I get sent back Earthside. It’s Selene’s one hard rule: if you don’t have a job, you get shipped out. You either contribute to Selene’s economy or you’re gone, man, gone. There’s no room for freeloaders. No charity. No mercy.
The light on my control board flashes green and I push Stomper’s throttle forward carefully. We’re off with a lurch and a bump.
Stomper’s six legs start thumping along as I edge the throttle higher. But Zeke Browkowski zips out ahead of the rest of the pack, just like I figured he would.
«So long, slowpokes,» he sings out as he pulls farther in front. «Hey, Taylor,» he calls to me, «why don’t you get out and push?» I can hear him laughing in my headphones.
Zeke’s in Dash-nine, the newest buggy in Selene, of course. His older brother runs the maintenance section and makes certain he does well by Zeke.
Even though Stomper’s cabin is pressurized, I’m suited up, helmet and all. It’s uncomfortable, but if I have to go outside for emergency maintenance during the race I won’t have to take the time to pull on the cumbersome suit.
Selene City is built into the base of Mount Yeager, the tallest mountain in the ringwall of the giant crater Alphonsus. Two-thirds of the way across the crater floor lie the remains of Ranger 9, one of the early unmanned probes from back in the days before Armstrong and Aldrin landed over in the Sea of Tranquility.
There’s been some talk about expanding Selene beyond Alphonsus’s ringwall, going out onto the Mare Nubium and even farther. But so far it’s only talk. Selene is restricted to Alphonsus, for now.
I figure the run out to the Ranger 9 site and back to Selene’s main airlock should take on the order of ten hours. Zeke Browkowski will try to make it faster, of course. Knowing him, I’ll bet he’s souped up Dash-nine with extra fuel cells, even though that’s against the race rules.