Charlie was no dummy. "How often do you get red lights?"
She shrugged. "They're not unheard of."
They put on his helmet and air hissed into the suit. Evelyn did a radio check. "You okay?"
"I'm fine."
"Good." She was pulling on her own helmet. "You'll enjoy it, Mr. Vice President."
The technician led them into an adjoining room where an airlock stood open, waiting to receive them. Charlie followed Evelyn inside and the technician closed the door. Colored lights flashed. "You'll feel a tingle as the air pressure changes," Evelyn said.
He couldn't see her face anymore behind the smoked Plexiglas. "How many times have you been outside?" he asked.
She laughed. "Once or twice."
Charlie assumed she was tweaking him, but a long silence followed. "You're kidding," he said.
"Yeah. I've been out a few times. Not as often as I'd like."
A green lamp came on and the exit door irised open. Charlie looked out at the lunar surface, a broken plain, etched in silver light. The sky was black, but filled with rivers of stars.
She waited, letting him go first.
"It's magnificent," he said. He stepped through the hatch. Out onto the regolith. The illumination, most of it anyway, was coming from Earth, which hung blue and white and very big almost directly overhead.
"It's about forty times brighter than a full Moon," said Evelyn.
The horizon looked close. Had there been natives on Luna, they would have known without any question they lived on a globe.
There were no words. He'd seen the hologees many times, but they were nothing like this.
Evelyn led him out to a rectangular area that had been cordoned off. It was about one hundred by fifty feet. A walkway had been built across it, a few inches above the surface. Here and there he saw footprints, each marked with a small post and a yellow tag. She showed him the names on the tags. They were all familiar, all well known: Sheila Davidson, who had commanded the first return mission to the Moon; Angela Mikel, the first woman to give birth on Luna; Ed Harper, who'd overseen most of the construction efforts. Evelyn pointed to an unbroken piece of ground. "I'd like you to step down onto the regolith," she said.
"Why?"
"You belong here."
"I don't think so."
"If you win in the fall, people will look at your prints centuries from now and remember the first president to walk on the Moon."
"If I lose?"
She smiled. "We'll take down the rope and run a roller over it."
He looked again at Earth, blue and warm and inviting in the black sky. "I can understand," he said, "why people come out here and get religion." And then with a rush of caution: "Can they hear me back inside?"
"Every word, sir," said the technician's voice.
"It's okay," said Evelyn. "Nobody'll quote you."
"Good." As Rick would have reminded him once again, it wouldn't be the first time a spontaneous remark had sunk a candidacy. George Romney had faded after commenting on his return from Southeast Asia that he'd been brainwashed; Teddy Roosevelt had ruled himself out of a second term without stopping to think; and Mary Emerson was on the verge of becoming the first woman president when she told a reporter there were a lot of deadbeats on Medicaid.
He stepped down onto the marked ground, trying to leave clear prints. It was gratifying to imagine people standing on this spot ages from now, pointing out to one another that Charlie Haskell had walked here. First president of the Space Age. It had a nice ring to it.
It occurred to him that Evelyn was probably wondering whether his moonwalk was a political stunt. Something that would appear later in a campaign biography. But there was nothing he could do about that. And Charlie wondered, not for the first time, whether his political career was worth all the hassle. He enjoyed the cut and thrust of politics, he loved winning, and he enjoyed being in a position to make things happen. But there was a price to be paid. He would never again be able to go out to a restaurant or run over to Wal-Mart without attracting a crowd.
A fan in the back of his helmet changed pitch, adjusting to temperature or humidity.
His one major political drawback was that he was a bachelor. The party believed the voters would not be comfortable without a first lady. That notion did not show up in surveys, but it was the common wisdom in a society that had become increasingly concerned about personal morals while only one marriage in six now stayed the course.
The ground was gray and crumbly. The guidebooks maintained the Moon hadn't changed much in three billion years or so. There was no volcanism on Luna, no climate, no wind to move things around. It was a world where nothing ever happened except occasionally it got plunked by a falling rock.
He climbed back up on the walkway and looked around at the flat plain. "I thought Moonbase was inside a crater," he said.
Evelyn was behind him, allowing him an unbroken view. "It is. But the crater's big, and the Moon's small. Alphonsus is a hundred seventeen kilometers across. We're in the center of the crater, and its walls are all below the horizon. But they're there. If you like, we can take a ride over."
"Yes," said Charlie. He studied her for a long moment, wishing he could see her face. "You'd like to do that, wouldn't you?"
She chuckled. "I think you caught me," she said. "But yes. With the vice president's permission, we can turn this into a jaunt."
"By all means," said Charlie. He looked at the horizon. "I wonder if we can see the comet from here."
Evelyn was silent, and the voice of the technician came over the radio. "No, sir, it's not visible from Moonbase."
"Pity," he said.
2.
Beaver Meadow Observatory. 9:30 A.M.
Wesley Feinberg canceled his flight home and stayed on at Beaver Meadow. Hoxon gave him an office and a computer and he got on the circuit with Kitt Peak and NASA and Zelenchukskaya and twenty other institutions. The astronomical community, of course, was fully aroused and scrambling to pin the comet down. Could it be identified with anything in the record? How big was it? Where was it going?
The quick way to get a handle on the object was to track down where it had been, say, in January or February. Then it would become possible to work out a trajectory. It should have been visible in the early part of the year. So it was just a matter of conducting a thorough search.
But as yet there was insufficient data to make even an intelligent guess where it might have appeared in the winter heavens. Feinberg worked methodically, bringing up sections of sky and comparing them against the database, hoping to find an object that did not belong. The images were produced by ACCDs, Advanced Charge-Coupled Devices, mounted on major telescopes around the world and in orbit. The pictures were far sharper than the photos with which he'd worked when he'd begun his career near the end of the last century.
He knew that an army of professionals and talented amateurs were doing the same thing, but he wasn't interested in waiting for someone else's results. Although he'd have denied it, he was a competitor and wanted very much to get there first. He was, after all, less likely to be led astray by every point of light that didn't fit the catalog. But after working through the night, he had nothing. That was understandable. What he did not understand was that no one else had anything either.