Ben Bova - Moonwar

I’m out on the surface of the Moon! she exulted. Her first time, with Captain Munasinghe and the Peacekeepers, she’d been too busy recording her story to appreciate the scenery. Now she looked about and saw nothing but stark desolation. Dusty flat ground, cracked here and there. Rocks of all sizes, from pebbles to boulders. Craterlets, too, as if children had been digging into the ground with sticks and shovels.

Off to one side was the deep pit that would one day be the grand plaza of the Moonbase that Doug envisioned. Maybe, she thought. If we can keep Yamagata from taking over.

It all looked about as romantic as a slag heap to her, yet Doug loved it.

“It’s kind of dark right now,” Doug said. “Nothing up there except a crescent Earth. When it’s full, or even gibbous, it’s a lot brighter.”

“I can’t even see—what’s that?”

A big round thing was sitting on the ground off to their right, like a giant beach ball the size of their tractor. Peering at it, Edith saw that it was not solid, but built of some kind of wire mesh. And it seemed to be resting on a curved metal track laid across the ground.

Doug laughed. “That’s the laundry.”

“Laundry?”

“Sure. Dirt dries almost immediately in vacuum and detaches from fabric while the ultraviolet from the sun kills germs. We pack the dirty laundry in there when the sun’s up and roll the sphere back and forth along the track for an hour or so. Clothes come out clean and sanitized.”

“My clothes have been cleaned in there?”

“Yep.”

“How do you iron them?”

“The old-fashioned way,” Doug answered. “With automated ironing machines that use waste heat from the base’s living quarters and machinery.”

Edith shook her head inside her helmet. Her clothes seemed clean enough when she got them back from the laundry, but rolling them around out here…?

“I’m switching to the base’s standard comm frequency,” Doug told her. “First keypad on your comm set.”

It took Edith a few moments to remember which row of pads on the wrist of her suit was the comm set. In the dim lighting, little more than the glow from the tractor’s dashboard instruments, she figured it out after a few moments.

“…yes, I’m outside with Edith,” Doug was saying.

“Are you crazy?” Jinny Anson’s voice snapped. “What the blazes are you doing outside?”

“Trying to get to Gordette before he reaches Yamagata’s people,” said Doug. “Any joy with tracking his tractor?”

“Hell no.” Anson sounded thoroughly unhappy. “He was smart enough to turn off its transponder and now he’s so far over the horizon that even if he had it on we couldn’t hear it.”

“Any idea of which way he went?”

“I checked the automated radar plot,” Anson replied immediately. “Shows he was heading on a bearing of three-forty-five degrees, relative to true north.”

“Three-forty-five?”

“That’s out past the mass driver, heading almost due north.”

“So he’s not taking Wodjohowitcz Pass, then.”

“Not yet. He’s probably trying to knock out the mass driver first. The magnets, I betcha.”

Doug’s voice caught in his throat. “The magnets! So we can’t use them to drive Wicksen’s particle beam gun.”

“Which means we won’t have any chance at all of stopping an incoming nuke.”

“I’ve got to stop him.”

“Get real! He’s got a six-hour lead on you.”

“I’ve still got to try. Does Wix have any people out at the driver?”

“Not for the past ten days. His whole crew’s been inside here, working on the new hardware.”

“Do we have anything at all that we can use to spot his tractor, Jinny?”

She humphed. “Crystal ball? Tarot cards…” Suddenly her voice brightened. “Hey! What about Kadar’s survey satellite?”

“Is it still functional?”

“We can power it up and see. Lemme check on when it’ll swing over Alphonsus again.”

“Good. Call me as soon as you can.”

“Will do, boss.”

Edith asked, “Aren’t we over the horizon from Moonbase?”

“We will be in another fifteen minutes,” Doug said.

“Then how will you be able to talk with Jinny? Or anyone at the base?”

“Antennas up on top of Mount Yeager,” Doug explained. “We can reach more than half of the area within the ringwall, and a considerable amount of territory out on Mare Nubium.”

“Then why can’t they find Gordetie’s tractor?”

“The antennas are for communications, not radar tracking.”

“Oh.”

“We’ll get him.”

Edith was worried that he was right.

Doug began to show her how to run the tractor. It wasn’t much different from driving a car.

“Not a lot of traffic out here,” he said, “but you’ve got to be on the lookout for craters and rocks that can get you stuck. Stay with the flattest, clearest ground you can find.”

“Like you’re doing.”

“Right.”

“Do you know where you’re going? I mean, without knowing where his tractor is?”

Doug pointed a gloved finger over the hood of the tractor. “I’m following his trail.”

“His trail?”

“Look. The cleat tracks.”

She saw a maze of tracks running pretty much in the same direction: out to the mass driver, she supposed.

“His are the brightest,” Doug explained. “Nobody’s been out here for ten days or so, so Barn’s tractor has churned up the newest tracks. Surface dirt is darkened by solar ultraviolet. New bootprints, new tractor marks, they uncover the brighter stuff underneath.”

“Shades of the Lone Ranger and his faithful Indian companion,” Edith muttered.

“Who?”

He knows so much, Edith thought, and there’s so much he doesn’t know. She settled back to watching the landscape, trundling by at a frustratingly slow thirty kilometers per hour or so.

“Do you really find this rock pile beautiful?” she asked.

“Don’t you?”

“It’s so barren! So empty and lifeless. There’s not even air to breathe.”

It took him a few moments to reply. “It all looks a lot better when there’s a full Earth. Fifty times brighter than a full Moon, back Earthside. It’s breathtaking. Everything glows like silver out here. And you can watch the Earth, see its clouds and oceans, it never stays the same for very long.”

“It’s only a sliver now,” Edith said, glancing upward at the thin crescent hanging in the starry sky.

“Take a good look,” Doug said. “Stare at it for a few minutes.”

There’s nothing better to do out here, Edith thought. She looked at the bright crescent Earth, a scimitar-slim curve of bright blue with flecks of white.

And saw that there was a blue glow stretching beyond the points of the crescent. The Earth’s air was gleaming, catching the Sun’s light and warmth.

“Look on the dark side,” Dough told her. “Focus your eyes a little to the left of the crescent’s bulge.”

She did, and saw nothing but darkness. The night side of Earth, she realized. Dark and-

There were lights glittering there! At first Edith wasn’t certain she really saw them, but the harder she stared, the more she saw. Cities aglow with light. Thin twinkling threads of highways linking them.

“Holy cow!” she blurted.

“See the cities?”

“It’s like a connect-the-dots map,” Edith said excitedly. “I can see Florida… at least I think it’s—no! That’s Italy! And over there must be Paris! Wow!”

“And look at—” A sharp buzz interrupted Doug. “Hold it. Incoming message.”

It was Anson again. “Gotta hand it to Kadar: his bird chirped right up when we interrogated it. It’s at periluna over Alphonsus, of course, so it’ll be zipping by at its fastest when it comes over us.”