Jack McDevitt: The Moonfall

• • • Moonbase, Grissom Country. 11:10 A.M.

Rick Hailey appraised Charlie's outfit, grinned at the Moonbase patch, and shook his head. "No," he said. "Don't do it."

"Why not?" Charlie thought it would be ideal for the situation.

"Because politicians who try to look like something they aren't inevitably come off looking dumb. You're too young to remember Michael Dukakis and his tank. But how about Bill Worthy?" Worthy had been knocked out of his party's nomination by Andrew Culpepper, then a relative unknown, after he'd tried on an astronaut's uniform for the cameras. He'd succeeded only in convincing the electorate he was frail and near death.

Charlie sighed. "Yeah," he said.

"I mean, I can see the editorial cartoons now. They'll send you to Mars."

It was annoying. He looked so good in this outfit.

"This is your day, Charlie," Rick said. "This afternoon we'll be creating our campaign theme. The future belongs to Haskell." He drank off a glass of moon rum, which was nonalcoholic.

"I'm a little uncomfortable about this," said Charlie. "I keep thinking the president should be here. Or maybe it's the low gravity." He grinned uncertainly.

"You'll do fine. Like you always do." Rick's voice dropped an octave. "Don't forget God," he said.

Charlie sighed.

"It's important. Out here, people expect you to notice creation. The blue Earth. The stars. The sense of human insignificance." He stopped and thought about it. "No," he continued, "not human insignificance. Your insignificance. Right? We don't want the voters to get the idea you think they're insignificant."

"I know."

Sometimes Charlie thought of his ascent to the vice presidency as some sort of cosmic joke. He couldn't recall having set out to become a politician. It was something that had just happened to him. He'd been running a small electronics business in Amherst twelve years ago when a dustup began over school prayer, evolution, creation science, and The Catcher in the Rye. Charlie, who'd thought those battles fought and won during the last century, had shown up at a school board meeting where he'd intended only to lend visible support to the English and science departments. But he'd been outraged by a tall, dark-haired, brimstone-eyed preacher who'd informed the board what their duties were, and left no doubt he was speaking for a higher power. The preacher had brought his congregation, one of whom was waving a sign with the number 649 on it, supposedly the number of obscenities in Catcher. Unable to contain himself, Charlie had taken on the preacher.

In hindsight, he hadn't thought he'd done well. The preacher was louder and more practiced than he, but the small group of school supporters liked what they saw. They asked him to run in the fall election, and as Charlie saw it, next thing he knew he was vice president.

He looked at his watch. "Give me a minute to change," he said. "And then we better get started."

"Yeah. Listen, on second thought, wear the jacket. Okay? It'll help you bond with these people. But the uniform's too much."

Rick's value lay in what Charlie liked to think of as an ability to see around corners. If there was a booby trap ahead, he could be counted on to find it before it exploded.

Wearing only the jacket would be a halfway measure. A sign of weakness. When Charlie came out of the bedroom, he'd pulled on his own custom-made gray suit.

Rick frowned. "I don't know why you keep me on," he said.

• • • Skyport, NASA/Smithsonian Orbital Laboratory. 12:13 P.M.

The Orbital Lab at the Earth satellite Skyport served as a worldwide clearinghouse for astronomical data. New variable pulsar analyses, fresh information on large-structure configurations, the latest findings on extra-solar terrestrial worlds supporting oxygen atmospheres-all were funneled into the Orbital Lab, collated, cross-indexed, relayed to interested consumers, and made available on the Web for the general public.

Tory Clark was watching the progress of the eclipse across North America on the overhead monitor while she looked through incoming reports. Although there was an enormous amount of activity connected with the event, nonrelated routine inputs did not slow down appreciably. She had, for example, a quasar update from Kitt Peak, a new report on R136a in the Large Magellanic, and corrections to the velocity measurements for the runaway star 53 Arietis. She also had something else.

"Windy?" She held up a hand to get the attention of her supervisor, Winfield Cross. "You want to take a look at this?"

Cross was in his fifties, medium size, medium build, medium everything. People tended to have a hard time remembering who he was, or what his name was. He was African-American, had grown up in south Los Angeles, gone to Princeton on a scholarship, and now seemed worried only by the possibility that his age would catch up to him before he achieved his one ambition. The automated observatory at Farside, the hidden side of the Moon, was going to be expanded and provided with a human staff. Windy hoped to get the director's job.

He held up one hand to signal that he understood, finished writing on a clipboard, and turned to his own screen. She heard him inhale. "What is it? You check it yet?"

They were looking at Tomiko's splinter of light.

"Don't know."

"Sun-grazer, you think?"

"I guess. Can't imagine what else."

There was nothing new, of course, about sun-grazing comets. They approached from the far side of the Sun and returned the same way. Consequently, they were virtually impossible to see from Earth, unless they happened to show up during a total eclipse, as this one had.

Windy's fingertips drummed on the computer table. "Who've we got?"

Tory was ready for the question. "Feinberg's at Beaver Meadow for the show." She was referring to the eclipse.

"Feinberg. Well, no point monkeying with the small fry. Okay, try to get him and ask him to take a look." Moonbase, Ranger Auditorium. 12:17 P.M.

The place was named for the only ship lost during the second wave of lunar exploration. The second vessel to go back to the Moon after more than thirty years, the Ranger had been less than forty minutes from reentry when a fuel line blew. The explosion damaged the navigational guidance system and forced Frank Bellwether, its skipper, to try an eyeball insertion, a seat-of-the-pants reentry. But the procedure was exceedingly difficult, and he'd misjudged the approach, had come in at too wide an angle. Ranger had skimmed off the atmosphere, and without enough fuel to return, had drifted into solar orbit. It had been the most traumatic incident of the age of space exploration, far more painful than the Challenger loss, because Bellwether and his crew were able to communicate for several days afterward, until their air supply ran out.

A plaque commemorating the captain was mounted in the auditorium. In addition, the five ferries that carried passengers between L1 and Skyport were named for the individual crewmembers.

When Charlie entered, a wallscreen was keeping track of the scene in Clifton, Ohio, where the high school band was lined up on the stage of a gymnasium. Concurrently with the lunar ceremony, the institution was being renamed the Andrew Y. Culpepper Memorial High School. The gym was crowded with students, and the band was playing an old tune, "Moon Over Miami." Well, it wasn't Miami, but Charlie imagined nobody cared about details. At Moonbase, some six hundred people, constituting visitors and virtually the entire population of the station not then on duty, had crowded into the auditorium.

Evelyn Hampton's technicians had erected a temporary platform and set out a row of chairs across it. A pair of double doors off to one side led out into Main Plaza, and a wide silver ribbon had been draped across these. The double doors were being treated symbolically on this occasion as the front entrance to Moonbase. The platform was decked with white, green, and blue bunting, the colors of Moonbase International. Flags of all (or almost all) the world's nations were mounted on the walls. A range of VIPs from international commerce, various governments, and the entertainment and academic worlds were seated on the platform. Prominent among these was Slade Elliott, known to millions of TV viewers as Captain Pierce on the immensely popular Arcturus Run. A recent poll had shown that Elliott had better name recognition than the president of the United States.