Ben Bova: Moonrise

Doug slid down the ladder to the cramped flight center, then wordlessly went out to the tunnel that led back to the base. Instead of taking the tractor, though, he pulled on one of the spacesuits standing on the rack and, after an hour of prebreathing and solemn meditation, he climbed up to the hatch that opened onto the floor of the crater. Without a spacecraft sitting on any of the pads it was hard to tell that humans were present in Alphonsus’ wide ring of mountains. The Sun was down but the sky gleamed with thousands of diamond-hard pinpoints of stars, strewn so thickly Doug felt almost as if he could walk upon them. His practiced eye scanned the weary, slumped old mountains of the ringwall, smoothed to an almost glassy polish by eons of infalling meteoric dust. He traced out the sinuous cracks in the crater floor, knowing that deep below there was ammonia and methane, precious life-sustaining resources.

He looked up and saw the Earth, a glowing crescent of blue and white, its night side clear to see against the starry sky. Warm and rilled with life, Doug knew. And yet he felt no longing, no desire to return to the world of his birth. The human race will die there, he knew, unless we help them to expand beyond Earth’s confines.

He looked again at the barren lunar landscape stretching all around him. Turning, he saw the barely-discernible mounds where the original Moonbase shelters had been buried, the slight cleft in the mountain face where the airlock of today’s base stood, the glittering acres of the solar power farms. Lifting his gaze, he traced out the rounded top of Mt. Yeager and the notch of Wodjohowitcz Pass.

We’re already putting names on the wilderness, Doug said to himself. We’re starting to place our marks here.

He saw Moonbase as it would be. A thriving city built underground but large enough for trees and flowering bushes and maybe even a stream of real water meandering through a grassy expanse. He saw spacecraft made of pure diamond plying the routes between Earth and Moon, and heading outward, toward the distant planets, toward the stars themselves.

He saw the human race growing, learning, facing the frontier and the future with hope and brimming desire.

There’s a lot of work to do, he realized. A lifetime of work, and then some. Generations of work.

Nodding inside his helmet, he strode toward the airlock, Time to get started, he told himself. If it is to be, it’s up to me.