Chapter Six

It was with mounting excitement that Banner reached Freedom Station for his first glimpse of the Yankee Clipper. Unfortunately, the vehicle was still shrouded in its golden wrapper, like a candy bar on Christmas morning.

His first job was to help pack away the tons of material that had been recently boosted to the station. NASA’s storage plan had been very carefully charted to the hundredth of an inch in a pattern that would, theoretically, allow the items of most use to be uncovered when most needed. Banner’s crew spent most of their time watching the lieutenant in charge scratch her head while muttering some truly inventive curses. Fortunately after an hour spent floating on his ass, Group Captain Ireton rescued him for the grand tour of the Clipper.

Banner remembered Ireton from his days on the ISS, although they had never exchanged more than a “Yessir!” or two. All Banner knew for sure is that he had been a hotshot Royal Air Force fighter pilot before joining the European Space Agency. Maybe fought somewhere. He had been the first British citizen to walk on the Moon and, if walk could be the word, on the Near Earth Object ReyRey 619. He was said to have been on the short list for the now cancelled international mission to Mars.

The Group Captain led him through the same long opaque tunnel they’d recently been hauling stuff through.

“Let’s start on the flight deck,” Ireton said as they crossed into the ship and down a long corridor curving deep inside.

“Yessir.”

Ireton stopped. “Corporal,” he said. “Banner. We’re going to be stuck in this tin can for the next seven to ten years. Let’s get rid of the formalities right away.”

“Yes . . . sir . . . sir,” Banner gulped.

“It’s Henry unless the brass is around.”

“It may take me awhile to get used to that, sir, uh, Henry.”

“Good man,” Ireton grinned. “Now this is the airlock leading onto the flight deck,” he said while undogging the hatch. “There are three discreet areas in the ship with its own atmosphere: the flight deck, the biosphere, and engineering. There are also a few special cases, like the hanger. The idea was that if there is a decompression in one area there would be others the crew could retreat to. Airlocks’ll be a pain in the ass to use but flight protocol says we use them and I’m a stickler for that kind of thing.”

He pushed open the inner lock and they moved inside.

“Whooah!” Banner gasped. “It’s like Star Trek.”

Ireton laughed. “The layout here is different. The Enterprise was made so Kirk could storm around like a sea captain and look good doing it. This is a little more practical and crowded. It has more in common with the layout of a submarine than the Enterprise. Also, we’ll be able to do most of our work from our offices in the habitat. We’ll only need this place occasionally, if at all. Only an emergency, most likely.”

“Yessir.”

“With luck it’ll all be very, very boring.”

“Boring is my middle name.”

“Mine, too.” He let them through another hatch into a corridor. “No sliding doors here, I’m afraid. This leads into the habitat.” Banner noticed that it had that new car smell that was so delightful and so probably carcinogenic.

“As you know we’ll be under a constant but slight acceleration for most of our trip. It should make it easier to get around but no one really knows. It could turn out to be annoying.”

Ireton opened the second airlock. “I expect you to know how to operate this in an emergency and I expect you to always maintain the protocols,” Ireton repeated. “Just because we’re informal does not mean we’ll be unprepared.”

“I understand, sir.”

“Good. Now this way leads back into the living area.”

“Good Christ!” Banner muttered as they opened the hatch and pulled themselves inside. He looked into a large well-lighted space, like a domed football stadium standing on its head.

“This is where we’ll live,” Ireton grinned.

“How can we afford to push all this mass?”

Ireton smiled, his eyes dreamy. “It’s mostly space, holding an atmosphere that we’d have to carry anyway. Space is space whether it’s inside or outside the hull. Small, cramped ships are the result of the difficulty of getting things into Earth orbit.”

“And limited fuels.”

“Yes, but that’s really the same thing, isn’t it? Once you’re out of Earth’s gravity well you’re half way to anywhere, as they say.”

“Heinlein . . . uh, Henry. Halfway plus four and a half years.”

“Of course. But look how long it took Drake to circumnavigate the globe. We do it in 90 minutes.” Ireton pulled himself along a rope. Banner followed warily. He wasn’t used to seeing so much space in space and it made him slightly giddy. He knew that he couldn’t fall but what if he couldn’t land?

“Stay focused, stay focused, stay focused,” he muttered.

“What was that?” Ireton called back.

“Urp!”

“Ah, I see. Well, you’ll get used to it.”

Ireton scuttled away and, reluctantly, Banner followed.

They reached something that looked like a giant shower head. “Once we’re under way water will be drawn from a reservoir behind the bulkhead and emerge here where it will be guided slowly along the walls, held together mostly by hydrogen bonding, until it reaches the plants. At what will be the bottom is another reservoir where it’ll be collected, filtered, and pumped back around.”

Banner pulled himself along a long rope crossing the bottom third of the vault. “Some storage in there,” Ireton pointed out areas of flimsy half structures and border tape, “med center, common room, cafeteria . . . once you’ve been through orientation you’ll be helping to put all of this right.”

He stopped by a corner of the biosphere’s dodecahedral framework. “These rooms are yours,” Ireton said, gesturing to a black marker perimeter, sad graffiti on the wall. “Since you’ll be working in the Clipper from now on there’s no reason you can’t move right in.”

“Uh.”

“I’ll requisition you a sleepysack. You can eat and bathe on Station.”

“Jesus, I left Indiana for this?”

“Indiana, that’s right, you’re a Hoosier,” Ireton never sounded more British than when he was saying Ho-o-osier. “It’s midlands, right? I’ve never been there . . . probably flown over it a thousand times.”

“Aw, you’d like it. It’s just like England.”

“I never lived in England all that much,” Ireton admitted. “My father was stationed in Jamaica where he met my mother. That’s where I was raised. Of course I went to university in England.”

“Purdue.”

“Cradle of astronauts.”

“In state, I was lucky.”

“Between the two globes is our gymnasium,” Ireton said while leading him through an air lock in the middle of a spokeless wheel. “Runs on magnetic tracks and spins quickly enough to make a couple Gs if you have the stomach. “An hour or two a day in here should be enough.”

Through another airlock and they were in Engineering, where they found Lomaine Brooks glaring into a partly disassembled workstation.

“Welcome aboard, Scotty,” Banner joked.

“Any more Star Trek references and we’ll drop you at Venus,” Ireton frowned. Banner realized he was serious. “Venus?”

“Hey, chicken,” Lomaine gave him a hug that pushed the air from his lungs.

“I guess you know each other. Lomaine, tell him about the trip to Venus would you old dear? I’ve got to get back.”

“Sure.” She didn’t bother to look up as he turned and left. “Old dear.”

“Don’t you like him?”

“Oh, he’s okay. He’s just got a thing about his color.”

Banner looked back at the airlock where he’d gone. “I hadn’t really noticed.”

“That’s what I mean.”

Banner puzzled over that for a moment. “How do you know that much about him, anyway?”

“I know. Believe me, I’ve met enough of his kind.” She sighed with discouragement. “We had a brief thing a little while ago,” she admitted. “I found out more than I needed to know about Group Captain Henry Ireton.”

“Oh, I . . . “

“Don’t worry about it. We’re professionals. We can work together. If anything he’s easier to get along with now. I treat him as well as I would any other white cracker wannabe.”

Banner laughed. “You get along with most of us actual white crackers well enough.”

She looked to him fondly. “You may be an idiot, Banner, but you ain’t no cracker.”

“So, where’s the reactor?” Banner said, changing the subject while he could.

“You’re sitting on it.”

She laughed as he flailed to escape the console without touching it.

“Actually, the nasty stuff is way south, near the end of the superstructure. You can’t see much from here.” She led him down a corridor, the walls were olive-green punctuated with red handles, violent orange signboard, and yellow radiation warnings. There must be another airlock down at the far end, he couldn’t tell. “The rest is classified.”

“Too bad. What’ll I be doing down here?”

“Oh, the usual.” She opened a storage unit. It was packed full of small black cones. She pulled one out and handed it to Banner. “Careful, it’s delicate.”

It felt like paper but he knew better. A small dark box fit at the apex of the cone.

“What is it?”

“An ion motor. We use thousands of them. When one burns out we throw it away and plug in another, like light bulbs.”

“Seems wasteful.”

“I suppose we might rehabilitate a few . . . let me show you the workroom. You can familiarize yourself with this stuff during our shakedown run.”

“They haven’t told me very much. Security.”

“Yeah. Security. Now that you’re here there’s no reason you shouldn’t know. We’re taking the Clip to Venus first to work the kinks out of her.”

“Isn’t that going in the wrong direction?”

“Sort of, but in the context of where we’re going it’s on the way. We’ll make it up by adding momentum with a gravity assist at Venus and then another when we blow past Earth on the way out. Hopefully we’ll have the bugs worked out of her by then. Now come on, I’ve got some sewage for you to treat.”

“That’s what all the girls say.”

ØØØ

Banner’s first night in the biosphere felt like an evening on Browning Mountain. Darkness fell slowly, in the course of an hour, a slow cascade from “east” to “west” until there was only the glow of a few safety lamps in the distance. The sound of crickets, frogs, and other night creatures throbbed subtly in the background. Of course it was only a program written to recreate the sounds of a rural summer evening but, what the hell, it sounded like home. “Nice,” he thought. “Maybe tomorrow we can listen to the beach.”

Sipping his fruit juice meditatively, he was about to turn-in when he saw a shaft of light stabbing in from the perimeter and realized that someone had opened the lower south hatch. He watched a shadowy figure pull itself along a guide rope though the ghostly white basin. The specter was lugging a box awkwardly behind him.

“Stubbs,” Banner cried out in astonishment. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m pulling duty in the kitchen, which you’d know if you’d ever come over.”

Banner shrugged. “Ain’t much reason to leave this place,” he said. “It’s like paradise.”

“If that’s the case, where’s Eve?” Stubbs growled.

“Any day now.”

The old sergeant snorted. “Be careful what you wish for.” He looked around the area suspiciously. “Can we go to your quarters? I’ve got something to show you.”

Mystified, Banner led him to the tent-like structure he’d docked against a bump of some sort. Stubbs carefully pulled his package along. “Here, take this.” He said when they’d gone inside, shoving the box in his direction.

“Oof,” Banner gasped.

“It’s for you.”

“Me? When did you start giving people gifts?”

“It’s a long story.”

Banner quickly unfolded the lid. To his astonishment he saw thick gray fur. “Camus!” he gasped.

“I had to sedate him,” Stubbs apologized. “He should be up and about in a little while.”

“But I thought Sophie had him.”

“Yeah, well she don’t.”

Banner picked up the dark, quiet form, holding him protectively to his chest. For a brief moment Banner thought he felt a gentle purring.

“He’s been hiding out in odd corners and ducts in Freedom all this time. I kept an eye on him when I was here but it was the Marines what kept him alive. They call him Tojo.”

“What?”

Stubbs looked at him impassively for a moment before shrugging. “Beats me.”

Banner cradled the cat in his arms.

“We can’t keep him hidden much longer. He crapped in General Reid’s sleepysack yesterday and the old boy put out an alert. I thought it would be best if you got him before I ship back to Earth.”

“Well . . . thanks.”

On his way out Stubbs stopped by the tent’s entrance. “See, Brummett, even you get a little pussy once in awhile.”

Banner shook his head. “I just didn’t expect to be getting it from you.”

Stubbs laughed, waving goodbye, whistling a little like Gene Kelly in a banana factory as he disappeared into the dark.

“Aw, my baby,” Banner murmured as he slowly made his way to his tent and trying to unravel his sleepysack using just one hand. It didn’t work so well but he didn’t want to let go of Camus, either, as he hummed along with the cat’s contented purr, using his teeth to pull open the bedroll. He was so skinny. He could feel his bones and the cat’s fur was matted in placed with some godawful gunk. "My poor kitty-cat,” he whispered sadly. “My poor cat.”

ØØØ

Finally the day arrived when the gold foil was stripped away and Banner, along with the rest of the world, watched the great ship unveiled. Its odd beauty took his breath away.

Since they didn’t dare break a bottle over its prow they spritzed a little champagne in its direction instead, officially christening the ship Dwight David Eisenhower in honor of the general who had led the original Allies to victory in World War Two.

Banner would have joined in with the celebration but, like the rest of the crew, he was busy preparing the ship to leave Earth’s orbit.

From his station he watched as the umbilicals were detached and felt the attitude jets slowly pushed the Ike away from the Freedom space station, its gravity wheel spinning round and round, like a circus carousel. Behind it was the blue Earth.

“All okay,” he said when cued, then quickly belted into a nearby safety chair. At the end of a countdown hydrazine rockets pushed them rudely into a long elliptical orbit falling past Venus. Banner unhitched himself and hurried into the biosphere. Along the north wall he found Sergio Biscone, the head of Life Sciences, talking with Francine Mathers.

“I’m all yours,” he said to Biscone, a thin, bony Guatemalan.

“We need to go over the plumbing and test it for leaks so I want you to study the procedure tonight—I’ve sent you the information—and tomorrow we can start. I’ve got you in the morning, right?”

“Yessir.”

Banner left them, pulling himself along the rope leading back to his living area. It still seemed naked. The hydrangeas were just stubs and the mother-in-law's tongue was threatening no one. They hadn’t planted the north forty yet. “Sweet,” he thought. “I can kick back for a few hours and read this stuff before going downstairs to unpack dinner for everybody.” He pulled a container of fruit juice out of his cooler, then leaped for his office area, passing Camus who was floating asleep in the middle of his area.

Banner quickly found Biscone’s email and its links. “Ouch, there’s a couple of hundred page documents in there and some virtual run-throughs. Shit!” Banner parked himself in the corner by his reading light and started with the first one.

They intended to turn their living chamber into a huge greenhouse that would simulate a sub-tropical earth environment. He looked at the schematic for the water system that would feed the plants. Once they started acceleration water, actually a nutrient solution, would be pumped in at the top of the habitat and fed into gutters running down the sides of their dodecahedral living chamber. The solution was divided into pans containing the root system of each plant, held in place by a plastic lattice through which the plants grew, covered by a thin opaque film. A fine mist was sprayed continuously onto the roots. Light was provided by fat ribbons of luminescent diode held above the gardens by thin carbon scaffolding.

Under the influence of the slight, but constant, push of the ion engines the excess water would slowly drip downward to be collected in a huge octagonal tank beneath the floor. There it would be sterilized with ultraviolet light, filtered, and mixed with water from the ship’s other systems. This water was then allowed to emerge as watercourse that languidly flowed into a large basin, AKA the “Ol’ Swimmin’ Hole,’ which would be filled with aquatic plants, tilapia, salmon, and trout. Finally the basin’s overflow disappeared down a drain where it would be moved around some more, before it was mixed with nutrient solution #409, and the cycle begun again.

He was reading the details of the system and what he would be expected to do when he noticed movement from the corner of his eye. Startled, he saw that Camus had woken from his snooze and was furiously spinning end-over-end, claws fully extended, chasing his own fluffed-up tail.

Banner quickly tossed a wadded pair of dungarees at the whirling cat.

“Rowl!” Camus shrieked, tearing at the fabric when it startled him, using its momentum to move him towards a sheet Banner had tied up as a privacy shield, which he quickly shredded while gaining the traction he needed to leap to a better place.

Banner sat openmouthed for a moment, before deciding that the crisis had passed.

“Lettuce and spinach, tomatoes and zucchini, parsley, chives and basil, wheat, beans, and potatoes, each seed must be placed precisely at the end of its unique fibrous enabling apparatus (FIENAP).”

He stopped reading. Feeling restless he left, taking the shortcut along the green conduit towards the west wing leading to the observatory crest.

Earth had already shrunk to the size of a waterlogged softball. Watching it recede was spooky, he decided. Bouncing willy-nilly between worlds like a basketball in a Jacuzzi factory suddenly seemed a damned crazy thing to do. What had he been thinking? He was beginning to appreciate just how empty the solar system really was.

“This is insane,” he murmured aloud.

“Ain’t that the truth!” Banner turned with a start to see one of the engineers, Stanislaus Orsky, pulling himself into the bay.

“Oh, hey,” Banner muttered. “It’s giving me the willies a little is all.”

“Me, too, kid.”

Banner grinned at the old veteran, all of 35, who had first ridden into orbit on the Atlantis Space Shuttle, which had been retired long after it was supposed to be. It was like reaching space in a Conestoga wagon and about twice as dangerous.

“Off duty?”

“For a little while, I have to go out later. I thought I’d break for a smoke.”

Banner gaped stupidly.

“A joke. I haven’t been able to smoke in space since the Russians left.”

“Uh . . .”

“Another joke. You’re much too uptight, my friend.”

Banner smiled. “Now you’re sounding like my dad.”

“A son needs a firm grip.”

“Is that what you tell your son?”

“Sometimes.”

“Does he ever listen?”

Orsky laughed, handing Banner the *Pod™ from his waistband.

Banner saw a pic of a blond-haired boy and girl sitting at a breakfast table. “Pretty daughter.”

“Takes after her mother, of course.”

“They must miss you.”

“Not really.”

Oh, no, Banner thought. What have I stepped into now?

Orsky sighed. “Wilma and I were divorced several years ago. Old story. Husband too involved in career to notice wife unsatisfied. Never home. Kids like strangers. Wife lonely. One day she emails to say she’s taken up with a retro-rock musician she met in Warsaw. ‘Where do you want me to send your medals?’”

“I’m sorry,” Banner replied feeling embarrassed.

Orsky shrugged philosophically while gazing back at the shrinking blue planet. “I’m not.”

ØØØ

Ireton watched the image on his screen for the twelfth time as the monstrosity fired its engines and moved violently out of Earth’s orbit. The “Big Banger,” as the Vloggers insisted on calling the vehicle, really did look like a huge sausage with 40 million pounds of thrust blowing out its ass. He shook his head. The Russians were crazy wankers, all right. You had to admire them. How they’d convinced the French and Japanese to go along was anybody’s guess.

It was estimated that the Eisenhower would catch up soon after the two ships reached Jupiter but after that, if their powerplant worked as promised, the Russians would leave them in their radioactive dust.

Meanwhile the German’s were still expanding their space station, enclosing it in a thin framework to hide what they were building, presumably. Not that it would matter, either. It was already too late for them.

And no one could figure out what in the hell the Chinese were up to inside their little crater on the Moon—New St. Mao, they were calling it. He snorted. “Whatever the hell that means.” The Allies’ satellites watched the outpost intently, counting how many cargo ships landed, calculating their mass. Not learning much and spending a lot of money doing it.

There was the sound of a bell chiming. Was it 21:30 already? He stretched and pulled himself to the flap that served as his door. “Come in,” he said to the dark-haired woman waiting there holding a thermal inertia device (TID). She floated into his arms for a quick hug, accompanied by the warm smell of spices.

“You look awful,” Francine laughed.

“Thanks. You look nice, too.”

“I just had four hours sleep,” she bragged. “Do you want something to eat? I brought up some Chinese from the cafeteria.”

“Yeah, thanks, let me set up the restraining units.”

“You didn’t need a restraining unit last night,” she teased.

“Some things are better left unrestrained, my dear.”

Mathers was about to answer when light tapping came at the flap. Ireton opened it reluctantly. Francine frowned when she heard a soft voice there, followed by a brisk invader.

“Henry, you said . . . oh, Francine,” Lissa Gaskill stopped talking suddenly, even as she drifted across the room. The two women eyed each other narrowly.

“We were about to have dinner,” Francine said, coolly. “Would you like to join us?”

“Oh, no. I’m watching my weight.”

“I suppose you have to,” Francine replied with a friendly smile, which turned into a puzzled frown as a beep came from the portal. It was the British flight surgeon, Mary Ellen Cartouche.

Ireton sighed, “Come in, Mary Ellen.”

The woman stopped just inside, surveying the three knowingly. Lissa looked back at her with an alarmed expression, while Francine stared blandly at nothing in particular. Ireton seemed resigned.

“Up to your old tricks, Henry?” Mary Ellen said mockingly. “I was going to ask if you could go for a nightcap but I’m guessing you don’t need the company.”

“Now, Mary Ellen . . .”

“My ass,” she laughed, shaking her head sardonically while pushing for the exit. “Ladies.”

“I guess I should be going too,” Lissa gulped as soon as she’d gone. “Busy day tomorrow.”

They watched her swim out the door. The room was silent for a moment before Ireton turned to Francine. “What are you thinking?” he finally asked.

She studied his face for a moment, straying lightly over the dark curve of his jaw, past lips pouting in a moue of uncertainty, resting on his questioning brown eyes.

“What the hell,” she said reaching for her cold supper.

More Links:
The Drake Hoax
Another description of Drake's circumnavigation
An Observatory Crest Appreciation

Chapter 5

Photo courtesy NASA

Freedom looked like a spider with a monstrous golden egg sac to Group Captain Henry Ireton as they made their approach. The sac was actually a flimsy, unpressurized structure made of thin gold foil meant only to keep prying eyes from seeing what was going on inside.

Ireton oversaw the ship’s approach to the opposite side of the station. He probably should have been using the time to prepare for the day’s meetings but what the hell? Routine felt comforting.

Ireton had been involved in the planning of the Allies’ deep-space ship—code-named Yankee Clipper—at every stage, but this was the first time he’d actually come to see the beast in person. It was state-of-the-art all the way. Maybe pre-state-of-the-art when you came right down to it. But that was the American Way, wasn’t it? The flashier the better. No wonder they’d never really gotten along with the Ruskies, who preferred to do other things in space besides spend money.

The transfer into the station went quickly but Ireton chafed at having to go through the ritual of greeting, which including the playing of a nineteen-70s era rock and roll song chosen by some groundside space geek in his honor—Rocket Man, was it? At least it wasn’t the William Shatner version.

He was met by General Lewis N. Clark, who had been lured out of retirement at his villa in the Moon’s northwest corner to ramrod the project. He was surprisingly informal as he introduced the project engineers.

He was then escorted to a bay overlooking the worksite and there it was, his baby, the Yankee Clipper, its shell a lumpy irregularly dimpled shape courtesy of its double-icosahedral frame.

“Not exactly the interplanetary spermatozoa of 2001,” smiled Lomaine Brooks, the engineer assigned to give him the tour. She was wearing khaki pants and suspenders stretched over her ample frame, and a navy-blue Snorg T-shirt reading:

All this
and
brains, too!

Ireton shook his head. Typical of the US. They'd built a Bugatti when a Chevy would have nicely done the job.

“When can we take her out for a ride?”

“Soon. Maybe six months, eight if we glitch.”

“Hmm. Well, I have a lot of questions.”

“That’s why I’m here,” she answered brightly. “We pressurized the outer hull three days ago and there were no major leaks. We can go right inside.”

He followed her as she propelled herself down the large transparent oval tube leading to the Clipper’s shell. Reaching the airlock first, she opened it before he’d had a chance to catch up, causing him to tumble ass over teakettle when she moved the place he’d planned on landing.

“Newbies always do that,” she laughed, catching him in her powerful arms. For a moment he could feel her warm breath on his face.

“But would you have caught General Clarke?” he asked, grinning as he reached out for a handhold.

“I wouldn’t have had to,” she sniffed while opening the inner lock. “Besides, he’s an oldbie” They were inside a large dark space, lighted by a few safety lamps. Translucent walls surrounded them. Ireton rapped on one with his knuckles. There was a dead, dry sound.

“Aerogel inner walls,” she said proudly. “Light as air and you can bounce a bowling ball off them.”

“I don’t remember designing for a bowling alley.”

She ignored him. “This gridwork along the inner hull connects to bundles of carbon filaments doped with copper that act as radiators for the heat we’ll be generating. That’s what gives the hull its hairy look and buff color.”

“I thought it just needed a shave.” Ireton felt a sense of awe, as he looked around, despite its state of dishabille—the missing panels, the fiber and conduits snaking everywhere. Shining his light inside, he could see where the tanks of hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, lithium, carbon, and water would wrap around the crew’s living quarters.

“At the gooey center is the habitat,” Lieutenant Brooks poked her head into the opening where Ireton had been woolgathering. She looked at him from the tops of her eyes, forehead wrinkled like an inquisitive child’s. “But nothing’s been installed yet. It’s mostly empty space.”

At the end of the corridor they came to a gap leading into the large self-contained icosahedron within.

ØØØ

“The habitat has privacy areas that will be assigned throughout the chamber,” she said leading him across on a Buckyrope™ ladder into another airlock. The sides will be terraced green space, mostly crops but ornamental plants as well, that grow fast and make lots of oxygen. As you know, when the ion motors are lit there will be a very mild constant acceleration that should cause things to settle a bit although it still will be kind of like living in a big bubble.”

Once inside they pulled themselves along into the emergency bridge where Ireton stopped by the Captain’s chair. Around him closely grouped were the stations for NAV, Engineering, IT, and the seat he expected to occupy—second in command. Not what he’d wanted but it would have to do. He knew the Americans would never let a Brit run the show but it was still his baby. Even so the demotion stung a little.

“Questions, sir?”

He hesitated for a moment, lost in thought. “Not really. I helped design this room. I can see what a beautiful job you’ve done.”

“Thank you,” she beamed.

“Have you had dinner, yet?” he suddenly asked.

“Why, no,” she replied, surprised.

“Well?” he asked after a moment of silence.

“Its just newbies hardly want to eat when they first come up.”

“Well, I may be clumsy but I’m hardly a newbie,” he laughed. “And microgravity has never bothered my appetite.”

“Lucky man.”

She took him back, this time through the large void where the habitat would soon be constructed. Halfhearted scaffolding twined deep into the vault. It took his breath away—the largest controlled space ever placed in orbit.

“Watch this!” Lomaine said, pulling herself to the edge of the scaffolding and launching off.

Ireton heard her whoop as she crossed the wide space to the other side. After a moment, and with a silly grin, he leaped after. It was something like skydiving inside the atrium of a building but not so fast, in fact he could feel himself slowing down as he pushed through the air.

“Does anybody ever get stuck in the middle?”

“Only newbies,” she laughed, launching herself straight towards him. She thumped him on the chest hard enough to kill his momentum, while conserving enough of her own to spin lazily off towards the scaffolding. She watched him for awhile as he tried various swimming techniques to get himself to the edge without success.

“Patience, sir, you’ll come over, eventually” she called out to him. “There’s enough air circulation to suck you down a vent sooner or later.”

“Lieutenant, I don’t want to have to order you to rescue me.”

Grinning, she threw him a strand of a Buckyrope.

ØØØ

“My father was a military man, also in the RAF,” he told her as they queued at the cafeteria railing. The Sticko-pads™ beneath it were worn and gave his stockings little purchase, but it didn’t seem to bother him as he used his knees to hold himself in place at the counter while grabbing portions of bread, asparagus—with some kind of clearish sauce holding it together—a piece of blackened chicken (although he suspected the blackening had nothing to do with the recipe), and a hot block of scalloped potato. “He was on loan to the Jamaican Air Force as a jet-fighter trainer, which is where he met my mother. He married her despite, you know, the racial thing,” he said apologetically. He didn’t know why he felt he needed to apologize, perhaps because Lomaine’s skin was so godawful black.

“You’d hardly notice,” she laughed.

“They noticed it enough in school,” he shrugged. “But, really, it wasn’t too bad. Better than being a fatty.”

“I hear that.”

“I didn’t mean . . .”

“No, no,” she smiled. “There ain’t an ounce of fat on this.” She pinched her powerful thigh. “It’s just the way I’m built. But I have to watch it. I can gain five pounds just looking at a piece of cheesecake.”

“I’d like to see that.”

“Why, Group Captain!”

“Call me Henry,” he grinned.

“I’m, ah,” she replied, flustered.

He was surprised that he felt so attracted to her. Usually he preferred the willowy type, whereas Lomaine was built like an effing lorry, he thought, feeling guilty. And the blackest woman he’d ever met. Part of it, he realized, was that he’d been too busy over the previous eighteen months for a proper romance, but part of it was genuine attraction, which disturbed him somehow.

“How about yourself?”

“Oh, you know, science-nerd-girl in grade school. Discovered physics, sports, and boys in high school. Decided I liked physics best. A couple of PhDs along the way. My first job was on the Moon. The usual thing.”

Ireton laughed. “I’ve got to go,” he said looking at his watch and pulling away from the table. “I have to return to London in a few hours and I need to talk with the General first. Thank you for the briefing, Lomaine,” he said gripping her hand. “I enjoyed dinner.”

“Well, I did, too.”

“Call me the next time you’re downside.”

“I’m not sure that I should,” she looked at him questioningly.

“I’m sorry,” he said, feeling a little embarrassed by his oversight. “I just assumed there was no one else.”

“N-o-o,” she frowned. “It’s not that. It’s that I’ve applied for a position with the Clipper’s crew.”

“Ah,” he replied, heart sinking. “I’ve no input either way with the committee, if that’s what you’re worried about. That’s Dr. Monelly’s purview . . . although they say the important thing is compatibility between crewmembers,” he smiled like a naughty little boy.

“I just don’t want to get too compatible too quickly,” she frowned at him momentarily and then laughed, disturbing a nearby technician who’d fallen asleep at his table.

“If we’re going to be mates we should know each other in any case. Besides, I owe you dinner.”

“I’ll think about it . . . Henry,” she added after he’d left.

ØØØ

On the other side of the world, outside Novy Mir, they didn’t care who saw the ship they were building. To the blogosphere it looked like a Tinkertoys™ set that had been jammed together by a crack baby with a Soviet-era atomic submarine at the center. The French proclaimed it the ultimate expression of the modernist ideal, the Russians shrugged and said plumbing wasn’t supposed to be pretty, while the Japanese simply didn’t bother to answer the question.

“Big Banger” was the headline of the Internet ’papes when the Russians slid an immense neoprene sheath over the construct like an obscenely huge prophylactic. It looked like a bright red sausage needing a good grilling. When bags of water started arriving from the Moon the Tweeters™ speculated jokingly about steam-powered rockets.

Then a report circulated that the water was indeed to fuel the monstrosity. It was first to be split by electrolysis. Then the hydrogen would be shoved through the reactor core to be superheated and recombined with the oxygen, working as an afterburner—an oxygen-augmented nuclear thermal rocket. There were plenty of problems with this design but it was simple and they could refill their tanks at Charon. The biggest problem was that they would have to coast between burns while they distilled the fuel.

They christened their ship the Sergey Pavlovich Korolyov, after the “master builder” of the Soviet space program.

Sophie Täuber was living in the French quarter of their lunar base, called jVerne. The city was buried well underground. During the lunar day filtered sunlight reflected down into it from a large mirror on the surface. The gardens that Sophie and her crew were building were already famous for their beauty as well as their practicality. Tall, thin frames invited vines to climb explosively in the weak gravity.

“Who would have thought it, autumn on the Moon?” said “Long” Jean Albertine as he accompanied her beneath a row of young sugar maples.

“The hardest part is making decent soil,” she said. “Lunar dust is worthless for growing things. Right now we use hydroponics for the crops. As we gather compost we refine it, mix it with sanitized lunar dust and sewerage, and make these planting regions. It’s coming along but it’ll take a generation or two.”

They stopped by a vending machine and he bought her an Italian ice. “It’s been a long time since I strolled with a pretty girl,” he said.

“I don’t believe that for a minute!” she laughed. They walked for a while longer. “Why are you here?” Sophie finally asked.

“I think you can guess,” he answered after a pause. “We want you—we need you—to join the Charon expedition. No one has tried to keep a closed ecosystem alive for so long a time. You better than anyone know the complexity of what we’re attempting. To my mind there is no one else I’d trust to manage such a system.”

“Pish,” she replied, scornfully. “What about Robbie Frankel, or Meridia Lacombe?”

“Nobody likes Frankel and Meridia has . . . other problems.”

“Huh. You do know what you’re asking of me? My parents could be dead by the time I return. My nephews and nieces grown up. My friends will seem like strangers. My lovers . . .” She suddenly stopped walking, a distant look on her face. “And I’ll never have children of my own.”

“I know, Sophie,” Albertine stood next to her, resting his hand on her shoulder in sympathy. “I don’t like asking you to make this sacrifice. If we thought anyone else could do it . . . Not many of us get the opportunity to make history. Your name will be remembered as long as Marie Curie’s.”

“Who?” she joked feebly, watching him from the corners of her eyes while fussing over a small planting of wildflowers.

Albertine laughed. “You may discover alien life, be the first scientist to study it and evaluate it. Speak with it.”

“Don’t be melodramatic, Jean.”

“All right, but what scientist could pass this up? You must do this—for yourself, for the human race, for France!”

“Viva la France,” she echoed hollowly.

ØØØ

The von Braun spun like a top as it followed the Moon in orbit at the L5 Lagrange Point. It looked very similar to the space station Werner von Braun had envisioned during the 1950s and had been elaborated upon so famously in 2001: A Space Odyssey. By calling the ship the von Braun the Germans were deliberately goosing both the Brits—by honoring the developer of the V2 rocket—and the Americans—by reclaiming von Braun’s legacy.

Christain Monelly sat in his office finishing his day’s work. EURO–NOL’s strategy, largely at his suggestion, was succeeding. None of their competitors had an inkling of what they were planning or how close they were to their goal. Still, they were a long time from launching and could easily lose this race. It all depended on American hubris.

He snicked his teeth with a splinter of wood while studying the files on his proposed crew and their understudies, each carefully evaluated and selected by Christain personally. He would be meeting with them all soon, the first time they’d be together, but now he was meeting with the head engineer, Walter Thiel, a German, and the Dutch captain Ole Christensen Rømer.

The walls of his office were filled with a surprising amount of bric-a-brac, considering the expense of shipping them here. There were his awards and diplomas, photos, and paintings of him with various politicians and pop stars. And they were all in heavy frames. The walls were made of wood—very thin wood—but real wood. The carpet was lush and ornate, and the window had blinds he could close whenever he tired of watching the Earth meandering about his sky.

His intercom buzzed.

“Mr. Thiel is here.”

“Send him in.”

Walter Thiel was a thin, angular man, his thinning hair plastered straight back. Dead skin would have peppered his shoulders if the environmental manager allowed it, of that Christain was certain. Of course his looks didn’t matter but his competence did. He had been recruited from Forschungszentrum Jülich—the Jülich Research Centre.

“I hope you have gotten comfortably settled in.”

“Yes, of course, thank you.”

“How is progress on the powerplant?”

“No problems with that. The technology is very well known. The problem is keeping the tests secret.”

“As long as we can stay on schedule.”

“If that’s the case then what am I doing here?” he answered testily.

Monelly looked at him closely. His tests had shown that Thiel was high strung, but malleable. He’d be leaving behind an estranged wife and two children but by all accounts everyone would be the happier for it. He was a man looking for direction and Monelly was the person to give it to him.

“We have to prepare for the journey itself, Walter. I want the crew to start training together.”

“Is that necessary?”

“We’re going to be together a long time.”

“Then we’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other.”

Monelly laughed. “You’ll be back to work soon enough, Walter, I’ll see to it. For this week, though, relax, get to know your crewmates. We can lay out your training schedule and maybe share a few drinks in the meantime.”

Thiel sighed resignedly. “Of course, Dr. Monelly.”

“Christain.”

Watching him leave Monelly reflected that all the old boy really needed to cheer him up was to get laid regularly. He was pinning his hopes for that on Fraulein Katerina Egge, who liked the brainy but dumb type. The kind she could push around. Christain’s psychological testing, not to mention his personal experience with her, had indicated that the two could be a very good match, but of course with the human heart nothing was a sure thing. He shrugged. At times he felt like he was running a very expensive dating service.

Captain Rømer proved to be much more affable. The “Flying Dutchman,” as the press insisted on calling him, was renowned for his calm demeanor and cold deliberation. A former test pilot, he had been the head astronaut for the European Space Agency before the split with France and Britain, and the first person to ride the German booster, Hringhorni, into orbit. He had carried EURO–NOL’s flag to the Moon.

Christain met him in the onion shaped module along the north axis of the space station, attached to the framework that surrounded the station like an oversized Faraday shield. It did not spin along with the rest of the station and so was without pseudogravity.

They shook hands. Rømer was a short man, solidly built, square-shaped, seemingly as wide as he was tall.

“It’s good to see you, Captain.”

“My pleasure, Dr. Monelly. I’m looking forward to seeing my crew.”

“They should be along shortly but first I wanted to have a little talk with you.”

“About what?”

“The chain of command.”

Rømer regarded him warily. “Yes?”

“I want us to be clear on this. You command the ship, obviously. I command the mission.”

The Captain grinned. “Christain,” he chided. “How long have we known each other?”

“Officially, I’m an advisor. I have no power whatsoever.”

“Um hmm. And if I told you to go fuck yourself how long would it be before I was back on Earth?”

“Monelly smiled. “How long would it take you to walk?”

Rømer nodded. “You tell me what to cook, Christain, and then stay the hell out of the kitchen.”

“Good, I knew you’d understand.”

“Or I never would have been chosen in the first place.”

The door to the airlock opened and the first member of the crew arrived, the Belgian, ecologic specialist, Geo Lemaître. Walter Thiel soon followed bringing along the rest of his engineering crew, Antonia Carubia from the Czech Republic, and Monelly’s fellow Italian Emily Romagna, the IT specialist. Dr. Katerina Egge arrived next, promptly sneering at the sight of Thiel, who had a splash of lasagna on his shirtfront. He stared back at her, intrigued. The cook, Kirin Wahmke, and pilots Hermann Gromek and Venetia Katherine Phair, all German, arrived together. Last to arrive was the Icelander, security specialist Arne Sak. He coldly surveyed the room.

“I’m so happy we could finally get together,” Monelly said after they had quieted down. “We are about to embark on one of the greatest adventures in the history of humankind. Compared to us Armstrong and Aldrin did take a very small step for mankind. Columbus sailed across a mud puddle. Marco Polo visited his next door neighbor and Magellan took a stroll around the block. It takes light four hours to travel where we’re going. No one will be close by to rescue us if we fail. Our enemies will be nearby. We must be closer than friends, closer than colleagues, closer than family, closer than shipmates have ever been. We can have no conflict, no jealousy, no anger, no strife.” He looked around the room, deliberately meeting each and every eye.

“I’ll be watching you very closely this week. Not as a big brother, or a policeman, or priest, but as a therapist so that we can anticipate trouble before it becomes a problem. Make changes. Keep everyone, if not satisfied, then at least understanding. I’m depending on your help, your cooperation, and your honesty—with me and with each other.

“We will be the first to claim Charon for our nations and unravel its secret. I have no doubt the history of the next thousand years depends on us. We are truly harbingers of a new era, when our peoples, too long restrained by the jealousy and hatred of other, lesser races, will once again take our rightful place at the head of civilization.”

With that he opened the champagne, squeezing drinks into a bulb for each as they toasted one another.

Later, back in his office, he sat sharing a cognac with Arne Sak.

“Nice speech, boss. Do you think anyone bought it?”

Monelly shrugged, unconcerned. “What have you found out?”

“Nothing that’s not in my report. The Allies . . .”

Monelly snorted. “Are they really calling themselves that?”

“I’m afraid so. I don’t know who in the hell they think they are. World War Two was a long time ago.”

“As propaganda it’s useful.”

“If you say so.”

“What else?”

“The Americans are getting nervous thanks to our Slav-Jap-Frog pals but as long as they plan to slingshot around Venus first they’re on a schedule we can beat.”

“What about the Russians?”

“I wouldn’t worry about them. That piece of shit they’re constructing will probably fall apart halfway there.”

“How about the efforts at sabotage?”

“We’re stirring the pot, backing as many groups as will take our money, but they’re mostly amateurs and about as likely to strike at us as any of the others.”

“The Chinese?”

Sak grunted with frustration. “We know they’re sending nuclear material to the Moon. They’re definitely up to something but we don’t have a chance in hell of finding out what that is.”

“Do you have an estimate?”

“Assume that it’s going to be very close.”

“All right, Arne. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Once he’d left Christain opened his window’s blinds and contemplated the blue globe drifting there.
. .

Chapter Four

New rules about non-combatants in space required Banner to first join the US Army. Soon after filling out the application he found himself in basic training at Ft. Benning, Georgia with a bunch of regular army infantry recruits. It didn’t kill him but there were a few moments when he wished that it had.

For one thing he couldn’t understand the young kids’ music. “Whatever happened to good old Hip-Hop?” he wondered. There was no other way to say it but this new stuff wasn’t even music.

His opinion didn’t bother anybody. At 28 he was the old man of the group and when they discovered why he was there, and that he had been in outer space, he was treated with an awed deference that he found embarrassing. After awhile they started calling him Gramps because he was always trying to protect them from themselves, offering them advice, and loaning them money that he didn’t really expect to get back.

By the end of training he was as tough as a dog’s old chewstick, knew how to fight to the death, and had made more friends than he could count. Kids that were heading out to Afghanistan, Borneo, Saskatchewan, Nigeria, Venezuela, and a half dozen other nasty killing places where their government thought they should be. He might be there soon himself, he reflected, if this Charon thing didn’t work out.

Then he was off to Houston and the Johnson Space Center to begin training in earnest. The bus let him off at a barracks where, for the next three months, he and the other recruits were put through a rigorous process by a rough old Sergeant who pushed them hard as they learned the bare necessities about surviving in the nekkid vacuum and radioactivity of a space environment. It was all old hat to Banner but he knew better than to let Sarge know that and diligently went through the process with the rest.

Cape Canaveral never looked so beautiful as their bus approached from the coastal road. Banner was surprised to find tears in his eyes when he saw the gantries where rockets went up almost daily. They let them off near a sad little flat-roofed one-story building that could have been built way back in the 1950s where they were given their duffel bags, queued up, marched a quarter mile to a transport where they gave up them back, and then marched to another bus, which took them to a larger building where they were inspected, hosed down, and issued generic space gear that they hastily donned as their loving Sergeant growled encouragement.

Then they hiked a short way through an air-conditioned tunnel, its scuffed walls a bright yellow. Banner waited his turn to squeeze in the elevator with five other recruits. When the doors opened they were hurried into the EEV (Earth Egress Vehicle), nicknamed Little Boots by its mischievous crew. Soon after they strapped in the Wally Schirra “Black Hat” booster was lit, beginning their trip to the Moon. The brutal acceleration of the vehicle brought a few anonymous whimpers from the recruits but it filled Banner with fierce joy.

They wouldn’t let Banner visit his old haunts on the ISS, or rather Freedom as it had been rechristened, during their stopover. He was there to pee, eat, and transfer with the rest of the troops to the Moon Unit taking them the rest of the way to Armstrong Base. The place looked shabby, worn out, he reflected as he pulled himself through the corridor along with the rest, carefully observing military rules so that Sarge wouldn’t get his shorts in an uproar.

He did recognize the old hatch leading into the mess. Inside, he saw that the video screen had been removed and the food station streamlined. Gone were the big old pressurized carboys that held drinks and in their place spigots stuck out from the wall where you could plug in your canteen’s blow hole. One was labeled coffee, one was labeled water, and one was labeled citrus, which oozed out as orange as a Safety Stripe™.

The ass-pad on his chair was gone and he had to curl his legs around the seat base to stay in place. Still, he was doing better than some of the guys, who stared at the food on their trays with a green look about their gills. “Once one of them barfs it’ll all be over,” he thought contentedly. He’d seen it happen before with newbies once the smell hit them—the dreaded chain-puke. The first one who could get out of the room was required to close the hatch behind him and leave the others to their fate.

“You gonna eat that?” he asked the rookie sitting next to him. She shook her head very slowly, not daring to look up.

“Thanks.” He swallowed the gooey briquette happily. That’s when he saw a woman gesturing from the entrance. Her red hair was cropped short, a reddish fuzz, really, emphasizing the flat planes of her skull and sharp angles of her cheekbones. It took him a moment to realize the officer was his Dr. Ashlee Monelly!

“Sarge,” he said to the man glowering from his station on the ceiling above him. “The Captain wants to talk to me.” Sergeant Teigs squinted in the direction he was indicating before saying quietly, “OK, Brummett, but be ready to leave in ten.”

“Yes, sir.”

He was trying to think of what he should say as he drifted towards her self-consciously.

”Uh . . .” he squeaked as she grabbed him in a fierce hug. He put his arms around her and inhaled deeply. She smelled neutral, of course, as everyone did, but somehow her neutrality smelled better than the rest.

“Banner! It’s so good to see a friendly face.”

He was melting into her when he realized that the entire room had gone quiet. He peeked around the back of her skull and saw that, yes, dear mother, everyone was staring at them. Some were smiling, cynically or wistfully, he couldn’t tell. Others looked shocked. Sarge looked like he was about to go major Krakatoa.

“Maybe we should . . .” he pushed off from the footrail pulling her out into the corridor next to a stanchion that used to hold one of Sophie’s old hydrangeas. They huddled together, whispering like two conspirators.

“It is good to see you again,” she said smiling. He saw there was moisture in her blue eyes. —Oh god . . .

“I’m sorry about you and Dr. Christain . . .”

She made a face. “It was going to happen anyway. What about you?”

He shrugged. “Teaching school, thinking about getting married."

“Ah.”

“But I could hardly ask her to wait by the fireside for ten or fifteen years.”

She hugged him again. “Which college were you teaching at?” she said to change the subject.

He laughed. “High school math. I like to start at the bottom.”

“And now you’re going with us to Charon!”

“I hope so. I’ve gotta get through space-basic first.”

“I’m sure you’ll do fine,” she said placing her hand on the blade of his shoulder. He was about to kiss her when an angry gray head poked through the hatch.

“Brummett!” Sarge pulled himself into the corridor where he encouraged the cadets that followed to move along, “Can the bullshit!”

Banner stared at him hopelessly. “I have to go, Ashlee. But I’ll see you soon.”

“Good luck, Banner.” She kissed him on the cheek as rough hands pulled him away.

“Excuse me, M’am,” Sarge said to Captain Monelly.

“Carry on, Sergeant,” she replied, eyes twinkling with amusement.

It wasn’t until they were in the Moon Unit that the old soldier released him, observing dryly, “You don’t have to stand at attention, soldier.”

Banner looked down, turning red, as a nearby soldier guffawed, earning a hard stare from the sergeant.

“Get strapped in, son,” he said not unkindly as he pulled himself down the line, checking each young soldier in turn.

ØØØ

JJ Gatlinberg was a hundred yards from the Chinese far-side base. No one had ever been closer. He had spent the previous eighteen hours maneuvering into position but was way too pumped to feel tired. Even so there wasn’t much to see—some very large tractors, a couple of shacks. Everything else was nestled deep inside the crater, which was roofed by a thick flat sheath. A huge retractable door ran along one side, its motors as tall as five-story buildings. If he could just make it to them without being detected he might find a place to hide until he could slip inside.

He thought he knew where all the security cameras were hidden but must have missed one because halfway to the engine housing he saw soldiers emerging from one of the nearby shacks. He watched them approach. There was nowhere to run.

“Shit! Call the Cap!” he hollered to no one in particular.

He couldn’t see their features in the glare as they approached in their red and gold spacesuits, stopping just inches from him. He watched as one of them raised a thick boot, bringing it down with a crunch. All was blackness.

Gatlinberg turned from the screen with a sigh. Behind him Cap looked on sternly, but resigned.

“You did the best you could JJ.”

“The Nanos were able to move a little closer during the distraction,” someone said.

“So it wasn’t a total loss,” said Cap.

“I was so close.”

“We learned a lot.”

“The next time . . . “

Cap took him by the shoulder. “Not for you, Lieutenant.”

Gatlinberg looked up at him, not comprehending.

“You’re being reassigned. I’m sorry JJ. Lieutenant Gustefson was caught in that blow-out at Cassini the other day and they need someone to replace him with the newbies.”

“Aw, no! Not babysitting. We’re so close to getting in.”

“It’s just for one group,” Captain Spigot (he pronounced it "Spee-jo") replied. “The Chinese will still be here when you get back.”

“When do I leave?” JJ huffed with frustration.

“Can you be ready in ten minutes?”

“But I haven’t slept in . . . yes, sir.”

ØØØ

“Go, go, go, go!” Sarge yelled as they jumped into their spacesuits. Banner helped his partner run down her checklist and then she did the same for him. Soon after they were outside on the parade ground standing at attention, easy to do in a pressurized spacesuit that could stand on its own without any help from the person inside.

Sarge came down the line with that funny little hop people used on the Moon. Hopping right along beside him was an officer. They stopped in front of Banner. The officer seemed to be staring at him intently. Hard to tell when his face was behind a gold-tinted faceplate. “What the hell?” Banner thought.

“Private Brummett?”

“Yessir!” With mounting horror Banner realized that he recognized the officer’s voice. “It can’t be!” He glanced at the namepatch on the man’s chest. “Lieutenant Gatlinberg?” he gasped.

“That’s right, Gump,” the lieutenant grated, putting his helmet right against Banner’s. He had turned off his radio but Banner could still hear him loud and clear. “I don’t know how you made it here, loser, but if you fuck up once I’ll run you back to Earth so fast it’ll take two weeks for your asshole to catch up!”

“Original,” Banner muttered.

“What was that?”

“Yessir! Uh, thank you, sir!” Banner tried to salute but his arm couldn’t quite make it all the way up in his pressurized suit.

“Pathet . . .” Gatlinberg muttered as he pulled away. Sarge stared at him for a moment with what would have been a puzzled expression but Banner couldn’t see his face, either, before following the Lieutenant down the line.

“Holy fuck!” thought Banner, sweat stinging his eyes. “Holy Jesus fuck!”

ØØØ

Hurry up and wait was the same everywhere. Even on the Moon. Banner was sweating in his suit like Aunt Maude at the 4th of July picnic. “I’m even starting to think like a Gump,” he realized. “What a world.” They had brought them out in the long afternoon sun because they were using a leftover atomic bomb to blow a new hole in a crater wall and thought it would be a good idea to take the troopers somewhere dangerous to see how they’d hold up. And here Banner had thought that the whole point was to avoid danger entirely.

“Thinking like NASA,” they called people with his attitude, and it was discouraged in the military.

The ground beneath them began to shake violently. A crevasse opened up a half mile away spewing forth chunks of possibly radioactive debris in tall parabolic arcs.

“Eat dirt!” Sarge growled as the pieces thudded down amongst them, some pinging off their suits. It seemed to take forever as Banner fell like a soap bubble to the regolith.

“Check your status!” came the next command.

Banner ran through his displays. Nothing damaged. Radiation high but tolerable. He dared a quick look around. Sarge was stalking amongst them intently watching his readouts and verifying the answers with his own eyes. When he was satisfied he made them leave in small groups, taking no chances that a vault might have opened up beneath them. Then they were marched back to the transport. At the barracks they were subjected to decontamination procedures before being allowed inside. A few of them had to see the docs but no one would need to go back to Earth.

“What the hey, I didn’t want kids anyway,” someone joked.

“Oh, you can have kids, they’ll just be ugly.”

“Can’t blame radiation for that.”

ØØØ

“Born again to what?” Banner asked his bunkie who was trying to recruit him to a higher cause.

“Born again in Christ,” Antowaine replied with a smile. “I know because the holy Greene, Penrose, and whatisname proclaimed that God’s world is smaller than we can ever see, heaven is in what they call dark matter. God is what they call dark energy . . .” he hesitated. “Or zero point energy, I forget which.”

“Gosh, Ant, I was raised a Catholic and they didn’t exactly teach string theory.”

“The Manifold,” he corrected piously.

“Yeah, and they said we’d go to hell if we talked about it too much.”

“They don’t want you to hear the truth. Where do you think hell is?”

“Somewhere down below . . . and hot?”

“It’s in the dark matter that makes up 22% of all the stuff in the universe, my man!” Antowaine replied cheerfully. “We’re only 4%, God is the rest.”

“The dark energy?”

“They only call it that because they’re ignorant,” he sniffed. “It’s just the Energy, man. It’s where our spirits dwell. It’s where we’re judged.”

“I can live with that, I mean with being judged. I’ve lived a clean life.”

“But you ain’t been born again, Banner. You’ve gotta be washed in the blood of the lamb. You have to accept Jesus for what He is.”

“About that . . . see, the nuns were right, we’ve talked about it too much. Now is the part where you tell me I’m going to hell.”

“You are if you’re not born again!”

Banner shrugged. "Halle-fuckin'-lujah!"

ØØØ

Lieutenant Gatlinberg seemed like was never far away. Part of that was because the base wasn’t very big but it was also because he wasn’t content to sit back and administer the program while letting the Sergeant handle the up close and personal. No, he was in their shit all the time. He even took calisthenics with them in the morning and found inner peace with them during yoga class in the evening. And every minute Banner felt his eyes watching closely, begging for any excuse to wash him out.

The base was eight Quonset huts buried deep in the regolith beneath a dull gray dome of aluminum. Filtered sunlight dappled down two weeks a month, the rest of the time sickly orange sodium lights competed with common sense outside the huts. Not much attention had been paid to a biosphere but nevertheless some scrub grass was growing in the corners, and a few things that could be jimson weed.

At one end was a small parade ground beside two squat buildings. One housed the mess hall and the other was a storage facility. Between them was a slope where the roadway sunk beneath one end of the dome to the main airlock. An entire company could be decompressed at one time. On the other side of the airlock a second dome housed the garage.

One day, while standing on the lump of green-painted sward outside the barracks thinking about the butterscotch pudding they’d had with dinner, he looked up to see the Lieutenant frowning at him.

“Have you heard from her, Gump?” Gatlinberg suddenly asked.

“Sir?”

“Sophie. You were her friend, right? At least she talked about you while I pretended to listen.”

“That would be against regulation, sir.” Banner snapped to attention, adding after a moment’s silence. “I haven’t heard from her since she left the ISS.”

“Yeah. I thought you might know a way.”

“No, sir.”

Gatlinberg turned and hopped away. Was this some kind of test? Banner wondered, watching him leave, feeling shaken by the man’s intensity. The less Jesus Johnny talked to him the better.

The next day the troops were out on the shooting range trying out various weapons. Banner had always been a good shot as a kid, although the first time he’d killed something it gave him a sick feeling and he never did it again. Firing a weapon was different on the Moon. The trajectory was flatter and there was no air pressure to account for. Since his suit made sighting the regular way impossible the gun was held at hip level and sighted electronically through a display on the inside of his faceplate. He soon had the hang of it and was amazed at the distance he could accurately shoot the rocket-propelled fléchettes.

“You’re a regular Davy Crockett, ain’t you Brummett?” the sergeant noted after the results were tabulated.

“Tweren’t nothin’, sir,” he replied, Crockett-like.

Hand-to-hand combat was an especially frustrating exercise in futility. There wasn’t much you could do to an opponent in a battle-hardened pressure suit without a weapon, except crack his helmet open with a rock. “We’ve come all the way to the Moon to fight like cavemen,” Banner thought after one encounter left both him and his opponent lying in the artificial mud, exhausted—until Sarge came along and whacked them both soundly on their heads with his “lickin’ stick.”

Banner did better in the tactical training class. Sitting at a console while running through various scenarios based on actual combat situations, Banner was able to outmaneuver his opponents more often than not. “I guess all those hours of wiizing are finally paying off,” he thought with some satisfaction. Closely reading the manuals they’d been given helped, too, he realized, and gave him an edge on the younger guys who weren’t quite so diligent.

Once a week they were taken out for a long hike across the Moon’s surface. Lighter gravity meant little when you were required to haul eight times your own weight around with you. Sometimes they’d walk in a big circle, returning to base the same day. Other times they spent the “night” on the surface, inflating pressurized tents inside a rill canyon or in the shade of a crater wall. Above them the Earth hung like a revolving blue lamp, the shadow of night creeping across its surface teasing lattices of light from its cities and highways. Banner watched for hours sometimes, waiting for sleep to come.

One day near the end of training they were following along the edge of a steep crater when his buddy stumbled, danced briefly for a moment trying to regain her balance, and fell inside. Without hesitating Banner followed her into the dark shadow, flicking on his lamp, digging at the ground to help brake his fall. Somehow he reached the bottom on his feet. Looking around for the soldier in the gloom he made out a small blinking red light. He gasped, hopping desperately to reach the still figure. The light meant her suit was depressurizing. In less than a minute she’d be dead.

Dropping his pack he ripped open his emergency shelter. Within seconds it had pressurized and he shoved her inside its fallopian airlock. Fearing this would not be enough he started depressurizing his own suit and followed her inside. The fit was extremely tight but he managed to wrestle her helmet off. He saw blood around her mouth, nose, eyes, and ears and that she was fitfully breathing. Removing his own helmet he began giving her artificial respiration, the taste of her blood in his mouth. Finally, with a cough and a wretch, she began breathing regularly again.

“Thank God,” he said over and over as the other troops caught up, quickly erecting a field tent and cutting them out of the shelter. He watched numbly as the medics took over.

“Man, you’ll do anything for a piece of ass,” said one of his buddies admiringly.

“Shut up,” Banner smiled wanly. “Shut the fuck up.”

ØØØ

Training was over at last. Sporting his new corporal’s stripes Banner went into the nearby town of Neil with some of his buds. He bought a round of whiskey for his table. It really didn’t taste like any whiskey he’d ever had but he supposed oaken casks were hard to come by on the Moon.

“Too true,” said the bartender, whose establishment it was. “We make it in the back. It’s basically vodka mixed with a little Liquid Smoke.”

“Uk.”

“But since it’s your last night,” the barkeep learned over confidentially, “Let me buy you a drink from my private stock.” The man poured him a shot of single malt scotch.

“Word,” Banner gasped, rolling the liquid around in his mouth gratefully. “I can’t even afford to drink this stuff on Earth.”

Back at the table Roland was doing an impression of General Starks that caused Cindy Lou to blow beer through her nose. The table burst into raucous laughter as Banner rejoined them.

“To the corporal,” one of them raised his glass and the others followed.

“Dawg.”

“Muh man.”

They all drank.

“What’s next, Banner?” One of them asked.

“I go back to Earth and wait for them to decide whether or not I get to go.”

“That is so great,” Cindy Lou said.

“What about you?” he asked her.

“I’m going down to the edge of Mare Nubium with most of the guys to keep an eye on the Germans. Some of us are going out to Lagrange to help with the new space station and a few can’t say. But you’re going all the way!”

“I hope so,” he looked into her eyes like Jim Beam on a Sunday.

“It’s such an adventure,” she said, touching his forearm. “I’ll probably never see you again.”

“Oh, it’s only for ten or twenty years.”

“That seems like forever.”

“You know, you have the bluest eyes,” he said as she smiled at him.

“Brummett!” Suddenly a figure came up beside them. “You pointy-dicked SOB, let me buy you a drink,” a very drunken John Jesus Gatlinberg croaked while sitting down beside him.

“Lieutenant, ah . . .” Banner gulped, standing.

“Siddown, hoss, that’s an order.”

Banner sat, not knowing what to expect. “It’s a little late to cashier me,” he tried to joke.

“Naw, naw, naw, man!” To his shock Gatlinberg tried to hug him.

“This guy, this soldier,” Jesus Johnny proclaimed to the table of bemused recruits. “You done me proud. Who’d a thunk it, a punk like you? We were on Freedom together, did you know that?” he blearily looked around the table. “And this guy was a low-life weenie. Could barely wipe his ass with both hands. Now you can shoot—you’re the best in the troop. You can fight, I’ve seen ya. And you know how to take care of your own. That makes you a soldier I’m proud to serve with.”

Accepting the compliment Banner finished his beer and poured another, to try and get in the spirit of the thing after Cindy Lou, with sad eyes, said goodnight. Towards the end of the evening he found that Gatlinberg had put his arm around him and was whispering confidentially into his ear.

“You know, I loved that Sophie girl.”

“Sure. Me too.”

“No, I mean it,” he growled. “I’ve fucked plenty of women in my green time but none like her. Did joo fuck her?”

“No,” Banner answered defensively.

“Ah, you woosie. I didn’t think so. That gal is all woman. It takes a real man to get to her.”

Banner flushed with anger. “There’s more to her than just a roll in the hay!”

“Calm down,” Gatlinberg said with a laugh. “Relax. You’re right. I know it. She’s not like any woman I’ve ever had, goddamnit! That’s why it still bothers me. Here, have another beer. I think maybe you’ve got the hots for her, too,” he added pityingly.

“So?”

“Well, you’ll never get her that way, pardner. Women talk, you know, but what they want is another thing entirely. You can listen to them, sympathize—if all you want is to be their brother! That’s why they like faggots,” he burped loudly, and maybe farted, too, Banner realized with disgust. “Or you can be a man and take what you want—and what they want—why else put you through all that bullshit . . . like that little girl you were talking to when I interrupted,” he smirked.

Banner looked at him dumbly, thinking about what he’d lost with Sophie, Annabeth, and now Cindy Lou, and feeling deep, dark despair. He noticed that the bar was closing and the others had gone, except Ferd who lay unconscious on the table, blowing little bubbles in a wet puddle of beer. Banner hoisted him over his shoulder.

“Thanks for explaining things,” he said coldly to Gatlinberg before turning to leave.

“When a shark stops swimming he dies,” Jesus Johnny shrugged to no one in particular.
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More links:
Apollo Over the Moon: a View from Orbit Chapter 4: The Maria
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