Moonrise

Moonrise

by Ben Bova

We have power, you and I, But what good is that now? We would build a new world if we only knew how.

PART I: Destiny

MARE NUBIUM

“Magnificent desolation.”

Paul Scavenger always spoke those words whenever he stepped out onto the bare dusty surface of the Moon. But this time it was more than a quotation: it was a supplication, a prayer.

Standing at the open hatch of the airlock, he looked through his tinted visor at the bare expanse of emptiness stretching in every direction. Normally the sight calmed him, brought him some measure of peace, but now he tried to fight down the churning ache in his gut Fear. He had seen men die before, but not like Tinker and Wojo. Killed. Murdered. And he was trying to get me. The poor bastards just happened to be in his way.

Paul stepped out onto the sandy regolith, his boots kicking up little clouds of dust that floated lazily in the light lunar gravity and slowly settled back to the ground.

Got to get away, Paul said to himself. Got to get away from here before the damned bugs get me, too.

Twenty miles separated this underground shelter from the next one. He had to make it on foot. The little rocket hopper was already a shambles and he couldn’t trust the tractor; the nanobugs had already infected it. For all he knew, they were in his suit, too, chewing away at the insulation and the plastic that kept the suit airtight.

Well, he told himself, you’ll find out soon enough. One foot in front of the other. I’ll make it on foot if I make it at all.

Twenty miles. On foot. And the Sun was coming up.

“Okay,” he said, his voice shaky. “If it is to be, it’s up to me.”

The sky was absolutely black, but only a few stars showed through the heavy tint of his helmet’s visor. They stared steadily down at Paul, unblinking, solemn as the eyes of God.

Turning slightly as he walked, Paul looked up to see a fat gibbous Earth, blue and gleaming white, hanging in the dark sky. So close. So far. Joa

“Get your butt in gear,” he muttered to himself. He headed out across the empty plain, fleeing death one plodding step at a time. With all the self-control he still possessed he kept himself from ru

His surface suit held the sweaty smell of fear. He had seen two men die out here; it had been sheer luck that the berserk nanomachines hadn’t killed him, too. How do you know they haven’t infested the suit? he asked himself again. Grimly he answered, What difference does it make? If they have, you’re already dead.

But the suit seemed to be functioning okay. The real test would come when he stepped across the terminator, out of the night and into the blazing fury of daylight. Twenty miles in that heat, and if you stop you’re dead.

He had calculated it all out in his head as soon as he realized what had happened in the shelter. Twenty miles. The suit’s backpack tank held twelve hours of oxygen. No recycling. You’ve got to cover one and two-thirds miles per hour. Make it two miles an hour, give yourself a safety margin.

Two miles an hour. For ten hours. You can make that Sure you can.

But now as he trudged across the bleak wilderness of Mare Nubium, he began to wonder. You haven’t walked ten hours straight in… Christ, not since the first time you came up here to the Moon. That was twenty years ago, almost Twenty pissing years. You were a kid then.

Well, you’ll have to do it now. Or die. Then Greg wins. He’ll have murdered his way to the top.

Even though it was still night, the rugged landscape was not truly dark. Earthglow bathed the rolling, pockmarked ground. Paul could see the rocks strewn across the bare regolith, the rims of craters deep enough to swallow him, the dents of smaller ones that could make him stumble and fall if he wasn’t careful.

Nothing but rocks and craters, and the sharp uncompromising slash of the horizon out there, like the edge of the world, the begi

Yet Paul had always loved it. Even encased in a bulky, cumbersome surface suit he had always felt free up here on the surface of the Moon, on his own, alone in a universe where he had no problems at all except survival. That’s what the Moon gives us, he told himself. Brings it all down to the real question, the only question. Are you going to live or die? Everything else is bullshit. Am I going to live or die?

But then he thought of Joa

Joa

He stopped, puffing hard. The visor of his helmet was fogging. A flash of panic surged through him. Have the nanobugs gotten to this suit? He held up his left arm to check the display panel on the suit’s forearm, trembling so badly that he had to grasp his wrist with his right hand to steady himself enough to read the display. Everything in the green. He tapped the control for the air-circulating fan in his helmet and heard the comforting whine of its speeding up.

Okay, it’s still working. The suit’s functioning okay. Settle down. Keep moving.

Turning to see how far he’d come from the underground shelter that Greg had turned into a death trap, Paul was pleased to see that its gray hump of rubble was just about on the horizon. Covered a couple of miles already, he told himself.

His boot prints looked bright, almost phosphorescent, against the dark surface of the regolith. In a couple thousand years they’ll turn dark, too; solar ultraviolet tans everything. He almost laughed. Good thing I’m already ta

Paul started out again, checking his direction with the global positioning system receiver built into the suit’s displays. He hadn’t had the luxury of timing his exit from the shelter to coincide with one of the GPS satellites’ passing directly overhead. The only positioning satellite signal his suit could receive was low on the horizon, its signal weak and breaking up every few minutes. But it would have to do. There were no other navigational aids, and certainly no road markers on Mare Nubium’s broad expanse.

The other shelters had directional beacons planted in the ground every mile between them. And they were no more than ten miles apart, all the way to the ringwall. Greg had pla

He plodded on, wishing the suit radio had enough juice to reach the tempo he was heading for, knowing that it didn’t There’s nobody there, anyway, he thought It’s just a relay shelter. But it ought to be stocked with oxygen and water. And its radio should be working.

Suddenly, with an abruptness that startled him, Paul saw the horizon flare into brilliance. The Sun.

He checked his watch and, yes, his rough calculations were pretty close to the actualities. In a few minutes the Sun would overtake him and he’d have to make the rest of the trek in daylight.

Christ he thought, if the visor fogged up when it was two hundred below zero outside the suit what’s going to happen when it goes over two-fifty above, and the damned suit can’t radiate my body heat away?