Moonrise

Who gives a flyin’ fuck? he said to himself as he pushed himself to his feet and staggered, limped, hopped on his one good foot, holding his breath, reaching out with both hands and flopped into the open airlock that stood in front of the buried shelter.

He pounded the yellow-glowing phosphorescent button that activated the lock. The outside door creaked shut, although Paul could hear no sound in the lunar vacuum. He imagined the creaking as the curving door slid shut on its track, grinding stray dust particles in its path.

Bracing himself inside the phonebooth-sized airlock, Paul heard the hissing of air and even the chug of the pump. Most beautiful sounds in the world, he thought Beats Duke Ellington any day.

The overhead light went on and the indicator panel’s green light glowed to life. Trembling, hoping this wasn’t the last hallucination of a man dying of oxygen deprivation, Paul fumbled with the catch of his visor and slid it up. Sweetest air in two worlds.

He took deep lungfuls of the stuff. Next sonofabitch complains about ca

The indicator pad told him the pressure in the airlock was high enough for him to open the i

But he was too tired, too exhilarated, too anxious to get inside the shelter and out of this foul-smelling suit even to begin vacuuming.

He opened the i

It was a typical temporary shelter. A long aluminum cylinder’tthat had been laid down in a trench scooped out by a bulldozer and then buried beneath a couple of feet of loose regolith rubble to protect it from the meteoroids that pelted the Moon’s surface and the harsh swings of temperature from daylight to Anight. And from the radiation pouring in unimpeded from deep space.

Radiation. Paul wanted desperately to flop on one of the lovely, beckoning bunks that lined the far end of the shelter, I but he knew he had to worm himself out of his suit first. And check his radiation patch.

It seemed to take hours, removing the helmet, then the backpack, the gloves, boots, leggings and finally wriggling out of the suit’s torso. The dust was thick enough to make him cough. Hope it doesn’t foul up the air vents, Paul thought.

His radiation patch had turned yellow. Not good, but not as bad as red would have been.

Hey, you’re alive and safe with nothing worse than a sprained ankle and a radiation dose that’ll take a year or so off the ass end of your life. Count your blessings, man.

He limped to the nearest bunk and flopped onto it But before he could close his eyes he thought of Greg.

I’m not home free yet He might still win this.

I should have known he’d try to kill me. All those weeks of his smiling and working with me. Started when I agreed to the nanotech demonstration. He’s hated me all along, every inch of the way. I should have known.

Ought to call the base, get them to patch me through to Joa

But he was too exhausted to do anything but close his eyes and sleep.

ALPHONSUS

Paul had been in good spirits when he arrived at Moonbase. The transfer spacecraft that took him from the space station in low Earth orbit to the giant crater Alphonsus was an ungainly collection of tankage, ante

As the lander literally fell toward the Moon’s surface, Paul commandeered a spot at one of the observation ports and hung there weightlessly, watching Alphonsus rush up at him. The crater’s ringwall mountains looked deceptively soft, tired and slumped from eons of erosion by dust-sized meteorites that sandpapered their slopes to almost glassy smoothness.

It was hard to get any sense of scale staring out at the barren, pockmarked face of the Moon. He knew Alphonsus was more than seventy miles across, a crater big enough to swallow all of Greater New York, from Newark to Bridgeport. But as he hovered in free fall, watching, it merely looked like a big circle of mountains with a dimple in its middle.

The floor of the crater was cracked, criss-crossed with sinuous rilles. Once in a while a whiff of ammonia or methane or one of the noble gases would seep out from the Moon’s deep interior through those cracks. It was one of the reasons Moonbase had been sited inside Alphonsus’s circling mountains: one day they would drill for the methane and ammonia, valuable sources of life-supporting volatiles.

Paul saw the unfinished oxygen plant and a crew of construction technicians milling around it like spacesuited ants.

Oxygen was the most valuable resource of them all, in space. If Moonbase ever became profkable, it would be by selling oxygen to the factories and other facilities in Earth orbit.

The spacecraft tilted over so that it could land on its rocket exhausts, and the/funar landscape shifted out of Paul’s view. Clasping the handgrips on either side of the port, he felt the slightest of pressures, just a gentle nudge. And then the soft thump of landing. Weight returned, but it was only a sixth oi the weight he felt on Earth. This was the Moon. Paul felt as if he were returning home.

It took less than ten minutes for the spacesuited ground crew to co

It was hardly grand. Moonbase consisted of a dozen ‘temporary’ shelters, each buried beneath piles of regolith rubble and interco

Paul loved it.

Wojo was at the receiving desk, checking out the cargo that the lander was unloading, his computer screen split between the invoice list and a camera view of the spacesuited ground crew hauling out the crates from the lander’s cargo platforms.

“So you’ve decided to come live with the proletariat for a while,” Wojo said pleasantly. He was a bulky man, big in the shoulders, with a beer gut and the glittering eyes of a seeker after truth. Roughly Paul’s age, Wojo’s hair and ragged beard were already dead white and thi

“How’re you doing, Wojo?” Paul asked, sliding his one travelbag from his shoulder and letting it thump softly on the plastic flooring.

“Still trying to get those narrow-minded bean counters in the insurance office to admit that the company owes me premium pay,” Wojo grumbled, not taking his eyes from his display screen.

It was an old, old argument. Wojo demanded compensation for his tractor maintenance work out on the surface, over and above the hazardous duty pay called for in his employment contract.

Paul had steered clear of the fight while he’d been Wojo’s division manager. Now that he was CEO he feared the man would ask him to intervene.

But Wojo had not done that, so far. “They got a new manager in the so-called human resources department. A man so narrow-minded he can look through a keyhole with both eyes.