Moonrise

FILE: GREGORY MASTERSON III

It has become possible — and even desirable — to transfer at least part of the subject’s feelings for his mother to a desire for security and self-esteem through success in the world of business and commerce. Therefore he has been encouraged to restart his career in Masterson Aerospace Corporation and to establish his own residence near his place of employment.

At age forty, this sublimation procedure is proceeding with apparent proficiency, although careful watch must be maintained since the subject is intelligent enough to know what his therapists desire and to parrot the responses they wish to observe — even under hypnotherapy.

However, his relationship with his twelve-year-old half-brother has apparently stabilized. The subject spent the Christmas holidays at home with his mother and sibling. Post-holiday interviews and testing showed no outward manifestations of hostility, although latent resentment is of course still present.

It has been four years since the subject’s last hypnotherapy encounter. As expected, his success in the corporate world has enabled him to build a new structure of self-esteem. His sexual feelings for his mother have not been eradicated, of course, but now he is able to usefully cha

Two years of semia

MOONBASE

Douglas Stavenger visited Moonbase for the first time on his eighteenth birthday.

His mother had been against it. She would not say why, but Doug knew her reason. His father had died on the Moon before he had been born. It was an accident, as far as Doug knew, a freak accident involving nanomachines that had been improperly programmed.

“That was eighteen years ago,” Doug pleaded with his mother. “And besides, I won’t be using nanobugs. I just want to see Moonbase with my own eyes.”

Joa

Not that he had quarrelled with his mother. Doug never quarrelled. Since elementary school he had made his smiling way through bullies among the students and the faculty alike, never fighting, never raising his voice, never losing his temper. He seemed to lead a charmed life. Everything came his way, seemingly without his needing to raise even a finger. People wanted to please him.

It wasn’t merely the fact that he was extremely wealthy. Everyone he knew came from wealthy families and most of them were miserably unhappy, absolutely no fun to be with. Like his brother Greg. Half-brother, actually. No matter how hard Doug tried, ever since childhood Greg had been a dark, sullen shadow across his life. He saw his half-brother only rarely, yet the room chilled when Greg was in it. Doug could feel the tension pulling between his mother and her other son. There seemed to be some deep, dreadful secret between them, a secret that neither of them chose to share with him.

Doug accepted it as a fact of his life, something that hac always been there. Someday he would find out what it was why his mother add half-brother were so guarded and uptight In the meantime, he had his own life to live.

Doug got along well with almost everyone simply because he thought farther ahead than the rest of them, and saw options that no one else considered. He was very bright and very adventurous. He had inherited his father’s compact, solid build and quick reflexes, his mother’s intelligence and endurance.

Captain of his prep school’s fencing team, shortstop on the baseball squad, Doug also discovered the thrills of jetbiking. When his mother objected he smilingly turned his fancy to rocket-boosted gliders that surfed the stratosphere’s jet streams. He took risks, plenty of them, but only after he had calculated all the odds and convinced himself that the risks were survivable. He knew he sometimes worried his mother, but he did not think he was foolhardy.

Still he did well enough academically to win acceptance by the top universities. His mother chose the University of Vancouver, where Kris Cardenas now headed the nanotechnology department. He accepted her decision, with the proviso that she allow him to visit Moonbase.

“Just for a few days,” he urged. “A weekend, even,”

Reluctantly, she gave in.

Doug had visited Masterson’s factories in Earth orbit He had experienced zero gravity before. But in preparation for his Moonbase jaunt he spent a week in Houston, at the corporation’s lunar simulator, teaching himself how to walk in one-sixth gee without stumbling and bouncing and making a fool of himself.

He was prepared for everything to be expected at Moonbase. Everything except meeting Foster Bre

His visit was something like a command performance. The son of the corporation’s board chairwoman was given a thorough tour of the base.

“Moonbase is built into the flank of the mountainous Ringwall of the crater Alphonsus,” his tour guide recited. She was a sloe-eyed brunette with a soft Sava

“The base consists of four parallel tu

“You didn’t use nanomachines to dig out the tu

The young woman blinked at him as if coming out of a trance. “Nanomachines? Uh, no… nanobugs are only used out on the crater floor, to harvest hydrogen out of the regolith and, um, to process regolith silicon into solar cells for the energy farms.”

“Then these tu

She nodded, frowning slightly as she tried to pick up her interrupted recitation. Once she remembered where she’d been stopped she resumed, “Living quarters, offices, laboratories and work stations have all been carved out of the rock…”

She walked Doug through each of the four tu

“When do I go outside?” he asked his guide after several hours of trudging through the underground faculties.

“Outside?’She looked alarmed.

“Yes,” he said pleasantly. “I want to see what it’s like out on the surface.”