Moonrise

Sitting comfortably in her chair, Joa

But her mind was on her sons. Greg was getting along well enough, ru

It was her younger son, Douglas, who worried her. Joa

An adventurous eighteen-year-old never thinks that pain or injury or death can reach him. When she found that he was pla

“Come on, Mom,” Doug replied with his father’s wi

During his first visit to Vancouver she learned that he had taken part in a power surfing jaunt to Victoria. “What could have happened to me?” he asked when she phoned, appalled at the risks he blithely took on.

She hoped that attending the university, under Cardenas’s tutelage, would calm Doug down. Lately he had taken to flying rocket-boosted soarplanes. “Riding the jet stream!” he chirped happily, all eagerness and enthusiasm. “What a blast!”

And now he was at Moonbase, celebrating his eighteenth birthday a quarter-million miles from home. From her.

How like his father Doug was, she thought. The same burning drive, the same restless urge to break new ground, to push the edges of the envelope. He had his father’s radiant smile and quick wit. His skin was lighter than Paul’s had been: a smooth olive complexion, with blue eyes that sparkled youthfully.

Paul must have been just like that at eighteen, Joa

And now he’s on the Moon, just as Paul was. Why? she asked herself. What is it about that harsh unforgiving country that draws men like that?

Joa

ALPHONSUS

The outer airlock hatch swung open at last and Doug stepped out onto another world.

He forgot about the pounding of his heart, forgot about Foster Bre

He forgot about making bootprints in the lunar dust. If Bre

The horizon was sharp as a knife edge, cutting off the world where it met the infinity of space. Gray and black, Doug saw. The Moon was a hundred shades of gray, from gleaming bright almost-white to the somber charcoal of the pitted ground beneath his booted feet And black, shadows darker than the deepest pits of Earth, and the even blacker expanse of endless space. An uncompromising world, Doug thought: brilliantly bright in sunlight or unconditionally dark in shadow, sharp and clear as the choice between good and evil.

The only touches of color Doug could see were the dayglo-painted tractors working silently at their tasks: bulldozers scraping up the regolith, backhoes piling the dirt into waiting trucks, which carried it to a small man-made hill. That’s where the nanomachines extract oxygen and hydrogen from the regolith, Doug told himself. On Earth they’d be roaring and grunting, their gears would be grinding away. Here on the Moon they do their jobs in perfect silence.

It’s quiet here, he thought. Peaceful. A man can hear himself think.

He turned and looked out toward the horizon once again, framed by the curving ringwall mountains and dimpled almost exactly in its middle by the tips of the crater’s central peaks, barely visible above the slash that separated sunlit ground from the endless void of space. Doug strained his eyes, but couldn’t see any stars at all.

“I thought there’d be stars even in the daytime,” he said.

“Slide up your outer visor,” Bre

Doug did it, yet the sky remained dark and empty.

“Cup your hands around your eyes. Cut off the ground glare.”

Doug pressed his cupped hands to his visor, but nothing changed.

“Give it a few seconds.”

And there they were! Stars appeared out of the darkness, not merely the pinpoints of light that Doug was accustomed to, but swarms of stars, oceans of stars, stars strewn so thickly across the heavens that the darkness was banished. Doug tottered as he stared out at the universe, felt himself getting dizzy.

“When I behold your heavens, O Lord,” he whispered, “the work of your fingers…”

“I know that one,” Bre

“Yes,” Doug said.

“You’re Paul Stavenger’s son, aren’t you?”

“You knew my father?”

“Knew him?” Bre

“What was he like?” Doug asked.

“You look a lot like him,” saidBre

As Doug followed him, the two of them galloping along like a pair of tailless kangaroos, Bre

“Would you believe old Billy-boy was one of us, then? A real hell-raiser, too.”

“The safety chief?” Doug guessed.

“Yep. He changed an awful lot once they put him behind a desk. You’re never going to see me vegetate like that!”

They were skirting the edge of the solar energy farms now, where the ground gleamed with acre after acre of glassy solar cells. Along the far edge of the glittering field Doug could see a dark oily film; it looked alien, out of place, almost hostile. Nanomachines, he realized, working ceaselessly to convert lunar regolith into more solar cells.

“Up there…’ Bre

Up ahead was a machine of some sort: a big, boxy, heavy metal contraption resting on what looked like caterpillar treads. It had once been painted white, Doug saw, but now it was streaked with smears of dusty dead gray.

“What is it?”

Bre

“What is this thing?” Doug asked again. Now that they were close enough to touch it, he saw that the machine was really massive, taller than even Bre

“This poor dumb beast,” said Bre