Moonrise

“It must weigh fifty tons,” Doug said.

Forty-two, on Earth.’,

“That’s a lot to lift.”

“Yep. The nanobugs are a lot better. But once upon a time, my boy, this beast was the height of modern technology. A tele-operated, self-sufficient, solar powered mechanical cow. Grazed on the regolith. Took in silicon, aluminum, et cetera in its front end, digested them and put them together, and shat solar cells out its backside.”

“And that’s how the first solar energy farms were made.”

“More or less. Damned dumb beasts kept breaking down, of course. Nobody knew how bad a problem the dust was, back then. We spent more time repairing these stupid cows than anything else.”

“Out here in the open?”

“Sure. Didn’t make any sense to trundle ’em all the way back to one of the tempos? Anyway, we didn’t have a garage in those days, so we’d have to work in the open one way or the other.”

“What about the radiation?”

“That’s why we’re all prematurely gray,” Bre

“Really?” Doug had never heard that before.

“I could tell you stories…’ Bre

“What happened to the other cows?” Doug asked.

“Scrapped them. We left this one out here and converted it into an emergency shelter.”

Doug turned, frowning, and saw that the airlock in the ringwall mountains was hardly a half-mile away.

“We also use it for other purposes,” Bre

Doug saw that someone had scrawled in luminescent red just above the machine’s hatch If this van’s rocking, don’t come knocking.

“Oh!” he said, with sudden understanding. “This is the Moonbase Motel.”

Bre

He started walking again, but at an angle away from the carcass of the mechanical cow and the glittering solar farms.

“So what’re you” doing up here, kid? Why’d you come to Moonbase?”

Doug almost shrugged, but the spacesuit made it too difficult. “I wanted to see it firsthand. All my life I’ve heard about Moonbase, and how my father worked to make it viable. He died here.”

“He let himself die in order to protect the base.”

“Yeah.” Doug was surprised at the lump in his throat. “Sol … I had to see the place.”

“Now that you’ve seen it, what do you think?”

“The inside’s a lot smaller than I thought it’d be,” Doug replied. “But the outside…’ He stretched his arms out to the horizon. “This is — well, it’s terrific!”

“You like it out here, do you?”

“It’s like all my life I’ve waited to get here and now that I’m here, I’m home.”

For a moment Bre

“What do you mean?”

“Are you ru

Doug thought it over. “No, I don’t think it’s that”

“Then what?”

He hesitated another moment, sorting out his feelings. “All my life I’ve heard about my father and Moonbase. Now that I’m here, I can see what he saw, I can understand why he’d give his life for it.”

“Why?”

Looking around at the barren landscape one more time, Doug answered simply, “This is the future. My future. Our future. The whole human race. This is the frontier. This is where we grow.”

He could sense Bre

“This is where we grow,” Doug repeated, convinced of the truth of it.

Bre

“What?”

“The most valuable real estate on the Moon — in the whole solar system, in fact. It’s down by the south pole…”

They walked side by side farther out into the giant crater’s floor, out toward the area where sinuous rilles cracked the surface, Bre

“There’s a mountain down there that’s in sunlight all the time, twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year.”

“ That’sthe place for a solar farm!” Doug said excitedly.

“And there’s fields of ice down in the valleys between the mountains,” Bre

Doug’s breath caught. He calmed himself, then asked, “That’s been confirmed?”

“It’s top secret corporate information, but, yes, it’s been confirmed.”

“Then we could—”

“Look out!”

Doug felt Bre

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” Bre

“What’s happening?”

“I’m not sure, it might — Look!”

Thousands of fireflies seemed to burst upward, out of the rille. Glittering coldly blue and bright green, the cloud of glistening light expanded in the sunlight, twinkling, gleaming, filling Doug’s vision with ghostly light. He was surrounded by the sparkling lights; it was like being inside a starry nebula or a heaven filled with angels.

Doug saw nothing but the lights, heard nothing but his own gasping breath. Tears filled his eyes.

“An eruption,” he heard Bre

“What is it?” Doug managed to whisper.

“Ammonia, methane. From down below. It seeps up through the rilles every now and then. Someday we’ll mine the stuff.”

The cloud grew and grew, enveloping them in its flickering light. Then it dissipated. As quickly as it had arisen it disappeared, wafted away into nothingness. The landscape went back to its dead grays and blacks.

“I’ve been coming up here more than twenty years,” said Bre

Doug could not reply. He was thinking that it was an omen, a sign. My welcome to the Moon, he said to himself.

“You must lead a charmed life, kid.”

“It was… beautiful,” Doug said lamely.

“That it was. It certainly was.”

For long moments they stood in silence, each secretly hoping a that another seepage of gas would envelope them in the colorful fireflies once again.

“I hope the monitoring cameras caught that,” Bre

“The cameras run all the time?”

“Right.”

At last Doug gave it up. There would be no more. Strange, he thought, how sudden elation can give way to disappointment so quickly.

“Guess we should start back to the base,” Bre

“Tell me more about this south pole business,” Doug said, as much to cheer their conversation as any other reason.

“We’ve got to claim that territory,” Bre