Moonrise

SAVANNAH

“There’s ice down there at the pole!” Doug said, brimming with enthusiasm. “Water ice! Mr. Bre

“I’ve seen his proposals,” Joa

“I want to go with him,” Doug said.

Joa

Bre

Misunderstanding her silence, Doug said, “Mom, all my life I’ve heard about my father and Moonbase. I want to carry on in his footsteps. I’ve got to!”

“Your freshman classes start in September.”

“We’ll be back by then. It’s my legacy, Mom! All my life I’ve wanted to get to Moonbase and continue what he started.”

All his life Joa

“It’s the frontier,” he told her Excitedly. “That’s where the action is.”

Joa

“Shutting it down? You can’t shut it down, Mom! It’s the frontier! It’s the future!”

“It’s a drain on this corporation’s resources.”

Doug started to reply, then hesitated. With a slow smile he said, “Mom, if you won’t allow me to go to Moonbase, I’ll get a job with Yamagata Industries. They—”

“Yamagata!”

“They’re looking for construction workers,” Doug said evenly. “I’ll get to the Japanese base at Copernicus.”

That was when Joa

“Douglas,” she said, “there’s much more at stake here than you understand.”

He jumped to his feet, startling her. Pacing across the office, Doug replied, “Mom, if we can get water from the ice fields down at the south pole we can make Moonbase profitable. We can even sell water to Yamagata and the Europeans.”

“No one’s ever gone to the south pole. It’s mountainous, very dangerous—”

Doug gri

Joa

Now he was pushing for an expedition to the lunar south pole. He had been at it for nearly two years, wheedling and cajoling every time he visited Sava

The trouble was, this time Bre

I can’t keep Doug on a leash, Joa

Doug couldn’t sit still. He paced between the two little Sheraton loveseats to the window, glanced out at the cloudy afternoon, then turned expectantly toward the door.

“He ought to be here any minute,” he said.

“Relax. Foster’s never been late for a meeting,” said Joa

Her intercom chimed. “Mr. Bre

“Send him right in,” Joa

Foster G. Bre

He wore a simple sky blue velour pullover shirt and pale blue slacks. Joa

“Foster,” she said with a gesture toward Doug, “You’ve already met my son—”

“Hello, Doug,” said Bre

Doug was surprised by Bre

“I presume the subject of this meeting is the south polar expedition,” he said.

“Of course,” said Joa

“The Aitken Basin down there is most valuable real estate on the Moon,” Bre

“I’ve watched your proposal disks several times,” Joa

Turning toward Doug, still standing by the window, Bre

“We’re producing enough water for Moonbase with the nanomachines,” Joa

“Barely,” said Doug.

Bre

“Once you put up the solar panels,” said Joa

“We can use nanomachines to build a power tower on the mountaintop.”

“And transmit the energy back to Moonbase by bouncing a microwave power beam off a relay satellite,” Doug added eagerly.

Shaking her head slightly, Joa

“Can put Moonbase solidly into the black,” said Bre

“There’s enough power and enough water at the south pole to allow Moonbase to grow and prosper.”

“But the cost.”

“Mom,” Doug said, “if we don’t claim the polar region somebody else will.”

Joa

“He’s right,” said Bre

No corporation could claim it owned any part of the Moon. No nation could claim sovereignty over lunar territory. Treaties signed almost a century earlier prevented that But, after people had actually begun building bases on the Moon and digging up lunar resources, the earthbound lawyers had to find some legal method of assuring some form of property rights. They cloaked their decisions in clouds of legalistic verbiage, but what it boiled down to was that any ’entity’ (which was defined as an individual or a combination of individuals) which could establish that it was utilizing the natural resources of a specific part of the Moon’s surface or subsurface was entitled to exclusive use of that territory. It was not first-come-first-served, exactly; it was the first to show utilization of a chunk of lunar real estate who could expect legal protection against others who wanted to use the same area.