Moonrise

Greg countered, “But maybe if we do it in space… on the Moon or in orbit. Everybody’s afraid of nanobugs getting loose and ru

“But what will they build? What can you make in space that we can sell here on the ground?”

“I don’t know,” Greg admitted. “Not yet. That’s why I want to spend a year at Moonbase, to see what they can do.”

Joa

“If you can find a product that could make Moonbase profitable,” Joa

“You mean you’d nominate me?”

She could see all the hope, all the need in him. He’s been through so much, Joa

“Let me talk with a few people,” she temporized. “In the meantime, I’ll see about getting you the Moonbase job.”

“That’s the best birthday present you could give me,” Greg said.

Doug is at Moonbase, Joa

“I love you, Mom.”

Joa

She knew that she meant it with every fiber of her being. She hoped that Greg meant his words, too. Yet she was always — afraid that he still didn’t understand what love really was.

He had been so sick, so terribly mixed up. He had never seen a loving relationship in his home until I met Paul, and then…

Joa

Then she realized, If we close Moonbase it will be the end of all Paul’s dreams. Greg will be killing him all over again. And I’ll be helping him.

MOONBASE

It was easy for experienced Lunatics to spot newcomers to the Moon. They walked fu

But not Doug Stavenger. Even though he had already been to Moonbase once, briefly, he left Sava

Until he ran into the linear football game.

It was almost midnight. Although most of the offices and labs were closed for the night, the tu

Doug was determined that he would know as much about the expedition as Bre

He heard shouting from down the tu

The tu

“Outta the way, tenderfoot!” one of the group hollered as he kicked a small round object in Doug’s direction. It was flat and black, like a hockey puck. As it skittered toward him, Paul saw that it was the plastic top from a container.

It bounced off a wall and the whole gang of men and women raced after it.

“Watch out!” yelled a young Asian woman, short and stocky, gri

The commotion boiled right into Doug. They were all young people, he saw, not much more than his own age. The coveralls they wore were mostly the pumpkin orange of the science and exploration group, although there was a medical white and even a management blue among them, the same as Doug’s own jumpsuit. One of the guys brushed past him, pushing him into the rock wall.

“Linear football,” the young woman gasped, by way of explanation. Then they were past him, kicking the black plastic lid down the corridor.

Doug trotted after them. The game seemed to have no rules. Everybody tried to kick the lid; they all scrambled to reach it, pushing and elbowing and laughing every inch of the way. Somebody kicked it into the slight niche of a doorway and they all whooped wildly. In an instant, though, the game continued down the tu

Doug followed them and before he knew it he was part of the game, too. It became obvious that the object was to kick the lid into a doorway. There were no teams, though; it was all against each. And the scorekeeping was casual, at best.

“That’s eight for me!”

“The hell it is!”

“You’ve only got six.”

“No, eight.”

“What’s the difference? Are we playing or doing arithmetic?”

The tu

“You’re Doug Stavenger, aren’t you?” asked the Asian woman.

He nodded, trying to catch his breath.

One of the young men puffed, “For a tenderfoot…you run … pretty good.”

Doug said, “Thanks.”

After a few minutes, one of the women said, “Hey, it’s past midnight already. I’ve got to be on the job at oh-eight hundred.”

“That’s where you sleep, isn’t it?”

“A comedian, yet.”

Slowly, laboriously, they clambered to their feet and started trudging back toward the living quarters.

“I’m Bianca Rhee,” the Asian woman said. Built like a fireplug, she barely came up to Doug’s shoulder. “The brilliant and beautiful Eurasian astrophysicist.”

Doug must have gaped at her, because she laughed out loud. Soon they were talking like old friends as they walked along the tu

“Doesn’t anybody complain about the noise you guys make?” Doug asked. “People are sleeping on the other side of some of those doors.”

“Oh, we wake them up, I guess. But the game moves past them so fast that by the time they’re really awake we’ve moved down the tu

“Nobody’s ever complained?”

“Oh, sure. But we don’t get up a game every night.”

They walked in silence for a while. “You’re an astrophysicist, you said?”

Bianca nodded. She had often used that ’beautiful Eurasian’ line to see what kind of reaction it would cause. In truth, her beauty was not physical. Short, thick-waisted, with a face as round and flat as a pie pan, Bianca was the daughter of a Korean-American father and Italian-American mother. She claimed that she grew up on sushi parmigiana.

She was bored with the astronomical work she was doing at Moonbase. It was strictly routine photometry, using the wide-field Schmidt telescope to make painstakingly accurate measurements of the positions of galaxies. Adding another decimal point or two to the details. The kind of work that they stick graduate students with, while the major players get to do the exciting stuff, like scoping out black holes in galactic cores or searching for extraterrestrial intelligence.