I shook my head.
“Hey, there are unusual golf courses on Earth, you know,” Sam said. “Like the old Hyatt Britannia in the Cayman Islands. I played that course! Blind shots, overwater shots—”
“They’ve got air to breathe,” I said.
“Well, what about the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain Golf Club in Yunnan, China? Ten thousand feet high! You practically need an oxygen mask.”
“But not a spacesuit.”
“And the Legends Golf and Safari Resort in South Africa, with that nineteenth hole on top of that fifteen-hundred-foot mountain. The ball takes thirty seconds to drop down onto the green!”
“A par three,” I murmured, remembering the course.
“I birdied it,” Sam said gleefully.
If there’s one thing Sam Gunn can do, it’s talk. He wheedled, he coaxed, he weaved a web of words about how we would be bringing the joys of golf to this bleak and dreary world of the Moon. Plus lots of golf-playing tourists to his entertainment center.
Not once did he mention that if I didn’t go to work for him I’d be forced to return to Singapore. He didn’t have to.
* * *
SO, OF COURSE, I went to work for Sam. Had I known how shaky the company’s finances were, I—well, to be perfectly truthful, I would’ve gone to work for Sam anyway. The man has a way about him. And there was that phalanx of police detectives and lawyers waiting for me back in Singapore. Plus an angry ex-wife and her angrier mother.
Sam had built what he euphemistically called an entertainment complex at Hell Crater, a couple of hundred kilometers south of Selene. The thirty-klick-wide crater was named after a nineteenth-century Austrian Jesuit priest who was an astronomer, Maximilian Hell, but in Sam’s impish eyes it was an ideal spot for a lunar Sin City. He built a gambling casino, a dinner club called Dante’s Inferno (staffed by Hell’s Belles, no less), gaming arcades, virtual reality simulations, the works, all beneath a sturdy concrete dome that protected the interior from micrometeors and the harsh radiation streaming in from the Sun and stars.
Underground, Sam had built the first-class Paradise Hotel and shopping mall, plus an ultramodern medical facility that specialized in rejuvenation therapies.
Apparently Sam had financed the complex with money he had somehow crowbarred out of Rockledge Corporation; don’t ask me how.
Anyway, his latest idea was to build a golf course out on the floor of Hell Crater, a new attraction to draw customers to the complex. As if gambling and high-class prostitution weren’t enough.
“How do you get away with it?” I asked Sam my first night in Hell, as we sat for dinner in Dante’s Inferno. The waitresses were knockouts, the entertainers dancing up on the stage were even more spectacular.
“Get away with what?” Sam asked, all freckle-faced innocence.
I waved a hand at the exotic dancers writhing on the stage. “Gambling. Women. I imagine there’s a good deal of narcotics moving around here, too.”
With a careless shrug, Sam told me, “All perfectly legal, Charlie. At least, nobody’s written any laws against it. This ain’t Kansas, Toto. Or Singapore. The New Morality hasn’t reached the Moon.” Then he grinned and added, “Thank God!”
Truth to tell, I was temped by one of Hell’s Belles, a gorgeous young blonde with the deep-bosomed body of a seductress and the wide, cornflower blue eyes of a naïf. But I didn’t act on my urges. Not then.
I got to work, instead.
Designing a golf course takes a combination of skills. The job is part landscape architecture, part golfing know-how, part artistry.
The first thing I did was wriggle into a spacesuit and walk the ground where the course was to be laid out. The floor of Hell Crater was pretty flat, but when I examined the area closely, I found that the ground undulated ever so slightly, sort of like the surface of a rippling pond that’s been frozen solid. Good, I thought: this would present some interesting lies and challenges for putting.
There were plenty of challenges for me, let me tell you. The Moon’s gravity is only one sixth of Earth’s, and the surface is airless, both of which mean that a golf ball should fly much farther when hit than it would on Earth. But how much farther? Sam provided physicists and engineers from the faculty of Selene University to work with me as consultants.
The key to the distance factor, we soon found, was the spacesuits that the golfers would have to wear. When Alan Shepard hit his golf ball, back in the old Apollo days, he had to swing with only one arm. His spacesuit was too stiff for him to use both arms. Spacesuit designs had improved considerably over the past century, but they still tended to stiffen up when you pressurized them with air.
Then there was the problem of the Moon’s surface itself. The whole darned place was one big sand trap. Walking on the Moon is like walking on a beach on Earth. Sandy. For eons dust-mote-sized micrometeors have been falling out of the sky, hitting the ground and churning its topmost layer into the consistency of beach sand.
I tried some putting tests. I tapped a golf ball. It rolled a few centimeters and stopped dead. I nudged it harder, but it didn’t go more than about a meter.
“We’ll have to smooth out the ground, Sam,” I said. “The greens, the areas around the cups. So the players can make some reasonable putts.”
“Okay,” he answered cheerfully. “Plasma torches ought to do the job.”
“Plasma torches?”
“Yep. They’ll bake the ground to a nice, firm consistency.”
I nodded.
“And once you’ve got it the way you want it, paint the areas green,” Sam said.
I laughed. “Not a bad idea.”
There was another angle to the distance problem. The greens had to be so far from the tees that some of the cups were over the damned short horizon. You wouldn’t be able to see the pin when you were teeing up.
Sam solved that one in the blink of an eye. “Make the pins tall enough to be seen from the tees, that’s all. Put lights on their tops so they’re easily visible.”
I nodded sheepishly. I should have thought of that myself.
The ground was also littered with lots of rocks and pockmarked with little craterlets and even sinuous cracks in the ground that the scientists called rilles. More than once I tripped on a stone and went sprawling. I found, though, that in the Moon’s gentle gravity I tumbled so slowly that I could put out my arms, brake my fall, and push myself back up to a standing position.
Cool. I could be an Olympic gymnast, on the Moon.
