“Judy, you don’t understand—” But he was talking to a blank screen.

Don had to return to Earth for the official opening ceremonies of Space Station Alpha. It was a tremendous international media event, with special ceremonies in Washington, Cape Canaveral, Houston and the new life-extension medical center in Senator Petty’s home state.

It was at the medical center ceremonies that Petty pulled Don aside and walked him briskly, urgently, into an immaculate, new, unused men’s room.

Leaning on the rim of a sparkling stainless steel sink, Petty gave Don a nervous little half-smile.

“Well, you got what you wanted,” the Senator said. “How do you feel about it?”

Don shrugged. “Kind of numb, I guess. After all these years, it’s hard to realize that the job is done.”

“Cost a whale of a lot of the taxpayers’ money,” Petty said.

Gesturing at the lavish toilet facility, Don riposted, “You didn’t pinch any pennies here, I notice.”

Petty laughed, almost like a little boy caught doing something naughty. “Home-state contractors. You know how it is.”

“Sure.”

“I guess you’ll want to start living here on the ground full-time again,” Petty said.

Don glared at him. “Oh? Am I allowed to? Is our deal completed?”

With an apologetic spread of his hands, Senator Petty said, “Look, I admit that it was a spiteful thing for me to do. . .”

“It wrecked my marriage. My kids are total strangers to me now. I don’t even have any friends down here anymore.”

“I’m. . . sorry.”

“Stuff it.”

“Listen. . .” The Senator licked his thin lips. “I. . . I’ve been thinking. . . maybe I won’t run for re-election next time around. Maybe. . . maybe I’ll come up and see what it’s like living up there for a while.”

Don stared at him for a long, hard moment. And saw that there was a single light-brown spot about the size of a dime on the back of one of the Senator’s hands.

“You want to live in the space station?”

Petty tried to make a nonchalant shrug. “I’ve. . . been thinking about it.”

“Afraid of old age?” Don asked coldly. “Or is it something more specific?”

Petty’s face went gray. “Heart,” he said. “The doctors tell me I’ll be in real trouble in another few years. Thanks to the technology you guys have developed, they can spot it coming that far in advance now.”

Don wanted to laugh. Instead, he said, “If that’s the case, you’d better spend your last year or two in the Senate pushing through enough funding to enlarge the living quarters in the space station.”

Petty nodded. Grimly.

“And you should introduce a resolution,” Don added, “to give the station an official name: the Senator Robert E. Buford Space Center.”

“Now that’s too much!”

Don grinned at him. “Tell it to your doctors.”

There was no reason for him to stay on Earth. Too many memories. Too few friends. He felt better in orbit. Even in the living sections of the Buford Space Center, where the spin-induced gee forces were close to Earth-normal gravity, Don felt more alive and happier. His friends were there, and so was his work.

Don had been wrong to think that his job was finished once the space station was officially opened. In reality, his work had merely begun.

A year after the station was officially opened, von Kluge came aboard as a retiree. His secretary, Alma Tucker, still lithe and wonderful despite the added years, came up to work for Don. They were married, a year later. Among the witnesses was Senator Petty, the latest permanent arrival.

The Buford Space Center grew and grew and grew. Its official name was forgotten after a few decades. It was known everywhere as Sky City.

Sky City became the commercial hub of the thriving space industries that reached out across the solar system. Sky City’s biomedical labs became system-famous as they took the lead in producing cures for the various genetic diseases known collectively as cancer.

Ex-Senator Petty organized the first zero-gee Olympics, and participated personally in the Sky City-Tranquility Base yacht race.

Von Kluge, restless with retirement, became an industrial magnate and acquired huge holdings in the asteroid belt: a Junker land baron at last.

Alma Tucker Arnold became a mother—and a prominent low-gravity ballerina.

Don stayed in administration and eventually became the first mayor of Sky City. The election was held on his ninety-ninth birthday, and he celebrated it by leading a bicycle race all around the city’s perimeter.

The next morning, his first official act as mayor was to order the thawing of Senator Buford. The two of them spent their declining centuries in fast friendship.

MOON RACE

It matters not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.

Yeah, maybe.

“Moon Race” is set on the Moon, at a time when that airless, barren little world is the frontier of human expansion beyond Earth.

It’s a hard and dangerous frontier. As one insightful man once put it, “Pioneering boils down to inventing new ways to get yourself killed.”

But even on the most arduous and demanding of frontiers, the human spirit will invent new forms of entertainment, too. No human community has ever been all work and no play.

Each form of entertainment has its own particular rules. Breaking the rules, even bending them, can get a player disqualified.

It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose? The hell it doesn’t!