For hours Douglas strode the underground corridors, walking blindly through the rough-hewn tunnels that laced the various parts of the settlement together. Past the long, pipe-fed vats of the hydroponics farms he strode, looking neither right nor left, seeing nothing and no one except his wife’s shocked face with the imprint of his angry hand on it.
I could have killed her, Douglas told himself. How can I come so close to murdering her if I love her?
He stopped briefly at the rock processing facility, soaking up the clamoring noise and bone-jarring vibration of the big grinding machines. It blotted other thoughts from his mind. The heavy machinery was fully automated: lunar rock went into one end of the massive crushers and grinders, out the other end came pulverized separated powders of aluminum, silicon, titanium, oxygen, and other ores. Some of them were channeled to the metal refineries. Others were fed through conveyor belts into the copper-clad electrolyzers of the water factory.
Douglas felt a tap on his shoulder. Turning, he saw one of the younger technicians. The kid held out a pair of earphones with one hand as he shouted over the rumbling roar of the grinders:
“Regulations, sir. No one allowed this close without protection.”
Douglas looked up at the wide window panel of the control room, set into the raw rock wall above. Larry LaStrade stood at the window, peering through a pair of binoculars at him. With a shrug and a wave, Douglas turned and left the big, noise-filled cave, leaving the youngster standing there with the earphones in his hand.
Finally, inevitably, he went up to the surface. He spent nearly an hour worming himself into a hardsuit, checking out all the seals, the breathing system, the radio and heater and circulation fans. He allowed the thousand details of dressing for vacuum to occupy his mind, blanking everything else from his thoughts.
After going through the checklist with the safety team on duty at the control office, he clumped into the airlock and swung its heavy door shut behind him. In a few minutes the metal womb of the lock was emptied of air, and the indicator light on the wall beside the outer hatch turned green. He nudged the toggle with a gloved hand and the hatch slid open.
It was a strange and barren land out there, almost colorless, the raw pockmarked ground a study of grays on more grays. Behind him rose the terraced wall of Alphonsus’ rim, massive, rugged, silent. Through the tinted visor of his helmet, Douglas’ eyes traced out the rimwall’s edge against the eternally black sky until it disappeared below the brutally close horizon. The crater’s row of central peaks sat out there, worn by eons of meteoric bombardment, eroded to tired, slumped, gray lumps of stone.
A dead world, Douglas thought. Frozen stone dead. No air. The only water available is what we squeeze out of the rocks. The only life here is our own, barely hanging on.
His glance took in the glittering swath of solar panels that covered hundreds of acres of the roiled, pocked floor of the giant crater. With a resigned sigh, Douglas headed toward them. Might as well check on the meteor damage, he thought, and see if the flare did any long-term harm.
As he walked with dreamlike lunar slowness, kicking up tiny puffs of moondust with each booted step, he glanced up at the sky. The Earth hung above him, huge, gibbous, blue and white and gleaming where the sunlight touched it. You’re still alive, he said to the beckoning home world. Despite everything, you’re still alive.
He forced his gaze back to the dead bare rock of the Moon.
“How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world,” Douglas murmured, inside his helmet.
Inevitably his eyes turned Earthward again. But now he saw not the gleaming blue and white globe a quarter-million miles distant, but the world that had greeted him when he had landed there nearly three weeks earlier.
Despite all the devastation that the traitorous Sun and nuclear-armed men could wreak on the Earth, it was still a green, living world. Palms and cypresses still graced the Florida shores. Wild birds crossed the soft blue skies. The wind sang its ancient harmony. And people were still alive, too, even though they were sick from radiation, starving, injured.
Winter will be on them soon, Douglas knew. Those who lived in the warmer climates might be able to get through, but what about those further north? What would they do when the snows came, with no fuel except the wood they could hack down with their own hands, no electricity, no food or medicines?
“I can’t save them all,” he told himself, his voice strangely muffled, muted, inside the hardsuit helmet. “I can’t even begin to save one percent of them.”
But even as he said it he knew he had to try. Without the knowledge and skills represented by the tiny handful of people here on the Moon, all of human civilization on Earth would soon expire. Some people would live, as their ancestors had lived five thousand years ago. But knowledge, art, freedom, the great works of the human mind and heart that had been built up so painfully over so many millennia—that would all perish. Civilization would die. And soon.
“Unless we do something about it,” Douglas said to himself. And immediately an inner voice answered. Not we. You. Unless you do something about it, they will all die.
He nodded his head inside the bulbous helmet of the lunar hardsuit. He admitted his responsibility.
“I’ve got to save them. No matter what it costs, I’ve got to try.”
Chapter 5
“You’re sure Douglas won’t...” Kobol left the thought dangling.
Lisa shook her head. “I checked with the comm center; he’s up on the surface, walking by himself.”
Kobol sat on the edge of her bed. He wore the usual worksuit of the underground community, a faded gray coverall. On the left shoulder was sewn an equally faded circular patch of blue, slashed by a yellow lightning bolt: the symbol of the electrical power division.
Still in her black jumpsuit, Lisa pulled her legs up and rested her chin on her knees.
“That’s a nice little bruise you’ve got on your cheek,” Kobol observed.
“I can cover it with makeup.”
“Sure.” He glanced around the cramped little room. “And what will you do when the makeup runs out? Send him back to Earth to raid a drugstore?”
“That’s not funny.”
“It’s not meant to be. There’s nothing funny about any of this.”
“You never expected him to come back, did you?”
Kobol did not answer.
“Martin, look at me!” she snapped.
He turned slowly on the edge of the bed, but made no move to come closer toward her.
“Douglas doesn’t know it was you,” she told him. “You don’t have to worry about that.”
His long somber face betrayed no emotion whatsoever. “I’ve been thinking about that. About us. About him. You saw the way the people flocked to him. He’s a natural hero. They want to worship him.”
