“Did you mean that? Did you really...”
She stumbled on a loose bit of floor tile and he put out his hand to steady her. She gripped his arm tightly and he swept her to him, wrapped both his arms around her slim body and kissed her hungrily. Lisa felt warm and vibrant in his arms; he wanted to hold her and protect her and love her forever.
She clung to him fiercely. “Oh, Doug, don’t ever leave me again. Please, please, please. Let’s forget the past. Let’s hold onto each other from now on.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” he said. “I’ll never leave you, Lisa. I love you. I’ve always loved you, every minute of every day.”
He was blinking tears away. She was completely dry-eyed. But he never noticed that.
Hours later, in the darkness of their room, the musky odor and body heat of passion slowly dissipating into the shadows, Douglas sat up in their rumpled bed.
“What is it?” Lisa asked drowsily.
“Fissionables.”
“What?”
“Uranium, thorium—fissionables for the nuclear generators. We can’t run the rock machines or the water factory without them.”
“But I thought we had enough for years and years.”
“About five years,” he said.
“Oh, by that time we’ll have found more right here on the Moon.”
He shook his head in the darkness. “Not likely. Nothing heavier than iron’s ever been found here. Not in any quantity above microscopic. We’ll have to go to Earth for fissionables.”
“They can convert the factories to solar energy.”
With a sigh, he answered, “Wish we could, but that would require conversion equipment that we just don’t have. And we don’t have the facilities for making it, either.”
“Then we’ll send a team down for the fissionables,” Lisa said.
“We’ll have to.”
“In five years. Now lie down and go to sleep.”
“Yeah. In five years. Maybe sooner.”
They both knew that he would lead the expedition back to Earth to obtain the fission fuels. Or he would try to.
Chapter 7
Five years passed. The lunar community grew both in numbers and living area. Miners quarried rock ceaselessly, expanding the settlement as rapidly as possible. The rocks they carved and lasered and exploded out of the underground spaces became the raw material for the factories. Out of that dead rock came aluminum and glass, silicon for solar panels, oxygen for life support, trace elements for fertilizers and vitamins. From the bulldozed surface soil came meteoric iron, carbon, and hydrogen embedded in the soil from the infalling solar wind: hydrogen to be mixed with oxygen to yield water, the most expensive and precious material on the Moon.
Expeditions went to Earth. At first they went every few months. Then twice a year. Finally, one per year. They modified the Earth-built transfer rockets to burn powdered aluminum and oxygen, then rode the spidery little spacecraft to the giant wheeled station still orbiting a few hundred miles above Earth’s blue-and-white surface.
Everyone at the station had been killed by the superflare, and most of the station’s electronics had to be rebuilt because of the radiation damage. But there were four space shuttles in the station’s docks when the flare had erupted. Four winged reusable ships that could land on Earth and return to the station, time and again.
The first trips to Earth brought medicines, seeds, electronics parts, fertilizers and tank after tank of nitrogen to the lunar settlement. And people. A few men and women, starving, ragged, sick, who were able to convince the armed visitors from the Moon that they had technical skills that would be valuable in the lunar community.
It was the sixth expedition that met organized resistance for the first time. Twelve men were killed or left behind; four wounded were brought back to the Moon. Kobol led that trip and came back with a gunshot wound in the hip that left him with a slight but permanent limp.
After that the expeditions became rarer. The landing sites were changed each time. Florida was too obvious. Marauding bands congregated at the old Kennedy Space Center, waiting to ambush the shuttles as they glided down to land at the three-mile-long airstrip there.
But picking the landing sites was no easy task. Most of the major airfields were close enough to nuclear-devastated cities so that the dangers of radiation still persisted.
Four months passed before the next expedition landed at the remains of Dulles International Airport, more than ten miles from the edge of the dully-glowing crater that had been Washington, D.C. The landing team ransacked a nearby Army base for weapons and ammunition, always keeping one careful eye out for marauding gangs, and another on the radiation dosimeter badges they each wore pinned to their shirts.
That expedition picked up one Earthside survivor; a skinny, raving, white-haired man who insisted he was an astronomer who could tell when the next flare would erupt on the Sun. On the way back to the Moon, once safely past the space station and irrevocably bound for the safety of the underground community, Dr. Robert Lord admitted that he had been lying, there was no foolproof way to predict a solar flare—yet. But he promised to spend the rest of his life studying the Sun to find a way.
As the lunar community felt safer, and as the armed resistance to their landings grew stronger, the time between expeditions stretched. Six months. Then ten. By the time the fifth anniversary of the flare arrived, it had been almost exactly a full year since the previous expedition.
“Why go Earthside?” people said. “There’s nothing there but maniacs and death. We’re doing all right here. We don’t need Earth.”
Douglas tried to convince them that they owed the world of their birth a debt. “We should be helping them to rebuild. We should establish a permanent base on Earth, a base where people can come to and be safe, a foothold where the rebuilding of civilization can begin.”
They smiled at Douglas and congratulated him on his ideals. But they outvoted him at council meetings.
Midway through the sixth year they sent a small expedition down to what had once been Connecticut. Three nuclear powerplants nestled among the rolling hills in the western part of the state, untouched by the bombs that had wiped out New York and Boston. The team met little opposition, but found little nuclear fuel. Only enough uranium to run the lunar factories for a few years was brought back. And two of the team members who handled the fuel rods fell ill almost immediately of radiation sickness. They both eventually died, after long cancerous agonies.
“I’ve got to take a team down there myself,” Douglas told his wife.
