Will came back, holding a metal flask in his big freckled hand. He sat on the floor facing Alec and Douglas. Grinning, he unscrewed the cap of the flask and sniffed at its contents.
“Wow! Shouldn’t keep this in the hot sun.”
Douglas reached for it and took a cautious whiff. “I’ll bet I could get fifty klicks to the gallon on my jeep with this stuff.” He passed the flask to Alec. “Here. You’re the guest of honor. You get the first shot. If you survive, maybe we’ll try it.”
“It’s not that bad,” Will said, trying to look aggrieved. “The farmer who sold it to me swore he brewed it last summer.”
Alec took the flask and brought it to his lips. The fumes seemed to crawl right up inside his eyeballs, making them water. He took a sip. It stung and tasted sour. Don’t cough! he commanded himself.
“Not bad,” he said, his voice-only partly choked.
Douglas took the flask from him. “Well, if you can stand it, I suppose I can too.”
Alec watched his father take a long swallow of the liquor, while his own sip burned its way down toward his stomach. They passed the flask among themselves for another round before Douglas said:
“We have a lot to talk about.”
“Yes, we do,” Alec agreed.
Will said, “Maybe I ought to tiptoe out...”
“No, stay right here,” Douglas commanded.
That eliminates talking about mother, Alec thought. Aloud, he said, “The fissionables are gone.”
“Right. We took them north... er, for safekeeping.”
“We need them.”
“I know you do. I knew it before you were born.”
“Then why did you take them away? Why didn’t you bring them back yourself? Why did you turn your back on us and stay here in this mudhole?” All in a rush.
Douglas held the flask in his hand. He looked at it, then shook his head once, abruptly, as if he’d made a firm decision. “That is a long story. But it all boils down to one unavoidable fact. The lunar settlement cannot survive by itself. It needs Earth. Otherwise, it’s going to die.”
“Of course! We need those fissionables.”
“It’s not the fissionables.” Douglas leaned an elbow on the sagging wooden shelf behind him. The wood creaked. “There’s more than the fissionables involved... far more. The life of the settlement itself.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Look—the settlement was never intended to be entirely self-sufficient. Right? When the Sun flared up they were suddenly thrust on their own. No more support from Earth.”
Alec said, “And we’ve been on our own for more than twenty-five years now. Doing fine.”
“Bull-hinkey! You think you’re doing fine.” Douglas’s voice rose slightly. “But take a good, unbiased look at the settlement. You’re still operating with the machinery that was there before the flare, right? No one’s built new reactors, new processing plants, new solar panels, new shuttles, eh? No one’s even tried to rectify the processing plants so they can run on the voltages that the solar arrays produce, have they? No! Instead you keep coming back to Earth to grab fissionables for the reactors.”
“So?”
“So what happens when you’ve used up all the fissionable fuel you can find? What then?” Douglas demanded.
“That won’t happen for centuries!”
“Centuries, millennia... what difference? The point is,” Douglas insisted, “that it’s going to happen one day, and unless you people have the knowledge and the guts to work out new devices—like fusion generators, for example—then you’re going to die. All of you.”
Alec said, “But that’s so far in the future...”
“Then what about medicines?”
“We synthesize all the medicines we need.”
“Oh sure you do. Certainly,” Douglas sneered. “But how many people in the settlement are too brittle-boned to make the trip to Earth? How many of your own men are going to suffer sunstroke because they don’t have enough melanin pigmentation in their skin? That’s a beautiful burn you’ve got on the back of your neck, by the way.”
Alec was starting to feel confused. “But those are hereditary traits. Medicine can’t...”
“Exactly!” Douglas pounced. “What about the four or five people each year who die of cancer in the settlement? Huh?”
Bewildered, Alec replied, “Cancer’s unavoidable... everybody knows that.”
“Oh it is, is it?” Douglas glanced over at Will, then turned back to Alec. “It happens that cancer-arresting drugs were being manufactured on Earth before the sky burned.”
“They were?”
Douglas nodded. “And the incidence of cancer in the settlement is rising at a rate of five percent a year. In another generation or two... pfft!” He snapped his fingers.
“No!”
“I calculated it out myself. Cancer, birth defects, other genetic diseases—they’re all on the rise in the settlement. Because of inbreeding. Before the sky burned, the inbreeding effect was masked because there was a constant flow of people coming and going from Earthside. But among the people who had lived on the Moon for years and intermarried, the hereditary effects were already starting to show up. Now that you’ve cut yourselves off from Earth, the genetic pool of the lunar community just isn’t big enough to be viable.”
