I couldn’t speak, so I grabbed Metzger’s hair, pulled his face to the viewport next to mine, and pointed. One speck crawled down a slope toward us, then another and another. The Slugs must have sent out patrols. They were returning. We would be very unpopular.
I turned from the viewport, squeezed past Howard, and reached into a wall-mounted cargo net. We had one more pistol.
Howard shook his head.
I dug in the cargo net for an ammunition magazine. “I’m not just quitting!”
Metzger tuned from the viewport. “No, Jason. It’s okay.”
I knew from Metzger’s tone, after a lifetime together, that it was okay.
Metzger peeled the rubber eye shield from Howard’s binoculars and held them in front of my eyes. I toggled the focus lever and saw a powder blue rectangle. A UN flag on an EVA suit sleeve. I widened the view field. A half dozen lunar dune buggies bounced toward us, filled with EVA-suited humans.
“What—?”
Howard said, “We couldn’t tell you. If you had been captured, you could have talked.”
My head spun. “We aren’t going to die?”
“Not from being stranded on the moon.” Howard pried the pistol from my fingers and slipped it back in the cargo net.
I pointed at the bouncing buggies. “What are they?”
“Gravity-optimized all-terrain vehicles.” Howard turned to Metzger. “What do we need to take with us? Those GOATs will be here in two minutes.”
I grabbed Howard’s elbow. “How did they get here?”
Metzger stuffed one foot into his EVA suit. “Just the Slug and any instrument readouts you picked up.”
Howard nodded, then turned to me. “Four days overland. We were afraid it would take even longer. GOATs weren’t designed to travel long distances. That’s why I gambled our only Saturn to get us here earlier. Good gamble, too. If we hadn’t gotten here early, those guys”— he pointed out the viewport—“would just be picking up Projectile pieces, like you and I did in Pittsburgh.”
My head spun. “I mean—there are other people on the moon?”
“Long story. We built a base on the dark side of the moon.”
My jaw dropped.
“You’ll see it. That’s where those guys are going to take us.”
An hour later I sat strapped into the front passenger’s seat of a GOAT, jerking slowly toward the dark side of the moon. The GOAT’s tires were springy, porous screen, its frame metal tubes as delicate as a racing bike. Its roof was a solar-cell panel. It might have weighed as much as a car on Earth, but here a man could lift it by one corner like a bed frame.
I looked at my driver. By the chevrons on his sleeve he was a master sergeant. I couldn’t ask him much, except during stops when we could touch helmets. This suit also had a bum radio. It made me wonder how we ever reached the moon in ancient times until I remembered that this suit was seventy years old.
We led the little parade. Howard rode in GOAT two, behind us, with Sluggo strapped across the backseat.
The trip gave time to think. Foremost, I was glad to be alive. I was mad at Howard and Metzger for letting me think, even for minutes, that we were stranded on the moon. I was even madder that Howard probably had guessed before we ever left Earth that the Slugs would blow themselves up. In fact, he said as much when he told me why he used up mankind’s one and only Saturn V to get here early. Knowing that, he had let me go inside a ticking bomb.
As a soldier, I knew it was all necessary and sound operational security. But I was still pissed.
Over the next four days, with nobody to talk to, my mood drooped from pissed to depressed. Somebody had to take the blame for wasting a zillion-dollar rocket ship and blowing up the greatest intelligence find in history, with nothing to show for it but a hyperthyroid amoeba frozen as stiff as a cucumber.
Howard was in charge of intelligence that would shape
I the war. He was safe. Metzger was a hero. In all the years I’d known him, he always skated past blame.
That left me.
It promised to be a long four days. At least this time I had hooked up my bladder-relief tube.
The journey turned uncomfortable and boring after two hours. The terrain soon became monotonous, even after we crossed to the dark side after two days. Plains and hills and boulders gave way to plains and hills and boulders. All blindingly bright but as black-and-white as an art-gallery holo.
Blindingly bright wasn’t what I expected of the “dark side,” one of history’s great misnomers. The moon doesn’t rotate on its own axis but always keeps one face toward Earth. When that face is sunlit, we see the moon. When the moon swings between Earth and the sun, the side toward Earth is dark and the “dark” side is lit.
During our trip, the moon swung so the front side we landed on darkened and sunshine “dawned” on the dark side. Sad to say, the moon is the moon. I’d sooner drive across Kansas.
There was little more to the trip until we crawled up a jagged hill range on the fourth day. A crater rim, as it turned out, then paused at its crest and looked down on Luna Base.
I shielded my eyes with my hand and stared across row after row of round-roofed white buildings. Vehicles crawled antlike between them. The place sprawled for miles, a town, not a base.
The bright sunshine faded, and I dropped my hand from my forehead. A cloud must be crossing the sun.
Cloud? There was no atmosphere here.
I swiveled my head and looked up. Above us loomed a gray metal skeleton frame that had to be a mile long and a quarter mile wide. I pointed and tugged my driver’s sleeve.
He leaned across and touched helmets. “Relax. That’s the ship. United Nations Spaceship Hope .”
Miles above us, the frame drifted slowly past us. Fireflies twinkled and zoomed all around it. “ The ship? The one that we were going to build five years from now? The one that’s going to Jupiter?”
I understood. She would be ready in months, not years. The biggest sucker punch in history.
I looked again. The hundred fireflies must be supply barges, construction-crew transports, tugs. It was the greatest show on Earth. Well, not on Earth. I touched helmets. “Why build it up here?”
“ Hope’s transplanetary. She’s strong enough to travel between here and Jupiter but if we set her down on Earth, or even here on the moon, gravity would collapse her. Hope was born in vacuum. Someday she’ll die there. Her orbit’s calculated so the moon or Earth is always between her and Ganymede. Any observer out there won’t know she exists.”
If nobody on Earth knew she existed, no spy—and no captured Spec Four—could give her away.
In orbit, Hope dwindled to a speck above the lunar horizon.
We zigzagged as we dropped toward the flat crater floor while another object grew against the moon’s black sky. A shuttle craft, looking much like the ones I had seen at Canaveral, powered down to the surface, its wings useless in vacuum.
A hundred yards away the UN flag stood stiff, framed to keep it flying in the nonbreeze.
We rolled past building after building. The building we stopped at was like every other building there, a white half tube you could fit a football field under, with a man-sized air lock sticking out one side. Two sergeants wrestled Sluggo loose as Metzger and Howard climbed down from their GOATs.
My driver grasped my elbow, holding me in my seat. Crap. They were separating the Bad Boy from the heroes.
Three buildings farther the GOAT halted. Stenciled on the building’s air lock door was “Detention.” Whether it was Judge March or Captain Jacowicz or the Grand Poobah of the Dark Side of the Moon everybody wanted me in the slammer.
My cell was a windowless room eight feet on a side with a bunk, sink, and toilet. They gave me fresh coveralls, a shaving kit, and freeze-dried rations no worse than Meals-Ready-to-Eat.
I planted my palms against the wall, hung my head, and shook it. I lay on the bunk and wondered why.
The door clanked; an MP in coveralls like mine stepped in and waved me out of the cell with a white-gloved hand.
He led me down into the tunnel system that linked Luna Base’s buildings. Our footsteps echoed down the rock tube. I asked him, “How’d they make the tunnels?”
“Melted with lasers.”
We walked for ten minutes, stopping at intersections to let electric trams pass. They shook the floor and bounced me in lunar gravity.
Cargos of hull plates flexed and rumbled toward the shuttles that would lift them to orbit.
Returning trams bore off-shift welders and riveters, swaying shoulder on shoulder and sound asleep with lunch therms in laps.
I smirked. “Union labor, huh?”
The MP glared at me. “Sixteen-hour shifts. Twenty-eight days every month. Quarter million miles from home.”
One thing you had to say for war, it got people off their butts. A century ago, humans flew in canvas-covered airplanes. World War II started, and six desperate years later humanity had jets, radar, and nuclear power. The Slug War had pushed humanity farther into space in months man all the idealism of the post-Cold War had in fifty years.
Finally, another MP at a desk looked over papers the first one gave him, then at me. He buzzed me in through a steel door behind him.
I stepped into an operating room, all stainless steel, bright light, and white sheeting. Chill enough that I saw my breath. The lights brightened a pedestal operating table in the room’s center, and a couple rows of amphitheater seating rose behind the table.
On the table was strapped my slimy sparring partner, Sluggo. He looked none the worse for wear after we’d dragged him from Mare Fecunditatis. Still short, green, and tapered.
A guy stood behind him, skinny, bald, and beetle-browed. Civilian, because a last-century soul patch smudged his chin. He wore a white lab coat and a hands-free headset with a mike that cherry-stemmed around his cheek. His headset was wired to a Chipman that stuck from his coat’s breast pocket among a cluster of pens.
He nodded at the Slug. “You did this?”
I stuck out my chest. “Yeah.”
“Tragic.” He snapped on latex gloves as he circled the operating table. “Our first meeting with extraterrestrial intelligence ends in violent death.”
I nearly laughed. The Slugs had killed how many million people, and he wept for this one?
He bent and sidestepped alongside the slab, lifting, then plopping down the carcass like a gob of liver. “You killed it?”
“He committed suicide.”
He sneered. “An alien psychologist. Did it leave a note?” He stabbed his finger like a cross-examiner at the carcass. “This body bears bootprint bruises!”
“He died before I made those.”
His eyes narrowed.
“We both got shot out of a cannon. I dropped on him.”
He snorted. “This is no joke.”
“Neither was that. We landed on a commissioned officer.”
He pouted at me, then spoke into the mike. “ Reported cause of death, self-inflicted.”
“You think I killed a POW? Did you talk to Howard Hibble?”
“I’ll ask the questions.” He adjusted his glasses, then sniffed. His eyebrows flew up, and he bent and sniffed the length of the carcass. He pulled his mike to his lips and his voice quivered. “Subject emits an unmistakable odor of urine! This suggests Earthlike excretory system and metabolism! An unexpected phenomenon!”
“It’s mine.”
“Don’t worry. You’ll get credit for your kill!” He snorted.
“The urine. It’s mine. We zipped the body inside my EVA suit for the trip from Mare Fecunditatis. I kind of had an accident in the suit, before that.”
“Oh.” He grumbled, then pressed the erase button on the Chipman in his pocket. “Anything else you haven’t shared with me?”
“If you’re really interested in how it excretes, I think it was on the toilet when I first saw it.”
He sneered. “Don’t tax your brain, killer. I’ll analyze behaviors.”
I shrugged. “Just a hunch.”
“Well then, let’s have a look, shall we?” He lifted the corpse’s tail end, peeked underneath, plopped it back, and smirked. “Nothing. And I know an anus when I see one.”
I stared at him. “Me too.”
The MP marched me back to detention after that.