like balloons as the chamber filled with air.
I cautiously cracked my helmet of my suit as Nikki and Jake removed theirs and unlatched the inner door of the chamber to create a small pop as the pressure differences between rooms evened out. I took a deep breath; stale, recycled, but still air. And after the humid conditions on the inside of the suits, if felt very refreshing, cool, and dry.
We stepped into the first room behind the lock, carefully sealing the door behind us. It was basically a larger version of the airlock: a huge, white bubble that filtered sunlight through it so that the interior was dimly lit. The electric lights seemed to be off. Flipping the switch beside the door didn’t do anything. The power was off inside the base. Fortunately, with a lunar day of fourteen and a half Earth days, we still had several more “days” of light and there was no big hurry to get things started up.
We put our helmets on a small dispatcher’s desk sitting next to the door. Nikki and I followed Jake’s lead and took off our gloves and laid them beside our helmets, followed by our backpacks.
“Now, let’s see how this station is set up,” I said, feeling light as a feather once I was freed of the pack and helmet.
“Our first task will be to locate the radio link.” Jake had told us that the station sensors were connected to an auto radio-link to Earth. If we didn’t disconnect it, it would eventually send back enough information on changes within the base, power systems in use, and so forth, to alert those on Earth that something was going on in the camp. We’d decided that if it suddenly stopped its transmission, anyone monitoring from Earth would assume that it was just an equipment malfunction; for us this was better than having detectors in the base showing that it was occupied (even if those on Earth would be at a loss to explain by whom or what).
Since we were standing in the command center of the base, a quick search allowed us to locate the monitor.
“Say good night,” I said as I jerked the electric cable from the back of the equipment. To be on the safe side, Jake also disconnected the antenna from the transmitter, noting, “Can’t be too careful. I’d suggest we spit up and see what sort of supplies we have here. Hopefully enough for a few days — I hate to make the return trip too soon.”
“Ditto,” I said, my stiff legs making me shudder at the thought. “Let’s split up… Where should we check?”
Jake gave us a rough layout of the domes that comprised the base. Half an hour later we rendezvoused at the control room again.
“What did everyone find?” I asked. “It looks to me like they left in a hurry. All sorts of stuff left behind in the crew quarters. Most of it is junk but…”
Nikki answered first. “There’s enough food and water to supply us for at least a year. My only question is what about the air?”
“We have a problem there,” Jake said. “When they pulled out, the hydroponics area wasn’t properly shut down. All the—now dead—plants were left in their trays. We’ll have to put in some elbow grease to get the greenhouse cleaned up and new seeds planted. But I think we’ll have enough air until they come online. There’s a pretty good reserve of oxygen in the tanks and we can scrub the air of CO2 for quite a while.”
“The mining operation doesn’t look like it ever got started,” I said. “I didn’t see a single bot anywhere in the shaft.”
“I can check that quick enough,” Jake said, bouncing over to a control console. He tapped some keys and an inventory came on screen. He moused his way through several links and then tapped the screen. “There you have it. It looks as though the mine was ready to be worked but, if this is correct, the are still stored in their crates.”
I nodded. “I saw a bunch of crates in the storehouse.”
“Then we could probably program them to clean out the hydroponics tanks and growth tanks,” Nikki suggested.
“'Fraid not,” Jake said, turning back from the screen. “According to the data here, the brains for the units were never shipped. But we should be able to clean up the hydroponics ourselves.”
“But that won’t help us start up the mining,” I said. The main reason we chose to land at the base had been to produce metal from the ore deposited by the impact of the ancient giant meteor that had created the Copernicus crater. The same metal which—with the help of the solar panel’s energy and some other odds and ends of equipment which could be scrounged or even dragged up from Earth, could then be converted into gravity rods.
But there were no bots to do the work.
“Apparently the last shipment to make the base operational was aborted,” Jake said.
No one said much else about it then. But we knew we’d have to find the bots before it would be possible to build more rods which we all saw as the key to creating our own little business that might do about anything from supply unlimited power to create a full-fledged space ship capable of traveling through the solar system with about as much ease as we now traveled around the surface of Earth.
After a quick meal of insta-rations, we were ready to call it a day. We made our way to the crew quarters which extended down into the lunar rock, consisting of forty cabins reached via a long, underground hallway leading from the command center. Each cabin was large, ten by twenty meters, and contained a pair of bunk beds, desks, two retrieval monitors, a 3V set, and a small bath as well as a Net device, the latter being dead. Each room was also a jumble as the tenants had apparently been forced to sort hurriedly through their belongings to try to decide what to take back to Earth. A few rooms had even ripened due to dirty clothing having been left behind to take on a life of its own. But most also had the towels, soap, and other supplies we’d be needing.
Despite my dream of sharing a bed with Nikki, she picked out a room of her own. I said my
“good nights” to Jake and Nikki—I was ready to sleep. I heard Nikki laughing out in the hallway; apparently she and Jake had decided to stay up a while. Feeling like a school boy, the thought sprang to my mind,
I didn’t know. I was too tired to worry about it. The weak lunar gravity made the thin mattress softer than anything on Earth. That—coupled with my exhaustion—quickly dropped me into a dreamless sleep.
Chapter 11
“Rise and shine,” Nikki’s voice ordered, drifting in from nowhere.
I felt a tug on my nose and opened my right eye to see what was going on. My timing was perfect; the overhead light flipped on with blinding clarity. I groaned and pulled the sheet over my head.
“We need to get going if we’re going to get things done today,” Nikki said as she left the room.
“Right…” With a brown taste in my mouth, I all but fell from bed then staggered a moment trying to get my footing in the light gravity of the Moon. I finally made it into the bathroom where a shower of hot, slowly-falling water got my eyes to where they’d stay open.
After rifling through the closets in my room, I discovered a pair of yellow coveralls that more or less fit me. A pair of slip-on sneakers—which I hoped hadn’t been owned by someone with a fungal disease—completed my pre- owned outfit. I wondered why I hadn’t had the good sense the night before to bring along a container of caffinex—in the instant-hot packages that filled the storage area of the mess hall—back to my room before retiring. On the other hand, thinking about getting out of the room and getting some caffinex gave me the will to live.
I bounced into the control room on my way to the mess and was surprised to see that the whole front of the room facing the airlock was now a clear plastic window which showed the panorama of the plain formed by the crater bottom. The gray stillness of it seemed alien when viewed from inside the safe confines of the room. Quiet, unfriendly, and lifeless. The pink van sitting in the distance looked like some sort of advertising joke that a used-car dealer might pull.
The pink was the only splotch of color on the whole plain.
Jake sat at a console speaking to a computer in a low tone and occasionally punching at a key with a beefy finger.
“How’d you do that?” I asked.
“What?” He turned toward me.
