Moonbane

“Shouldn’t you be saying something profound?” Cowboy asked me.

“I know what you mean.” The moment was ripe with allusions: the parting of families, humanity on the threshold of a great and dangerous adventure, a bold last attempt at salvation of the human race—the very apex of human endeavor. But I had nothing. My brain was dry. Perhaps at no other moment in human history was a statement so necessary, a word or phrase that would capture this supreme moment for future generations. I felt Cowboy waiting for me—in a way I felt all of mankind waiting for me—

And then, across the room, Jimmy Rogers did my work for me. He called for attention, and, spitting a wad of tobacco juice, he grinned under his huge mustache, pointed out the long windows at the shuttle waiting for us, and shouted, “Showtime!”

CHAPTER 25

The Light Comes Brighter

I watched the Lexington in awe as we neared it. It resembled an arrogant yet fragile bird. Yet it would soon rise as no bird flew, straight up out of Earth’s grasp under the power of the largest rocket ever made by man. The Big Dumb Booster, a huge bottom bulge of rockets resembling a cluster of Saturn V’s strapped together, was frightening: a manmade Zeus, or, possibly, a Trojan Horse, filled with tons upon tons of deadly explosive rocket fuel.

A knot formed in my stomach; in essence, we would be sitting in a winged toy, on top of the largest stick of dynamite ever made.

Hartnet, the nuke man, who walked beside me in his shuttle jumpsuit, was as pale as I was.

“Hell,” he muttered, “I don’t even like riding in cars.”

“I’ll help you through it,” I said.

He grinned. “And who’s gonna help you?”

We stopped at the base of the launch pad and marched to the gantry like any other shuttle crew. Someone took pictures. Someone else said, “Go get ‘em.”

“You betcha,” Jimmy Rogers said, firing a long stream of tobacco juice to the ground.

We followed Rogers into the elevator, which rose along the tiled white flank of the shuttle. The American flag on the Lexingtons side, which had looked so small from the ground, was the height of a man.

The elevator snapped to a halt, and Rogers ushered us in. He stayed behind, spitting one last stream of tobacco juice off the gantry before ejecting his chewing tobacco after it.

“Damn shame you can’t chaw in zero-G,” he said.

We strapped in. Ahead, through the quartz windows, it was growing dark. I heard Rogers talking with the ground. Suddenly there was a burst of static. “Hell and damnation,” he cursed. “Cowboy, get on up here.”

Beside me, Cowboy unstrapped himself. “Goddamn engineers.” He went up front and was back in a few minutes. The radio had resumed working.

As Pettis settled himself back into his couch, I said, “What is it you do, Cowboy? After what we’ve been through the last couple of days, I feel I know you like a brother, but where do you fit into all this?”

He gave me a huge ear-to-ear grin. “I’m an engineer.”

My laughter was only interrupted by Jimmy Rogers’s cheery, booming voice up front. “One minute to liftoff, gents.”

A soft silver glow filtered through the darkened quartz windows. Outside, through the thickness of the shuttle walls and the hum of expectant machinery, I heard the snap-snap of a rifle and the thud of mortar fire.

At thirty seconds, the radio crackled with a curse from mission control. “Goddamn, Jimmy, we got a breakthrough at the east end of Kramer, and they’re heading for the Lexington.”

“Can you hold em back?” Rogers inquired.

“No sweat. But we’ll have to put a hold on you.”

“Hell with that. How close are they to me?”

“Three or four hundred feet. Lasers got a couple—”

“Don’t hold. We’ll take care of ‘em from this end.”

“Hey, Jimmy—”

“I said no problem.”

“All right, Jimmy, you’ve got a go.” The mission controller began to count down: “Eight, seven, six—Jesus, Jimmy, they’re up at the base of the booster! They’re climbing up on it!”

“Punch it, damn it!” Rogers yelled.

“One, zero, liftoff—Jesus!”

I felt a dull thump way below me; then there was a sudden roar, and a giant’s hand pushed down invisibly on my chest, trying to pin me to Earth as the Lexington lifted. It was a rocky but inevitable rise. The giant’s hand tried mightily to keep me down, but he was losing to the Big Dumb Booster’s huge engines. We rose, rattling like a cupboard of pots and pans in an earthquake. The Lexington did a long, graceful rollover showing us a tip of the Earth under us. We bore up, away from the sight; a minute and a half later we punched a hole in gravity as the ride smoothed out and the giant’s hand became a caress.

Rogers said to mission control, “How’d we do?”

The voice cackled. “Jimmy, you fried ‘em where they stood. Must have burned close to a hundred of em.”

“How ‘bout the rest?”

“The hole in the fence is closed. Lasers are mopping up the stragglers.”

“Good-o, buddy.”

They talked about what we had to do next, when the engine would burn, about orbit and our second burn, which would throw us toward the Moon. I glanced at my companions. Cowboy seemed to be resting. Wyatt had his eyes closed, a dreamy look on his face. Hartnet was white as a sheet of paper, his hands gripping his armrest, knuckles stiff and bloodless. He wouldn’t even meet my gaze.

Up front, the windows showed blue-black. Rogers caught me looking. “Keep an eye out,” he said. “In a minute you’ll see something interesting. His tobacco was gone, but his tongue pressed into his cheek, feigning the presence of his chew.

I watched. There was only deepening black, then a silver pie-plate edge pushed up into the windows and filled them. The Moon, away from the softening sheen of Earth’s atmosphere, was even colder and harder. It sent a strange, deep thrill through me.

Rogers mimicked a tobacco spit. “Here comes the interesting part,” he said. He cocked his hand like a pistol, firing off an imaginary shot through the windows.

“Bull’s-eye,” he said.

CHAPTER 26

Memory

The Moon.

As the hours went by, as the silver-white vision of it grew in our window, I began to feel a strange sadness, a sense of loss and betrayal at its sight. This was not the Moon I had grown up with, the one I had lain under on summer nights and told my wishes and dreams to; this was not the Moon that lovers throughout the ages of man had made love to and relied on for strength and light in the night, the one we had longed so mightily to reach and, having reached, had found so dead, desolate, and ultimately boring that we had all but turned our backs on it, leaving it once again to lovers and poets. This was not that Moon and never could be again—just as the dropping of the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima had forever changed that city in the mind of man, metamorphosing it from a quiet, anonymous industrial port to a symbol of the horror that man was capable of unleashing on himself.

The Moon had even changed in physical shape. As we drew nearer, the huge, blasted, pocked area in what had once been the crater Aristarchus became grotesque and ugly—a gaping black evil eye that spewed rock spores from its volcanic interior. Its vile cannon, aimed at Earth, would not be quiet until we silenced it forever.