I never expected to see him again.
When I graduated there was this problem: I was a metallurgist, and there were a lot of us. Metallurgists had been in big demand when I started UCLA, so naturally everybody studied metallurgy and materials science; by the time I graduated it was damned tough getting a job.
The depression didn’t help much either. I graduated right in the middle of it. Runaway inflation, research chopped to the bone, environmentalists and Only One Earthers and Friends of Man and the Earth and other such yo-yo’s on the rise; in those days there was a new energy crisis every couple of years, and when I got my sheepskin we were in the middle of, I think, number 6. Industry was laying off, not hiring.
There was one job I knew of. A notice on the UCLA careers board. “Metallurgist wanted. High pay, long hours, high risk. Guaranteed wealthy in ten years if you live through it.”
That doesn’t sound very attractive just now, but in those days it looked better. Better than welfare, anyway, especially since the welfare offices were having trouble meeting their staff payrolls, so there wasn’t a lot left over to hand out to their clients.
So, I sent in an application and found myself one of about a hundred who’d got past the paperwork screening. The interview was on campus with a standard personnel officer type who seemed more interested in my sports record than my abilities as a metallurgist. He also liked my employment history: I’d done summer jobs in heavy steel construction. He wouldn’t tell me what the job was for.
“Not secret work,” he said. “But we’d as soon not let it out to anyone we’re not seriously interested in.” He smiled and stood up, indicating the interview was over. “We’ll let you know.”
A couple of days later I got a call at the fraternity house. They wanted me at the Wilshire headquarters of United Space Industries.
I checked around the house but didn’t get any new information. USI had contracts for a good bit of space work, including the lunar mines. Maybe that’s it, I thought. I could hope, anyway.
When I got to USI the receptionist led me into a comfortable room and asked me to sit down in a big Eames chair. The chair faced an enormous TV screen (flat: TriVee wasn’t common in those days. Maybe it was before TriVee at all; it’s been a long time, and I don’t remember). She typed something on an input console, and we waited a few minutes, and the screen came to life.
It showed an old man floating in mid-air.
The background looked like a spacecraft, which wasn’t surprising. I recognized Admiral Robert McLeve. He had to be eighty or more, but he didn’t look it.
“Good morning,” he said.
The receptionist left. “Good morning,” I told the screen. There was a faint red light on a lens by the screen, and I assumed he could see me as well as I could see him. “I’d kind of hoped for the Moon. I didn’t expect the O’Neill colony,” I added.
It took a while before he reacted, confirming my guess: a second and a half each way for the message, and the way he was floating meant zero gravity. I couldn’t think of anything but the Construction Shack (that’s what they called it then) that fit the description.
“This is where we are,” McLeve said. “The duty tour is five years. High pay, and you save it all. Not much to spend money on out here. Unless you drink. Good liquor costs like transplant rights on your kidneys. So does bad liquor, because you still have to lift it.”
“Savings don’t mean much,” I said.
“True.” McLeve grimaced at the thought. Inflation was running better than 20%. The politicians said they would have it whipped Real Soon Now, but nobody believed them. “We’ve got arrangements to have three quarters of your money banked in Swiss francs. If you go back early, you lose that part of your pay. We need somebody in your field, part time on the Moon, part time up here in the Shack. From your record I think you’d do. Still want the job?”
I wanted it all right. I was never a nut on the space industries bit—I was never a nut on anything—but it sounded like good work. Exciting, a chance to see something of the solar system (well, of near-Earth space and the Moon; nobody had gone further than that) as well as to save a lot of money. And with that job on my record I’d be in demand when I came home.
As to why me, it was obvious when I thought about it. There were lots of good metallurgists, but not many had been finalists in the Olympic gymnastics team trials. I hadn’t won a place on the team, but I’d sure proved I knew how to handle myself. Add to that the heavy construction work experience and I was a natural. I sweated out the job appointment, but it came through, and pretty soon I was at Canaveral, strapping myself into a Shuttle seat, and having second and third thoughts about the whole thing.
There were five of us. We lifted out from the Cape in the Shuttle, then transferred in Earth orbit to a tug that wasn’t a lot bigger than the old Apollo capsules had been. The trip was three days, and crowded. The others were going to Moon base. They refueled my tug in lunar orbit and sent me off alone to the Construction Shack. The ship was guided from the Shack, and it was scary as hell because there wasn’t anything to do but wonder if they knew what they were doing. It took as long to get from the Moon to the Shack as it had to get to the Moon from Earth, which isn’t surprising because it’s the same distance:
