Howard unwrapped a foil food tube. “We need to get the alien out of vacuum.”
I scrunched my face. “Bring him in here?”
Howard shrugged. “I suppose he could rot if we warm him. He lived at zero Fahrenheit.”
My EVA suit hung on the wall. Howard pointed. “Would he fit in there?”
“I guess. He’s like five-five, 150 pounds.”
There was an extra suit, but it hadn’t been unpacked.
Metzger and Howard suited up, went down the ladder, and wrestled Sluggo into my suit while I unpacked the new one.
They stuffed him into the suit, his butt end down one leg, his head end just peeping up inside the helmet, behind the visor like… let’s just say the word “dickhead” will never be the same for me. They left him lying on the moon, frozen but protected, and came back inside.
I addressed the burning question. “There’s no way to repair the LEM.”
Metzger shook his head. “Dead as your green friend outside.”
They both avoided my eyes.
Did they think it was my fault that the Projectile had blown up? That I had marooned them here, to die? Neither of them knew Slugs like I did. Nobody in world history knew Slugs like I did! The little worms were going to blow themselves to pieces, regardless. I had fought my way out of that snake pit dragging a dead Slug! I hadn’t asked to die this way, either.
I opened my mouth to snap at them, then turned away and looked out the viewport at Sluggo. He lay inside my misshapen EVA suit, dead on a harsh and lifeless world far from home, as I would be, soon. Had he died an orphan, as I would? Were the other Slugs whose ashes lay scattered across the Sea of Fertility his family?
I looked beyond him, beyond the boulder fields, unchanged for three billion years, to the distant hills, pale against the black sky. Within days I would starve, then freeze, then lie here as still as those hills for another billion years.
On the horizon, something moved.
Chapter Twenty-Two
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.
