"Luna" by Garon E. Whited

It’s the end of the world, and I have the best seat in the house.

About a quarter-million miles away—spitting distance in astronomical terms—there is a planet that once held eight billion people.  Eight billion human beings.  Cities the length of continental coastlines drew lights like magical maps of the land.  Bright streaks of aircraft were like shooting stars in the upper air.  Lines of light covered the side of the world like a map of a nervous system.  Even the oceans held bright points, signs to any with eyes to see that read “Here I am!”

Right now, it’s a planet full of swirling black vapors, underlit with a hellish glow.

Someone once tried to convince me that the human race would kill itself with biowarfare—killer diseases, designed and grown far in advance of our understanding of how to cure such things.  You don’t need a computer accident to lose control of a virus; life tends to escape its confines and spread, even if it kills all other life.

If he had been right, I wouldn’t be listening to radioactive static from my home.

Don’t ask me why missiles and bombs went flipping about like tiddlywinks at a national tournament; I’m an astronaut, not a political theorist.  Someone pushed a button, someone said the wrong word, or someone felt like it was a good day to die.

How the hell should I know?  I was in the Luna, over halfway here, when multiple EMPs made the ship hiccup and whine.  That takes work; a moonship has to be resistant to all sorts of nasty things.  Of course, it isn’t exactly designed to take an electromagnetic pulse from a fusion warhead, to say nothing of hundreds, maybe thousands of them.  But we had a lot of distance—nearly two hundred thousand miles of it.

The Luna wasn’t a happy ship, but she stuck with us and we got her put to rights.  We couldn’t raise Houston, or Vandenberg, or even Woomera.  All we got was static.  So we turned the ship around and had a look.

I think we made a mistake, there.  We should never have looked.  We could have wondered and maybe died from curiosity, but we wouldn’t have seen it, known it….

We watched the firestorms and the spreading clouds.  The blue-white marble on which we grew up was now a blackened, smoky ball.  The cool blues and greens and browns and whites were either dull grey or lurid red.  The surface of the Earth had a thousand screaming mouths to Hell.  Each one belched out a black-and-red cloud of poison and hate and death, laughing the last laugh of the destroyer of worlds.

Damn you, Oppenheimer.  Now it’s stuck in my head.

Yeah, the destroyer of worlds.  That’s us.  Humanity.

Carl ordered us to resume our normal heading.  When Katherine didn’t move, he did it himself.  I don’t blame her for staring; it was the ultimate road accident and it demanded your attention.

When the remains of the Earth finally swung out of view, we sort of drifted and whispered and wondered.

“All right, people.  Let’s not forget where we are.”

Carl sometimes has the sensitivity of ten-point steel.  When Judgment Day rolls around, he’ll line up everybody in his ship in alphabetical order, get the chaplain to lead a last prayer, and then wait to be called.

If it hasn’t come and gone, that is.

“We’re the last of the human race,” Julie answered softly, tears filling her eyes.  It’s hard to cry properly in zero gravity.  “That’s where we are.  We’re all that’s left.”

“We don’t know that for certain,” Carl replied, stolid and matter-of-fact.  “There are heavy bunkers—Norad, for instance.  It’s hard to kill an entire navy when it’s out to sea; that’s a lot of area to cover.  So there are possible survivors.

“But, if we are the last survivors of mankind, I mean to see to it that we survive.  Now, we’re heading for a parking orbit around the Moon, preparatory to landing at Lunar Base Alpha.  We have twenty-six minutes until our retro burn and we’ve had a number of systems twitch from the warhead pulses.  I want a complete prep check-off finished in twenty, that’s two-zero, minutes.  Move it!”

With the brain off-line from the unthinkable, I just let habit take over.  I think everyone else did, too.  Everyone except Gary.  He just sat, strapped into his station, staring out at the distant stars.  His wife was in a hospital—had been in a hospital—when he boarded for the mission.  Their second child was on the way.  He almost didn’t go, but she had insisted.

I remembered the congratulations, eleven hours into the mission.  It’s a boy, they said.

Now it’s a scattering of atoms in a radioactive cloud.  Its baby squalling merged into a shockwave and echoed around the planet.

Nobody said anything to him; we just left him alone.  We divvied up his checklist, worked around him, and let him have a little time to himself.  Annette touched his hand every so often, to try and get his attention.  She might as well have been touching a statue.  A dry-eyed statue with a thousand-yard stare.

After a while, I noticed a drop of water float by.  I reached out and caught it, smeared it into the thick material of my jumpsuit so it would absorb, and looked around for the source.  I’d thought maybe Gary had finally started to weep, but I was wrong.  A few other drops were drifting, a glittering trail back to our pilot.  Katherine was crying silently, though, and not letting it slow her down.  She was doing her job by the book, every movement precise, every command perfect, but the tears were getting away from her whenever she blinked.

I got out a Kleenex and kicked off the bulkhead.  Reaching up from behind her, I dabbed at her eyes.  She flinched in surprise, then held her head still and let me.  I mopped up her tears and offered her the tissue. 

“Thank you, Max,” she said, softly, and took it.

We finished our checkoff lists, sealed up, and strapped in for acceleration.

It’s a hair-raising thing to do this—to go to another heavenly body, even if it is the closest neighbor.  We simulated it time and again to try and get used to it.  And I think we were as close to jaded to the experience as you can get without ever having actually done it—I take that back; Captain Carl (USN) had actually been to the moon once, but not in our brand-new go-buggy.  So we were a little nervous.

What had us really on edge was that Mission Control was silent.  Except for the pop and crackle.  We should have heard navigation data from the ground installations.  We should have heard procedure calls from Harve, our flight director.

That’s when it hit me—really hit me.

Harve was dead.

Harvey Klum, five-foot-two of pure astronautical genius.  If he’d been taller, he’d someday have been the first man to set foot on Venus, by God, if he’d had to drag the spaceship there with his own two hands!  He was a marvel of brains, stamina, and determination.  I envied him in so many different directions.  He had so much talent that I always felt like a hippo in a leotard next to his effortless ballet.  I wished, oh, how I’d wished, that the stupid damn regulations could have made an exception for him.  Nobody ever deserved it more.  I’d have fought to follow him to Venus, too, and helped to haul the ship.

All he ever wanted was to get into space.  Mission Control was the closest he would ever get.  Except for radiant light and a few rogue particles, I suppose.

I’m glad I had a job to keep me busy while it all sank in.  I didn’t have a wife, just a girlfriend I was semi-seriously considering turning into a wife; I can’t imagine how it must have been for Gary.  It finally hit me hard—all the people I knew, gone in a flash if they were lucky, dying of burns and radiation if they weren’t.  We had our helmets sealed for maneuvering, so I couldn’t wipe my eyes.  But I could turn off my microphone so I didn’t sob into the intercom.

Judging by way people paused before replying to anything, everybody was off intercom.

We had to turn around to fire the main engines for the burn.  Out the front port, we could see Earth.  I couldn’t look away from it; it was the most beautiful and terrible thing I have ever seen.  Lucky for me, I wasn’t flying the ship.  Captain Carl and Hot Pilot Katherine swung us around the Moon, slamming us into our couches with a short, hard burn; Earth sank below the lunar horizon.  We were on the money, too; no corrections afterward.  We made a complete orbit to double-check our navigation before we burned for landing.

That’s when we lost Gary.

He unstrapped—nobody thought much of it; one orbit of Luna would take us slightly over two hours—and headed aft.  I guess we really just thought that he was going to the head, and glad that wasn’t still staring like a zombie.  Nobody would blame him for wanting to climb out of the monkey suit and use a proper toilet; the plumbing arrangements in a suit aren’t exactly pleasant.  But no, he unsealed his helmet and left it floating in the compartment as he stepped into the airlock.

The sound of the heavy airlock door hissing closed is a lot different from the gentle swish of the polymer-accordion-panel for the zero-gee toilet.

We started to unstrap frantically, everyone but Carl and Katherine; they had a ship to run.  I’m fast and I have legs that would let me play pro basketball if I hadn’t been crazy to get to space.  I got to the inner door and started to unseal it when Gary blew the outer door.

What happened to him is best left to the imagination.  And if I’d had my way, would have been.  The emergency purge blows the explosive bolts on the outer lock; the door came away in one piece, shooting away like a cork from a bottle.  Gary followed it, carried along by the outrush of air.

I saw him through the inner door’s window before he left.  He looked sad, so incredibly, infinitely sad.  It hurt my heart to see it.

And then his eyes exploded as he was sucked out into space.

Our helmets have a tube for occasions when you have to throw up.  The engineer who designed them probably designed the waste-relief system lower down, too.  Whoever he was, he never threw up in a helmet.  The system isn’t worth the plastic it’s made of.

We made an extra orbit while we corrected our vector from the airlock purge.  That gave Anne and Julie a chance to calm down.  Anne was ready to have weeping hysterics, officer or no officer—it’s one thing to see a planet with nastiness on the surface some quarter-million miles away; it’s quite another to watch a shipmate and a friend decide to die.  Carl wound up issuing her a tranquilizer; Julie administered it.

“Captain?” Julie asked.

“Yes, lieutenant?”

“May I have a dose?”

“No.  If you’re stable enough to handle it so far, you’ll be fine.  Besides, we have a ship to run and we’re shorthanded as it is.”

“I—yes, sir.”

While all that was going on, I got my helmet cleaned up.  I could have used Gary’s, but nobody insisted, not even Carl.  I guess he’s human after all.  Not a very nice human, but he’s also the ship’s captain.  And we were about to do an airless landing.

Landing on the Moon isn’t like a landing on Earth.  On Earth, you catch air with your wings and fly down, gliding.  On the Moon, you take aim for where you want to go, slow down until you’re falling onto it, then retro until you come to a stop just as you touch down.  You can’t even come in with a sideways vector and land like a normal plane; on the Moon, you don’t have enough weight for the wheels to keep any traction during braking.  And don’t even think about a drag chute.

Landing is actually a lot more complicated than that, but you get the general idea.

Captain Carl can navigate.  Katherine really is a Hot Pilot.  We came down with hardly a bump.

Lunar Base Alpha was built by robots as a special project with NASA and a couple of other countries; the idea was not only to build a permanent base, but to use it as practice close to home before blowing a few billion on, say, Ganymede.  A three-second delay was good practice for a three, thirteen, or thirty-hour delay, later—not that it looks like there will be a “later.”  A ship built on the Moon for a trip to the outer planets would have been a lot more economical; smaller gravity well, no atmosphere, that sort of thing.

We were originally going up just to test the place for a six-month hitch and shake out the bugs; if anything went seriously wrong and we had to evacuate, the Luna carried more than enough go-juice to get us home.  I found myself hoping that the engineering boys had got it right on the first try.  There would be no going to the corner store for a bottle of milk.  No milk.  No store.  Not even a corner.

Ideally, we would live there for six months in our own little biosphere arrangement.  Everything recycled, everything reconstituted; with solar panels to provide power and enough battery backup to last three times the dark phase, that shouldn’t be hard.  Eventually, if all went well, NASA would have sent up more people—the Moon is a perfect place for manufacturing of all sorts.  Raw vacuum by the mile, plentiful power, temperatures between absolute zero and boiling—the place was a chemical engineer’s playground.  And, one day, there would be a city growing where once there was just an experimental base.

Or not.

Getting from the Luna to the base proved to be more of a challenge than we’d anticipated.  Gary’s abrupt departure had cost us our personnel airlock.  We made sure our suits were tight, then went through the tiny, one-man lock into the cargo bay; the bay isn’t pressurized.  From there, we could open the cargo ramp in the underbelly and make our way down to the mooncrete landing pad.

We paused on the surface.

We were on the Moon.  We were standing on another heavenly body.  It’s one thing to be in a ship—you could be anywhere in a ship.  But here we were on our nearest neighbor, almost a planet in its own right.  Standing on silver-grey concrete made from lunar soil, under the blazing light of a Sun unfiltered by gentle atmosphere, beneath the glow from our former home, the Earth.  Both sides were glowing, the sunlit half and the night half, looking twice as big and three times and ominous as it had through the comforting glass of the ports.

I know I wasn’t the first, but it may well have been the last time Man put foot down on the lunar landscape.  It was just… I had a sense of finality in my heart.  We ruined the Earth, green and brown and blue and white; I could see the mess we’d made of our birthworld.  Now we had the next-closest thing to it: The Moon, silver-grey and stark as Hell.

Maybe we deserved it for what we’d done.  Maybe we didn’t even deserve it, but got it anyway.  I felt a desire to kill someone—the fat-fingered fool that punched a launch button, probably.  The bastard that exiled me to the Moon for the remainder of my life, the person that had killed my planet.  Whoever was responsible.

We all stood there for a while, feeling the gravity of our new home and getting used to the idea of being here.  Of this being our home.

“All right, people, let’s not dawdle; the Sun’s still up and these suits aren’t bulletproof,” Carl said, over the radio.  “Max, make sure the base is hot.  Katie, help Anne and Julie get the cargo ramp set up for offloading.  Looks like we’ll be working in suits until we can give the base a once-over.”

We moved.  Anne looked okay; she wasn’t stumbling or fumbling, anyway.  It’s hard to see into a suit in the sunlight—the visor polarizes.  Julie seemed to be jittery; she wasn’t adjusting well to the low gravity.  She kept bouncing when she walked, skidding when she landed.  I couldn’t blame her.

The base was mostly underground; what little there was above the surface didn’t look like much.  There were a couple of structures for the observatory and other such junk—mainly just access points to let you in and out.  There were acres of solar panels and a few antennae, both tower and dish types, but nothing fancy to get scrambled by solar radiation.  The top level of the whole underground complex was actually more than twelve feet under lunar rock to avoid radiation hazards.  I got the airlock opened up and cycled through into the base.  Pressure was okay, but there was no way to tell if it was a breathable mix.

Mission Control should have had the telemetry from the base.  They should have already told us.  But that wasn’t scheduled until an hour before our retro burn, and they wouldn’t be telling us anything.  It should be all right; it was all right when we launched or we would never have lifted…

I lumbered down the corridor; with the suit I weighed in at slightly over three hundred pounds on Earth.  Here, I was barely fifty—with my mass undiminished.  I learned to lean heavily into the turn when I tried to make my first one; I did a wonderful, slow-motion slide-tumble-slide.  It didn’t hurt, but I was surely glad that no one was there to watch me flail like a kid on his first pair of skates.

I checked the air in the hydroponics section.  The gauges were all on the green, so I opened my helmet and kept an eye on my blood-oxygen indicator.  I kept watching for three minutes; no changes.

“Captain?” I radioed.

“Go ahead,” crackled back.  The signal was lousy; too much lunar rock between us.  There was a repeater unit that had an antenna on the surface, but I hadn’t thought to turn it on—or found it, for that matter.

“I’ve got positive on the life support, sir.  Come on in; the air is fine.”

“Good!  Thank you, commander.  Would you do us the courtesy of opening the cargo lock?  We’re about ready to take a load down.”

“Aye aye, sir.”  I headed up to the cargo elevator.  The elevator itself is a huge, pressurized box with gears mounted on the lower corners; these lock into tracks mounted on the walls of the shaft.  When it’s at the bottom of the shaft, you can throw the levers and connect it to air couplings.  These can suck the air out of the box or ventilate it again.  I closed the doors and threw the lever; about ten minutes went by while the air was pumped out.  Then the couplings disengaged and the elevator rose.

On the surface, the covering hatch swung open silently and I opened the doors.  Most of the cargo was unloaded already.  Rollers and power equipment in one-sixth gravity make it easy.  The lion’s share of the cargo was life-support oriented:  ration packs, oxygen and nitrogen, and a lot of water.  In theory, Lunar Base Alpha would recycle everything, but there would always be tiny losses to be made up—no airlock could get all the air out before you open the outer door.

We loaded and lowered, offloaded and returned; trip after trip, cycling the cargo lock over and over again.  The Luna had a sizable cargo hold and it was full; we had picked up the majority of our cargo from Heinlein Station at L4. 

The Luna was designed for shuttling from the Earth to the Moon, provided she could refuel in orbit; she needed full tanks just to get into Earth orbit.  She could land on Earth and fuel up, reach orbit, then refuel and head to the Moon and back before loading up again.

We wouldn’t be refueling on Earth anytime soon.  Until we got a replacement for the blown airlock door, we couldn’t even dare atmosphere; reentry would rip the Luna to pieces.

Altogether, it took nearly six hours to transfer everything; a lot of that was waiting for pressures to equalize.  But we had everything in, checked, and stowed away inside of eight hours.

It gave us something to focus on, and we needed that.

After the inventory was done, Carl had us going over the base with a fine-tooth comb; if we were going to live here, we had better by God make sure it was livable.  So we checked everything from the air ducts to the Zanini solar panels.  The engineers and robots had done good work; everything was running like a Swiss watch.

Then we all sat down in one lounge.  We were all tired from the work and stress.  Our muscles didn’t need the rest, but we’d been running our brains, trying not to think about . . . things.  Like how a single screw-up on our part could make the human race extinct.  To say nothing of killing us all.

Trying not to wonder who might snap, like Gary.  And maybe take us all along.

Carl stood at the head of the table; the lounge could hold thirty people, but it was small compared to the cafeteria.  Eventually, the base would hold—would have held—nearly three hundred people.

“All right, listen up, please,” he began.  “This is our situation.  We have a working environment and a good shot at living out our normal lives here on the Moon.  We may—and I stress this—we may be the last of our race.”

Julie put her face in her hands; her dark hair fell forward in a slow-motion curtain.  Katherine’s lips compressed in an grim expression.  Anne just nodded, cold-eyed and expressionless.  I have no idea what I looked like, but my stomach did a nasty sort of flip-flop at the words.

We had all been thinking it.

“If that is so, then we are going to have to survive,” Carl went on.  “Not just because we are individuals and should struggle to live, but because we have something more important to live for.  We have all of humanity to consider.”

“So we play Eves to your Adams and send our kids back to Earth when it cools down?” Anne asked.  Her tone wasn’t frosty or eager; it was a cool, calculating question.  “If that is your plan, then I might point out that we are an exceptionally small gene pool.”

“But a very high-quality one,” Carl replied.  “Besides, I am not certain that we are the last of our race.  There may be survivors on Earth.  There are almost certainly survivors at the space stations at L4 and L5.”

“So you do plan for us to be mothers to the new human race.  I don’t think I like being relegated to the status of breeding cow.”

Carl sighed.  “No.  You can choose freely if you wish to take a man to your bed or not, to have children or not.  There will be no attempt to coerce you or anyone else to have children.  That’s for you to decide.

“But if we are all that’s left, we will have to face the fact that the only way our race will survive is through the three of you,” he added.  “We can get by with one man; more would be better.  But we absolutely cannot do without you three.  Unless and until we can find more survivors, I want you to consider the possibility.  That’s all.”

I swallowed.  “Uh, Captain?”

“Yes, Max?”

“Do we have to discuss this now?  I mean, I don’t really feel like becoming a father right this minute.”

Carl blinked at me, then nodded.  “Point taken.  But it had to be said.”

“I guess it did.”

“So how do you feel, Max?” Katherine asked.  She was sitting between Julie and I; her hands were clasped with one of Julie’s.  Julie was sitting very still and quiet, breathing slow, deep breaths to keep calm.  Anne was a lot better for having had her tranquilizer.  Maybe Julie should have had one too.

I thought about her question.  Nobody said anything, just waited and tried not to stare at me.

“I guess… I guess that I’m feeling numb.  More than anything.  A little disgusted that we could come this close to killing ourselves.  Scared, at least a little; I’d be a fool not to be.  A little glad, too.”

“Glad?” Julie demanded.  I was pleased at her reaction; I’d hate for her to zone out and go like Gary.

“A little,” I admitted, in the face of her glaring.  “Glad that I am alive.  Glad that maybe the human race will go on.”  I sighed.  “Not at all glad that the situation is like this.  Glad that we might have a second chance at being… well, a decent species.  Someday.

“But, like I say, mostly I’m numb.  It’s too big; it’s the whole world, the whole race.  I can’t grasp that emotionally, at least not yet.  Ask me again after I’ve had a hot meal and twelve hours in the sack.”

“How can you think of food?” Anne asked.

Carl chuckled.  It wasn’t a great chuckle, but it did show amusement and that made the whole room seem less like a tomb.

“When did we last eat?” he asked.

Katherine opened her mouth to answer, but Julie beat her to it:  “Zero-eight-thirty.  Fifteen hours ago.”

“I haven’t been hungry,” Katherine added.  “Too keyed up, I guess.”  Anne nodded agreement.

“We will have dinner,” Carl decided.  “After that, we can all use some rest.  Max, stick some rations in the warmer.”

I fetched us some plastic-wrapped bricks and stuck them in the microwave.  Inwardly, I wondered what we would do with the plastic wrap; it was a lot of polymer.  How would we recycle it? 

Conversation lulled while the food was warming; it failed to pick up again while we ate.  Fortunately, everyone did eat.  Julie picked at her food at first, but got serious about it after the first couple of mouthfuls.

The only comment was from Carl.

“You had to pick the teriyaki chicken?” he asked.  “I hate the stuff.”

I examined the package.  “It’s the barbequed beef, actually.”

Carl sighed theatrically.  “Everything in a quickie ration winds up tasting like chicken.”

It lightened the mood a little.  But nothing was going to bring out smiles.

After dinner, we retired to quarters; there were lots to choose from.  Since I needed one, I took a shower; the hot water was working perfectly.  Hours in a space suit don’t do much for your personal hygiene.

One-sixth gravity, by the way, makes even a thin foam mattress feel like a cross between a waterbed and free falling.  I thought I would have trouble falling asleep; instead, I was out like a light.

Somewhen along the next few hours, I found that I needed two things: a trip to the head, and something more to eat.  One ration goes fast when you’re strung out on stress.  So I made a brief stop at the toilet before zippering into a jumpsuit and bouncing out into the corridor toward the galley.  Salmon in lemon sauce.  Mmm.  It didn’t even bother me that it was artificial protein molecules reconstituted to resemble fish.  I was hungry.  And it tasted nothing like chicken.

On the way back to my quarters, I heard something.  I paused, listened.  The sound was ongoing and faint.  I tracked it down at one of the other chamber doors.  Someone sobbing.

How long I stood there, thinking, I don’t know.  I couldn’t just barge in.  And what do you say?  “Sorry, but I could hear you crying from the hall”?  Hell, I didn’t even know whose quarters these were; we just picked our own.

At a bet, it wasn’t Carl.

Finally, I just knocked.  The sobs choked off and there was a pause.  Then someone inside asked, “Who is it?”

“It’s Max.”

“What do you want, Max?” asked the muffled voice behind the door.

“Can I come in for a minute?”

A longer pause.  “Okay.”

I went in.  The room was dark except for the glow from the hallway.  To the left, one of the ladies was sitting up in bed, hugging her knees.  I stepped aside to let in more light and saw that it was Kathy.

“Close the door, please.”  I did that.  Darkness like ink filled the room.  “What is it, Max?”

I wanted to go to her, to hold her and comfort her and tell her it would all be all right.  But I couldn’t.  She had a husband down on Earth—a computer programmer for some civilian company.  For all I knew, he might be alive.  But if he was, he probably wouldn’t be for long.  How could I tell her that it would all come out okay?

“Kathy?  Can I ask a favor?”

“Sure, Max.”

“Will you hold me and tell me that it’ll all be okay?”

There was a silence for the space of about six heartbeats.

“Come here, baby,” she said.  I went to her and she helped me into the bed.  She took my head in her hands and pressed it to her breast.  I put my arms around her body.  She stroked my hair and crooned over me, rocking slightly.

I burst into tears, and so did she.  We held each other, cried, and rocked until we both fell asleep.

***

She woke up when I squeezed her.  Kathy smiled at me and squeezed me back, then released me and sat up.

“You know this is going to be complicated?” she asked.

I lay there and looked up at her.  She looked good in a jumpsuit, even with her short hair all mussed.  She turned a little to look at me.

“Why?” I asked.  “Just because you outrank me?”

“Partly; I am a superior officer.”

“That you are.  I know that you’re ahead of me by a grade.  This won’t keep me from taking orders.”

She nodded.  “Okay.  But there’s another problem.”

“Such as?”

“I might have trouble giving you an order that I need to.”

I thought about that one.  If someone had to do something dangerous and possibly lethal… I looked at her; she was watching me think.  I noticed that her eyes were green, like spring grass.  I’d never noticed before.

“I see your point,” I conceded.  “Do you want me to go?”

“No…” she trailed off.

I rubbed her back, gently.  “But you think this may be a mistake.”

She lay down next to me and didn’t meet my eyes.  “I don’t know, Max.  Maybe.”

“Okay,” I answered, and kissed her forehead.  “I’ll go.  You can’t really think about it while we’re so close.  I know; I can’t think about it either.  We each need someone to hold on to—and I’m glad I was there for you, and you for me.  Friends, Kathy?”

She smiled a little.  “Always, Max.”

“If you need me, you say so, okay?”

“I will.  You, too.”

I got up and stretched; sleeping in lunar gravity beats the best foam mattress ever made.

“What time is it?” Kathy asked.  I looked at my wrist—no watch.  I’d forgotten.

“Beats me.  I haven’t heard reveille.  Do you think the captain will be sounding it?”

She smiled.  “He might.”

“Then I ought to get a jump on it.  Do me a favor?”

“Maybe.”

“Kiss me goodbye before I go?”

She smiled and sat up on the bed, held out her arms.  I moved to her and we embraced, then she kissed me, soundly, and for good.  She held me a moment longer, looking at my face.

“There’s no such thing as ‘goodbye,’ Max.  Just ‘until we meet again’.”

“I look forward to it,” I replied.  My head was spinning a little.  She let go of me and I bounced out into the corridor.

One of the things the engineers in mission control missed was the installation of clocks.  While they were building stuff with robots, they had timestamps on the telemetry from the robot cameras.  Why look around for a clock?  I had to go back to my quarters to get my wristwatch before I could find the time.  It was a little after nine hundred hours—or nine in the morning—on the Greenwich time zone, our time zone.  Made me wonder about the captain and when he’d be up.

As I walked into the cafeteria, I discovered that he was already up and dawdling over coffee.  Anne and Julie were still in various stages of breakfast.  All three were in the dark blue jumpsuits we were issued for Luna Base.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Anne called.  Julie and Carl nodded at me as I got food.  Anne continued with, “Did you sleep in your uniform, or did you get an early start on crawling through the access spaces?”

“Ha ha,” I replied.  “If you must know, I was conducting a low-gravity fabric stress test.”

“You slept in your uniform,” she stated.

“Well, yes.  And good morning to everyone.  I’d have been here sooner but I was expecting a bugle call over the one-em-cee.”

Carl chuckled.  “Not today.  We got a lot done last night and we had a lot of stress before that.  Sleep is good for you; we all needed the rest.  We’ll break up into watches and schedules later today.”

I nodded.  It made sense to have somebody awake and alert at all times, especially here—one disaster could kill us all.  No matter how safe the building looked, it was still a lifeboat for humanity—a big lifeboat, but it was way undercrewed.

I felt a chill, ignored it, and ate.

Kathy came in last.  She had showered and run a brush through her hair.  I tried not to stare; I’d known she was beautiful—all three of the ladies were, at least to me—but I hadn’t felt much for her.  Now, I felt closer.  She wasn’t just someone I worked closely with; she was my friend.  It didn’t matter if she hated my taste in music or had weird ideas about religion.  We had shared something—something that had nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with being human, so she seemed more beautiful this morning.

“Good morning,” I offered.  “How’d you sleep?”

She smiled at us all; I thought I detected a slight increase in wattage when her eyes met mine.

“Very well, thank you.  And the rest of you?”

“Like a baby,” I answered.

Anne shrugged.  “Okay.”

Julie shook her head.  “Not so good.  Nightmares.”

Carl smiled at Julie a little.  “I had a few bad dreams, myself.  If they persist, I’ll authorize Anne to issue us each a sleeping pill.”  Julie didn’t argue, just nodded and looked unhappy.  She did have some dark circles under her eyes, and I noticed that she hadn’t eaten much of her morning ration.

“What’ll you have?” I asked Kathy.  I was seated at the end of the cafeteria table, close to the dispenser.

“Do we have anything resembling eggs and orange juice?”

“Yep.  Fried or scrambled?”

“Scrambled.”

I punched buttons and then handed her the plastic-wrapped tray.  We fell to.  As we were eating, Carl gently nudged Julie and nodded at her plate.  He did it subtly, even smoothly, but we were all sitting clustered together, possibly in a sort of defense against the vast, empty space that was meant for more people.  I couldn’t even imagine ghosts in these seats; they were cold and hard and sterile.  They had never even seen a human being.

Except us.

I found that my appetite wasn’t what I’d thought it was.  But I ate anyway, lest Carl assign someone to kick me under the table—I was too far away to nudge.  Julie also managed to eat.

When we had finished breakfast, Carl stood up.

“Ladies and gentleman, we will now come to order.”  We all sat up a little straighter and watched Carl.  He was the captain of the ship and the commander of the base; things could be about to get interesting really quickly.

“I am captain Carl Hughes of the United States Navy, mission commander and copilot of the Luna.  I want each of you to give your name and rank as we go around the table, then your mission specialty.  Katherine?”

“I am lieutenant colonel Katherine Edwards, United States Air Force, second in command for the mission, primary pilot for the Luna, and communications engineer while on base.”  Carl nodded at her and directed his attention to her right, to Anne.

“I’m Annette Fleming, ah, lieutenant in the United States Navy.  I’m a staff officer; I’m a doctor.  I’m also trained to handle the hydroponics department and a lot of life support… Is there anything else I need to say?”

“No, Anne; that’s fine,” Carl replied.  “Thank you.  Julie?”

“My name is Juliette Lewis, and I’m a lieutenant in the United States Army.  I’m a chemical engineer.  And a staff officer, too, I suppose I should say.”

“Very good.  Max?”

“Maxwell Hardy,” I rapped out in my best cadet-review tones, “lieutenant commander, United States Navy.  Aboard the Luna, I’m chief damage control officer; here on base, I’m still damage control, as well as being the structural and mechanical engineer.  The space janitor,” I finished, smiling.  Anne and Kathy grinned; Julie let out a short, sharp laugh out of surprise.  Even Carl smiled slightly.

“I will now note our casualty,” he said, folding his smile and putting it away.  “Gary Lindgren, captain in the United States Air Force, and the chief electronics engineer for Lunar Base Alpha.”

There was a silence around the table.

“Services for captain Gary will be at twenty hours tonight,” Carl went on, after the pause.  “In the meantime, his duties will be divided among Katherine and Maxwell.

“So, the chain of command for the base is as follows:  Myself, commanding.  Katherine is my first officer, Max is second, followed by Anne and then Julie.

“Our schedule of watches is as follows.  Lights-out is at twenty-two; lights-on will be at oh-six-hundred.  Watches will be two hours long and will rotate night to night—we’ll all stand a watch four nights out of five, I’m afraid.  I want someone awake and keeping an eye on the base from the control center while everyone else is asleep.”

Anne stuck up a hand.  “Sir?”

“Yes, Anne?”

“May I ask why we don’t just stagger our sleeping schedules so that we don’t have to get up in the middle of the night?”

“Yes, you may.  The reason is that I want the watcher in the central station; you can’t all do our jobs from there,” he answered.  “If something goes wrong, I want to have someone with a hand on the klaxon and the other on the bulkhead door controls.  I don’t want to have a meteorite hit the number three storage bunker and have nobody know it until our ears pop from the pressure lost.”

“Oh,” she replied, in a very small voice.

“It also occurs to me that if we stagger ourselves as you suggest, we may have conflicts when we need assistance from another human being.  It also maximizes our ability to have social contact if we want it; we can’t crawl into our holes and hide, people.”

Nods from around the table.  Julie shifted uncomfortably and folded her hands in her lap.

“Today, we need to look over our new home,” Carl went on.  “The robots obviously did a good job, but I want a human opinion by eighteen hundred.  Tackle your areas first, check everything over, make sure that it’s working right—we already know the place is functioning; look for things that need to be fixed, replaced, or rearranged.  Be proactive, people.  We gave it a once-over before we hit the sack, but I want details and suggestions for improvements.  We’re going to be here for a while, so I want to have a nice, clean house to live in.  Any questions?”

I stuck my hand up.  “Sir?”

“Go ahead, Max.”

“Once I’m done checking the integrity of the base and making sure the toilets flush, do you want me to start on Gary’s list?  Or should I wait for Kathy?  Or vice versa, if she finishes before I do?”

“Wait for each other,” he decided.  “None of us is fully qualified on Gary’s areas.  Anything else?”

Nobody spoke up.

“Then let’s get cracking, people.  I’ll let you know when lunch rolls around.”