Lunar Descent

by Allen Steele

  Oh, please … Lester scrunches his eyes tightly shut, dreading whatever is to come from McCloud’s eclectic tastes this morning. God help them, he might have decided to subject everyone to an old Residents or Plasmatics cut—last Thursday morning it was Sid Vicious’ version of “My Way”—but instead the mellow tremor of Miles Davis’ trumpet cuts through the fog. Lester takes a deep breath, slowly lets it out, and watches as the ceiling lights gradually sharpen in intensity like a false dawn. He hears around him from other cubicles the sullen squeak of bedsprings releasing their weight, the hollow thump of feet landing on floorboards. Time to get going. He rolls over and places his feet on the cold floor.…

  … Did I tell you that we’ve got a former fashion model working here? No kidding! The girl who was on the Sports Illustrated cover you had taped over your desk at UMC, the one in the purple bikini under the waterfall—“Maui Zowie.” Yeah, that Susan Peterson!!! I’m not lying: she’s a scientist up here! Didn’t you read that interview with her in Playboy? I don’t know how old she is now, but I swear she’s got a great ass! Hey, and don’t believe me if you don’t want to, but I think she likes me. Watch it, pal. You’ll get hair in your palms if you start thinking like that, nyuk nyuk nyuk.…

  Butch Peterson snaps her ankle-weights into place, then stands up from the bunk and steps up to the chinning bar mounted just above the door of her niche. Wearing only the panties and tanktop she slept in, she reaches up, grabs the bar, and begins to do twenty quick ones, her morning regimen. One … two … three … four …

  Perspiration soon beads her forehead and chest, running in rivulets down the front and back of her top. Eight … nine … ten … eleven … Her mind is already at work, going over the results of the polar geological survey she has just completed. She’s going to have to talk to Les about letting her go up to Byrd Crater for an inspection of the permaice extraction facility. It’s not a prospect that particularly excites her, except maybe for the fact that it gives her an excuse to get away from the base for a day or two.

  Fourteen … fifteen … sixteen … She grits her teeth with the exertion. Face it, kiddo, you’re going stir-crazy here. Even if it’s just going up to the north pole again, it might be worth the trip just to give yourself a change of scenery. Eighteen, nineteen …

  … Skycorp must have been desperate to send up the replacement workers we’ve received last month. Specially trained personnel? Who do they think they’re kidding? These are guys out of die-tool factories, pool halls and chop-shops; I can’t imagine how they were recruited for a job like this. Every shift there is a mishap of one sort or another, whether it be loss-of-oxygen accidents, sprained ankles and wrists, machinery broken because of lack of proper instruction—it’s really pathetic, like a bad TV sitcom sometimes. I know we needed the money to send the kids to college, but I’m sincerely beginning to wonder if this was a serious mistake.

  Don’t worry—I’m looking out for myself. That’s my Number One priority. I refuse to let myself be harmed because some tobacco-chewing yahoo from East Podunk was screwing around on the clock. Just keep the money in the bank where it belongs, darling, and don’t quit your job at the shoe store. The kids are old enough to take care of themselves while you’re at work. I’ll be home in only five months, and we’ll put this ordeal behind us.

  I really miss you, too, Doug.…

  In the infirmary, Monk Walker is already laying out bandages, antiseptic, sutures, and low-level painkillers in preparation for the long day ahead. Through the door leading to the locker room, he can hear moondogs from the third shift returning from work—lockers opening, men talking and cussing. He hums along in time with the Miles Davis cut on the radio, thankful for a little bit of good music before the daily barrage of rock and roll begins.

  The prayer beads around his left wrist click softly as he begins to change the sheets on the cot, and he briefly remembers the silence of the Tibetan Himalayas in the morning: the way the low morning clouds curled around the columns of the great monastery at Lhasa, the melodic sound of drums and chimes being beaten by the Gyuto monks—all very long ago and far away. He thinks of the smiling face of his teacher and former patient, the Dalai Lama, the mornings they spent together, sipping tea and discussing the ways of the world, and finds himself longing for those simpler times … and reaches for the dosimeter logbook, in which he keeps a written record of each moondog’s radiation exposure.

  Keep your mind on the present, he reminds himself. This isn’t Lhasa.…

  … I swear to God, Chuckie, this job is beginning to suck something big-time. Remember how you told me this would be easy, workin on the moon? “Anythings got to be better than stayin on the assembly line?” (you sez that—I remember!) Ha-ha-ha and fuck you too, and I mean it. If its so fuckin easy, why ain’t you up here, you low piece of shit? (Just kiddin—honest!) Anyway, we’re workin a hundred times harder now that this new GM is here, and even tho the sun went down last week (the nights are two weeks long here, remember?) we’re still pullin three eight-hour shifts a day, and I’m workin like a cocksucker now, but you think fuckin Skycorp is goin to give us back our bonus pay? Not a fuckin chance!

  Dont try sendin me any more doobies in the mail again, cuz fuckin NASA and the company clamped down on all the illicit contraband thats been sent up here. And stay away from my sister, you asshole, cuz if I find out you’ve been banging her while I’m up here, I rip your head off and shit down your neck.…

  Mighty Joe gently unlocks Annie Noonan’s arms from around his neck and pushes her aside in the narrow bunk. The sleeping woman whispers something unintelligible as she rolls over, pulling the covers around her nude body. Joe looks down at her and fondly pats her rump, then stands up and stretches his back. Good God, he thinks as he hears it crack, many more nights like this and the woman’s going to throw my spine out of place.

  He grins saucily. And you’re not going to hear me complaining, either. Sure is weird, having a steady girlfriend again. He knuckles sleep out of his eyes. So long as she doesn’t get serious on him or anything, he doesn’t mind.

  “Aw, well,” he says softly. “Time for that glorious first piss of the day.” Scratching his ass, he reaches for the door and pulls it open—just in time to catch one of the other women who share the females-only dorm on her way back from the head. She shrieks at the sight of his naked body and dashes down the corridor as Mighty Joe slams the door shut.

  Christ! He had forgotten he had been sleeping in Annie’s niche again.…

  … You know how much Dad meant to me. I loved him as much as you or anyone else in the family, and if I could have been there for the funeral, you know I would have made it. That’s the truth. But Skycorp’s contract prohibits me from coming back for any other reason than serious injury, mental unfitness, or being fired or laid off. Dad knew that when I signed on, and he told me to go ahead, even though he knew he didn’t have that long to live. I’m sorry, sis. That’s the way it is. I’ve said kaddish for him. Please lay flowers on his grave for me until I get back.…

  Willard DeWitt, sitting behind his desk in his niche, shuffles through a stack of printout next to his Toshiba laptop, scanning information he has already collected and collated over the past couple of weeks. He absently curls his lower lip between his thumb and index fingers. Ah, yes. Most interesting indeed.

  DeWitt has been up all night, working through the graveyard shift on his secret plans; he’s ready to turn in and catch a few hours of sleep before reporting in at MainOps for duty on the second shift. But his mind continues to work, spinning along the endless permutations of his scheme. He’ll stay awake for a little while longer. He turns back to his keyboard and scrolls to the end of the file to enter some new data. At the top of the screen is printed the filename for his latest entrepreneurial endeavor: MOONTUNES.…

  … And to really put the cherry on the sundae, there’s a new security chief up here. Her name is McGraw—nicknamed Quick-Draw, get it?—and she seems to regard herself as The Law
up here, meaning that she’s a pain in the ass. We weren’t even sure whether she was a man or a woman when she first showed up … there’s something weirdly androgynous about the way she walks, talks, etc., like a bull dyke who was once a national champion on the mud-wrestling circuit.

  The funniest part is her uniform: a dark-blue NASA Space Enforcement Division outfit with a straight black clip-on tie (a tie! Can you believe it?) with every zipper and snap spit-polished and perfectly in place, badge pinned just above the left breast pocket (though she really doesn’t have any breasts to speak of), ankle-weights at precise height on her boots, cap set on her head with the bill exactly straight ahead, never tipped back or pulled forward. And her belt! She’s always got a riot-stick, Taser, Mace and tear-gas dispensers, first-aid kit, two (count ’em, two) sets of handcuffs, beltphone, flashlight, utility knife, emergency oxygen mask, dosimeter, lock-remover, universal keycard, and God knows what else stashed in the pouches (we’re betting a suicide pill, in case we get invaded by aliens). She clanks when she walks down the corridor—like Clint Eastwood, Batman, and your cousin Darienne all rolled into one. Weirder than shit, man.

  But McGraw’s all right in some ways. One of the gays—yeah, we got a few up here, but they’re all right—told me that she caught him and his friend going at it in the storeroom. He was giving head to his boyfriend when she walked in, and all she did was give ’em a lecture about safe sex and hand Mike a condom (from the pouch on her belt, of course). “I’m glad she didn’t make a scene about it,” he told me, “but do you know how nasty those things taste?”

  Tycho Samuels, encased in his hardsuit, stands in the Number Two airlock and waits patiently until the cell decompresses. The status-light over the hatch switches from amber to green; after a quick glance at the digital pressure gauge to make certain that the airlock is in hard vacuum, he grasps the lockbar between his gauntleted fists, yanks it down, and shoves the hatch open.

  Beyond the hatch, caught in the shadowless glare of the scaffold-mounted floodlights, is the Moon. Within the privacy of his helmet, Tycho’s face breaks into a seldom-seen smile. This is the part of the job he loves the most: stepping out there for the first time each day. The strange, pitted landscape below his feet, Earth hovering high above his head …

  This is what he came here to find. Its harsh beauty is indescribable; he has tried to put it in words, in his letters to his father back in Nashville, but writing is a skill he has never mastered. But it’s a world away from the Jefferson Street projects where he was born and raised; even if he goes back there, he intuitively knows that he will never be the same again.

  Tycho steps out onto the Moon, heading for the rover which will take him out to his job at the mass-driver plant … then, impulsively, he bends his knees, swings back his arms, and leaps into the starlighted sky, just the way he used to jump-shoot on the basketball court in his old neighborhood. Straining against his bulky suit, he stretches out a hand and, for just a brief second, touches the blue-green face of the Earth.

  Yeah! Dunk-shot! Tycho scores another two points! And the crowd goes wild.…

  … You should see what Earth looks like from up here. You wouldn’t believe it. I’ll send pictures.

  Love, as always …

  11. Wang Dang Doodle

  First-shift began much like any other: in the EVA ready-room, the last few moondogs squirmed and grunted into their sour-smelling hardsuits, waited for the suit techs to check them over, slam shut their back hatches, and wave them along into the line in front of the airlocks. Outside the base, they climbed onto the beds of rovers—shoving against each other for room, swearing at the long-suffering driver, guts roiling from yet another tasteless powdered-eggs-reconstituted-hashbrowns-and-freeze-dried-sausage breakfast hastily shoveled down in the mess deck. Finally the rovers started up and began crawling out to the regolith fields a quarter of a mile away.

  The habitat slowly receded in the distance; narrow slits of light from the windows cast long shadows from the nearby fuel tanks and the antenna grove. Floodlights on the landing pads reflected dully off the hulls of spacecraft being worked on by the pad rats. The rovers paused next to the long aluminum rails of the mass-driver, stretching toward the western horizon, to let off a few workers; out behind the rim of Spook Crater to the south, they could see the faint glow of the searchlights on the twin SP-100 nuclear reactors at the bottom of the crater. It was nothing they hadn’t seen before; they bumped along in the back of the rover, gripping the bed rail for support, and mentally counted the days until they could get the hell off the Moon.

  Over their suit radios, if they switched to Channel Four and pinned the cross-talk switch on Channel Two so that they could still hear one another, LDSM played the blues: “Wang Dang Doodle,” Willie Dixon’s ferocious growl coming through the headsets, talking about drinking and brawling down at the local union hall.

  Out in the regolith fields, the lights of vehicles slowly roamed across a terrain that vaguely resembled furrowed New England pasture land covered by the first heavy snow of winter. Rovers shuttled men back and forth, bulldozers shoved rocks and boulders aside, immense caterpillar-treaded combines scooped up the tough regolith and deposited the powdery fines into the bins of tractors—to be taken back to the Dirt Factory at the base for processing for oxygen, aluminum, and silicon—leaving behind straight low hedgerows of coarser till-soil.

  Beneath the untwinkling starlight, hidden from the Sun, men and machines labored against the ancient topsoil deposited by millennia of meteorite impact and tectonic movement, gradually stretching the expanse of worked-over ground further north, stripmining the rich highlands foot by foot. Dust thrown up by the mining operations lingered above the ground; it gave the fields a perpetual gauzelike haze which coated their white suits with a gray film, making it necessary for everyone to stop now and then to rub the tips of their gloves across their faceplates to clear their vision.

  “Christ, I love this job.” Mighty Joe tamped the last knotty bud of his private stash of California sinsemilla into the battered mini-waterpipe he had carried with him since his Navy days and fumbled in a hipside cargo pocket for a lighter. “Y’know that, Seki? I fuckin’ love this job.”

  “Yeah, uh-huh. I love this job too.” Seki Koyama reached up to the little Sony radio suspended by its strap over his driver’s seat and turned down the volume a tad. Through the narrow windows of the combine’s pressurized compartment, he could see a ’dozer struggling to move a boulder out of his way. He downshifted to first gear and touched the lobe of his headset. “C’mon, Jenny, get that thing outta there already,” he muttered. A pause, then he added, “Any time and any place, but move the rock first, okay?”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Mighty Joe held the pipe steady against the sudden forward lurch of the massive vehicle. A tiny speck of marijuana was knocked loose from the pipe’s lip and slowly fell toward the floor between his knees; he reached down and caught it before it landed. “No, I mean it. I love having to sneak out in a suit just to smoke a little weed. I love having Quick-Draw kick down my niche door to look for drugs when I’m trying to sleep … and I’m telling you, I really enjoy the presence of your company.”

  “Just light the thing, willya? Damn, what takes her so long?” Koyama shifted to neutral, almost causing Joe’s helmet to topple from its perch on the sill above the dashboard. “Might as well,” he said, shoving the helmet back in place before it fell. “Gives us a little time to enjoy the last of your stash.” The Japanese-American combine operator inched back his bucket seat a little and loosened the harness. “That is the last of it, right?”

  “Sad to say, it most certainly is. Treasure it.” Mighty Joe nicked on the butane lighter, held it over the pipe’s bowl and gently baked the nub as he sucked on the stem. He took a big hit of the acrid smoke—the pot was more than three months old, hardly fresh at all—and held it in his lungs as he capped the bowl with his thumb and passed it to Seki. He half-closed his eyes and waited till his ches
t felt like it was ready to explode, then slowly exhaled, letting out a pale stream of smoke, which swirled around the tiny cabin and was promptly sucked through the vent above their heads.

  Pretty soon we’re going to be scraping the residue from this thing’s air-filter and trying to smoke that, Joe thought. Goddamn Skycorp. Goddamn NASA. It had been six weeks since he had crashed the Dreamer. Although he and his crew still had their jobs, it had definitely been the end of the party for their smuggling operation. Even if he wanted to attempt getting more dope up here, he couldn’t pull it off. Their Cape Canaveral connection had fallen to the feds, and even though Fast Eddie had managed to get away from the NASA investigators, he was unwilling to risk his neck again for a good long time, if ever. The Skycorp inspectors had discovered the pot crop being cultivated in the greenhouse during the purge, and Quick-Draw had been making regular searches of the hydroponics tanks to make certain the new farmers hadn’t gotten any frisky ideas. Unless someone else had their own stash hidden somewhere, this was the last marijuana to be found on the Moon.

  “Oh, yeah!” Seki exclaimed. The Willie Dixon tune had made a clean segue into the bump-and-grind of the Doors’ “Road-house Blues” and Seki reached to turn up the volume. “My theme song,” he said, exhaling through his nose and passing the pipe back to Mighty Joe. “‘Keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheee-ahl,’ wah-wahh!” he sang off-key, slapping his bare hands on the thighs of his suit.