Apollo's Outcasts Read online

  Nicole was quiet for a moment. "They're in protective custody," she said at last. "The Secret Service has taken them to some undisclosed location where they'll be safe."

  "That's a lie," Nina said.

  I stared at her. Sure, she he was smarter than a girl her age ought to be, but how would she know that? Yet she seemed utterly positive in what she'd just said.

  "How do you...?" I began.

  "Look at the Moon!" Eddie yelled. "We're falling!"

  Through the portholes, the Moon had become a flat landscape slightly curved at its ends, its mountains, rills, and craters rushing toward us. "No, we're not," Nicole said, and a second later we heard the muted rumble of the ferry's main engine. "We're just on primary approach, that's all."

  "We won't crash, Eddie." Nina clasped her brother's hand a little more tightly. "See? The rocket's firing. We'll be landing in just a little bit."

  "Um...yeah, that's right. Nothing to worry about at all." Nicole glanced at me and silently mouthed a word: slow? It wasn't the word I would have used, but I nodded and she winced. "Sorry about Billy," she said quietly. "What he said, I mean. He can be a jerk sometimes."

  Sometimes? So far as I could tell, being a jerk was a full-time job for him. "Hasn't changed since he made Second Class, I see," Gordie murmured, folding his arms across his chest. "I would've thought Luis would've straightened him out by now."

  "Yeah, well..." Nicole shrugged. "Mr. Garcia's been working on him. I think that's why he sent Billy and me on this mission...to give us an assignment with some extra responsibility." Then she smiled at me. "You and your friends are in the hands of the Rangers." She pointed to the patch on her shoulder, and I noticed the inscription at the bottom. "'Failure is not an option'...that's our motto."

  "The Rangers?"

  "That's what they call Lunar Search and Rescue." Gordie said. "They do a lot more than just that, though. Sort of a team of all-purpose troubleshooters...including defense, if it ever becomes necessary."

  "If you mean taking on Moon Dragon, that'll never happen." Nicole shook her head. "The PSU isn't bothering us and we aren't bothering them."

  She sounded confident, but I wasn't so sure. If President Wilford had been assassinated by a Chinese agent, then it sounded to me like another war with the Pacific Socialist Union was inevitable. The China Sea War was before my time, but I'd learned in history class that it had ended only after the Third Treaty of Saigon brought an end to Taiwan's bid for independence and gave China permanent territorial control of the island. Relations between the PSU and the rest of the world had been frosty ever since, but at least neither side was back to sinking the other guy's ships. Reactionaries like Lina Shapar were aching for a rematch, though, and President Wilford's death might give them the excuse they wanted.

  Another prolonged rumble from the main engine caused me to look out the windows again. The Moon was very close; the ferry was no longer gliding above its surface, but appeared to be in vertical descent. "We'll be down soon," Nicole said, then glanced at Nina and Eddie. "You might want to check your harnesses. The pilots usually give us a smooth ride, but the landing might be a little bumpy."

  It didn't occur to me until then that, over the past few minutes, I'd been gradually feeling just a little heavier. Not nearly as much as I did on Earth, but nonetheless the weightlessness I'd experienced over the last three days was going away. When I experimentally moved my legs, though, I had no trouble bending my knees or wiggling my feet. Sure, this was only one-sixth Earth gravity, but still...

  "You're not going to have any trouble walking." Gordie had noticed what I was doing. "No more than Nicole does, or Billy either."

  "Why would he...? Nicole began, and then she stopped to stare at me. "Oh, my God...are you the one? The one who was born here, I mean?"

  I nodded. It didn't seem like such a big deal, yet Nicole was astonished. "Oh, man," she breathed. "We'd heard you might be coming up, but I didn't know..."

  "Yup. That's him." Gordie's grin couldn't have been any wider. "Jamey Barlowe...the man, the myth, the legend."

  My mouth fell open. "Wha-a-a-a-t?"

  Anything else Gordie or Nicole might have said was forgotten in the next instant. The ferry's main engine fired, louder and longer than ever before, as a vibration passed through the spacecraft and caused the deck the tremble beneath my feet. Lunar gravity, distinct but not uncomfortable, pulled me into my seat. I gripped the armrests and watched through the windows as the rocky grey terrain rose up from below. A quick, hard jolt, and then the engine noise abruptly ceased.

  We had landed on the Moon.

  If you go outside on a clear night toward the end of the month, you can see the Man in the Moon. He gapes at you with a wide-eyed expression that can be interpreted any number of ways--surprise, jollity, disbelief--and his mouth is open as if to laugh, scream, or simply say hello. And if you have a good pair of binoculars, you can look to the right side of his mouth and make out a small dimple on his pock-marked face. The mouth is Mare Nubrium, and the dimple is Ptolemaeus crater--pronounced "toll mouse," with a slight ptt sound at the beginning--the remnants of an extinct volcano partially filled by lava flows. In the upper right side of Ptolemaeus is a smaller crater, Ammonius, which was formed by an ancient meteor impact.

  That's where Apollo was located.

  When NASA sent the first men to the Moon, no one seriously thought they'd find anything other than rocks, rocks, and more rocks. For a while, that seemed to be the case; people thought the Moon was just a big ball of dust and stone, an interesting place to visit but where no one in their right mind would want to live. After the final Apollo expedition in 1972, nobody returned to the Moon for more than fifty years. What was the point of colonizing a dead world?

  However, when geologists examined the samples of surface dust--or regolith, to use the technical term, since it's essentially powdered rock that doesn't contain the organic compounds that define soil--brought back by the Apollo astronauts, they discovered that the Moon wasn't as useless as first believed. The regolith contained ilmenite--a compound of iron, titanium, silicon, and oxygen--that could be extracted and used to build a self-sufficient lunar colony. Robotic probes sent in the early 21st century confirmed the presence of thorium and phosphorus; these rare-earth elements had become strategic resources in the 21st century, particularly since the countries in which they were most abundant tended to have dicey relations with the United States. And the discovery of subsurface ice in the south polar craters showed that the Moon had the resources to make inhabitation possible.

  But the bonanza was helium-3.

  An isotope that comes straight from the Sun itself as a by-product of the fusion reactions that causes the stars to shine, He3 is carried across space by the solar wind. Because most of it burns up in Earth's upper atmosphere before it can reach the ground, it's very rare on our world. There's no air on the Moon, though, so He3 is relatively abundant there, particularly in the equatorial regions where it resides within the regolith as a thin layer.

  On one hand, you need to process approximately 275,000 tons of regolith to extract about two pounds of He3. On the other, even such a small amount makes it the perfect fuel for nuclear fusion. Once combined with deuterium and fed into a fusion reactor, two pounds of He3 can generate 100 million kilowatt-hours of electricity while producing virtually no radioactive waste.

  At first, few people took lunar helium-3 seriously. That changed when oil reserves began to run low at the same time as global energy consumption was increasing, and the effort of getting what little oil remained carried with it war, terrorism, and environmental destruction. The costs of mining He3 and transporting it to Earth were considered prohibitively high until several countries, led by the United States and the European Union, combined their national space programs to establish a multinational public corporation, the International Space Consortium.

  Apollo was the result. A city on the Moon, its main industry the mining and export of helium-3 and other ma
terials, chartered by and belonging to the American, European, and Asian countries that contributed to its construction. The Pacific Socialist Union--China, the United Korean Republic, Vietnam, and Taiwan--followed suit with their own lunar mining colony, Moon Dragon, located in Mare Nectaris. The China Sea War prompted the PSU to go it alone; the United States and its allies still distrusted China, but so long as they stayed in their corner of the Moon, no one minded if they got their share of the goodies.

  Lunar He3 helped usher in a new era of global prosperity that brought an end to the years of turmoil that had defined the first decades of the century. But Vice President Shapar--it was still hard to think of her as President Shapar--and her cronies had their own agenda.

  Which is why I found myself returning to the place where I was born.

  From the north landing field, Apollo looked different than it did from space. It took a little while for the regolith kicked up by the ferry engines to settle, so all we saw through a grey, dusty mist was a vast wall so long that its curved sides disappeared below the visible horizon. About five and half miles in diameter, Ammonius was covered by a shallow dome that resembled an upended saucer; a narrow, band-like atrium stretched around its upper surface. Light gleamed from tiny windows set within the crater walls, the only obvious indication of its enormous size. The place was huge; even the small forest of antennas that stood near the dirt road leading to it were dwarfed.

  My first sight of Ammonius was impressive enough to make me forget what Gordie had said to me just before the Cernan touched down. It wasn't enough, though, to make me overlook a small miracle. I unbuckled my seat harness, hesitated for a moment, then took a deep breath and...stood up.

  No pain, and my legs didn't give way beneath me. Sure, I'd already done this aboard the LTV, but that was while wearing stickshoes in zero-g; a quadriplegic could have performed the same feat. But this was lunar gravity, one-sixth that of Earth's, and not only was I standing on my own, but...

  I carefully took a step forward, then another. Yes. I was able to walk.

  I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, or join the nearest basketball team. I settled for staring down at my feet and forgetting for a second or two that I was able to do this only because I was 240,000 miles from home. I was still giggling under my breath when Eddie asked, "What's so funny, Jamey?"

  "Never mind." Gordie unfastened his harness and stood up to place a hand on my shoulder. "You okay? Not having any problems, are you?"

  "No, I...whoops!" I'd turned around too quickly and tripped over my own feet; he caught me before I fell over. Sure, I was able to walk, but the coordination that comes with learning how to walk was something I'd have to work on. In any case, I wasn't ready to try out for the varsity team.

  "Take it easy until you get used to it." Gordie made sure I was steady, then looked over at Eddie and Nina. "That goes for you two as well. Until we get some ankle weights, you're going to have to be careful. So look before you step."

  Nina quietly nodded, but Eddie didn't understand. "Why?" he asked as he unsnapped his harness and stood up. "I can...ow!"

  He'd gotten up a little too fast. His feet left the deck as if he'd jumped, and he banged the top of his head against the low ceiling. He winced and doubled over, and as Nicole darted forward to help, there was an unkind laugh from behind us.

  "Yeah, dummy," said Billy, peering in through the hatch. "Watch where you're going."

  Despite my own clumsiness, I angrily turned toward him. Nicole beat me to it. "Don't ever call him that again!" she hissed, her eyes narrow with anger as she put an arm protectively around Eddie's shoulders. "Never! Do you understand?"

  Billy stopped grinning. He disappeared from the hatch. I caught a brief glimpse of Melissa; she'd been standing behind him and had heard the whole thing, and it was obvious that she was just as shocked as I was. Even she had learned not to make fun of Eddie.

  Gordie slowly let out his breath. "Maybe everyone should just sit down and wait until the bus gets here," he murmured.

  Good advice, but I wasn't ready to take it. Indeed, I didn't think I'd ever want to sit down again. Careful not to repeat Eddie's mistake, I stepped closer to the portholes. Figures approached the ferry; they wore moonsuits, and two of them dragged a thick hose from a caterpillar-treaded vehicle with a fuel tank at its rear. While they attached the hose to an intake valve on the ferry's lower hull, a third man slowly walked around the spacecraft, helmet visor lowered against the solar glare as he conducted a visual inspection.

  I was still watching the ground crew when another vehicle came down the nearby road. Larger than the tanker, it resembled a subway car mounted atop six enormous, overinflated tires. It came to a halt nearby, then slowly began to move backward toward the ferry, with one of the ground crew raising his arms to guide the driver into position. The bus had an accordion-like docking hatch at its rear, and its car slowly elevated until that it was the same height as the Cernan's upper hull. A few moments later there was a muffled thump as the bus mated with the ferry.

  "All right, then," Nicole said. "Everyone get their bags and follow me." She stepped over to the compartment hatch and looked through it. "Billy, why don't you go up top and see how the pilots are doing?"

  Billy apparently didn't get the hint, because he started to argue with her. Nicole repeated the request, an edge in her voice this time, and a second later I heard Billy's boots clanging up the ladder to the cockpit. Good riddance, I thought as I pulled my bag down from the ceiling net. Billy Tate was someone I hoped I'd seldom see again.

  Once the airlock was pressurized, Nicole opened the hatch and led us from the ferry, moving single-file through the short accordion tunnel and into the bus. It was about the same size as the LTV, with padded benches beneath thick-paned windows. A heavy-set guy sat up front in the driver's seat; when he turned around to look back at us, I saw that the name patch on his skinsuit read TOLLEY. Nicole waited until we were seated and had pushed our bags beneath the benches, then Tolley opened an overhead compartment and pulled out a plastic bag filled with what appeared to be thick, padded bracelets.

  "Take two of these and fasten them around your ankles," he said, passing the bag to us. "They'll keep you from bouncing around when you walk."

  It was hard to tell how much the anklets weighed; I guessed they were about twenty pounds each, although in lunar gravity they were only a fraction of that. I clamped one around each ankle, then experimented by standing up again and taking a couple of steps. It felt strange to have bracelets around my ankles, and when I noticed that Nicole didn't put on a pair, I wondered if I really needed them either. After all, it wasn't as if I'd spent a lifetime walking in Earth-normal gravity. I decided to err on the side of caution, though, or at least until I was sure that I wouldn't make a fool out of myself.

  Once everyone had put on their ankle weights, Nicole asked Gordie to close the rear hatch. Once that was done, Tolley retracted the accordion, put the bus in gear, and moved forward, stopping for a minute to lower the bus to its normal position.

  Logan was sitting beside me, with Melissa on my other side. "How did you like the ride down?" I asked them as we waited for the bus to start moving again.

  "Great," Logan said, "except for Ace Starhunter."

  I smiled, catching the allusion to the hero of the space adventure game he and I liked to play. "Yeah, I hear you," I said. "He's got some kind of attitude."

  "If you're talking about Billy...really, he's not that bad." Nicole was seated across from us. "Once you get to know him, I mean."

  "I hope I don't," Melissa muttered. That surprised me; I would have thought Billy Tate was her type: good-looking, arrogant, full of himself. Apparently he was too rotten even for her. "Please tell me we won't see much of him."

  Nicole shook her head. "I can't promise that. There's only a dozen guys our age in the whole colony, and less than forty kids total. So you'll see everyone in school...and more often than that, depending on which Colony Service team you join." I s
tarted to ask what she meant by that when the bus started moving again. "I'll explain later," she said. "Me, or someone else. As a matter of fact..."

  Nicole abruptly got up and walked to the front of the bus. She bent down to the driver and said something to him. Tolley nodded and Nicole returned to her seat. "We've got about an hour before we're supposed to meet the city manager, so I asked Ed to give us a quick drive around so we can get familiar with this place. Is that okay with you?"

  I had no problems with that and neither did anyone else, so when the bus reached the end of the graded dirt road the driver turned to the right. I spotted an intersection sign: North Field Road was the way we'd just come, and now we were on Collins Avenue. To the left was a short road leading straight to the crater, but we didn't go that way but instead headed north.

  As the bus trundled up the road, I saw what appeared to be a long row of giant, rectangular mirrors pointed toward Ammonius. They appeared to surround the crater as a ring; each mirror was independently mounted on swivels and elevated about ten feet above the ground, their polished sides pointed toward the top of the crater dome.

  "Those are reflectors," Nicole said when I asked her what they were. "During the two-week day, they capture sunlight and point it toward the sun window." She pointed toward the circular window that surrounded the top of the dome. "There's another mirror that bounces the light down into the solarium on the crater floor. The mirrors are set to automatically move during a twenty-four-hour cycle, and that gives us sunrises and sunsets, just like on Earth."

  "What about at night?" Logan asked. "That lasts two weeks, too."

  "When we don't get any sun, the solarium is lit by florescent ceiling lamps. They operate on a twenty-four-hour cycle, too."

  "That's stupid." Melissa was sitting beside Nicole; she gazed at the reflector ring with disbelief. "Why go to all that trouble? They could have just built the dome out of glass and let the sun shine straight in."