She had no intention of showing her work to anyone but her fellow Moonbase residents. But one of them electronically relayed back to Savannah a few choice shots of the Sun rising over Alphonsus’s ringwall mountains. A minor executive in the public relations department showed them to an editor of a photography magazine. Within a month several other magazines were asking for her work.
She had started with ordinary color film, but soon asked her new-found friends in the world of photography to send her black-and-white film, instead. It seemed made to order for the black-and-gray world of the Moon.
With dizzying suddenness, Lana Goodman became an artist of global renown. Her photos of the Moon showed all the barren splendor of this new world in its rugged challenge. Her work adorned the covers of newsmagazines. Media personalities clamored to interview her, live, from the Moon. — The handsome young football hero of a physician left after his three-month tour ended. The next doctor was a woman, just as qualified, just as determined to see that Goodman continued her exercise routine, but nowhere near as emotionally interesting.
When medical tests showed she was physically able to return to Earth, she asked for a postponement. I’m not ready, she said. Psychologically, I’m not prepared to face the return trip.
On the first anniversary of her heart attack she decided to quit the subterfuge and asked her contacts in the corporation’s personnel office to allow her to stay on the Moon indefinitely.
The decision went all the way up to Paul Stavenger, head of Masterson’s space division. In full sympathy with her desire, and prodded by the corporate public relations director, he decided to allow Lana Goodman to stay at Moonbase as long as she wished.
She never returned to Earth.
Lana Goodman become the first person to live on the Moon permanently.
SPACE STATION
The Clippership took off with a thundering roar that was only slightly muted by the passenger cabin’s acoustical insulation. The ship rattled hard enough to blur Paul’s vision for a moment. Pressed flat against the reclined seat, he turned his head to see how Joanna was taking it. Her eyes were squeezed shut, hands clutching the armrests with whitened knuckles.
The vibration eased off a good deal, but the bellowing thunder of the rocket engines still shook his innards. Then a sharp bang! and the noise abruptly ceased.
Paul felt all sensation of weight disappear. One instant he was flattened against the chair, weighing three times normal, the next he was floating lightly against the restraining seat harness.
Joanna’s arms had lifted off her seat’s rests. Her gray-green eyes were wide open now, looking startled.
Paul grinned at her. “We’re coasting now. Zero gee.”
She smiled back at him, weakly.
Within fifteen minutes the Clippership made its rendezvous with the space station. The ship lurched slightly once, twice, a third time. Then the co-pilot opened the cockpit hatch and announced, “We’re docked. They’re attaching the access tube to the main hatch.”
“Can I come up and take a look?” Paul asked, unstrapping his seat harness.
“Sure, we’re all finished here,” said the co-pilot.
Paul floated up into the ladderway aisle. The other passengers were unbuckling their harnesses, bobbing up out of their chairs, opening the overhead luggage bins to haul out their gear. Straps snaked weightlessly, as if alive; travel bags and equipment boxes hung in mid-air.
Looking down at Joanna, still firmly strapped into her seat, he said, I’ll be right back.”
She tried to smile again.
The cockpit was cramped with two seats for the astronauts shoehorned into wall-to-wall instrumentation. But there was a wide transparent port for Paul to look through.
The space station was still unfinished. Paul could see a spacesuited construction team hauling girders and curved sheets of alloy into place along the station’s outermost section, so far distant that they looked like little toy figures. A welding laser flashed briefly. The construction workers all wore maneuvering backpacks so they would not need tethers to keep them from drifting off into space. The Earth hung off to one side, huge and bright blue with parades of pure white clouds marching across the face of the broad ocean. Paul could see specks of islands and, off at the curving horizon, the wrinkled brown stretch of California’s rugged coastline swinging into view.
The station was built in three concentric wheels with a docking area at the hub. Once the construction was finished the station would be spun up so that people in the widest, outermost wheel would feel a normal Earthly gravity. The inner wheels would provide one-third and one-sixth gee, while the docking hub would be effectively in zero gravity all the time. For now, though, the entire huge structure hung motionless against the utterly black sky. It was all in zero gee.
“They’re making good progress,” Paul said.
“Had an accident yesterday,” the pilot told him. “Boom operator got pinned between one of the girders and a new section of flooring they were installing.”
“Was he hurt bad?”
“She,” said the co-pilot. “Ruptured her suit. She was dead before they could get to her.”
Paul shook his head. “How many does that make?”
“Four this year. Six, altogether.”
“Christ, you think they’d be more careful.”
“It’s the new guys, every time. They start hauling big girder around and they’re weightless so they forget they still got mass. And momentum. Get hit by one and it can still cave in your ribs.”
“There hasn’t been much publicity about it back on th ground,” Paul said.
The co-pilot smiled grimly. “Rockledge has a damned tight public relations operation. No reporters up here at all.”
“Still… you’d think they’d be screaming about it.”
“Nah,” said the pilot. “Rockledge insures the workers, pay off the family plenty. Nobody complains.”
“Not yet,” the co-pilot countered.
“The work’s getting done on schedule and within budget from what I hear.”
Paul asked, “Even with the insurance costs factored in?”
The pilot nodded. “Rockledge must’ve factored in a casualty rate when they decided to build this wheel.”
Yeah, Paul thought, and our rental of space in the station must be helping to pay off their insurance premiums.
“It’s a tradeoff,” the co-pilot said, as if he could read Paul’s face. “The sooner they get this station finished and operating the sooner they can rent out all its space. They must’ve figured that the insurance costs are worth it if they can get the job done fast enough.”
“Pretty damned cold-blooded,” Paul muttered. “I don’t think I’d push an operation that way.”
The pilot grinned at him. “That’s why we work for you boss, instead of Rockledge.”
Masterson Corporation’s space operations division — Paul’s former bailiwick — had rented half the innermost wheel of the space station for research laboratories and an experimental zero-gee manufacturing facility. Once the station was completed and spun up, that innermost wheel would rotate at one-sixth gee: the gravity of the Moon’s surface. The labs would shift from zero-gee to a lunar environment. The manufacturing facility would be removed from the station and hung outside as a ‘free floater,’ where it could remain in the weightless mode.
Part of Masterson’s rented space was living quarters for its employees. Spartan at best, they were meant to house people who would spend no more than a few months aboard the station.
“It’s not exactly the Ritz,” Paul said to Joanna as he slid back the accordion-fold door to their designated quarters.
It was a cubicle about the size of a generous telephone booth. No window, but a small computer terminal built into one bulkhead. Otherwise the walls, floor and ceiling were covered with Velcro and loops for tethering one’s feet. A mesh sleeping bag was stuck to one wall.