LEV BRUDNOY
He was a good-will ambassador or a con man, a free spirit or a pariah, depending on your point of view. Levrentь Alexandrovich Brudnoy was a trained fluid dynamicist who somehow managed to wangle a job as a life-support engineer at the ill-starred Russian facility called Lunagrad, and then go on to become its most famous — or infamous — emissary. The Russians had placed their base at the giant crater Aristarchus, up in the area where Mare Imbrium and Oceanus Procellarum merge, nearly a thousand miles northwest of Moonbase.
Like Moonbase, Lunagrad was originally heavily subsidized by the Russian government. After years of supporting the primitive base as basically an outpost for scientific research and further exploration of the Moon, Moscow decided (long before Washington did) to’spin off the base to private enterprise.
While Masterson Aerospace Corporation operated the American Moonbase under government contract, NPO Lunagrad, the corporation hastily formed to run the Russian base, sought investors all over the world. Few were willing to risk their money on a lunar base.
Lev Brudnoy happened to be in Moscow, applying for his second tour of duty at Lunagrad, when the desperate corporate personnel director caught sight of him. Handsome, red-haired, charming, young enough to appear dashing, old enough to appear knowledgeable, Brudnoy would make the ideal ‘image’ of the new Russian space pioneer. After all, the man wanted to return to Lunagrad, no?
Why did he want to return to the Moon? Some said to realized that this new frontier was humankind’s great new challenge and opportunity. Others said it was to make tht extra salary so he could pay his gambling debts. At leas three different women were certain that handsome Lev was running off to the Moon to escape from them (although none of them knew of the other two).
No matter what his reasons, the corporate personnel chief knew a media star when she saw one. She interviewed lca extensively, often in bed, and then unleashed him as the new Russian icon: the space traveller, the lunar explorer, the man of the future.
In his way, Lev helped to raise billions for Lunagrad. He became an international television celebrity. When he went to Lunagrad he brought virtual reality equipment with him so he could ‘escort’ Earthbound visitors through the facility and show them the stark grandeur of the Moon’s harshly beautiful environment.
The Lunagrad that he showed was mostly a television studio’s carefully prepared set, a heavily cosmeticized version of the grubby reality of the cramped, stuffy, overheated and underfinanced underground shelters that composed the true Lunagrad.
Money flowed in for Lunagrad. Not enough to really expand the base, but enough to keep it staggering along. Scientists came to the Moon and departed. Geologists and metallurgists explored the wide expanses around Lunagrad. In Moscow the board of directors, chaired now by the woman who had been personnel director, published glowing full-color brochures of the glorious future of Lunagrad.
Like many tragedies, Brudnoy’s success came crashing down when he went one single step too far. He shuttled back and forth to Lunagrad so often that he became known world-wide as ‘The Moon Man.’ Inevitably, on a certain global television broadcast, he was asked the fateful question: When will tourists be allowed to visit Lunagrad?
“Why not now?” was his immediate, unthinking reply.
Within hours the offices of NPO Lunagrad were deluged with requests for visits to the base on the Moon. For the first time in ages, the Russians had scored a public relations triumph over the West. Tourists to the Moon! It was fantastic. But it promised to be profitable. Even at a cost of millions, there were wealthy individuals who — bored with the Great Wall of China and Antarctica and the space stations in low Earth orbit — simply had to see the Moon firsthand.
Brudnoy led the first contingent himself. Their complaints started even before the booster rocket took off from Baikanour. There were no hotels! They were expected to sleep in barracks, like… like… well, like cosmonauts or scientists. Lunagrad was small, crowded, smelled bad. The food was awful. There weren’t enough spacesuits for everyone to go out for a walk on the Moon’s surface at the same time; they had to take turns. And the suits stank!
On and on, a litany of complaints that went all the way back to Mother Russia and over the television networks to the rest of the world.
Lunar tourism was set back twenty years. Lunagrad was exposed as a dirty, dangerous, crowded and unwholesome frontier outpost. Lev Brudnoy was accused of fronting for a fraud. Lawsuits were actually started by several of the American tourists, although the Russian government quietly quashed them — with Washington’s even quieter acquiescence.
Lev Brudnoy became a pariah. He was no longer welcome in the Moscow offices of NPO Lunagrad, nor in the beds of women who had adored him only weeks earlier.
Then came the most tragic blow of all. Their finances ruined, NPO Lunagrad declared bankruptcy. Lunagrad would shut down. Permanently.
Lev was at Lunagrad when the terrible news came. Most of the skeleton crew of scientists and cosmonauts did not blame him, exactly, but they did not console him either.
Deep in his heart, Lev knew he had done nothing truly wrong. And he wanted to continue his life as a ‘lunik.’ So he commandeered one of the last rocket vehicles left at Lunagrad, reprogrammed its guidance computer with his own hands, and flew it in one long ballistic arc to Moonbase, where he asked for asylum.
The people at Moonbase had seen Lev on television, of course. They immediately took a liking to the big, lovable redheaded Russian. Besides, they had no way to get him back to Lunagrad; Lev’s rocket transport could be refueled of course, but somehow its guidance computer had broken down as soon as the craft had landed at Moonbase.
After somewhat frenzied discussions with Savannah, Moscov and Washington, it was decided that Lev could become a Masterson Corporation employee without losing his Russian citizenship. But it was all kept very quiet. Lev’s days as a television idol were over. He became a regular visitor to Moonbase, working there six months at a time, then spending a month Earthside.
He even returned to Moscow, but only briefly. Too many women were waiting for him there.
MARE NUBIUM
A part of his mind wanted to giggle. I must be going crazy, Paul thought. Yet it was slightly ludicrous, leaning against the massive boulder, alone on the desolate lunar plain, miles from shelter, running out of oxygen while the fingers of his right hand wiggled pitifully around the metal collar of his surface suit, trying to reach the water tube.
Suppose I die like this. When they finally find me they’ll think I strangled myself.
He wanted to laugh but his throat was too dry for it. Sweat stung his eyes, though. I’m not dehydrated. Not yet.
There! His thumb and forefinger grasped the slim plastic tube. It was just below his chin, out of his field of vision. Blinking the sweat away, Paul slowly, carefully slid his fingers along the tube. He could not feel a kink in it. The tube went into the metal collar ring, where it connected with the piping that ran inside the suit, across the left shoulder to the water tank in the life-support backpack.
Maybe when I fell I dislodged the connection in the collar, he guessed. Don’t feel any wetness. The tube’s not ruptured. He spent several precious minutes searching for kinks in the slim tube, finding none.
Must be the connection inside the collar ring, he told himself. No way to get to it.
He pushed himself up to a standing position and stared out at the sharp horizon, blazing in unfiltered sunlight. Must be at least another ten miles to go. Without water I won’t make it. He held up his forearm display panel. In the shade of the boulder the temperature was a hundred eighty below zero. But just a foot away, in the sunlight, it was over two hundred above, to knew. And still rising.