“It must weigh fifty tons,” Doug said.

Forty-two, on Earth.’,

“That’s a lot to lift.”

“Yep. The nanobugs are a lot better. But once upon a time, my boy, this beast was the height of modern technology. A tele-operated, self-sufficient, solar powered mechanical cow. Grazed on the regolith. Took in silicon, aluminum, et cetera in its front end, digested them and put them together, and shat solar cells out its backside.”

“And that’s how the first solar energy farms were made.”

“More or less. Damned dumb beasts kept breaking down, of course. Nobody knew how bad a problem the dust was, back then. We spent more time repairing these stupid cows than anything else.”

“Out here in the open?”

“Sure. Didn’t make any sense to trundle ’em all the way back to one of the tempos? Anyway, we didn’t have a garage in those days, so we’d have to work in the open one way or the other.”

“What about the radiation?”

“That’s why we’re all prematurely gray,” Brennart said. “Even your dad, although on him it looked good. He was a “handsome devil. The women flocked around him.”

“Really?” Doug had never heard that before.

“I could tell you stories…’ Brennart broke into a low chuckle.

“What happened to the other cows?” Doug asked.

“Scrapped them. We left this one out here and converted it into an emergency shelter.”

Doug turned, frowning, and saw that the airlock in the ringwall mountains was hardly a half-mile away.

“We also use it for other purposes,” Brennart added, before Doug could ask. “It’s fitted out with a double bunk inside and certain other, ah… amenities.”

Doug saw that someone had scrawled in luminescent red just above the machine’s hatch If this van’s rocking, don’t come knocking.

“Oh!” he said, with sudden understanding. “This is the Moonbase Motel.”

Brennart guffawed. “Pree-cisely!”

He started walking again, but at an angle away from the carcass of the mechanical cow and the glittering solar farms.

“So what’re you” doing up here, kid? Why’d you come to Moonbase?”

Doug almost shrugged, but the spacesuit made it too difficult. “I wanted to see it firsthand. All my life I’ve heard about Moonbase, and how my father worked to make it viable. He died here.”

“He let himself die in order to protect the base.”

“Yeah.” Doug was surprised at the lump in his throat. “Sol … I had to see the place.”

“Now that you’ve seen it, what do you think?”

“The inside’s a lot smaller than I thought it’d be,” Doug replied. “But the outside…’ He stretched his arms out to the horizon. “This is — well, it’s terrific!”

“You like it out here, do you?”

“It’s like all my life I’ve waited to get here and now that I’m here, I’m home.”

For a moment Brennart did not reply. Then, “Are you running away from something, son, or running toward something?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you running away from your father’s ghost, or maybe trying to get away from your mother? Is that why you came here?”

Doug thought it over. “No, I don’t think it’s that”

“Then what?”

He hesitated another moment, sorting out his feelings. “All my life I’ve heard about my father and Moonbase. Now that I’m here, I can see what he saw, I can understand why he’d give his life for it.”

“Why?”

Looking around at the barren landscape one more time, Doug answered simply, “This is the future. My future. Our future. The whole human race. This is the frontier. This is where we grow.”

He could sense Brennart nodding approvingly inside his helmet. “That’s exactly how your dad felt.”

“This is where we grow,” Doug repeated, convinced of the truth of it.

Brennart said, “Now let me tell you about something even more exciting.”

“What?”

“The most valuable real estate on the Moon — in the whole solar system, in fact. It’s down by the south pole…”

They walked side by side farther out into the giant crater’s floor, out toward the area where sinuous rilles cracked the surface, Brennart talking nonstop.

“There’s a mountain down there that’s in sunlight all the time, twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year.”

“ That’sthe place for a solar farm!” Doug said excitedly.

“And there’s fields of ice down in the valleys between the mountains,” Brennart went on. “Water ice.”

Doug’s breath caught. He calmed himself, then asked, “That’s been confirmed?”

“It’s top secret corporate information, but, yes, it’s been confirmed.”

“Then we could—”

“Look out!”

Doug felt Brennart clutch at his shoulders and yank him backwards from the edge of the rille he was about to step over. As the two men staggered backward several steps Doug could see that the rille — a snaking crack in the ground — was crumbling along its edge, just where he was about to plant his boot.

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” Brennart muttered.

“What’s happening?”

“I’m not sure, it might — Look!”

Thousands of fireflies seemed to burst upward, out of the rille. Glittering coldly blue and bright green, the cloud of glistening light expanded in the sunlight, twinkling, gleaming, filling Doug’s vision with ghostly light. He was surrounded by the sparkling lights; it was like being inside a starry nebula or a heaven filled with angels.

Doug saw nothing but the lights, heard nothing but his own gasping breath. Tears filled his eyes.

“An eruption,” he heard Brennart say, his voice filled with awe.,

“What is it?” Doug managed to whisper.

“Ammonia, methane. From down below. It seeps up through the rilles every now and then. Someday we’ll mine the stuff.”

The cloud grew and grew, enveloping them in its flickering light. Then it dissipated. As quickly as it had arisen it disappeared, wafted away into nothingness. The landscape went back to its dead grays and blacks.

“I’ve been coming up here more than twenty years,” said Brennart, his voice hollow, “and I’ve never seen an eruption before.”

Doug could not reply. He was thinking that it was an omen, a sign. My welcome to the Moon, he said to himself.

“You must lead a charmed life, kid.”

“It was… beautiful,” Doug said lamely.

“That it was. It certainly was.”

For long moments they stood in silence, each secretly hoping a that another seepage of gas would envelope them in the colorful fireflies once again.

“I hope the monitoring cameras caught that,” Brennart said at last. “The science people’ll want spectra and all that.”

“The cameras run all the time?”

“Right.”

At last Doug gave it up. There would be no more. Strange, he thought, how sudden elation can give way to disappointment so quickly.

“Guess we should start back to the base,” Brennart said. He sounded dismayed, too.

“Tell me more about this south pole business,” Doug said, as much to cheer their conversation as any other reason.

“We’ve got to claim that territory,” Brennart said, his tone brightening immediately. “I want to lead an expedition down there and…”