His earphones chirped. Then he heard Brennart’s unmistakable voice, “This is your expedition commander. I want every person suited up and outside to help dig the connector tunnels. The only personnel excluded from this order are the second-in-command and the communications technician now on watch. Everybody else get to the digging. This includes you, Mr. Stavenger. Get moving. Now!”

MOONBASE

“A peasant,” muttered Lev Brudnoy to himself. “That’s what I am. Nothing but a dolt of a peasant.”

He was kneeling between rows of fresh light green shoots that would become carrots, if all went well, bent over the dismantled pieces of a malfunctioning pump. Stretched all around him for a full hectare, one hundred meters on a side, were neatly aligned hydroponic troughs in which carrots, beans, lettuce and black-eyed peas were growing. And row after row of soybeans. Plastic hose lines ran above the troughs, carrying water enriched with the nutrients the plants needed to grow. Strips of full-spectrum lamps lit the underground chamber with the intensity of summer noon.

Off in a corner of the big cavern was a carefully boxed-in plot of lunar sand, dug up from the regolith outside and turned into a garden of brightly-hued roses, geraniums, daffodils and zinnias — all lovingly pollinated by Brudnoy’s own hand. Moonbase’s agrotechnicians and nutritionists were responsible for the hydroponics crops; the plot of soil-grown flowers was Brudnoy’s alone.

Sweating, Brudnoy sat on the rock floor amid the strewn pieces of the pump. For the life of him, he could not see what had gone wrong with it. Yet the pump had stopped working, threatening the farm’s carrot crop with slow withering death. Brudnoy had wanted to fix the pump before the agrotechs realized it had malfunctioned. Now, instead of becoming a hero, he felt like a dunce.

“Lev!” a voice rang off the farm’s rock walls. “Lev, are you in here?”

He scrambled to his feet. Two of the biologists were standing uncertainly at the airlock, several rows away. They started toward him.

“I thought you were leaving today,” Brudnoy said as they approached.

“Flight’s cancelled. Solar flare coming up,” said Serai N’kuma.

“Oh.”

“So we thought we’d take you out to dinner,” Debbie Paine added.

N’kuma was tall, leggy, lean as a ballet dancer, her skin a glistening deep black. Paine was blonde and petite, yet with an hourglass figure that strained her coveralls. Brudnoy had fantasized about the two of them ever since they had first arrived at Moonbase, even after he realized that they preferred each other to men.

“I can’t leave here until this wretched pump is fixed,” Brudnoy said. Spreading his arms, he added, “You see before you a true peasant, chained to his land.”

The women ignored his heartfelt self-pity. “What’s wrong with the pump?” Paine asked.

Shrugging, Brudnoy replied, “It won’t work.”

“Let’s take a look at it,” said N’kuma, dropping to her knees to examine the scattered pieces.

“I’ve taken it apart completely. Nothing seems wrong. Yet it refuses to do its job.”

“Engineer’s hell,” Paine said, grinning. “Everything checks but nothing works.”

“In the old days we would have it shot,” Brudnoy grumbled.

“And then you’d have no pump at all,” N’kuma said, from her kneeling position.

Paine ran a finger along the hose that carried the water and nutrients. “Is the pump getting electricity okay?”

“There’s nothing wrong with the electrical power,” Brudnoy said.

Plucking at the wire that ran along the hose, Paine said, “Except that the insulation on this wire is frayed and the bare aluminum is touching the metal pipe fitting here.”

N’kuma popped to her feet. “It’s shorting out.”

Peering at the slightly scorched metal fitting, Brudnoy said, “1 don’t think the wire we make here at the base is as good as the copper stuff they make Earthside.”

“Didn’t you smell the insulation burning?” Paine asked.

Brudnoy scratched his thatch of graying hair. “Now that you mention it. there was a strange smell a while ago. I changed my coveralls the next day and the smell went away.”

Both women guffawed. In short order Brudnoy produced a new length of wire, Paine spliced it into the line while N’kuma reassembled the pump with hands that were little short of magical. Brudnoy watched them admiringly.

Once they were finished he insisted, “Now I will take you to dinner. It’s all on me! My treat.”

They laughed together as they left the farm. Meals at the galley were free, part of the corporation’s services for Moonbase’s employees.

Brudnoy laughed the hardest. Hardly anyone in the base knew that these two young women were lovers. All the men will choke on their food when they see me with these young lovelies on my arms. Some of the women will, too. Not bad for an old man, he thought.

“Welcome to Moonbase,” said Jinny Anson.

Greg Masterson’s nose wrinkled at the strange smell of the place: human sweat mixed with machine oil and a strange sharp burnt odor, as if someone had been firing a gun recently.

But he made himself smile and took Anson’s proffered hand. “Thanks. It’s good to get here ahead of the flare.”

Anson had gone down to the receiving area dug into the floor of Alphonsus adjacent to the rocket port. Little more than a rough-hewn cavern beneath the crater’s floor, the place was called ’The Pit’ by veteran Lunatics. It was connected to the main section of the base by a single tunnel, nearly two kilometers long. There were plans to put in an electrified trolley line along the tunnel; for now, a stripped down tractor did the job, its finish dulled and dented from years of work on the surface.

She kept a hand on his, arm as Greg hip-hopped like any newcomer to the Moon.until he was safely seated in the tractor.

“I brought you a present,” she said, climbing into the driver’s seat next to him”

“A present?”

Reaching behind the seat, Anson pulled out a worn-looking pair of boots. “Moon shoes. They’ve got weights built into them so you won’t go bouncing around when you try to walk. Remove one weight per day while you’re here, and inside of five days you’ll be walking like a native.”

It was a standard line among the Lunatics. So far there were no natives of the Moon. Women got pregnant occasionally; they were gently but firmly transferred back Earthside as soon as their condition was discovered.

“I was surprised to see a working elevator,” Greg said as he took off his slippers and pulled on the weighted boots.

The tractor was programmed to run the straight tunnel without human guidance. Anson hit the starter button and its aged superconducting electric motor whined to life.

“We just put it into operation last week,” she said. “Makes it much easier to load and unload cargo, once you get the crates through the airlock.”

“Takes a lot of electrical power, though,” Greg said as the tractor jolted to a start.

Anson waved a hand in the air. “Electricity’s cheap. The nanomachines chomp up the regolith and lay down solar cells. Our solar farms are constantly getting bigger.”

“I’ve seen the reports,” Greg said. “And the projections.”

“Good.” They were tooling along the tunnel now at nearly twenty miles per hour. The overhead lamps flicked past, throwing shadows across Greg’s sculpted face like phases of a moon hurtling by.

He’s really a handsome devil, Anson told herself. But there’s something unsettling about him. The eyes? Something. He looks… she struggled to define what was bothering her. At last she thought, He looks as if he could be cruel.

Miyoko Homma felt that she should be standing at attention, like a soldier. As it was, she had bowed deeply to the chief manager of Nippon One upon entering his cubicle and then remained standing with her arms rigidly at her sides and her face as blank as she could make it.