Bears Discover Fire

I was considered sort of the unofficial mayor, since I had served in and out (or up and down, as earthsiders put it) of Edwards for some twenty years before being forced into retirement exactly six days short of ten years before the base itself was budget-cut out of existence by a bankrupt government. I knew where the septic tanks and waterlines had been; I knew where the electrical lines and roads were buried under the blowing sand. And since I had been in maintenance, I knew how to splice up the phone lines and even pirate a little electric from the LA-to-Vegas trunk.

Though I didn’t know everybody in Slab City, just about everybody knew me.

So when a bald-headed dude in a two-piece suit started going door to door asking for Captain Bewley, folks knew who he was looking for. “You must mean the Colonel,” they would say. (I had never been very precise about rank.) Everybody knew I had been what the old-timers called an “astronaut,” but nobody knew I had been a lunie, except for a couple of old girlfriends to whom I had shown the kind of tricks you learn in three years at .16g, but that’s another and more, well, intimate story altogether.

This story, which also has its intimate aspects, starts with a knock at the door of my ancient but not exactly venerable 2009 Road Lord.

“Captain Bewley, probably you don’t remember me, but I was junior day officer when you were number two on maintenance operations at Houbolt—”

“On the far side of the Moon. Flight Lieutenant J. B. ‘Here’s Johnny’ Carson. How could I forget one of the most”—I searched for a word: what’s a polite synonym for “forgettable”?—“agreeable young lunies in the Service. No longer quite so young. And now a civilian, I see.”

“Not exactly, sir,” he said.

“Not ‘sir’ anymore,” I said. “You would probably outrank me by now, and I’m retired anyway. Just call me Colonel Mayor.”

He didn’t get the joke—Here’s Johnny never got the joke, unless he was the one making it; he just stood there looking uncomfortable. Then I realized he was anxious to get in out of the UV, and that I was being a poor host.

“And come on in,” I said. I put aside the radio-controlled model I was building; or rather, fixing, for one of my unofficial grandsons who couldn’t seem to get the hang of landing. I don’t have any grandkids, or kids, of my own. A career in space, or “in the out” as we used to say, has its down side.

“I see you’ve maintained an interest in flight,” Here’s Johnny said. “That makes my job easier.”

That was clearly my cue, and since we lunies never saw much use in beating around the bush (there being no bushes on the Moon) I decided to let Here’s Johnny off the hook. Or is that mixing metaphors? There are no metaphors on the Moon, either. Everything there is what it is.

Anyway, accommodatingly, I said, “Your job, which is—”

“I’m now working for the UN, Captain Bewley,” he said. “They took over the Service, you know. Even though I’m out of uniform, I’m here on official business. Incognito. To offer you an assignment.”

“An assignment? At my age? The Service threw me out ten years ago because I was too old!”

“It’s a temporary assignment,” he said. “A month, two months at most. But it means accepting a new commission, so they can give you clearance, since the whole project is Top Secret.”

I could hear the caps on the T and the S. I suppose I was supposed to be impressed. I suppose I might have been, fifty years before.

“They’re talking about a promotion to major, with increased retirement and medical benefits,” said Here’s Johnny.

“That would be a de facto demotion, since everybody here calls me Colonel already,” I said. “Nothing personal, Here’s Johnny, but you wasted a trip. I already have enough medical and retirement for my old bones. What’s a little extra brass to a seventy-six-year-old with no dependents and few vices?”

“What about space pay?”

“Space pay?”

Here’s Johnny smiled, and I realized he had been beating around the bush the whole time, and enjoying it. “They want to send you back to the Moon, Captain Bewley.”

In the thrillers of the last century, when you are recruited for a top secret international operation (and this one turned out to be not just international but interplanetary; even interstellar; hell, intergalactic), they send a Learjet with no running lights to pick you up at an unmarked airport and whisk you to an unnamed Caribbean island, where you meet with the well-dressed and ruthless dudes who run the world from behind the scenes.

In real life, in the 2030s at least, you fly coach to Newark.