Bears Discover Fire

She introduced herself as Dr. Sunda Hvarlgen and said: “Welcome to Reykjavik, Major. I understand you are part of Houbolt’s history. I hope they are treating you well in my hometown.”

“The films in the waiting room aren’t bad,” I said. “I watched/?. T. twice.”

“I promise an official briefing when you get to Houbolt. I just wanted to welcome you to the E team.”

“Does this mean I passed my medicals?”

She rang off impatiently and it struck me as I hung up that the whole purpose of the call had been to get a look at me.

They finished with me at nine P.M. The next morning at seven, I was loaded into a fat-tired van and taken twelve miles north on a paved highway, then east on a track across a lava field. I was the only passenger. The driver was a descendant (or so he said) of Huggard the Grasping, one of the original lost settlers of Newfoundland. After an hour we passed through the gates of an abandoned air base. Huggard pointed to a small lava ridge with sharp peaks like teeth; behind it I noticed a single silver tooth, even sharper than the rest. It was the nose cone of an Ariane-Daewoo IV.

The Commission had given up the advantages of an equatorial launch in order to preserve the secrecy of the project; this meant that the burn was almost twenty-eight minutes long. I didn’t mind. I hadn’t been off planet in eleven years, and the press of six gravities was like an old lover holding me in her arms again. And the curve of the planet below—well, if I had been a sentimental man, I would have cried. But sentiment is for middle age, just as romance is for youth. Old age, like war, has colder feelings; it is, after all, a struggle to the death.

High Orbital was lighted and looked bustling from approach, which surprised me; the station had been shut down years ago except for fueling and docking use. We didn’t go inside; just used the universal airlock for transfer to the lunar shuttle, the dirty but reliable old Diana in which I had made so many trips. She was officially Here’s Johnny’s command, but he was on rotation: presumably his reward for bringing me in alive.

When we old folks forget how decrepit and uninteresting we are, we can count on the young to remind us by ignoring us. The three-person crew of the Diana kept to themselves and spoke only Russo-Japanese. It made for a lonely day and a half, but I didn’t mind. The trip to the Moon is one of the loveliest there is. You’re leaving one ball of water and heading for another of rock, and there’s always a view.

Since the crew didn’t know I speak (or at least understand) a little RJ, I got my first clue as to what my assignment might be. I overheard two of them speculating about “ET” (a name that is the same in every language) and one said: “Who would have thought the thing would only relate to old folks?”

That night I slept like a baby. I woke up only once, when we crossed over what we lunies used to call Wolf Creek Pass—the top of the Earth’s (relatively) long, steep gravitational well, and the beginning of the short, shallow slope to the Moon. In zero g there’s no way this transition can be felt: yet I awoke, knowing exactly (even after eleven years) where I was.

I was on my way back to the Moon.

Situated on the farside of the Moon, facing always away from the Earth, Houbolt lies open to the Universe. In a more imaginative, more intelligent, more spirited age it would be a deep-space optical observatory; or at least a monastery. In our petty, penny-pinching, paranoid century it is used only as a semiautomated Near-Earth-Object or asteroid early-warning station. It wouldn’t have been kept open at all if it were not for the near-miss of NEO 2201

Oljato back in ’14, which had pried loose UN funds as only stark terror will.

Houbolt lies near the center of the farside’s great Korolev crater, on a gray regolith plain ringed by jagged mountains unsmoothed by water, wind, or ice; as sheer as the lava sills of Iceland but miles instead of meters high; fantastic enough to remind you over and over, with every glance, that they are made of Moon, not Earth; and that you are in their realm; and that it is not a realm of living things.

I loved it. I had helped build and then maintain the base for four years, so I knew it well. In fact, on seeing that barren landscape again, in which life is neither a promise nor a memory, not even a rumor, I realized why I had stayed in the desert after retirement and not gone back to Tennessee, even though I still had people there. Tennessee is too damn green.

Houbolt is laid out like a starfish, with five small peripheral domes (named for the four winds, plus Other) all connected by forty-meter tubes to the larger central dome known as Grand Central. Hvarlgen met me at the airlock in South, which was still the shop and maintenance dome. I felt at home right away.

I was a little surprised to see that she was in a wheelchair; other than that, she looked the same as on the screen.

The blue eyes were even bluer here on the blueless Moon.