Evolution

What might have been the ghost of a smile flitted over her face, but it was gone before he could be sure. “Maybe we could go look around sometime. I’ve been pretty busy since I got here, but I’ve had time to find a few things. Would you like to?”

He felt like he was falling—out of control—Mayday, Mayday… “When?”

“How about tonight? After you get off work.”

He had to remind himself to breathe. “I… yeah, that sounds good.”

The rest of the afternoon was hazy to him. Unable to concentrate, his mind was fogged by a curious mixture of elation and an odd sense of not being quite as alive, now that she wasn’t where he could see and talk to her. The rest of his shift lasted nearly forever.

Alan Lister’s grimace spoke volumes. “It’s the same old problem. Either the Door is open, or it’s closed. There’s no middle ground.”

“And both extremes present problems,” Hammond Kent acknowledged. As the Commissioner of New London, the largest city on Luna, he was only too aware of the problems that Lister faced. He saw them daily.

“It’s the old saw about can’t live with them, can’t live without them. We need the Door open so we can tap into Earth’s industrial base and schools. On the other hand, if it is open, we get people coming up who seem to feel that we owe them something, based purely on the fact that they were born. Emily Starnes, for all the trouble she ended up causing, didn’t ask for anything but a quiet place to spend her last days. Some of those who followed in her footsteps have been a little more demanding.”

Kent nodded. “We’ve had a few of them over here. They come up under false pretenses, but it’s hard to prove. So far, we’ve seen two kinds—one claims to have a way to support himself, but doesn’t—the other comes up on vacation, then stays. We’ve just begun trying to track them down. When we find them, we’re going to throw them out.”

“Great!” Lister said sarcastically. “That means they’ll be coming back through here on the way back to Earth. Why don’t you open up your own Door to Earth, instead of doglegging through us to get to New York?”

Kent took the facetious question seriously. “Two reasons. One, it’s hard enough to keep track of the people coming in the Door we have over to Crisium. Another Door would only make it worse. Two, it wouldn’t produce enough revenue to justify keeping the Door open. If New London and Crisium were to split the existing traffic, both links would end up losing money hand over fist.”

“Well, supposedly we’re a nation now,” Lister said. “We’re going to have to deal with this on our own. It’s not like we can ask Earth to solve it for us. Unfortunately, it seems to me that it’s going to be one of those long running battles that nobody wins.”

“We could deny all non-commercial traffic,” Kent suggested. “Or, as a variation, anybody who comes across to Luna has to be out by the end of the day.”

Lister shook his head. “That’s too much like a police state, Hammond. It would also be a monumental logistical headache.”

“I guess you’re right. If nothing else, we’ll need some immigrants in order to help us grow.”

“The best I’ve been able to come up with is to raise the non-commercial rates to exorbitant levels. Then we could subsidize the ones we want to come up from a fund fueled by the rate increase itself.”

“Call it a surcharge? A tax?”

Lister nodded. “Something like that. I hate it. It’s not a free market pricing system, and as soon as the government gets involved in anything, it goes to hell in a handbasket. We’ll have to have rules and regulations. Then those will breed exemptions and exceptions. In a couple of years, we will have created a whole new class of lawyers who specialize in getting people through the Door.”

“Which will, in turn, make it even more costly to go through the Door,” Kent added, eyes twinkling.

Lister shook his head sadly. “I’ve spent my entire term in office trying to keep the government here in Crisium out of things. Now that I’m near the end of my term, I’d hate to betray people by doing the exact opposite.”

“Get Lunar Magnetics to do it. After all, it’s their Door. Jenny designed it for them, not the city of Crisium.”

“I’d rather do my own dirty work, Hammond.”

“If Lunar Magnetics does it, it’s a rate increase. If you do it, it’s either a tax or a surcharge. Seems to me that it would be more palatable if it comes from them instead of you.”

Grudgingly, Lister agreed.

“Alan, the way I see it, the Holmes Door will either make or break Luna. It’s all going to boil down to the details of how it’s managed.”

Lister mused aloud, “I think I’m beginning to understand how Jenny feels about this Door—so far, it’s created more problems than it’s solved.”