Apollo's Outcasts (12 page)

On one hand, you need to process approximately 275,000 tons of regolith to extract about two pounds of He
³
. On the other, even such a small amount makes it the perfect fuel for nuclear fusion. Once combined with deuterium and fed into a fusion reactor, two pounds of He
³
can generate 100 million kilowatt-hours of electricity while producing virtually no radioactive waste.

At first, few people took lunar helium-3 seriously. That changed when oil reserves began to run low at the same time as global energy consumption was increasing, and the effort of getting what little oil remained carried with it war, terrorism, and environmental destruction. The costs of mining He
³
and transporting it to Earth were considered prohibitively high until several countries, led by the United States and the European Union, combined their national space programs to establish a multinational public corporation, the International Space Consortium.

Apollo was the result. A city on the Moon, its main industry the mining and export of helium-3 and other materials, chartered by and belonging to the American, European, and Asian countries that contributed to its construction. The Pacific Socialist Union--China, the United Korean Republic, Vietnam, and Taiwan--followed suit
with their own lunar mining colony, Moon Dragon, located in Mare Nectaris. The China Sea War prompted the PSU to go it alone; the United States and its allies still distrusted China, but so long as they stayed in their corner of the Moon, no one minded if they got their share of the goodies.

Lunar He
³
helped usher in a new era of global prosperity that brought an end to the years of turmoil that had defined the first decades of the century. But Vice President Shapar--it was still hard to think of her as
President
Shapar--and her cronies had their own agenda.

Which is why I found myself returning to the place where I was born.

From the north landing field, Apollo looked different than it did from space. It took a little while for the regolith kicked up by the ferry engines to settle, so all we saw through a grey, dusty mist was a vast wall so long that its curved sides disappeared below the visible horizon. About five and half miles in diameter, Ammonius was covered by a shallow dome that resembled an upended saucer; a narrow, band-like atrium stretched around its upper surface. Light gleamed from tiny windows set within the crater walls, the only obvious indication of its enormous size. The place was
huge
; even the small forest of antennas that stood near the dirt road leading to it were dwarfed.

My first sight of Ammonius was impressive enough to make me forget what Gordie had said to me just before the
Cernan
touched down. It wasn't enough, though, to make me overlook a small miracle. I unbuckled my seat harness, hesitated for a moment, then took a deep breath and...stood up.

No pain, and my legs didn't give way beneath me. Sure, I'd already done this aboard the LTV, but that was while wearing stickshoes in zero-g; a quadriplegic could have performed the same feat.
But this was lunar gravity, one-sixth that of Earth's, and not only was I standing on my own, but...

I carefully took a step forward, then another. Yes. I was able to walk.

I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, or join the nearest basketball team. I settled for staring down at my feet and forgetting for a second or two that I was able to do this only because I was 240,000 miles from home. I was still giggling under my breath when Eddie asked, "What's so funny, Jamey?"

"Never mind." Gordie unfastened his harness and stood up to place a hand on my shoulder. "You okay? Not having any problems, are you?"

"No, I...whoops!" I'd turned around too quickly and tripped over my own feet; he caught me before I fell over. Sure, I was able to walk, but the coordination that comes with learning
how
to walk was something I'd have to work on. In any case, I wasn't ready to try out for the varsity team.

"Take it easy until you get used to it." Gordie made sure I was steady, then looked over at Eddie and Nina. "That goes for you two as well. Until we get some ankle weights, you're going to have to be careful. So look before you step."

Nina quietly nodded, but Eddie didn't understand. "Why?" he asked as he unsnapped his harness and stood up. "I can...
ow!
"

He'd gotten up a little too fast. His feet left the deck as if he'd jumped, and he banged the top of his head against the low ceiling. He winced and doubled over, and as Nicole darted forward to help, there was an unkind laugh from behind us.

"Yeah, dummy," said Billy, peering in through the hatch. "Watch where you're going."

Despite my own clumsiness, I angrily turned toward him. Nicole beat me to it. "Don't ever call him that again!" she hissed, her eyes narrow with anger as she put an arm protectively around Eddie's shoulders. "Never! Do you understand?"

Billy stopped grinning. He disappeared from the hatch. I caught a brief glimpse of Melissa; she'd been standing behind him and had heard the whole thing, and it was obvious that she was just as shocked as I was. Even she had learned not to make fun of Eddie.

Gordie slowly let out his breath. "Maybe everyone should just sit down and wait until the bus gets here," he murmured.

Good advice, but I wasn't ready to take it. Indeed, I didn't think I'd ever want to sit down again. Careful not to repeat Eddie's mistake, I stepped closer to the portholes. Figures approached the ferry; they wore moonsuits, and two of them dragged a thick hose from a caterpillar-treaded vehicle with a fuel tank at its rear. While they attached the hose to an intake valve on the ferry's lower hull, a third man slowly walked around the spacecraft, helmet visor lowered against the solar glare as he conducted a visual inspection.

I was still watching the ground crew when another vehicle came down the nearby road. Larger than the tanker, it resembled a subway car mounted atop six enormous, overinflated tires. It came to a halt nearby, then slowly began to move backward toward the ferry, with one of the ground crew raising his arms to guide the driver into position. The bus had an accordion-like docking hatch at its rear, and its car slowly elevated until that it was the same height as the
Cernan's
upper hull. A few moments later there was a muffled thump as the bus mated with the ferry.

"All right, then," Nicole said. "Everyone get their bags and follow me." She stepped over to the compartment hatch and looked through it. "Billy, why don't you go up top and see how the pilots are doing?"

Billy apparently didn't get the hint, because he started to argue with her. Nicole repeated the request, an edge in her voice this time, and a second later I heard Billy's boots clanging up the ladder to the cockpit.
Good riddance
, I thought as I pulled my bag down from the ceiling net. Billy Tate was someone I hoped I'd seldom see again.

Once the airlock was pressurized, Nicole opened the hatch and
led us from the ferry, moving single-file through the short accordion tunnel and into the bus. It was about the same size as the LTV, with padded benches beneath thick-paned windows. A heavy-set guy sat up front in the driver's seat; when he turned around to look back at us, I saw that the name patch on his skinsuit read T
OLLEY
. Nicole waited until we were seated and had pushed our bags beneath the benches, then Tolley opened an overhead compartment and pulled out a plastic bag filled with what appeared to be thick, padded bracelets.

"Take two of these and fasten them around your ankles," he said, passing the bag to us. "They'll keep you from bouncing around when you walk."

It was hard to tell how much the anklets weighed; I guessed they were about twenty pounds each, although in lunar gravity they were only a fraction of that. I clamped one around each ankle, then experimented by standing up again and taking a couple of steps. It felt strange to have bracelets around my ankles, and when I noticed that Nicole didn't put on a pair, I wondered if I really needed them either. After all, it wasn't as if I'd spent a lifetime walking in Earth-normal gravity. I decided to err on the side of caution, though, or at least until I was sure that I wouldn't make a fool out of myself.

Once everyone had put on their ankle weights, Nicole asked Gordie to close the rear hatch. Once that was done, Tolley retracted the accordion, put the bus in gear, and moved forward, stopping for a minute to lower the bus to its normal position.

Logan was sitting beside me, with Melissa on my other side. "How did you like the ride down?" I asked them as we waited for the bus to start moving again.

"Great," Logan said, "except for Ace Starhunter."

I smiled, catching the allusion to the hero of the space adventure game he and I liked to play. "Yeah, I hear you," I said. "He's got some kind of attitude."

"If you're talking about Billy...really, he's not that bad." Nicole was seated across from us. "Once you get to know him, I mean."

"I hope I don't," Melissa muttered. That surprised me; I would have thought Billy Tate was her type: good-looking, arrogant, full of himself. Apparently he was too rotten even for her. "Please tell me we won't see much of him."

Nicole shook her head. "I can't promise that. There's only a dozen guys our age in the whole colony, and less than forty kids total. So you'll see everyone in school...and more often than that, depending on which Colony Service team you join." I started to ask what she meant by that when the bus started moving again. "I'll explain later," she said. "Me, or someone else. As a matter of fact..."

Nicole abruptly got up and walked to the front of the bus. She bent down to the driver and said something to him. Tolley nodded and Nicole returned to her seat. "We've got about an hour before we're supposed to meet the city manager, so I asked Ed to give us a quick drive around so we can get familiar with this place. Is that okay with you?"

I had no problems with that and neither did anyone else, so when the bus reached the end of the graded dirt road the driver turned to the right. I spotted an intersection sign: North Field Road was the way we'd just come, and now we were on Collins Avenue. To the left was a short road leading straight to the crater, but we didn't go that way but instead headed north.

As the bus trundled up the road, I saw what appeared to be a long row of giant, rectangular mirrors pointed toward Ammonius. They appeared to surround the crater as a ring; each mirror was independently mounted on swivels and elevated about ten feet above the ground, their polished sides pointed toward the top of the crater dome.

"Those are reflectors," Nicole said when I asked her what they were. "During the two-week day, they capture sunlight and point it toward the sun window." She pointed toward the circular window that surrounded the top of the dome. "There's another mirror that bounces the light down into the solarium on the crater floor. The mirrors are set to automatically move during a twenty-four-hour cycle, and that gives us sunrises and sunsets, just like on Earth."

"What about at night?" Logan asked. "That lasts two weeks, too."

"When we don't get any sun, the solarium is lit by florescent ceiling lamps. They operate on a twenty-four-hour cycle, too."

"That's stupid." Melissa was sitting beside Nicole; she gazed at the reflector ring with disbelief. "Why go to all that trouble? They could have just built the dome out of glass and let the sun shine straight in."

"The Moon doesn't have an atmosphere," Nicole said patiently. "That means there's nothing to protect us from cosmic radiation. You don't have to worry about that on Earth, but radiation overexposure can be deadly up here. So the dome is covered by several inches of regolith except for the windows. That shields us while the mirrors collect sunlight from outside. See?"

Melissa scowled and folded her arms across her chest. She didn't like to be made to feel like an idiot, but it served her right; Nicole was her age, but twice as smart and a Ranger as well. I hid my smile behind my hand. I had a feeling that my sister wasn't going to get away with goofing off at school here.

By then the bus had reached the end of Collins Avenue. Another signpost showed the way to Loop Road on the left and Krantz Avenue on the right. Just before the bus turned onto Loop Road, Nicole pointed out the long black rows of the solar farm and the adjacent dome of the fusion reactor, located just off Krantz Avenue. "Two weeks of the month, we get our power from the sun," she said. "The other two weeks, we get it from that little tokamok over there. We've also got hydrogen storage cells under the city to provide us with electricity if either one of those goes down. So energy is the least of our worries."

Loop Road led us back toward Ammonius. Across the road from the crater was a row of large hemispherical domes. A huge tandem rover, twice the length of our bus and with a open-top trailer riding on six balloon-like wheels, was parked near the closest of them. A
chute had been lowered from its back end and two workers in moonsuits were using long-handled rakes to push regolith down the chute and through an open door in the dome wall.