Her mother looked scandalized. “Darling! You can’t be serious. We’re doing just fine.”
“Look, I’m not kidding. I make plenty and spend almost nothing. I’ve even got money saved.” She paused, unsure as to whether she should, then told her mother how much she was making.
Her mother’s involuntary gasp was completely satisfactory.
“Please? I want to send you two something. Running off the way I did probably wasn’t the right way to handle things, but I want to show you that everything turned out all right in the end.”
“Baby, I don’t want your money. You’ve given me the best present you possibly could just by calling and—”
Roberta played her trump card. “I love you, Mom.” Then she added, “This is something I want to do.”
Complete capitulation. Her mother just slowly shook her head and cried, unable to respond. Behind her, Roberta’s father entered the picture.
His face cascaded through four or five distinct emotions before he was able to choke out, “Roberta?”
After dealing with her mother, her father was a piece of cake. In seconds he had accepted the inevitable—his little girl was a grown woman.
“Listen, I want the two of you to come up here and see me. I want to show you my tunnel and take you shopping and we’ll go out to eat and—”
Her father shook his head gently. “Honey, we can’t afford that.”
Roberta smiled. “But I can. I’ll send you tickets and everything. It’s no problem, really.”
Her mother looked up at her father, her expression pleading with him to set his pride aside and take the offer.
“Besides, Mom, I need help figuring out how to decorate this tunnel so that it looks just right.” It was a traditional ploy, but, as it had for so many other young women, it worked.
Without even waiting for her husband to reply, Roberta’s mother said, “Of course, darling. When do you want me to come up?”
Her father, seeing the inevitable, gave in gracefully. “I guess I’d better come, too. You might need the furniture moved, or something.”
Roberta decided not to mention that, in Lunar gravity, she could pick her father up with one arm. “Just as soon as you can get here. Yesterday, if possible.”
Her mother sighed. “I’ll get there if I have to walk.”
A few minutes later, they concluded their call. Roberta sat back and took a deep breath.
Had her parents always looked so old?
Mike Ordner aimed his pocket laser scanner at the bill of lading on the side of the crate he had just brought across from New York. It beeped, registering the crate as having been delivered to Luna, from New York, via the Holmes Door, with the date, time, and his name.
“Excuse me, do you work here?”
“Yeah.” He turned—and froze, unable to say more. A young woman was standing next to him. She was attractive, but not beautiful. More like… interesting. Something about her eyes.
“My name is Roberta Lith, and I was expecting something from Earth. I was wondering whether it had arrived yet.”
Ordner nodded. In an abstract way, he noted that his knees were getting weak.
“It has? Good.”
“Uh, no. I mean, I don’t know, but I’ll be glad to check.” His face flushed. He felt like an idiot.
It was almost as though she hadn’t noticed. “Great! What do we do?”
He wasn’t breathing right, and his mind kept trying to break free and gallop in a thousand directions at once. What was she doing to him? Must be some hellacious perfume. Is this what it felt like to get a whiff of pheromones?
He nodded towards the freight desk on the Crisium side. “Let’s go see what we can find out.”
Motion helped. Like a bicycle, by moving forward he discovered that he could retain his balance.
She caught him looking at her and grinned. “You’re Mike Ordner, aren’t you?”
Two years before, simply through being in the right place at the right time, he had managed to save Alan Lister’s life. Ever since then, people would come up to him and call him by name. It had never meant anything to him before. Now, suddenly, he was obscurely pleased that this stranger named Roberta Lith knew his name.
He nodded. “I—”
“It’s a box my parents are sending me. It was supposed to get here today. They’re coming, too, but they won’t be here until the end of the week.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but decided that, since he would only say something inane, it was probably wiser to let her carry the conversation. She continued to chatter gaily as they approached the counter, telling him about how her mother wanted to help her decorate her tunnel. While he queried the computer about her package, she told him that she had come up during the period that the Door had been closed. That sparked his interest.
“Are you the one who camped out next to a junkyard, waiting for the Door to open?” he asked.
Her eyes sparkled. “It wasn’t much fun at the time, but now that I look back at it, it was pretty neat.”
“So you were born on Earth.”
She nodded. “Just like you.”
Suddenly serious, he turned and faced her. “Can I ask you something?”
She nodded. “Sure.”
“Do you ever feel like you don’t belong? I’ve always felt like I don’t quite fit in.”
She looked at him as though he were demented. “Are you kidding? I’ve waited my whole life to be up here! I love it.”
He shook his head. “I wish I could feel that way. I mean, I live here now, and even though the Door’s open again, I won’t move back to Earth. I just don’t feel like I belong on either side of the Door.”
Her eyes softened. “Have you ever given Luna a chance? I mean really tried to get to know people and everything?”
“I don’t know anybody other than the people I work with.”
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.”