“You’ll just have to make sure nothing happens to me,” Delmer said.
Still frowning, Leo said, “Look, just between friends here, let me warn you: your photos aren’t that big a deal. They could cause problems, but they won’t shut us down. So if you become more trouble than your photos would be, then I’m not going to be able to help cover your ass, you understand?”
Delmer shuddered. What was he getting himself into? He didn’t know, not for sure, but it looked like he was going to find out, for the only answer he could make was the one Leo wanted to hear. “All right,” he said. “We’ve got a deal.”
Delmer used his cell phone to call his home number and left a message on his answering machine, which, he’d explained to Leo, his co-conspirators would also call and use the remote codes to listen for his instructions. Leo was listening over his shoulder, so he said simply, “Hold ‘em for a week. If you don’t hear from me by then, send ‘em.” He was about to hang up when he realized that Leo and his pals would think they could just synthesize his voice and leave other messages for his imaginary conspirators, so he quickly said the first nonsense word he could think of, as if it was a code: “Glastonbury.”
He hung up the phone and turned to Leo. “Okay,” he said. “You’ve got a week. Let’s see your wonderful setup.”
Delmer’s first ride in a UFO was everything he had hoped for. They boarded a flying saucer in a field outside of Redmond, and the pilot—an almond-eyed alien with skinny arms and an oversized head—took them for a joyride down the backbone of the Cascade Mountains before lifting off into space. The alien even let Delmer fly the ship for a while, using the amazingly simple controls to zip around the Earth as if the planet were no bigger than an asteroid.
“Aren’t we setting off practically every radar alarm in the world?” Delmer asked.
Leo grinned. “That’s right. Of course our side knows what’s causing it, and the people who don’t know need a good scare every now and then. Why don’t you make another low pass over the Middle East just for the heck of it?”
They soon tired of buzzing humanity and headed for the base on the back side of the Moon. Once they were free of the atmosphere it took just under an hour to travel the quarter-million miles to get there. As Delmer watched the Moon grow steadily larger, he boggled at the degree of technology involved. They weren’t even wearing seat belts.
The moonbase was an architect’s dream. Low gravity and improbably strong building materials allowed structures to span incredible distances without support. Buildings shaped like palm trees—each frond a separate apartment—filled one crater like an inverted south-seas island, while the crater next to it was a webwork of narrow ribbons weaving among angular, crystalline-looking spikes. Real trees grew among the buildings and even on some of them, and Delmer wondered what they did for air until he noticed a shimmering hemisphere over the entire city, like a soap bubble resting on the surface. They’d domed in an area at least twenty miles across.
Then as they crossed through it and came in for a landing Delmer realized it was wilder than that: the “dome” was just a boundary between air and space. They used nothing so crude as an actual wall to hold in the atmosphere; rather some kind of force field that allowed spaceships to come and go without hindrance. He presumed the field also kept out cosmic rays and other harmful radiation.
They flew straight to Leo’s house, which was a crystal palace the size of the Taj Mahal. Multisided columns hundreds of feet high stuck out at odd angles from a central core like flowers in a vase. They landed on a plush lawn beside one of the towers, next to half a dozen other UFOs, no two of which were alike. One of them was undoubtedly Leo’s own private ship: It was a chrome-silver ellipse, almost liquid-looking, like a raindrop caught in motion. It was smaller than the others, only twenty feet long or so, and maybe fifteen wide. The control bubble at the top was swept back, giving the whole thing an impression of speed even standing still. Like a fighter jet parked next to a passenger plane, it screamed out “fast.”
“Nice car,” Delmer said as they walked past it toward the palace’s entrance. He was trying to keep from falling over in the strange, light gravity, and trying not to freak out at the very idea of being in a city on the back side of the moon.
“Isn’t she slick?” Leo said proudly. “Maybe later we can take her out to Saturn and do some ring racing or something.”
“Sure,” Delmer said, thinking, Must be rough living here.
His impression didn’t change when he saw the inside of Leo’s mansion. It had enough rooms to house a small nation, and the potential to transform into practically any shape Leo wanted. Leo just had to show him the rushes from his latest movie, and they watched it from the fourteenth row of a thirty-row theater in which three-quarters of the seats were occupied by soft, realistic dummies put there so the acoustics would match that of a nearly full theater. Leo took him on a tour of the grounds as well, pointing out all the exotic plants he’d brought from Earth and a few that had come from farther away.
When Delmer grew tired of admiring Leo’s riches, Leo sent him to bed in his very own penthouse apartment atop a leaning spire about fifty stories high. Delmer spent a restless few hours waiting for the thing to either fall over or launch him to Alpha Centauri, but neither happened so he turned down the windows to simulate night—sunset still being a few days away according to Leo—and slept fitfully until Leo woke him up and took him on a tour of the city.
The population seemed to be about half alien. It took Delmer a couple of days to stop flinching whenever he turned a corner and came face-to-face with one of the almond-eyed Vreenish, and even after he’d met a few and discovered that they weren’t interested in doing painful rectal exams on him, he still felt like a cat in a room full of dogs. What were they doing here? he wondered.
And as his stay stretched into the third and fourth days, each one full of wonderful new discoveries, Delmer began to wonder why none of this technology was making it to Earth. He asked Leo about it on the afternoon of his fourth day on the Moon.
The Sun was just setting at the end of the city’s two-week day. Leo and Delmer were watching it from the top of a corkscrew-shaped building nearly a mile high. They were still in full sunlight, but the ground below them was already a dark plain glittering with points of light that were hills and crater rims catching the last rays of the sun.
Leo considered Delmer’s question for a minute or so before answering. “Well, we do share some of it. Mostly movie special effects, and some computer technology. Cell phones. We plan to introduce more of it eventually, but not just yet. The Vreenish haven’t finished studying us yet, and they don’t want to mess things up before they understand how it works. We can’t just dump new technology and a new way of life on people all at once; they aren’t ready for it. Give them all this without preparation and pretty soon Luna will look just like Cleveland rather than the other way around.”
“Hmm,” Delmer said. He’d heard that argument before, as an excuse to keep from helping underdeveloped nations industrialize. He said, “You seem to have adapted pretty well. And the what, half million or so other people here? They’ve handled the culture shock without too much trouble, haven’t they?”
Leo had been leaning out against one of the slanted windows; he turned his head toward Delmer and said, “Well, yeah, but we’re a special case. We were ready to accept this. Most of us were already living in a fantasy world of our own creation when we discovered the Vreenish.”