«Yeah, this is the spot. The transponder’s beeping away, all right.»
Two more figures clambered down from the cab, bulbous and awkward-looking in the bulky space suits. One of them turned a full three hundred sixty degrees, scanning the scene through the gold-tinted visor of the suit’s bubble helmet. There was nothing to be seen except the monotonous gray plain, pockmarked by craters like an ancient, savage battlefield that had been petrified into solid stone long eons ago.
«Christ, you can’t even see the ringwall from here.»
«That’s what he wanted—to be out in the open, without a sign of civilization in sight. He picked this spot himself, you know.»
«Helluva place to want to be buried.»
«That’s what he specified in his will. Come on, let’s get to work. I want to get back to Selene City before the sun sets.»
It was a local joke: the three space-suited workers had more than two hundred hours before sunset.
Grunting even in the general lunar gravity, they slid the coffin from the back of the truck and placed it gently on the roiled, dusty ground. Then they winched the four-meter-high crate from the truck and put it down softly next to the coffin. While one of them scoured a coffin-sized hole in the ground with the blue-white flame of a plasma torch, the other two uncrated the big package.
«Ready for the coffin,» said the worker with the torch.
The leader of the trio inspected the grave. The hot plasma had polished the stony ground. The two workers heard him muttering over their helmet earphones as he used a hand laser to check the grave’s dimensions. Satisfied, he helped them drag the gold-filigreed coffin to the hole and slide it in.
«A lot of work to do for a dead man.»
«He wasn’t just any ordinary man.»
«It’s still a lot of work. Why in hell couldn’t he be recycled like everybody else?»
«Sam Gunn,» said the leader, «never did things like everybody else. Not in his whole cursed long life. Why should he be like the rest of us in death?»
They chattered back and forth through their suit radios as they uncrated the big package. Once they had removed all the plastic and the bigger-than-life statue stood sparkling in the sunlight, they stepped back and gaped at it.
«It’s glass!»
«Christ, I never saw anything so damned big.»
«Must have cost a fortune to get it here. Two fortunes.»
«He had it done at Island One, I hear. Brought the sculptor up from Earthside and paid enough to keep her at L-4 for two whole years. God knows how many times he tried to cast a statue this big and failed.»
«I didn’t know you could make a glass statue so big.»
«In zero gee you can. It’s hollow. If we were in air, I could ping it with my finger and should hear it ring.»
«Crystal.»
«That’s right.»
One of the workers, the young man, laughed softly.
«What’s so funny?» the leader asked.
«Who else but Sam Gunn would have the gall to erect a crystal statue to himself and then have it put out in the middle of this godforsaken emptiness, where nobody’s ever going to see it? It’s a monument to himself, for himself. What ego. What monumental ego.»
The leader chuckled. too. «Yeah, Sam had an ego, all right. But he was a smart little guy, too.»
«You knew him?» the young woman asked.
«Sure. Knew him well enough to tell you that he didn’t pick this spot for his tomb just for the sake of his ego. He was smarter than that.»
«What was he like?»
«When did you know him?»
«Come on, we’ve still got work to do. He wants the statue positioned exactly as he stated in his will, with its back toward Selene and the face looking up toward Earth.»
«Yeah, okay, but when did you know him, huh?»
«Oh golly, years ago. Decades ago. When the two of us were just young pups. The first time either of us came here, back in—Lord, it’s thirty years ago. More.»
«Tell us about it. Was he really the rascal that the history tapes say he was? Did he really do all the things they say?» asked the young woman.
«He was a phony!» the young man snapped. «Everybody knows that. A helluva showman, sure, but he never did half the stuff he took credit for. Nobody could have, not in one lifetime.»
«He lived a pretty intense life,» said the leader. «If it hadn’t been for a faulty suit valve he’d still be running his show from here to Titan.»
«A showman. That’s what he was. No hero.»
«What was he like?» the young woman repeated.
So, while the two youngsters struggled with the huge, fragile crystal statue, the older man sat himself on the lip of the truck’s cab hatch and told them what he knew about the first time Sam Gunn came to the Moon.
The skipper used the time-honored cliché—he said—«Houston, we have a problem here.»
There were eight of us, the whole crew of Artemis IV, huddled together in the command module. After six weeks of living on the Moon the module smelled like a pair of unwashed gym socks.
With a woman President the space agency figured it would be smart to name the second round of lunar explorations after a female: Artemis was Apollo’s sister. Get it?
But it had just happened that the computer who picked the crew selections for Artemis IV picked all men. Six weeks without even the sight of a woman, and now our blessed-be-to-God return module refused to light up. We were stranded. No way to get back home.
As usual, capcom in Houston was the soul of tranquility. «Ah, A-IV, we read you and copy that the return module is no-go. The analysis team is checking the telemetry. We will get back to you soonest.»
It didn’t help that capcom, that shift, was Sandi Hemmings, the woman we all lusted after. Among the eight of us, we must have spent enough energy dreaming about cornering Sandi in zero gravity to propel each of us right back to Houston. Unfortunately, dreams have a very low specific impulse and we were still stuck on the Moon, a quarter-million miles from the nearest woman.
Sandi played her capcom duties strictly by the book, especially since all our transmissions were taped for later review.
She kept the traditional Houston poker face, but managed to say, «Don’t worry, boys. We’ll figure it out and get you home.»
Praise God for small favors.
We had spent hours checking and rechecking the cursed return module. It was an engineer’s helclass="underline" everything checked but nothing worked. The thing just sat there like a lump of dead metal. No electrical power. None. Zero. The control board just stared at us as cold and glassy-eyed as a banker listening to your request for an unsecured loan. We had pounded it. We had kicked it. In our desperation we had even gone through the instruction manual, page by page, line by line. Zip. Zilch. The bird was dead.
When Houston got back to us, six hours after the skipper’s call, it was the stony, unsmiling image of the mission coordinator who glowered at us as if we had deliberately screwed up the return module. He told us:
«We have identified the problem, Artemis IV. The return module’s main electrical power supply has malfunctioned.»
That was like telling Othello that he was a Moor.
«We’re checking out bypasses and other possible fixes,» Old Stone Face went on. «Sit tight, we’ll get back to you.»
The skipper gave him a patient sigh. «Yes, sir.»
«We’re not going anywhere,» said a whispered voice. Sam Gunn’s, I was certain.
The problem, we finally discovered, was caused by a micrometeoroid, no less. A little grain of sand that just happened to roam through the solar system for four and a half billion years and then decided to crash-dive itself right into the main fuel cell of our return module’s power supply. It was so tiny that it didn’t do any visible damage to the fuel celclass="underline" just hurt it enough to let it discharge electrically for most of the six weeks we had been on the Moon. And the other two fuel cells, sensing the discharge through the module’s idiot computer, tried to recharge their partner for six weeks. The result: all three of them were dead and gone by the time we needed them.