Until Julio suddenly sat up in his bunk, the second or third morning after we had run out of tranquilizers, and shouted:
«Booze!»
Sam had been sitting on the edge of Julio’s bunk, telling an outrageous story of what he planned to do with Sandi once we got back to Houston.
«Booze!» Julio repeated. «I smell booze! I’m cracking up. I’m losing my marbles.»
For once in his life, Sam looked apologetic, almost ashamed.
«No you’re not,» he said to Julio, in as quiet a voice as I’ve ever heard Sam speak. «I was going to tell you about it tomorrow—the stuff is almost ready for human consumption.»
You never saw three grown men so suddenly attentive.
With a self-deprecating little grin, Sam explained, «I’ve been tinkering with the propellants and other junk out in the return module. They’re not doing us any good, just sitting out there. So I made a small still. Seems to be working okay. I tasted a couple sips today. It’ll take the enamel off your teeth, but it’s not all that bad. By tomorrow—»
He never got any further. We did a Keystone Kops routine, rushing for our space suits, jamming ourselves through the airlock and running out to the inert, idle, cussedly useless return module.
Sam was not kidding us. He had jury-rigged an honest-to-backwoods still inside the return module, fueling it with propellants from the module’s tanks. The basic alcohol also came from the propellant, with water from the fuel cells, and a few other ingredients that Sam had scrounged from miscellaneous supplies.
We lost no time pressurizing the module, lifting our helmet visors, and sampling his concoction. It was terrible. We loved it.
By the time we had staggered back to our barracks module, laughing and belching, we had made up our minds to let the other three guys in barracks B share in Sam’s juice. But the skipper was a problem. Once he found out about it, he’d have Sam up on charges and drummed out of the agency, even before the rescue mission reached us. Old Stone Face would vote to leave Sam behind, I knew, if he found out about it.
«Have no fear,» Sam told us, with a giggle. «I will, myself, reveal my activities to our skipper.»
And before we could stop him, he had tottered off toward the command module, whistling in a horribly sour off-key way.
An hour went by. Then two. We could hear Skip’s voice yelling from the command module, although we couldn’t make out the words. None of us had the guts to go down the tunnel and try to help Sam. After a while the tumult and the shouting died. Mickey Lee gave me a questioning glance. Silence; ominous silence.
«You think Skip’s killed him?» he asked.
«More likely,» said Julio, «that Sam’s talked the skipper to death.»
Timidly, we slunk down the tunnel to the command module. The other three guys were there with Sam and the skipper; they were all quaffing Sam’s rocket juice and grinning at each other.
We were shocked, but we joined right in. Six days later, when the guys from Base Alpha landed their return module crammed with food and fresh water for us, we invited them to join the party. A week after that, when the rescue mission from Canaveral finally showed up, we had been under the influence for so long that we told them to go away.
I had never realized before then what a lawyer Sam was. He had convinced the skipper to read the medics’ report carefully, especially the part where they recommended using tranquilizers to keep us calm and minimize our energy consumption. Sam had then gotten the skipper to punch up the medical definition of alcohol’s effects on the body, out of Houston’s medical files. Sure enough, if you squinted the right way, you could claim that alcohol was a sort of tranquilizer. That was enough justification for the skipper, and we just about pickled ourselves until we got rescued.
The crystal statue glittered under the harsh rays of the unfiltered sun. The work leader, still sitting on the lip of the truck’s hatch, said, «It looks beautiful. You guys did a good job. Is the epoxy set?»
«Needs another few minutes,» said the young man, tapping the toe of his boot against the base that they had poured on the lunar plain.
«What happened when you got back to Houston?» the young woman asked. «Didn’t they get angry at you for being drunk?»
«Sure,» said the leader. «But what could they do? Sam’s booze pulled us through, and we could show that we were merely following the recommendations of the medics. Old Stone Face hushed it all up and we became heroes, just like Sandi told us we would be—for about a week.»
«And Sam?»
«He left the astronaut corps for a while and started his own business. The rest you know about from the history books. Hero, showman, scoundrel, patriot, it’s all true. He was all those things.»
«Did he and Sandi ever, uh … get together?» the young man asked.
«She was too smart to let him corner her. She used one of the other guys to protect her; married him, finally. Cowboy, I think it was. They eloped and spent their honeymoon in orbit. Zero gee and all that. Sam pretended to be very upset about it, but by that time he was surrounded by women, all of them taller than he was.»
The three of them walked slowly around the gleaming statue.
«Look at the rainbows it makes where the sun hits it,» said the young woman. «It’s marvelous.»
«But if he was so smart,» said the young man, «why’d he pick this spot ‘way out here for his grave? It’s miles from Selene City. You can’t even see the statue from the city.»
«Silly. This is the place where Base Gamma was,» said the young woman. «Isn’t that right?»
«No,» the leader said. «Gamma was all the way over on the other side of Nubium. It’s still there. Abandoned, but still there. Even the blasted return module is still sitting there, as dumb as ever.»
«Then why put the statue here?»
The leader chuckled. «Sam was a pretty shrewd guy. He set up, in his will, a tourist agency that will guide people to the important sites on the Moon. They start at Selene City and go along the surface in those big cruisers that’re being built back at the city. Sam’s tomb is going to he a major tourist attraction, and he wanted it far enough out in the mare so that people wouldn’t be able to see it from Selene; they have to buy tickets and take the bus.»
Both the young people laughed tolerantly.
«I guess he was pretty smart, at that,» the young man confessed.
«And he had a long memory, too,» said the leader. «He left this tourist agency to me and the other guys from Artemis IV, in his will. We own it. I figure it’ll keep me comfortable for the rest of my life.»
«Why did he do that?»
The leader shrugged inside his cumbersome suit. «Why did he build that still? Sam always did what he darned well felt like doing. No matter what you think of him, he always remembered his friends.»
The three of them gave the crystal statue a final admiring glance, then clumped back to the truck and started the hour long drive to Selene City.
AMORALITY TALE
This is, of course, an alternate history tale. How might the world have changed if the incidents in this story had actually happened in the 1970s? As more than one character has said in more than one story, «It just might work!»
To: The President of the United States
The White House
From: Rev. Joshua Folsom
Associate Director (pro tem.) National Security Agency
Dear Mr. President:
Although the immediate crisis seems to have passed, and our beloved Nation has apparently weathered the worst of the storm, I fear that we are and will continue to be in the gravest danger for some time to come. Frankly, sir, I do not see how we can avoid eventual retribution and disaster.