Last night Gwen had saved me from "a fate worse than death" and for that I was grateful. Well, moderately grateful. Certainly an old man tripped by a barely nubile female not yet into her teens (Gretchen would not be thirteen for another two months) is a ridiculous sight, an object of scorn to all right-thinking people. But, from the time the night before when Gretchen had made it plain to me that she did not consider me too old, I had been feeling younger and younger. By sundown I should be suffering the terminal stages of senile adolescence.
So let the record show that I am grateful. That's official.
Gwen was relieved, I felt sure, when at noon Gretchen waved us good-bye from the cab of her father's rolligon lorry, as we rolled south in Aunt Lilybet's rolligon bus, the Hear Me, Jesus.
The Hear Me was much larger than Jinx's lorry, and fancier, being painted in bright colors with Holy Land scenes and Bible quotations. It could carry eighteen passengers, plus cargo, driver, and shotgun-the last riding in a turret high above the driver. The bus's tires were enormous, twice as tall as I am; they shouldered up above the passenger space, as its floor rested on the axles, high as my head. There were ladders on each side to reach access doors between the front and rear tires.
Those big tires made it hard to see out to the sides. But Loonies aren't much interested in scenery, as most Lunar scenery is interesting only from orbit. From the Caucasus to the Haemus Mountains-our route-the floor of Mare Serenitatis has hidden charms. Thoroughly hidden. Most of it is flat as a pancake and as interesting as cold pancakes without butter or syrup.
Despite this I was glad that Aunt Lilybet had placed us in the first row on the right-Gwen at the window, me next, Bill on my left. It meant that we could see all that the driver saw out front and also we could see somewhat out to the right because we were forward of the front axle and thereby could see past the tire. We could not see too clearly to the right, as the plastic of the pressure window was old and crazed and yellowed. But forward Aunt Lilybet had her big driver's port raised and fastened back; the view was as clear as our helmets permitted-excellent for us; the equipment rented to us by Charlie Wang took the curse off raw sunlight without noticeably interfering with seeing, like good sun spectacles.
We didn't talk much because passengers' suit radios were all on a common frequency-a babel, so we kept ours turned down. Gwen and I could talk by touching helmets, but not easily. I amused myself by trying to keep track of where we were going. Neither magnetic compasses nor gyro compasses are useful on Luna. Magnetism (usually none) means an ore body rather than a direction, and Luna's spin, while it exists (one revolution per month!), is too leisurely to affect a gyro compass. An inertial tracker will work but a good one is extremely expensive-although I can't see why; the art was perfected long ago for guided missiles.
From this face of Luna you always have Earth to steer by and half the time you have the Sun as well. The stars? Certainly, the stars are always there-no rain, no clouds, no smog. Oh, sure! Look, I have news for any groundhogs listening: You can see stars easier from Iowa than you can from Luna.
You'll be wearing a p-suit, right? Its helmet has a lens and a visor designed to protect your eyes-that amounts to built-in smog. If the Sun is up, forget about stars; your lens has darkened to protect your eyes. If the Sun is not in your sky, then Earth is somewhere between half and full and earthshine is dazzling-eight times as much reflecting surface with five times the albedo makes Earth at least forty times as bright as moonlight is to Earth.
Oh, the stars are there and sharp and bright; Luna is wonderful for astronomical telescopy. But to see stars with "bare" eyes (i.e., from inside your p-suit helmet), just find a meter or two of stove pipe- Wups! no stoves on Luna. So use a couple of meters of air duct. Look through it; it cuts out the dazzle; stars shine out "like a good deed in a naughty world."
In front of me Earth was a bit past half phase. On my left the rising Sun was a day and a half high, twenty degrees or less; it made bright the desert floor, with long shadows emphasizing anything other than perfect flatness, thereby making driving easy for Aunt Lilybet. According to a map at the airiock in Lucky Dragon Pressure we had started out from north latitude thirty-two degrees and twenty-seven minutes by longitude six degrees fifty-six east, and were headed for fourteen degrees eleven minutes east by seventeen degrees thirty-two minutes north, a spot near Menelaus. That gave us a course generally south-about twenty-five degrees east of south, as close as I could read that map-and a destination some 550 kilometers away. No wonder our ETA read three o'clock tomorrow mom-ing!
There was no road. Aunt Lilybet did not seem to have a tracker, or anything in the way of navigating instruments but an odometer and a speedometer. She seemed to be piloting the way river pilots of old were reputed to find their way, just by knowing the route. Perhaps so-but during the first hour I noticed something: There were range targets for the whole route. As we reached one, there would be another, out at the horizon.
I had not noticed any such guides yesterday and I don't think there were any; I think Gretchen really did pilot Mark Twain style. In fact I think Aunt Lilybet did also-I noticed that she often did not come close to a range marker as she passed it. Those blazes had probably been set up for occasional drivers or for relief drivers for the Hear Me.
I started trying to spot each one, making a game of it: If I missed one, it scored against me. Two misses in sequence counted as one "death" by "lost on the Moon"-something that happened too often in the early days... and still happens today. Luna is a big place, bigger than Africa, almost as big as Asia- and every square meter of it is deadly if you make just one little mistake.
Definition of a Loonie: a human being, any color, size, or sex, who never makes a mistake where it counts.
By our first rest stop I had "died" twice through missing ranging marks.
At five minutes past fifteen Aunt Lilybet let her bus roll to a stop, then switched on a transparency that read: REST STOP- TWENTY MINUTES-and under it: Late Penalty-One Crown per Minute.
We all got out. Bill grabbed Aunt Lilybet's arm and put his helmet against hers. She started to shake him off, then listened. I didn't try to check on him; twenty minutes isn't long for a rest stop when it involves coping with a p-suit. Of course this is even harder for females than for males, and more time consuming. We had a woman passenger with three children... and the right arm of her suit ended just below the elbow in a hook. How did she cope? I resolved to outwait her, so that the fine for being late would be assessed against me, rather than her.
That "refresher" was dreadful. It was an airiock leading to a hole in the rock, attached to the home of a settler who combined tunnel farming with ice mining. There may have been some oxygen in the pressure gas that greeted us, but the stench made it impossible to tell. It reminded me of the jakes in a castle I was once quartered in during the Three-Weeks War- on the Rhine it was, near Remagen; it had a deep stone privy which was alleged never to have been cleaned in over nine hundred years.
None of us was fined for being late, as our driver was even later. And so was Bill. Dr. Chan had resealed Tree-San with a roll-and-clamp arrangement to permit it to be watered more easily. Bill had solicited Aunt Lilybet's help. They had managed it together, but not quickly. I don't know whether Bill had time to pee or not. Auntie, of course, had time-the Hew Me couldn't roll until Auntie arrived.
We made a meal stop about half past nineteen at a small pressure, four families, called Rob Roy. After the last stop this one seemed like the acme of civilization. The place was clean, the air smelled right, and the people were friendly and hospitable. There was no choice in the menu-chicken and dumplings, and moonberry pie-and the price was high. But what do you expect out in the middle of nowhere on the face of the Moon? There was a souvenir stand of handmade items, presided over by a little boy. I bought an embroidered change purse that I had no use for, because those people were good to us. The decoration on it read: "Rob Roy City, Capital of the Sea of Serenity." I gave it to my bride.