Test of Fire

Chapter 1

One man died on the Moon when the Sun emitted its superflare. Billions died on Earth. The Sun returned to normal, shining as steadily and peacefully as if nothing unusual had happened. It had spewed out such flares before, in the distant past, before human civilization had covered the Earth with villages and farms and cities. In another hundred thousand years or so it might emit such a flare again.

The entire Old World was a scorched ruin, burned to a smoldering black wasteland. From Iceland to the easternmost tip of Siberia there was nothing but silent, smoking devastation. All the proud cities of human history were pyres, choked with the dead. The Eiffel Tower stood watch over a charred Paris. The cliff of the Acropolis was surrounded by a scorched Athens; the stench of rotting bodies rose past the shattered remains of the Parthenon, which had finally collapsed in the unbearable heat from the flare.

Moscow, Delhi, Peking, Sydney were no more.

For a thousand unbroken miles the tundra of high Asia was blackened, and the only animals that had survived were those who had been burrowed deep enough underground to escape the heat and the suffocating firestorms that followed the flare.

The whole of Africa was a vast funereal silence.

Men, elephants, forests, insects, veldts were nothing more than brittle blackened corpses, slowly turning to dust in the gentle summer breezes. The ancient Pyramids stood undamaged by the scorching flare, but the Western Desert beyond them had been turned into hundreds of miles of glittering glass.

The Americas had escaped the Sun’s momentary outburst, but not the rage of terrified men. Nuclear-tipped missiles had pounded North America.

Almost every city had been blown into oblivion under a mushroom cloud, and the radioactive fallout smothered the continent from sea to sea, from the frozen muskeg of Canada to the jungles of Yucatan. Alaska received its share of nuclear devastation; even Hawaii was bombed and sprayed with deadly radiation.

Latin America survived almost untouched, but cut off from the rest of the world by oceans and the radioactive wasteland that blocked migration northward. The great cities of Rio de Janiero, Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires, Lima, soon began to disintegrate as their swollen populations drifted back to the subsistance farming that would feed them — some of them. Even in the lucky South, without the commerce of a worldwide civilization, the cities died. The old ways of life reaffirmed themselves: dawn-to-dusk toil with hand-made implements were necessary to raise enough food to survive.

The veneer of civilization cracked and peeled away quickly.

The few hundred men and women living on the Moon watched with growing horror as their mother world died. They were safely underground, buried protectively against even the normal glare of the powerful Sun. In their telescopes they saw the Old World disappear under continent-wide clouds of smoke and steam. From their radio receivers they heard the cries of the dying. Then came the pinpoint bursts of light that marked the nuclear deaths of the cities of North America.

They watched, they listened, in silence. Numbly.

And their horror began to turn into guilt. Everyone on Earth was dying. The human race was being flensed from the surface of its mother world. But they were here on the Moon, inside its protective rocky shell. They were safe. They lived while their mothers, brothers, friends, lovers died.

After three days of numb horror and mounting guilt they looked at each other and began to wonder: How long can we keep ourselves^ alive without Earth to supply us with food, equipment, medicine?

The guilt was there, in each man and woman’s mind. The horror went beyond words; none of them could voice what they truly felt. The nights were filled with nightmare screams. But surmounting it all was the drive to live. Deep within each of them was the burning secret: I’m alive and I’m glad of it No matter what happened to all the others, I’m glad it wasn’t me.

Not every man and woman in the lunar community could face the secret. Some retreated into catatonic shock. A handful committed suicide.

Others tried suicide, but in ways that easily caught the attention of their friends. Stopped in their attempts at self-destruction, convinced by the psychologists among them that they had no need to expiate their sins, they returned to the ranks of the overtly healthy. Two of them tried to sabotage the life support systems of the underground settlement, attempting to kill themselves and everyone else. Both of them were stopped in time. Both of them died in hospital beds: one received an improper dose of medication, the other had a totally unexpected heart attack. The physician who was in charge of both patients shrugged his shoulders about them and the next morning was found dead of a huge overdose of barbituates.

Douglas Morgan sat on the edge of the hospital bed, gazing at the sleeping face of his wife. The lunar settlement’s hospital was only six beds and a pair of surgery rooms, carved out of the solid basalt of the lunar crust. Before the Sun’s flare the most serious medical problems facing the community’s four doctors had been broken bones among the miners and depression among those who had difficulty adjusting to an underground life.

The beds were empty now, except for Lisa’s. All mining work had stopped since the flare. The depressions that afflicted everyone were being treated without hospitalization. The last patient to occupy one of the other beds had been the would-be saboteur who had died of a heart attack.

Lisa’s exquisitely sensitive face was pale and drawn. With her eyes closed she seemed almost a mask of death. But if death is so beautiful, Douglas thought, no man should fear it. Her dark, short-cropped hair framed her delicate face and looked more lustrous for the contrast against the white pillowcase and sheets of the hospital bed.

Douglas looked down and saw that his left hand, pressing against the bed’s surface, rested next to Lisa’s hand. The contrast between the two fascinated him. Her hand was so tiny, delicate, almost fragile beside his heavy, thick-fingered paw. Her hand was made for a ballerina, a painter, a musician. His was built to carve rock from lunar caves, to punch equations into a computer, to point and command men. But he knew the strength that her china-boned hands were capable of; he had felt those fingers clawing at him even through the thickness of a pressure suit.

With a reluctant sigh he pushed himself up from the bed and, standing, stretched his tensed back muscles. Tendons popped as his fingers scraped the ceiling.

Lisa’s eyes opened. She was looking straight at him. Her dark smoldering eyes betrayed the delicacy of her features. She was strong. Despite the seeming fragility of her body, she was as strong as a thin blade of steel.

“You’re awake,” Douglas said, instantly feeling inane.

“You’re leaving,” she countered.

“Yes.” He glanced at his digital wristwatch.

“The ship leaves in two hours. I’ve got to get my gear ready and…”

“Why you?”

He blinked at the question. It had never occurred to him that he would not lead the mission.

“Why take on this expedition at all?” Lisa went on. “It’s all nonsense. None of you will get back alive.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” he said.

Lisa’s eyes roamed around the bleak little chamber, the rock walls that had been laser-fused into smoothness and then painted pastel green, the five empty beds sitting stiffly starched and white around them. Finally she looked back at her husband.

“It’s foolishness,” she said. “Male foolishness. You’re just trying to prove that you’re brave.”

He almost smiled. The terrible events of the past few days had not destroyed Lisa’s spirit.

Sitting on the edge of her bed again, he answered carefully, “We are a community of five hundred and seventy-three men and women. Most of us are mining engineers and technicians. We have three physicians, five psychologists…”

“Four physicians,” Lisa corrected.

“Three. Haley OD’d last night.”

She took the news with no discernable reaction.

Douglas resumed, “As things stand now, we can’t survive on our own. And there’ll be no further help from Earth—unless we go Earthside and take what we need.”

“If you go to Earth you will be killed.”

“Maybe,” he conceded, shrugging. “Maybe you’re right and we’re all subconsciously trying to kill ourselves in one grand final gesture, instead of waiting around up here in this underground tomb.”

Lisa sighed, a mixture of weariness and impatience.

“You’re always so logical. The Earth has been destroyed, billions of people have died, and you’re as cool and logical as one of your computers.”

“We’re not dead. Not yet, anyway.” His voice was tight, grim. “And I want to live. I want you to live, Lisa. That’s why I have to lead this mission Earthside. We’ll only go as far as the space station, for sure. We won’t go down to the surface unless…”

“I don’t want you to kill yourself,” Lisa said.

Her voice was flat, devoid of emotion.

“Why not?”

“Because we need you here. / need you here. You’re a natural leader. I need you here to hold this community together.”

He thought for a few moments before replying softly, “What you mean is, you want me here so that you can run the community through me.”

Her gaze never wavered from him, but she did not answer. The silence between them stretched achingly.

Finally Douglas said, “I don’t mind, Lisa. You want the power. I don’t.”

“You’re a fool,” she said, unsmiling.

“Yeah. I know.” He got up slowly to his feet.

Looking down at her, “The baby… it was Fred’s, not mine, wasn’t it?”

The barest flicker of surprise crossed her face.

Then she said, “What difference does it make now? Fred’s dead and I’ve lost the baby.”

“It makes an enormous difference to me.”

She turned away from him.

Suddenly his hand flashed out, grasped her slim jaw and wrenched her head around to face him.

“Why?” he demanded. “Why did you do it? I love you.”

She stared at him, eyes blazing, until he released his grip on her. Then she said, “Go to Earth and kill yourself. Just as you killed him. Just as you killed my baby. You deserve to die.”

Chapter 2

We can make it,” Martin Kobol said, his long face somber. “We can survive—I think.”

Six of them had crowded into the tiny bedroom.

Like the rest of the underground settlement, it had been carved out of the lunar rock, designed originally as a standard dormitory room for a mining technician or a scientist. Its furniture consisted of a single bed, a wall unit that combined closet, desk, bureau drawers and bookshelf, and the same type of shower stall and toilet system that had been developed for the space station.

William Demain shared the room with his wife, Catherine. Now it was being used as a meeting place for the Demains, Kobol, and three other men. The Demains and one of the men sat on the narrow bed. Kobol had the room’s only chair. The other two men had hunkered down on the thinly carpeted floor.

“Each of us is in charge of a key section of the settlement,” Kobol said, pointing to each individual in turn. “Hydroponics, communications, life support, medicine, mining.” He jabbed a thumb at his own narrow chest and added, “Electrical power.”

“You forgot administration.”

They turned, startled, to the accordian-fold door to the corridor outside. Lisa stood there, gripping the door jamb as if she would collapse if she didn’t have something to hold onto. Her face was white.

She wore a jet black jumpsuit, so that it was difficult to see how frail she had become.

“You shouldn’t be out of the hospital!” Kobol was at her side in a single bound. Catherine Demain pulled herself up from the bed and also went to Lisa. Together, they moved her to the chair.

“I’m all right,” Lisa protested. “Just a little weak from being in bed so long.”

“You walked here from the hospital?”

Catherine Demain asked. At Lisa’s nod she said, “That’s enough exercise for one day. You still have a lot of recuperating to do.”

Kobol glanced at her with a curious grin. “How did you know we were meeting here? I mean, we didn’t broadcast…”

Fixing her dark eyes on his long, hound-sad face, Lisa answered, “The day that you—any of you — can get together like this without me knowing about it, that will be the day I resign as head of administration.”

LaStrande, the other man sitting on the bed, said gravely, “We’re happy to see you up and around.”

The rest of them murmured agreement.

“Thank you,” said Lisa. “Martin, you made a slight misstatement a moment ago. You are not in charge of electrical power; Douglas is.”

Kobol nodded unhappily. “That’s right, Douglas is… when he’s here.” His voice was nasal, reedy, and had a tendency toward screeching when he got upset. “But it’s been nearly two weeks since he went Earthside. We haven’t heard a report from him for three days now.”

“He’ll be back,” Lisa said.

“Of course. And when he’s back he’ll be in charge of electrical power. But until he comes back, I’m in charge.”

Lisa smiled at him. “Naturally.”

Kobol was tall, almost as tall as Douglas, but bone-thin. Cadaverous, Lisa thought. He looks like those mummies the archeologists dig up in Egypt.

For a briefest moment a hot pang of remorse shot through her as she realized that the temples, the museums, the archeological digs, the people of Egypt and England and everywhere else were all gone, dead, burned, melted by the fury of the Sun and the even hotter fireballs of human retaliation.

She forced the thought down, just as she forced away the pain that surged through her abdomen.

Instead she concentrated on the other people in the room, the self-proclaimed leaders of the isolated little colony.

Demain sat on the bed, his back pressed against the stone wall, his legs pulled up against his chest foetally. His bulging, balding dome gave him an infant’s look, but his eyes were crafty. The eyes of a peasant, a farmer. And that’s exactly what he is, Lisa thought, even if his farms are complicated hydroponics facilities that use chemicals and electrical energy and sunlight filtered down from the surface through fiber optics pipes.

His wife was in charge of the hospital. White haired but still radiantly lovely, her skin unwrinkled, her life truly dedicated to caring for others, Catherine had given up a brilliant medical career Earthside to be with her husband on the Moon.

LaStrande was a little gnome of a man, already half-blind despite the laser surgery performed on his failing eyes. But he was a powerhouse of a personality, argumentative yet never offensive, a genius at maintaining and even enlarging the settlement’s vital life support equipment on a shoestring of personnel and materials.

Blair was dying of cancer. They all knew it, despite the fact that he looked pinkly healthy arid went about his work at the communications center with unfailing good cheer. Marrett was a burly, loud-voiced diamond in the rough who had retired from a career in meteorology to spend his final days on the Moon and somehow—restless, talented, a born leader—had become chief of the tough, no-nonsense miners.

And Kobol. She looked up at him as he stood next to her chair, automatically taking charge of the meeting, reaching for the power to rule them all the way an eager little boy reaches for a jar of cookies.

What would they think, Lisa wondered, if they knew that Kobol had fathered the baby I’ve lost, and not Fred Simpson? What would Douglas do, if I ever told him? She closed her eyes for a moment.

Catherine Demain noticed and thought that Lisa must be in pain. But Lisa was merely holding tight the anger she felt at Douglas, her husband, the man she had chosen five years ago to mold into a leader, a giant, a commander who could take charge of this pathetic little community on the Moon and use it as a base for political power on Earth.

She shook her head, trying to dismiss the thoughts from her mind. The Earth was gone now.

There was nothing left. Not that Douglas would have followed her lead anyway; he had turned out to be far too stubborn and self-centered to be influenced by anyone else. What a mistake I made!

Lisa told herself. To think that I believed I could mold that domineering, simple-minded bull into a world leader.

But he’s gone too, she realized. He’ll never come back. He’s probably dead by now. Strangely, the thought saddened her.

“…and if the hydroponics output can be increased fifteen percent,” Kobol was saying, in his reedy twang, “we ought to be able to get along without importing food from Earthside indefinitely.”

If the population stays level, Lisa thought.

Demain was bobbing his head up and down, over his drawn-up knees. “I can do it,” his soft voice was barely audible, “if you can get me more room, more acreage. And more energy. It takes energy.”

“We’ll carve out the acreage for you,” Marrett assured him.

LaStrande waggled a hand in the air. “Listen, I know how we can get a leg up on the energy problem. The safety margins we’ve enforced on the life support systems are ridiculously large. Typical Earthside over-engineering. I can run the air and heating systems on half the energy we now allocate…”

“Half?” Kobol snapped. “You’re sure?”

LaStrande peered at him myopically. “If I say I can, I can. The recyclers don’t need all that standby power. There’s no reason we can’t shunt it off to hydroponics.”

Kobol rubbed his chin in thought.

Lisa smiled inwardly at him. He’s not easy to mold, either, she told herself. But at least he wants power. He has the ambition that Douglas lacks.

But he’s insidious. Like a snake. He’d never challenge Douglas face-to-face. But he didn’t mind slipping into my bed when I invited him. And now he’s trying to take charge of the community.

With a weary sigh of regret, Lisa realized, this is all the world we have now. Martin can be made into its ruler. And I will rule him.

“It’s settled, then,” Kobol was concluding. “The standby power goes to hydroponics. Marrett, your miners will start enlarging the hydroponics bay immediately. Jim…”

But Blair and the others were looking past Kobol, to the doorway. Lisa turned in her chair and saw a youngster standing there in a drab coverall. She wore the shoulder patch of the communications group.

“Yes?” Blair said to her. “What is it?”

Her youthful face seemed flushed with excitement.

She stepped into the tiny, crowded bedroom, maneuvered past Kobol and Lisa’s chair, and handed Blair a flimsy sheet of ultra-thin plastic—the lunar settlement’s reusable substitute for paper.

Blair read the message, his face lighting up.

“It’s from Douglas,” he said, his eyes still scanning the typed words, as if he could not believe what they said. “He’s on his way back. He’ll arrive in forty-five hours.”

They all gasped with surprise. Lisa felt an irrational pang of joy spring up inside her. Idiot! she raged at herself. He’ll spoil everything. Everything.

Yet she could not control the surge of happiness that coursed through her.

Kobol’s face was as gray as a corpse’s. His mouth pressed shut into a thin, bloodless line.

“That’s not all,” Blair told them, waving the flimsy sheet in his hand. “Douglas says he’s bringing twenty-five people back with him. He says most of them are in very bad physical condition and will need hospitalization immediately.”

Chapter 3

The biggest chamber in the underground community was a combination warehouse, depot, and garage just inside the big double metal hatch of the main airlock leading out to the surface. Vehicles were parked next to the airlock’s gleaming, vault-like doors, assembled in precise rows along colored lines painted on the smooth floor: electric forklift trucks, springy-wheeled lunar surface rovers, bicycles for pedalling along the underground corridors.

Supplies were stacked in equally precise ranks and files, each box or crate carefully labelled and arranged in sections according to what was inside it. Machinery, foodstuffs, medicines, clothing — all the things that the lunar settlement did not make for itself were stacked there, row upon row, piled up almost as high as the rugged stone ceiling of the cave.

They are a reminder, thought Lisa as she entered the big chamber, a reminder of how much we depended on Earth. Can we survive without Earth? Kobol says we can, but is he right? Can we survive?

Kobol stood beside her, and at her other side was Catherine Demain. They waited before the airlock hatch, at the end of the wide aisle separating the stacks of supplies from the rows of parked vehicles.

Behind them stood a specially-picked team of volunteers, ready to help the survivors from Earth to beds and medical care.

Kobol studied his wristwatch. “Another few minutes, at most.”

“The radar plot is still good?” Lisa asked.

He shrugged his bony shoulders. “I could check with Blair,” he said, gesturing toward the phone set into the wall next to the hatch.

“No. Don’t bother. If anything goes wrong he’ll put it on the public address system.”

She heard the sounds of shoes scuffing on the plastic floor of the cavern, sensed the presence of other people. Turning, Lisa saw that dozens of people were stepping off the powerlift, milling around the cavern expectantly.

Kobol turned too, and his long face sank into a scowl. “Why aren’t these people at their jobs? Nobody’s been given permission to come up here except those…”

Lisa laid a land on his arm, silencing him. She saw that still more people were coming up on the powerlift, chatting, grinning to each other, pressing forward to make room for even more. They were dressed in their work fatigues, almost all of them, but the air was like a holiday excitement back on Earth.

“There must be at least a hundred of them,”

Catherine Demain said, smiling happily.

“And more coming.”

“ATTENTION,” the loudspeakers in the ceiling blared, echoes reverberating along the rock walls.

“THE TRANSFER SHIP HAS TOUCHED DOWN AT THE LANDING PAD…”

The growing crowd cheered, drowning out part of Blair’s message. Lisa held her hands to her ears; the noise of the crowd was painful as it rang through the cavern.

“…SHOULD BE AT THE AIRLOCK IN APPROXIMATELY FIVE MINUTES. MEDICAL TEAMS SHOULD BE AT THE AIRLOCK IN APPROXIMATELY FIVE MINUTES.”

The crowd was laughing and talking and surging forward now. Lisa felt herself pushed closer to the metal hatch; not that anyone touched her, but the emotional energy of the crowd had a vital force to it.

“Who the hell gave anyone permission to leave their jobs?” Kobol snarled, his voice rising. “We can’t have people meandering around like this!”

Catherine Demain laughed at him. “What are you going to do about it? They’re excited about Douglas bringing back survivors, I guess.”

Lisa watched the crowd. Almost every one of the settlement’s five hundred and some people seemed to have suddenly jammed into the cavern, filling up the big central aisle, spilling over into the narrower passages between stacks of crates.

Even the children had come, to clamber over the lunar buggies that they were never allowed to touch.

They were happy. They were excited. They kept a respectful distance from the medical volunteers and the trio of leaders next to the hatch, but they had come to see Douglas’ return, to witness his rescue of a handful of people from Earth.

They want to see that Earth isn’t totally dead, Lisa realized. They’ve come to see survivors of the holocaust with their own eyes.

The crowd surged forward again, kids standing on tiptoes atop buggies and forklifts, an expectant crackle of excitement running through the cavern.

Lisa suddenly felt cold, shiveringly cold. She turned and saw the airlock indicator light had turned from red to amber.

Everyone seemed to hold their breath. The big cavern went absolutely silent. The light finally flashed green and the massive metal door began to swing slowly open. Kobol stood as tense as a steel cable just before it snaps. Catherine Demain took an unconscious half-step toward the slowly opening hatch.

“Help them,” Lisa commanded. Two of the medical volunteers dropped the stretcher they were carrying and rushed to the hatch. They leaned their weight on it, swinging it fully open.

The first man out was one of the pilots, grinning broadly as he stepped through, searching the crowd with his eyes until a tiny blonde woman raced through the people standing in front and threw herself into his arms. A murmur ran through the cavern.

A younger man stepped out next. Lisa recognized him as one of the communications technicians.

His coverall was stained with mud, his face was grimy. But he too had an enormous grin on his face, a smile of satisfaction, of relief, of accomplishment.

The crowd watched, hushed, as the survivors from Earth came out one by one, most of them supported by members of Douglas’ crew. The medical volunteers helped them onto stretchers and carried them toward the powerlift to the makeshift infirmary that had been prepared for them. The crowd melted back to make room for them.

They were awed into silence as the survivors were carried past. The people from Earthside were mostly men. They seemed weak, they looked thin, as though starved. There were no obvious burns or wounds on their raggedly-clothed bodies.

When the last of the survivors came out, Catherine Demain hurried after his stretcher. Lisa stood where she was. The crowd began to murmur again, to talk excitedly. The rest of the crew who had gone Earthside stepped through the airlock hatch, each of them wearing that same grin of victory. As each of them came into sight, the crowd cheered and applauded. The noise was growing, building, reverberating off the rock walls and ceiling. One by one, the men who had participated in the mission came out and were quickly surrounded by friends, family, lovers.

And then, last of all, came Douglas Morgan. His smile was not as broad as the others’. There was less of joy and relief in it, more of irony and doubt.

But only Lisa saw this. The others simply roared their approval once they saw him, rushed to him cheering wildly and raised Douglas to their shoulders.

He looked genuinely surprised. Lisa saw that his eyes were tired, sleepless. His coverall was grimy and stained with what might have been blood along one sleeve.

But the crowd noticed none of this. All they knew was that Douglas had led the expedition to Earth, had brought back living survivors of the holocaust, had proved that they were not totally cut off from their mother world, had shown that the Earth was not entirely dead.

They paraded with him on their shoulders and cheered themselves hoarse. Their noise was absolutely head-splitting. But Lisa stayed where she was, her hands at her sides no matter how much she wanted to press them to her ears.

Almost as an afterthought, a pair of wildly laughing men grabbed her and hoisted her up onto their shoulders, then fought their way through the circling, howling, triumphant mob to march side-by-side with their pair holding Douglas aloft. He looked at her and grinned boyishly, almost guiltily. He shouted some words at her but Lisa could not hear them over the ceaseless animal roar of the mob.

Douglas laughed and shrugged his broad shoulders.

Lisa knew, in an utterly unmistakable flash of insight, that her husband could lead these people wherever he chose to take them. They worshipped him. And she knew with equal certainty that he would throw it all away, that he did not want to be their leader, that he thought it all an absurd cosmic joke.

Then she looked back over her shoulder at Kobol, standing alone now back by the open airlock hatch, his face twisted with anger and envy, halfway between weeping and murder.

Dr. Robert Lord sat staring at the open refrigerator.

There were only four lumps of what had once beer food in it, but now they were green, slimy, shapeless blobs that dripped between the rungs of the refrigerator shelves. The stench made his stomach heave. The emergency power generator had run out of fuel four days earlier, and the food had quickly rotted.

Fungus, Lord thought. At least the simple life forms are still working.

His stomach pangs were so insistent that his hand started to reach out for the festering mess.

“No!” he said aloud. The sound startled him. He pulled his hand away; then grabbed the edge of the refrigerator door and slammed it shut. Slowly, weak with hunger and the fever that was sapping his strength, he made his way out of the observatory’s basement kitchen, up the spiral iron stairs that clanged as hollow as his stomach, and entered the big dome.

The telescope stood patiently, a massive monument to a dead civilization. With each step across the cement floor Lord’s boots echoed eerily through the vast, sepulchral dome. He had always thought of the astronomical observatory as a sacred place. Now it was truly a tomb. He was the only one left alive in it. Two days after the sky had burned, a wild, frenzied mob from the town had sacked the observatory, killing everyone they could find in their madness and hatred for scientists.

“It’s their fault!” the mob screamed as they attacked the handful of men and women in the observatory.

Lord had fled to the film vault and locked himself in without waiting to see if any of the others could reach its safety after him. The vault was almost soundproof, but some of the tortured shrieks of his colleagues and students seeped through, burning themselves into his mind. He waited two days before he dared to come out, weak from hunger, filthy from his own excrement.

They were all dead. The pert little Robertson girl had made it almost to the door of the vault before they found her, stripped her, and raped her to death.

Lord knew he should have buried them, but he did not have the strength. Now, as he tottered across the observatory’s main dome, smudged here and there by fires that the mob had started, there was no one to talk to, to confess to, except himself.

“It was a solar disturbance,” he said to the empty, silent dome. His voice quavered and echoed in the accusing shadows. “Maybe a mild nova. My paper on the fluctuations of the intrinsic solar magnetic field… it’ll never be published now. There’s nobody left to read it.”

He sank to his knees, buried his face in his hands, and cried until he collapsed exhausted on the cold cement floor.

For weeks he had patiently sat at the observatory’s solar-powered radio, calling to other astronomical observatories around the world. When none answered, he swept the frequency dial from one end to another, searching for sounds of life.

He heard voices. There were people out there.

But the tales they told made his blood freeze.

Cities blasted into radioactive pits. Disease ravaging the countryside. Maddened bands of looters prowling the land, worse than animals, killing for the insane joy of it, raping and torturing and enslaving anyone they found.

Lord shuddered, remembering their voices, pleading, angry, bitter, sick, frightened. He still heard them sometimes, and not always in his dreams.

One woman, a psychology professor at Utah State, actually engaged him in a pleasant conversation over several days, reporting clinically on the devastation of Salt Lake City, the enormous levels of radiation that blanketed the state thanks to the heavy megatonnage that had been targeted for the mobile missile sites along the Nevada border. The wrath of the Lord, she had called it, not knowing his name.

On her last day she told him with mounting excitement in her voice as she watched a group of young men nosing around the wrecked campus.

Her excitement turned to disgust as they set buildings on fire and finally broke into the room she was in. She left the radio on as the marauders kicked down her door and poured into the room.

Lord could still her screams whenever he tried to sleep.

Her screams awoke him.

He was lying on the cold cement floor of the observatory, exhausted and stiff. And starving. He could not tell how much of his weakness was due to the fever that raged through him, how much the fever was due to his hunger. Every muscle in his frail body ached hideously. It was dark now inside the dome. Night had fallen.

Slowly, painfully, he pulled himself to his feet and tottered outside to the balcony ringing the observatory dome. In the shadows of night, the forest was as dark and mysteriously alive as ever.

The warm breeze rustled the leafy boughs the way it always did. Insects buzzed and chirped. Frogs sang their peeping song.

“It’s only the men who have disappeared,” Lord whispered to himself. “Life goes on without us.”

He wondered idly, almost calmly, if he were the last man alive on Earth. Why wonder? he asked himself. Why prolong it? The world will be better, safer, without us. With eyes that glittered of fever and the beginnings of madness he stared down from the parapet ringing the balcony into the inky darkness that fell away to the forest floor a hundred feet below.

“Life goes on without us,” he repeated, and cast his head up for one last glimpse of the stars.

The stars!

Lord gaped at the sight. He had hoped for a glimpse of them, but the clouds had broken at last, after weeks of virtually uninterrupted overcast, and the stars were blazing at him in all their old glory, ordered in the same eternal patterns across the sky. Ursa Major, Polaris, the long graceful sweep of Cygnus, Altair, Vega—they were all there, beckoning to him. Lord almost fainted at the splendor of it.

The Moon rode high in the sky, a slim crescent with a strange unwinking star set just on the dark side of its terminator.

“It can’t be…” he muttered to himself. But even as he said it, he stumbled through the shadows to one of the low-powered binoculars set into steel swivel stands along the balustrade. They had been put in place for visitors, a sop to keep them from pestering the staff to look through the big telescope. They were ideal for gazing at the Moon.

Hands trembling, Lord focused the binoculars on that point of light. It resolved itself into several rings of lights: the surface domes of the lunar colony.

“They’re alive up there,” he whispered to himself, almost afraid that if he said it too loudly the lights would wink out. “Of course… they live underground all the time. The flare wouldn’t have affected them, only their instruments on the surface.”

He stood erect and stared naked-eyed at the Moon. “They’re alive!” he shouted. The lights did not disappear.

Babbling with nearly hysterical laughter, Lord staggered to the stone stairs that led down to the observatory’s parking lot. A dozen cars were there, surely at least one of them would have enough fuel in its tank to take him as far as… where?

He stopped halfway down the winding stairs, panting and trembling on wobbly legs. Where?

Most of the cities were radioactive rubble. Barbarian gangs roamed the countryside. But somewhere there must be a scientific outpost that still survives. With a radio powerful enough to reach the lunar colony.

“Greenbelt, Maryland!” Lord exclaimed. “The NASA Goddard Center. They’re far enough away from Washington to have escaped the blast. Radiation may have been heavy, but most of it should have dissipated by now.”

Nodding eagerly, he resumed his descent of the stairs. “Greenbelt,” he muttered over and over again, convincing himself that it was true. “I can call them from Greenbelt. They’ll have rocket shuttles up there. They’ll come to pick up survivors.

I’ll call them from Greenbelt.”

Chapter 4

Once they were alone in their one-room quarters, Lisa turned to her husband and said, “So now you’re a hero.”

Douglas almost laughed. The wild joy of his reception at the airlock had been completely unexpected.

For more than two weeks he had shouldered the responsibilities of the leader of an expedition into hell. He had seen more of death than any man wanted to see, had forced himself to accept it, to deal with it. He had even steeled himself to killing a few of the wild marauders who had attacked his men almost as soon as their shuttle had touched down on the long airstrip in Florida.

Then came the long return back to the Moon, with the sick and starving survivors they had picked up. And the memories of the others they had been forced to leave behind, too weak to make the trip, too old to be useful once they got back home, too sick to be saved by the lunar settlement’s limited medical staff.

Douglas felt he had aged ten years in less than a month. His nostrils still smelled the stench of decaying corpses; the smell seemed to cling to his clothing, his skin.

And then the outburst of welcome, the hero’s return, the tumultuous enthusiasm of his friends and colleagues, carrying him on their shoulders, praising him, laughing, cheering, blessing him.

For what? Douglas had wondered. For adding two dozen casualties to their already-strained facilities? Or for giving them Kope that they might return to Mother Earth some day?

Now Lisa faced him, lithe and deadly in her severe black jumpsuit, her expression unreadable.

He had never understood her, he realized. He loved her, but he could not for the life of him fathom her moods. Or maybe, said a mocking voice within him, maybe you love not her, not the real Lisa Ducharme Morgan, but your own idea of what she should be. That would be just like you, Douglas: in love with the theory and trying to force reality to fit your flight of fancy.

“How does it feel?” Lisa asked. “Being a hero, I mean. Having men hoist you up on their shoulders.”

All the excitement of the reception drained out of him. He replied defensively, “But they put you up on their shoulders, too.”

Her dark eyes glittered coldly. “Yes, didn’t they? But they didn’t kiss my hand. They didn’t fall to their knees and worship me as their savior.”

“Nobody did that.”

“Not quite,” she said, turning toward the desk unit, putting her back to him. “Almost, but not quite.”

Their room was a duplicate of all the other living quarters in the underground settlement.

Spartan utility, nothing more.

Lisa pulled out the chair, looked down at it for an uncertain moment, then let it go and sat instead on the edge of the bed. Her back was ramrod straight, her hands clenched with tension. Douglas stood just inside the door, knowing that if he went to sit beside her she would move away from him.

“We have a lot to talk about,” he said.

“I don’t feel like talking.”

“Sooner or later…”

She looked up at him. “What would you have done if Fred hadn’t died out there? Would you have killed him?”

Douglas searched his mind for an answer.

“Well?”

“There’s been enough of death,” he said, seeing the blood-soaked remains of the towns around Cape Canaveral. The radiation level had quickly tapered off, but the towns had self-destructed in orgies of terror and greed. There was no place to dig in Florida, no place to hide from the fallout.

But even in the blast-hardened blockhouses of the space center human beings had clawed each other to death over scraps of food or a safer corner to huddle in.

“Is your honor satisfied?” Lisa asked scornfully.

“He’s dead, and so is the baby.”

“What does honor have to do with it?” he snapped. “When did you become interested in honor? Did you do it in this bed, right here? Or over in his quarters?”

A bitter smile turned the corners of her lips.

“What makes you think we did it in either place? Or that we did it only once. It’s only in melodramas that a single copulation gets the maiden pregnant.”

He snorted with disgust. “Maiden. Who else have you been doing it with?”

“Before I met you or since?”

He took an involuntary step toward her, his fists clenched.

“Would you like me to evaluate them for you? On a scale of one to ten, you come pretty close to zero, you know.”

He swung without realizing it and only at the last instant did he open his hand. The slap rang through the tiny room, knocking Lisa over backward across the narrow bed, halfway over its far side.

She pulled herself up slowly, the side of her face burning with the red imprint of his fingers.

“Thank you,” she said slowly. “That’s precisely what I expected from you.”

He turned and stamped out of the room.

For hours Douglas strode the underground corridors, walking blindly through the rough-hewn tunnels that laced the various parts of the settlement together. Past the long, pipe-fed vats of the hydroponics farms he strode, looking neither right nor left, seeing nothing and no one except his wife’s shocked face with the imprint of his angry hand on it.

I could have killed her, Douglas told himself.

How can I come so close to murdering her if I love her?

He stopped briefly at the rock processing facility, soaking up the clamoring noise and bone-jarring vibration of the big grinding machines. It blotted other thoughts from his mind. The heavy machinery was fully automated: lunar rock went into one end of the massive crushers and grinders, out the other end came pulverized separated powders of aluminum, silicon, titanium, oxygen, and other ores. Some of them were channeled to the metal refineries. Others were fed through conveyor belts into the copper-clad electrolyzers of the water factory.

Douglas felt a tap on his shoulder. Turning, he saw one of the younger technicians. The kid held out a pair of earphones with one hand as he shouted over the rumbling roar of the grinders:

“Regulations, sir. No one allowed this close without protection.”

Douglas looked up at the wide window panel of the control room, set into the raw rock wall above.

Larry LaStrade stood at the window, peering through a pair of binoculars at him. With a shrug and a wave, Douglas turned and left the big, noise-filled cave, leaving the youngster standing there with the earphones in his hand.

Finally, inevitably, he went up to the surface. He spent nearly an hour worming himself into a hardsuit, checking out all the seals, the breathing system, the radio and heater and circulation fans. He allowed the thousand details of dressing for vacuum to occupy his mind, blanking everything else from his thoughts.

After going through the checklist with the safety team on duty at the control office, he clumped into the airlock and swung its heavy door shut behind him. In a few minutes the metal womb of the lock was emptied of air, and the indicator light on the wall beside the outer hatch turned green. He nudged the toggle with a gloved hand and the hatch slid open.

It was a strange and barren land out there, almost colorless, the raw pockmarked ground a study of grays on more grays. Behind him rose the terraced wall of Alphonsus’ rim, massive, rugged, silent. Through the tinted visor of his helmet, Douglas’ eyes traced out the rimwall’s edge against the eternally black sky until it disappeared below the brutally close horizon. The crater’s row of central peaks sat out there, worn by eons of meteoric bombardment, eroded to tired, slumped, gray lumps of stone.

A dead world, Douglas thought. Frozen stone dead. No air. The only water available is what we squeeze out of the rocks. The only life here is our own, barely hanging on.

His glance took in the glittering swath of solar panels that covered hundreds of acres of the roiled, pocked floor of the giant crater. With a resigned sigh, Douglas headed toward them. Might as well check on the meteor damage, he thought, and see if the flare did any long-term harm.

As he walked with dreamlike lunar slowness, kicking up tiny puffs of moondust with each booted step, he glanced up at the sky. The Earth hung above him, huge, gibbous, blue and white and gleaming where the sunlight touched it.

You’re still alive, he said to the beckoning home world. Despite everything, you’re still alive.

He forced his gaze back to the dead bare rock of the Moon.

“How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world,” Douglas murmured, inside his helmet.

Inevitably his eyes turned Earthward again. But now he saw not the gleaming blue and white globe a quarter-million miles distant, but the world that had greeted him when he had landed there nearly three weeks earlier.

Despite all the devastation that the traitorous Sun and nuclear-armed men could wreak on the Earth, it was still a green, living world. Palms and cypresses still graced the Florida shores. Wild birds crossed the soft blue skies. The wind sang its ancient harmony. And people were still alive, too, even though they were sick from radiation, starving, injured.

Winter will be on them soon, Douglas knew.

Those who lived in the warmer climates might be able to get through, but what about those further north? What would they do when the snows came, with no fuel except the wood they could hack down with their own hands, no electricity, no food or medicines?

“I can’t save them all,” he told himself, his voice strangely muffled, muted, inside the hardsuit helmet. “I can’t even begin to save one percent of them.”

But even as he said it he knew he had to try.

Without the knowledge and skills represented by the tiny handful of people here on the Moon, all of human civilization on Earth would soon expire.

Some people would live, as their ancestors had lived five thousand years ago. But knowledge, art, freedom, the great works of the human mind and heart that had been built up so painfully over so many millennia—that would all perish. Civilization would die. And soon.

“Unless we do something about it,” Douglas said to himself. And immediately an inner voice answered. Not we. You. Unless you do something about it, they will all die.

He nodded his head inside the bulbous helmet of the lunar hardsuit. He admitted his responsibility.

“I’ve got to save them. No matter what it costs, I’ve got to try.”

Chapter 5

“You’re sure Douglas won’t…” Kobol left the thought dangling.

Lisa shook her head. “I checked with the comm center; he’s up on the surface, walking by himself.”

Kobol sat on the edge of her bed. He wore the usual worksuit of the underground community, a faded gray coverall. On the left shoulder was sewn an equally faded circular patch of blue, slashed by a yellow lightning bolt: the symbol of the electrical power division.

Still in her black jumpsuit, Lisa pulled her legs up and rested her chin on her knees.

“That’s a nice little bruise you’ve got on your cheek,” Kobol observed.

“I can cover it with makeup.”

“Sure.” He glanced around the cramped little room. “And what will you do when the makeup runs out? Send him back to Earth to raid a drugstore?”

“That’s not funny.”

“It’s not meant to be. There’s nothing funny about any of this.”

“You never expected him to come back, did you?”

Kobol did not answer.

“Martin, look at me!” she snapped.

He turned slowly on the edge of the bed, but made no move to come closer toward her.

“Douglas doesn’t know it was you,” she told him. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

His long somber face betrayed no emotion whatsoever.

“I’ve been thinking about that. About us. About him. You saw the way the people flocked to him. He’s a natural hero. They want to worship him.”

“Yes,” Lisa admitted. “But he’s not a natural leader. There’s a difference.”

Kobol made an impatient snorting noise.

“No. Listen to me. I know.” Lisa sat up straighter, pressed her spine against the wall behind her. “He doesn’t know how to be a leader. Not really. He knows how to charge off and do what he thinks has to be done. But he assumes that everyone else sees things the way he does, and that they’ll follow along with him. He doesn’t even realize that he has to convince people, to cajole them or force them to fall into step behind him.”

With a slow, reluctant smile, Kobol agreed.

“You’re right. That’s him. Charging off into the enemy guns without even glancing back over his shoulder to see if his troops are following behind him.”

“We must form a real government,” she said, more firmly. “These little meetings of the department heads must be turned into a board of governors or a council of some sort, with regular meetings…”

“And elections?”

“Yes. Elections. Of course. Not right away, naturally. But next year, after things have settled down a bit.”

“They’ll elect Douglas our maximum leader,” he said, that sardonic smile touching his lips again.

“Perhaps.”

“You think they won’t?”

“I’m not certain that it matters,” Lisa said, her voice hard and cold as the rock that supported her. “Let the fools vote him any title they choose. In the council he’ll have to deal with us. And he won’t know how to handle that. Three or four of us acting together can run rings around him.”

Kobol’s lean, bony hand stroked his jaw. “You’d do that to him?”

“Why not? It would be for the good of the community, wouldn’t it? He’ll want to fly back to Earth and drag as many survivors as he can find back here. We can’t handle them, you know that.”

“But you’d deliberately… knife him?”

Lisa fixed her dark, unblinking eyes on Kobol.

“Don’t make it sound so dramatic, Martin. I married the wrong man. We may have to share this room, even this bed, but that doesn’t mean that I love him or I’ll follow him like a blind little slave.”

“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “I was watching you when he came through that airlock. You looked…” He hesitated.

“Well?”

“You looked happy to see him. Very happy. Almost like a schoolgirl with her first crush of puppy love.”

Her face went red. “Don’t be absurd.”

“That’s what it looked like to me.”

“Nonsense.” But she turned away from Kobol, turned her gaze to the polished metal mirror hung on the opposite wall, over the drawer unit.

“About you and me…” Kobol started to say.

“Nothing’s changed,” Lisa said. “He doesn’t know a thing.”

But Kobol shook his head ruefully. “Something has changed, Lisa. I have. I’m not going to live in his shadow. I want you to leave him.”

She looked genuinely shocked. “I can’t do that! Not now. Not yet, anyway.”

“Why not?”

“How can I, with the whole world turned inside out? Don’t you see what’s happening, Martin? Don’t you understand? The life of this entire settlement is hanging by a thread. The Earth is dead, and we’re on our own. It’s dangerous enough, just as it is, without adding our personal problems to the mix.”

He pointed a long unwavering finger at the growing blue bruise on her cheek. “Don’t you think your personal problems are already out in the open?”

“No,” Lisa said firmly. “I’m putting that behind me. For the time being. I’m going to be his wife, and he’s going to be the head of the new government.”

“You mean you’re going to be the head of the new government and I’m going to be out in the cold.”

She reached out to touch his hand. “Martin, please. You’ve got to understand. We can still be… together. The way we have been.”

Kobol pulled his hand away. “No, Lisa. You’ve got to understand something. I want to be the head of whatever government we put together. I want to have it all for myself. Including you. Especially you.”

“You will,” she said soothingly. “You will. But it will take time, Martin. You must be patient.”

“You’ll leave him for me?”

“In time.”

“You’ll work to make me chief of the council?”

She hesitated. “I’m not sure that they would elect you chief, Martin. They’ll elect Douglas. He’s their hero. We’ll have to work through him.”

Kobol broke into a bitter, barking laughter.

“What you mean is, you’ll run the council through him. You intend to be boss, one way or the other.”

Lisa pressed back against the stone again, feeling its strength along her spine. “Is that what you think?”

Kobol’s laughter choked off. “No matter who wins, you want to come out on top. You want to be queen bee.”

“And what do you want, Martin?” she asked icily. “Isn’t your interest in me based at least partially on jealousy of Douglas? Don’t you want to be the top man, to have everything for yourself?”

Kobol’s laughter choked off. His face went grim.

“Christ, Lisa, we’re two of a kind. If we don’t tear each other to pieces we can make one hell of a great team.”

“I’ll keep my claws sheathed, Martin, as long as you don’t get in my way.”

“And you’re staying with him.”

“For the time being.”

“Do you think he’ll have you?”

Lisa smiled. “Oh yes. Douglas has one glaring weakness. He wants to do the right thing. He wants to be good.”

“Not like us.”

Lisa’s smile faded. She swung her legs off the bed, got to her feet. “We’ll have to start making arrangements for a permanent council— a schedule of meetings, official titles, things like that.”

Kobol nodded agreement.

The intercom phone by the bed buzzed. Lisa picked it up, listened briefly, then thanked the caller and hung up. Turning to Kobol, she said:

“He’s come back to the airlock. He’ll probably be here soon. Time for you to be on your way, Martin.”

Chapter 6

Living space was at a premium in the lunar community.

The original airlock and storage chamber had been a natural cave eroded into the terraced side of Alphonsus’ ringwall. The living and working quarters below had been blasted and carved out of the lunar rock by the miners, down at a depth that would assure full protection against radiation and the wild swings of temperature during the 648-hour-long lunar day/night cycle.

The staff psychologists and mining crew foremen had agreed, though, that the living quarters needed more than just dormitory rooms. So despite the cost and labor, they had carved out a few social rooms as well. Before the Sun had devastated Earth, the lunar community boasted a recreation room, complete with a billiard table and extra-sized (for lunar gravity) ping-pong table; a library stocked with real books and video viewers that could access the tapes in most of the libraries on Earth, and a small conference room with a real wood table.

The self-appointed governing council chose the conference room as their meeting place. Nine department heads arranged themselves around the walnut table. Douglas unconsciously took the chair at the head of the table. Lisa sat at his right.

Kobol slouched in a chair halfway down the table.

Their first order of business was to elect a chairman pro-tem. Douglas was unanimously chosen.

Standing at the head of the group, smiling at them boyishly, he said, “Thank you. I appreciate the confidence you’ve shown in me, and I respect the responsibilities of the job. Now I think we’ve got to work out an agenda for this committee…”

“Council,” corrected James Blair, down at the far end of the table. “This is a governing council, not a committee.”

Douglas shrugged. “Council. We need to agree on an agenda for action. As I see it, the most important thing is to ensure the survival of our community. The next thing, and it’s closely coupled to the first, is to re-establish our links with Earth. The two…”

“Our links with Earth?” William Demain asked, his high-domed babyish face wrinkled into a puzzled frown. “What Earth? Earth’s gone.”

“Not entirely,” Douglas said. “Not by a long shot.”

“As head of life support systems,” LaStrande interrupted, his voice as strong as an operatic baritone’s despite his frail frame, “I think that the most important issue before us—the only issue that really matters—is the one you mentioned first, Doug. We’ve got to make ab-so-lutely certain that we can support ourselves. Food, air, water, electrical power, medicine… all the things that we need for survival. We’ve got to make certain that we can provide these things for ourselves. Without any connections Earthside. We can’t depend on Earth for anything! To do that is absolute nonsense.”

A murmur of agreement went around the table.

“Now wait a minute,” Douglas said. “I’ve been Earthside. The planet isn’t dead.”

“No, just half dead,” LaStrande stage-whispered.

“There are people on Earth who need our help,”

Douglas insisted. “And there are supplies on Earth that we need: medicines, replacement parts, equipment…”

“We can’t bring more people up here!”

Catherine Demain blurted, her voice pleading.

“We just can’t! We don’t have the room, the medical facilities, the supplies for them. It wouldn’t be fair to the people who live here.”

They argued back and forth for nearly an hour as Douglas stood helplessly at the head of the table, looking confused and frustrated. Kobol said nothing. Lisa said nothing. They carefully avoided each others’ eyes as the debate dragged on.

“We have got to be able to take care of ourselves,”

LaStrande kept insisting, clipping each word for emphasis. “We cannot depend on Earth for anything!”

“But we can’t just turn our backs on the people Earthside,” Douglas countered. “They need our help, and we need the things they can provide for us.”

“No! Never! The Earth is gone! Write it off.”

“That’s inhuman!”

When the digital clock set into the wall next to the room’s only door showed that the argument had raged for fifty-five minutes, Kobol finally unfolded his lanky frame and got to his feet.

“You’re both right,” he said, looking first at LaStrande and then at Douglas Morgan. “We’ve got to be able to support ourselves. We can’t depend on supplies from Earth anymore. But there are supplies that we lack, and Earth has. To become fully self-sufficient, we’ve got to send teams to Earth to get those supplies.”

Douglas, who had been on his feet for the whole debate, sank into his chair. LaStrande peered through his thick glasses, eyeing Kobol owlishly.

“We should organize an expedition,” Kobol went on. “More than one, if necessary. Go Earthside, take what we need, and bring it here.”

“What about the people Earthside?” Douglas asked.

With a forlorn shake of his head, Kobol replied, “Catherine is right. We just can’t take on more people. We haven’t got the room, the facilities, or the food or medicine. Most of the Earthers you brought up, Doug, are too sick to work. Half of them are going to die of radiation poisoning. Bringing them here was a waste of time and energy.”

Douglas stared at him, his face showing more hurt than anger. But he said nothing. Kobol looked around the table, abruptly sat down.

Lisa broke the lengthening silence. “We’ll need a list of requirements from each department. Catherine, you’ll have to go through the medical stores and tell us what you need from Earthside. Prioritize the list; put the things you need most at the top.”

Catherine Demain nodded and murmured, “A pharmaceutical factory would be nice.”

Lisa leaned forward, arms on the polished surface of the conference table. “Each of you… I’ll need a prioritized list of needs from each of you.”

“I’ve been thinking,” LaStrande said, his voice softer now that he was no longer arguing, “that we could ease the strain on the air systems if we simply grew more grass and other greeneries throughout the settlement. Can’t we peel off the flooring in the corridors and plant grass along them?”

“It’d be trampled down, wouldn’t it?” Blair asked.

“There were resistant strains developed Earthside,”

LaStrande said. “For lawns where kids would play…” He blinked behind his owlish glasses and took a long, deep breath, as if fighting back tears. “Anyhow—if we could find the right seeds, or even strips of sod…”

“Put it on your list,” Lisa said.

Douglas slumped back in his chair, saying nothing, his eyes focused a quarter-million miles away. Lisa glanced at him and knew that he had not accepted defeat; he was merely planning the next round of the battle.

“Who’s going to head this expedition?” asked Blair. “Any volunteers?”

Inadvertently, even against their conscious wishes, everyone turned to Douglas.

He nodded. “Sure, I’ll do it.”

“No,” Lisa said.

The single syllable filled the conference room with ice. Everyone froze where they were, unable to move or speak.

Finally Douglas blinked and asked, “What do you mean?”

Her beautiful face, framed by her black hair, took on the look of a saint facing martyrdom.

“Douglas has already led one mission Earthside. My husband has taken enough risks for the time being. I won’t chance losing him again. It’s not fair to ask him to go again.”

Douglas started to reply, but held his silence.

The others turned to one another, muttering.

Kobol said languidly, “I’ll volunteer for it. It’s my idea, basically, so I guess I ought to put my money where my mouth is.”

“You mean, put your ass on the line,” Marrett joked.

A ripple of relieved laughter went around the table.

“We should take turns on this,” LaStrande suggested, “if we’re going to send more than one expedition. No one of us ought to be out under the pressure more than anyone else.”

“Take turns, yes. That’s fair.”

“That’s the democratic way.”

Douglas shook his head. “Running a quasi-military expedition isn’t a democratic chore.”

“Come on now, Doug,” Catherine Demain chided. “You can’t be the hero every time. Give somebody else a chance.”

Walking down the curving corridor that led toward their quarters, Douglas scuffed a boot against the worn plastic flooring.

“Can you imagine grass growing along these tunnels?” he asked.

Lisa, walking beside him, looked up at the raw rock of the arched tunnel roof. “We’ll need special lights for it. Infrared, I think. Or is it ultraviolet?”

“Near-infrared,” he answered. He mused aloud, “We can get inert gases for fluorescent lamps easily enough. And there’s plenty of glass in the rocks.”

“All we need is the grass seed.”

“And fertilizer.”

“Sylvia Dortman, in the bio labs, she might be able to engineer nitrogen-fixing microbes for the grass. It was done on Earth before… before…”

Lisa’s voice suddenly choked up.

They walked in silence for a few moments, then Douglas asked, “Why did you object to my leading the next expedition Earthside?”

She glanced up at him, then pulled her gaze away and looked rigidly straight ahead. “I don’t know. The words just blurted out of me.”

Douglas watched her carefully as they walked slowly side by side. This was the Lisa he had known long ago, back on Earth, the vulnerable warm beauty he had fallen in love with. Not the ice-hard statue she had become. Has the ice melted? he asked himself. Has all that’s happened over the past few weeks brought her back to me?

He started to speak to her, but the words caught in his throat. Like a damned schoolboy! he thought. He coughed, swallowed.

“Lisa,” he managed at last, “you… in there, in the meeting, you said you didn’t want to risk losing me again.”

“Yes. I know.” Her voice was so low he could hardly hear it.

“Did you mean that? Did you really…”

She stumbled on a loose bit of floor tile and he put out his hand to steady her. She gripped his arm tightly and he swept her to him, wrapped both his arms around her slim body and kissed her hungrily. Lisa felt warm and vibrant in his arms; he wanted to hold her and protect her and love her forever.

She clung to him fiercely. “Oh, Doug, don’t ever leave me again. Please, please, please. Let’s forget the past. Let’s hold onto each other from now on.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” he said. “ ’Til never leave you, Lisa. I love you. I’ve always loved you, every minute of every day.”

He was blinking tears away. She was completely dry-eyed. But he never noticed that.

Hours later, in the darkness of their room, the musky odor and body heat of passion slowly dissipating into the shadows, Douglas sat up in their rumpled bed.

“What is it?” Lisa asked drowsily.

“Fissionables.”

“What?”

“Uranium, thorium—fissionables for the nuclear generators. We can’t run the rock machines or the water factory without them.”

“But I thought we had enough for years and years.”

“About five years,” he said.

“Oh, by that time we’ll have found more right here on the Moon.”

He shook his head in the darkness. “Not likely. Nothing heavier than iron’s ever been found here. Not in any quantity above microscopic. We’ll have to go to Earth for fissionables.”

“They can convert the factories to solar energy.”

With a sigh, he answered, “Wish we could, but that would require conversion equipment that we just don’t have. And we don’t have the facilities for making it, either.”

“Then we’ll send a team down for the fissionables,”

Lisa said.

“We’ll have to.”

“In five years. Now lie down and go to sleep.”

“Yeah. In five years. Maybe sooner.”

They both knew that he would lead the expedition back to Earth to obtain the fission fuels. Or he would try to.

Chapter 7

Five years passed. The lunar community grew both in numbers and living area. Miners quarried rock ceaselessly, expanding the settlement as rapidly as possible. The rocks they carved and lasered and exploded out of the underground spaces became the raw material for the factories.

Out of that dead rock came aluminum and glass, silicon for solar panels, oxygen for life support, trace elements for fertilizers and vitamins. From the bulldozed surface soil came meteoric iron, carbon, and hydrogen embedded in the soil from the infalling solar wind: hydrogen to be mixed with oxygen to yield water, the most expensive and precious material on the Moon.

Expeditions went to Earth. At first they went every few months. Then twice a year. Finally, one per year. They modified the Earth-built transfer rockets to burn powdered aluminum and oxygen, then rode the spidery little spacecraft to the giant wheeled station still orbiting a few hundred miles above Earth’s blue-and-white surface.

Everyone at the station had been killed by the superflare, and most of the station’s electronics had to be rebuilt because of the radiation damage.

But there were four space shuttles in the station’s docks when the flare had erupted. Four winged reusable ships that could land on Earth and return to the station, time and again.

The first trips to Earth brought medicines, seeds, electronics parts, fertilizers and tank after tank of nitrogen to the lunar settlement. And people. A few men and women, starving, ragged, sick, who were able to convince the armed visitors from the Moon that they had technical skills that would be valuable in the lunar community.

It was the sixth expedition that met organized resistance for the first time. Twelve men were killed or left behind; four wounded were brought back to the Moon. Kobol led that trip and came back with a gunshot wound in the hip that left him with a slight but permanent limp.

After that the expeditions became rarer. The landing sites were changed each time. Florida was too obvious. Marauding bands congregated at the old Kennedy Space Center, waiting to ambush the shuttles as they glided down to land at the three mile-long airstrip there.

But picking the landing sites was no easy task.

Most of the major airfields were close enough to nuclear-devastated cities so that the dangers of radiation still persisted.

Four months passed before the next expedition landed at the remains of Dulles International Airport, more than ten miles from the edge of the dully-glowing crater that had been Washington, D.C. The landing team ransacked a nearby Army base for weapons and ammunition, always keeping one careful eye out for marauding gangs, and another on the radiation dosimeter badges they each wore pinned to their shirts.

That expedition picked up one Earthside survivor; a skinny, raving, white-haired man who insisted he was an astronomer who could tell when the next flare would erupt on the Sun. On the way back to the Moon, once safely past the space station and irrevocably bound for the safety of the underground community, Dr. Robert Lord admitted that he had been lying, there was no foolproof way to predict a solar flare—yet. But he promised to spend the rest of his life studying the Sun to find a way.

As the lunar community felt safer, and as the armed resistance to their landings grew stronger, the time between expeditions stretched. Six months. Then ten. By the time the fifth anniversary of the flare arrived, it had been almost exactly a full year since the previous expedition.

“Why go Earthside?” people said. “There’s nothing there but maniacs and death. We’re doing all right here. We don’t need Earth.”

Douglas tried to convince them that they owed the world of their birth a debt. “We should be helping them to rebuild. We should establish a permanent base on Earth, a base where people can come to and be safe, a foothold where the rebuilding of civilization can begin.”

They smiled at Douglas and congratulated him on his ideals. But they outvoted him at council meetings.

Midway through the sixth year they sent a small expedition down to what had once been Connecticut.

Three nuclear powerplants nestled among the rolling hills in the western part of the state, untouched by the bombs that had wiped out New York and Boston. The team met little opposition, but found little nuclear fuel. Only enough uranium to run the lunar factories for a few years was brought back. And two of the team members who handled the fuel rods fell ill almost immediately of radiation sickness. They both eventually died, after long cancerous agonies.

“I’ve got to take a team down there myself,”

Douglas told his wife.

There were wisps of gray at his temples now, although Lisa’s midnight-black mane was as lustrous as ever. She could feel her whole body stiffen; the moment of challenge, the moment she had known would inevitably arise, had come at last.

“No, Doug,” she said softly. “I won’t let you go. You’re too important to me here.”

They were sitting facing each other across the tiny dining table of their new, enlarged, three-room suite. As chairman of the council, Douglas had been forced to accept the first of the bigger apartments. It included a sitting room where five or six people could be squeezed in for informal meetings, a dining area with its own cooking unit, and an indecently large bedroom.

He reached across the tiny stone table and grasped her slim hand in his. “Lisa, there’s no way around it. I’ve got to go. No one else can handle the job. It’s my responsibility.”

“You have responsibilities here,” she said.

“None of them mean a damned thing if the nuclear generators run out of fuel.”

“There are others who can lead a team Earthside.”

With a dogged shake of his head, “It’s my responsibility, Lisa. I’ve got to do it.”

She looked into his ice-blue eyes for long moments and saw that there was no way to talk him out of his resolve. Except one. Lisa knew she had one final card to play, one unbeatable trump that would bend him to her will.

“Doug… it’s not just for me,” she said, her voice light, almost girlish. “I… well, I’m with child, as they say.”

“You’re pregnant?”

She nodded slowly, and let a happy smile spread across her lips.

He grinned back at her. “Really?”

“I had a checkup with Catherine this morning.”

“A son,” he said, gripping her hand tighter than ever. “Do you think it’ll be a boy?”

She laughed. “I hope so.”

“A son.” He was beaming. “Even if it’s a girl, that’ll be okay. I won’t mind.”

Not much, she said to herself. How transparent you are, Douglas. How malleable.

Lisa had feared that just the mention of pregnancy might trigger memories of nearly six years ago and the moment they had come so close to tearing each other apart. Her cheek still stung from his hand every time she thought about it. But she had spent the years being faithful to him, being the model wife for the leader of the community, never allowing the slightest hint of a rumor to spring up in this hothouse settlement where gossip flew along the corridors faster than a pistol shot. For nearly six years now she had done everything in her considerable power to keep him happy. And for nearly six years he had jumped through hoops for her in unsuspecting gratitude.

Douglas Morgan was chairman of the council. Lisa Ducharme Morgan ran it.

“I… Doug,” she stammered, “do you think… well, could you… postpone the expedition Earthside? Until after the baby is born?”

“Nine months?” The grin on his face slowly dissipated, replaced by an introspective frown. “Nine months,” he repeated, almost to himself. “I’ll have to check. That’s slicing it very thin.”

But she knew he would wait. And after the baby was born she would find other ways to keep him by her side. Especially if it was a son.

But she reckoned without Martin Kobol.

Five months passed without incident. Douglas chafed, but kept postponing the Earthside expedition.

Kobol watched and waited as the nuclear generators’ supply of fuel rods slowly dwindled.

“At this rate,” he told Douglas, “we’ll be eating into the emergency reserves before the year’s out.”

They were standing in the cubbyhole office just off the control room of the nuclear powerplant.

Through the leaded window Douglas could see the broad sweep of the control board, with its array of dials and switches. Two bored, sleepy-looking technicians sat there. Beyond the massive leadline doors across the chamber from them was the nuclear generator itself, silently converting the energy of splitting uranium atoms to electricity.

Douglas nodded unhappily.

“I know. We’ve got to bring up more fissionables from Earthside.”

“And we can’t wait much longer,” Kobol pointed out, tapping the computer screen that showed the fuel supply numbers.

“A few more months…” Douglas muttered.

Kobol sat on the edge of the desk to ease his aching hip. “We should have gone three months ago, in the spring. It’s high summer now. In a few more months it’ll be winter.”

“I know the seasons!” Douglas snapped.

Kobol closed his eyes momentarily. He looked almost as if he were praying. “It’s Lisa, isn’t it? She’s making you wait until the baby’s born.”

“I want to wait until he’s born,” Douglas corrected.

“While we run out of fuel.”

“We won’t run out, Martin. Don’t try to pressure me.”

“Doug, this is a serious matter. If you won’t act, I’m going to have to bring it before the council.”

“Do that,” Douglas snapped. “Do anything you damned well please. Lead the expedition Earthside yourself. You tried that once and it didn’t work out so goddamned well, did it?”

His voice had risen to a room-filling roar, he suddenly realized. Both the technicians on the other side of the thick window had turned in their chairs to stare at him.

Kobol said nothing.

With a self-exasperated sigh, Douglas went over to Kobol and grabbed his bony shoulders. “Marty, I’m sorry. You’re right, we should have gone at least three months ago. It’s just that… Lisa lost her first baby, and the radiation dose she got — well, I just want to be here and make sure this one’s okay.”

Kobol pulled free of him and walked, one leg slightly stiff, toward the door. Without looking back at Douglas he said, “Why should this one be so special? She’s aborted three or four others.”

It was such a strange thing to say, such an incredible statement, that Douglas did not believe he had heard the man correctly.

“What did you say?” He heard a weird half chuckle in his own voice.

Kobol put one hand on the doorknob, then halfturned toward Douglas. “She’s keeping this baby to hold onto you. You’re the puppet; the baby’s the string.”

Douglas could feel his blood turning to ice.

“What did you say about three of four others?”

His voice was deadly calm.

Shrugging, Kobol replied, “Nothing. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. It’s none of my business.”

“But it’s my business, Marty.” Without being consciously aware of it, Douglas was advancing on Kobol, fists clenched.

“It’s just… something I heard.” Kobol’s voice quavered. “Ask Catherine Demain about it. She knows.”

He yanked the door open and rushed through it and out into the corridor, leaving Douglas standing there alone.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” Douglas said to his wife.

Lisa lay in their bed, a black robe pulled around her. To Douglas she looked more beautiful than ever, glowing from within. Her belly was just slightly rounded.

She said nothing, merely watched him with her dark enchantress’s eyes.

“I checked with Catherine. She didn’t want to admit it, but she finally did. Four abortions in the past five years. Four sons or daughters we could have had. Why? Why did you kill them?”

“I didn’t want them,” she said, her voice as flat and controlled as if she were reading off a list of numbers. “Other things were more important.”

“And for five years I worried that the radiation you’d been exposed to in the flare… Jesus Christ, Lisa, why didn’t you at least ask me?”

“It was none of your business. It was my decision to make.”

He sank onto the end of the bed, head bowed, tears of frustration welling up in him. “Four children,” he muttered. “Four children of mine… and you never even said a word to me about it.”

“We had more important things to do than to argue about having babies,” Lisa said.

He looked up at her. She was perfectly calm, totally in control of herself.

“They were mine, weren’t they?” he heard himself snarl at her. “Not Demain’s or Blair’s or Marty’s. Or maybe some of the miners? Do you know who the fathers were?”

Even that failed to crack her facade. “They were yours, Douglas. Only yours. But the decision to keep them or not was mine.”

Nodding bitterly, he hauled himself to his feet.

He swayed there at the end of the bed for a moment, as if drunk.

“Okay,” he said. “You made your decisions. Now I’m making mine. I’m taking an expedition Earthside as soon as we can get it ready. You can lie there and swell up and burst, for all I care. I don’t believe it’s my kid. I’ll never believe a word you say to me, never again!”

He stamped out of the bedroom. Lisa lay unmoving, listening to him rummaging around the other rooms for a few moments. Then she heard the corridor door slide open and slam shut.

He’ll be back, she thought. He’s angry now, but he’ll cool down. He’ll come back, feeling sheepish.

And I’ll ask him to forgive me. He will, and then I’ll forgive him. We’re having a son. I’ll tell him that all the tests indicate that. He’ll stay to see his son born. He’ll be back. Soon. He won’t stay away long.

But he never returned to her.

It took three months to organize the Earthside expedition to Douglas’ satisfaction: three months of frantic preparation, of meticulous detail work, of unceasing training for the men he hand-picked to go with him, of driving, flogging everyone— himself most of all.

Lisa watched the takeoff of his spidery transfer craft on the video screen in her bedroom. Every ship in the settlement was needed to lift the expedition members toward the Earth-orbiting space station. Douglas, she knew, was in the very last spacecraft. When its rocket engines ignited and it leaped off the Moon’s dusty surface and out of view, she felt a sudden, searing pain in her abdomen.

Her son was about to be born, five weeks prematurely.