his hips, breaking in the Third on how to be happy and stay healthy on the Moon. His voice was ragged and strained and sounded like a top-sergeant’s.
*
Dahl and Eberlein stood in the outer port of the relief ship, staring back at the research bunker. It was half hidden in the shadows of a rocky overhang that protected it from meteorites.
“They kidded him a lot this morning,” Dahl said. “They said he had found a home on the Moon.”
“If we had stayed an hour or so more, he might have changed his mind and left, after all,” Eberlein mused, his face a thoughtful mask behind his air helmet.
“I offered him money,” Dahl said painfully. “I was a coward and I offered him money to stay in my place.” His face was bitter and full of disgust for himself.
Eberlein turned to him quickly and automatically told him the right thing.
“We’re all cowards once in a while,” he said earnestly. “But your offer of money had nothing to do with his staying. He stayed because he had to stay, because we made him stay.”
“I don’t understand,” Dahl said.
“Chapman had a lot to go home for. He was engaged to be married.” Dahl winced. “We got her to write him a letter breaking it off. We knew it meant that he lost one of his main reasons for wanting to go back. I think, perhaps, that he still would have left if we had stayed and argued him into going. But we left before he could change his mind.”
“That—was a lousy thing to do!”
“We had no choice. We didn’t use it except as a last resort.”
“I don’t know of any girl who would have done such a thing, no matter what your reasons, if she was in love with a guy like Chapman,” Dahl said.
“There was only one who would have,” Eberlein agreed. “Ginny Dixon. She understood what we were trying to tell her. She had to; her brother had died up here.”
“Why was Chapman so important?” Dahl burst out. “What could he have done that I couldn’t have done—would have done if I had had any guts?”
“Perhaps you could have,” Eberlein said. “But I doubt it. I don’t think there were many men who could have. And we couldn’t take the chance. Chapman knows how to live on the Moon. He’s like a trapper who’s spent all his time in the forests and knows it like the palm of his hand. He never makes mistakes, he never fails to check things. And he isn’t a scientist. He would never become so preoccupied with research that he’d fail to make checks. And he can watch out for those who do make mistakes. Ginny understood that all too well.”
“How did you know all this about Chapman?” Dahl asked.
“The men in the First told us some of it. And we had our own observer with you here. Bening kept us pretty well informed.”
*
Eberlein stared at the bunker thoughtfully.
“It costs a lot of money to send ships up here and establish a colony. It will cost a lot to expand it. And with that kind of investment, you don’t take chances. You have to have the best men for the job. You get them even if they don’t want to do it.”
He gestured at the small, blotchy globe of blue and green that was the Earth, riding high in the black sky.
“You remember what it was like five years ago, Dahl? Nations at each other’s throats, re-arming to the teeth? It isn’t that way now. We’ve got the one lead that nobody can duplicate or catch up on. Nobody has our technical background. I know, this isn’t a military base. But it could become one.”
He paused.
“But these aren’t even the most important reasons, Dahl. We’re at the beginnings of space travel, the first bare, feeble start. If this base on the Moon succeeds, the whole human race will be Outward Bound.” He waved at the stars. “You have your choice—a frontier that lies in the stars, or a psychotic little world that tries and fails and spends its time and talents trying to find better methods of suicide.
“With a choice like that, Dahl, you can’t let it fail. And personal lives and viewpoints are expendable. But it’s got to be that way. There’s too much at stake.”
Eberlein hesitated a moment and when he started again, it was on a different track. “You’re an odd bunch of guys, you and the others in the groups, Dahl. Damn few of you come up for the glamor, I know. None of you like it and none of you are really enthusiastic about it. You were all reluctant to come in the first place, for the most part. You’re a bunch of pretty reluctant heroes, Dahl.”
The captain nodded soberly at the bunker. “I, personally, don’t feel happy about that. I don’t like having to mess up other people’s lives. I hope I won’t have to again. Maybe somehow, someway, this one can be patched up. We’ll try to.”
He started the mechanism that closed the port of the rocket. His face was a study of regret and helplessness. He was thinking of a future that, despite what he had told Dahl, wasn’t quite real to him.
“I feel like a cheap son of a bitch,” Eberlein said.
*
The very young man said, “Do they actually care where they send us? Do they actually care what we think?”
The older man got up and walked to the window. The bunkers and towers and squat buildings of the research colony glinted in the sunlight. The colony had come a long way; it housed several thousands now.
The Sun was just rising for the long morning and farther down shadows stabbed across the crater floor. Tycho was by far the most beautiful of the craters, he thought.
It was nice to know that the very young man was going to miss it. It had taken the older man quite a long time to get to like it. But that was to be expected—he hadn’t been on the Moon.
“I would say so,” he said. “They were cruel, that way, at the start. But then they had to be. The goal was too important. And they made up for it as soon as they could. It didn’t take them too long to remember the men who had traded their future for the stars.”
The very young man said, “Did you actually think of it that way when you first came up here?”
The older man thought for a minute. “No,” he admitted. “No, we didn’t. Most of us were strictly play-for-pay men. The Commission wanted men who wouldn’t fall apart when the glamor wore off and there was nothing left but privation and hard work and loneliness. The men who fell for the glamor were all right for quick trips, but not for an eighteen-month stay in a research bunker. So the Commission offered high salaries and we reluctantly took the jobs. Oh, there was the idea behind the project, the vision the Commission had in mind. But it took a while for that to grow.”
A woman came in the room just then, bearing a tray with glasses on it. The older man took one and said, “Your mother and I were notified yesterday that you had been chosen to go. We would like to see you go, but of course the final decision is up to you.”
