ON THE ROAD
“We oughtta start back,” Phillips said.
Grant lifted his arm and peered at the watch set into the pad on his wrist. Christ, we’ve been out here more than six hours, he realized. The roof was half finished and the robots were working away industriously.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Looks like the ’bots are working okay.”
“Josie’s keeping an eye on them,” said Phillips as he headed for the tractor.
Josie’s off-shift now, Grant knew. He tried to remember who was next on the duty roster for the monitoring task. Not Oberman, he told himself. I don’t care how shorthanded we are, I won’t let Nate get his hands on anything important. Keep him on the administrative side; let him do a clerk’s job.
“You coming, or you gonna stay out here permanently?” Phillips called.
“I’m coming.”
Grant turned away from the busy robots. From here on they would be operated remotely, from the teleoperations center. Once the roof was finished their next task would be to erect a shelter for humans who visited the site and then construct a frame for the mirror that the nanos would build. There would be no need for humans to come to Mendeleev for many weeks. Unless something went wrong.
Phillips was in the driver’s seat as Grant climbed into the tractor’s cab and sealed its hatch. Together they went through the tractor’s abbreviated checklist, then Phillips leaned a gloved finger on the start button. Grant heard nothing in the lunar vacuum, of course, but he felt the vibration of the tractor’s electric motor starting up.
“We should’ve flown out here on a hopper,” Phillips said as the vehicle lurched into motion. “Make it in less than an hour instead of a frickin’ two-day trip, one way.”
Grant knew that the flimsy little rocket hoppers couldn’t carry the cargo that they’d just delivered to the site, and he knew that Phillips knew. He was just griping for the sake of something to gripe about.
Over the ringwall they trundled, then out onto the pockmarked plain, heading back to the Sea of Moscow and the Farside facility. After four days out in the open, Farside’s bare-bones accommodations would look like a five-star hotel, Grant thought.
They followed the smoothed road across the barren plain. Grant thought the undulating ground looked like the waves of an ocean, only frozen solid. It was liquid once, he reminded himself. Molten lava, a few billion years ago. Now it was an empty expanse of dust-covered rock, pockmarked by craters of all sizes, from fingerpokes to depressions so deep and rugged that you didn’t dare drive a tractor into them.
Half dozing, Grant recalled that some of those deeper craters were partially filled with dust. Drive into one of them and you sink into the dust, like a ship sinking in the sea. He remembered reading a story once about a place in India where a guy got himself stuck in a dust-covered depression and couldn’t crawl out. Was it by Kipling? he asked himself.
Phillips’s voice jarred him into wakefulness.
“Yeah, we’re moving along, no sweat,” Phillips was saying. Grant realized he was talking to the excursion monitor, back at Farside. “Gonna stop for a meal in a few minutes.”
“Copy you stopping for meal,” came the voice of one of the technicians. Grant recognized Harvey Henderson’s sweet, almost girlish tenor.
“What’re you doing on the monitor console, Harvey?” Grant asked.
“Just filling in for a few minutes while Rava takes a leak, boss.”
“How’s the foot?”
“Just fine. I’m gonna take the new kid out dancing later tonight.”
Grant knew Harvey was joking, but he also knew that “the new kid” he mentioned was Trudy Yost and his brows knitted at the idea.
“Time to stop and get something to eat,” Phillips said, tapping a gloved finger on the mission schedule displayed on the control console’s central screen.
Grant nodded, then realized that Phillips couldn’t see it inside his helmet and said, “Right.”
Phillips actually pulled the tractor over to one side of the road. Grant smiled inwardly. Sherry doesn’t want to block traffic, he thought.
They double-checked the seals of the cab’s hatches before removing their helmets. Grant’s nose wrinkled at the body odors. God, we smell like a couple of cesspools, he thought. But he said nothing as he turned awkwardly in his seat and reached into the storage bin at the back of the cab. They ate prepackaged sandwiches, chilled and soggy from refrigeration, and drank an energy-enriched fruit drink.
Then Phillips said, “I’ve gotta take a crap.”
Grant dreaded using the toilets built into the cab’s seats. In their space suits, it was a laborious and degrading ordeal: sealing the suit’s bottom to the toilet hatch, opening both, checking the readouts to make certain the connection was secure, and then finally doing your business. With your crewmate sitting beside you. Grant took the diphenoxylate pills that Kapstein offered and tried to avoid the whole ugly business. The pills made him thirsty as hell, but using the relief tube was a lot easier and much less humiliating than working the trapdoor.
Once he was finished and buttoned up again, Phillips said, “I’m gonna flake out, Grant.” He started to crank his seat back as far as it would go.
“Change your air tank first and then put the helmet back on,” Grant said.
“I got enough air—”
“Do it now,” Grant said.
Phillips looked unhappy about it, but he gave in without a complaint. It was awkward sitting in the tractor’s seats, but they helped each other to replace the air tanks on their backpacks, then fastened their helmets back in place.
“Now you can sleep in peace and the safety police will be happy with us,” Grant said.
“By the book,” Phillips grumbled.
“By the book,” Grant echoed. It’s always best to go by the book, he thought. But then he added, Almost always.
Phillips slept like a dead man for more than five hours while Grant drove the tractor across the empty lunar wasteland. Rocks, rocks, and more rocks, some as big as a house, most of them the size of pebbles. Sinuous rilles snaking across the dusty ground. Craters. He thought about putting the tractor on autopilot and taking a quick nap, but fought off his drowsiness and doggedly kept control of the vehicle. Phillips woke up at last, popped his helmet to take a few sips from the thermos of coffee they’d brought with them, then took over the driving and allowed Grant to nod off.
He slept well enough, although he dreamed of being a little boy in South Africa once again and sailing a raft out into the tossing waves of the ocean. The raft capsized and he was floundering in the freezing water when he suddenly woke up.
Phillips was muttering as he bent over the tractor’s control panel, his thumb jammed against the starter button.
“Sonofabitch died on me,” he said to Grant.