RECOVERY
“You okay?” Winston’s voice made Trudy’s eyes snap open. He sounded concerned, worried.
“Me?” she squeaked. “Yeah. I’m okay. I’m fine.”
“You sounded like you were puffing, gasping.”
“I’m okay,” she insisted, concentrating on looking at him, not the sky.
She couldn’t see his face through the tinting of his helmet, but she heard him say, “Some people get a jolt when they first come out here. Guys from Selene, they’re used to seeing Earth overhead. It bothers them here.”
“That’s what the farside is all about, isn’t it?” Trudy replied, desperately trying to keep her voice from shaking. “I mean, this side of the Moon is always pointed away from Earth. You never see Earth from here.”
“Right,” said Winston.
“Is that a road?” she asked, pointing with one gloved hand.
“Yeah. Simpson’s Highway, we call it. That’s where they took the mirror off to Mendeleev.”
“And now they’re bringing it back.”
Winston didn’t reply, but Trudy got the sense that he was nodding his head.
“Not much to see, is there?” she said, keeping her eyes on her companion. Not the stars. Not the stars.
“Most of the base is underground. Those are the solar farms, out there.” He pointed. “That’s how we generate our electricity.”
Trudy followed his pointing arm and saw an area of dark solar cells spread across the floor of the plain, silently drinking in sunlight.
“Daylight for fourteen days straight, just about,” said Winston.
“And fourteen straight days of night,” Trudy added.
“Yeah. We generate twice the power the base needs and store the excess in superconducting coils for the night. We’ve also got a nuclear generator buried out there, as a backup.”
“Just like Selene.”
“Uh-huh.” Winston hesitated a moment, then said, “Well, that’s about it. You want to go in now?”
I passed the test! Trudy exulted. I got through the initiation. As nonchalantly as she could manage, she replied, “I guess.”
As they turned toward the airlock hatch, set into the slope of the ringwall mountain, Trudy’s eye caught a glint of something halfway up the distant twisting road.
“What’s that?”
Winston said, “Oh, that’s Simpson’s gang toting the mirror back.”
An enormous rig was laboriously inching along the winding road, bearing a huge flat load that gleamed in the sunlight.
Trudy stared at it, fascinated. It was like a huge round metal pancake, obviously on wheels of some sort, creeping down the road, painfully slowly.
“Mirror must’ve cracked at one of the switchback turns,” Winston was saying. “It’ll take them seven, eight hours to get it back down here.”
“Do you have a pair of binoculars on you?” Trudy asked.
“Naw. C’mon, let’s go back inside.”
A smaller vehicle was speeding down the switchbacks at breakneck speed, kicking up a trail of dust that hung lazily in the vacuum. Lighter gravity, Trudy told herself. Dust doesn’t settle as fast as on Earth.
“We’d better get inside,” Winston urged.
Whoever’s driving that buggy is in an awful hurry, Trudy thought. He could get himself killed zipping around those curves like that.
“Time to go, Dr. Yost.”
Hesitantly, Trudy turned and followed Winston back to the airlock hatch.
“How on Earth do they get the mirror back inside the base?” she asked.
As he pressed the control pad set beside the hatch, Winston replied, “Biggest airlock in the solar system. It forms one entire wall of the mirror lab, over on the far side of the big turntable. Hard to see from this angle, but it’s right over there, set into the mountainside.”
Trudy nodded inside her helmet. Must be something to see, she thought. An airlock that can take a hundred-meter mirror.
As the hatch slid silently open, Winston went on, “Professor Uhlrich thought about building the mirror lab out here in the open. Vacuum is a lot cleaner than an underground facility filled with air and sweat and all sorts of impurities and contaminants.”
“But?” Trudy prompted.
“He decided it’d be easier for the staff to work in air, instead of outside in suits. So they built the big airlock.”
Trudy realized that Winston hadn’t pointed out the airlock to her when he’d taken her through the mirror lab. He hadn’t even mentioned it.
Once back inside, it took nearly an hour to vacuum the dust off their suits and then wriggle out of them. The air in the locker room had an acrid smell to it.
Before she could ask, Winston smilingly explained, “Place smells like gunpowder, doesn’t it? That’s from the dust.”
As she peeled off her thermal undergarment, Trudy realized her blouse and jeans were soaked with perspiration.
“I need a shower,” she said, wrinkling her nose at her own odor.
“Yeah. Everybody does after they’ve been outside.”
At that moment the inner hatch of the airlock slid open and a figure in a space suit tromped in. As he unsealed his helmet and pulled it off, Trudy recognized the darkly bearded guy with the sad eyes she’d seen on the screen in Professor Uhlrich’s office.
“Hey, Grant,” said Winston.
“Hello, Win.”
“Uh, this is Trudy Yost. She’s going—”
“Hello,” said Grant Simpson. And he clomped past Trudy, heading for the corridor that led to Professor Uhlrich’s office, without bothering to take off his space suit.