THE LUNAR SCHOOL BUS rolled tank-like out of its airlock in the Cosmopolis Department of Transportation and onto the surface of the Moon. Next to Byron sat his robotic crony, José Ignacio, the pair of them peering out the glass-paneled bus at the silvery regolith, a word that Byron, as a newly minted Lunarite, was quickly growing very fond of, a word meaning the top layer of powder covering the Moon’s stratum of solid rock. “Regolith.”
Several carrot-colored mooncrawlers were bulldozing nearby, alongside one mammoth rockcrusher, a vehicle the shape of a grasshopper but the size of an elephant, with an enclosed cockpit up top for its operator to sit in. Byron watched as a rockcrusher’s front arms came down hard and smashed a boulder to bits, which a mooncrawler promptly scooped up for transport. Then the rockcrusher’s operator spotted the school bus and ceased his crushing long enough to wave hello.
Byron raised his own hand and asked:
“Miss Ahlooloo, are they mining diamonds?”
Intead of answering, Miss Ahlooloo turned to a girl of Byron’s age by the name of Honeybun Bajpai. The first thing you would’ve noticed about Honeybun if you’d been watching her get ready back in the airlock at Cosmopolis a few minutes earlier was that she’d taken off the pink-and-gold, over-the-shoulder sash from her sari (which is a kind of attractively draped garment that female persons in India tend to wear) and put it back on over her spacesuit, adding a delightful stripe of color to the otherwise black-and-white lunar fashion routine. Also her ski-goggle glasses, which typically make a person look slightly zany, somehow made Honeybun look quite cute, even inside her spacesuit helmet.
But it wasn’t her looks that made her really stand out, it was what you couldn’t tell about her just using your eyeballs: she was a genius! No surprise really, since her whole family was abnormally smart. Her parents—who she’d moved up to the Moon with from Jaipur the year before—were both doctors, her mother a brain surgeon and her father a space-allergist. Anyway, Honeybun was not only the best student in Miss Ahlooloo’s class, she was the best student in the history of the lunar school system. She could always be relied on to keep the conversation going with an accurate fact or figure, which is why teachers liked calling on her whenever there was an informational gap happening. As in right now:
“Honeybun, would you care to answer Byron’s question?”
“The diamond miners still work by hand,” Honeybun told Byron in an accent that sounded a little like singing—and in a very friendly voice. She was the kind of individual, you realized pretty fast, who most likely knew more than you did about whatever the topic was that was being discussed, but she never made you feel uninformed; instead she always made you feel like you were finding out something new at exactly the right moment to know it.
“These vehicles and their operators are mining oxygen,” Honeybun said. “They use a hydrogen reduction process to extract fresh air from moon rocks. You’re breathing the result right now.”
Byron sucked in a deep, noisy breath, then exhaled with a whistle. “Refreshing!” he said.
By pure coincidence, half a mile away in Central Dome, Taji Barnett was at this very moment saying the very same thing, after Xing-Xing had just explained to him the basics of oxygen production at Cosmopolis, oxygen being the lunar colony’s number-one concern at all times. As they discussed the ins and outs of it, Xing-Xing finished strapping Taji into his set of plastic wings, since they were gearing up for flight.
“Ready, Earth-boy?”
“Ready like confetti.”
“Confetti? How is confetti ready?”
“You know, like you’re at a surprise party waiting for the birthday girl to show up, holding your fistful of confetti, all set to throw it at her when she walks in the door, to commence the fiesta. Ready like confetti.”
Without commenting on the dubious simile, Xing-Xing turned away from Taji, sprinted a few yards, jumped, and flew up into the dome’s airspace, using her wings in graceful bursts. Taji followed her lead. Since Xing-Xing had been doing this for years, she was elegant in the air; but Taji was a natural athlete, and he took to the new sport on the spot. Together they swooped and swirled, starry space above them on the other side of the dome, green grass and hillocks below on the dome’s floor.
“Hey, Moon-girl! How’s this?” Taji executed an impressive loop-de-loop. “Don’t be afraid to say ‘magnificent!’ ”
Xing-Xing smiled at his swagger, then flew straight up toward the roof of the dome. She was heading for a small aerie there, which was only visible from halfway up. Taji, naturally, flapped his wings and followed.
In the Barnett family’s quarters, Mrs. Barnett was by this time sizing up her weekend’s work. She was in the kitchen unpacking her china, which she’d insisted on bringing along as a condition for agreeing to move to the Moon, because she had no intention of eating off somebody else’s plates in her own home.
As she checked each piece for chips or cracks, she mentally divided up her next several tasks in order of importance and degree of difficulty. Also she was thinking about how to redecorate. At two thousand square feet, their quarters were spacious enough, and the rooms flowed nicely; but the place needed an across-the-board overhaul in interior design, and she was just the woman for the job.
She was still musing over colors and fabrics when she went into Byron’s bedroom to unpack his clothes and hang them in the closet. Here her mind shifted over to Byron himself, and she put her eye to his telescope at the porthole-window. She didn’t really expect to catch a glimpse of Byron’s class on the regolith, but there was the lunar school bus, maybe a mile away, a glassy box glinting in starlight as it rolled slowly along. Spotting it made Mrs. Barnett feel better than had been the case for the last several hours; because even though she hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, she’d had a nagging feeling of doom all morning long.
Only a minute later, the school bus reached its destination and came to a stop. Miss Ahlooloo gave her students final instructions and reviewed all the safety precautions one last time. Then they were ready.
Byron let his classmates exit the bus first, not because he was nervous about going outside, but because he didn’t want anyone behind him rushing him along. Byron was a person who preferred doing things at his own pace. Most of the time very fast, but once in a while quite slow. Right now, for instance, speed was not his prime concern. He wanted to savor the experience as he descended the small ladder on the side of the bus that would bring him to the surface of the Moon …
With each step down, his anticipation of placing his foot in the soft moondust rose. At the last rung of the ladder he leapt off and hit the regolith with both feet at the same time. The moment of contact was spine-tingling, unlike any step Byron had ever taken before or expected ever to take again.
He walked a few feet, then turned back to examine his footprints in the regolith: they were lighter in color than the rest of the radiation-darkened “topsoil.”
He spun around to take in the view of a mile-high mountain peak and a mile-low impact crater. With no atmosphere to soften the views, everything was razor-sharp in the distance. The lunar horizon was so close and clear that it precisely divided the Moon’s surface from starry space—and from the shining orb of Earth beyond.
Next Byron tested out the laws of physics as applied to his own body by letting himself fall face-forward from a standing position: before hitting the ground he had plenty of time to put out his hands, break his fall, and push himself back up. This was due to the fact that, as Governor Tang had pointed out, the Moon’s gravity was only one sixth the gravity back home: a delightful detail of lunar living that would make time spent here quite interesting.
Spotting a boulder that would’ve weighed way too much for him to lift in Arizona, Byron laid his gloved hands on it and hoisted it over his head, grinning at his own lunar superstrength.
“I can do that on Earth,” quipped José Ignacio.
The robot was standing right behind Byron, transmitting directly into Byron’s helmet intercom. Byron swung around and flung the boulder straight at him, knocking him down. But José Ignacio easily righted himself by digging both claws into the regolith and extending his arms, leaving a perfect imprint of his robotic body in the moondust.
Miss Ahlooloo now checked her watch and addressed the class through their intercoms:
“Ready, everyone? Daylight is about to strike!”
Byron watched the sharp line of daylight hit the mountains in the distance as it moved in their direction. Since there was no air to diffuse sunlight, it was an instantaneous difference between night and day along the Day-Night Terminator Line. Nothing like on Earth, where day breaks slowly in the sky and night sinks away like light down a funnel. Here the switchover happened all at once!
The moving flank of sunlight triggered a phosphorescent effect in the regolith, causing minerals to light up and sparkle until it looked like the Moon was covered by ten trillion tons of crushed diamonds. The advancing line of daylight reached Byron, bathing him in brilliance and lighting up the ground all around him.
“Byron,” said Miss Ahlooloo via intercom, you can keep up with it, if you like. Just don’t go over the ridge.”
Byron shot off, chasing the advancing line of daylight, moving ahead of it with big, lunar strides. Hearing him giggle via the open intercom link, Miss Ahlooloo smiled at her new pupil’s get-up-and-go. Also she was amused by the toy robot bouncing along behind him, hooked to his spacesuit by cord. From Byron’s perspective, of course, it was a seven-foot-and-several-centimeters José Ignacio bounding alongside him—until José Ignacio lengthened his leaps by dialing up his boot jets and flying ahead.
“Hey!” Byron hollered. “Wait up, you pretentious appliance!”
José Ignacio did not wait up. Byron only caught up to him when the robot stopped at the top of a ridge. From here, looking down, they could take in the whole canyon below.
“Zanzibar!” Byron whispered.
“What?” José Ignacio said, hearing in Byron’s voice that he wasn’t commenting only on the view. “What are you looking at?”
“What are the odds?” Byron said.
“What are the odds of WHAT? What’s down there?”
“Don’t you see it?”
José Ignacio scanned the canyon floor, but sometimes a boy’s brain is just plain better than a robot’s cranium at spotting the item of utmost importance.
“It’s Rattlesnake Rill!” Byron said. “Right there!”
José Ignacio zeroed in on the tiny bit of moonscape below that Byron was pointing at (and which, by the way, in Byron’s mind—by way of Byron’s memory, by way of his colorized moon poster in his room back in Arizona—was lit up the color of cotton-candy pink)—and there, indeed, was the snake-like groove that Byron was referring to: Rattlesnake Rill, in actual fact.
“If I know what you’re thinking,” José Ignacio warned, “and I always DO know—stop it!”
“You have no idea what I’m thinking!”
“You’re thinking you want to go DOWN there!”
“Exactly!”
“We can’t!”
“We HAVE to!”
“We’re not authorized! We’re not equipped! We’re not even organized!”
José Ignacio’s argument would have been stronger if he could’ve added that back at Cosmopolis, in the command center atop the control tower, trouble was brewing which in a matter of minutes would require the field trip to be cut short and Miss Ahlooloo’s class to climb back into the bus and hurry home.
But José Ignacio was not in touch with the command center, where an alarm had just started ringing. On the big screen was a picture of the solar system taken telescopically a moment earlier: the alarm corresponded to a blinking yellow dot just past Saturn.
The governor’s deputy and right-hand-man, twenty-eight-year-old Canutus Olafsson, sprang into action, double-checking every circuit in the system to be sure the alarm was no glitch. Six feet eleven inches tall, with white-blond hair down to his shoulders, blond eyebrows, and a ready-to-chase-the-ball look always in his eyes, Deputy Olafsson seemed like a golden retriever running around on hind legs. A golden retriever, that is, who beyond his canine-sharp reflexes and doggy-powered energy levels also knew what a blinking yellow dot on a telescreen actually meant.
After finishing his technical checks and confirming that the alarm system was in good working order, he took the elevator down to the bottom of the control tower and headed quickly into Cosmopolis proper. Here he intercepted Governor Tang leaving Central Dome with Mr. Barnett. In a low voice he informed the governor:
“Sir, we may be in for some trouble.”
Six minutes later, Governor Tang, Mr. Barnett, and Deputy Olafsson were in the control tower elevator rising toward the orb, the governor asking questions all the way up:
“Why was there no warning? Is the radar-net offline?”
“The distortion came out of nowhere,” Deputy Olafsson said. “And the meteoroids shooting through it show no sign of stopping anytime soon.” In a worried voice, he added: “Sir, we think it’s a white worm.”
“I’m a diplomat by training, Canutus, not an astrophysicist—what the devil is a white worm?”
“In theory it’s a phenomenon created by the collapse of a supernova with a glut of overcharged quarks at its core. It has properties of a black hole on one end and a worm hole in the middle—which means it can tunnel through spacetime itself. By firing rays of gravitation out of its front orifice, it’s able to capture objects the size of small planets, pull them all the way through its body, and shoot them out its supercharged rear orifice.” (Deputy Olafsson was using the word “orifice” instead of “anus” because he thought “anus” sounded too rude to be saying to his boss’s face. Both words are correct, so let’s not make a thing of it.)
“But are we talking about a living creature?” the governor said. “Is it alive?”
“No, sir, it’s a force of nature. Which means it’s even more menacing, because it has no mind to control it. Making the danger random and unpredictable.”
The elevator doors opened, depositing the three men in the command center, the very cockpit of lunar operations. The “orb.”
“Can we patch into a live feed off a probe?” the governor asked after glancing at the picture on the big screen, which wasn’t enough information to tell them what they needed to know.
“Already working on it, sir!” a technician fiddling at switches called out. “There!”
The picture of the solar system was replaced by a live shot in black-and-white, relayed by a series of unmanned probes moving outward from Earth. Now they all saw it: a massive, wormy-shaped, silvery-white celestial object near Saturn was expelling large quantities of meteoroids, a veritable tsunami of space-rocks, or a rocky space-tsunami if you prefer.
Suddenly there was a bit of luck: the Red Planet’s gravity grabbed the meteoroids as if in an invisible net and swung them away from the general direction of Earth.
“Mars gravity caught it!” shouted Deputy Olafsson.
All eleven people in the command center exhaled in relief. Until Mars’s lopsided outer moon, Deimos, locked onto the white worm’s rocky spew with its own gravitational force and swung it back in Earth’s general direction again. Eleven people gasped: this was now a major emergency.
“Overlay a course projection,” ordered Governor Tang.
The technician worked at his panel, causing a line of dots to come up on-screen, predicting the meteoroids’ trajectory: not only the Moon, but Cosmopolis itself!
“My God,” whispered the governor, “it’s heading straight for us.”
“Sir, there’s not enough time to get our rockets aloft,” Deputy Olafsson explained, “and too many meteoroids to shoot down even if we tried.”
“Sound the alarm,” instructed the governor. “Get everyone underground.”
“What about my son?” said Mr. Barnett. “And the other children on the fieldtrip?!”
“They’re outside the trajectory zone. They’re safer than we are.”
Indeed, at this very moment, Byron was not only safe but quite factually jumping for joy, moving in great, low-gravity leaps down a lunar ridge and toward Rattlesnake Rill. José Ignacio, flying beside him, was berating him by intercom:
“This is madness!”
“Why am I sure that no adult in the solar system would agree with that?!”
“Why am I sure I don’t care?!”
They hit the canyon floor. Rattlesnake Rill was only fifty yards away: they made a dash for it. But the rill was less sensational up-close than from a distance: it was, in fact, only a four-foot-deep trench in the ground. The rattlesnakeiness of it disappeared altogether when you were standing in it, as Byron was doing now. He had no intention of admitting his disappointment to José Ignacio, however. Then something caught his eye which all of a sudden made this mini-expedition worth the trouble. From where he was standing, he had a view straight to the bottom of the canyon wall, and there, dead ahead, he saw a shadowy nook in the rock that gave every indication of being the entrance to a cave.
“José Ignacio, do you see what I’m seeing?”
This time the robot had no trouble spotting what Byron was looking at. “No more cliffs, no more caverns, no more caves!” he said. “You promised your mother! I was there! I heard you say it!”
“No caves on EARTH! I didn’t say anything about caves on the MOON! Lunar spelunking was not discussed, ergo was not prohibited! Do you know nothing about the law?!”
Byron leapt out of the rill and made a run for the canyon wall. José Ignacio went after him, trying to stop him with every argument that his logic board could generate. But Byron’s mind was already made up. They arrived in under a minute at the nook in question, which as Byron had suspected and as luck would have it was, in point of fact, the entrance to a cave.
“I’m going in,” Byron said.
“Stop or I’ll shoot!” warned José Ignacio.
Ignoring him, Byron snapped the built-in flashlight off his spacesuit, turned it on, and took a step into the cave.
José Ignacio zapped him from behind with a voltage-ray. Byron turned around and stepped back out of the cave’s mouth to say:
“You’re losing juice, old chap: I barely felt that.”
“And you’re losing brain function, old kook! This is demented! It’s too dangerous!’
“I welcome danger! I send danger a telegram that says where to meet me! When we see each other, I run up and give danger a hug!”
“I thought you spat in danger’s face.”
“Listen: you can either wait for me here where it’s ‘safe’ or come in with me where it’s fun! But either way, I’m not leaving this perfectly good cave unexplored!”
José Ignacio sighed vividly before giving in and following Byron inside. Had they looked up before going forward, they would’ve seen the incoming flood of meteoroids, now mere moments from reaching Cosmopolis. But they didn’t look up, so they had no idea.
They weren’t the only ones out of the loop. Back in Central Dome, colonists were fleeing to the sound of alarms going off; but up above the panic, way up in the very apex of the dome, in the secluded aerie, Xing-Xing and Taji were enjoying each other’s company, oblivious to the commotion below. They were seated in the aerie’s titanium rafters, right up against the super-tempered glass separating them from starry space. This meant they were also at least two hundred yards from the ground below—well out of range of the alarm bells.
“You can’t resist me, can you?” Taji said, playing out the flirty fun that had been going on between them all morning. “That’s why you brought me up here. To get me alone.”
“I brought you here to show you a scenic spot,” Xing-Xing said. “You’re a new citizen of the Lunar League, I’m just offering a little Lunarian hospitality.”
“On a related point: you never answered my question about going out with me tonight. It’s Saturday morning. Date night’s only eight hours away. You’re taking a huge risk by not locking me in.”
“My life won’t come to an end if I don’t go out tonight.”
“But your life might really start if you do.”
Xing-Xing’s jaw dropped at Taji’s interpersonal daring. But before she could comment, Taji dared even more:
“I have an idea. I’ll give you a kiss right now, and depending on whether you like it, you can rule me in or out for tonight.”
“Hmmmmm,” Xing-Xing said, with a very long “mmmmm” at the end—as if she were weighing the pros and cons of it.
“But I mean, if you don’t want a test kiss from me,” Taji said, “that’s fine too. I know the dos and don’ts of dating. And I certainly don’t want a ‘do’ if you’re thinking ‘don’t.’ ”
Xing-Xing had to admit to herself that she found this boy ridiculously irresistible. Or possibly irresistibly ridiculous. Either way, she couldn’t deny that she liked him. “Well,” she said, “since I’m already being hospitable … I guess … sure, why not.”
She leaned in to give him a better angle to kiss her by; but to get close enough he still had to wrap his plastic wings around her, which they both found quite pleasant. Then, very gently, he pressed his lips to hers. It was going along well for several seconds, until Xing-Xing suddenly pulled back.
“I felt a tremor.”
“That’s what all the girls say.”
Taji smiled; Xing-Xing did not. And that’s when a meteoroid the size of a watermelon smashed through the roof of Central Dome not twenty yards from the aerie. Taji’s wings were sucked right off his back and went flying straight out the hole. The vacuum-effect yanked at Taji too, pulling him out of the rafters. But he grabbed hold of a metal beam ten yards from the hole into open space and clung tight.
“Just hang on!” shouted Xing-Xing over the din of rushing air. She leapt off the aerie and dove straight down.
“Xing-Xing! Where are you going?! This is not a good time to break up with me!”
Pulling out of her dive at the last possible second, Xing-Xing landed beside a goo-gun on the floor of the dome and leapt into the gunner’s seat. She flicked open the canon’s control box and, using its tiny joystick, swiveled the massive corkscrew-shaped barrel upright. She aimed through the crosshairs and fired.
A stream of gooey sealant in bright metallic purple shot from the cannon and didn’t stop shooting until Xing-Xing released the trigger. Her aim was perfect: the goo whizzed past Taji at the top of the dome and struck the hole into space, sealing it instantly.
Xing-Xing leapt up from the gunner’s seat, flapped her wings hard, and made for the apex. When Taji saw her coming, he let go of the beam he was clinging to. Xing-Xing caught him neatly, flipping him onto her back.
“Hold on tight!” she said.
“Oh, I’m gonna! Don’t you worry!”
Xing-Xing nosedove with Taji hanging onto the straps to her wings—while behind and above them the dome was struck by a dozen new meteoroids puncturing holes in the super-thick glass and letting oxygen flood out. Taji could see below them that the dome was otherwise evacuated: they were the only ones left. They escaped by darting through the last open tubeway. Xing-Xing slapped the door’s control lever as she flew past, sealing the tubeway behind them and closing off Central Dome for good.
From the command center atop the control tower, Deputy Olafsson was appraising the devastation through a hyper-scope. He turned to Governor Tang to report:
“Sir, there’s damage on every dome. Central Dome has been hit hardest.”
“What about the air supply?” asked Mr. Barnett, thinking like an engineer.
“The oxygen processing station is housed in a bunker fifty feet beneath Central Dome,” said the governor. “Only an atomic event could break it open. These aren’t the bad old days when every diamond-prospector’s hut needed its own cannister of O2 for atmosphere. The system is centralized and secure.”
“Sir!” called a technician. He was pointing to one of the smaller screens in the room. Its live feed of the West Landing Zone showed the tsunami of space-rocks striking the rocket-ships parked upright there. Rather than watch it electronically, everyone rushed to the glass walls of the orb to look out and see it with their own eyes.
They now beheld a sight so hideous that it was as if all their worst fears had been packed together into a single hyper-nightmare: rocket-ships were tumbling into one another like dominoes in slow motion, most exploding on impact. The Biarritz actually blasted off, its atomic engines having been triggered accidentally by an adjacent blast. It shot up high over the lunar surface; but pilot-less, it began to veer into an arc, then tipped over and headed back down.
Gaining velocity in descent, the rogue rocket crashed into Central Dome, its atomic engines roaring. From there it barreled straight into the grass covering the dome’s floor, piercing the ground and penetrating multiple layers of rock and concrete. The rocket’s nose cone broke through the roof of the bunker fifty feet down, the very bunker that housed the colony’s oxygen processing station.
But The Biarritz didn’t stop there. With its engines petering out though not yet dead, it drilled into the facility and nudged up against the oxygen processors and their connected pumps. A moment of calm followed in which it seemed that the situation might have stabilized. Then The Biarritz blew up.
The atomic detonation cracked open the dome above, sending the dome’s contents twirling into space. Whole hillocks and long strips of the bike path, all the cutlery from the food court, bicycles, plastic wings, palm trees, lawn chairs, a thousand sushi rolls made for a wedding reception that was now going to have to be postponed, somebody’s guitar, the bronze statues of Laika, Neil Armstrong, Sfiso Mahlobo, and Moonbeard Marc, the Space Gazelle Ice Cream sign from the soda shop, and ninety-six bags of frozen french fries were scattered to the stars: instant space-junk.
Up in the command center, still watching what was happening through a hyper-scope, Deputy Olafsson turned away from the shocking spectacle to consult a newly beeping monitor. Then he gave the governor the bad news:
“Sir, the oxygen processing station has been destroyed. Air circulation across Cosmopolis has ceased.”
All eyes in the room turned to Governor Tang. The tension was supreme and the anticipation unbearable. With a grim voice, the governor declared:
“Canutus, inflate the space-raft and issue the order for total lunar evacuation. We have to get everyone off the Moon.”