Harvest Moon by William Barton Of his latest tale, William Barton tells us, “The twentieth century holds a lost world, a real SF world dominated by a familiar dream of science and space, a world in which you and I might have lived, if only the mortals who ruled the world of that long-gone age hadn’t been fools. This is one version of that lost world, whose bright dream was killed off by those accursed men.” * * * * I was the first man to walk on the Moon back in 1965. Nine years ago, and I’m still here, still walking. I’d been one of the four men aboard Gemini M-1, dropping down out of a dead black sky on the western edge of that little scrap of mare in the northern half of the bottom of Crater Riccioli, the first of ten manned flights that would set up the Army’s Moonbase over the next two years. Project Harvest Moon, the best damned impossible dream a moonstruck boy ever had, a dream I’d been dreaming at least since I was in high school, during the War, and first heard about those mysterious “flying gas mains,” the V-2s falling on London. Oh, hell, earlier than that. Since I was a kid in the thirties, reading Amazing, Astounding, all that crap, wondering if we’d see a man in space before I was dead from old age (or maybe dead a whole lot sooner in the war everyone watching the Munich Olympics said was sure to come). Well, the War ended when I was eighteen years old, and when I was thirty-seven, I flew to the Moon, the only civilian aboard the first ship to land, getting my seat through politics, more than anything else. President Nixon told them to pick a civilian, so they picked me, not so much because I was such a hotshot planetary geologist, as because I was the one detailed to teach them geology, and the astronauts already knew me pretty well. Let’s take Bill. He’ll be okay. So. Thirty-seven years old, wife, teenage son, two button-cute little daughters, and there I was headed for two years’ duty on the Moon, flying up with the base commander, some major from the Corps of Engineers, and a warrant officer pilot who’d’ve been flying Hueys in Vietnam if he hadn’t been going to the Moon. All right. You’ve slept as long as you’re going to. Might as well get up and get started. I stayed still, hands behind my head laced in stiff, sweaty hair, staring up through almost-dark at the criss-cross of wires eight inches from my nose, holding up the bunk above me. They’d been a wonderful improvement when the first dormcans set down. For the first few months, we’d slept in the landers, supposedly in our acceleration chairs, though most of us just curled up on the deck. Nobody sleeps well on the Moon. Oh, maybe me, maybe not. I spend most of my time outdoors, twelve thousand hours over the past decade, the EVA Champion of the Universe, and that makes you tired enough, sometimes. I pulled the little curtain open and slid out of my rack, the same sort of bunk you see on a nuclear submarine, bare feet on the deck, yawning, stretching, hands pressed against the upper bulkhead. Christ, I smell skunky again already. And it’s five more days before my turn in the shower comes round. Somebody in one of the other curtained-off bunks farted softly in his sleep. Great. I got a set of coveralls out of my drawer, one of six new ones I had left, Dunbar neatly stenciled on every breast pocket, pulled on my felt deck shoes, turned and opened the tunnel hatch, crawled in and pulled it shut behind me. Swell. Light’s burned out again. Wonder if there’s any more left? How long ‘til the next consumable supplies lander shows up? Two months? Weird prickle in the back of my neck: I’ll be gone by then. Pushed open the other hatch and crawled into the messhall. It was just another dormcan, with a kitchenette and some tables, bright fluorescent tubes lining the overhead. My old buddy Meade Patterson called out, “‘ bout time you gotcher ass out of bed, Dunbar! Getcher coffee so we can get going!” “Up yours.” That got me the usual bird. Hell, you got to wonder about a man in his forties still wants everyone to call him “Meat.” I said, “You’re just pissed off because I’m senior geologist on the planet.” He snickered, “Not for long, ole buddy.” Oh, yeah. Right. Time to hurry. * * * * Outside, it was a bright and sunshiny day, daylight now seventy hours old, sun well above the eastern horizon, grazing-incidence reflection gone from the landscape, though the shadows were still quite long, black fingers and smears reaching away from the rubble of Moonbase. I pushed up my gold sunvisor, so I could get a true-color look at the mooncar, and was struck by the mess we’d made of the place in only ten years. Not just the humps of buried habitats, but the trash and tracks, footprints of forty men churning up charcoal dust year in and year out. And lander stages. As far as the eye could see from ground level, lander stages. Since 1965, counting the three crashes, there had been over a hundred landings here, mostly setting down south and east of the Moonbase site, out on the mare part of the crater floor, ten manned, the rest supplies and hardware. I was always glad the crashes had been just supplies, fresh fruit, fresh underpants, whatever. Imagine having to bury someone here? Imagine that. Buckling vinyl straps over the instrument payload and the supply canisters we’d be dropping off at the observatory, Meat said, “Damn! These EVA suits are the best thing ever to come out of fucking Apollo!” I got in the left-hand seat and started clipping carabineers to D-rings on my suit. “How about the only thing?” Lot of bitterness about Project Apollo on the Moon. Seemed like a good idea at the time. The Army’s Project Harvest Moon would use the Gemini M/C configurations to deliver men and hardware starting in ‘65. Meanwhile NASA would have the time to get the kinks out of Apollo, so we could use its five-man reentry capsules and three-man landers, would get quarterly crew rotations started in 1967. Meat got in beside me and started hooking up. “Oh, these mooncars are pretty good. Lot better than that Stirling jeep we started out with. That fucker never worked right!” I remember when they sent up film of the fourth and last Saturn C-5 exploding in the blue sky over Florida, big, bright, orange-and-black puff-ball blossoming above the pretty white clouds, bits and pieces showering into downtown Miami, starting all those fires. I remember thinking we should’ve known better, when Apollo 1 burned on the pad in January ‘65, killing those three NASA astronauts, but Apollo 2 flew just fine come August, and in September, me and three other guys climbed on top of a Titan IIIZ and set out for the Moon, with no way home. They’d sent us some tape, too, of the Senate hearings in 1970, when the Army was authorized to develop Gemini R and start bringing us back. So, meanwhile, I’ve been on the God-damned Moon for nine years. Meat said, “Let’s get going. Sooner we can get up there, the sooner Carl can finish talking and we can be on our way. Jeez. That boy is nuts!” I slid the hand controller forward and the mooncar started rolling, wire tires flexing gently over the bumpy ground. “Oh, he’s all right. You know Drake told me the both of them wanted to skip their rotation and stay on here even after the Gemini R comes on line?” “Both of ‘em are nuts.” “Maybe so.” Meat reached over and tried to clap me on the shoulder, but the Apollo suits weren’t flexible enough to support that much arm rotation, so he patted my steering hand instead. “Well, you won’t have to wait, buddy-boy! You’ll be on your way home with the Russkis, this time next week.” My eyes went up to the black sky reflexively. Nothing. Bright sun. Blue sliver of Earth hanging perpetually seven degrees above the middle of the western horizon. But Almaz 9 had been up there for two weeks already, the fourth manned Russian spacecraft to fly around the Moon, the first one to launch atop their new UR900 superbooster, with one of those big Oryol landers aboard. I think maybe the government wouldn’t have agreed to a Russian “rescue mission,” but Gemini R-1, the first unmanned test, had come down in the middle of Riccioli, making no attempt to stop, leaving nothing but a big, bright star pattern in the dust. R-2 had worked, only a month ago, actually bringing home two tons of Lunar samples, but by then it was a done deal. Meat said, “Ole Wild Bill, by this time next month, you’ll be home, docs’ll be through with you, and that old wife of yours’ll be so sore she’ll need a wheelchair!” Old wife. As if we had nine years of catching up to do together? By this time, we were clear of the last layer of lander stages and space junk, and I slid the controller forward toward its stop. Meat said, “Hey, take it easy, Wild Bill! You crash our asses, neither one of us’ll ever smell pussy again.” I pulled back a little, though not before we took a good four-wheel bounce that made my teeth snap together, and said, “Meat, I ever tell you how much I hate being called ‘Wild Bill’?” He laughed, “About ten million times, Wild Bill.” * * * * From the observatory at Site 5, fifteen klicks up into the north ringwall mountains, you get a good view back downslope to the mare floor of Riccioli. From up here, Moonbase looks like someone emptied a car trash bag full of old soda cans and crap all over a parking lot. I remember when they’d faxed up an illustration of the moonbase the Russians said they were going to build over at Mare Smythii, we’d all gotten a good laugh. So neat and orderly and clean. Compared to it, ours looked like some redneck trailer park. The observatory itself was just a mess of hardware, antennas, and telescopes scattered around on the dirt, no blue sky, no atmosphere, no reason for a dome. The pressurized part was just a hump with an airlock doo...
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