The New Guy In Moon Base Twelve Read online

The New Guy in Moon Base Twelve

  Copyright 2012 by Tom Lichtenberg

  Chapter One

  They weren't exactly the crew President Spud Goodman had in mind when he first announced his intention to establish a permanent base on the moon just so the Chinese wouldn't get there first. Goodman was not just a Republican, he was an ultra-Republican, the very distillation of antique notions of values and morality. If there was an old-fashioned bias to be had, Goodman had it in spades, so to speak. He loathed everyone not Caucasoid, Christoid and Heteroid, which was just enough bigotry to swing him the particular swing states he needed to get into office. Once ensconced, he set about launching his bold, grandiose (and micro-managed) ideas as if the presidency was a game of Frisbee golf, just tossing stuff out there to see what happened. Moon Bases One and Two were among the first eagles to land.

  The settlements had to be staffed, of course, and according to Goodman's precise calculations the chosen crew were meant to remain there for at least ten years at a stretch. He formed a commission to determine the bestest and mostest qualified persons to meet his audacious requirements. The commission worked very diligently, took their task quite seriously, and eventually came to the conclusion, after numerous conferences and meetings, that the proper candidates would need to meet four essential criteria; they would have to be bisexual, atheist, socialist vegetarians. Their reasons were multiple and their logic quite unassailable.

  Since there were to be relatively few persons on the base, bisexuality would be a highly adaptive quality, ensuring the most possible partnerships among the population. Atheism was considered extremely desirable due to the tendency of religious persons to argue amongst themselves as to which of their fairy tales was the least incoherent, and which of their imaginary friends the least prickly. Also, the landscape of the moon was one of the most god-forsaken places in which it humans had ever attempted to live, and it would help to have no god to blame this forsakenness on. Socialist, even Communist, was highly regarded in a similar way because of the limited quantity of goods that would be distributed, and the lack of quality of same. People with a will and desire to share and share alike on principle would get along much better than those perpetually looking out for number one. Vegetarianism, the final consideration, was perhaps the most obvious. There was to be no meat on the moon, excluding cannibalism, of course. The settlers would be growing their own food hydroponically and developing additional nutrients chemically.

  The commission decided not to tempt fate by letting the President in on these requirements right away; in fact they managed to keep it all secret for just long enough to staff and propel the original crew of twenty six souls into space. Among them were fifteen men and eleven women, and together they were commissioned to constructed exactly two moon bases within three hundred yards of one another. The commission arranged for everything and everyone to get shipped off all at once. They didn't have a lot of confidence in the staying power of this particular program. They had the feeling, which was later borne out to be prophetic, that the President would quickly lost interest and drop all funding altogether. The commission did not want to leave the bases either half-staffed or half-equipped, and so it was that in one single week, more than twenty launches carrying men, women, tools and equipment blasted off, along with an assortment of potentially useful odds and ends that seemed to have randomly occurred to one commission member or another. Thus there were volleyball nets but no volleyballs, pool cues but no tables, decks of cards, chewing gum, battery-powered flashlights without the right kind of batteries, and many other surprises which made those early days feel like Christmas-in-a-foster-home for the crew, who from the start referred to themselves, only half-jokingly, as Loonies.

  They worked hard in those early days. Quarters were cramped in the rockets so they were in a hurry to build Moon Bases One and Two. In the end, those buildings resembled cube farms more than anything else, with each resident allotted an eight by twelve gray area to decorate in their own idiosyncratic way. The cubes had ten foot walls but no ceilings, gaps but no doors, and were laid out in four-by-three grids, twelve per base. Each base also had a large, open common area so that the cubicle region occupied about a third of the total space. The rest was filled with tables hosting lab equipment, kitchen-type gadgets and setups, two conference rooms apiece for more private communications, and large common seating areas for general meetings and entertainment. The buildings themselves were basically metal boxes all around with heavy doors and flat roofs dotted by occasional skylights.

  They were not much to look at, but after the first, hectic few months, there was no one to look. There had been twenty-four hour video coverage of the camp, and for a time an audience on Earth that was interested in the goings-on up there - the busy construction, the novelty of the thing - but as they got to know the personalities of the crew, and as the crew settled in to a life of everyday routine, the audience lost interest, as did the President, and soon there were only a handful of die-hard Moon Base addicts watching their daily activities. The truth was the settlers were rather boring. They all got along pretty well with each other, and made a point of avoiding conflict at every turn. And then the ratings had fallen through the floor in a hail of protest and outrage once Americans fully discovered the root belief systems and sexual proclivities of the Loonies. They didn't mind the bisexuality too much - at least the girl-on-girl stuff was fairly popular for a time - and they could deal with the whole sharing thing as long as it was couched in Jesus-like terms. It was the Atheism that broke the whole show.

  The crew had been advised to keep that topic on the down low, but what could you expect from wall-to-wall continual coverage? People are people, after all, and the subject kept coming up in emails from the folks back home in the U.S.S.A. Could they see Heaven? Was there any audible harp music up there? And once someone down below caught on that nobody ever ever saw anybody praying up there, that's when all Hell broke loose and the demands came quick and fast to return those sinners and exchange them for more acceptably Believing settlers.

  It was far too late, though. Contracts had been signed and decisions made. The Loonies Show was subject to boycotts and the producers to all sorts of threats, so after a time, though the cameras remained turned on for the sakes of history and security, the scheduled broadcasts ceased, and the Loonies were left alone to themselves.

  The biggest problem they had was not what one might think. They had no issues of supplies - they were able to generate all the food they needed and had enough oxygen supply to last until they were able to produce more on their own. All in all they enjoyed a decent standard of living. They had no basic survival issues - moon life wasn't all that difficult given the proper equipment and pressurization. The latest advances in these areas provided them with very light-weight garments and headsets, and the bases were quite secure. They had no interpersonal problems at all in those earliest days. Without leaders or any political structure, they managed to hash things out pretty well amongst themselves. The biggest problem, indeed the only major one, was their utter lack of a job description. There was nothing they absolutely had to do.

  It seemed obvious, in retrospect. There is nothing you can do on the moon that you can't do as easily - more easily, in fact - on Earth. There was no really good reason for anyone to even be there, aside from President Goodman's desire to beat the Chinese. As it turned out, the Chinese had already realized the utter pointlessness of such an undertaking and had no plans whatsoever to do so. Yet there were certainly some things that could be done, and some of the crew set about doing them. One band of four crew members - the Farmers - had ambitions to cultivate the lunar surface, to develop a new kind of agriculture that mi
ght serve well on other planets. A group of three known as the Drillers began a mining operation to extract ice or water and whatever else they might find beneath the Moon's surface. The communications expert, an extremely tall woman by the name of Fydia Sooth, had her own pet project, seeking out extraterrestrial life forms by means of certain encoded broadcasts which often sounded suspiciously like Disco. These were not idlers, although there was a man by the name of Pete who, in the same of scientific research, began a project to see how long he could sleep, working his way up to several weeks at a stretch.

  Then there were the Builders, the crew who had originally done most of the work of putting together the bases. Left without any specific tasks they began to plan construction of an extra base, made of spare parts and whatever they could find. These ad hoc architects scavenged whatever bits of rocket and rubble were lying around, and eventually put together a sort of structure which came to be known affectionately as Moon Base Twelve. No one inhabited the thing. It was thought that no one could, that it was not really suitable for human residence. It was just an ongoing pile of junk thrown together by a group of bored men and women, intended primarily to keep them from going entirely out of their minds. And so it was quite a surprise one day when one of the builders, a gentle, long-haired man by the name of Galen Harbid, found The New Guy living in Moon Base Twelve.

  Chapter Two

  The fact that he was living in Moon Base Twelve was not nearly as shocking as the fact that he was even there at all. No one had come to the moon since that first exciting week already so long ago that most of the settlers had effectively lost track of the time. They had remained in occasional contact with mission control back home, calling every once in a while just to make sure that everyone they knew was still alive and to reassure the folks back home that no one among them had cancer or anything. It would be a shame if they did, because there were no plans or money to send any rocket ships to bring anybody home. It was in the contract. Get sick up there and too bad, deal with it. Live and learn about death and dying on the moon. Someone would have to file a report and that was about it.

  Also, no one had seen or heard an arrival. Maybe they'd all been asleep at the time, but even so, where was The New Guy's space ship now? There wasn't any sign of one. None of this occurred to Galen Harbid at first. He didn't know what he was thinking. One morning he'd gotten up and meandered over to Moon Base Twelve. It was a sort of habit. As a Builder, he was used to tinkering with the structure. He'd tighten a bolt here, loosen another one there, hammer out some folds in the corrugation, or move a little pile of junk from one corner of the unit's small room to another. He'd gone through the double-lock doors, removed his breathing tube, and started scouting around for anything to do. The New Guy was sprawled out on the red foam couch, snoring loudly through his open mouth. He was a regular sized guy, maybe five ten, a hundred and eighty-some pounds. He had short, straight dark brown hair, brown eyes and a decent crop of stubble around his face. He was wearing a t-shirt and jeans. The guy was nothing out of the ordinary; he could have easily passed for one of several other guys in the place. In fact, Galen thought at first it was Hardin Harwell, one of the Farmer crew, and assumed that Hardin had had a falling out with his regular cube-mate, the green-eyed botanist, Gayle Henderson.

  That was okay. It wasn't normal, but it was acceptable, for a non-Builder to appear in Builder territory. There were no rules preventing that. Galen was prepared to step lightly so as not to wake up his fellow Loonie, and was tip-toeing past the couch when The New Guy awoke and sat up, looking startled himself. Galen froze in place as he realized he did not know who this person was. The first words out of his mouth were,

  "Do what have a who?"

  The New Guy regarded him suspiciously and scratched his chin for a few moments as Galen stood and gaped.

  "Oh, that's okay," The New Guy assured him. "Everything is A-okay."

  "A-okay?" Galen echoed the sentiment.

  "Tip-top," said The New Guy, nodding vigorously in agreement with himself, and attempting what he must have thought was a smile. To Galen it looked like the guy's teeth were slickly sliding off his face.

  "Okay," Galen murmured as it occurred to him that he had no idea how to handle this situation. Thinking he'd be much better off yelling for help and running away, he back-tracked toward the door, put his breathing piece back into his mouth, crept out the double-locked doors and took off leaping, as only a moon-resident can do, and in a dozen or so hefty bounds found himself back home in Moon Base One, breathlessly ranting about his encounter to the first people he saw hanging around.

  These included Demaryius Ballantyne, the master chef, Rolanda Lin, the medicine woman, and Harriet Karat, one of the Driller's water specialists. They'd been clustered in the kitchen area discussing the genetics of a new mushroom the botanical team had come up with when Galen burst onto the scene, and they all sat calmly as he sputtered through several physical contortions and raspy attempts to emit a rational sound. These were people especially selected for their relative blandness and mild dispositions, which was one of the reasons why the television series had gone so badly.

  The commission had had the opportunity to cash in on the process. They could have hosted a tournament of sorts, like those for singing talents or barbecue cook-offs. They could have held a nationwide lottery and picked ordinary clowns at random for the settlement, but they’d taken their job seriously. If a whole book had been written about the planning and execution of their mission, it would have been a dull one indeed, consisting mainly of meetings with psychologists and sociologists and former astronauts discussing the incredible boredom of space and the kind of people likely to be able to handle a scenario once and best described as 'sitting in a tin can, far above the world'.

  The most surprising thing, perhaps, was how well they had done their job. Blue ribbon committees like theirs were not famous for doing things right, but so far the people they'd stuck in those boxes on the moon were doing pretty well.

  "And he's, and he's, and and he's ..." Galen sputtered. His audience of three looked at him expectantly, and then exchanged glances among themselves as Galen, for the ninth or tenth time, ran out of gas.

  "Sounds like he's trying to say there's a new guy over on Moon Base Twelve," Demaryius remarked.

  "That was my interpretation, too," Rolanda agreed, "although it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense."

  "We should check with Maya," Harriet added. Maya Nguyen was the official liaison and diplomat, the one who was most frequently in contact with mission control. She lived in Moon Base One, but worked most days over in Moon Base Two. Harriet tapped a code into the two-way transmitter on her vest and at the responding crackle, said,

  "Maya? If you wouldn't mind popping by for a moment. Something's come up."

  "Right-ho," came Maya Nguyen's voice through the yellow, penguin-shaped plastic tab.

  "Maya's coming," Harriet said to Galen, to calm him down. He was still standing there before them, shaking uncontrollably, and now seeming to enter into a very uncharacteristic panic mode.

  Chapter Three

  This was not like Galen, not at all, was Maya's first thought when she arrived on the scene, and she would know. She and Galen had been monogamous socio-sexual partners since the early days of the mission. Somehow they'd hit if off right away and kept on hitting it off every day. She had never believed in 'love at first sight', and Galen was not even what she would have called 'her type'. He was too tall, for one thing, at six foot two compared to her five foot tininess. He was kind of shaggy and messy, with his long brown hair and scratchy full beard. He dressed poorly - not that she was some kind of fashion maven herself, but she did value neatness at least. He was also Caucasian and she'd never had a thing for that kind before. But all those negatives were washed out by the friendly look in his eyes and the sound of his quiet laughter, and Galen had a way of blinking that somehow went straight to her heart. He reminded her of a pet rabbit she had treasured as a child.
For his part, Galen was fascinated by Maya's endless theories and speculations on the very topics that interested him most - aliens, music, and stars - and her way of getting along just fine with everyone and everything all the time.

  "Honey?" Maya approached cautiously. Galen was twitching in a most peculiar manner. She had never seen him like this before. He blinked at her as she put her arms around him and felt his heart pounding away like never before. Her presence certainly helped. In a short time he was able to breathe again, and, relaxing, let her lead him to a sofa where he sat down. She sat beside him and patted his arm while the other three remained attentive, if a little annoyed by the ongoing interruption. Harriet in particular wanted to get back to the subject of the mushroom, which could be grown in different shapes and colors, and added an interesting sense of variety to almost any meal. She was a foodie, and in her eyes Demaryius was a Kitchen God. An expert herself in nothing but water and deep wells, of which she was at least a leading one, Harriet was easily impressed by people who knew about more than just one or two things.

  "He's over there taking a nap," Galen was saying when Harriet snapped herself out of her fungal reverie.

  "What did you say his name was?" Maya said.

  "Dang, I can't believe I forgot to ask," Galen threw up his hands in disbelief at his own stupidity.

  "I doubt he's going anywhere anytime soon," Demaryius put in.

  "But what's he doing there?" Rolanda directed her question at Maya. "Do you know anything about this?"

  "No, nothing at all," Maya replied. "Mission Control never said anything about a new guy. Fact is, as you all know, there's nothing planned coming or going for another seven years at least."

  Everyone nodded and shrugged. They'd known what they were getting into when they first signed up. None of them were in it for the money, which wasn't going to be much anyway. They weren't in it for the publicity or potential book sales once they got back home, assuming they ever did. It was pretty clear from the start that after the first wave of excitement had passed, they'd be pretty much on their own to do their best to wile away the time and make something out of nothing if they could. This was their focus now, in each of their individual ways.