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James Axler - Outlanders - Devil in the Moon honeycombed by tunnels and
hollows shaped by un-equal cooling aeons ago."
' 'Cooling?'' Grant asked uneasily. ' 'Cooling down from what?"
Brigid said, "There are numerous theories about the origin of the Moon. One is
the fission theory in which part of the rapidly spinning Earth was flung off
to create the Moon. Another version of the fission theory stated that the Moon
originated from the Pa-cific Ocean."
Phüboyd nodded inside his helmet. His lips were creased in an approving smile.
"And here I'd pretty much convinced myself that the descendants of the war
were going to be as well-read as your average heavy-metal fan. I'm glad to be
proved wrong. Any-way, if the fission theory is correct, then there would have
been a lot of volcanic activity here."
Phüboyd turned the craft a few degrees to star-board. "Look over there, to the
left of the chasm. There's your evidence of volcanism."
Kane looked and saw nothing at first. Then light flashed, white and bright. It
was like sunlight reflect-ing from an immense, highly polished surface.
"Mare Frigoris," Phüboyd declared. "The Sea of
Ice. Pumice fused into glass. In a couple of hours, it'll be like a giant
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mirror."
The flitter-gig returned to its original course, arrow-ing between a pair of
conical peaks. On the other side lay the grounds of the mine. Huge, dirty
ore-processing structures shouldered the open sky, skel-etal frameworks
stretched this way and that between gargantuan storage bins. In the starlight,
the mine looked oddly unfinished, like the foundations of a city someone might
get around to building one day.
Philboyd slowed their speed and went into a ver-tical descent. He set the
flitter-gig down on a flat con-crete pad opposite a flat-roofed building
marked Op-erations. There were no windows, only an exterior air lock bearing
the warning Authorized Space Command Personnel Only.
In a tense voice, Brigid asked, "You expect us to moon-walk over there?''
"Why not?" Philboyd asked as he throttled down the engines. "The flitter-gig
wasn't pressurized and you survived the flight, didn't you? Besides, it's only
one-sixth of a g. You won't go floating out into space."
Inside his helmet, Kane heard an almost impercep-tible grunt from Grant, even
over the whisper of ox-ygen feeding from the twin tanks on his back. During
the flight from Manitius he had heard the soft clicking of an apparatus that
cleared out the toxic residues in the recycled air.
All four people wore EVA suits, routinely known in old NASA vernacular as
extravehicular activity suits.
At least Marian referred to it as vernacular, re-ferring to a time when
tramping around in the hard vacuum of the Moon's surface was something not
lightly done.
In actuality, the one-piece garments were not too different from the
environmental suits found in
Cer-berus redoubt. They weighed about thirty pounds apiece and consisted of
ten layers of aluminized
My-lar insulation interlaced with six layers of Dacron and tough outer facings
of Kevlar to absorb micromete-orites.
The EVA suits had been designed to create micro-environments, pressuring the
skin so the pressure of the body would not rupture blood vessels. They even
came equipped with a sealed water dispenser and sip-ping tube attached to the
inner wall of the helmet. Their heads moved freely within them. The
Plexiglas visors instantly adjusted to different light levels, and all four
people communicated over UTEL
radio sys-tems.
Philboyd slid open the canopy and he, Grant, Kane and Brigid climbed out. Kane
looked toward the looming storage bins and repressed a shiver. Seem-ingly
perched atop a lunar peak like a ball was the blue-
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Moon.html (102 of 127) [12/28/2004 3:52:10 PM]
James Axler - Outlanders - Devil in the Moon white globe of the Earth.
A couple of years before he had seen a satellite view of Earth. Now as then he
was filled with awe and a sense of despair. Earth seemed shadowy, dim, with a
lost look to it as though the universe had for-gotten about it long ago. He
saw large areas of the planet lying under an impenetrable belt of dust and
debris. In some places, the belt looked like a dense blanket of boiling,
red-tinged fog. The clouds were the last vestige of skydark, the
generation-long nu-clear winter.
The four people trekked the fifty yards to the air lock. Kane kept stifling
the impulse to take Brigid's gloved hand as they walked over the open lunar
ter-rain, and his steps kept lifting him into ungainly hops.
He and Grant had left their Copperheads in the flitter-gig, but their Sin
Eaters were strapped around their forearms. Their weight provided a degree of
ballast, though the actuators weren't as sensitive through the layers of their
EVA suits.
The lock system wasn't particularly complex Philboyd punched in a series of
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digits on the keypad beside it, and two gasketed irises slid open. They
stepped inside a narrow cubicle as the lock closed behind them. They faced a
metal disk surrounded by a thick collar gleaming like copper. A light fixture
above it flashed green and the metal disk rolled to the left, into a slot
inside the collar.
Philboyd announced,' 'It's safe to take off your hel-mets."
They all stepped out of the cubicle, disengaging the seals and lifting the
helmets off their heads. They looked around the room, which once had served as
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