by the  public-somewhere  or  other  I've  got  a
parchment  from  some  civic  organization  commending  me  for
excellence in journalism for one of them--was it the Kiwanis or
the Elks?--but the ground had been prepared for over a year  by
the  P.R. firm Walter had hired at his own expense. By the time
of Silvio's assassination sentiment was growing  for  a  public
display.  You  couldn't call it a celebration, it hadn't been a
proud day in human history. It had to include  a  memorial  for
the  billions  of dead, that was certain. The tone of the thing
should be one of sadness and resolve, all seemed to  agree.  If
you  asked them what was being resolved--the recapture of Earth
and extermination of the Invaders, is  that  what  you  had  in
mind?--you  got an uncomfortable shrug in reply, but dammit, we
ought to be resolute! Hell, why not?  Resolution  doesn't  cost
anything.
     But  the  commemoration  was going to. It kept snowballing
with nary a voice raised against it (Walter's fine hand again),
until by the time the Great Day arrived every  pisspot  enclave
in Luna was holding some kind of shindig.
     Even  in  Texas, where we avoid as much outside news as we
can, they were having a barbecue as big as  Alamo  Day.  I  was
sorry I was going to be missing it, but I'd promised Brenda I'd
go with her, and besides . . . Cricket was going to be there.
     Yes,  dear  hearts,  Hildy  was  in love. Please hold your
applause until I can determine if the feeling is mutual.
     #
     All the Eight Worlds were commemorating the day; Pluto and
Mars had actually created a  permanent  yearly  holiday  to  be
known as Invasion Day, and the betting was that Luna would soon
follow suit. And Luna, being the most populous planet, hated to
follow  any  of  the seven worlds in anything and so, being the
most populous planet and the Refuge of Humanity as well as  the
FrontLine  Planet  and  the Bulwark of the Race--not to mention
the First to Get Our Asses Whipped if the Invaders ever decided
to continue what they started . . . Luna being  all  that,  and
more,  had  determined to put on the biggest and bestest of all
the eight festivals, and King City being the  largest  city  in
Luna  made  it  seem  a  natural  site for the planet-wide Main
Event, and Armstrong Park being over twenty times the  size  of
the  vanished  Walt  Disney  Universe, it just seemed to follow
that the thing ought to be held there, and that was where I was
going that fine Solar Evening when all I really  wanted  to  do
was  stroll  down  Congress  Street, Cricket on my arm, and eat
cotton candy and maybe bob for apples.
     And hey, sure  it  wasn't  a  celebration,  but  what's  a
holiday without fireworks?
     That's  the only reason I'd agreed to go, Brenda's promise
that I could see the whole  thing  a  safe  distance  from  the
madding  crowds.  The  fireworks  themselves didn't scare me; I
liked fireworks, hated crowds of strangers.
     The tube trip almost killed me, though. We'd  deliberately
decided  to  start  out  quite  early to avoid the crush on the
tubes, but what one genius can think up, another can duplicate,
so the trains were already jammed with  people  who'd  had  the
same idea. Worse, these were people planning to rough it on the
surface,  away  from  the eight gigantic temporary domes set up
for the show, so they  had  brought  their  camping  gear.  The
aisles  and  overhead racks were piled high with luggage carts,
beer coolers, inflatable five-room tents, and 3.4 children  per
family.  It got so bad they started hanging small children from
the overhead straps, where they dangled and  giggled.  Then  it
got  worse.  The train stopped taking passengers long before it
arrived at Armstrong. My stop was three short of the park,  and
I soon saw there would be no point in fighting my way out, so I
rode  it  to the end of the line--gaped in horror at the masses
already assembled there--was disgorged by an irresistible human
tide, then re-boarded and rode it  back,  empty,  to  Dionysius
Station.
     Where  I  sat  down  on a bench, my suit and picnic hamper
beside me, and just shook for a  while,  and  watched  about  a
dozen  human sardine cans rumble by in one direction and a like
number return. Then I grabbed my gear and went up the stairs to
the surface.
     After returning from my  frolics  with  the  Alphans,  I'd
found  my  suit on the foot of my bed in my cabin. I don't know
who brought it there. But I didn't  want  it  anymore,  so  one
Saturday  I  took it back to the shop, meaning to have them fix
the faceplate and sell it on consignment. The salesman took one
look at the hole and before I had a chance  to  explain  I  was
being ushered into the manager's office and he promptly fainted
dead  away.  None  of  them  had  ever  seen a broken faceplate
before. So I shut up, and soon found myself  in  possession  of
their  top-of-the-line  model,  plus  five  years  of free air,
courtesy Hamilton's Outdoor Outfitters. I made no  demands  and
was asked to sign no disclaimers; they simply wanted me to have
it.  They're probably still chewing their knuckles, waiting for
the lawsuit.
     I climbed into this engineering wonder, and  that  special
new-suit  aroma  went  a  long  way toward calming me down. I'd
worried it  might  stir  entirely  different  associations--how
about  that cute point-of-view shot of a piece of the faceplate
tumbling away?--but instead the low whirs and hums and the pure
luxurious feel of the thing did wonders. Too bad they won't let
you wear suits in the tube; with this on, I could have  handled
anything.
     Checking  the  pressure seals on the hamper, I walked into
the lock and out onto the surface.
     #
     "You been waiting long?" I asked.
     "Couple hours," Brenda said.
     She was leaning on the side of  her  rental  rover,  which
she'd  driven  all  the  way  from  a  suburb of King City, the
nearest place you could rent one. I  apologized  for  being  so
late,  told her of the nightmare in the train, how I wished I'd
come with her instead of "saving time" by tubing out.
     "Don't worry about it," she said. "I like it out here."
     I could already tell that, mostly by looking at her  suit.
It  was  a  good  one,  had no rental logo on it, and though in
perfect shape, showed signs of use it  couldn't  have  acquired
unless she regularly spent time in it. Also by the easy way she
stood  and  moved  in  it,  something  most Lunarians never get
enough suit time to achieve.
     The rover was a good one, too. It was a pickup model,  two
seats side by side, a flat bed in back where I tossed my hamper
along  with  her  much  bigger pile of things. They have a wide
wheelbase to compensate for being so  top-heavy  with  the  big
solar panel above, which swings to constantly present itself to
the  sun.  The  sun  being almost at the horizon just then, the
vehicle was at its most awkward, with the panel hanging out  to
the  right  side,  perpendicular  to the ground. I had to crawl
over Brenda's seat to get to mine because the panel blocked the
door.
     "I forget," I said, as I settled myself in the open  seat.
"Will we be going into the sun to get there?"
     "Nope.  South  for a while, then we'll have the sun at our
backs."
     "Good." I hated riding behind the panel. It's not  that  I
didn't  trust  the  autopilot;  I just liked to see where I was
going.
     She told the rover to giddyup, and it did, right along the
broad, smooth highway.  Which  is  why  we'd  chosen  Dionysius
Station  in  the  first place, because it's right on one of the
scarce surface roads on Luna, which is not a  place  where  the
wheeled  vehicle  was  ever a primary mode of transport. People
move on elevators, escalators,  beltways,  maglev/tube  trains,
the  occasional  hoverbus.  Goods  go  by  the  same ways, plus
pneumomail tubes, linac free-trajectory, and  rocket.  Recently
there'd been something of a fad in wheeled surface rovers, two-
and  four-wheeled,  but they were all-terrain and quite rugged,
no roads needed.
     The road we were on was a relic from  a  mining  operation
abandoned  before  I  was born. From time to time we passed the
derelict hulks of ore carriers at the side of the road, mammoth
things, not looking much different from  the  day  they'd  been
stripped  and  left there. Some economic vagary of the time had
made it a better idea to actually smooth out a road surface for
them. Then the road had been used for another half  century  as
the  conduit  between King City and its primary dumping ground.
It was still glass-smooth, and quite a novel way to travel.
     "This sucker moves right along, doesn't it?" I said.
     "It'll reach three  hundred  kay  on  the  straightaways,"
Brenda  said.  "But  it's  gotta  slow way down for the curves,
especially ones to the left."  That  was  because  the  rover's
center  of gravity was at its worst at sunrise and sunset, with
the big panel canted on its  side,  she  explained.  Also,  the
banking  of  the road was not great, and since we were going to
be staying out after dark, she'd had to  carry  ten  batteries,
which  added a lot to our inertia and could easily make us skid
off the road, since the tire traction wasn't as much  as  she'd
prefer. She told me all this with the air of someone who'd done
this  many  times  before,  someone  who  knew  her  machine. I
wondered if she could drive it.
     I got my answer when we turned off the road, and she asked
if I minded. Actually, I did--we're not  used  to  putting  our
lives   in  other  people's  hands,  only  into  the  hands  of
machines--but I said I didn't. And I needn't have worried.  She
drove  with  a  sure  hand,  never  did  anything stupid, never
overcontrolled. We took off across the plains toward the rising
rim of Delambre, just becoming visible over the horizon.
     When we reached the bottom of  the  slope  a  Black  Maria
landed  in front of us, blue lights flashing. A cop got out and
came over to us. He must have been bored, since he  could  have
used his radio, or simply interrogated our computer.
     "You're entering a restricted area, ma'am," he said.
     Brenda  showed  him  the  pass  Liz  had  given her and he
examined it, then her.
     "Didn't I see you on the tube?" he asked, and she said  he
might  have,  and  he  said sure, you were on the such-and-such
show, now how about that? He said he'd loved it  and  she  said
aw,  shucks,  and  by  the  time he finally let us go he'd been
flirting so outrageously I'm convinced  we  hadn't  needed  the
pass  at  all.  He  actually  asked  for her autograph, and she
actually gave it.
     "I thought he was going to ask for  your  phone  code,"  I
said, when he'd finally lifted off.
     "I  thought  I was going to give it to him," she said, and
grinned at me. "I keep thinking I ought to give guys a try."
     "You could do better than that."
     "Not since you Changed." She jammed in the throttle and we
sprayed dust behind us as we charged up the rounded rim of  the
crater.
     #
     Delambre isn't a huge crater like Clavius or Pythagoras or
any number  of  celestial bullet holes on the farside, but it's
big enough. When you're standing on the rim you can't  see  the
other side. That's plenty big for me.
     Still, it would look just like a hundred others except for
one thing: the junkyard.
     We  re-cycle  a lot of things on Luna. We have to; our own
natural  resources  are  fairly  meager.  But  we're  still   a
civilization  driven  by  a market economy. Sometimes cheap and
plentiful power and the low cost of boosting bulk raw materials
in slow orbits combine to make it just too  damn  much  trouble
and  not cost-effective to sort through and re-process a lot of
things. Fortunes have been lost when  a  bulk  carrier  arrives
with  X  million  tonnes  of  Whoosisite  from the mines on Io,
having been in secret transit for thirty  years  disguised  and
listed  as  an Oort comet. Suddenly the bottom falls out of the
market for Whoosisite, and before you know it  you  can't  give
the  stuff  away  and  it's being carted out to Delambre by the
hundred-tonne bucketload. To that add the  twenty-thousand-year
half-life   radioactives  in  drums  guaranteed  to  last  five
centuries. Don't forget to throw  in  obsolete  machines,  some
cannibalized  for  this  or that, others still in working order
but hopelessly slow and not worth  taking  apart.  Abandon  all
that  stuff  out  there,  and  salt  in that ceramic horror you
brought home to Mom from school when you were eight, that stack
of holos you kept for seventy years  and  can't  even  remember
who's  in  them,  plus similar treasures from millions of other
people. Top it with all the things you can't  find  a  use  for
from every sewage outflow in Luna, mixed with just enough water
so  it'll  flow through a pipe. Bake on high for fourteen days,
freeze for fourteen more; continue doing that for  two  hundred
years, adding more ingredients to taste, and you've created the
vista that met us from the lip of Delambre.
     The  crater's  not  actually  full, it just looks that way
from the west rim.
     "Over there," Brenda said. "That's where I said  I'd  meet
Liz."
     I saw a speck on the horizon, also sitting on the rim.
     "How about letting me drive?" I asked.
     "You  can drive?" It wasn't an unreasonable question; most
Lunarians can't.
     "In my wild youth, I drove  the  Equatorial  Race.  Eleven
thousand  klicks,  very little of it level." No point in adding
I'd blown the transmission a quarter of the way through.
     "And I was lecturing you on how to  handle  a  rover.  Why
don't you ever shut me up, Hildy?"
     "Then I'd lose half of my amusing stories."
     I  switched  the  controls over to the British side of the
car and took off. It had been many years since I'd  driven.  It
was  lots  of fun. The rover had a good suspension; I only left
the ground two or three times,  and  the  gyros  kept  us  from
turning  over.  When  I  saw  her gripping the dash I throttled
back.
     "You'd never make a race driver. This is smooth."
     "I never wanted to be a race driver. Or a corpse."
     #
     "I feel like a Girl Scout," I told Brenda as I helped  her
spread out the tent.
     "What's   wrong  with  that?  I  earned  all  the  surface
pioneering merit badges."
     "Nothing wrong. I was one, too, but that was ninety  years
ago."
     She  wasn't nearly that far removed from scouting, and she
still took it seriously. Where I'd have  just  pulled  the  rip
cord  and  let  it  go  at that, she was a fanatic about saving
energy, and ran a line from the  rover's  solar  panel  to  the
tent's  power  supply,  as  if  the  reactor  wouldn't  last  a
fortnight on its  own.  When  the  tent  was  arranged  to  her
satisfaction  she  pulled the cord and it shuddered and flopped
as it filled with air, and in ten seconds we had  a  five-meter
transparent hemisphere . . . which promptly frosted up inside.
     She  got  on her knees and crawled into the iglootype lock
and I zipped it behind her to save her  squirming  around,  and
she told me this model had automatic zippers, so there had been
progress  since my childhood. She fiddled with the air controls
while I stacked blankets and pillows and thermoses and the rest
of our gear in the lock-got to get it well-packed,  don't  want
to  waste air by cycling the lock too much--then I stood around
outside while she brought it all in and got the temperature and
pressure and humidity adjusted. When I got in and took  off  my
helmet  it  was  still on the cool side. I wrote my name in the
frost like I remembered doing on  long-ago  camping  trips;  it
soon melted, and the dew was absorbed . . . and the dome seemed
to vanish.
     "It's  been  too  long,"  I said. "I'm glad you brought me
here."
     For once she knew exactly what I meant.  She  stopped  her
fussing  around  and  stood  with  me and we just looked around
without saying anything.
     Any beauty on Luna is going to be a harsh sort of  beauty.
There's  nothing benevolent or comforting to see anywhere--much
like West Texas. This was the best way to see  it,  in  a  tent
invisible  to  our  eyes,  as  if  we  were standing on a black
circular pad of plastic with nothing between us and vacuum.
     It was also the best time of day to see it; the Lunar Day,
I mean. The sun was very close to the horizon, the shadows were
almost infinitely long. Which helped, because  half  our  vista
was  of the biggest garbage dump on the planet. There's a funny
thing about shadows like that. If you've never seen snow, go to
Pennsylvania the next time they've scheduled it and  watch  how
snow  can  transform  the most mundane--even ugly--scene into a
magical landscape. Sunlight on the surface is like  that.  It's
hard and bright as diamond, it blasts everything it touches and
yet  it  does  no  damage; nothing moves, the billion facets of
dark and light make every  ordinary  object  into  a  hardedged
jewel.
     We  didn't  look  west; the light was too dazzling. To the
south we saw the rolling land falling away to  our  right,  the
endless  heaps  of  garbage to the left. East was looking right
out over Delambre, and north was the  hulk  of  the  Robert  A.
Heinlein, almost a mile of derelict might-have-been starship.
     "You  think  they'll  have any trouble finding us?" Brenda
asked.
     "Liz and Cricket? I wouldn't think so. Not  with  the  old
Heinlein over there. How could you miss it?"
     "That's what I thought, too."
     We   set  about  little  domestic  chores,  inflating  the
furniture, spreading a few rugs. She showed me how  to  set  up
the  curtain  that  turned  the  tent into two not-very-private
rooms, how to operate the little campstove. While we were doing
that, the show began. Not to worry; it was going to be  a  long
show.
     I  had  to admit the artistic director had done well. This
was to be a commemoration of the billions dead on Earth, right?
And at the latitude of  Armstrong  Park,  the  Earth  would  be
directly overhead, right? And if you start the show at sundown,
you'll  have a half-Earth in the sky. So why not make the Earth
the center and theme of your sky show?
     By fudging just a little you can begin the show  when  the
old  International  Dateline is facing Luna. Now picture it: as
the Earth turns, one by one the vanished nations of  Old  Earth
emerge  into the sunlight of a new day. And as each one appears
. . .
     We were bathed in  the  red  light  of  the  flag  of  the
Siberian  Republic,  a  rectangle  one hundred kilometers long,
hanging above us at a height sufficient to blot  out  half  the
sky.
     "Wow," Brenda said. Her mouth was hanging open.
     "Double  wow,"  I  said, and closed my own mouth. The flag
hung there almost a minute, burning  brightly,  then  sputtered
out. We hurried to get Brenda's boombox turned on, hung the big
speakers on each side of the tent, and were in time to hear the
opening  strains  of  "God Defend New Zealand" as the Kiwi flag
unfurled above us.
     That's how it was to be for eighteen hours.
     When Liz arrived she told us how it was done. The flag was
a mesh construction stuffed into a big container and blasted up
from one of the pyro bases, in  Baylor-A,  about  forty  klicks
south of us, and Hyapatia and Torricelli, to the east. When the
shell  reached  the right height it burst and rockets spread it
out and it was set afire by radio control. Neat.
     How do fireworks burn in a vacuum? Don't  ask  me.  But  I
know  rocket  fuels  carry  an oxidizer, so I guess it was some
chemical magic like that. However they did it, it  knocked  our
socks  off,  me  and Brenda, no more than fifty clicks from the
big firebase in Baylor, much closer  than  the  poor  hicks  in
Armstrong, who probably thought they were getting one heck of a
show.  And  who  cares  if,  from  our  vantage, the flags were
distorted into trapezoids? I sure didn't.
     Brenda turned out to be a fountain  of  information  about
the show.
     "They  didn't  figure it made sense to give a country like
Vanuatu equal time  with,  say,  Russia,"  she  said  (we  were
looking  at  the ghastly flag of Vanuatu at the time, listening
to its improbable national anthem). "So  the  major  countries,
ones with a lot of history, they'll get more of a pageant. Like
the Siberian Republic used to be part of some other country--"
     "The U.S.S.R.," I supplied.
     "Right.  Says  so  right here." She had a massive souvenir
program spread out before us. "So they'll  do  more  flags  for
that--the Tsarist flag, historical stuff--"
     "--and play the 'Internationale.'"
     "--and folk themes, like what we heard from New Zealand."
     They  were  telling  us  most  of that on a separate radio
channel, giving a  history  of  each  country,  pitched  at  an
illiterate  level.  I turned it off, preferring just the music,
and Brenda didn't object. I'd have turned off  the  television,
too-Brenda  had  pasted  a  big screen to the south side of the
tent--but she seemed  to  enjoy  the  scenes  of  revelry  from
Armstrong and all the other celebrations in all the major Lunar
cities, so what the hell.
     Get  out  an Earth globe and you'll quickly spot the major
flaw in the Earth-rotational program. For the first  six  hours
only  a  few  dozen countries will swing into view. Even if you
give the entire history of China and Japan, there's going to be
some gaps to fill, and how much can you say about Nauru and the
Solomon Islands? On the other hand, when dawn broke over Africa
and Europe the  pyrotechs  were  going  to  be  busier  than  a
onelegged man in an ass-kicking contest.
     Not to worry. When they ran out of flags, that's when they
trotted out the heavy artillery.
     From  the first appearance of that red ensign, the sky was
never dark.
     There were the conventional shells, starbursts in all  the
colors  of the rainbow. Without air to impede their flight they
could be placed with pinpoint  precision--one  thing  Lunarians
understand is ballistics. They were also perfectly symmetrical,
for the same reason.
     You  want  more? In the vacuum, it was possible to produce
effects never seen on Earth. Huge gas canisters could produce a
thin atmosphere, locally, temporarily,  upon  which  tricks  of
ionization   could  be  played.  We  were  treated  to  auroral
curtains, washes of color in which the entire sky  turned  blue
or  red  or  yellow,  then flickered magically. Shrapnel shells
filled the sky with spinning discs no bigger than a coin, which
were then swept by searchlights to twinkle as no stars ever had
on Luna, then exploded by lasers.
     Still not satisfied?  How  about  a  few  nukes?  Brenda's
program  said  there  would be over one hundred special fission
shells, an average of one every ten minutes for the duration of
the show. These were detonated in  orbit  and  used  to  propel
literally  thousands  of regular pyro shells into bursts over a
thousand klicks wide. The first one went off at the end of  the
Vanuatu  National Anthem, and it rattled our teeth, and then it
went on exploding, and exploding, and exploding. Glorious!
     And don't think I didn't  hear  that!  You're  complaining
that  sound  doesn't  travel in a vacuum. Of course it doesn't,
but radio  waves  do,  and  you  obviously  never  listened  to
Brenda's  top-of-theline  boombox  cranked  up  to full volume.
Those poor folks who watch fireworks in an atmosphere  have  to
wait  for  the  sound  to arrive, too, and they get a chance to
brace for it; we got it instantaneously, no warning, a flash of
hurting light and a ka-BOOOOOOOM!
     Sometimes wretched excess is the only thing that will do.
     #
     "They say this place is haunted."
     We'd just been treated to the national anthem of Belau and
its flag had faded from the sky (a big yellow circle on a  blue
field,  if  you're  keeping  score at home), and two things had
dawned on us. One, you need a  breather  from  wretched  excess
from  time to time, or it gets . . . well, wretched. Between us
we'd emitted not even one "wow" at the last three nukes, and  I
was  thinking  of suggesting we switch to Top 40 for an hour or
so. Somehow I thought I could survive missing  the  playing  of
Negara  Ku  (My  Country;  Mayalsia)  and Sanrasoen Phra Barami
("Hail to our King! Blessings on our King! Hearts and minds  we
bow/   To   Your   Majesty   now!"   words   by  H.R.H.  Prince
Narisaranuvadtivongs). And two,  Liz  and  Cricket  were  three
hours late.
     "Who's  they?" I asked, munching on a drumstick of Hildy's
Finest WesTex Fried Chicken. Hunger had overcome the demands of
politeness; Brenda had miked a few pieces, and  the  hell  with
Liz  and  Cricket.  I  was  eyeing the beer cooler as well, but
neither of us wanted to get too much of a head start.
     "You know," she said. "'They.' Your primary news source."
     "Oh, that 'they.'"
     "Seriously, though, I've heard from several people  who've
come  out  to  visit  the  old  Heinlein. They say they've seen
ghosts."
     "Walter put you up to this, didn't he," I said.
     "I've talked to him about it. He thinks  there  may  be  a
story in it."
     "Sure  there  is, but there's no need to come out here and
interview a spook. That kind of story, you  just  make  it  up.
Walter must have told you that."
     "He did. But this isn't your ordinary filler story, Hildy,
I mean it. The people I interviewed, some of them were scared."
     "Give me a break."
     "I've  been  coming out here and bringing a good camera. I
thought I might get a picture."
     "Come on. What do you think the Nipple's photo  department
is for? Dummying up just that kind of pic, that's what."
     She  didn't  say  anything  about  it  for a while, and we
watched several more ghost flags in the  sky.  I  found  myself
eyeing  the  Heinlein.  And  no,  I'm  not  superstitious, just
godawful curious.
     "Is that why you've been camping out so  much?"  I  asked.
"The story's not worth it."
     "Camping  . . . oh, no," and she laughed. "I've camped out
a lot all my life. I find if very . . . peaceful out here."
     Another long silence went by, or as silent as it could  be
with  nukes  exploding outside and her boombox turned down to a
low rumble. At last she got up  and  walked  to  stand  by  the
invisible plastic wall of the tent. She leaned her head against
it.  And  by  the  rockets red glare, she told me something I'd
have been a lot happier not hearing.
     "Ever since I met you," she began, "I've thought  I  could
tell  you  something I've never told anybody else. Not a soul."
She looked at me. "If you don't want to hear it, please say  so
now,  'cause  if  I  get  started I don't think I'll be able to
stop."
     If you could have told her to shut up,  I  don't  want  to
know  you.  I  didn't  need  this, I didn't want it, but when a
friend asks something like that of you, you say yes, that's all
there is to it.
     "Make it march," I said, and glanced at my watch. "I don't
want to miss the Laotian National Anthem."
     She smiled, and looked back out over the landscape.
     "When you first met me . . . well, later, that first  time
I  came out to Texas to see you, you probably noticed something
unusual about me."
     "You're probably referring to your lack of genitalia.  I'm
observant that way."
     "Yes. Did you ever wonder about it."
     Had  I?  Not much actually. "Ah . . . I guess I thought it
was something religious, or cultural,  something  your  parents
believed. I remember thinking it wasn't a nice thing to do to a
child, but not my business."
     "Yes.  Not  a nice thing to do. And it did have to do with
my parents. With my father."
     "I don't know a lot about fathers," I said,  still  hoping
she'd change her mind. "I'm like most; mom never told me who he
was."
     "I  knew  mine. He lived with me and my mother. He started
raping me when I was about six. I've never had the nerve to ask
my mother if she knew about it, I didn't even  know  there  was
anything wrong with it, I thought it was what I was supposed to
do."  Standing  there,  looking  out  at the surface, the words
spilling out of her but calm, calm, no hint of tears. "I  don't
know  how I learned it wasn't something my friends did, maybe I
started  to  talk  about  it  and  picked  up  something,  some
attitude, some beginning of horror, something that made me shut
up about it to this day. But it went on for years and I thought
about  turning him in, I know that's what you're wondering, why
didn't I do it, but he was my father and  he  loved  me  and  I
thought I loved him. But I was ashamed of us, and when I turned
twelve  I  went  and  had  .  .  . it . . . removed, closed up,
eradicated so he couldn't put it in me anymore, and I know  now
the  Minor's  Referee  who let me get it done in spite of dad's
objections had figured out what was going on because  she  kept
saying  I should bring charges, but all I wanted was for him to
stop. And he did, he never touched me from that day on,  hardly
spoke  to  me,  for that matter. So I don't know why it is that
some females prefer the company of other  females,  but  that's
why  for  me, it's because I can't deal with males, only when I
met you, well, not too long after I  met  you,  I  fell  badly,
madly  in  love  with  you. Only you were a boy, which drove me
crazy. Please don't worry about it, Hildy, I've  got  it  under
control,  I know there's things that just can't happen, and you
and me are one of them. I've heard you  talking  about  Cricket
and  I  ought to be jealous because she and I were making love,
but it was just for fun, and besides Cricket's a boy now,  too,
and  I  wish  you  all  the  happiness. So my secret's out, and
another one is I arranged it so you and I would be alone for  a
little  while  out  here,  the place I always come, always came
when I wanted to get away from him. This is rotten and  I  know
it,  but  I've thought about it a long time and I can live with
it. I won't cry and I won't beg, but I'd like to make  love  to
you  just  one time. I know you're hetero, everyone I've talked
to says that about you, but what I'm  hoping  is  it's  just  a
preference, you're a Changer, you've made love to women before,
but  maybe  it's  something you can't do when you're female. Or
maybe you don't want to or think it's a bad  idea,  and  that's
fine,  too.  I just had to ask, that's all. I know I sound real
needy but I'm not, not that way; I'll live either  way,  and  I
hope  we'll  still be friends, either way. There. I didn't know
if I'd have the guts to say it all,  but  I  did,  and  I  feel
better already."
     I  have  a short list of things I never do, and right near
the top is surrendering to emotional blackmail.  If  there's  a
worse  kind of sex than the charity fuck, I haven't heard about
it.  And  her  words  could  be  read  as  the  worst  kind  of
whipped-puppy  appeal and dammit, okay, she did have a right to
act like a whipped puppy but I hate whipped puppies, I want  to
kick  them  for  letting  themselves  be whipped . . . only the
words  didn't  come  out   like   that,   not   out   of   that
straight-backed,  dry-eyed  beanpole  over  there  against  the
blazing sky. She'd grown since I met her, and  I  thought  this
was  part  of  the  growth.  Why she'd picked me to unload on I
don't know, but the way she'd done it flattered me rather  than
obligated me.
     So  I told her no. Or would have, in a perfect world where
I actually follow my short list of things I never  do.  What  I
did  instead  was get up and put my arms around her from behind
and say:
     "You handled that very well.  If  you'd  cried,  I'd  have
kicked your butt all the way to King City."
     "I  won't  cry.  Not about that, not anymore. And not when
it's over."
     And she didn't.
     #
     Brenda had arranged for  our  moment  of  privacy  by  not
telling  me  Cricket had been assigned to cover the festivities
at Armstrong Park. After our little  romantic  interlude--quite
pleasant,  thanks  for asking--she confessed her ruse, and also
that he was going to play hooky after the first few  hours  and
should be arriving any minute, so let's get dressed, okay?
     I  can't  imagine why I worried about getting a head start
on Liz. She got a head start on all of us, drinking on her  way
out to Armstrong and all the way back, as if Cricket needed any
more causes for alarm.
     She  came  barreling across the dunes in a fourwheel Aston
Assbuster, model XJ, with  a  reaction  engine  and  a  bilious
tangerine-flake  paint  job.  This was the baby with four-point
jets for boosting over those little potholes you sometimes find
on Luna--say,  something  about  the  size  of  Copernicus.  It
couldn't actually reach orbit, but it was a near thing. She had
decorated  it  with  her  usual understated British good taste:
holographic flames  belching  from  the  wheel  wells,  a  whip
antenna  with  a  raccoon  tail  on  the  tip,  a chrome-plated
oversize skull sitting out front  whose  red  eyes  blinked  to
indicate turns.
     This  apparition  came  skidding  around  the Heinlein and
headed straight  for  us.  Brenda  stood  and  waved  her  arms
frantically  and  I had time to ponder how thin a soap bubble a
Girl Scout tent really was before Liz hit the brakes and  threw
a spray of powdered green cheese against the tent wall.
     She  was  out  before the fuzzy dice stopped swinging, and
ran around to the left side to unbelt Cricket,  who'd  strapped
himself tight enough to risk gangrene of the pelvis. She picked
him  up and stuffed him in the airlock, where he seemed to come
to his senses. He crawled  inside  the  tent,  but  instead  of
standing  he just hunkered there and I began to be concerned. I
helped him off with his helmet.
     "Cricket's a little under the  weather,"  Liz  said,  over
Cricket's  suit  radio.  "I  thought  I ought to get him inside
quick."
     I realized he was saying something so I put my  ear  close
to  his  lips  and  he was muttering I think I'm gonna be okay,
over and over, like a mantra. Brenda  and  I  got  him  seated,
where he soon regained some color and a passing interest in his
surroundings.
     We  were  getting  a  little  water into him when Liz came
through the lock, pushing a Press-UKennel in front of  her.  At
last  Cricket came alive, springing to his feet and letting fly
with an almost incoherent string of curses. No need  to  quote;
Cricket  wouldn't  be  proud  of  it, he feels curses should be
crafted rather than hurled, but he was too upset for that now.
     "You maniac!" he shouted. "Why the hell wouldn't you  slow
down?"
     "'Cause  you  told  me  you were getting sick. I figured I
better get you here quick as I could."
     "I was sick because you were going so fast!" But then  the
fight  drained  out  of  him and he sat down, shaking his head.
"Fast? Did I say fast? We came all the way from Armstrong,  and
I  think  she  touched ground four times." He explored his head
with his fingers. "No, five times, I count  five  lumps.  She'd
just  look  for  a  steep crater wall and say 'Let's see can we
jump over this sucker,' and the  next  thing  I  knew  we'd  be
flying."
     "We  were  moving along," Liz agreed. "I figure our shadow
ought to be catching up with us about now."
     "'Thank god for the gyros,' I said. You  remember  I  said
that? And you said 'What gyros? Gyros are for old ladies.'"
     "I  took  'em  off,"  Liz  told us. "That way you get more
practice using the steering jets. Come on, Cricket, you--"
     "I'm going back with you guys," Cricket said. "No way  I'm
ever riding with that crazy person again."
     "We only have two seats," Brenda said.
     "Strap  me  to  the  fender,  I don't care. It couldn't be
worse than what I just went through."
     "I think that calls for a drink," Liz said.
     "You think everything calls for a drink."
     "Doesn't it?"
     But before going out to bring in her portable bar she took
the time to release her--what else?-English  bulldog,  Winston,
from  the  kennel.  He  came  lumbering  out,  revising  all my
previous notions of the definition of ugly, and  promptly  fell
in  love with me. More precisely, with my leg, which he started
humping with canine abandon.
     It  could  have  spoiled  the  beginning  of  a  wonderful
relationship--I  like  a  little more courtship, thank you--but
luckily and against all odds he was well-trained, and  a  swift
kick from Liz discouraged him short of consummation. After that
he  just  followed me around, snuffling, mooning at me with his
bloodshot, piggy eyes, going to sleep every time I sat down.  I
must  admit,  I took a shine to him. To prove it, I fed him all
my leftover chicken bones.
     #
     Eighteen hours is a long time for a party, but there is  a
certain type of person with a perverse urge not to be the first
to  call  it quits. All four of us were that type of person. We
were going to stick it  out,  by  god,  right  through  to  the
playing  of  the  Guatemalan National Anthem ("Guatemala, blest
land, home of happy race,/ May thine altars profaned be never;/
No yoke of slavery weigh on thee ever/  Nor  may  tyrants  e'er
spit in thy face!").
     (Yes,  I  looked  at  the globe, too, and if you think the
whole planet was going to stay up six hours  for  the  national
hymn  of  Tonga,  you're crazier than we were. Tonga got in her
licks just after Western Samoa.)
     No one was going to catch up with Liz, but  we  were  soon
matching  her, and after a while Cricket even forgot he was mad
at her. Things got a bit hazy as the  celebration  wore  on.  I
can't actually remember much after the Union Jack blazed in all
its  Britannic  majesty. I remember that one mainly because Liz
had been nodding out, and Brenda got me and  Cricket  to  stand
when "God Save the Queen" began to play, and we sang the second
verse, which goes something like this:
     #

     O Lord our God arise,
     Scatter her enemies,
     And make them fall:
     Confound their politics,
     Frustrate their knavish tricks,
     On Thee our hopes we fix:
     God save us all!

     #

     "God save us all, indeed," Cricket said.
     "That's  the  most  beautiful  thing  I  ever  heard," Liz
sobbed, with the easy tears of the veteran drunk. "And I  think
Winston needs to go wee-wee."
     The  mutt  did  seem in some distress. Liz had given him a
bowl or two of Guinness and I, after the chicken bones  had  no
visible  effect,  had  plied  him  with  everything  from whole
jalapen~os to the bottlecaps from Liz's  home  brew.  I'd  seen
Cricket  slip him a few of the sausages we'd been roasting over
the holographic campfire. All in all,  this  was  a  dog  in  a
hurry.  He  was  running  in  tight  circles  scratching at the
airlock zipper.
     Turned out the monster was perhaps too  well  trained.  He
flatly refused to do his business indoors, according to Liz, so
we all set about stuffing him into his pressure suit.
     Before  long  we  were all reduced to hysterical laughter,
the sort where you actually fall on the floor and  roll  around
and  start  worrying  about your own bladder. Winston wanted to
cooperate, but as soon as we'd get his hind legs into the  suit
he'd start bouncing around in his eagerness and end up with the
whole  thing  bunched around his neck. So Cricket scratched his
back, which made the dog hold still and arch himself  and  lick
his  nose  and  we'd get his front legs in and maybe one of his
back legs, and then he'd start that reflexive back leg  jerking
they  do, and all was lost again. When we did get all four legs
into the right holes he thought it was  time,  and  we  had  to
chase  him  and hold him down to get his air bottle strapped to
his back, and at the last moment  he  took  a  dislike  to  his
helmet  and tried to eat it--this was a dog who made short work
of steel bottlecaps, remember--and we had to  put  on  a  spare
seal and test it before we finally screwed him in tight, shoved
him in the lock, and cycled it.
     Whereupon  we  laughed  even  harder  at  the spectacle of
Winston running from rock to rock lifting a leg  for  a  squirt
here  and  a  dribble there, blissfully unaware that it was all
going into the waste pouch through the hose Liz had fastened to
his doggie dingus with a rubber band. Yes, folks, I said doggie
dingus: that's the level of humor we'd been reduced to.
     #
     Later, I remember that Brenda  and  Liz  were  napping.  I
showed  Cricket  the wondrous curtain that turned the tent into
two rooms. But he didn't get it, and suggested we suit  up  and
take a walk outside. I was game, though it probably wasn't real
wise considering I spent almost a minute trying to get my right
foot  into  the  left  leg  of  my  suit.  But  the  things are
practically foolproof. If Winston could handle one, I reasoned,
how much trouble could I get into?
     So who should come trotting up as soon as  we  emerged?  I
might  have  been  in one sort of trouble right there, since he
seemed to feel all bets were off now that Liz was sleeping, but
after pressing his helmet to my leg and trying to sniff it  and
getting   no  results  he  sulked  along  behind  us,  probably
wondering why everything out here  smelled  of  plexi  and  dog
slobber.
     I  really don't want to sound too gay here, switching from
that time with Brenda to  the  hijinx  of  the  Queen  and  her
Consort. But that's the way it happened; you can't arrange your
life to provide a consistent dramatic line, like a film script.
It  had  rocked  me, and I had no notion of how to deal with it
except to hold Brenda and hope that  maybe  she  would  cry.  I
still don't.
     My god. The horror that exists all around us, un-noticed.
     I  said  something  like that to her, with the half-formed
feeling that maybe it would be good for her to approach it as a
reporter.
     "Did you ever wonder," I said, "why we spend all our  time
looking  into these trivial stories, when stories like that are
waiting to be told?"
     "Like what?" she said, drowsily. To be  frank,  it  hadn't
been  all  that great for me, it never is with homosex, but she
seemed to have enjoyed herself and that was the important part.
You can always tell. Something glowed.
     "Like what happened to you, dammit. Wouldn't you think, in
this day and age, that we'd have put that sort  of  .  .  .  of
thing behind us?"
     "I  hate  it when people say 'in this day and age.' What's
so special about it? As opposed to, for instance, the  day  and
age of the Egyptians?"
     "If  you  can  name even one of the Pharaohs I'll eat this
tent."
     "You're not going to make me mad, Hildy." She  touched  my
face,  looked  in  my  eyes, then nestled against my neck. "You
don't need to, don't you see that? this is the first  and  last
time we'll ever be intimate. I know intimacy frightens you, but
you don't need--"
     "It does not fr--"
     "Besides, give me another, oh, eighty-three years and I'll
recite every Pharaoh from Akhenaton to Ramses."
     "Ouch."
     "It  was  in the program book. But this day and age is the
only one I know right now, and I  don't  know  why  you  should
think  it's  any different from the day and age you grew up in.
Were there child molesters back then?"
     "You mean the early Neolithic? Yeah, there were."
     "And you  thought  the  steady  march  of  progress  would
eliminate them any day now."
     "It was a foolish thought. But it is a good story."
     "You've  been  away from the Nipple too long, jerk. It's a
terrible story. Who'd want to  read  a  depressing  story  like
that?  I  mean,  that  there's still child molesters? Everybody
knows that. That's for sociologists, bless 'em. Now one  story,
one  really  gruesome one, that's news. My story is just a stat
in the Sunday Supplement grinder; you can put it  on  file  and
run it once a year, they'll all have forgotten it by then."
     "You sound so much like me it's scary."
     "You know it, babe. People read the Nipple to get a little
spice  in  their  lives.  They  want to be titillated. Angered.
Horrified. They don't want to  be  depressed.  Walter's  always
talking  about  The  End Of The World, how we'd cover it. Hell,
I'd put it on the back page. It's depressing."
     "You amaze me."
     "I'll  tell  you  what.  I  know  more  movie  stars  than
everybody  else  in  my  school put together. They call me, the
minor ones, anyway. I love my work. So don't tell me about  the
important stories we ought to be covering."
     "That's why you got in the business? To meet celebrities?"
     "Why did you get in the business?"
     I  didn't  answer  her then, but some vestigial concept of
truth in media forces me  to  say  that  hob-nobbing  with  the
glittering people may have had something to do with it.
     But  it  really was amazing the changes a year had wrought
in my little Brenda. I didn't think I liked it. Not that it was
any of my business, but that's never stopped me in the past. At
first I blamed the news racket itself, but thinking about it  a
bit  more  I  wondered  if maybe that injured little girl, that
oh-so-good little girl who'd had herself sewed up  rather  than
do  what  the  nice lady suggested and turn daddy in to the bad
people . . . I wondered if she might actually teach cynical old
Hildy a thing or two about the bad old world and how to get  by
in it.
     "I'm sorry about not bringing Buster."
     "Huh? What's that?"
     "Luna to Hildy, come in Hildy, over."
     "Sorry,  my  mind  was  wandering." It was Cricket, and we
were walking together on the surface. I even  remembered  going
through the lock.
     "I  know  I  said I'd bring her so you could meet her, but
she put up a big fuss  because  she  wanted  to  go  with  some
friends to Armstrong, so I let her."
     Something  in  his voice made me suspect he wasn't telling
the whole truth. I thought maybe he hadn't argued as hard as he
might have. The only thing I really knew about his daughter was
that he was very protective of  her.  I'd  learned,  through  a
little  snooping,  that  none  of his coworkers at the Shit had
ever met her; he kept work and family strictly segregated.
     Which  is  not  unusual  in  Lunar  society,  we're   very
protective  of  the little privacy we have. But we'd known each
other as man and woman for not even a week at that  point,  and
already  there  had  been a series of these signs that he . . .
how should I put it? . . . was reluctant to let me deeper  into
his  life. To put it another way, I'd been tentatively plucking
at the daisy of devotion, and most of the petals were coming up
he loves me not.
     To be fair, I was un-used to being in love. I was  out  of
practice at doing it, had never been adept at it, was wondering
if I'd forgotten how to go about it. The last time I had really
fallen, as they say, had been a teen-age crush, and I'd assumed
lo  these eighty years that it was an affliction visited solely
on the young. So it could be that I wasn't communicating to him
the tragic, hopeless  depth  of  my  longing.  Maybe  I  wasn't
sending  out  the  right signals. He could be thinking, this is
just old Hildy. Lot's o' laffs. This is probably just  the  way
she is when she's female, all gooey and cow-eyed and anxious to
bring me a hot cup of coffee in the morning and cuddle.
     And  to  be brutal . . . maybe I wasn't in love. It didn't
feel like that distant adolescent emotion, but hardly  anything
did;  I wasn't that person any more. This felt more solid, less
painful. Not so hopeless, even if he did come right out and say
he loved me not. Does this mean it wasn't love?  No,  it  meant
I'd keep working at it. It meant I wouldn't want to run out and
kill myself . . . bite your tongue, you stupid bitch.
     So  was  this the real turtle soup, or merely the mock? Or
was it, at long last, love? Provisional verdict:  it  would  do
till something better came along.
     "Hildy, I don't think we should see each other anymore."
     That  sound  is all my fine rationalizations crashing down
around my ears. The other sound is of a knife being driven into
my heart. The scream hasn't arrived yet, but it will, it will.
     "Why do you say that?" I thought  I  did  a  good  job  of
keeping the anguish out of my voice.
     "Correct  me if I'm wrong. I get the feeling that you have
. . . some deeper than usual feelings about  me  since  .  .  .
since that night."
     "Correct you? I love you, you asshole."
     "Only  you  could  have put it so well. I like you, Hildy;
always have. I even like the knives  you  keep  leaving  in  my
back, I can't imagine why. I might grow to love you, but I have
some problems with that, a situation I'm a long ways from being
over yet--"
     "Cricket, you don't have to worry--"
     "--and  we won't get into it. That's not the main reason I
want to break this off before it gets serious."
     "It's already--"
     "I know, and I'm sorry." He sighed, and  we  both  watched
Winston  go haring off after some vacuum-loving bunny rabbit of
his own imagination, somewhere in the vicinity of the Heinlein.
Only the top part of the immense  ship  was  in  sunlight  now.
Sunset  at  Delambre  came  later  than at Armstrong. There was
still enough light reflected from the upper hull for us to  see
clearly, not the blazing brightness of full day, though.
     "Cricket . . ."
     "There's no sense hiding it, I guess," he said. "I lied to
you. Buster  wanted to come, she'd like to meet you, she thinks
my stories about you are funny. But I don't want  her  to  meet
you.  I  know  I'm  protective  of her, but it's just my way; I
don't want her to have a childhood like mine, and we  won't  go
into that, either. The thing is, you're going through something
weird,  you must be or you wouldn't be living in Texas. I don't
know what it is, don't want to know, at least  not  right  now.
But I don't want it to rub off on Buster."
     "Is that all? Hell, man, I'll move tomorrow. I may have to
keep teaching for a few weeks till they can get a new--"
     "It wouldn't do any good, because that's not all."
     "Oh, goody, let's hear more of the things wrong with me."
     "No  jokes, for once, Hildy. There's something else that's
bothering you. Maybe it's tied up with your  quitting  the  pad
and moving to Texas, maybe it isn't. But I sense something, and
it's  very ugly. I don't want to know what it is . . . I would,
I promise you, if not for my child. I'd hear you out,  and  I'd
try  to  help. But I want you to look me in the eye and tell me
I'm wrong."
     When a full minute had gone by and no eye contact had been
made, no denials uttered, he sighed again, and put his hand  on
my shoulder.
     "Whatever it is, I don't want her to get mixed up in it."
     "I see. I think."
     "I don't think you do, since you've never had a child. But
I promised  myself  I'd  put  my own life on hold until she was
grown. I've missed two promotions because of that, and I  don't
care.  This hurts more than that, because I think we could have
been good  for  each  other."  He  touched  the  bottom  of  my
faceplate  since  he  couldn't reach in and lift my chin, and I
looked up at him. "Maybe we still could be,  in  ten  years  or
so."
     "If I live that long."
     "It's that bad?"
     "It could be."
     "Hildy, I feel--"
     "Just go away, would you? I'd like to be alone."
     He nodded, and left.
     #
     I  wandered for a while, never getting out of sight of the
bubble of light that was the tent, listening to Winston barking
over the radio. Why would you put a  radio  in  a  dog's  suit?
Well, why not.
     That  was the kind of deep question I was asking myself. I
couldn't seem to turn my mind to anything more important.
     I'm not good at describing the painful feelings. It  could
be  that  I'm  not  good at feeling them. Did I feel a sense of
emptiness? Yes, but not as awful as I might have expected.  For
one thing, I hadn't loved him long enough for the loss to leave
that  big  a  cavity.  But more important, I hadn't given up. I
don't think you can, not that easily. I knew I'd  call  on  him
again,  and  hell,  I'd  beg, and I might even cry. Such things
have been known to work, and Cricket does have a heart in there
somewhere, just like me.
     So I was depressed, no question. Despondent? Not really. I
was miles from suicidal, miles. Miles and miles and miles.
     That was when I first noticed a  low-grade  headache.  All
those  nanobots in that cranium, you'd think they'd have licked
the common headache by now. The migraine has gone  the  way  of
the dodo, true, but those annoying little throbbing ones in the
temple  or  forehead  seem beyond the purview of medicine, most
likely because we inflict them on ourselves; we want  them,  on
some level.
     But  this  one  was different. Examining it, I realized it
was centered in the eyes, and the reason was something had been
monkeying with my vision for quite some time. Peripherally, I'd
been seeing something, or rather not seeing something,  and  it
was  driving  me  crazy. I stopped my pacing and looked around.
Several times I thought I was on the track of something, but it
always flickered away. Maybe it  was  Brenda's  ghosts.  I  was
practically  touching the hull of the famous Haunted Ship; what
else could it be?
     Winston came bounding along, leaping into the air, just as
if he was chasing something. And at last I saw it,  and  smiled
because  it  was  so  simple. The stupid dog was just chasing a
butterfly. That's probably what I'd seen, out of the corner  of
my eye. A butterfly.
     I  turned and started back to the tent (the dog), thinking
I'd have a drink or two or three (was chasing) or, hell,  maybe
get really blotto, I think I had a good excuse
     a butterfly
     and  I turned around again but I couldn't find the insect,
which made perfect sense because we weren't in Texas,  we  were
in  Delambre  and there's no fucking air out here, Winston, and
I'd about dismissed it as a drunken whimsy when  a  naked  girl
materialized  out  of  very thin air and ran seven steps--I can
see them now, in my mind's eye, clear as  anything,  one,  two,
three,  four,  five,  six,  seven,  and then gone again back to
where ghosts go, and she'd come close enough to  me  to  almost
touch her.
     I'm  a  reporter. I chase the news. I chased her, after an
indeterminate time when I was as capable  of  movement  as  any
statue in the park. I didn't find her; the only reason I'd seen
her at all was the very last rays of the sun reflected from far
overhead,  not much more light than a good candle would give. I
didn't find the butterfly, either.
     I realized the dog was nudging my leg. I saw a  red  light
was blinking inside his suit, which meant he had ten minutes of
air  left,  and  he'd  been  trained to go home when he saw the
light. I reached down and patted his helmet, which did  him  no
good  but  he  seemed  to  appreciate  the thought, licking his
chops. I straightened and took one last look around.
     "Winston,"  I  said.  "I  don't  think  we're  in   Kansas
anymore."

        =*= =*= =*= =*=

        CHAPTER TWENTY








     Ezekiel  saw  the  wheel.  Moses saw the burning bush. Joe
Smith saw the Angel Moroni, and  every  electro-preacher  since
Billy  Sunday  saw  a  chance at good ratings in prime time and
more money than he could lift.
     Hayseed farmers, asteroid miners and chronic drug  abusers
have  seen Unidentified Flying Objects and little guys who want
to see our leaders. Drunks see pink elephants  and  brontosaurs
and   bugs   crawling  all  over  everything.  The  Buddha  saw
enlightenment and Mohammed must have seen something,  though  I
was  never  clear  just  what  it  was. Dying people see a long
tunnel full of light with all the people they hated while  they
were alive standing at the end of it. The Founding Flack knew a
good thing when he saw it. Christians are looking to see Jesus,
Walter  is  looking  for a good story, and a gambler is looking
for that fourth ace  to  turn  up;  sometimes  they  see  these
things.
     People  have  been seeing things like that since the first
caveman noticed dark shadows  stirring  out  there  beyond  the
light  of  the  campfire, but until the day of the Bicentennial
Hildy Johnson had never seen anything.
     Give me a sign, O Lord, she had been crying, that I  might
know Thy shape. And behold, the Lord sent unto her a sign.
     A butterfly.
     #
     It was a Monarch butterfly, quite lovely in its orange and
black, quite ordinary at first glance, except for its location.
But upon  closer  examination  I  found  something on its back,
about the size of a gelatin capsule, that looked  for  all  the
world like an air tank.
     Yes,  dear ones, never throw anything away. You don't know
when you might need it. I'd had no use for my optic holocam for
quite a  while,  since  the  Texian  isn't  equipped  to  print
pictures. But Walter had never asked me to give it back and I'd
not  gone  to  the bother of having it removed, so it was still
there in my left eye, recording everything  I  saw,  faithfully
storing  it all until capacity was exhausted, then wiping it to
make way for the new stuff. Many a wild-eyed prophet before  me
would have killed to have a holocam, so he could prove to those
doubting  bastards he'd really seen those green cocker spaniels
get out of the whistling gizmo that landed on the henhouse.
     Considering the number of cameras made between the Brownie
and the  end  of  the  twentieth  century,  you'd  think   more
intriguing pictures would have been taken of paranormal events,
but  look for them-- I did--and you'll come up with a bucket of
space. After that, of course, computers got so  good  that  any
picture could be faked.
     But  the  only  person  I  had to convince was myself. The
first thing I did, back in the tent, was  to  secure  the  data
into  permanent storage. The second thing I did was to not tell
anybody what I'd seen. Part of that  was  reporter's  instinct:
you  don't  blab  until  the  story's nailed down. The rest was
admission of the weaknesses flesh is heir to: I hadn't been the
soberest of witnesses. But more importantly . . . this  was  my
vision.  It  had  been  granted  to  me.  Not  to Cricket, that
ingrate, who'd have seen it if he'd said he loved me and thrown
his arms around me and told me what a knuckle-headed dope  he'd
been.  Not  to Miss Pulitzer Prize Brenda (you think that, just
because I gave her the big story, I wasn't  jealous?  You  poor
fool, you). Just me.
     And  Winston. How could I have thought that gorgeous hound
was ugly? The third thing I did back in the tent was give  that
most  sublime  quadruped  a  pound  of  my  best  sausage,  and
apologize for not having anything better--like a Pomeranian, or
a Siamese.
     #
     We're not  talking  about  the  butterfly  now.  That  was
amazing, but a few wonders short of a nonesuch.
     It  was  an  air  tank on the insect's back. With suitable
enlargement I could make out tiny lines going from  it  to  the
wings. The images got fuzzy when I tried to find out where they
went.  But  I could guess: since there was no air for it to fly
in, and since it seemed to be flying, I  deduced  it  was  kept
aloft  by  reaction  power, air squirting from the underside of
its wings. Comparing this specimen to one mounted in a museum I
noted  differences  in  the  carapace.  A  vacuum-proof  shell?
Probably.   The   air   tank  could  dribble  oxygen  into  the
butterfly's blood.
     None of the equipment I could identify was what you'd call
off-the-shelf,  but  so  what?  Nanobots  can  build  the  most
cunning,  tiny  machines,  much  smaller  than the air tank and
regulator and (possibly) gyro I saw. As for the carapace,  that
shouldn't  be  too  hard to effect with genetic engineering. So
somebody was building bugs to live on the surface. So what? All
that implied was an eccentric tinkerer, and Luna is lousy  with
them.  And  that's  just  the  sort  of hare-brained thing they
build.
     All this research was being done in bed, in Texas.
     On my way home from the celebration I'd stopped at a store
and bought a disposable  computer,  television,  recorder,  and
flashlight  and  put  them  in my pocket and smuggled them past
temporal customs. Easy. Everybody does it,  with  small  items,
and  the  guards  don't  even  have to be bribed. I waited till
nightfall, then got in bed and pulled the covers over my  head,
turned  on  the  light,  unrolled  the  television,  dumped the
holocam footage into the recorder and wiped all  traces  of  it
from  my  cerebral  banks.  Then I started scanning the footage
frame by frame.
     Why all the secrecy? I honestly couldn't have told you  at
the  time. I knew I didn't want the CC to see this material but
don't know why I felt it was so important. Instinct,  I  guess.
And  I  couldn't have guaranteed even these measures would keep
him from finding out, but it was the best I could do.  Using  a
throwaway   number  cruncher  instead  of  hooking  in  to  the
mainframe seemed a reasonable way to keep the  data  away  from
him, so long as I didn't ever network it with any other system.
He's good, but he's not magic.
     It  was an hour's work to deal with the butterfly and file
it under Wonderments, Lepidopterous. Then I  moved  on  to  the
miracle.
     Height: Five foot two. Eyes: of blue. Hair: blonde, almost
white,  shoulder-length,  straight.  Complexion:  light  brown,
probably from tanning. Apparent age: ten or  eleven  (no  pubic
hair  or  bust,  two  prominent  front  teeth,  facial  clues).
Distinguishing marks: none. Build: slender. Clothing: none.
     She could have been much older; a small minority prefer to
Peter Pan it through life, never maturing. But  I  doubted  it,
from  the  way  she  moved.  The  teeth were a clue, as well. I
pegged her for a natural, not modified, she just grew that way.
     She was visible for 11.4 seconds, not  running  hard,  not
bouncing  too  high with each step. She seemed to come out of a
black hole and fall back into one. I was being methodical about
this, so I got everything I could out  of  those  11.4  seconds
before  moving  on  to  the  frames I was dying to examine: the
first one, and the last one.
     Item: If she was a ghost, then ghosts have mass. I'd  been
unable  to  find  her  footprints among the thousands of others
there on the crater rim (I had noted a lot of  the  prints  had
toes,  but it meant nothing; lots of kids wear boots that leave
prints like bare feet), but the film clearly showed the  prints
being  made, the dust being kicked up. The computer studied the
prints and concluded the girl massed about what you'd expect.
     Item: She was not completely naked.  In  a  few  frames  I
could see biomagnetic thermosoles on the bottoms of her feet, a
damn good idea if you're going to run over the blazing rocks of
the  surface.  There  was also a bit of jewelry sticking to her
chest,  a  few  inches  above   the   left   nipple.   It   was
brass-colored,  and  shaped  more  like a pressure fitting than
anything else I could think of.  Conjecture:  Maybe  it  was  a
pressure fitting. The snap-on type, universally used to connect
air hoses to tanks.
     Item:  In  some of the early frames a slight mist could be
seen in front of her face. It looked like moisture freezing, as
if she had exhaled. There was  no  sign  of  respiration  after
that.
     Item:  She was aware of my presence. Between step four and
step five she turned her head and looked  directly  at  me  for
half  a  second.  She  smiled.  Then  she made a goofy face and
crossed her eyes.
     I made a few more observations, none of them seeming  very
relevant  or  shedding  any real light on the mystery. Oh, yes:
Item: I liked her. Making that face was just the sort of  thing
I  would  have  done  at  her  age.  At first I thought she was
taunting me, but I watched it over and over and  concluded  she
was daring me. Catch me if you can, old lady. Doll-face, I plan
to.
     Then  I spent most of the rest of the night analyzing just
a few seconds of images before and after her appearance. When I
was done I wiped the data  from  the  computer,  and  for  good
measure,  put  it  in with the glowing embers of the fire in my
kitchen stove. It crackled and  popped  nicely.  Now  the  only
record of my experience was in the little recorder.
     I slept with it under my pillow.
     #
     Next  Friday, after putting the Texian to bed, I went back
to Hamilton's and purchased a two-man  tent.  If  that  puzzles
you,  you've  never  tried  to live in a one-man tent. I had it
delivered to the rover rental office  nearest  the  old  mining
road,  where  I  leased a vehicle from their second-hand fleet,
paying two months in advance to get the best  rate.  I  had  it
tanked  full of oxygen and checked the battery level and kicked
the tires and had them replace a sagging leaf spring,  and  set
off for Delambre.
     I  set up the tent in the exact spot where we'd been seven
days before. Sunday  night  I  struck  the  tent,  having  seen
nothing  at  all,  and drove back to park the rover in a rented
garage.
     The Friday after that, I did the same thing.
     #
     I spent all my weekends out at Delambre for quite  a  long
time.  It  was enough that, soon, I had to trade in my nice new
suit for a maternity model. If you've never worn one of  those,
don't  even  ask.  But  nothing  was going to keep me away from
Delambre, not even a developing pregnancy.
     It all made sense to me at the time. Looking back,  I  can
see  some questions about my behavior, but I think I'd still do
it again. But let's try to answer a few of them shall we?
     I only spent the weekends at the crater  because  I  still
needed Texas to give my life some stability. I still would have
kept  coming  back  until  the end of the school term because I
felt I had a responsibility to those who hired me, and  to  the
children.  But  the question didn't arise, because I needed the
job more than it needed me. Each Sunday evening I found  myself
longing  for my cabin. I guess a true Visionary would have been
ashamed of me; you're supposed to drop  everything  and  pursue
the Vision.
     I did the best I could. Every Friday I couldn't get out of
the disney fast enough. I attended no more churches, unburdened
my soul to no more quacks.
     It's  a  little  harder explaining the pregnancy. A little
embarrassing, too. As part of my efforts to experience as  much
as  possible of what life had been like on Old Earth, I had had
my menstrual cycle  restored.  I  know  it  sounds  crazy.  I'd
expected  it  would  be  a one-time thing, like the corset, but
found it not nearly as onerous as Callie had cracked it  up  to
be.  I  hadn't  intended to let it go on forever, I wasn't that
silly, but I thought, I don't know, half a dozen periods or so,
then over and out. The rest is really no mystery at  all.  It's
just  what happens to fertile nulliparous centenarians who know
zip about Victorian methods of birth control, and  who  are  so
un-wise  as  to  couple with a guy who swears he's not going to
come.
     The real mystery came after the rabbit died (I boned up on
the terminology after I got the news). Why keep it?
     The  best  I  can  say  is  that  I'd  never   ruled   out
child-bearing  as  something I might do, some day, some distant
day when I had twenty years to spare. Naturally, that day never
seemed to dawn. Having a baby is probably something you have to
want to do, badly, with an almost instinctual urge  that  seems
to reside in some women and not in others. Looking around me, I
had  noted  there  were plenty of women who had this urge. Boy,
did they have the urge. I'd never felt it. The  species  seemed
in  fine  shape  in  the  hands of these breeder women, and I'd
never flattered myself that I'd be any good at it,  so  it  was
always a matter of someday.
     But  enough  unsuccessful  and  unplanned and ununderstood
suicide attempts focuses the mind wonderfully. I realized  that
if  I didn't do it now, I might never do it. And it was the one
major human experience I could think of that I  might  want  to
have  and  had  not had. And, as I said, I'd been looking for a
sign, O Lord, and this seemed like one. A bolt from  the  blue,
not  on  the order of the Girl and Butterfly, but a portent all
the same.
     Which simply meant that every Friday on my way to Delambre
I gave serious thought to stopping  off  and  having  the  damn
thing  taken  care  of,  and every time, so far, had elected to
keep it, not exactly by a landslide.
     There's an old wives' tale that a  pregnant  woman  should
not  visit  the  surface.  If  that's  true,  why  do they make
maternity suits? The only danger is of coming into labor  while
in  the suit, and that's not much of a danger. An ambulance can
get you from any point on Luna to a birthing center  in  twenty
minutes.  That was not a concern to me. Nor was I neglecting my
duties as an incubator. I got  roaring  drunk  that  once,  but
that's easily cured. Each Wednesday I visited a check-up center
and  was  told  things  were  cooking  nicely.  Each Thursday I
dropped by Ned Pepper's office and, if he was sober enough, let
him poke me and thump me and pronounce me as fine a  heifer  as
he'd  ever  come  across, and sell me a bottle of yellow elixir
which did wonders for my struggling rose bushes.
     If I kept it to term, I intended to bear it naturally. (It
was a male, but it seems silly to think of an embryo as  having
a  sex.)  When  I  was  about twenty it seemed for a while that
birthing was soon to be a thing of the past. The large majority
of women were rearing their pups  in  jars,  often  prominently
displayed  on  the  living  room coffee table. I watched many a
neighbor's blastocyst mature over the years, peering  into  the
scope  with  all  the  enthusiasm one usually brings to viewing
Uncle Luigi's holos of his trip  to  Mars.  I  watched  many  a
mother  scratching  the bottle and cooing and goo-gooing to her
secondtrimester fetus. I was present at a few decantings, which
were often elaborately catered, with hired  bands  and  wrapped
presents and the whole megillah.
     As  is  so  often  the  case,  it was a fad, not a tide of
civilization. Some studies came out suggesting  that  Screwtops
did  less  well  in later life than Bellybusters. Other studies
showed the opposite. Studies frequently do that.
     I don't read studies. I go with my gut. The  pendulum  had
swung  back toward the "healthy mother/child bonding of vaginal
delivery" and against the "birth trauma scars a child for life"
folks, but my gut told me that, given that I should do this  at
all,  my  gut was the proper place for it to grow. And now that
my uterus has been heard from, I will thank it to shut up.
     #
     The frames recording the girl's appearance and  subsequent
seeming  exit  from  this  dimensional  plane  revealed several
interesting things. She had not materialized out of thin vacuum
nor had she fallen out of and back into  a  black  hole.  There
were images before, and after.
     I  couldn't  make a thing of them, given the low light and
the mysterious nature of  the  transubstantiation.  But  that's
what  computers  are  for. My five-and-dime model chewed on the
images of twisted light for a  while,  and  came  up  with  the
notion that a human body, wrapped in a perfect flexible mirror,
would  twist  light  in just such a way. All you'd see would be
distorted reflections of the person's  surroundings,  so  while
not  rendering  one  invisible,  it sure would make you hard to
see. Up close it would be possible to make out a  human  shape,
if  you were looking for it. From a distance, forget it. If she
stood still, especially against a background  as  shattered  as
the  Delambre  junkyard,  there  would be no way to find her. I
remembered the nagging headache  I'd  had  shortly  before  her
little  show.  She'd  been  around before she decided to reveal
herself to me.
     A search of the library found  no  technology  that  could
produce  anything like what I had observed. Whatever it was, it
could be turned off and on very quickly; my  holocam's  shutter
speed  was  well  below  a  thousandth of a second, and she was
wrapped in the mirror in one frame,  naked  in  the  next.  She
didn't take it off, she turned it off.
     Looking  for  an  explanation  of the other singular thing
about her, the ability to run nude,  even  if  for  only  seven
steps,  in  a  vacuum,  produced  a  few tidbits concerning the
implantation of oxygen sources to dispense  directly  into  the
bloodstream, research that had never borne profitable fruit and
had been abandoned as impractical. Hmmmm.
     I   put  myself  through  a  refresher  course  in  vacuum
survival. People have  lived  after  exposure  of  up  to  four
minutes,  which  is  when  the brain starts to die. They suffer
significant tissue damage, but  so  what?  Infants  have  lived
after  even  longer periods. You can do useful work for maybe a
minute, maybe a  bit  longer,  work  like  scrambling  into  an
emergency  suit.  Exposures  of five to ten seconds will likely
rupture your eardrums and certainly hurt like hell, but do  you
no other real harm. "The bends" is easily treatable.
     So  wait a minute, what's all this talk about a miracle? I
determined in fairly short order that what I'd seen was  almost
surely  a technical marvel, not a supernatural one. And I was a
bit relieved, frankly. Gods are capricious characters, and  the
biggest  part  of  me  had no desire to have it proved that one
really existed. What if you saw your burning bush and it turned
out the Power behind it was  a  psychopathic  child,  like  the
Christian  God?  He's God, right? He's proved it and you've got
to do what he tells you to do.  So  what  if  he  asks  you  to
sacrifice  your  son on an altar to His massive ego, or build a
big boat in your back yard, or pimp  your  wife  to  the  local
honcho,  blackmail  him,  and  give  him a dose of clap? (Don't
believe me? Genesis 12: 10-20. You learn the  most  interesting
things in church.)
     It  didn't  diminish  the  miracle  one bit to know it was
probably man-made. It excited me all the  more.  Somewhere  out
there,  in that huge junkyard, somebody was doing things nobody
else knew how to do. And if it wasn't in the  library,  the  CC
probably  didn't  know  about  it, either. Or if he did, he was
suppressing it, and if so, why?
     All I knew was I wanted to talk to  whoever  had  made  it
possible  for  that  little  girl  to wrap herself in a perfect
mirror and make a face at me.
     #

     Which was easier said than done.
     The first four weekends I  simply  camped  out,  did  very
little  exploring.  I  was hoping, since she'd come to me once,
she'd do it again. No real reason why she  should,  but  again,
why not?
     After  that  I spent more time in my suit. I climbed a few
alps of rubble, but there didn't seem much point  in  it  after
the  first few. It stretched as far as the eye could see; there
was no way to search it, or even a small part of it.
     No, it seemed to me it was no coincidence the sighting had
come at the base of that monument to high hopes,  the  Starship
Robert  A.  Heinlein. I set about to explore as much of the old
hulk as I could, but first I  visited  the  library  again  and
learned  something  of  his history. Herewith, in brief, is the
saga of failed dreams:
     The Heinlein was first proposed in 2010, by a group  known
as  the  L5 Society. It was to be humanity's first interstellar
vessel, a remarkable idea when  you  consider  that  the  Lunar
colony  at  the  time was quite small, still struggling year to
year for funding. And it was to be another twenty years  before
the keel was laid, at L5, one of the Trojan libration points of
the  Earth/Luna  system.  L5  and L4 enjoyed several decades of
prominence before the Invasion, and thrived  for  almost  forty
years  afterwards.  Today they are orbiting junkyards. Economic
reasons again.
     The ship was half completed when the Invaders  came.  Work
was  naturally  abandoned  in  favor of more pressing projects,
like survival of the species. When that seemed  assured,  there
was  still  very  little  effort to spare for blue-sky projects
like the Heinlein.
     But work resumed in the year 82, A.I., and went on five or
six years before another snag was  hit,  in  the  form  of  the
Lunarian  Party.  The  loonies,  or Isolationists, or (to their
enemies) Appeasers, as they came to be  called,  had  as  their
main  article  of faith that mankind should accept its lot as a
conquered race and thrive as best it  could  on  Luna  and  the
other inhabited planets. The Invaders had reduced all the works
of  humanity  to  less  than rubble in the space of three days.
Surely this demonstrated, the Loonies  reasoned,  the  Invaders
were a different breed of cat altogether. We had been extremely
lucky  to  have  survived at all. If we annoyed them again they
might come back and finish the job they started.
     Rubbish, responded the old guard, who have since  come  to
be  known as Heinleiners. Sure they were stronger than us. Sure
they had superior technology. Sure they had bigger guns.  God's
always  on  the side of bigger guns, and if we want him back on
our side, we'd better build even bigger guns. The Invaders, the
reasoning went, must be a vastly older race, with vastly  older
science.   But  they  still  shit  between  two  .  .  .  well,
tentacle-heels?
     This was the flaw in the Heinleiners' reasoning, said  the
Loonies. We didn't know if they had bigger guns. We didn't know
if  they  had  tentacles  or cilia or good honest legs and arms
like you and I and God. We didn't know anything. No  human  had
ever  seen  one and survived. No one had ever photographed one,
though you'd think our orbiting telescopes would  have;  they'd
been looking, on and off, for two hundred years, and no one had
seen  them  check  out of the little motel known as Earth. They
were weird. Their capabilities had  thus  far  admitted  of  no
limits. It seemed prudent to assume they had no limits.
     After    almost    ninety    years    of    jingoism,   of
rallyround-the-flag rhetoric and  sheer  pettifogging  bombast,
this  sounded  like  a  good  argument  to  a  large  part of a
population weary of living on a perpetual war  footing.  They'd
been making sacrifices for nearly a century, on the theory that
we must be ready to, one, repel attack, and two, rise up in our
wrath one glorious day and stomp the bejesus out of those . . .
whatever  they  were.  Live  and  let  live made a whole lot of
sense. Stop our puny saber-rattling round the ankles  of  these
giants,  and  we'll  be  okay.  Speak softly, and screw the big
stick.
     Eventually all our forward listening posts  in  near-Earth
orbit  were  drawn  back--a  move  I applaud, by the way, since
they'd heard nothing and seen nothing since  Invasion  Day.  It
was  commanded that no man-made object approach the home planet
closer than 200,000 kilometers. The  planetary  defense  system
was  scaled  back drastically, turned to meteoroid destruction,
where at least it saw some use.
     How all this affected the  Heinlein  was  in  the  ban  on
fission  and  fusion  explosive  devices.  The  R.A.H. had been
designed as an Orion-type  pusherplate  propulsion  system,  to
this  day  the  only  feasible  drive if you want to get to the
stars in less than a thousand  years.  What  you  do  is  chuck
A-bombs  out of a hole in the back, slam the door, and wait for
them to go off. Do that every second or  two.  The  shock  wave
pushes you.
     This  needs  a  big  pusher  plate--and  I'm  talking  big
here--and some sort of shock absorber to  preserve  the  dental
work  of  the  passengers. They calculated it could reach about
one-twentieth of  light-speed--Alpha  Centauri  in  only  about
eighty  years. But it couldn't even leave L5 without bombs, and
suddenly there were no more bombs. Work shut down with the main
body and most of the shock absorbing  system  almost  complete,
still no sign of the massive pusher plate.
     For forty years the friends of the Heinlein lobbied for an
exception  for  their  big  baby,  like  the one granted to the
builders  of  the  first  disneylands  for  blasting  purposes.
Changing  political  winds and economic pressure from the Outer
Planets Confederation, where most fissionables were mined,  and
the decline of the L.P. combined to eventually bring a victory.
The  Heinleiners  celebrated  and  turned to the government for
funding . . . and nobody cared. Space  exploration  had  fallen
out  of  favor. It does, periodically. The argument not to pour
all that money down the rathole of space when you  could  spend
it  right  here on Luna can be a persuasive one to a population
more interested in standard of living  and  crippling  taxation
and no longer afraid of the Invader boogeyman.
     There  were  attempts  to  get it going again with private
money. The perception was the whole thing had passed its  time.
It  was  a white elephant. It became a regular subject in comic
monologues.
     The ship still had some value as scrap. Eventually someone
bought it and strapped on some  big  boosters  and  lowered  it
bodily  to  the  edge  of  Delambre, where it sits, stripped of
anything of worth, to this day.
     #
     The first thing I noticed about  the  Heinlein  during  my
explorations was that it was broken. That is to say, snapped in
half.  Built strongly to withstand the shocks of its propulsion
system, it had never been meant to land on a planet,  even  one
with  so  weak a gravity field as Luna. The bottom had buckled,
and the hull had ruptured about halfway back from the stem.
     The second thing I noticed was that, from  time  to  time,
lights  could  be  seen from some of the windows high up on the
hull.
     There were places where one could get inside.  I  explored
several of them. Most led to solidly welded doors. A few seemed
to go further, but the labyrinthine nature of the place worried
me.  I  made a few sorties trailing a line behind me so I could
find my way out, but during one I felt the  line  go  slack.  I
followed  it  back and couldn't determine if I'd simply tied it
badly or if it had been deliberately loosened. I made  no  more
entries  into the ship. There was no reason to suppose the girl
and anyone she lived with would wish me well. In fact,  if  she
did,  she  certainly  would  have contacted me by then. I would
have to resort to other tactics.
     I tried magnetic grapplers and  scaled  the  side  of  the
hull,  trying to reach the lighted ports. When I reached them I
was seldom sure I had the right one, and in any  case,  by  the
time I got there no light could be seen.
     It began to seem I was chasing ghosts.
     I got discouraged enough that, one Friday night, I decided
to stay  home  for  the  weekend.  I was getting quite big, and
while one-sixth gee must make it easier to carry a baby,  we're
none  of us as strong as our Earth-born ancestors were, and I'd
become prone to backaches and sore feet.
     So I decided to rent a rig and take a trip  to  Whiz-Bang,
the  new  capitol of Texas. Harry the blacksmith had just got a
new Columbus Phaeton-$58.00  in  the  Sears  catalog!--and  was
happy  to let me try it out. (Mail-order was our polite fiction
for  Modern-Made.  There  would  never  be  enough  disneys  to
manufacture  all the items one needs for survival, there's just
too many of them. Most of the things I owned had arrived on the
Wells-Fargo wagon, fresh from the computer-run  factories.)  He
hitched a dappled mare he assured me was gentle, and I took off
down the road.
     Whiz-Bang  is  in  the  eastern  part  of  the disney. The
interior  compresses  about  two   hundred   miles   worth   of
environment  into  a  bubble only fifty miles wide, so before I
got there I was into a new kind of  terrain  and  climate,  one
where there was more rainfall and things grew better. Purely by
chance  I  was  passing through at the height of the wildflower
season. I saw larkspur, phlox, Mexican hat, Indian  paintbrush,
cornflower,   and   bluebonnets.   Millions   and  millions  of
bluebonnets. I stopped the horse and  let  her  graze  while  I
spread  my  blanket  among them and ate a picnic lunch. I can't
tell you what a relief it was to get away from  the  foreboding
hulk  of the Heinlein and the bitter white rock of the surface,
and hear the song of the mockingbird.
     I pulled into Whiz-Bang around noon. It's  a  bigger  town
than  New  Austin--which  means it has five saloons and we have
two. They get more of the tourist trade, which New Austin  does
not  work  to  attract,  which means they have more small shops
selling authentic souvenirs, still the main means of livelihood
for two out of five Texans. I strolled the streets, nodding  to
the gentlemen who tipped their hats, stopping to look into each
shop   window.  The  merchandise  fell  into  four  categories:
Mexican, Indian, "Primitive West,"  and  Victorian.  The  first
three  were  all  hand-made  in  the  disney, certified genuine
reproductions-with  a  little   fudging:   "Indian"   artifacts
included items from all southwest tribes, not just Comanche and
Apache. But there were no totem poles and no plastic papooses.
     Suddenly I realized I was looking at the answer, if answer
there was. I was standing at the window of a toy shop.
     #
     I  felt  like  Santa  Claus  as I drove once more down the
mining road and across the rising rim of  Delambre  early  that
Sunday  morning.  I  certainly  had  a  sleighful of toys, in a
vac-sack tossed on the passenger seat. It was  about  two  days
past full noon.
     "On  Dasher,  on Dancer, on Prancer," I cried. The ride in
the country and the new plan of attack had buoyed  my  spirits,
which  had  been  at a low ebb. I stopped the rover and quickly
deployed the tent. I spoke not a word but went straight  to  my
work, setting out all my presents . . . oh, stop that, Hildy. I
laughed, which no doubt caused my big round belly to shake like
a bowl full of jelly.
     What  I'd  done  was first to make a Whiz-Bang toymonger a
very happy and much wealthier woman. She'd followed me  out  of
the  store, carrying my boxes of trifles, not quite kow-towing,
stowing them in the buggy for me. Then I'd driven back  to  New
Austin,  pausing  only  to pick a bunch of bluebonnets, which I
mailed to Cricket. No, I hadn't given up yet.
     I'd exercised little selection in the  toy  store,  ruling
out  only  the  ranks  of  lead soldiers and most of the dolls.
Somehow they just didn't feel right; maybe it was just personal
prejudice. But now I sweated the choice of  each  of  the  four
items I wanted to lure her with.
     First  was  a  tin-and-pewter wind-up of a horse pulling a
cart, brightly painted in reds and yellows.  All  little  girls
like horses, don't they?
     Next  was  a  half-meter  Mexican puppet in the shape of a
skeleton, made of clay and papiermĀche' and corn husks. I liked
the way it clattered when I picked it  up,  dangling  from  its
five strings. It was old and wise.
     Then  a  Kachina doll, even older and wiser, though carved
and painted only months ago. I chose it over the sweeter, safer
white man's dolls, all porcelain and pouty lips  and  flounces,
because  it spoke to me of ancient secrets, unknown ceremonies.
It was as brashly pagan as my elusive sprite, she of the  funny
face.  Reading  up  on  it,  I found it was even better, as the
Kachinas were said to exist among the tribe, but invisible.
     And last, my most fortuitous find: a butterfly  net,  made
of  bent cane and gauze, with a glass Mason jar, wad of cotton,
and bottle of alcohol for the humane euthanizing of  specimens.
Just  the  sort of toy parents could put together for a pioneer
child, if the child had a biological bent.
     None of the toys would be much harmed by vacuum,  but  the
sunshine  on  the  surface  is  brutal,  so I placed them where
they'd stay in the shade, near the hull of  the  Heinlein,  and
arranged  little  lights  over  them so they'd be easy to find.
Then I went back to the tent.
     I didn't have much time to stay if I was to  be  back  for
Monday  classes, and I spent that time unprofitably. I couldn't
eat anything, and I couldn't read the book I'd brought along. I
was excited, worried, and a  little  depressed.  What  made  me
think this would work?
     So  in the end I struck the tent and took one last tour of
my little toy tableau, which once more was undisturbed.
     The next week was hell. Many times I  thought  of  looking
for  a substitute and getting the hell back. You want a measure
of my distraction? Elise caught me dealing  seconds,  and  it's
been seventy years since that had happened.
     But the week did crawl by, faster than any ordinary garden
slug,  and  Friday afternoon I turned the editorial chores over
to Charity with instructions to keep the libel  suits  down  to
three or four, and broke all records getting out to Delambre.
     #
     The  Kachina was gone. In its place was something I didn't
recognize at first, but quickly  realized  was  a  Navajo  sand
painting.  These  are made by dribbling different colored sands
onto the ground and they can be amazingly detailed and precise.
This one wasn't, but I appreciated the effort. It  was  just  a
stick  figure  Indian,  with  war  bonnet and a bow held in one
hand, a tipi in the background.
     She'd taken the  horse  and  carriage,  too,  and  left  a
vac-cage about the right size for taking your pet hamster for a
stroll  on the surface. But inside was a horse. A living horse,
ten centimeters high at the shoulder.
     I hadn't seen a horselet in years. Callie had given me one
for my fifth birthday, not as small as this one. Not long after
that people like David Earth had succeeded in getting that sort
of gene tinkering outlawed. You could still buy minis on Pluto,
but the most that was allowed on Luna these days were perpetual
puppies and kittens. When I was young you could still get  real
exotics, like winged dogs and eight-legged cats.
     Somehow  I  didn't  think this beast had been purchased on
Pluto. I held the cage up and tapped  on  the  glass,  and  the
horselet  looked back at me calmly. I wondered what I was going
to do with the damn thing.
     The butterfly equipment  didn't  seem  disturbed  until  I
looked at it more closely. Then I saw the monarch at the bottom
of  the jar, still, apparently dead. I put the jar in my pocket
for later examination, left the net where it was,  and  hurried
on  to  find that my last offering had been taken. The skeleton
puppet was gone, and where it had been was a scrap of paper.  I
picked it up and read the word "thanks," written in pencil.
     #
     I  pondered  all  this  on  the drive back to King City. I
didn't know whether to be encouraged or crestfallen.  Three  of
my  toys  had  been  taken,  and three other toys left in their
place. I had never expected this. My hope had been to gradually
lure her out with gifts; the idea of trading had never  entered
my mind.
     So it was good that I had finally made contact, of a sort.
At least, I hoped it was she who had left the horse, butterfly,
and painting.  It  was still possible another sort of prankster
entirely was at work here, but I didn't  think  so.  Each  gift
told  me something, though it was hard to know just how much to
read into each one.
     The horselet was illegal, so she was telling me she didn't
give a damn about the law. The painting, when  I  examined  the
photo  I  took of it, proved to be of a Lipan Apache brave, not
just a generic "Indian." That meant to me  that  she  knew  the
gift  came  from  Texas . . . and that I lived there? Might she
come to me? You're getting too far-fetched, Hildy.
     The butterfly was the most interesting of  all,  and  that
was  why  I had not erected the tent but was on my way to Liz's
apartment in King City. Of the people I knew, she'd be the most
likely to be able  to  give  me  the  help  I  needed  with  no
questions asked.
     #
     Before  I got there I stopped and bought another computer.
I used  this  one  to  doctor  the  images  from  my  recorder,
completely wiping out the background from those crucial seconds
until  I  had  nothing  but  the  nude figure of a girl running
against a black background. The impulse to protect the story is
a deep one; I had no reason to mistrust Liz, but no reason  why
she should know everything I knew, either.
     I  showed  her  the  film and explained what I wanted from
her, managing  to  befuddle  her  considerably,  but  when  she
understood I was answering no questions she said sure, it would
be no problem, then stood watching me.
     "Now, Liz," I said.
     "Sure,"  she  said,  and  did a double-take. "Oh, you mean
right now."
     So she called a friend at one of  the  studios  who  said,
sure,  he  could  do  it, no problem, and was about to wire the
pictures to him when I said I'd prefer to use the mail. Looking
at me curiously, Liz addressed the tape and popped it into  the
chute, then waited for my next trick.
     "What  the  hell,"  I  said, and got out the butterfly. We
both looked at it with the naked eye,  handling  it  carefully,
and  she wanted to let her computer have a go at it, but I said
no, and instead ordered an  ordinary  magnifying  glass,  which
arrived  in  ten  minutes.  We both examined it and found I had
been right about the propulsion system.  There  were  hair-fine
tubes  under  the  wings,  which  were  somehow attached to the
insect's musculature in such a way that flexing the wing caused
air to squirt out.
     "Looks kind of squirrely to me," Liz pronounced. "I  think
it'd just fall down and lie there."
     "I saw it fly," I said.
     "If  that'll  fly, I'll kiss your ass and give you an hour
to draw a crowd." She waited expectantly for my response, but I
didn't give her one. It was obvious she was  being  eaten  with
curiosity.  She  tried  wheedling a little, then gave it up and
turned to the horse. "I might be willing to take this off  your
hands,"  she said. "I know somebody who wants one." She tickled
it under the chin, and it trotted to  the  edge  of  the  table
where I'd released it, then jumped down. A scale model horse in
one-sixth gee is quite spry.
     Liz  named  a  price, and I said she was taking bread from
the mouths of my children and named another,  and  she  said  I
must  think  she just fell off the turnip wagon, and eventually
we settled on a price that seemed to please her. I didn't  tell
her that if she'd asked, I'd have given it to her.
     The pictures arrived. I looked at them and told her they'd
do nicely, and thanked her for her time and trouble. I left her
still trying to find out more about the butterfly.
     #
     What  I'd obtained from her was a strip of images suitable
for installing inside a zoetrope. If you don't know  what  that
is,  it's  a little like a phenakistoscope, but fancier, though
not quite so nice as a praxinoscope. Still at  sea?  Picture  a
small  drum,  open at the top, with slits around the sides. You
put the drum on top of a spindle,  paste  pictures  inside  it,
rotate it, and look through the slits as they move past you. If
you've  chosen  the  right  pictures, they will appear to move.
It's an early version of the motion picture.
     I put the strip inside the  zoetrope  I'd  bought  at  the
Whiz-Bang  toy  store,  twirled  it,  and  saw the girl running
jerkily. And I'd done it all  without  the  aid  of  the  Lunar
computer net known as the CC. With any luck, these images still
existed only in my recorder.
     I  went right back out to Delambre and put the zoetrope in
a location where it couldn't be missed.  I  set  up  the  tent,
fixed and ate a light supper, and fell asleep.
     I  checked  it several times during the weekend and always
found it still where I'd left it. Sunday night--still  daylight
in  Delambre--I  packed the rover and decided to look once more
before leaving. I was feeling discouraged.
     At first I thought it hadn't been touched, then I realized
the pictures had been changed. I knelt and spun the  drum,  and
through  the  slits  I saw the flickering image of myself in my
pressure suit, with Winston in his, capering around my legs.
     #
     I had a week to think it over. Was she saying  she  wanted
to  see  the  dog?  Any dog, or just Winston? Or was she saying
anything at all except I see you?
     What I had to remember was there was no real hurry to this
project, my feelings of impatience notwithstanding. If  Winston
had  to  be involved, it would require bringing Liz deeper into
my confidence, something I was reluctant to  do.  So  the  next
weekend  I  went out armed with four dogs, one from each of the
cultures in Texas. There was a brightly  painted  Mexican  one,
carved  from  wood,  another  simpler  wooden  pioneer  dog,  a
Comanche camp scene, with dogs, painted on rawhide--the best  I
could  do--and  my prize, a brass automaton of a dog that would
shuffle up to a fire hydrant and lift its leg.
     I set them out on my next visit. As I  was  crawling  into
the tent afterwards my phone rang.
     "Hello? I said, suspiciously.
     "I still say it can't fly."
     "Liz? How'd you get this number?"
     "You  ask  me that? Don't start me lying this early in the
morning. I got my methods."
     I thought about telling her what the  CC  thought  of  her
methods,  and  I  thought about chewing her out for invading my
privacy--since my retirement I'd  restricted  my  telephone  to
incoming calls from a very short list--but thinking about those
things  was as far as I got, because as I was talking I'd stood
up and turned around, and all four of my new gifts  were  lined
up  just  outside the tent, looking in at me. I turned quickly,
scanning the landscape in every direction, but it was  useless.
In  that  mirror  skin  of hers she might be lying flat no more
than thirty meters away and I wouldn't have a prayer.
     So what I said was "Never mind that, I was  just  thinking
of you, and that lovely dog of yours."
     "Then  this  is  your lucky day. I'm calling from the car,
and I'm no more than twenty minutes from Delambre, and  Winston
is  having a wet dream that may concern your left leg, so throw
some of that chili on the stove."
     #
     "I think you gained two kay since  last  week,"  she  said
when  she came into the tent. "When it comes time to whelp that
thing, you're gonna have to do it  in  shifts."  I  appreciated
those  remarks  so  much that I added three peppers to her bowl
and miked it hard. Pregnancy is maybe the most  mixed  blessing
I'd  ever  experienced.  On  the  one hand, there's a feeling I
couldn't  begin  to  describe,  something  that  must  approach
holiness. There's a life growing in your body. When all is said
and  done,  reproducing  the  species  is the only demonstrable
reason for existence. Doing so satisfies a lot of  the  brain's
most  primitive wiring. On the other hand, you feel like such a
sow.
     I told her as little as I could get away with, mostly that
I'd seen someone out here and that I wanted to get  in  contact
with her. She saw my box of toys: the zoetrope, and the dogs.
     "If  it's  that  girl you had the pictures of, and you saw
her out here, I'd like to meet her, too."
     I had to admit it was. How else was I  going  to  convince
her to leave Winston in my care for the rest of the weekend?
     We  tossed  around a few ideas, none of them very good. As
she was getting ready to leave she thought of something, pulled
a deck of cards from her pocket, and handed them to me.
     "I brought these along when I found out where  you'd  been
coming  all these weekends." She'd previously told me the story
of her detective work, nosing around Texas,  finding  out  from
Huck  that  I always left Friday evening when the paper went to
bed--lately even earlier. Rover rental records available to the
public, or to people who knew how to get into  them,  told  her
where  I'd  been renting. A bribe to the right mechanic got her
access to the odometer of my vehicle, and simple division  told
her  how  long  a  trip  I'd been taking each time, but by then
she'd been pretty sure it was to Delambre.
     "I  knew  you'd  seen  something  out  here   during   the
Bicentennial,"  she  went on. "I didn't know what, but you came
back from that last walk looking wilder than an acre of snakes,
and you wouldn't tell anybody what it was. Then you show up  at
my  place with those pictures of a girl running through nothing
and you won't let me wire 'em or digitize 'em. I expect you got
secrets to keep, but I could figure out you  were  looking  for
somebody.  So  if you want to find somebody, what you do is you
start playing solitaire, and pretty soon they'll  come  up  and
tell you--"
     "--to  play the black ten on the red Jack," I finished for
her.
     "You heard it. Well, at least it'll give you something  to
do."  She  left, casting a worried eye over her pet, who didn't
seem at  all  disturbed  to  see  her  go,  and  with  a  final
admonition that Winston got his walkies three times a day or he
was apt to get mean enough to make a train take a dirt road.
     #
     I'd  already  brought  a deck of cards. I usually have one
with me, as manipulating the