But at last he heard, Trajectory alterations are approved. You are cleared for high-thrust bum to Moonbase."

"Cleared for Moonbase. Roger," said the pilot Greg heard the radio link click off. Then, "Yahoo!" yelled one of them, loud enough to make Greg's ears ring.

"Light 'er up and move 'er out!"

As a heavy hand of acceleration pressed Greg back in his seat, he realized that the astronauts were more than happy with his insistence on pushing ahead to the Moon.

Killifer's main assignment was to remain inside the headquarters shelter of the expedition's base camp and monitor all surface activities. Thus the communications center was his principal station.

He had quite deliberately erased Moonbase's warning message from the comm system's computer memory. He waited calmly underground until Brennart came in. Then Killifer hurried to the airlock, where Brennart was carefully removing his suit and vacuuming the dust from it.

Sitting on the slim-legged bench next to Brennart, he spoke just loudly enough to be heard over the buzz of the hand vacuum.

"We got a warning of an imminent solar flare."

"When?"

"About two hours ago. I didn't say anything about it; didn't want to shake up the team."

Brennart looked down at him, his brows knit in thought. They made an odd pair: the tall, golden-haired leader and his dark, lantern-jawed aide.

"I might have exceeded my authority," Killifer confessed. "I erased the warning from the log."

"Why?"

"I didn't want anyone but you to know about it. You're the expedition commander. You should be the one who makes the decision on what to do. If the comm tech or Doug Stavenger or somebody else found out about the warning, they'd be blabbing it to everybody and nobody'd want to be outside."

Brennart nodded slowly. "That's true enough."

"I hope I did the right thing," Killifer said, with as much humility as he could muster.

"Yes, you did. A warning of an imminent flare poses no immediate danger and we still have a lot of digging to do out there."

"The connectors?"

With a shake of his head, Brennart said, "We're behind schedule, I know. You don't have to remind me. The ground out there is all rock. Hardly any regolith over it at all."

Without the tunnels to connect them, the expedition members would be stuck in the four separate buried shelters when the flare's radiation reached them.

"What do you plan to do, then?" Killifer asked.

Frowning, Brennart said, I'd better put everybody into the digging. We don't even have enough rubble to adequately shield the four shelters yet, let alone the connecting tunnels."

For the first time, Killifer felt alarmed. But he hid it and said merely. "You always know what's best."

It was dark out on the surface, menacingly, cryogenically dark with the high mountains blocking out any chance of light or warmth. Yet Doug found it thrilling. More than thrilling; it was the most exciting thing he had ever known. To put your bootprints down where no human being has ever stood before. To see what no human eyes have ever gazed on. Danger and wonder and the lure of the unknown, all mixed together. That's what the frontier is all about Doug told himself. God, it must be habit-forming, like a drug.

He took a deep breath of canned air, realizing with a grin that it was an artificial mixture of oxygen and nitrogen at unnaturally low pressure. Every breath we take, every step we make, all depends on the machines we've developed.

So what? he asked himself. How long do you think humans would've survived on Earth if they hadn't developed fire and tools? We're machine makers, and with our machines we can expand throughout the universe.

Then he chuckled to himself. Throughout the universe, huh? Maybe you ought to just concentrate on this little base camp you're building here at the south pole of the Moon. Get that done before you start challenging the rest of creation.

Starlight guided his steps across the rocky ground. The hard unblinking stars were strewn across the black sky like dust; even through his heavily tinted visor Doug could see thousands of them staring back at him. They lit the ground like pale moonlight on Earth.

He walked to the edge of the ice field. Staring at its dark flat expanse, Doug felt disappointed that the dust-covered ice did not reflect the stars. It looked almost like a dead calm sea, flat and still and gleaming slightly, as if lit from within. Then he looked up as high as he could from inside his helmet and realized that he could not see the Earth. From Moonbase the Earth was always hanging overhead, warm, beckoning, friendly. The sky down here was empty, lonely.

Turning, he saw Mt. Wasser, its flat-topped curving peak bathed in glowing sunlight, shining against the darkness like a disembodied beacon. Tomorrow we start up the mountain, Doug told himself. With the nanomachines. With any luck, we'll be building the power tower within thirty-six hours.

We're making history here! The thought exhilarated him. Kids will read about this expedition in their schoolbooks.

He looked out at the ice field again and suddenly, without even deciding consciously to do it, he ran to the edge of the softly gleaming ice with long, loping lunar strides; almost like flying. Then he felt his boots on the ice and he glided along like a skater, spinning and turning, laughing inside his helmet like a boy at play.

His earphones chirped. Then he heard Brennart's unmistakable voice, "This is your expedition commander. I want every person suited up and outside to help dig the connector tunnels. The only personnel excluded from this order are the second-in-command and the communications technician now on watch. Everybody else get to the digging. This includes you, Mr. Stavenger. Get moving. Now!"

MOONBASE.

"A peasant," muttered Lev Brudnoy to himself. "That's what I am. Nothing but a dolt of a peasant."

He was kneeling between rows of fresh light green shoots that would become carrots, if all went well, bent over the dismantled pieces of a malfunctioning pump. Stretched all around him for a full hectare, one hundred meters on a side, were neatly aligned hydroponic troughs in which carrots, beans, lettuce and black-eyed peas were growing. And row after row of soybeans. Plastic hose lines ran above the troughs, carrying water enriched with the nutrients the plants needed to grow. Strips of full-spectrum lamps lit the underground chamber with the intensity of summer noon.

Off in a corner of the big cavern was a carefully boxed-in plot of lunar sand, dug up from the regolith outside and turned into a garden of brightly-hued roses, geraniums, daffodils and zinnias-all lovingly pollinated by Brudnoy's own hand. Moonbase's agrotechnicians and nutritionists were responsible for the hydroponics crops; the plot of soil-grown flowers was Brudnoy's alone.

Sweating, Brudnoy sat on the rock floor amid the strewn pieces of the pump. For the life of him, he could not see what had gone wrong with it. Yet the pump had stopped working, threatening the farm's carrot crop with slow withering death. Brudnoy had wanted to fix the pump before the agrotechs realized it had malfunctioned. Now, instead of becoming a hero, he felt like a dunce.

"Lev!" a voice rang off the farm's rock walls. "Lev, are you in here?"

He scrambled to his feet. Two of the biologists were standing uncertainly at the airlock, several rows away. They started toward him.

"I thought you were leaving today," Brudnoy said as they approached.

"Flight's cancelled. Solar flare coming up," said Serai N'kuma.

"Oh."

"So we thought we'd take you out to dinner," Debbie Paine added.

N'kuma was tall, leggy, lean as a ballet dancer, her skin a glistening deep black. Paine was blonde and petite, yet with an hourglass figure that strained her coveralls. Brudnoy had fantasized about the two of them ever since they had first arrived at Moonbase, even after he realized that they preferred each other to men.

"I can't leave here until this wretched pump is fixed," Brudnoy said. Spreading his arms, he added, "You see before you a true peasant, chained to his land."

The women ignored his heartfelt self-pity. "What's wrong with the pump?" Paine asked.

Shrugging, Brudnoy replied, "It won't work."

"Let's take a look at it," said N'kuma, dropping to her knees to examine the scattered pieces.

"I've taken it apart completely. Nothing seems wrong. Yet it refuses to do its job."

"Engineer's hell," Paine said, grinning. "Everything checks but nothing works."

"In the old days we would have it shot," Brudnoy grumbled.

"And then you'd have no pump at all," N'kuma said, from her kneeling position.

Paine ran a finger along the hose that carried the water and nutrients. "Is the pump getting electricity okay?"

"There's nothing wrong with the electrical power," Brudnoy said.

Plucking at the wire that ran along the hose, Paine said, "Except that the insulation on this wire is frayed and the bare aluminum is touching the metal pipe fitting here."

N'kuma popped to her feet. "It's shorting out."

Peering at the slightly scorched metal fitting, Brudnoy said, "1 don't think the wire we make here at the base is as good as the copper stuff they make Earthside."

"Didn't you smell the insulation burning?" Paine asked.

Brudnoy scratched his thatch of graying hair. "Now that you mention it. there was a strange smell a while ago. I changed my coveralls the next day and the smell went away."

Both women guffawed. In short order Brudnoy produced a new length of wire, Paine spliced it into the line while N'kuma reassembled the pump with hands that were little short of magical. Brudnoy watched them admiringly.

Once they were finished he insisted, "Now I will take you to dinner. It's all on me! My treat."

They laughed together as they left the farm. Meals at the galley were free, part of the corporation's services for Moonbase's employees.

Brudnoy laughed the hardest. Hardly anyone in the base knew that these two young women were lovers. All the men will choke on their food when they see me with these young lovelies on my arms. Some of the women will, too. Not bad for an old man, he thought.

"Welcome to Moonbase," said Jinny Anson.

Greg Masterson's nose wrinkled at the strange smell of the place: human sweat mixed with machine oil and a strange sharp burnt odor, as if someone had been firing a gun recently.

But he made himself smile and took Anson's proffered hand. "Thanks. It's good to get here ahead of the flare."

Anson had gone down to the receiving area dug into the floor of Alphonsus adjacent to the rocket port. Little more than a rough-hewn cavern beneath the crater's floor, the place was called 'The Pit' by veteran Lunatics. It was connected to the main section of the base by a single tunnel, nearly two kilometers long. There were plans to put in an electrified trolley line along the tunnel; for now, a stripped down tractor did the job, its finish dulled and dented from years of work on the surface.

She kept a hand on his, arm as Greg hip-hopped like any newcomer to the Moon.until he was safely seated in the tractor.

"I brought you a present," she said, climbing into the driver's seat next to him"

"A present?"

Reaching behind the seat, Anson pulled out a worn-looking pair of boots. "Moon shoes. They've got weights built into them so you won't go bouncing around when you try to walk. Remove one weight per day while you're here, and inside of five days you'll be walking like a native."

It was a standard line among the Lunatics. So far there were no natives of the Moon. Women got pregnant occasionally; they were gently but firmly transferred back Earthside as soon as their condition was discovered.

"I was surprised to see a working elevator," Greg said as he took off his slippers and pulled on the weighted boots.

The tractor was programmed to run the straight tunnel without human guidance. Anson hit the starter button and its aged superconducting electric motor whined to life.

"We just put it into operation last week," she said. "Makes it much easier to load and unload cargo, once you get the crates through the airlock."

"Takes a lot of electrical power, though," Greg said as the tractor jolted to a start.

Anson waved a hand in the air. "Electricity's cheap. The nanomachines chomp up the regolith and lay down solar cells. Our solar farms are constantly getting bigger."

"I've seen the reports," Greg said. "And the projections."

"Good." They were tooling along the tunnel now at nearly twenty miles per hour. The overhead lamps flicked past, throwing shadows across Greg's sculpted face like phases of a moon hurtling by.

He's really a handsome devil, Anson told herself. But there's something unsettling about him. The eyes? Something. He looks... she struggled to define what was bothering her. At last she thought, He looks as if he could be cruel.

Miyoko Homma felt that she should be standing at attention, like a soldier. As it was, she had bowed deeply to the chief manager of Nippon One upon entering his cubicle and then remained standing with her arms rigidly at her sides and her face as blank as she could make it.

"The solar flare that you predicted has not come," said the head chief. He was old for Nippon One, in his forties. His belly was beginning to round out, although his face was still taut and his eyes piercing.

"Sir, it will come," Miyoko said flatly. "It is only a question of time."

"How much time?" the chief demanded. "We have kept everyone inside. The work that must be done on the surface is suspended because of this flare that was supposed to erupt. It's been more than twelve hours now! Twelve hours of lost work! How much longer must we wait?"

Miyoko took a small breath before answering, "I do not know, sir."

"But you are our astronomer! It is your job to know!"

"Sir, no one can predict the eruption of a solar flare with such precision. The configuration of magnetic field lines that I saw when I first issued the warning was typical of an imminent flare, one that would burst out in twenty-four hours or less."

"Twelve hours have gone by," said the chief. With a glance at the digital clock on his desk he added, "Twelve hours and eighteen minutes."

Miyoko felt like a small mouse trembling between the paws of a very large cat. "Sir, I can only report to you what my instruments show. Any other astronomer in the world would have reported exactly the same as I did. It is unfortunate that the Sun is not cooperating with us."

The chief settled back in his chair and rubbed his stubbled chin. "The Americans are apparently not afraid of your flare. Our reconnaissance satellite shows them working very busily on their base."

"But they must know!" Miyoko blurted.

"Or they know better."

Miyoko clamped her lips shut.

The chief stared hard at her. "It is a great problem. Do I send the surface crews back to work or not? It is most inefficient to have them sitting cooped up in here when they should be working on the surface. Yet..."

"Sir, may I make a suggestion?"

He nodded assent.

"When the flare actually erupts there will be at least an hour before the heavy particle radiation begins to build up. If the surface crews are willing to accept the first burst of relatively light radiation, it should be possible to get them inside to safety before the truly dangerous radiation builds up."

Immediately the chief said, "Tell me about this first burst of relatively light radiation." Miyoko could detect no trace of sarcasm in his words.

She said, "When the flare erupts it throws out a burst of high-frequency radiation-mostly ultraviolet and x-rays. This arrives in our vicinity within eight point three minutes, since it travels at the speed of light."