LITMIR.BIZ

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else now and tell him how she had once been engaged to the Man in the Moon.

      It would make good conversation. It would be funny. A joke.

      He got up and walked over to his phonograph and put the record on. The somewhat scratchy voice sang as if nothing had happened

      Way Back Home by Al Lewis.

      The record caught and started repeating the last line.

      He hadn’t actually wanted to play it. It had been an automatic response. He had played it lots of times before when he had thought of Earth. Of going home.

      He crossed over and threw the record across the bunker and watched it shatter on the steel wall and the pieces fall to the floor.

      The others came back in the bunker and the men of the Second started grabbing their bags and few belongings and getting ready to leave. Dahl sat in a corner, a peculiar expression on his face. He looked as if he wanted to cry and yet still felt that the occasion was one for rejoicing.

      Chapman walked over to him. “Get your stuff and leave with the others, Dahl.” His voice was quiet and hard.

      Dahl looked up, opened his mouth to say something, and then shut up. Donley and Bening and Dowden were already in the airlock, ready to leave. Klein caught the conversation and came over. He gripped Chapman’s arm.

      “What the hell’s going on, Chap? Get your bag and let’s go. I know just the bistro to throw a whing-ding when we get—”

      “I’m not going back,” Chapman said.

      Klein looked annoyed, not believing him. “Come on, what’s the matter with you? You suddenly decide you don’t like the blue sky and trees and stuff? Let’s go!”

      The men in the lock were looking at them questioningly. Some members of the Third looked embarrassed, like outsiders caught in a family argument.

      “Look, Julius, I’m not going back,” Chapman repeated dully. “I haven’t anything to go back for.”

      “You’re doing a much braver thing than you may think,” a voice cut in. It belonged to Eberlein.

      Chapman looked at him. Eberlein flushed, then turned and walked-stiffly to the lock to join the others.

      Just before the inner door of the lock shut, they could hear Chapman, his hands on his hips, breaking in the Third on how to be happy and stay healthy on the Moon. His voice was ragged and strained and sounded like a top-sergeant’s.

      *

      Dahl and Eberlein stood in the outer port of the relief ship, staring back at the research bunker. It was half hidden in the shadows of a rocky overhang that protected it from meteorites.

      “They kidded him a lot this morning,” Dahl said. “They said he had found a home on the Moon.”

      “If we had stayed an hour or so more, he might have changed his mind and left, after all,” Eberlein mused, his face a thoughtful mask behind his air helmet.

      “I offered him money,” Dahl said painfully. “I was a coward and I offered him money to stay in my place.” His face was bitter and full of disgust for himself.

      Eberlein turned to him quickly and automatically told him the right thing.

      “We’re all cowards once in a while,” he said earnestly. “But your offer of money had nothing to do with his staying. He stayed because he had to stay, because we made him stay.”

      “I don’t understand,” Dahl said.

      “Chapman had a lot to go home for. He was engaged to be married.” Dahl winced. “We got her to write him a letter breaking it off. We knew it meant that he lost one of his main reasons for wanting to go back. I think, perhaps, that he still would have left if we had stayed and argued him into going. But we left before he could change his mind.”

      “That—was a lousy thing to do!”

      “We had no choice. We didn’t use it except as a last resort.”

      “I don’t know of any girl who would have done such a thing, no matter what your reasons, if she was in love with a guy like Chapman,” Dahl said.

      “There was only one who would have,” Eberlein agreed. “Ginny Dixon. She understood what we were trying to tell her. She had to; her brother had died up here.”

      “Why was Chapman so important?” Dahl burst out. “What could he have done that I couldn’t have done—would have done if I had had any guts?”

      “Perhaps you could have,” Eberlein said. “But I doubt it. I don’t think there were many men who could have. And we couldn’t take the chance. Chapman knows how to live on the Moon. He’s like a trapper who’s spent all his time in the forests and knows it like the palm of his hand. He never makes mistakes, he never fails to check things. And he isn’t a scientist. He would never become so preoccupied with research that he’d fail to make checks. And he can watch out for those who do make mistakes. Ginny understood that all too well.”

      “How did you know all this about Chapman?” Dahl asked.

      “The men in the First told us some of it. And we had our own observer with you here. Bening kept us pretty well informed.”

      *

      Eberlein stared at the bunker thoughtfully.

      “It costs a lot of money to send ships up here and establish a colony. It will cost a lot to expand it. And with that kind of investment, you don’t take chances. You have to have the best men for the job. You get them even if they don’t want to do it.”

      He gestured at the small, blotchy globe of blue and green that was the Earth, riding high in the black sky.

      “You remember what it was like five years ago, Dahl? Nations at each other’s throats, re-arming to the teeth? It isn’t that way now. We’ve got the one lead that nobody can duplicate or catch up on. Nobody has our technical background. I know, this isn’t a military base. But it could become one.”

      He paused.

      “But these aren’t even the most important reasons, Dahl. We’re at the beginnings of space travel, the first bare, feeble start. If this base on the Moon succeeds, the whole human race will be Outward Bound.” He waved at the stars. “You have your choice—a frontier that lies in the stars, or a psychotic little world that tries and fails and spends its time and talents trying to find better methods of suicide.

      “With a choice like that, Dahl, you can’t let it fail. And personal lives and viewpoints are expendable. But it’s got to be that way. There’s too much at stake.”

      Eberlein hesitated a moment and when he started again, it was on a different track. “You’re an odd bunch of guys, you and the others in the groups, Dahl. Damn few of you come up for the glamor, I know. None of you like it and none of you are really enthusiastic about it. You were all reluctant to come in the first place, for the most part. You’re a bunch of pretty reluctant heroes, Dahl.”

      The captain nodded soberly at the bunker. “I, personally, don’t feel happy about that. I don’t like having to mess up other people’s lives. I hope I won’t have to again. Maybe somehow, someway, this one can be patched up. We’ll try to.”

      He started the mechanism that closed the port of the rocket. His face was a study of regret and helplessness. He was thinking of a future that, despite what he had told Dahl, wasn’t quite real to him.

      “I feel like a cheap son of a bitch,” Eberlein said.

      *

       The very young man said, “Do they actually care where they send us? Do they actually care what we think?”

       The older man got up and walked to the window. The bunkers and towers and squat buildings of the research colony glinted in the sunlight. The colony had come a long way; it housed several thousands

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