k 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 it