The Lunarian: Chapter 2.

In which I learn the Lunarian way of life

Day by day, the sun grew almost imperceptibly lower in the sky, as the rover made its slow but steady way southward. I quickly learned the roverman’s way of life. For the first days, I was confined to the plexiglas chamber, and let out only under the watchful eye of Trader Munchhausen himself.

The first surprise was the small gray cube that were shot through a pneumatic tube into my chamber.

“This is your food token. One of these will last you about a day. Drink the water through this tube”

Nicholas Munchhausen addressed me through an intercom speaker mounted in the translucent wall.

‘What is it’

‘Protein, carbohydrates, and all essential vitamins and nutrients’

I popped it into my mouth and chewed it. It tasted something like bread and something like chicken that had been boiled too long, As I chewed, it seemed to expand, and by the time I was done, I felt like I had eaten a three-course meal.

‘What is this thing made out of?”

‘It comes from the machine,”

Trader Munchhausen grinned, and uproarious laughter came from below.

‘What you should be asking, is what goes in to the machine,’

This is when I learned about the closed environmental loop system. All biological waste products were preserved, boiled and chemically manipulated and turned back into edible substance. Supplement was also produced directly from carbonates found in rock. Unlike the Terran agents, who had regular food and supply shipments from Earth, Lunarians had no such luxury, and did what they could. It was a revolting concept, to be sure, but the Terran biosphere does perform the same functions after all...

I stared silently out at the lunar landscape. My stomach churned.

‘All right! Now let’s get down to business! What do you know about Terran Union bases, and lunar operations,’

Nicholas Munchhausen soon found that I had little knowledge of Terran Union operations, except for my own narrow field of identifying lunar settlements on maps. I was quickly given more freedom of movement, released from the prisoner’s cube, and assigned to menial tasks.

Nicholas Munchhausen was not the first bearer of his name. The Munchhausens, as I soon learned, were one of the oldest families of Lunarians, and at least ten generations of them lived in the crater of the same name. Despite their remarkable longevity, their numbers grew but slowly, as the vast majority of sons perished in various skirmishes and accidents during expeditions. Nicholas was particularly adept at dodging TULA, and a warrant for his arrest had been active for at least a decade.

“It’s all about the isotopes. If our fuel is confiscated, our society would perish. The greenies would have us buying power from TULA, but we’re no fools. We’d be no better than an air breather if we did,”

He had a wry, if somewhat grim sense of humor. One anecdote brought the rover endless amusement.

“The Terran spacesuits are a wonderful thing. They have so many widgets and bells that they can walk and talk so well that you would think it was a real man. The greenies are so stupid, they just dump last year’s models out in a dump up in the Mare Frigoris.

My grandfather had nabbed a bunch of them from the dump, and fixed them up, repainting them in the Munchhausen colors. TULA had just begun its first crackdown on uranium runners. A TULA agent saw a hundred Lunarians blithely marching down the route hefting big bags of ore, naturally, they took after them.

When they opened fire and they saw all their charge blown on a bunch of old robots, Carolus took care of the rest,”

“Ahh , but those days are long gone,”

“Can’t we still get caught any day ?”

“No Lunarian has dared mine the surface in ages. Any ground operation would be blown up for sure.”

“Then where do you get your fuel now?”

Munchhausen scratched his chin stubble. “It’s all in the lava tubes. No Terran knows how deep the caverns go, frankly neither do we. We have found things down their beyond their wildest dreams,”

“What sort of things do you mean?”

His demeanor darkened.

“I wouldn’t ask any more if I were you. After all, never trust a greenie, as old Carolus would say,”

The other rangers grunted in assent.

I knew of course, that TULA traded with the Lunarians for minerals they wouldn’t mine themselves. The Terrans had found it far more profitable to tax the Lunarians already burrowed into the lava tubes, than operate mines outright. This policy was the result of the so-called ‘streamlining’ reforms made almost a century ago.

One day, as we lined up for our food tokens, everyone was in an inexplicably good mood. A brief theremin fanfare blared over the intercom, and to my surprise, in stead of the usual food token, a piece of freeze-dried fried chicken was ejected onto my plate,”

“A Happy Uprising Day to one and all!”

“Uprising Day?”

“How would a Terran greenie know,”

“A hundred years ago you see, we Lunarians worked for the company just like you, except we could own habitats and property above ground. We even had our own rocket liners. Some of us got mighty tired of sending all that helium back to Earth, and thought we could get some of the Terran profits,” Nicholas Munchhausen paused, thinking.

“So the leading lights of the Lunarians, the businessmen and the engineers, got together and hatched a plan to start running industry here on Luna, and we started building our own fusion reactors and running factories. Naturally TULA didn’t like seeing this. Lunarian factories making Lunarian rockets and Lunarian habitations and Lunarian rovers,”

“How could I have never heard this before,”

“The Terrans at that time had recently fallen under the World Government. All their companies merged into one and became TULA. They naturally came up with some bogus rule for why it wasn’t safe to run factories on the moon. When our ancestors refused to budge, TULA declared this resistance an insurrection and blew up the factories,”

I paused, it had become clear that a lot of the history I had learned was badly wrong.

“But TULA didn’t get the ones underground. And they also forgot about the brand-new Lunar Fleet hovering near L5. The Lunar Fleet fought hard, but they were vaporized to a man. Since then, TULA knows not to meddle where it doesn't belong. And so do we,” Nicholas Munchhausen furrowed his brow.

“And so do we!” An atmosphere of resignation then prevailed within the room.

We were carrying a cargo of Personal Nuclear Reactors, the Mr. Uranium brand to be precise. Reactors are one of the most valuable commodity on Luna. They are the typical source of energy for Lunarians, solar panels get one only so far, and are worthless in crater shadows. The Mr. Uranium brand is gray and cylindrical, contains an input and an output wire, is emblazoned with a smiling cartoon atom, and about the size of a refrigerator. It was my job in that time sector, during the one-hour rest period, to ensure, using a Geiger counter, that no leaks developed in the cargo, each unit of which was strapped to a separate flatbed rover. I tried not to think of the dosage I was receiving. On the rear face of each cylinder, there is usually a marking stating the isotope inside, typically U-238, or a variety of plutonium. As I was working my way through the rows of rovers, I noticed new isotopes. Pu-244, Cm, Bk, No..? I was slightly surprised, but kept on with my work. As I trudged through the moon dust into another row of rovers the symbols changed, and soon turned to ones I had never seen before.

A memory came back to me from my university years, shortly after I had learned there were 118 elements in the Periodic table and that no new ones had been discovered for at least a century. I had noticed that a strange object was left at my professors desk. It was a kaleidoscope that was like a periodic table, but as I turned it around and around I kept on revealing new elements, groups and columns. When my professor saw me looking at it, he grew very pale, and told me never to tell what I had seen. He later disappeared, and his disappearance was rumored to be the result of an action of the Bureau of Misinformation Prevention.

Something was up. Nicholas Munchhausen was no ordinary dust pirate. But if not simple evasion of Terran taxes and oversight, what was truly going on?

However, such thoughts were quickly interrupted by a volley of blue bolts from the horizon.

Without thinking , I ran to the nearest boulder, and crouched under it. As I activated my helmet radio with my chin, I saw red-hot pools of molten iron littering the plain wherever the beams struck. My helmet radio registered only static, my connection with Munchhausen was severed. At that point, I reasoned that my odds of survival were low. As the green Terran rovers grew closer, I had two choices, either rejoin the Terrans, or attempt to make my way back the South Polar caravan. I had safety behind the reactor flatbeds, for any strike on them would create a boiling radioactive mess, destroying the Terran vehicles. At the same time, this was my only chance I would ever have to return…

As the Terran line grew closer, the green suits began to boil out of the lead vehicles. Unlike Lunarians, the Terran forces always traveled in groups of one hundred or more. For it was their way never to act alone.

I attempted to communicate with my headlight, a weak laser always mounted on top of a helmet for emergency communication, flashing the distress signal.

I saw a Terran pointing a blaster at me.