Something Made of Vacuum

On her way back to the Easterday family grounds, Helene was stopped by a train. She stepped back and watched in bemusement as a line of two dozen unmanned cars trundled out of the lunar East and rolled sedately past her. One by one, the cars pivoted at a slight angle to align themselves with the street grid. They headed for the central square downtown and parked themselves in neat ranks next to the church.

When Helene arrived at the central square, Tom and several other people were already there. “Hey, Helene,” he said. “Let’s grab a car. The rock fall won’t be for another hour yet, but I want to make sure we’ve got a car to get there.”

“Oh, that sounds too exciting for me,” Helene said. “A rock fall. Just imagine. What does the rock fall off of?”

“The rock falls out of the sky, makes a hell of a big boom and a new crater.”

Her eyes went wide. “My God! Don’t you have some way to shoot those down or blow them up or something? What if it hits somebody? Will it hit us?”

“It’s okay,” Tom said, grinning. “The rock is an asteroid called a ‘carbonaceous chondrite’ and it’s going to fall about thirty kilometers south of here. It’s going to fall there because that’s where we aimed it. We want this rock to fall – in fact, I’m an investor in this particular rock. Asteroids like that are full of carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen and other stuff that is valuable here, so we knock them out of near-Earth orbits and put them down where we can recover them. It’s a terrific show and I’d like to take you to see it.”

“Listen, Moonie, if you want a date with me, why don’t you just ask me to go to a play or a movie or something?”

“They have theaters in air town. When we go to the movies together we just sit next to each other and watch the same show in our helmets. A rock fall’s more fun. Anyway, it’s not much of a date. After that I have to go into the shop and work today. But why not go? It’s not like yesterday was all that fulfilling for you.”

“I thought Wednesday was your day off?”

“I’m the boss. The boss doesn’t really get a whole day off, just enough time to lose at pitch and toss and watch this show.”

“All right, you silver-tongued devil, you’ve beguiled me. Do we have to get tickets to watch a rock fall out of the sky?”

“Nope. And Helene … thanks. I really do appreciate that you’re going to do something with me.”

“I’m still going back to Earth.”

“So you are.”

“Where did all these cars come from?”

“We rent them from other towns. When somebody else has a rock fall, we rent some of our cars to them.”

“I’m guessing that costs some money?”

“My treat,” Tom said.

Tom and Helene climbed on to one car and fitted their suits to the pipe racks. The car rolled along the edge-lighted street to the edge of the village, then sped up and took them bouncing over the rolling landscape south of Sinus Amoris. The other rented cars followed them, along with the cars that already belonged to the village.

The car went faster than Helene would have driven and she was obliged to hold on desperately to the hand rail. Moon Men seemed to have an unlimited appetite for gossip – the whole group spent the trip discussing others who had to work and were not part of the caravan. The village quickly receded beyond the Moon’s horizon, and they rolled through the gray dusty landscape, automatically dodging around outcrops and craters.

They arrived at a precisely determined point on a low hill, overlooking a shallow valley which appeared, to Helene’s eyes, to be exactly as worthless as any other stretch of Moon dust. They dismounted from the car and stood with other spectators, all of them chattering away to each other.

There were a few Moon Men already at the site, herding a set of robot work vehicles that presumably would start harvesting the asteroid after it crashed in.

“I’d figure you had all the rock you want,” Helene said privately to Tom. “Why another one?”

“We can cook the dust with mirrors during the Day and get all the oxygen and aluminum we want,” Tom said. “Asteroids like this one have stuff we can’t get out of the dust, principally carbon and hydrocarbon compounds and nitrogen. You have to have nitrogen for plants and your body really is happier if you breathe about the same nitrogen/oxygen mix as Earth air. Carbon we need for food and all kinds of businesses. I invested in the ship that searches out Apollo asteroids for the right kind and slings them down here. I should make a little money on it. Two minutes.”

“I don’t see anything,” Helene said, looking into the Night sky.

“This rock’s as black as coal, which it almost sort-of is,” Tom said. “You wouldn’t see it. Ninety seconds. Ask your suit to highlight where it’s going to hit – the schedules for these things are public.”

Her suit drew a red circle inside her helmet that appeared to rest on a patch of Moon ground a kilometer away. Helene said, “How big is this thing? Is this safe?”

“Only about fifty meters across. We’ll be okay. Here we go, now.”

She never saw anything come out of the sky. The ground erupted as though the explosion had come from underneath. Dust blasted high into the sky and a visible wave rolled through the solid landscape. The sound, coming half a second after the impact, was reduced by having to come through the insulated soles of her boots but was still shattering.

Boulders leaped and bounced all around the impact. The ground shook so hard that several of the watching Moon Men fell over and bounced themselves. Helene stumbled back and Tom caught her. Everything that went up rocketed so fast it was nearly invisible. Everything that fell looked, in the weak Lunar gravity, like a slow-motion film.

A patter of small rocks hitting the ground sounded like rain. Apparently they had calculated their position well, because nothing larger than sand landed on the Moon Men.

Rocks fell for a solid three minutes. The dust that obscured the stars fell at exactly the same speed, with no air to keep it suspended, and when the explosion was over, it was over all at once. The ground was exactly as still as it had been before. The work vehicles moved in and began sifting for pieces of the black rock.

“Okay, Tom,” Helene said, “you know how to show a girl a good time. I have to admit that was impressive.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“A cheap date, too. Come to think of it, what do you Moon Men spend money on? You don’t seem to have much of anything, really, except what’s in your suits.”

“We have each other.”

“That sounds like a slogan.”

“Ouch, guilty. Yeah, it is a slogan. True, though. Everybody has to work here, because you have to pay for air and water and food and health insurance and all. I’ve never heard of an unemployed Moon Man aside from the kids, but if there was one, we’d have to send him to air town. But there really isn’t much we can spend money on.”

“And I’m the traveling salesman who is trying to make you want to make more money,” Helene said. “All of a sudden I see the business strategy problem here.”

“Hey, if you’re a traveling salesman you’re supposed to have a guy in every town, right? Can I be your guy in Sinus Amoris?”

“As long as you stay inside your Moon suit, Tom, you’re welcome to call yourself by any title you want. You want to be my beau, my boo, my schnookums, my inamorato if that’s a word? Knock yourself out.”

“What happens if we’re in air and I get out of the suit?”

“Then you behave yourself, lover boy.”

Tom was silent for a long moment. “I have to go in to the shop,” he said. “Will you come with me? It involves breathing air together, but I’ll behave while we’re there.”

“Of course, Tom,” Helene said. “Listen, I’m sorry, I think I sound more snippy than I really am. I’d like to see your shop. I don’t actually know as much about spices as I try to sound like I do.”

“You don’t know your danger. When we get to the shop,” Tom said, “every ten minutes or so, smack me across the face if I keep talking about spices, okay?”

“Count on it.”

The car took them to a small, windowless building on the edge of the landing field, surrounded by warehouses. The airlock was only big enough for one person at a time. Helene waited outside, looking at the ships on the field being serviced by busy Moon Men, while Tom cycled himself through. She entered when the door opened again.

There was a teenage girl there with Tom, her helmet off to reveal her pale face and straight blonde hair. Her suit was painted with the logo and name of the local high school team, the Sinus Amoris Sabertooth Tigers. Tom had removed his helmet as well. “Helene,” Tom said, “this is Shavon, who works for me when she’s not in school.”

Helene struggled for a minute to remove her helmet, then shook Shavon’s bare hand with her gloved one. “Hi,” she said. “Glad to meet you. I’m kind of surprised kids here go to school. I mean, go someplace specific for school. Couldn’t you learn everything from displays in your helmet?”

“Hi,” Shavon said. “School is just a place in the village but they make us go there.”

“Gotta socialize the little monsters,” Tom said cheerfully. “Otherwise they grow up feral. Shavon, what have you been working on?”

Shavon waved to a monitor mounted on the wall that showed a list of orders. “Curry masalas,” she said. “We’ve got sixteen orders, I just got them all packed.”

“Which masala?”

“Special Garam.”

“Okay, good,” Tom said. The room was lined with shelves holding sealed plastic bags of spices. At a work table in the center, Shavon had been measuring strongly aromatic powders into a bin, then ladling the mixture into thick-walled, pressure-locked plastic boxes. The full boxes were stacked on one end, and there were a hundred or more empty boxes of the same kind on one of the shelves.

“Listen, Tom, Helene, I’ve got to go,” Shavon said. “Is your car still out there?”

“I think so,” Tom said.

Shavon pulled on her gloves and put her helmet on without sealing it. She glanced at the display and said, “Yeah, it is. I have to get to school. Helene, nice to meet you.” She sealed the helmet.

“Nice to meet you, too,” Helene said, and watched as Shavon cycled herself through the airlock.

When they were alone, Helene asked, “Did she really have to go to school right then?”

Tom retrieved his helmet from a hook on the wall and glanced into it. “No, that was an excuse, I guess,” he said.

“For what?”

“I think she thought I wanted to be alone with you. I suppose she’s right.” He replaced his helmet on the hook.

“How would she know that?”

“This is going to sound like a pickup line,” Tom said ruefully, “but my pulse rate went up when I watched you take off your helmet. She must have seen the numbers too.”

“You people really are strange, you know that? You can barely stand to touch each other, and at the same time you’re in each others’ private business every minute of the day.”

Tom looked down. “Yeah, we are. I know it.”

Helene hung her own helmet on the wall and pulled off her gloves, looking around at the tiny room. “You mix your spices by hand?” she asked? “I just assumed you’d have packaging machinery.”

“There are only 72,418 Moon Men,” Tom said. “I don’t need any automation to make spices for them.”

“Tom,” Helene said, smiling, “we need to work on that pronounced ethnic accent you have. Now try to put that in regular language. You should say, ‘There are about seventy thousand Moon Men.’ Try it!”

“There are about seventy thousand Moon Men,” Tom said obediently.

“Very good! We’ll have you talking normal in no time.”

“Why are ‘we’ worried about that?”

Helene looked confused. “Oh, just … I don’t know, in case you need to talk everybody-language.” She picked up one of the containers of curry powder Shavon had just filled. “This box looks like it’s been kicked around a few times.”

“It’s probably fifty years old,” Tom said. “We almost never throw away containers. We hardly ever throw away anything.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier just to use disposable containers? What, do the customers have to send these back to you when they’re empty?”

“They do. On Earth, I think you can pretend that when you throw something away, the bacteria in the landfill will degrade it, or the little forest creatures will eat it or it will sink in the mud or something, right? We can’t pretend that. When you throw something out here, it will stay there until the Sun goes nova. So we don’t use disposable stuff if we can possibly avoid it.” Tom brought out a clean cotton rag and wiped the mixing bin, then cleaned the table top. He moved the filled containers of curry to another shelf and set out various bags of spices from Earth.

“What are you making?”

“Herbes de Provence. Winter savory, summer savory, thyme, rosemary, tarragon. I put in a little bit of a few other ingredients, too, strong-tasting stuff the actual French in Provence would never use. Our tastes are actually slightly different from people on planets. I think it’s because we don’t have the opportunity to smell food as much, so the taste in your mouth is more important. Anyway, my own mix sells better than what I can get pre-mixed from Earth.” He washed his hands at a sink, the water looking syrupy and blobby in the low gravity. He began slitting open bags and pouring spices into the bin. The room filled with warm, delicious odors.

“I take it you recycle those plastic bags?” Helene asked.

“Sure. During the Day, you can melt almost anything with sunlight and a mirror, pretty much free. It’s a lot easier to re-use stuff when you don’t have to worry about oxidation.”

Helene looked around and found a low stool, sized to fit someone wearing a suit. She pulled it over and sat, watching Tom. After a while she asked, “Are all Moon Men as gung-ho about living here as you are?”

“I think so,” he said. “There are always some kids who grow up here but want to get away – usually because they’re full of teenage hormones, if you want the truth – so their families buy them a ticket out to one of the planets. Or they go away for college and don’t come back to stay.”

“To Earth?”

“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a kid going to Earth, although I suppose they could. But they always say all the jobs are out on the colony planets, so that’s where they go. Anyway, the ones who stay on the Moon and become adults, they like it here.”

“You like it here.”

“Yeah, and you don’t. I get that.” Tom stirred his mixture with a startlingly incongruous wooden spoon.

“Everybody’s been nosy but otherwise real nice to me here,” Helene said. “I like your family a lot. But the Moon is … is nothing. Gray dust, no air.”

“You won’t get any argument about that from me, or any Moon Man. If any Moon Man ever took a walk to commune with Nature, he was drunk. We know it’s gray rock.”

“Did you ever bring a girl here, to breathe air with you and smell the spices?”

Tom looked up at her. “Actually, no. Maybe I should have, now that you mention it. I’ve gone to Theophrastus with ladies a few times. They have gardens in the city parks, with flowers you can smell.”

“How did those dates work out for you?”

“Pretty well, thank you very much. I’m not exactly desperate, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

She looked at him and smiled. “Then why are you chasing a woman who is unavailable? Tom, I’m from another planet, for pity’s sake.”

“It’s what men do.”

“Yeah, women too. Listen, Tom, I’ve got another ten days or so. Want to have a really short-term affair?”

“No.”

“Not up for something spontaneous?”

“Moon Men don’t do spontaneous,” Tom said.

“I could seduce you.” Helene held up her hands and wiggled her fingers. “Look, bare naked female hands! Not even a ring! Back home I’m the girl next door, but up here I’m the sex bomb.”

Tom put down his spoon, and carefully fitted a lid over the bin. “Helene, please don’t play with me. I’m an easy target and I don’t know how this game works. Yes, I’m attracted to you but I’ll deal with it.”

Helene lowered her hands and looked down. “Oh, God, I’m being a bitch again. Tom, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I think wearing this Moon suit affects me. I feel like nothing can touch me in here, like everything human bounces off my shell.”

Tom walked toward her. “What are going to do?” Helene asked nervously.

“Bounce off you, probably,” he said. But when he held out his arms, she rose into them. They came together with a metallic clang and leaned far forward to allow their faces to meet. They kissed passionately and held each other as though their bodies could touch.

Presently Helene pulled back and smiled. She was about to speak when Tom put a finger to her lips. “No jokes,” he said quietly.

“I was going to make a joke,” Helene said. “But you’re right. Tom my dear, you know me well enough to know what I was going to say. That’s … I mean, no man on Earth ever knew me that well.”

“Helene,” he said.

“Also you’re articulate.”

“I said no jokes.”

Helene smiled again, and this time her smile was vulnerable and endearing. “Also,” she said, “you’re articulate.” She kissed him again.

Tom pulled her close so that their cheeks could touch, and they held each other without moving. After a long while, he pulled back to look at her face, and his eyebrows went up.

Helene smiled, her eyes half-lidded. It was a conversation.

“Helene,” he said, “what actually just happened here?”

“Not much, really,” Helene said sadly. “You’re still a Moon Man, and I still have to go back to Earth. This is just a summer romance. The difference is, now I don’t say ‘whee,’ I say ‘damn’.”

“Kiss me again.”

“I’ll kiss you as many times as you’ll let me for ten days,” she said, and did. She sat back down. “But I still have to go back. I’m not a Moon Man, I’m just dressed up like one. Tom, Tom, I know you’re sweet on me because I’m the exotic woman from another planet, and I have long hair, and because you’ve seen me in clothes. But there’s no future in this.”

“That’s not how men work,” Tom said, pulling up another stool and sitting on it. “Men don’t actually fall in love with women for reasons. We fall in love first, and then whatever that woman has, that’s what we think the reasons are. I really want to touch your hair, and if somebody asked me I’d say I have a thing for long-haired women, but the truth is, it’s just because that’s what you’ve got.”

She reached out and took his hand, and put it on her hair. When she took her hand away, Tom still stroked her hair and twined his fingers in it.

Eventually Tom pulled back. “I told you we don’t do spontaneous. I still have to get these orders packed.”

“Tom, I knew you were going to say that. I can tell what you’re thinking, too. I know perfectly damn well you’re going to pack up a bunch of containers, put on your gloves and helmet and do a system check, cycle through the airlock, call a car to go to the terminal and ship that stuff off to other Moon Men villages. And you know what? I’m okay with that. I’m better than okay, I’m enchanted with it. Tom, you just got yourself a girl by the sheer power of stodginess.”

“You just got yourself a guy by the sheer power of …” Tom said, and could not finish his sentence.

“By the sheer power of. That’s a good way to say it. Kiss me again, then back to work,” Helene said. “I’ll just look at your bare hands.”

“I’m sorry I can’t be more spontaneous,” Tom said. “I actually have to get these orders out.”

“I used to be spontaneous,” Helene said, “but I have decided on the spur of the moment to give it up.”