Farside Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Sandpapered by those little dust motes flying in from space.”
    “Yeah,” Trudy replied. No water to erode them. No rain or wind. But if a bullet-sized micrometeorite happened to hit me …
    She tried to shake off her worries and at last worked up the courage to look up at the stars. There were thousands of them! Millions! Billions! Even through the heavy tinting of her helmet, Trudy could see them spangling the blackness of space, stretching out to infinity, staring down at her with ominous unblinking solemnity. So many stars! Trudy couldn’t make out any of the constellations she was so familiar with back on Earth: the profusion of stars blotted them out.
    Then it hit her. The sky was empty! No Earth appeared up there, bright and friendly, the way it hung in the sky over Selene. Suddenly she was seven years old again, all alone, very frightened, all alone in the universe, staring at the cold empty sky, feeling as if she were falling upward into that unfeeling, remorseless infinite wilderness.
    She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to fight down the panic that was surging through her.

 
    RECOVERY
    “You okay?” Winston’s voice made Trudy’s eyes snap open. He sounded concerned, worried.
    “Me?” she squeaked. “Yeah. I’m okay. I’m fine.”
    “You sounded like you were puffing, gasping.”
    “I’m okay,” she insisted, concentrating on looking at him, not the sky.
    She couldn’t see his face through the tinting of his helmet, but she heard him say, “Some people get a jolt when they first come out here. Guys from Selene, they’re used to seeing Earth overhead. It bothers them here.”
    “That’s what the farside is all about, isn’t it?” Trudy replied, desperately trying to keep her voice from shaking. “I mean, this side of the Moon is always pointed away from Earth. You never see Earth from here.”
    “Right,” said Winston.
    “Is that a road?” she asked, pointing with one gloved hand.
    “Yeah. Simpson’s Highway, we call it. That’s where they took the mirror off to Mendeleev.”
    “And now they’re bringing it back.”
    Winston didn’t reply, but Trudy got the sense that he was nodding his head.
    “Not much to see, is there?” she said, keeping her eyes on her companion. Not the stars. Not the stars.
    “Most of the base is underground. Those are the solar farms, out there.” He pointed. “That’s how we generate our electricity.”
    Trudy followed his pointing arm and saw an area of dark solar cells spread across the floor of the plain, silently drinking in sunlight.
    “Daylight for fourteen days straight, just about,” said Winston.
    “And fourteen straight days of night,” Trudy added.
    “Yeah. We generate twice the power the base needs and store the excess in superconducting coils for the night. We’ve also got a nuclear generator buried out there, as a backup.”
    “Just like Selene.”
    “Uh-huh.” Winston hesitated a moment, then said, “Well, that’s about it. You want to go in now?”
    I passed the test! Trudy exulted. I got through the initiation. As nonchalantly as she could manage, she replied, “I guess.”
    As they turned toward the airlock hatch, set into the slope of the ringwall mountain, Trudy’s eye caught a glint of something halfway up the distant twisting road.
    “What’s that?”
    Winston said, “Oh, that’s Simpson’s gang toting the mirror back.”
    An enormous rig was laboriously inching along the winding road, bearing a huge flat load that gleamed in the sunlight.
    Trudy stared at it, fascinated. It was like a huge round metal pancake, obviously on wheels of some sort, creeping down the road, painfully slowly.
    “Mirror must’ve cracked at one of the switchback turns,” Winston was saying. “It’ll take them seven, eight hours to get it back down here.”
    “Do you have a pair of binoculars on you?” Trudy asked.
    “Naw. C’mon, let’s go back inside.”
    A smaller vehicle was speeding down the switchbacks at breakneck