The Voices of Heaven Read Online Free PDF

not real safe. Then, when they began excavating space for living quarters, they took advantage of the fact that once, a long time ago, the Moon had had real volcanoes.
    The lunar volcanoes weren't the violently explosive kind you find on some planets, like Krakatoa or Vesuvius; they were the kind that gently ooze lava over long periods of time, like Earth's volcanoes in the Hawaiian islands. And when lava flows that way, the outsides of the flowing lava river cool before the insides, so you have a sort of pipe of solidified rock on the outside, while still-molten lava is flowing inside. When the flow stops and the lava runs out, what's left is a kind of immense, empty tube.
    Then those tubes get covered over with new flows from later eruptions—or, in the case of the lunar craters, by the splash of material the asteroids push out of their way when they make the craters. That impact destroys all the near-surface lava tubes in the vicinity, but the deep-down ones survive, like lengths of tunnel abandoned way underground. So the people who designed the colony simply lined them to keep the air in and built connecting passages, and, voila!, there's your underground city.
     
    Danny's is a big, noisy place, and at first I had trouble finding where Alma was sitting, though I didn't doubt that she would be waiting there for me.
    Indeed she was, but the bad part was that she wasn't waiting alone. Rannulf Enderman was sitting at the table with her.
    Rannulf Enderman was a man of about my age, and also about my size and build, or maybe just a trifle bigger. (Well, I guess we have another of those little obstacles to understanding here. You don't care about height, because yours changes so. We do care. I was 190 centimeters tall, and I liked being that way; it was an annoyance that my predecessor in Alma's affections had been just a centimeter or two taller than that.)
    The fact that we looked a little bit alike didn't make us friends. We were, in fact, pretty unfriendly rivals, and what we were rivals about was Alma Vendette. Technically there should have been no rivalry, because Rannulf was history—or should have been. Alma had told me herself that they had broken up before I met her.
    It bothered me very much that she didn't always treat him like history.
    As I approached Rannulf looked up at me with an expression I didn't recognize: pleased with himself, a little pensive. "Hello, Barry," he said. "Nice to see you again."
    I didn't think it was nice at all, but I took a grip on my feelings—the doctors kept telling me it would be prudent to do that. I said, "Hello, Rannulf," in as nearly friendly a tone as I could manage, and bent down to kiss Alma.
    Alma kissed me back, but she didn't prolong it. She had something else on her mind, and as soon as her lips were free I found out what it was. "Barry, Rannulf's gone out of his mind," she said.
    "Haven't," Rannulf said, looking defensive.
    "You have so. Talk sense to him, Barry, please. Tell him not to be an idiot."
    I sat down next to her, gazing at Rannulf. He didn't appear to be any more idiotic than usual. "What's he done?"
    "He's going to volunteer to go to Pava."
    I will say for me that I did not show my pleasure at the news. I felt it, though. I just said, "Are you sure anybody at all is going there?"
    "Didn't you hear? They got their reprieve, so they're going to leave with a full complement of colonists, as soon as they can get the ship ready. What do you think of that? Imagine Rannulf throwing away a career on the Moon to go and live on a farm."
    What I thought of Rannulf's new-formed plan was that it was the best news I'd had all day. I also thought that it was a grandstand play to get Alma's sympathy—which is to say, to get Alma back. It was the oldest trick in the book, and just what I would have expected from Rannulf. "Honey," the soldier on embarkation leave tells the girl, "don't let us waste this moment, because I may be dead in a few days," and so she falls into his