Bind Your Sons To Exile
(1979)*
Jerry Pournelle

Content

	Prologue
	Chapter One
	Chapter Two
	Chapter Three
	Epilog

Prologue

	Heat rose in dry waves from the black asphalt surface. The cooling trade winds carried dust and clouds of bright yellow butterflies. The insects fluttered in confusion, vainly seeking vegetation or moisture among the low concrete buildings of the spaceport; eventually they died and their dessicated bodies added to the blowing dust.

	Under other circumstances, Bill Jack Shipton might have worried about the butterflies. There were millions of them, and surely the addition of the spaceport would not really reduce their numbers; but it was a cost, and his grandmother would have wanted him to count it. This land was not the land of his ancestors, but he had been taught reverence for all the Earth, even the dry deserts of Baja California.

	Now, however, he was concerned only with the works of man. A dozen bright steel rails ran from the asphalt into the blue waters of the Bahia de la Paz. The monstrous flatcar squatting across them was so large that it was impossible to take it seriously; it looked like an advertising stunt for a toy company. The stubby-winged spacecraft sitting atop the rail car added to the illusion of a child's toy, or a set for a television show; the spacecraft itself was not so large, but the monstrous fuel tanks beneath it looked more illusion than reality.

	The flat car had already taken the spacecraft from its landing area in the bay and placed it atop the launching tower; now the railcar slowly withdrew, while below the spacecraft itself white plumes of condensing vapor blew off the fueling lines. The yellow butterflies flocked toward the moisture.

	Bill Jack's open jitney bus purred across the asphalt toward the spacecraft. It plunged into the swarms of butterflies, spattering them onto the windscreen and sending others careening onto the pavement, leaving a fluttering yellow trail as it moved across the blacktop. The driver sang softly in the Baja patois, part Indian and part Spanish. He wore a wide hand-tooled belt with enormous silver buckle, and in the tavern the night before he had told Bill Jack that the buckle cost more money than his father ever had in his life. The spaceport had brought that; and Bill Jack thought that even his grandmother would have approved, despite the cost to the butterflies.

	There were a dozen young women and twice that number of young men on the jitney. Most sat lost in thought; some spoke in artificially cheerful tones and elaborately ignored the spacecraft, pretending a boredom they didn't feel. They had prepared for this moment for years, but few had ever been in orbit before; and the enormous bulk of the shuttlecraft cast its shadow across them.

	They were all dressed alike: reflective coveralls over a finely woven body-stocking. Their tool belts were mostly new and stiff, the tools shiny and unused. Few of them wore glasses, and most shielded their eyes with uplifted hands from the glint of the sun off the bay to one side and the desert to the other.

	Bill Jack sat at the end of the jitney. Although the small bus was crowded, he seemed set apart from the others. His tool belt was oil-stained, and his coveralls did not have the creased stiffness of new material. The others chatted with each other, but few spoke to him. He was effectively alone except for Caroline.

	This no longer concerned him. He was rarely conscious now of his isolation from his peers, and when he was he thrust the thoughts deep into his subconscious. Bill Jack Shipton had never made friends easily. His attitudes and the residual scars of his origin, rather than his origins themselves, had kept him from forming close ties with his classmates at Cal Tech.

	He was both analytical and introspective, and he knew that he could have had friends. The others would have accepted him if only from politeness; but it was this, a fear of forced acceptance, that held him aloof. It was one more reason why he so desperately wanted to be part of their world; but he was afraid of rejection, and even more afraid of being merely tolerated. He wanted acceptance as something earned rather than granted, and until he had earned his way he told himself he was content to be alone. He had never cared for people who spent income they did not vet have, or who claimed credit for jobs they had not yet finished. Potential to him was nothing; only accomplishments mattered, and he had as yet earned nothing.

	The jitney stopped at the entryway to the shuttle-craft, and the group excitedly darted up the steep ramp, a little nervous but eager to be going up at last. The others had said their goodbyes back at the debarkation center; now Bill Jack paused halfway up the ramp to say his own. There was no one out there, and no one would care anyway; but he whispered a silent farewell to Earth and the life he had won his way out of.

	"I'll be back," he whispered. "Ten years, and I'll be back, rich."

	The San Gabriel Valley Community Housing Project was far to the north beyond the scruffy desert shrubs and tall cardones cactus of Baja, but it was still real in his mind: a rabbit warren of stinking concrete corridors filled with hopeless people; concrete towers stuffed with youths without hope who made their own hell, and who made life hell for everyone else—especially for anyone who wanted out, who dared hope in this tower of the hopeless. Gangs and wanton violence, cheap thrills, drugs, theft, rape, and casual murder; fear of the police, fear of neighbors, fear that the government would cease to support them; goodbye to that. Bill Jack thought. I'll be back, but to La Canada, not to San Gabriel ever again.

	"Bill—"

	He turned with a grimace. She knew he liked to be called "Will" or "William." The name on his birth certificate was "Bill Jack," not "William John, and that said everything about his mother; she had thought so little of his chances that she hadn't even given him a name he would bear with dignity.

	"Bill, come on—"

	The girl was not pretty. She was not offensively ugly, merely plain. She was not awkward or clumsy, merely graceless. Her brown hair was neither in disarray nor coifed, it was only hair. She was not difficult to look at, but generally if there were other girls in the room men turned away from her.

	"Come on, Bill, we can't keep the shuttle waiting. ' She took his hand and smiled gently as she led him up into the ship. He followed without resistance.

	They took seats together, and presently the Captain came into the passenger compartment.

	"Good morning. I am Captain Haney," she said. She was tall and slim and self-assured, her dark hair cut short hut plainly feminine. She was the kind of woman that Bill Jack had always wanted to know, although he had never become friends with anyone like that for fear of rebuff. One day, he thought; and not so very long now. Not so long, after all.

	"Be sure that all zippers are closed on your pressure suits," Captain Haney said. "This is not an airliner even if it looks like one in here."

	The passengers gave short nervous laughs. "Make certain that your helmets are accessible," Haney continued. "In the very unlikely event of a depressurization, expel all the air in your lungs. Do not attempt to hold your breath. Then get your helmets on and dog down the neck seal. There are oxygen outlets at each seat. Look at them, and make certain you know how to find them."

	They all looked. Bill Jack went about it methodically, checking to see that the helmet under his seat was his own, and that it was not caught on anything; checking again to be certain he could find the valves and hoses to connect it. Beside him Caroline did the same.

	When he had examined the helmet he checked the zippers on his suit. It felt good beneath his coveralls, tight, like a diver's wet suit, but far more comfortable because it was porous. The suit was a thick web of nylon and steel threads which reinforced his own skin so that, given pressure in an attached helmet, he could live in vacuum.

	The helmet under the seat was one of the latest designs, with integral radios and lights and water bottle. The cost of the suit and helmet were almost incomprehensible: when he and Caroline had received their equipment they had calculated that had they saved every cent they had ever had, they would be unable to buy their gear.

	Of course, Bill thought, the cost is high: how many years of my life? But he could not accuse Space Industries of being niggardly: they had promised him education and equipment and they had stinted on neither. Cal Tech. and the latest David Clarke suit and helmet; and all it cost was several years. He smiled faintly. Years of his life: worth something now, but not so long before all his years might have been bought for a promise of enough to eat and relative peace; for a houseboy's job away from San Gabriel.

	No. He had made no bad bargain with Space Industries.

	Captain Haney finished her spiel and went forward to the control cabin. The passengers buckled their lap belts and shoulder harnesses, while the First Officer went carefully from seat to seat making certain they'd done it right.

	Caroline reached over to adjust Bill's shoulder straps. She liked doing things for him, although she was never sure how he would react. Often it angered him, but she didn't care. At least he noticed her. Now she took his hand and squeezed nervously. His response was automatic, with no feeling in it, but she was used to that. At least, she thought, I have this much of him, for a little while more.

	This would be her second trip riding the thundering ramjet to orbit, and she wasn't frightened; but she envied Bill Jack's calm appearance. His eyes were fixed on something a long way outside the spacecraft. San Gabriel, she thought. He will always be haunted by that place.

	They had met at Ca] Tech, at the orientation meeting for Space Industries contract students. There had been a score of them at the meeting; now there were only four left, and they all had different assignments, each to go a separate way.

	The shuttle gave off strange noises, and Caroline gulped hard, trying, like the others, not to show any signs of nervousness. A line from an ancient recording of some standup comic came to her. "You sit on the airliner reading a magazine and smiling, but it's sweaty palms all the way ..." And that was true enough. But Bill's not sweating at all. And he's truly not scared at all.

	They had roomed together at Cal Tech. The classes were difficult, especially for the industrial scholarship students who were under enormous pressure to keep up their grade points, and it had seemed an easy solution to the problem of social life and biological pressures. They would only be friends and roomates, sleeping together when they both wanted to, but with no emotional involvements, no lasting ties; so they had arranged, and so she had believed when it began.

	And it had been that way for a while. She couldn't remember precisely when things had changed, when Bill Jack became more important to her than anything or anyone else; but certainly it had happened. Pointlessly. He liked her but she did not fit his plans for the future and never would; she couldn't, because she came from another rabbit warren project, a place indistinguishable from San Gabriel. Her mother was welfare like his. Her father had vanished years before, and it was unlikely that Caroline's mother had any right to her father's name. It was reasonably certain that Flipper Riley had fathered her; insane jealousy was one of his less unattractive traits.

	Her origins were an impossible barrier to anything more than friendship with Bill Jack Shipton. His ambitions reached higher than a welfare bastard. She'd known that and accepted it long before he told her why.

	They had just finished their first year's examinations, and although the grades were not yet listed they each knew they had done well. To celebrate they'd gone to a concert at Beckman auditorium. Bill obviously hadn't liked the music, but he sat quietly, trying to enjoy it; and afterwards they'd finished a bottle of Bourbon together while she tried to understand.

	"It was my twelfth birthday," he'd told her. "The social worker was always coming around. She liked me. She took me out for my birthday. She had a cousin who was active in a thing called the Big Brothers, and she took me up to her cousin's home. It was a big place, all white with red tile roofs, up on a hill in La Canada. The view was terrific. It looked all the way out across Pasadena to the coast.

	"San Gabriel was an ugly smear off to one side, not really very big at all. I was surprised at that because I thought that goddam place was the whole world.

	"I'd seen houses like that on TV, but they weren't real, they were just for actors. Nobody you knew lived like that. Only this was real. Three bathrooms. The faucet handles in one of them were shaped like cats heads. In San Gabriel you had to take a pair of pliers to the can because somebody always stole the faucet handles.

	"They had books, and rugs, and everything was clean, and it wasn't a TV trick, they really lived that way. They were so damned nice! Bill Lincoln had been around, but Mrs. Lincoln had never seen anybody like me. She'd always lived in a big clean house, but goddam! she was nice to me. Made me feel like I belonged there.

	He'd told her a lot more, and Caroline could guess the rest. We're so much alike, she thought. Pink monkeys in a world of brown ones. But Bill wants to paint himself brown.

	There were warning tones, and a ready light flashed at the front of the passenger compartment.

	We're really going, Caroline thought. We really are. Eight years of work, for both of us. We really are alike. We both got the idea of getting something better. We both knew we'd never make it any way but with our brains, and we both knew we weren't like the people around us. We went to the same libraries, and it's a wonder we didn't run into each other when we were twelve or thirteen years old. I wish we had.

	The ship tilted vertically until they were lying on their backs. There was another wait, less than a minute in real time, but it seemed hours. Bill Jack became aware that Caroline was holding her breath, and he gave her hand a gentle squeeze.

	I should be in love with her, he thought. She was nearly the only friend he'd ever had, and certainly the only lover. She worked hard at keeping him out of the fits of depression that too often came over him. They were sexually compatible. I warned her, he thought. I told her she didn't fit into my plans.

	By now he knew the image he'd carried since he was twelve was a false one; but he'd had it too many years to discard it. He would make it come true. He deserved that. The years of study on his own, because the San Gabriel schools were useless, filled with timeserving teachers who cared only for quiet in the classrooms and a minimum of work; and after the National Merit Examination when he was fourteen, there'd been the other school, across town, the middle-class school filled with the kind of people he wanted to be and wasn't. They might have made friends but he wouldn't chance it; instead, he studied their ways until he could ape their manners.

	The engines roared. For a moment there was nothing more, only the terrible sound of the engines, then the ship lifted and they were pressed down into their seats. That went on for a long time, then came the lurch as the upper vehicle separated from the atmospheric ramjet that carried it aloft. There was a moment of weightlessness, marked by chatter from the passengers who'd never felt it before, then more acceleration until the Earth and its atmosphere were left behind.

	Bill looked across Caroline and through the tiny-viewport. Baja lay spread out below, dark land standing out from the grey Pacific and the bright blue Sea of Cortez. There were almost no clouds over the peninsula's thousand and more miles. Los Angeles was out of his field of view, but he didn't care. He had no need for a last look at San Gabriel.

Chapter One

	To get to the Belt you must first build your own ship. We worked on her for three months. Of course most of the orbital assembly had been done before we got to the satellite complex, but Space Industries wants to be sure the crew know the ship before starting out. The trip out is nearly the worst thing about the Belt.

	It takes over 12,000 hours, nearly 18 months Earth time, and there's not much to do on the way. I kept telling myself it wasn't so bad. I had it easier than those poor blokes on sailing ships ever did. They had storms and scurvy and they were wet all the time. They had the sea, but I had all the stars in the universe, rivers of stars, stars without number, and no atmosphere to get in their way.

	But the old sailors tired of the beauties of the sea, and it wasn't long before I was sick of the stars.

	We had other compensations. I had my choice of more than a hundred programmed learning courses I could take. Foreign languages, ancient history, higher math for amusement; I got a master's in engineering for professional work; I studied up on mining and manufacturing in space. It was all there, anything I wanted. Information stored in holographic chips doesn't mass very much, and if there was anything else one of us wanted they'd beam out a program from Earth. They even sent ball games and movies.

	There was also the work. Nothing on the ship was automated. Any job that a human could do, we did for ourselves. Of course we could get clever and build automatic systems, and we did, but that took up time. The ships are designed that way. Space Industries doesn't want its people going stir crazy on the way out. They have too much money tied up in us. Coming back they wouldn't care ...

	The hardest part is other people. There were thirty-two aboard our ship. Thirty-four when we started, but two didn't make it: murder-suicide. It's a wonder there wasn't more of that. It's easy enough to hate someone you can't avoid. We had mixed sexes, but that didn't help as much as the psych boys thought it would. There were times when I thought it would be better to have enforced celibacy. I'd left my girl—well, my college roommate—back in Earth orbit, and by the time I got over wishing she'd come along, most of the women aboard had sorted themselves into reasonably permanent arrangements—without me. We had seven married couples aboard, five completely so. The other two slept around, an arrangement I got into a couple of times, but there was no satisfaction other than hydrostatic. I might as well have made out with a prostitute. In fact, I wished we'd had a couple of honest whores aboard.

	Then there was privacy. We didn't have much. Each of us had a compartment about the size of a bunk. The partitions were as thin as they could make them. No soundproofing. If we wanted quiet, we wore earphones. Not earplugs—there were times when we needed to hear what was happening and hear it fast. Otherwise we wouldn't live to enjoy the privacy.

	There were stresses in plenty—and yet, there weren't as many as people live with every day on Earth. The overcrowding was nothing new to me— even a bunk sized thin-wall compartment was more privacy than any of us had in San Gabriel Development. We weren't going to be mugged or robbed. We had one murder the whole trip; I remember a week when I was eleven years old in San Gabriel, and there were nine murders in our tower alone. Space has its dangers, hut they're predictable, or if not predictable, understandable. You can't be filled with helpless rage when the sun Hares and everyone has to huddle into the "storm cellar" shielded area among the fuel tanks. In space you don't spend your whole life feeling helpless; there's something you can do about your problems.

	It wasn't easy, but we got there, and considering that none of us had any deep space experience that's an accomplishment all by itself. Seventeen months after we left Earth orbit we matched velocities with Moria. It wasn't much of a place to be. We parked about a kilometer from the rock. Moria looked impressively big, like a mountain torn off the Earth and flung up into the sky. It had no real shape: rugged peaks sticking up all over, and big cracks running through them.

	Over at one edge there was an enormous rock, maybe a half kilometer in diameter. It sat on Moria, or I suppose you could say that Moria sat on it; anyway the two rocks had collided with just enough force that they stuck together.

	I could spout all the statistics from memory. Moria: first inhabited asteroid. Mining colony. Average distance from the sun: 2.39 AU, or 357 million kilometers. Irregular shape. Average radius: 7.5 kilometers, minimum 4, maximum 11 km. Mass: 1.78 trillion tons, or about one ten-billionth of Earth mass. Rotation period: 8.2 hours. Period: 3.69 Earth years, or 1348.6 Earth days, or 3947 local "days." Surface gravity: 0.2 cm/sec2, two ten-thousandths of an Earth gee, just enough to keep you from jumping off the place.

	If you jumped as hard as you could you'd go up a couple of kilometers, and take hours for the round trip. It wouldn't be a smart thing to do.

	Composition: varied, with plenty of veins of metals. Moria was once part of a much bigger rock, one big enough to have had a molten core. Then it got battered to hell and gone, exposing what had been the interior. Now you can mine: magnesium, uranium, iron, aluminum, and nickel. There's gold and silver. There's also water and ammonia ices under the surface, which are a hell of a lot more important than the metals. Or are they? Without the metals we wouldn't be out here. Without the ices we couldn't stay.

	There were men coming up from the rock. Some took scooters: a rocket motor with a saddle on it. No enclosure. Their suits were all the cabin they had.

	A couple of dudes just plain jumped. I supposed they must have had some kind of backpack reaction systems, because they came pretty fast, but it looked like they'd jumped. It would be possible, I told myself. But it wasn't a stunt I was anxious to try.

	The airlock cycled and three of them came aboard. They didn't waste any words on welcome. One of them opened his helmet and shouted, "Shipton? William Shipton?"

	"That's me," I admitted.

	"Dorrington. I relieve you, sir. Please get everyone into their helmets. We've got transportation. I assume you have an anchor watch set up?"

	"I'd intended to take that myself," I said.

	"Appoint someone else. The skipper wants to see you. OK, OK, let's get with it."

	You'd think that after all the time we'd spent getting to Moria we'd be anxious to get into the rock. I suppose we were, but we'd got out of the habit of doing anything that wasn't part of our routine. It took me a moment to get organized while Dorrington fumed. I asked Hal Williams to stay aboard. He'd been First Officer for the trip and knew the ship as well as anyone aboard. Then I mumbled something about our gear.

	"We'll bring the gear down," Dorrington said. "Come on, let's get it together."

	I herded our people out through the airlock. They were mostly older than me. I was Captain because I'd had a few months orbital experience and I was a graduate engineer. That made me the best man for the job. When I got the others outside I closed my faceplate and tested the pressurization, then followed them out.

	Outside is outside. I'd been out a lot during the trip. Nothing had changed. The sun was much smaller than it had been when we were closer to Earth, but it was too bright to look at. Jupiter blazed off the port bow, brighter than any star I'd ever seen. My skin felt puffed up and there were a couple of wrinkles in my skintight that I hadn't adjusted. They hurt.

	There was a big scooter out there. It had seats for forty or more. A crewman motioned me to a saddle and pointed to the straps. I le didn't bother to find my frequency and talk to me. Or maybe he had the wrong one. Or I did. None of the crew seemed to talk very much, and when they did it was mostly to give commands.

	The pilot took his seat and we started moving. After a second it didn't feel like we were moving at all; it looked as if the rock were growing. Moria got bigger and bigger until it filled the sky, and suddenly it wasn't a rock floating above me but something we could really land on. Moria was incredibly rugged, worse than it had looked from a kilometer. There were boulders and craters and everything was cracked with sharp edges. No weathering. No weather. Veins stood out in clear lines running across the cliff faces.

	The scooter braked at the surface and we set down in a little cleared flat area not much bigger than a football field. There were cliffs sticking straight up all around. They were high, half a kilometer or more, and it was hard to realize that if I wanted to I could jump to the top.

	The sun was almost directly overhead. Shadows were like shadows always are in space, sharp, no fuzzy edges, and everything not in direct sunlight was black as the inside of a cow. There was a lighted cave just in front of us. The pilot waved us to it.

	We were comical. We'd got used to no gravity at all, then when we matched orbits with Moria we'd had a hundred times the acceleration this rock gave. Now we'd have to learn to get around all over again. Some of us tried to dive horizontally and misjudged, ending up on our noses in the dirt. A couple tried to walk and that didn't work out too well either. One man jumped forty feet high and took a whole minute to come down, the pilot made a single leap, like a kangaroo, and reached the cave in one jump. It took me two falls and a splat against the cliff face to get there.

	There was an airlock inside the cave, and through that was a corridor maybe four meters wide. It was lit by flourescents set too far apart, the pilot glanced at a telltale and opened his faceplate. When he didn't keel over I opened my own, and then the rest unbuttoned.

	"—be wanted in the main assembly room, the pilot was saying. "Over there." He pointed to a cross corridor.

	We trooped along, not saying much. Wed lived together too long, so there wasn't a lot left to say. A few had made some really close friendships, but not me. I've always been something of a loner. Besides, there was the command bit: I couldn't afford to have close buddies or somebody would accuse me of favoritism. They did anyway.

	The corridors were bare rock. Well, not bare: they had been sprayed with some kind of varnish as an air seal. The rock had a lot of color in it, and there were veins. One looked like gold. Real gold. Well, you can't eat or breathe the stuff.

	There was an airlock at the end of the corridor. It was a crude slab of cast iron with milled surfaces only where it sealed. Through that was a cavern maybe fifty meters across and nearly that high. There were a few stone benches and tables on the floor.

	I had to laugh. There were niches carved all over the walls, all the way to the top, and people were perched in them like bats. I saw an empty niche and thought it over for a second, then tried a jump. I gauged it well enough to grab the hand-hold. There was a piece of line attached to the rock, and I tied that across my waist so I wouldn't drift off.

	There were a couple of dozen station regulars perched on the walls. They stank. Well, so did we, and so did the station, and so had the ship. All the stinks were different. It's amazing how many ways things can smell bad. When everything's recycled, you just can't get all the gunk out of the air and water. Not all of it. There are always a few molecules left, and the human nose is an amazingly sensitive instrument.

	About half the station personnel were missing something: fingers, an arm, a leg, one eye; one chap was missing one of each. They didn't say anything to us.

	Sure makes us feel welcome, I thought. Greenhorns are fair game everywhere, but it can be carried too far.

	Another man came into the chamber. His coveralls were a bit cleaner than most, although just barely. He wore three black bands at the ends of his sleeves. The fabulous Commander Ulysses John Wiley, who'd discovered this rock and camped on it until they d sent him additional crew. He'd built this place and was nearly its absolute master. I'd heard a dozen stories about him.

	"I'm Wiley," he said. His voice carried easily through the big rock chamber. "You've been studying tapes of this operation for damned near a year, so you think you know all about it. You don't. You don't know what work is, either, but you will."

	"We worked our arses off in the ship." That had to be Fran Lyle, one of the permanently married women. She wasn't a bad sort, but touchy.

	I was curious to know how Wiley would take Fran's smart remark. Moria was legally a US registered ship. Commander Wiley had all the powers of a captain at sea, and then some. In theory we were all part of a semi-military service.

	I needn't have worried. Wiley laughed. "Ships work was planned. Most of it. Here there's no planning, there are just jobs that have to be done.

	"Let's get to it. I'm pairing each of you with an old hand. Until further notice you don't go anywhere without your partner. When I call your names come meet your shadows."

	He was pairing us up as individuals. Fran didn't like that and said so.

	"You and your husband are in different crews," Wiley said. "Later we'll try to put you on the same shift and give you a chance to carve out your own quarters. For now you'll have to live with the situation."

	He kept on calling names until he was done, but he never called mine. I said so. "Commander, you didn't assign me a partner—"

	"You are?"

	"Shipton."

	"I was just getting to you. I want you in my office. The rest of you, get with it. Your partners will show you quarters and get you mess assignments, and aim you at some of the work. Move out. Shipton, this way. "

	"Sure." I jumped down from my perch. It was a nice feeling as I floated toward the floor, but I'd misjudged how long it would take. I was almost a full minute floating down from my perch, and before I landed everyone was laughing at me. Commander Wiley waited impatiently at the airlock.

	OK, I told myself, that's a mistake I don't make again.

	His office wasn't much, just a chamber cut in the rock. It had a computer console, and a big solid model of Moria, and some maps. There were iron chairs although there wasn't really any need for them except as a place to anchor yourself.

	"Drink?" he asked. 

	"Thanks."

	He opened an iron door in one wall and took out a couple of free-fall bulbs. I caught one. It was beer. "Good stuff," I said.

	"We pay attention to the brewing. One of our pleasures in life." He sat behind the desk and motioned me to one of the chairs. "Shipton, you're my only graduate engineer in this batch. My records show you've put in for first available transport back when your contract runs out. That right?"

	"Yes."

	"Maybe we can make you change your mind." 

	"Not bloody likely."

	He didn't much care for that. "Then why are you here?"

	"You know why I'm—"

	"No, I mean why did you sign the contract in the first place?"

	"A Space Industries contract was the only chance I'd ever have to get to Cal Tech."

	He had punched in my name on the console, and now he studied my records. "They caught you pretty young. You could have got out. And with your grades you'd have made it to any of the state universities—"

	I laughed at him. "Commander, I'm urban poor and about one half Delaware. There's no way I could flunk out of a state university. And no way I could ever convince anybody I'd learned anything. I graduate and they give me a nice cushy job being visible in equal-Opportunity reports. Regular promotions. And they might trust me with management of paper clip supplies."

	He nodded. His gray eyes were pointed at me but he wasn't looking at me. "I like that. So now—"

	"So now I prove to myself and everybody else that I earn what I get. And I'm going to get a lot."

	"Yeah, you'll go back rich all right. OK, Shipton. What do they call you, Bill?"

	"No. William. Or Duke." No point in telling him why my classmates had stuck that on me. None of them knew I was aware of their reasons, anyway; and it's not that bad a name.

	"We'll try Duke. Look, I haven't got many first class engineers. It's hard to get people to come out here unless you catch em early."

	"The way they did with inc."

	"Yeah. Or unless they've got other reasons for coming. The company doesn't look too close at those. We have to take what we can get. People come out here for screwy reasons. The important thing is that they come out to stay."

	"And the duds—"

	Wiley shrugged. "The rock eliminates most of the ones we don't want."

	"Expensive personnel selection method."

	"Yeah. But it's effective. Shipton, you're the first top grade engineer I don't have to assign to mining. In fact, on paper you're the best qualified man in this rock."

	"That's a little scary," I said.

	"It ought to be. It's hard to get expensive people out here, and those that come usually have problems. I'm moving you into the Chief of Staff's office—"

	"Ye gods—"

	"His office, not his job," Wiley said. "Jason Hoff was a hell of a man, and it'll be a while before anybody fills his boots."

	"What happened to him?" I asked.

	"He ran out of reaction mass for his suit belt. As near as we can tell he jumped over a mountain. Not a good idea, to jump where you can't see. His trajectory carried him right into the focus of one of the big mirrors. It vaporized him. I shuddered.

	"And he was one damned good man. I hope it was a lesson to everybody here. Anyway. His job slot's empty. So's his office. I'm moving you in there, but as my aide, not as part of the chain of command. Your job is to study this place. I mean study everything, not just mining and manufacturing where most of our effort has gone, but the rock itself. Living conditions. Recreation. Food production, the whole works. I'll try to keep you off definite assignment. It won't last. There's always fires to piss on, so make good use of your time."

	"Maybe somebody more familiar with the place— "No. He had a habit of interrupting when he knew what you were going to say. It saved time, but it took getting used to. "My people piss on fires. If we need a pump, they cobble up a pump. It never occurs to them to take a little more time and set up a pump-making operation. Or they go the other way and set up a production assembly for an item we need only one copy of. What I need is an analysis of basics. We don't have much effort to spare, so where's the best place to put what we have? That kind of thing." 

	"Sure. I'll try it."

	"Do more than try." He got up and opened the cabinet again. I hadn't asked for more beer, but he got two out anyway. "Duke, tell me what you know about this place."

	"Crap doodle. Commander, I just spent more than a year studying tapes—"

	"I don't mean technical. I assume you know as much as you can get from our reports. I'm after what this place means to you."

	"A way to get rich. OK, you don't like that. What do you want, the recruiters' pitch? 'Moria is the opening wedge of an enterprise that will liberate mankind from both poverty and pollution. It is a stepping stone to the stars. In time, asteroid mines will—' "

	"That will do." He hadn't cared for my mocking tone. "Don't you feel any of that? The recruiters may be corny, but it's all true! Have you ever seen a strip mine?"

	"Yes—"

	"Ugliest thing in the universe! Obscene! What we're doing here means there will never be another of those blasphemies again! You say you're half Indian—"

	"Native American. Not that it matters."

	"You of all people ought to appreciate what we're doing here! We're saving the Earth—"

	"Look, Commander, let's get something straight. I say I'm half Delaware because that sounds good. The Delawares were respectable people, and I guess I can claim kin to them. But mostly that side of my family were from scruffy tribes that goddam near starved to death before the white men ever came. That's half of me. The other half is split between German and Scots. Now tell me, if I want to pay honors to my ancestors, do I put on war paint, kilts, or horns on my hat?"

	"Now see here—

	"No, you see here. You talk about ending poverty. Crap. I'm ending poverty. My poverty. Whatever that takes, I'll do. But don't talk to me about helping the sons of bitches I grew up with, because I'm not interested. They used to beat the shit out of me everyday for fun. I wouldn't give them the sweat—" I got back in control of myself "Sorry. I've been cooped up in that ship too long."

	"You're an interesting man, Shipton. I like the way you calmed yourself down. Maybe you'll do. And maybe we can get you to change your mind about Moria.

	"Maybe. It doesn't make much difference. I'm here, and I'll work. I don't slack."

	"I believe that. All right, we've wasted enough time. Got work to do—"

	"You still haven't assigned me a partner. I'll need one."

	"Yes. I'm giving you to O'Grady. Maybe that will remind you to be careful." He pushed a button on the desk console.

	The door opened and the man who'd been missing everything came in. He had one leg, the right one; one arm, the left; and one eye, also the left. He looked to be fifty years old, and there were pale patches in the dark tan on his face and the back of his hand. His hair was patchy, steel gray what there was of it. "O'Grady, this is Mister Shipton,'' Wiley said. "I'm counting on you to see that he doesn't kill himself. He'll have Hoff's quarters."

	"Aye aye, Skipper." O'Grady's voice was cheerful. I couldn't help staring at him, and he saw that, he grinned like a thief. "Don't let the horror show throw you, Mister Shipton. I can still get around." He gestured toward the airtight door.

	He was right; he had no trouble getting around. He hopped in arcs that didn't take him far off the deck and carried him in long flights down the corridors to land just in front of the airtight doors every fifty meters or so. We went a long way, around turns and down ramps, until I was thoroughly lost. "If this is the Chief of Staff's office and quarters, why is it so far from Commander Wiley's?" I asked.

	"Planned that way. We have a blowout, don't want to lose the whole top layer in one whump, do we?"

	I got the picture.

	Just in case I hadn't, though, O'Grady chattered on. "Lots of ways to do yourself in. Like me. Got my leg caught in an airtight as it was slammin' for a blowout. Got an arm caught in the hammer mill. That one could of happened on Earth, maybe, except it was being off the deck and no way to move that made it happen ...

	"It's not so bad as it could be, though," he said. "Look at me. I'm still useful. Get in a full shift's work every shift. Plenty I can do. Here we are."

	He opened another airtight door. It was a slab of iron like the others. I fingered the rough surfaces. It stood to reason that there'd be plenty of iron to work with.

	The compartment was luxurious. Well, not really. There wasn't much for furniture, and the decor was spartan; but it was big, ten meters by five. It was warm and had plenty of light and there was room to move around in, empty space that wasn't filled with consoles and pumps and elbows …

	There was a big TV screen on one wall, and a table with an input console under it. Next to that was a work bench with electronic parts scattered around a soldering iron. The bed was a flat hammock slung up high, three meters off the deck. Why not? The chamber was a good five meters high, and there were shelves and niches carved into the rock walls, not just down low, but all the way to the ceiling.

	The stone walls were sprayed with air sealant. Here and there were flat spaces painted black with chalked diagrams on them. For decoration there were plants; pumpkin and squash and two kinds of melons, and a rose bush. The plants grew out of niches cut in the walls, and they poked out at incredible angles. A whole watermelon hung almost horizontal in the air, big fruit supported by the slender vine stalk and nothing else.

	"Here's your home," O'Grady said.

	Home. It would be that, for quite awhile. A lonely one.

Chapter Two

	Our supporters on Earth called us the cutting edge of technology. We were the first of a series of asteroid mine operations that would eventually liberate Earth forever from shortages of raw materials. The orbital space factories already demonstrated what space manufacturing could do; and with asteroid mines to supply raw materials, the day would come when everyone on Earth could enjoy the benefits of industry without the penalties of industrial pollution.

	They fought hard in Congress: more government support for Space Industries, and more importantly, tax writeoffs for the private companies investing in Moria. "Look to the future," they said. "We cannot afford short-sightedness now! Is it not time that mankind looked twenty years and more ahead, instead of always seeing no further than the next election?"

	Unfortunately there were more on the other side. "Boondoggle" was the kindest word they had for us. We were, they said, a terrible waste of resources. We absorbed billions that could go to immediate improvements for everyone. Foreign aid; schoolhouses; unemployment; these were the immediate problems, and they would not go away through dumping money into outer space! Who ever heard of Moria? Who could even find it? A rock not even visible through Earth's largest telescopes, a tiny speck hundreds of millions of miles away, where expensive people demanded more and more expensive equipment ...

	Our friends kept us alive, but they couldn't get us main supply ships; we were holding on with our fingernails. Commander Wiley hadn't been joking when he said I would be the only unassigned person of any description. Even O'Grady worked a full shift when he wasn't shepherding me around. My leisurely study couldn't last.

	Commander Wiley knew nothing of scientific management. He was a Navy man, explorer, turned station commander and mining manager. Jason Hoff had done the operations analysis for the station. He had concentrated on the mining and milling, and those were efficiently run. We had three mirrors, the largest nearly two hundred meters in diameter. They concentrated enough sunlight to melt veins of metal out of the rocks. If we wanted ultra-pure materials we could even boil them. Distillation of metals: vaporize them by holding the ores at precisely controlled temperatures, and condense the metal vapor onto cooled plates. It could only be done in space, and it was an impressive operation. It was also dangerous, as Hoff had found too late.

	After my first hundred hours I gave up trying to make much improvement in mining and refining. There was slack in the system, but the improvements would be marginal, and would take a lot of study and Operations modeling. Then too, there was a natural limit to efficiency, because there had to be people on standby for emergencies. I looked at other departments.

	Food production was part of environmental control. We had to grow everything, of course. We could get vitamins from Earth, but you can t feed people across hundreds of millions of kilometers.

	Everything grew in hydroponics tanks. The tanks were kept in a series of air-tight glass bubbles, each bubble isolated from the rest so that if one blew out we wouldn't lose everything. They had to be on the surface to catch sunlight. Since Moria receives only 20% as much sunlight as Earth, the bubbles were large, and had mirrors to reflect the light into them. The result was that we got about as much sun on our crops as most places do on Earth—after all, we never had cloudy days. The plants even adapted well to four hour days—but the four hours of dark made temperature control tricky.

	Nutrient solutions were pumped through outside heat traps in the daytime, and the heated fluids circulated into the tanks at night. The timing was critical. Plants must be fed at regular intervals, and their roots can't be kept under fluid for very long. The result was a lot of work. With only 312 people on Moria, 40 worked full time, 16 hours on and 8 off, just in food production. Even then there was no time left for experimentation.

	The food systems operation was managed by Jesse and Doris Woodridge. They were over seventy, and between them they had more experience in agronomy than the rest of us put together. I was afraid that Jesse might be touchy about a newcomer poking about in his farms, but I needn't have worried. He and his wife were proud of their system, and were glad to show me around.

	Plants grew everywhere. Jesse pointed out squashes, breadfruit, barley—"That mostly goes for beer," he said, and gave a quick grin.—corn, wheat, tomatoes, chard, strawberries ...

	"You can see they do pretty well without much gravity," Jesse said. "Course it makes a problem for the pumps."

	The crops grew in bare crushed rock. Nutrients were hand pumped into the gravel beds, then pumped out with vacuum assist because otherwise the fluids wouldn't run fast enough in Moria's low gravity. The nutrient solutions had to be gathered into tanks for re-use. They had to be routed through the heat sinks, then back into the proper tanks.

	The valve system was a maze, and the instruction sheet for the operators looked like an airline schedule: close Valve C-4 at 2240 hours, then pump fifteen strokes on Pump #5; open Valve 73-A at precisely 2244 hours and give seven strokes to Pump #6, then nine more on Pump #5.

	I looked at the maze of plastic pipes, valves, and pump handles. It would take 150 hours or more to understand any of it. "Couldn't you automate some of this?" I asked.

	Jesse sniffed, then chewed on a stem he'd broken off one of the plants. "Used to chew tobacco," he explained. "Pity we can't grow any here. Miss the stuff. He worked his jaw sideways and swallowed. "Sure we could, Duke. Back on Earth we had seven acres of greenhouses. Full hydroponics operation. Doris and I ran the whole show with three hired hands. Timers to run pumps, solenoid valves to run the timers—sure we could."

	"So why don't you?"

	He laughed. "No pump motors. Every electric motor we get ends up in the mine operations. Not enough solenoids for the valves. No timers. But we make do. Doing all right, too." He waved at his tomato crop for emphasis. A hundred plants, most of them covered with fruit. Without gravity to fight, the plants grew in a wild tangle, reaching ten meters upward to gather in sunlight. Purple eggplants grew in among the tomatoes.

	"You like it here, don't you?" I asked.

	Jesse looked for a spittoon, grinned, and swallowed again. "Sure. Back home I'd be tired out every day. Getting too old to do heavy work. No heavy work here. Doc tells us we're going to live to be a hundred, and I feel like I'm thirty again."

	I nodded. "Low gravity—

	"Yeah, but it's more'n that, Duke. Back home, every month or so I'd have to fix up the place again. Kids throwing rocks just to hear the glass break. Replace the glass with plastic and that makes 'em mad, they take an axe to the greenhouses. Tax people comin' around to make sure I didn't improve anything without a permit. Building inspectors tellin' me I'd have to hire a union electrician to do all my wirin' over again, when goddamit I knew it was safe, and they knew it was safe, I do better than any goddam—"

	"Yeah," I said. And I'll put up with every bit of it. Just let me get home again. But I didn't say that. "Jesse, if you had the gear to automate some of this, would you still have plenty to do?"

	"Sure. We're just keeping things goin' now. No time to play around. I'd like to do some cross-pollination. We got a virus with the last batch of seed. Not too bad, but we could develop strains more resistant to it. If we had time. Hungry?"

	Before I could answer he bounded across the 25-meter dome, landed, and jumped toward the top. An orange bush grew out of a small tank hung near the top. Jesse grabbed a handhold and reached out to pick an orange. Then he pushed himself back down. When he landed he handed me the fruit. "Be sure and save the seeds," he said. "That's one of our best ones. And bring back the peel, too. Recycle everything here. Have to."

	"Thanks." I looked at the control board again. Three women and two men were working valves and pump handles. 'They had to anchor themselves to be able to put any effort into pumping. It looked terribly inefficient. "I'll see what I can do for you here."

	"Yeah, well, maybe there's others need help more'n we do," he said. "But if you can get us a little more time, I got plenty of slots to put it in."

	"I just bet you do."

	'The whole place was like that. There were dozens of simple improvements we could make, only we couldn't because we couldn't spare anybody to make the tools to make the parts to make the improvements. How do you make labor-saving devices if all your labor is on overtime to begin with?

	Eventually I came up with a plan. "What we need is wire," I told Commander Wiley.

	"Yeah. I know." He got two beers out of his cupboard. It was his only luxury, and nobody begrudged him it. Wiley worked harder than anyone else, and we never knew when he slept. "They didn't send us much last shipment—"

	"We can make it," I told him. "I want to build a wire-drawing mill."

	"And what do you use for insulation? Don't mean to belittle your work, Duke, but we've thought of that one—"

	"Sure. I did some checking with Flo in organic synthesis. She thinks she can make me some enamel that'll work for motor insulation." I sucked up a slug of beer and laughed. "Of course, first she's got to make starting chemicals. Since everything in her plant is on continuous production runs of stuff we need to stay alive, she'll need new reaction vessels. But the reactions need stirring, so either somebody's got to stand there and twirl the stirrer or we need an electric motor—"

	"Only you need insulated wire to make the motor," Wiley said. He wasn't laughing. "Every problem is like that. A ball of snakes."

	"That's not all, either," I said. "To make my wiredrawing gadget I need some precision milling. The mill operators right now do about half skilled work and half stuff anybody could do. I could get milling done by putting some of the farm people to the unskilled work in the mill, except that to get the farmers loose I need solenoids and pump motors to automate the farms to release the labor to do the milling to make the wire-puller to make the wire to make the solenoids—"

	I wasn't laughing either. "Do we try it?" I asked.

	He thought about it for a moment. "Yes. I like it. There's positive feedback. You get started, and I'll see if I can't pull a couple of people off the refinery. Let's do it."

	Fifteen hundred hours later we had wire. We also cobbled up hand-turned coil-winding machines, which were easy because most of the parts could be cast. Pretty soon everyone in the station was carrying around a coil-winder and making motor and solenoid coils during their off-hours. We wound coils while we ate, while we watched TV casts from Earth, during general station-crew assemblies; I think some of the fanners learned to wind coils in their sleep.

	There were other things like that, most of them not so dramatic, but I felt we were making some progress. It wasn't enough. We needed more equipment from Earth, and more trained people. We were still figuratively hanging over the edge of a cliff, but now it was by our fingers, not our nails.

	My job title didn't change, but as time went on I unofficially had Jason Hoff's job as well as his office. At first the experienced people tended to resent me. Most weren't as pleasant as Jesse Woodridge had been. Jane MacPherson in Air Supply ordered me out of her plant the first time I came there. I could have complained to Wiley, or brought it up in a staff meeting, but I didn't; and after Jesse got through talking about how many improvements I'd helped him make in the farms, she asked me in.

	She was about thirty, blonde, a tall thin girl with an inferiority complex because she'd graduated from a state university. She was also fighting the battle of the sexes, and she was damned if some man was going to tell her how to run her air plant.

	Airmaking was mostly mining: chunks of ice were cut loose, melted into water, and electrolyzed. We breathed the oxygen and the hydrogen was put into tanks to be used as fuel for ships headed home—when we had a ship ready to go home, which wasn't going to be for a long time. We also used some of the hydrogen and oxygen for chemical power: welding torches, and fuel cells for mine camps on the surface.

	It was a little more complicated than that, because the ice wasn't pure. 'There was ammonia in it, and other contaminants. The ice chamber was colder than the blue balls of Pluto. I couldn't wait to get out of there.

	When we got back to her office and I was warmed up a bit, I asked, "Why do you melt the stuff in there?"

	"How the hell else can we pump it to the separators?"

	"I thought you might try moving it in solid chunks."

	"And what moves those—oh!"

	"Oh. Vapor pressure. So we lose some ice. We've still got maybe a hundred million tons. We won't run out. And I think you'll save some man-hours. Or people-hours if you like that term better—"

	"You don't have to get smart about it." She began punching inputs into her console. "It would take a tunnel through here—"

	"I expect I can talk Freeman into loaning us a crew. It shouldn't take long."

	"Hmmm. I like it."

	"Thanks. While you're in a good mood, can I make another suggestion?"

	She laughed. "I didn't know I was that obvious. Sure, what is it?"

	"Have dinner with me. In my quarters."

	"You've got more than dinner in mind."

	"Probably. So what?"

	"I'm a department head. An engineering officer. You don't see any of that. Just a bed partner—"

	"Oh, go to hell. Sorry I asked. You're right, I haven't made romantic overtures to Jesse Woodridge. Or Hank Freeman. I thought you were a woman. It might surprise you to know I've known better engineers than you are who were women."

	"That's not fair.

	"The devil with being fair—"

	"And it's not even true. You must know I have an arrangement with Jim Dorringer—"

	"You and the chief pilot? No. I didn't know. I don't know any of the arrangements here. I haven't time for social life. You were just witness to my first attempt at doing something about that. My apologies." I stormed out. I was angry with myself. Twelve thousand hours in the ship, another 1600 hours on Moria, and I wasn't getting my work done because half the time I was thinking about sex. I decided to go look up the little technician in biochemistry. One of the engineers said she loved to sleep around. 'That wouldn't help my emotional problems much, but it would sure as hell relieve one difficulty. For a while.

	The matter didn't end, though. Flo Randall, our chief in organic chemistry, began inviting me to social functions. They weren't much, just drinking parties in the rooms she shared with Roland Hordoy—they were married, but she didn't want any name changes—and there were usually unattached women at the parties. I finally asked Flo why the sudden interest in me.

	"Jane says you're lonely." Flo was the universal housemother on Moria. Low gravity had given her an excuse to gain weight until on Earth she'd barely have been able to walk. Here it hardly mattered. They tell me the legend of the jovial fat lady is a myth, but not in .2 centimeters gravity it isn't.

	"That's probably true, but this isn't going to solve the problem," I told her.

	"Why not?"

	"I'm built funny. Thoroughly middle class. I'm looking for family stability. Permanence. It's all in my psych records."

	"And you left someone behind?" she asked.

	"Yeah. I left someone behind."

	"So she wouldn't come out here. You can't blame a woman for that. It's—"

	"She'd have come," I said. "I didn't ask her. And I don't know why the hell I'm discussing my personal problems with you—"

	"Who else can you discuss them with?" she said absently. She always said that. So had the housemother in the boarding house I'd lived in back in Pasadena. But Flo had lost her smile. "If you're so damned broken up about it, why didn't you ask?"

	"It's a long story," I told her. "I'm not sure I understand it myself."

	"I suppose it's too late now," Flo said. "You might have brought her, but now—"

	"She could get a ticket here anytime she wanted to. Ye gods. MacPherson and you, between you you're going to drive me nuts! Charlie got better grades at Cal Tech than I did. So much better she got a choice of assignments and I had to take Moria."

	"Ask her now," Flo said. "Why not? What can you lose?"

	"I'll think about it."

	I thought about it a lot. The idea was exciting. I couldn't get it out of my head. What could I lose?

	Only a silly dream that was getting sillier every day. What could Caroline lose? If she wants to come, I told myself, then—well, if when she gets here she's still crazy enough that she wants to live with me forever, why not? We can go back home together. It would be better than living with some fluffy-headed Earth girl who'd never been in orbit.

	What can I lose?

Chapter Three

	After 9000 hours Commander Wiley made it official and named me Chief of Staff. I'd been doing the job anyway, so it didn't change my status much. I still tended to stay out of Roland Hardoy's mining operations except to borrow his people when I had to—and to loan him people out of housekeeping. We'd cut that back to no more than 50% of what it had been when I got to Moria. I was proud of that. The work hadn't been all that brilliant, but it was mine.

	That was about all we had to be happy about. The news from Earth was bad.

	For me it had been good at first: Caroline was coming out. Her ship had left Earth orbit and was on the way. I found out later that she'd been coming anyway; she was working on ship assembly when I called her.

	Twelve thousand hours is a long time to wait, but I thought I could manage it.

	That was the good news. Commander Wiley had the bad when her ship had been on the way for 2000 hours. "They tell me that may be the last ship," he said.

	We were in his office with the door closed. He didn't often close it. Now I understood why. "We can't live without supplies. Are they sending up transport home?" I asked.

	"They're talking about it. They've also ordered me to start a building program. Build our own ships to get home on. Incidentally, can we?"

	"I don't know. It's Dorringer's department—can I ask him?"

	"Rather you wouldn't," Wiley said.

	"I don't think we can do it anyway," I told him. "I'd have to work on it awhile, but I suspect they'll have to send up a lot of transport." When personnel ships arrived from Earth we took them apart. The engines were ganged into the big booster we were building to send our mine produce back to Earth. We had precious little portable life-support equipment. "Let me play with it."

	I went over to the console and began poking at numbers. It didn't look good. Finally I said, "Scheduling. It takes too many people in housekeeping to keep this place going. If we send any significant number home, we'll have to send all of them. Or it's going to be pure hell for the ones we leave behind—I guess we could do it, but it won't be any easy job."

	"I'd rather we couldn't do it at all," Wiley said. He opened the cabinet, but he didn't take out beer. He had a bottle of scotch in there; the last on Moria. Flo had never been able to produce drinkable scotch, and Wiley had had this since he left Earth. He took a pull at the bottle and offered it to me. I shook my head. "Can I trust you, Duke?" he asked. Before I could say anything he said, "Dumb question. Sorry. But you re still planning on going home. This may be a chance to get home early."

	"Yeah." It would cut years off my time. "But— Commander, out here I've been part of something. Something important. I wouldn't want to see it be for nothing. I intend to stay out my contract. You've got a plan. What is it?"

	"Not a plan. Just an idea." He chuckled. "You know, our library's pretty complete. Even got law books. Admiralty law."

	"Yeah?" Of course we had admiralty law in the computer library. We had to. Commander Wiley was the only law on Moria. As his Chief of Staff I had to sit on trial boards. Fortunately we didn't have much serious crime, and rules infractions could be dealt with in the work schedule.

	"Interesting thing, admiralty law. Applies to space if there's not special legislation. Damn it, Duke, why do you want to go back so bad?

	"I own a house in La Canada. I'm going to live in it."

	"Old family home?" Wiley asked.

	I laughed. "My brokers bought it 500 hours ago. Took my first year's salary.

	"Bought a house you've never seen?"

	"I've seen it. Once. When I was twelve years old. This conversation isn't getting anywhere, Commander. Tell me what you need. I'll do it if it can be done."

	"And probably if it can't. All right. Duke, I need a study. What do we absolutely have to have from Earth? Bare minimum. And I'd rather you didn't let the department heads know you're making the study. Can do?"

	"Won't be easy. There's manpower, too. I assume you mean to pull everyone off mining and refining—"

	"No. Certainly not now, anyway. And I'd like to know what effort we can put into M&M even if we go balls-out to be self-supporting. I'm not trying to be mysterious, It's just that I'm not sure of a couple of points. And I know that if any hint of what I've got in mind gets out, it won't work. Trust me?"

	I'd have trusted him with my life. Come to think of it, we all did, every day.

	"And maybe nothing comes of it," he said. "Or maybe the bloody fools back on Earth will change their minds.

	Maybe, I thought.

	An Earth year later it was still maybe. Congress gave Space Industries a small tax break and a smaller appropriation for Moria. One more supply ship was sent up, this time with only six people aboard, the rest of the payload supplies from my critical list.

	Eight of our people bought it. Commander Wiley read from the appropriate service, and we put up plaques in the mess hall. The bodies went into the recycling system. We couldn't let go of any organics at all. We tried not to think about that, the way you try-not to think that your food on Earth has grown in fields sown with human dead.

	We also had our first birth, Debbie Frankmeyer. Her mother was our chief nurse and took a lot of kidding about it. Debbie was one reason we got our supply ship; she was a minor sensation on Earth. There had been children born on the Moon, but never this far away from Manhome. It soon became obvious that Debbie wouldn't be the last child born on Moria.

	And Caroline's ship arrived.

	I nearly became a nervous wreck waiting for her. I even came up with a good reason to get our scout-ship readied for a prospecting mission that I kept putting off until it was certain that there was nothing wrong with her ship's engines.

	"What if she's changed her mind?" I asked. "What—"

	"Oh for God's sake shut up." Jane Dorringer said. She watched her husband's scooter cross to where the ship waited a kilometer from Moria. "It's a little late now!"

	I couldn't help saying "For you too." I eyed her bulging belly. "So ends the great feminist engineer—"

	"I just thought of something," Jane said. "This is that woman you said is a better engineer than I am—

	"Oh Lord. You'll never forget that, will you? What's taking them so long?"

	"Don't be an idiot."

	It seemed to take hours, but eventually the scooter came back. The airlock cycled. She came through and fell flat on her face.

	"I suspect collusion," Caroline said. "Everyone else was paired with a member of the same sex. So how come I drew you? Just where are you taking me, anyway?"

	"You'll see." Commander Wiley had finished his lecture to the newcomers and sent them on their way.

	I led Caroline through the corridor to my room. "Here we are. If you want a place by yourself, you'll have to build it. This is all I've got to offer—"

	"The hell it is, Mister," she said. "You've got a house in La Canada—"

	"How the hell did you know that?"

	"I heard it was up for sale and tried to buy it. For you. Until I found you'd had your brokers watching it. Bill, it's beautiful! Flowers! Roses! It's magnificent. "

	"Jesse Woodridge's work. He grows things— Charlie, look, this isn't fair. I didn't ask you if you wanted to move in with me."

	"You damn fool. Did you think I came a half billion kilometers to sleep alone?"

	You could have cut the gloom in the mess hall with a mining laser. We were all there except for minimum crews at the life support stations. Our people were perched along the walls like bats, each of us in our favorite niche. Even the children were there, all eight of them, from Debbie aged three to our newest, Kevin Hardoy-Randall who was getting his dinner from the biggest equipment in space. "Possibly the biggest in the solar system," Flo was fond of saying. But they tell me there are a couple of women on Earth—"

	There wasn't much to joke about. "It's official," Commander Wiley said. "We've been ordered to abandon Moria. There will be no more support from Earth."

	Everyone talked at once. "We can't get home without help," Jim Dorringer said. "Not that I'm going."

	There were mutters of approval. There were also a lot of worried looks.

	"You've known this was coming,'' Hank Freeman shouted. "So why the hell have you had my crews working the mines? We could have—there are things we could have done. Ways to—Damn it, I'm not leaving! We can live here."

	Commander Wiley shook his head. "No. Not without supplies from Earth. Some of our expendables we just can't make here.'' He looked to me for continuation. I nodded miserably. "We can almost live, but not quite. Not quite."

	"God damn," Jesse Woodridge said. "What happens to Dori and me? Who wants us? God damn."

	We all had our memories. Caroline's first baby, premature and dead. Michael Gillivray O'Grady, who'd had one accident too many. And the others. They were part of us, and part of Moria. And for what?

	Commander Wiley let the chatter go on for a while. Then he said, "There's a way. It's not something I can order, and it's not something I can put to a vote. But there's a way."

	"What?" A hundred people, or more, maybe everyone asked it. "What is it?"

	"We can send down one big payload to Earth," Wiley said. "Only one. It can be us, or most of us, if that's what's got to be done. But it could be something else. Twelve thousand tons of copper, iron, silver, and gold. Twelve thousand tons that we can put into Earth orbit from here. If we use every engine we've got and all our fuel."

	More chatter. The department heads who were in on Wiley's plan looked smug.

	"And it's ours, Commander Wiley said. "The instant they ordered us to abandon Moria this entire station became jetsam. It belongs to the first salvage crew that can get aboard. There's a Swiss firm willing to buy our cargo if we can get it to Earth orbit. They'll pay enough to let us buy our own ship."

	And they'd be getting a hell of a deal even so. I could see international lawyers arguing this case for thirty years and more. 'The United States didn't want us, but they wouldn't want their billions to be lost to the Swiss.

	"There's nothing easy about this," Commander Wiley said. "It will be years before we can send our cargo down and bring up new supplies. We'll be on short rations the whole time. And there won't be any new people."

	Kevin Hardoy-Randall let out a wail. "There's your answer to that," his mother said. "We'll have plenty of new people. Commander, can we really do it?"

	"We can."

Epilog

	'The children swam easily across the big rock chamber. In Moria's low gravity they could just manage to fly by flapping their arms. They couldn't go very fast, but it was an exciting game.

	They could fly but they couldn't walk. We had always known about losses of bone calcium in adults exposed to low gravity; what we should have forseen but didn't was that children born in miniscule gravity never develop strong leg bones at all. Our children had normal arms, chests, and heads; but they would never walk. Children born on the Moon can live on Earth, although they are never happy there; but ours could never go home at all. Earth and the planets would be forever forbidden to them.

	None of them seemed to care. Earth was something to watch on television; it wasn't a real place. Anyway, who would want to live where they couldn't fly? Where falls could break bones, and you might drown in water? Earth was a strange and terrible place of horrible danger ...

	The ship waited two kilometers from Moria. It had a huge swollen nose: fuel tanks and twelve thousand tons of pure metals. It had a swollen tail: engines, every space drive on Moria. The cabin between was tiny, but fitted with every luxury we could afford.

	"I'll be all right," I said.

	"I still worry about you," Charlie said. "I wish—it isn't fair, but I wish Jim Dorringer were going instead of you."

	So did I, but Dorringer was needed on Moria. We needed a prospecting ship, and a real shuttle for the run to Earth, and Dorringer was by far the best man to supervise work on both. "We've been over all this before, Charlie, and I'm the best man for this job." I held her close for a moment. "It's not so bad. Four years. Lots of navy men have been to sea for longer. I will miss you." I looked up at the niche thirty meters above and laughed. The kids were playing tag. Daddy was leaving, but they were too young to understand what that meant. "I'll miss the boys, too.

	There wasn't anything more to say, and no more time either. We kissed and I closed my faceplate.

	They took me up on a scooter, and I waved them away. The outer airlock door of the ship was open, but I didn't go inside for a moment. Instead I turned and looked back at the rock below. Sunlight glinted from the mirrors at the poles.

	I'll be back, I thought. Then I laughed, because I remembered the last time I'd said that; the last time I left what I thought was home. I'd been wrong.

	You can't buy a home, and you can't buy a dream. But you can build a home, and when you've built it, you know it's yours.

The End