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Chapter 2

Barbara concentrated on running as fast as she could, staring at the blank beige-enameled wall in front of her. The clear plastic mask on her face made every breath louder than normal, but she felt exhilarated. With every step, she bounded high above the track of the treadmill. She could almost fly! The Moon’s gravity, only one-sixth of Earth’s, seemed barely enough to hold her down. In a way, that felt more alien than zero-gee aboard the shuttle.

“All right! You may stop.” Dr. Devi Singh came around to the front of the treadmill and reached up to put the disk of her stethoscope on Barbara’s chest above the edge of her blue cotton examination gown. Barbara straightened up involuntarily at the touch of the cold metal and bounced a little off the table. Goosebumps rose along her arms, and she couldn’t help but shiver slightly. If the doctor found something wrong now, she might send Barbara right back to Earth on her very first day. “Breathe in again . . . and now, out.”

Barbara pulled off the mask and let her head drop back. She inhaled a lungful of the air scented with rubbing alcohol, cleaning fluids and an unfamiliar sweetness like the smell of synthetic fabrics. For a medical exam room on the Moon, it looked amazingly ordinary, with its plain blond-wood counter, its metal sink, the sphygmomanometer attached to a frame in the wall, and the poster showing the muscles and blood vessels of the body taped to the back of the door. Somehow that seemed weirder to her than having it full of bubbling retorts and futuristic life-restoration cabinets. Even the jar full of cotton balls next to the tongue depressors and latex gloves seemed too Earthlike to Barbara, almost taking away the wonderful alien feeling of being on the Moon.

“Very good, young lady.” Dr. Singh let the end of the scope drop to her ample chest. Her dark eyes crinkled as she smiled up at Barbara. “Your heart and lungs sound good. All your scans and your records from Earth agree. You’re in good health. You may go now. If you have any concerns, always come back to me or call. Be very careful of your oxygen levels, and don’t be too brave to ask for help.”

“Okay.” Barbara picked off the wired electrodes, then hopped off the treadmill to stretch. At almost 173 centimeters, she was a good 15 centimeters taller than the colony physician, and taller still than the slender girl at the doctor’s side, her daughter and one of the younger Bright Sparks.

“Come with me,” said Daya Singh, holding out a tiny hand. She was a smaller, slighter version of her mother, with plump lips and large, long-lashed eyes. Her black hair was braided into a long plait that fell down her back, but escaped wisps floated around her heart-shaped face. “The others can’t wait to meet you!”

“I can’t wait to meet them.”

“Let her get dressed first!” Dr. Singh laughed, and plumped lightly onto her rolling stool to enter information onto the tablet propped on the steel table attached to the wall. “I would bet that after days on the shuttle she would like a real shower.”

“I really would,” Barbara agreed.

Daya led Barbara out into the changing room and turned her back to give the tall girl privacy. Barbara carefully stepped into the glass walled booth and let the water wash away all the accumulated sweat and dead skin cells. She squirted lightly scented moisturizing cleanser from the dispenser bolted to the wall above the controls into her palm and rubbed it all over her skin and hair. It felt so good to be clean again.

The shower was a closed cube, three meters tall by a meter square, with a floor that rose a few centimeters in the center. The condensation and droplets that touched the ceiling drained slowly down the walls in the one-sixth gravity and dripped into slots along the edge of the floor, to be collected in a graywater system for reuse and recycling, or so the information about the colony had said.

She toweled her short brown hair until it was just damp. It would dry quickly; the humidity of Armstrong City’s atmosphere was far lower than Earth normal, particularly the Florida coast where she had spent her last few weeks. In fact, part of her training and briefings before her flight there had warned her to drink fluids, moisturize all exposed skin often, and to use lip balm regularly to avoid a dry skin injury. There was so much to learn about living in space. She had only just begun to take it all in.

“Did you like your trip from Earth?” Daya asked, eagerly, still talking to the wall. Barbara, wrapped in a towel, retrieved her new clothes and fresh underwear from the third of the row of metal lockers. “Did you get sick? Everyone gets sick on the second day in space.”

“I did,” Barbara admitted with a grin, pulling on underwear and a purple coverall with her name embroidered in black over the left breast pocket and on the upper right sleeve. She stuffed her dirty clothing into one end of her duffle bag behind her toiletry kit. Daya was just as nice as she had seemed in the weblogs. Barbara had liked her on sight. “It wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t been so cramped in the compartment. I was embarrassed by being sick right in front of other people like that. There were four of us coming up with a ton of cargo. And our luggage. I was surprised how much of my own stuff they let me bring.”

“There’s lots of room for things that aren’t temperature or pressure sensitive,” Daya said, her head nodding as she spoke. “We leave things outside in the vacuum under tarps all the time. The only equations that matter are how much room there is in the shuttle, and how much extra thrust it needs to lift the ship from Earth. But there’s usually plenty of both.”

“Are you studying engineering, too?” Barbara asked. She reached for the heavy-soled boots and pulled the tapes to secure them. The crisp sound of the fasteners told Daya it was all right to turn around. She smiled up at Barbara.

“No, medicine. My mother was a medical school professor at Johns Hopkins before she took the assignment here in Armstrong City. But I’m in Dr. Bright’s program, and I pick up plenty of science along the way.” She pointed to the wristwatch-like gauge that Barbara had yet to fasten on. “Keep that on at all times. It shows your oxygen and CO2 levels. You must be religious about it, not just for your safety, but for those around you. You might be the first to notice when something is wrong.”

Barbara pulled the band snug. She had a lot to get used to. All her training had told her what it was going to be like to live on the lunar surface, but not what it really felt like.

“I have to keep reminding myself I’m really here,” she said, shouldering her duffle bag. “After so long, I almost can’t believe it.”

“Come on!” Daya said, reaching for her hand again. “The others must be bouncing off the walls to meet you!”

She pulled Barbara along behind her, covering the length of the room in four long bounds. As part of her preparation, Barbara had spent two weeks in NASA’s undersea training facility, so the buoyancy wasn’t as disorienting as it might have been. Even though the floor was solid, she felt as though she was walking on a trampoline, bobbing partway to the curved ceiling with every step.

Daya grabbed hold of a U-shaped handle near the door to steady herself and slapped the panel. The door slid aside, and four bodies tumbled toward them, knocking one another over in a cheerful jumble.

“You took long enough!” exclaimed a thin teenage boy with longish brown hair and freckles across his nose as he pulled himself to his feet. Behind him were a young woman with sharp cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes, a tall, dark-skinned man with the bulk of a football player, and a slim, broad-shouldered young man with flared nostrils, dark blue eyes and a strong jaw. She knew them all!

“Hi, there,” she said, her heart pounding in excitement.

The boy steadied himself on another wall cleat and stuck out his free hand.

“Hi! I’m Neil Zimmerman. This is Jan Nguyen and Dion Purchase and Gary Camden. You’re Barbara Winton.” He said it almost like an accusation.

“Call me Barb,” Barbara said, shaking Neil’s hand and the others that were suddenly proffered. The Bright Sparks! All of them wore jumpsuits like hers, but in different colors and conditions of wear. Neil was the shortest of the four. Jan and Gary, the self-styled Nerd Twins, were almost exactly the same height, about 170 centimeters, both with shining dark hair cut short and whip-thin bodies. Dion stood at least thirteen centimeters taller. He had beautiful, dark brown eyes with long, curling lashes. Barbara found herself staring into them until Dion grinned self-consciously. She broke off her gaze and glanced at the others. “I know all of you from the weblog and Dr. Bright’s show! It’s amazing to meet you at last!”

“Welcome to the Bright Sparks,” Jan said. She had a low, musical voice like the song of a wooden flute. Barbara had heard it a million times on the vlog, but it sounded different—prettier—in person. Her jumpsuit had been fuchsia once, but it had faded to rose pink, especially around the knees and elbows. “Come on! We’ll show you to your quarters. You’re rooming with me. Not that we’re going to get to spend a ton of time there.”

“I won’t want to,” Barbara said, spinning in a circle with her arms out. “I’m on the Moon!”

“That’s the right attitude,” Neil said, pleased. He pulled a thin gold-cased PDE out of the pocket of his jumpsuit. “Hold it! Great! I’m uploading the picture to the page now. ‘Barbara’s here!’”

Barbara stopped spinning.

“Can I see it before you post it?” she asked, in alarm.

“Sorry!” Neil looked sheepish. “Too late! I’ll let you see the next one, okay?” He turned the screen toward her. Barbara peered at the image. He had caught her in mid-spin, with her brown hair flying outward from centrifugal force. She wrinkled her nose at the uninhibited expression on her face.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I look geeky, but I’m embracing my inner geek.”

“Sorry. Sometimes I just move too fast. Come on. I think I saw the loader carrying your luggage toward the dorm.”

He bounced off down the domed corridor. Jan laughed at him. The others set out more slowly in his wake.

“Don’t mind Neil. He’s always in a hurry to get to the next thing. We’d say he was ADHD if we didn’t know better. What do you think of Armstrong so far?”

“I haven’t had a chance to see much of it,” Barbara admitted. She had kept her eyes glued to the viewport on the side of the shuttle as long as she could once it made orbit. “I only landed about forty minutes ago. They ran the four of us into the infirmary in a cart for our checkups. The light on the spaceport was so bright I couldn’t see much beyond the plain. There were other craft out there. Six, I think?”

“Yes,” Dion said. “They belong to NASA, ESA and the colony administrator, Ms. Reynolds-Ward, plus the hotel shuttle. Tourism’s getting to be a big deal up here. I help with vehicle maintenance, even though my specialty is biology. That’s how I got my scholarship from Dr. Bright. What was your project?”

“Smart meters,” Barbara said. “My program helps make power sources more efficient, especially renewables. I’ve been incorporating organics into the matrix. I used them to make our satellite guided tractors use less power back on the farm at home.”

“That’s bright!” Dion said. It was one of the group’s catchphrases along with “we got this.” Barbara grinned.

“That sounds good,” Gary said. “I thought of going into electrical engineering, too, and I read your bio. Do you want to work on a project with me? I’ve got some ideas for expanding the colony grid.”

“I . . .” Barbara hesitated for a moment, then realized this was exactly the kind of opportunity she had been looking forward to. “Yes, sure! But, do we have to talk to Dr. Bright about it first?”

“Nah. He’ll check in on us now and again when he needs to,” Gary said.

“Come on!” Neil called, beckoning with his whole arm from ahead in the corridor.

“He’s just hyper,” Jan said, but Barbara could see it was with exasperated affection. They followed.

“We’ll throw ideas around later,” Gary promised.

The corridors had high arched ceilings and a flat, level floor. Barbara knew from the settlement handbook that all the passageways were round tunnels that had panels fitted in to walk on. Below them ran conduits, pipes and heating elements in a thick cradle of insulation.

“You can’t see much of the colony buildings from the shuttle portholes because of the sunlight,” Barbara said. It looked like a big spiderweb with occasional buildings that rose above the rest. “It’s like being out in the desert.”

“You mean Earthlight,” Jan said, with a grin. “We’re moving into nightside here.”

“How big is this place?” Barbara asked, glancing around. “I mean, the city.”

“One might could say it’s as big as the Moon!” Jan laughed. “Or maybe it will be someday.”

“Getting bigger all the time,” Dion said. “I can send you the most current map, if you want.” He held up a wafer-thin, silver PDE, the same shape as Neil’s. Barbara noticed with a touch of envy that theirs were of a much fancier model than hers, sleek and trim, with an optical sensor as well as the usual buttons. She was almost ashamed to take her smaller and less complicated device out of her pocket, but he waited until she did. Her screen lit up with a notification of a file. She touched it and let go. Fido hovered in the air before her. A chart with a key in the corner unfolded into a three-dimensional moving image. The colony had a lot more buildings and structures than showed on the surface. It looked as if the servers had even picked up her shuttle landing on the strip. Following Dion’s gestures, she could use both hands to pull the image apart to examine it layer by layer as they walked.

“Thanks!”

“There are about three thousand people here right now,” Dion said, as she scanned the diagrams floating above her screen. He pointed to a circle that seemed to stand out above the mottled gray landscape. “That’s counting the hotel right next to the spaceport. We get a lot of scholars up here for study programs, engineers, scientists, people looking to create industry up here, documentary producers, and tourists.” He screwed up his face as if he didn’t approve. “There’s even talk of them making a big movie up here soon.”

“What’s wrong with all that?” Barbara asked, puzzled. “I’d have come up before if I could have afforded it.”

“It’s not that . . .” Dion seemed reluctant to say more.

“Are the tourists the problem?” Barbara guessed.

Dion’s round cheeks relaxed from their scowl.

“Yeah. They come four hundred thousand kilometers and think it ought to be just like it is at home. But it’s so far from being like on Earth, you’d think they’d be completely into it!”

The gray corridor abutted a red-walled corridor, this one with thick plexiglass windows set into the sides. All the doors and hatches had silver metal clasp locks and wide latex gaskets. Barbara glanced out of one of the windows, but could see nothing but gray lumps through it. The section seemed so primitive. None of the entries on the Armstrong City website or Facebook page showed this much detail.

“Why is this part different than the part near the spaceport?”

“It’s older,” Dion said. He plucked her PDE out of the air and touched it, then touched his own device. Both screens lit up, and he let hers go. The hovering chart became more detailed, color coded by zone. “The original landing zone for the colony was adjacent to this part, in gray. Armstrong looks like one big unit when you see it from the sky, but it’s been put together out of a bunch of old project huts and things, and joined by the tunnels. There’s new construction going on all the time. That’s yellow. The Bright Sparks dorm used to be in this section after they moved ground control to the new tower, in blue.” He waved at a line of doors on the left. “Now we have a pod with rooms connecting around a lounge where we can hang out and talk. And our own kitchen.”

“You like to cook?” Barbara asked.

“I do.”

“Ha, ha.” Gary laughed, his voice echoing off the plastic walls. “We like to eat!”

“You’ll find you need to eat more than you do at home, too,” Jan said. “Just staying alive takes more calories. And both of us work out with Dr. Bright. Have you met him yet?”

“Not yet,” Barbara said, excitement and nervousness making a cold tangle in her belly. “He sent a video recording to me at home to tell me I’d won a contest I didn’t even know I’d entered, and told me about the program. I couldn’t believe I was actually hearing him leave a message for me. I’ve spoken with him a few times since on video calls. I couldn’t believe I was actually speaking with him! I’ve watched his show for years!”

“We all have,” Neil said. He had gotten tired of waiting at the far end of the hallway for them to catch up, and bounced back to rejoin the group. “He’s cryo.”

“He’s what?” Barbara asked.

“Cryogenic,” Neil said with a cheeky grin. “Cooler than cool. It’s our word. We don’t even put it on the vlogs. You can use it now, too, Barb. You can talk to Dr. Bright. You’ll see. Come on, let’s show you your room. Then you can see the rest!”

The walls changed color frequently as they passed through the well-lit tunnels and into various habitats of distinctly different sizes and shapes. A glass door to the right obviously led into a clean-room complex that occupied its own pod. Through the panel, Barbara could see figures in hazmat suits moving between scientific equipment and glass-fronted refrigerators. Screens on the wall displayed images from the electron microscopes as well as images from Earthbound television stations. She knew that there was a broadcast station somewhere in the complex. Dr. Bright’s show had been produced from there for the last few years. She had recorded every episode and watched them over and over, feeling that she was part of the group that embraced science with burning curiosity. To think she would actually be working with him seemed beyond possibility. OMG, it had come true!

I’m here! The thought added extra bounce to her step as she crowded along with the others. Even petite Daya kept up, bounding along beside her.

Barbara’s ears had begun to recover from the roar of the shuttle trip. She became aware of an ongoing hum. When her feet touched the ground, she sensed vibration coming through the floor.

“What’s that noise?” she asked.

“What noise?” Gary asked.

“The hum?” Daya asked, with a laugh. “It’s the ventilation pumps. The air is constantly recirculated through CO2 scrubbers to keep it breathable.”

“I guess I knew that,” Barbara said. “I just never thought about the sound.”

“We never really notice it anymore, I guess.” Daya shook her head. “It’s never completely quiet here. You’ll get used to it. You can even use a white noise app. It may help you to sleep through it at first.”

Barbara suddenly felt a moment of panic. During her training in the undersea environment back on Earth, if something went wrong with the environmental controls, she could go out through an escape hatch and surface. Here, there was nowhere to go if there was no air.

“Do they ever . . . stop?” she asked. She’d known that, but now she felt it.

“No,” Dion said, firmly, putting his arm around her shoulders. His grip was firm and comforting. “There are backups on backups. Life support has, like, sextuple redundancy.”

“We’ll show you the best place to go,” Neil assured her, his hazel eyes serious for once. He pointed down. “There on the floor, you see the orange line?” Barbara nodded. “Well, those always lead to a safe air supply. You can follow that and there will be either an emergency air lock or a suit locker. Also, in a pinch, you can pull any of those red levers under glass on the wall and they’ll lock down the corridor around you and sound an alarm. Personally, my PDE has an algorithm based on air flow and the Navier-Stokes equations that can guide me to pockets any time I need them to. But then, you have to worry about the carbon dioxide, which I also have an app to override the sensors built in to the PDEs here that tell me the real safety margins . . .”

“Neil,” Gary slugged him on the shoulder. “We have things to do.”

“Uh, right,” the boy replied sheepishly. “I’ll show you later. After you check in. Come on!”

Barbara drank in all her surroundings. The air in the tunnels felt warmer than she expected. It smelled of chemicals, cooking aromas, stone dust, human sweat, cleaning fluids, and the sharp odor she associated with electrical circuitry. There was also a faint hint of machine oil or some other lubricant in the background of all of it. The floors and walls were not perfectly smooth, which would have made them easier to clean. She recognized that the texture was intended to help generate and retain heat, a vital trait on the cold lunar landscape.

“Even the smell isn’t what I imagined.” She shrugged. “Stranger than I expected.”

“Like what?” Dion asked.

“I bet it’s the ozone from all the printers and electrical components,” Neil added. Barbara shook her head.

“No. Not ozone. It’s something else. Something more, well, dirty or earthy. It reminds me of the machine shop I go some times to have parts made on the CNC or the metal sintering devices,” Barbara explained.

“Eureka!” Neil shouted. “Lubricants! They’re on everything up here.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Jan added. “You see, moving parts tend to collect lunar dust because of static electricity and all. They get into the parts and clog stuff up. So everything is constantly being lubricated and relubricated. You’ll get used to that. You’ll learn quickly that any of your projects with mechanical parts better be checked often for wear or they’ll seize right up.”

“Or they’ll get sanded down to nothing.” Gary said. “That happens a lot.”

“Machine oil mixed with pine-scented cleaners? It’s everywhere?” Barbara asked. “That sounds kind of awful.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Jan told her.

The tunnels sloped downhill from the old section. Soon, there were no windows on the sides, but light came from daylight-equivalent LED fixtures in the ceiling alternating with faceted crystals as thick as her thigh, that she realized were catching the brilliant light reflected from Earth.

Each section had a set of large massive metal hinged doors with environment sealing gasketlike fixtures about the door jamb that either stood open or had to be cycled like an automatic airlock door. There were some thin, clear, not airtight polycarbonate doors, that slide aside as the youths approached. Barbara recalled from her reading and training that if there were an air leak or an over or under pressure situation that sliding doors would be stuck and couldn’t be opened. Hinged airlock doors, in contrast, had mechanical jacks that would force a crack in the seal and could then be swung free. She often wondered why the city designers just didn’t put bleed-off valves on the sliding doors, but had never known who to ask. Maybe Dr. Bright would know, she thought.

Alongside all the doors were enameled, permanent posters containing detailed emergency instructions and mounted cases containing oxygen masks attached to small tanks. Barbara glanced at them with a feeling of alarm. She hoped she’d never need to use any of those things.

The next section, painted dark green, was filled with private apartments. Some of the inhabitants had dressed up the otherwise utilitarian plastic-coated entryways with decorations. A number of doorways had a pair of large green potted plants on either side. One modest door had a bronze ornament high up on the frame that Neil identified as a mezuzah. Kids’ toys lay against the wall in front of several. Everywhere, there was a light film of gray dust. It was the lunar regolith, Barbara realized. Moon dust. On Earth, Moon rocks were precious relics. Up here, the lunar soil was everywhere—absolutely everywhere—and it had to be dealt with.

Small, white, disk-shaped robotic cleaners scuttled along the corridor on the floor or clinging to walls, brushing it into themselves. That would account for the stone smell. She thought about that for a moment and recalled that there was a lot of titanium oxide in the lunar dust and wondered if it had a smell. She’d seen titanium oxide paint and sunscreen before but it either smelled like paint or coconut oil. Moon dust didn’t smell like either.

The next room was a high-domed chamber full of tables where people sat over trays talking with one another or immersed in books or tablets. The long wall to Barbara’s right was a cafeteria line from which savory aromas rose. A couple dozen other people were collecting items for their breakfast, dishing eggs out of a covered, rectangular steel pan or pouring coffee from a cylindrical samovar. Her last meal on the shuttle suddenly felt as if it had been days ago, but she ignored the pangs. She had to keep up. Neil took a hard left and headed toward the farthest right of three widely spaced blue doorways. It slid aside at his approach.

“We have proximity sensors for this hallway,” Jan said. “It helps if you have your arms full. We have to give a palm print ID or an iris scan for the others.”

“Cryogenic,” Barbara said, trying out the word. Jan gave her a grin of approval.

Alternating to the left and right were narrow hallways, each ending in a brightly lit room. According to the map shimmering above her PDE screen, each indicated a round pod divided into segments around a central chamber. At the fourth archway, Neil turned right. Barbara opened her stride to keep up with him, and bounced into an oval chamber. Its ceiling was lower than the cafeteria’s, but well illuminated by an array of prisms and LED fixtures. The dark brown stone floor had twenty-centimeter rectangular niches cut into it. Barbara realized they were there to anchor the furniture in place. Two big couches and a handful of padded chairs stood around a low, round table that doubled as a bookshelf. Tattered paperbacks leaned against big hardcover books, some with dust jackets. She was surprised that people still read paper books. She was even more surprised that somebody wasted their launch mass allotment on them when they could simply download all the books in the world onto a small solid state drive ten times smaller than one book. Her family had thousands of books on the family mainframe that she could download into Fido for reading or listening. This was the most high-tech place human beings lived, but they still kept books.

Four doors were set into the walls. As Gary had mentioned, there was an open kitchenette with all the familiar appliances. The wall opposite the kitchen had smooth plastic-coated shelves set into it. More plants, many of them trailing vines, shared space with oddments and a mechanical clock that ticked audibly over the rushing sound of the ventilators. A wide porthole was set into the far bulkhead. It all looked smooth and seamless, so it seemed pretty clear to Barbara that it had been printed rather than built or machined.

Lights from the exterior flickered through the porthole and Barbara hurried to look out. It gave her a view of the next round dormitory pod and a winding walkway half covered by drifts of gray dust. She jumped in surprise to see a solemn, bronze face looking back at her. She realized that it was a statue, a replica of Savannah’s Bird Girl, with small bowls in her outstretched hands.

“Word to the wise,” Gary said over her shoulder. “Don’t open the window.”

Barbara spun around to retort that she wouldn’t be that stupid, and saw that they were all grinning at her.

Dion flopped down on one of the big sofas in the center of the room and crossed his long legs on the arm.

“Don’t worry. They did that to me, too, when I got here.”

“Why is the statue there?” she asked.

“Just to give us something to look at,” Gary said. “And a reminder. When her bowls fill up with regolith, it’s time to sweep the paths. Of course, there’s no wind. But the force from ships taking off and landing stirs up the local dust.”

“And every time the day-night line passes over us every twenty eight days or so a wave of dust follows it.” Jan said.

“Really? Why?”

“Well, it’s thermal physics,” Neil started explaining. “You’ve got searing heat from the Sun inches away from freezing cold in the shadow, so a horizontal whirling cloud of dust forms. It’s kind of like a dust storm but only a meter or so high. You’ll see. It’s neat.”

Jan put her palm on the plate of the door to the right of the kitchenette, and beckoned Barbara over.

“This one’s ours. Check in so it’ll recognize you.”

Barbara approached the door with confidence that she didn’t really feel, but she planted her hand on the big rectangular plate. It beeped and turned red. A bar behind the glass rose up, then down. A slot to the right of the plate lit up.

“Identity card, please?” a polite female voice asked.

Barbara fumbled in the pocket of her jumpsuit and came up with the card she had been issued during orientation. She ran it through the slot as though it was a credit card. The plate turned green.

“Welcome, Barbara,” the female voice said. The door slid open.

“Thank you,” she said reflexively.

“You’re in,” Jan said. Barbara followed her inside.

Her bags had beaten her there. Apart from the sealed window in the curved wall, the chamber wasn’t that different than the dorm she had shared in Houston. Two beds lay on opposite sides of the room. A low, black-topped table with padded edges stood between them. A couple of plain desks with adjustable LED lamps were tucked in beside built-in closets. All horizontal surfaces were filled with personal items: plants, coffee cups, tools, and small pieces of electronic equipment, some of it disassembled. Barbara looked around with dismay. Jan began to gather up the piles of books and clothes that lay all over the plastic 3D printed bed on the left.

“Sorry,” Jan said. “I got used to having the place to myself. I’m like a slime mold. I tend to spread out and take up all available space.”

“Aren’t there empty rooms?” Barbara asked, stepping in to help her collect it all. “You could keep this one, and I could stay somewhere else.”

“I guess there are.” Jan grinned. “Dr. Bright prefers us to have roommates. It helps to keep you out of your own head as well as fostering a sense of community. Besides, maybe it’ll help me to break some bad habits. You’re not a neat-freak or something?”

“Uh,” Barbara hesitated. “Maybe a little,” she admitted, hoping it wouldn’t put Jan off.

“Do you want me to help you unpack?” Jan asked. “I managed to keep from filling up your closet or the bureau.”

“Sure.” Barbara smiled. “Thanks.” She undid the combination locks on her cases and pushed one toward the other girl. “Wasn’t there someone else in here before? Pam?”

Jan tossed her long black braids back over her shoulder and dug an armful of T-shirts out of the suitcase. She kept her back to Barbara as she pushed at one of the bureau drawers to unlatch it.

“Yeah. Pam lived with me.”

Following the blog, Barbara had seen entries from Pam, but they had gotten fewer and more terse over the course of some weeks, then stopped completely. She couldn’t help but voice her curiosity. The group seemed so friendly, and Barbara admired Pam’s brains.

“Where is she now? Did she graduate? Transfer to another program?”

“I don’t know,” Jan said, flatly. “She . . . didn’t fit in.”

Barbara stood quietly for a moment, stacking clothes in a drawer. Part her of really wanted to ask what Pam had done. It had to be something pretty bad for it not to have been mentioned on the Bright Sparks vlog when Pam left. Whatever it had been, it had clearly rubbed Jan the wrong way.

Worry added to the tangle of emotions in Barbara’s belly. She wanted desperately to fit in with the group. To be accepted into the Bright Sparks seemed like the apex of everything she had ever worked for, then she was starting to figure out achieving her place was only the beginning. She had the opportunity to work in an environment open to so few that it was on a par with winning the lottery. Who wouldn’t do everything they could for the chance to do science on the Moon?

“Well, I’ll fit in, don’t worry.” she said, shutting the drawer with a firm hand. She smiled at Jan. “What do you want to do now?”

“Let’s ask the others,” her roommate said.

“We can take you on a tour of the whole settlement, if you want,” Dion offered, when they emerged into the common room. “There are plenty of amazing things to see. What do you want to see first?”

The others chimed in, all shouting suggestions. Barbara looked from one to another, unable to make up her mind. Neil held up his hands.

“Hey, quiet!” he yelled, his voice echoing off the top of the dome. “I know where to take her. The lake.”

The others nodded eagerly.

“Oh, yeah,” Jan said. “Let’s get our suits.”

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