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Chapter 3

“I’ve seen the lake in the vlog and on the Moon website,” Barbara said, as they trooped out of the dorm pod in bathing suits, sandals and robes, with towels over their arms. “I know it’s possible, but it still feels unbelievable to have a lake of liquid water on a planetoid with no atmosphere.”

“It’s because it’s far enough underground to be insulated,” Gary explained. “You’re warm enough walking around without a protective suit in the tunnels, aren’t you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, thank the lake for that.”

Barbara tilted her head. “How do you mean?”

“The Moon isn’t volcanically active with a molten core like the Earth, or at least we don’t think it is, so we can’t get heat from underground. . . .”

Neil raised his voice to interrupt Gary.

“Where do you think all the heat from people, machines, doorways, generators, electrical systems, HVACs, power plants, and everything goes?” Neil asked, giving her a look of wide-eyed disbelief. “It would be a waste to let all that waste heat just radiate out into space. It’d be hard to do, too. So it’s all stored in the lake. Everything at Armstrong City that has to be cooled is cooled with water, and that water is pumped into filtration systems around the bottom of the lake, then into the lake itself.”

“I see,” Barbara said and then shook her head. “Well, not exactly. Not yet, anyhow. Is there so much waste heat that it keeps the lake at swimming temperatures?”

“Oh, yes!” Jan smiled. She dodged around a gigantic cart full of merchandise being pushed toward one of the stores in the arcade. Thanks to the light gravity, the woman driving it seemed to be able to move it all with one hand. “In daytime it’s absolutely balmy—almost thirty degrees Celsius. At night, it drops down to about twenty-three. It’s a little cool for me then so I wear a wetsuit or don’t swim. But the boys don’t seem to care. The Sun set two days ago and it’s just now starting to cool off a little, but it isn’t cold enough for a wetsuit yet.”

“So does the lake just cool off because it isn’t used as much at night?” Barbara asked. “I mean, it’s dark for almost twenty-eight days, so why doesn’t it get a lot cooler?”

“You need to read Dr. Bright’s analysis of the system. It works just like it was designed to,” Neil said proudly. “At night, the heat in the lake is pumped through exchangers and used to keep the facility air temperature at a stable twenty two and a half degrees Celsius. In daytime, the water takes heat out of the HVAC system to keep it cool.”

“Ever any chance of not generating enough heat?” Barbara asked. She was beginning to get how it worked, but she was realizing that she had a lot more to learn about living on the Moon, things that the Sparks seemed to take for granted as everyday life. It was all so strange to her. She knew they’d probably be impatient with her, but Barbara didn’t like feeling like the kid holding the class back. She thought she’d known everything about the Moon and the Bright Spots. She was finding out that being there was a lot different from reading about it.

“Nah,” Jan elbowed her playfully. “Quit worrying about it. The nuclear fission reactor system that powers the city needs a whole bunch of cooling, and that thing will run for another hundred and fifty-seven years without need of replacement rods. We’re good.”

“Oh, okay. So how deep is it?”

“Pretty deep in spots,” Gary said. “And it’s warmest at the bottom where the heat exchangers are buried.”

Barbara started to do the calculations in her head, and was overwhelmed by awe.

“That’s amazing. I’d love to check that out.”

“Everything here is amazing when you first see it or hear about or experience it. But you’ll get used to it pretty soon,” Dion said, with a kindly grin.

“Maybe, I don’t know. I mean, my forebrain gets it, but the limbic system’s still panicking,” Barbara admitted.

The main corridor to the lake was wide enough to drive a flatbed through and ran from one end of Armstrong City to the other with the larger buildings attached to it on either side. The hotel lobby double doors were on the north side and were always open. As the Sparks walked by, Barbara got her first view of the plushest area on the Moon. She glanced curiously into the lobby of the hotel. Overstuffed chairs covered in damask brocade and tables that were the cutting edge in sleek modern design, down to the complex electronics, were arranged in conversation groups in front of the registration desk, a floating, jet black tabletop.

So far, the hotel was the only place that had elegant furnishings in it that she had seen. Everything else was pretty basic, but considering what it cost to get things up there, she wasn’t surprised.

“Hey, before we get there, you can swim, right?” Neil asked, stopping and pointing an accusatory finger at her.

“I’m a good swimmer,” Barbara assured him. “But, I like to know I can surface into the air or check the level on my tanks.”

“You a scuba diver?” Dion asked, looking pleased.

“Ever since I was a kid,” Barbara said. She had noticed the red and white PADI flag patch on his dark blue and white swim shorts, but she already knew he was a diver, too, from the vlogs. “I qualified for cave diving so I could go to the NASA training facility off the Florida coast.”

“That’s cryo,” Neil said, tapping away with both thumbs on his PDE. He hit send. “Our readers will find that interesting.”

“We can all swim,” Gary said, “but Dion’s the real merman. Water’s his element.”

“I got my master and teacher certifications,” Dion said, a little embarrassed at the compliment. “Learning to breathe with a respirator and a CO2 converter meant it was a piece of cake to adjust to spacesuits. I’m hoping to get a permanent job up here when I have my bachelor’s degree. There’s a bunch of colleges that will let me work for my master’s and doctorate with remote learning.”

“You’re a biologist, isn’t that right?” Of course, Barbara knew them like she had known them all of their lives. Only a few months prior she had never really expected to even meet them. Not only the light gravity made her feel as if she was walking on air. “You’ve been helping out with plant hybridization?”

“You been reading up on us.” Dion grinned, to show he didn’t mind. “Yes. It’s been a privilege to be able to study the effects of lunar gravity and radiation on Earth fruit-bearing trees and edible vegetation. Dr. Bright attracts some pretty prestigious colleagues to come up here. I’ve had a cryoblast working with them.”

“And I have been able to sit in on experiments performed by noted medical researchers,” Daya said. “It’s a small community, but a diverse and fascinating one.”

“Wow.” Barbara felt her heart swell with happiness. “I can’t wait to start.”

Jan shook her head, as if pitying her. “You’ll be sorry you said that. We work pretty hard. We had the morning off to greet you. I was kind of surprised Dr. Bright wasn’t waiting in the module for us.”

The route to the lake went past a darkened room with a bar behind a number of small tables and a wall of blinking video games. Loud music poured out of the door. Except for a couple of people bent over the glowing screens of portable computers, the room was empty.

“Why isn’t anyone in there?” Barbara asked.

“Too early,” Gary said. “It’s just after nine a.m. local time.”

“Nine? I feel like I’ve been awake for hours!”

“Shuttle time’s something all its own,” Jan said. She captured her floating PDE and put it in her robe pocket. “We’re synched with ground control in Houston, Texas and payload operations in Huntsville, Alabama. They’re both on Central Time, minus-six hours GMT. It just makes it easier to have one time zone.”

The corridor next to the bar had only one name on the direction plate: Selene Lake. The passage was wider and sloped down even more markedly than other tunnels in Armstrong City. Barbara was having a bit of difficulty adjusting her gait to account for the lower gravity and the downslope of the corridor.

“Why are we going so far down?” Barbara bounced clumsily a time or two to keep up, worried her sandaled feet might go out from under her. “Don’t the tourists complain?”

“Sure, but you’ll get used to it. The lake is where you go if there’s a problem big enough to affect the entire colony,” Neil said, his mobile face serious for once. “It’s deep underground, to protect against solar radiation and almost any surface strike except maybe a big asteroid. The temperature is regular, there’s water and oxygen-giving plants. But otherwise,” his expression brightened, “it’s just the place most people like to go and hang around.”

His voice sounded more and more hollow the farther down the corridor they walked. The floor wasn’t carpeted, adding to the echo. Instead, the stone had been cut into a cross-hatched pattern and sprayed with an anti-skid long-chain polymer coating. Barbara started to smell water, and the air began to feel pleasantly humid. According to the colony map, which she kept running on Fido, the rumbling in the wall to her right came from a huge water-purification plant. The corridor widened still further until they walked through a set of open doors four panels wide.

Inside, the expanse of dark, shimmering water stretched across more than half of the cavern’s floor. It was difficult to grasp the scale of the lake, but small jetties and piers jutted out into it along its rim. The expanse of water had to be a full kilometer across at the least. Barbara breathed out in awe.

A couple of men in T-shirts and board shorts sat on the nearest pier with fishing poles in their hands. Colorful canoes and kayaks were stacked against the near wall beside a rack of oars and life vests. Three red kayaks plied their way along the water near the far wall, their female operators wearing lycra body suits and bright yellow life vests.

In her imagination, Barbara had pictured a body of water like a massive swimming pool, but the cavern, well lit by daylight-equivalent fixtures, looked more like a woodland glade. Young trees rimmed the left edge of the pool, giving way to reeds and other water plants. A clutch of water lilies spread white blossoms across their broad green leaves. She could just smell their sweet scent among the odors of moss, algae, and the water itself. The tiling ended in a small lawn of tangled grass mixed with knots of weeds, purple deer clover, and wild flowers growing up through gray sand.

Barbara’s eyes were wide as she scanned the room, taking in every detail. This lake had never been aired on the Bright Sparks website, though one short, tantalizing video of it was on the Armstrong City feed. Neil turned, the ever-ready camera PDE in his hand. Barbara caught him just in time.

“Don’t you dare take a picture of me in my suit!” she warned him. Neil lowered the PDE, looking chastened.

“You have a really expressive face,” he said. “We like to show everyone how people react to life up here.”

“Well, photograph my face,” she said. “Leave my body out of it, okay?”

“You have a nice body,” Neil said, with a cheeky grin. “But it’s up to you.” He stuffed the PDE into his robe pocket and tossed the robe onto one of the chaises laid out in long rows on the side of the lake. “Last one in is a tricephalopedalus!”

He ran in big low gravity bounds and jumped in a long slow arc into the water and plunged face first into the deeps, his arms flailing wildly. As the water splashed up and about it caught Barbara off guard. The water appeared to fall in slow motion. Dion and Gary followed more slowly, but still made huge slowly falling splashes that looked more like an explosion than a splash. Barbara shook herself. The lower gravity affected everything.

“The water’s colder the farther down you dive and then it turns over at about twelve meters as you start to near the heat exchangers on the bottom over there,” Jan warned her, pointing to the left side of the lake. Barbara automatically thought of it as the west side, then checked her PDE to see which way north was. She realized she was completely turned around. The heat exchangers were on the east side. Now she had a bearing to go with a landmark.

“No way you could make it to the thermocline without gear, though,” Jan continued, as she and Barbara put their PDEs away and shed their robes. The grass underfoot tickled Barbara’s feet. Jan pointed to a visible current in the water near the edge closest to the wall. Numerous life-rings were attached to posts driven into the stone. “Stay away from the colony intakes on the north side. See the rock wall jutting out of the water in a circle there?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s to keep you out of the intake area. The suction’s fierce there. You won’t get sucked into a pipe or something because of the grate covering it, but you could get caught in the vortex and drown even with a lifejacket.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Barbara said. She waded into the water up to her knees. The shallows were warmer than the air. The Sparks were right. It felt wonderful. She squeezed the soft bottom sand with her feet. Small ripples moving on the surface caught her eye. “What’s that?”

“Fish,” Jan said, with a laugh. “The lake has been seeded with a lot of oxygen-producing plants, including reeds, lakeweed, even freshwater kelp. Moss grows on the rocks all along the bottom of the lake. It sucks up the CO2, but it tends to get out of hand. The fish eat it. The fish also nibble at the rocks, so the lake gets a fraction deeper all the time. There are snails, too. Don’t get grossed out.”

“I won’t,” Barbara promised. The lake was definitely not like a big pool as she had expected. It was more like the pond on the south field back home. She wondered if there were snakes in it as well, but she didn’t want to ask yet another question.

She followed her roommate into the depths. The water was at least ten degrees cooler than the air, making her shiver slightly as her body adapted. But she would have braved it if ice was actually floating on the surface. I’m swimming on the Moon!

Her wonder must have shown on her face. She caught the expressions of two guys fishing on the pier. They grinned and nodded indulgently at her. Barbara laughed. They knew what she was feeling.

A shout came just before water hit her from one side, drenching her hair for the second time that morning. She paddled in a half-circle to glare indignantly in the direction from which it had come.

“Gotcha!” Neil crowed, leaping up out of the water like a dolphin.

He and Gary started splashing her furiously. Barbara had no choice but to retaliate, sweeping waves of water at them.

“Watch out!” Daya shouted, standing on the lake’s edge in her bright pink suit. Too late, Barbara felt her feet being yanked down into the depths. She sucked in a big breath before she was dragged under the water.

Oh, my God, I’m going to drown in outer space! she thought, fighting hard to kick free of the bond around her legs.

Under the water, which was clearer than any lake she had ever swum in, the band around her legs let go. She blinked hard to clear her eyes. It was Dion who had pulled her under. She swam at the big youth, who kept easily out of her reach. Having seen the width of his shoulders, Barbara didn’t expect such slim hips and rippled abdomen. He had a natural swimmer’s physique. Dion stopped, swishing his arms from side to side to stay in place, then used hand signals that she recognized from dive training, and touched his forefinger to his lips. She stopped. He gestured toward the other two boys’ legs, which she could see about six meters from her. She nodded, making her hair swirl in the water. Together, she and Dion swam toward them, arms out. She grabbed Neil around the knees as Dion tackled Gary. Barbara couldn’t help laughing at the astonishment on their faces when they pulled them down under the surface. Her breath exploded out of her in a gout of bubbles. She surfaced, breathing in lungfuls of the sweet, moist air, laughing. Neil came up almost under her chin.

“No fair!” he sputtered.

“What’s not fair?” Jan asked, flutter-kicking her way over and thrusting armfuls of water all over the smaller boy. “You splashed her. She got you back. Hurray for you, girlfriend.”

Neil shielded himself, but it was useless. He shoved waves back at Jan. The two girls buried him in a tsunami of water.

“Okay, you win!” he yelled. He gave Barbara a mischievous look. “Welcome to the group.”

“Thanks,” Barbara said, lying back on the surface of the water with a sense of satisfaction. She felt more buoyant than she did in Earth waters, and it was wonderful. “I think I’m going to love it.”

“And this is my favorite place in the whole colony,” Jan said, at last. Once they had dried off and cleaned up, the Sparks took her on through the main hydroponics garden, into the grand hotel lobby and the entertainment center again, then cruised by one side of the small but chic shopping mall. Just past the last of the administrative offices under the big dome, the others stepped aside at a set of double doors to let their new member pass inside. Barbara stepped in and looked around at the big chamber, almost holding her breath as the strange sense of familiarity overwhelmed her. “This is our lab and workshop and classroom, all in one.”

“I know,” Barbara said, her eyes wide. “I’ve seen it on the web series. It’s . . . it’s . . .”

“Cryogenic,” Gary said with a laugh. “Yeah, it is.”

Neil took pictures of her incessantly as Barbara walked around. She paid no attention to him. The room was so familiar, but at the same time unreal, like the set from a television series. She kept expecting to look behind a piece of equipment and see stagehands holding it up.

The huge chamber was well-lit, with plenty of work lights and table lamps to supplement the overhead lights and deck prisms that would have admitted and spread sunlight if they were on the Sun side. A couple of electron microscopes sat on a battered basalt-topped table near the wall. Beside them was a closed glass cabinet with lights shining inside. Refrigeration units, glass-fronted or stainless steel: hummed at the rear of the chamber, alongside massive shelves on which lay, in no particular order, lengths of conduit, coils of cable and wire in innumerable gauges, boxes of connectors, soldering irons and flux, circuit boards, laboratory equipment she didn’t recognize and infrared laser heaters. She ran her hand through a bin of loose LEDs and capacitors. Heavy shop equipment with plastic shields pulled down over blades and drill bits was attached to the floor. Hand tools and dozens of pairs of safety goggles and ear protectors were hooked on a plastic wire grid on the wall. According to Gary, the lockers and boxes marked with masking tape held works in progress or finished projects that had been put to one side for the time being. A Tesla coil two meters high, like a gigantic steampunk mushroom, stood idle in a corner next to a similarly scaled shiny metal ball atop a plastic tube.

“We’re not allowed to run the Tesla coil anymore,” Neil said, with evident disappointment. “It kept blowing out the rest of the colony’s lights because the electric field kept inducing too much charge onto the room’s power conduits. Apparently, they need to be grounded or shielded or both a little better. Maybe someday.” He eyed her. “Maybe you could make it work.”

Maybe I could, Barbara thought wonderingly.

Across the room, computer desks with multiple flat projector screens and touchpads faced one another in a circle. Barbara noticed there were half a dozen individual stations. Nearby, a trio of enormous screens was attached to the wall over a line of numerous smaller ones. One of the big screens had a world map showing the Moon’s position and the day-night meridian. Hundreds of small points on the map were illuminated.

“You can have this desk,” Neil suggested, pointing to the chair that had its back to the big screens. He flopped into the seat facing the map. “This one’s mine. I keep the group blog. And the vlog. Daya helps out with that.”

“I know,” Barbara grinned. “I subscribe to the free channels. This is awesome.”

“Sit down,” Jan suggested, slipping into the chair next to the empty station. “Let’s log you into the system. You’ll have full access from now on.”

“To the subscriber area?” Barbara asked, hopefully.

“Yeah, of course,” Jan said. “You’ll be contributing to it. You have to have access.”

Barbara smiled.

The projector screen lit up at her touch, crisp and bright. The colorful logo in the middle, a yellow-white nuclear starburst with multiple faces in each of the rays over a field of electric blue, filled the screen.

“Do you see?” Daya asked, pointing to an image in the ray that stuck out at 2:00. “We have already added you.” Barbara peered at the cartoon drawing. It wasn’t a bad likeness, although she always hated pictures of herself. She managed to spot three of the other Sparks: Gary, Daya and Jan.

“Who are all the others?” she asked.

“Sparks from past years,” Gary said, sliding into the station on her other side. He logged into that computer, and a photo album appeared in the lower corner of Barbara’s computer screen. The “cover” opened itself and flicked through page after page of faces. She knew some of the faces from the web series and the blog. “Some of them are scientists now, working all over the world. Once in while they come back to visit. Dr. Bright started the program back on Earth a long time ago and we’ve only been up here a few years, you know. Dion’s been in it the longest.”

“I’m hanging in until they throw me out,” Dion said. “I started when I was fourteen, like Daya.”

“I’ve been taking the tests since I was ten,” Barbara admitted.

“I was lucky,” Gary said. “My folks work for Armstrong City, so I was already up here when my application was approved.” He nudged Jan. “We started on the same day.”

“Twins,” she agreed, and fist-bumped him.

“Open that folder,” Neil said, as a yellow arrow-shaped cursor moved into Barbara’s field of view. It pointed urgently at an icon on the left margin. “That’ll show you what we’ve been doing this year.”

“I’ve been following the show and your blogs,” Barbara protested.

“This is some of the cryogenic stuff that we couldn’t post yet,” Jan explained. “But since you’re part of the program now, you can see all of it.”

When she clicked on the icon, it exploded into running images. “Ore sampling in craters,” one was labeled. “Effects of radiation on shielded microcircuitry,” read another. “Effects of low gravity on neurological development.” “Deep-space imaging.” Her mind whirled too much to concentrate on one of these fascinating projects. She looked up at the others, her eyes shining. Her new colleagues looked pleased at her evident excitement.

“So what will we be working on now?” she asked. “What can I do?”

“I’m glad you asked that,” said a new voice.

Barbara glanced up, and her heart almost stopped in her chest. She would have known the voice if she had been on the surface of Pluto. Dr. Keegan Bright stood there, not on television or on the other side of a computer screen, but in person, right in front of her.

She was struck hard by how good-looking he was, with a square jaw, wavy blond hair and blue eyes that squinted humorously at her. She had had a serious crush on him since she was a little girl. To her surprise, she discovered that he was only a few centimeters taller than she was, but broad-shouldered for his height. His biceps strained at the material of his jumpsuit sleeves. Barbara felt flustered.

“I, uh, I’m . . .”

Dr. Bright came toward her with his hand outstretched and grasped hers firmly.

“You’re Barbara. I’m glad that you’re here at last! We’re going to get a lot of work out of you, young lady. But you’ll be helping out in the name of scientific exploration and astrophysics. I hope you’re ready for it.”

“Yes! I mean . . .” Barbara stopped, as the words tangled in her brain. “I, um . . .”

“She was talking normally just a minute ago,” Gary said, with mischief on his long face.

“Are you sure?” Dr. Bright asked, bending down to peer at her mouth. He had a warm tenor voice softened by a Southern accent. “All I hear is squeak, squeak, squeak. Maybe we should send her back to medical and have them take a look at her?”

The teasing made Barbara indignant for a moment, then she relaxed.

“It’s the way we talk on Earth now,” she said, offhandedly. “English is so last decade.”

“Well played.” Dr. Bright laughed. “Things change pretty quickly when you’re out of touch. I’d better run to keep up with you!” He gestured to the others to sit down, and hitched a hip onto the edge of a steel table. “Have a seat. Most of you have heard some of this briefing, but I’m going to give you the full rundown. We’re ready to start Project Moon Beam.”

The Sparks cheered. Barbara looked at them with curiosity brimming inside her.

“What’s that?”

“So glad you asked,” Dr. Bright said.

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