Ship of Fools - Chapter 34

The Space Tourist

[Start at the beginning of the novel: Prologue.]

[Go to the Table of Contents.]

Welcome back to Ship of Fools, my satire about a science journalist trying to make sense of conspiracy theorists, flat-earthers, moon-landing deniers, New Agers, and more.

At the Tranquility Lunar Base, Slim sets about investigating the tourist he met on the ride up from Earth.

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ROGERSSON wasn’t too happy with Slim when the cowpoke-turned-detective checked in after his meeting with Mr. Ester, even less so when it turned out the “rich fella” was William Luddington, playboy son of media mogul Henry Luddington, head of the News-Hound News empire.

“We’re going to have to tread carefully with this one. Public relations aren’t my specialty, but I know we don’t want to get on the wrong side of the Luddington media organization. They’ve ruined politicians’ and celebrities’ careers. They won’t be able to do the same to our joint lunar base operation, but we don’t need the aggravation. I’m going to assign this to someone with a little more experience.”

“Now just a minute, Mr. Rogersson, if you send in a regular security type to question this fella, you’ll spook him for sure. But he’ll recognize me from the flight, and it’ll seem perfectly natural to strike up a conversation.”

Rogersson gave him a long, searching look. “All right, but I’m going to put a tail on him too. You can catch up with him in the mess after your shift.”

The regular patrol involved guarding the station’s perimeter, the main threat being any sort of intrusion by their Chinese neighbors to the north. Not that any intrusion had ever occurred, given the distances involved, just a few close passes of Chinese hypergolic drones along the boundary, similar to the close brushes the US and China regularly got into in the Pacific and in the newly ice-free Arctic. It seemed strange to Slim that the two groups — Chinese on the one side, US/European Space Agency/SpaceOut on the other — had the whole moon to spread out on, and here they were, hundreds of miles apart and still playing these games. So much for space offering relief from the competition for scarce resources. The Russians had their base at the other pole, so at least he didn’t have to worry about them.

It took him a couple days to get used to the routine. His first moonwalk hadn’t gone so well. He thought he was used to wide open spaces, but when he first stepped out of the airlock in his “environment suit,” he felt the moon begin to spin. First there was the gray expanse of cratered lunar dust stretching to a horizon that seemed far too close, then above that the blackness of space. That was all fine, until he tried to get a view of home, his eyes moving up and up and up to catch sight of the Earth overhead — or a three-quarters Earth, to be exact. Then it had all gone sideways, almost literally, something about the low-g environment making him feel like he was about to fall off the moon and back down to Earth. He kept telling himself there was no down in space, as the instructor back in Salsa Verde and Mr. Rogersson had both tried to drill into him, but it did no good. To a no-nonsense fella such as himself, up was up and down was down, and it didn’t matter what you thought about the situation. Now that up felt like down, he couldn’t get his brain to switch back to “normal,” whatever that meant anymore. He felt like he was about to lose his breakfast, and Rogersson had driven home how awful that could be.

“Looks like some of you have a case of vertigo,” Rogersson’s voice sounded in his ear. “Remember, never look up, keep looking down at the ground in front of you until you’re accustomed to the low-g environment.”

He’d managed not to hurl inside his helmet, and by his second patrol, he was beginning to get the hang of things. His day started with checking out an ATV from the stable next to the base. Then he and his partner, a tough Polish gal named Marie who’d been at the base a little over a year, headed out toward the perimeter. The vehicles did all right going up and down over the cratered terrain — by this point they were following well worn tracks left by years’ worth of previous patrols — but they seemed a little antiquated to Slim, who thought they’d at least have speeders or jetpacks or something by now. Instead, the ATVs were standard Hondas and Polarises with electric motors and batteries instead of combustion engines.

He and Marie tooled around the perimeter track on their miniature dune buggies, never encountering anything like a threat or a danger, except for one time when her ATV’s battery gave out. Then it was just a matter of her hoppin’ onto the passenger seat of his vehicle and off they went to fetch a spare. Three hours of driving, stopping, scanning with space-age binos, then driving some more. Back to the sec building for lunch and new oxygen canisters, then another three hours of patrolling in their “afternoon,” this time out to the old Apollo 11 site, cordoned off at a distance of 75 meters. All to preserve humanity’s (and more importantly, Americans’, Slim guessed) first steps on the moon.

Slim saw how the job could get awful gosh-danged boring awful quick. To keep himself entertained, or maybe just to remind himself that he was a cowpoke, he found a way to fasten his Stetson to the helmet of his environment suit using glued-on Velcro strips. The effect was a mite comical, but Slim didn’t care, the only drawback being that he had to duck going out the airlock. He just wished SpaceOut made pressurized cowboy boots instead of the bulky standard-issue ones.

On his third day on station, his schedule matched up with Luddington’s, so running into him in the mess hall wouldn’t seem suspicious. He got the message that “the subject” was heading for dinner, and went straight to the dining room, so excited to make amends for his former mistake that he walked up behind his mark, seated at one of the cafeteria-style tables, with a boisterous “Well, howdy there, Kid!”

Luddington nearly jumped out of his seat so that he had to grab the table to keep from launching up to the ceiling, then settled slowly back down. “Crikey, you nearly scared me to death,” he said as Slim set down his plate, loaded with a vat-raised steak, hydroponically-grown baked potato, freeze-dried peas, and a cup of coffee far weaker than the eponymous kind.

“’Pologies,” Slim said, doffing his Stetson, rueful of the red marks the Velcro made on his forehead. “Just saw you sittin’ over here by your lonesome and thought I’d see how your trip is goin’.”

“Oh, you know, the usual space tourist stuff — low-g golf, a jaunt down to the A-11 site, a trip to the dark side for star-gazing.”

“You’re pullin’ my leg with that ‘dark side’ business, ain’t ya?”

“Just speaking literally, of course. How’s your work treating you?”

“Pretty well. I do miss my horse.”

“I see you have a pistol now. Fastest gun on the moon, am I right?”

“It works okay. Designed to maim, not to kill, but I reckon it’ll wreak havoc on an environment suit.”

“Is that so?” The Aussie’s eyes got a shifty look and he lowered his voice. “Say, you don’t know anything about your security colleagues tailin’ me, do you?”

Darned block heads. No wonder Luddington spooked so easy. He’d have to talk to Rogersson about that. “No, why?”

“Nothing specific, just had a sixth sense I was being followed. Hair standing up on the back of my neck kinda thing.”

“I can’t think why they’d do a thing like that. Is there a reason they should be?”

The Aussie grinned. “Nah. It’s only, I’ve been pretty vocal about my opposition to colonizing space.”

“Really? Why’s that?”

“Look at what humans have done to Earth, and each other, Ester being a prime example of how billionaires treat their minions. Why export that plague to to the rest of the solar system and wreck it too?”

That was pretty rich, a billionaire’s son complaining about how billionaires treated people. Maybe the Kid was the black sheep of the family. “What’s to wreck? Seems to me there’s nothin’ out here but rocks and dust and no breathable atmosphere.”

“But for all we know, some worlds like Mars or Titan or Ganymede could have extraterrestrial life, maybe something microscopic that we wipe out before we even know it’s there. That would be just like us.”

“That’s why Mr. Ester wants to build these space stations, if I ain’t mistaken.”

“But those stations will take raw materials and where will those come from? Then there’s the principle of the thing. It’s just nice to know there are still places mankind hasn’t trod all over. Places that are still a bit mysterious.”

“Well, heck, even if someone does decide to colonize Mars or one o’ these moons, there’ll still be six other planets, a passel o’ moons and dwarf planets — not to mention a whole universe full of star systems, galaxies — all free of any sullyin’ by humanity.”

“So we have a philosophical disagreement. The point is, it wouldn’t have been that hard for my views to come to Ester’s attention, and I could see how he might have me confused with other folks who are even more hostile to his projects.”

“Oh yeah? Like who?”

“You must have heard of No Exit? One Planet, One People? CAOS? If not, I bet your bosses have. Tell them I’m not involved, will you?”

“Sure. Don’t know how much good it’ll do you though.”

“You might also tell them I’ll be writing an op-ed when I get back next week. It could be ‘Fabulous Time on a Luna Holiday with SpaceOut,’ or ‘The Dark Side of SpaceOut’s Race for Space’ — it’s their choice, depending on how much they keep pressuring me.”

“Did you ever think, maybe you’re bein’ a tad paranoid? Like maybe you’re seein’ shadowy figures where there ain’t any?”

“Nah. First of all, I can spot a tail a mile away, since my dad had me followed so often. And second, someone in my position has to be paranoid, it’s the only way to survive.” He rose from the table. “Gotta run. Can’t be late for my evening ride in a Moon Rover replica.”

Slim watched him leave, uncertain if he’d learned anything useful.

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Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this chapter, please give it a like, a share, a restack, or a comment. And if you really enjoyed it, I hope you’ll buy me a coffee or upgrade to a paid subscription.

What do you think? Doth Luddington protest too much? And what about this group he mentioned, CAOS?

Next up: Chapter 35, “In the Belly of the Beast,” in which Liz and her two companions arrive at the South Pole — the center of the round-earth hoax, as far as Sarge is concerned — then set off on skis, aiming for a spot in which Dawa has a mysterious interest.