Moonfall Read Free Page B

alderman. He’d started as a speechwriter back in Illinois, had developed a natural talent for orchestrating campaigns, and was credited with the uphill victory of Mike Crest in the last Illinois gubernatorial.
    He knew what made Charlie look good, what the voters wanted, what the hot-button issues were. (Voters always assume that politicians simply avoid talking about things that are important. Sometimes that’s true. But more often, the pols just don’t know themselves. In the rarefied air of the nation’s capital, it’s often hard to figure out what drives people who have to make trips to supermarkets.)
    While they talked, sipping coffee and munching mooncakes (yeast disguised as chocolate baked goods), Charlie glanced up at a wallscreen. An exotic forest moved beneath the camera eye. A ringed planet floated in the background, and a river sparkled in blue-tinged light as it vanished into thick purple trees. “You’re right, Rick,” he said. “Absolutely. Place like this, politics just looks ugly.”
    Rick stared at him across the lip of his cup. “But you have to remember, it’s all bullcrap,” the campaign manager said. “The action’s downstairs, in D.C. Always will be, during our lifetimes, and that’s all that counts. But I think if we handle this right we can take a long step toward securing the nomination.” He finished off the last of his cake. “This isn’t bad,” he said.
    It wasn’t. The cake was very close to real chocolate.
    Charlie looked back up at the screen. The camera eye had raced out over open water, and a second world, silver and misty, was rising out of the sea. And it wasn’t bullcrap. Of all the places Charlie had visited in an extraordinarily well traveled life, none had ever struck him with the sheer emotional force that had come with looking down out of the shuttle at the cluster of brave lights blinking near the center of Alphonsus Crater, the home of Moonbase. Some had come here and described a religious experience, a sense of the power and majesty of the creator. Charlie had felt instead uncompromising neutrality, timelessness, an infinite indifference to everything human. It was a place for which he was not psychologically designed. The rock-hard void, the absence of living things, the extreme temperatures, drove home the fact that he was an interloper.
    This plain had looked the same when the first protozoans began swimming in terrestrial oceans. It was bathed in the soft light of the unmoving home world. There had been a time when one could have stood on the regolith and seen that same world in that same place in the sky, the land masses allcrowded together in a single supercontinent. He remembered having read the name of the supercontinent once, but he couldn’t remember what it was. Godwannaland . Something like that.
    He would never have come here on his own initiative. He’d seen all the visuals, artists’ impressions, holograms, and the rest of it. He thought he understood how it would be. How it would feel. The ten-year-old Charlie who’d collected dinosaurs and built model starships had gotten lost somewhere. But he’d come back with a vengeance, and now the vice president absorbed the moonscape, took it into his soul, and understood he was living through an experience he would remember all his life.
    He’d read extensively about the Moon in preparation for this trip, hoping to find something to insert in the remarks that his campaign manager would prepare. Rick got nervous when Charlie did that. He was heavily armed with examples of well-meaning public servants whose presidential ambitions had foundered on the rocks of an impromptu comment. Still, Rick was only a political advisor. A hired gun. Trained to weigh everything against polls, public reaction, party ramifications. Like most of the other hired guns, he was decent enough, and would be honest with whoever happened to be paying him; but his perspective was limited to thinking about what was needed to