This part of the Roosa Barracks dated all the way back to the beginning of humanity’s permanent presence on the Moon. No doubt one could argue that these were not in fact the original modules of that first American moonbase, for the simple reason that routine maintenance had pretty much replaced every component.
Still, it hadn’t kept NASA from deciding to put considerable effort into restoring everything to what it had looked like back in 1979 when the moonbase (there had only been one back in those days) had been established as a staging base for the first crewed mission to Mars. They wanted a regular little museum for the big celebrations around the fiftieth anniversary of the original lunar landing, so all the grandees and VIP’s could see the humble beginnings from which Grissom City had come.
Except they’d never appointed any staff to keep the museum. As a result, everyone out here had taken turns devoting some of their off hours to tending this little museum. For the younger pilots and ground crew, it had been something done out of a sense of obligation.
For Peter Caudell, coming here always brought a sense of nostalgia. Not that he’d actually seen the moonbase in its original configuration — he hadn’t come up here until the latter part of the 80’s, when the second Mars mission was coming back home. By then the place had expanded a fair amount, and there’d been some problems with the interconnections between the older and newer modules, which had created a near-disaster just when the Mars astronauts needed to be quarantined before going home to Earth.
It had been a different age, maybe not as wild and woolly as those early days of the Mercury astronauts, but still very much a frontier outpost from which home was very far away.
And now it may well be a refuge, if things are as bad as some reports seem to indicate. Or rather, the lack of reports.
In some ways the silences were almost worse than the information that was coming through. Not just the various Third World countries that had seemingly fallen off the grid altogether, although the reports of flyovers showing whole towns abandoned were disturbing. But on a more personal level, pretty much everyone up here had lost contact with one or more friends, colleagues or family members.
His own children and their families were safe — one of the back-handed benefits of the Expulsions, which had brought them up here to lunar exile. But his natal family was still back on Earth. His parents had both passed away shortly before the Expulsions, so they hadn’t had to watch those appalling events, but he had siblings and cousins with family scattered around the US, even abroad, and while he wasn’t constantly e-mailing or texting them, he did keep some contact through social media — and every now and then he’d think when did I last hear from that person?
Sometimes he’d become worried enough to actually look back and find it had only been a few days. Other times he’d find that more time had passed, and when he attempted to contact the person, he’d get a brief reply that the person was hanging on. He could only hope they weren’t canned replies, similar to the “out of office” replies some people set up in anticipation of a planned absence.
And that’s one of the most draining parts of this whole thing — the uncertainty. Risk can be managed — you don’t get into this line of work if you can’t deal with risk. It’s the damned uncertainty and ambiguity that is so crazy-making.