Mare Tranquillitatis

Lewis and Clark were ostensibly sent to map the moon.  They were shot from the earth, separately of course, and spun into orbit.  Lewis, on the earth-visible side of the moon, was a familiar sight to amateur astronomers.  Clark, on the so-called ‘dark side’ was its twin.

The moon had been mapped pretty thoroughly, first by the naked eye, then astronomers with telescopes, then by radar.  The little satellites could present a far more detailed picture than the other methods, but once the big installations at Sagan and Tycho were complete, the mapping functions were really no longer necessary.

Since security at Sagan - and once a year, Tycho - was my responsibility, I relied on the two eyes in the sky to give me information about what was going on topside.  Lewis kept an eye on Tycho but I only filled in there when Jared Carson, the security guy, went earthside for his annual leave.

Sagan on the other side was my job, and Clark was one of my assistants.

Mercifully, Tranquillity was not my responsibility. After the space program on earth had dwindled to a couple of small-time probes and inexpensive dirt-diggers, a couple of rich Caltech lunatics got together and decided to cash in on the moon’s mineral resources. The moon was a very valuable lump of dead wealth and a little water.

The first landing site, Tranquillity, was a good place for a shuttle base, but not the best place for a mine, since the plain contained nothing you couldn’t get back home cheaper and easier.

Tranquillity was anything but.  In addition to the base itself, a sprawling complex of the usual gantries, cranes, pads, equipment, Quonsets, control bays and terminals, there was a typical border boom town that sprang up around its edges.  It was populated by tourists, mechanics, engineers, pilots, surveyors, laborers, drifters, con artists, losers and sexual entertainment providers.  Restaurants, bars, theaters, overnighters, shops, tour agencies and brothels operated out of self-contained units.  Tranquillity was the most exciting place in the known, inhabited universe.  Eventually, of course, things coalesced, a single shelter covered the whole thing, and it became a city, the first real city on the moon.  From the earth, Tranquillity looked like a scab.  Up close, it didn’t look much better.

By contrast, Tycho, the next settlement, was a model of efficiency and sleek design.  Most of Tycho was under the center of the crater, in the rich mineral deposits, seven levels of activity. From earthside, Tycho was nearly invisible, a dot in the crater of the same name.

Sagan was a replica of Tycho, only the levels spread out further to the sides.  Sagan was on the far side. ‘Dark side’ became a politically incorrect term right about the same time the first human child was born on the moon, never mind that this incredibly important and historic event happened in a movie studio in Tranquillity, the result of a hurried encounter between an unemployed shuttle mechanic and the estranged actress-wife of an acupuncturist.

Such things did not happen in Sagan.  The far side was not visible from the earth, so Sagan was not under the nightly gaze of every kid with a telescope, but it wouldn’t have mattered.  It was as discreet as Tycho, with as little surface disturbance.  After all, tracks on the moon could last forever.  There was no vegetation, no shifting sands, nothing to cover them.  And life at Sagan was orderly.

Clark, my eye in the sky assistant, worked both ways.  Not only could I see the outside of Sagan at all times and monitor the comings and goings, but Clark also relayed, via several channels, everything from the live sex shows at Tranquillity to cooking instructions, a reading program and advanced physics classes.

We kept our people so busy that there was very little time for crime.  Of course, we had all the minor incidents common to a large group of people, but thanks to an elaborate system of electronic surveillance, I was able to keep the peace with a small staff and minimal effort.

“Good morning, Boss!”  I smiled at Joe Chang’s greeting.  He was fairly new, a contract security assistant with almost four years left to go.  He called me boss, got me my morning tea, arranged the previous shift’s reports on my desk and then spent the rest of his shift at the monitor console, checking out the labyrinth of Sagan for behavioral anomalies.

I came to Sagan eight years ago, with the first mining crews.  Tranquillity was booming with its new shuttle and entertainment industries.  Tycho was running smoothly and Sagan was brand-new.  I almost had a choice then - I could have stayed earthside with my then-husband and borne the child I carried.  But he made the choice for me when he blacked one of my eyes after an argument.  Again.  I gave up the kid and signed on with the company.  I’m older than most of the other folks here, I guess, but one-sixth grav can keep you looking young for a long time.  I work out mornings in full grav, just to stay in shape.  It’s hell, though.  I can’t even imagine going back for longer than my two-week vacation every year.

Joe handed me the previous shift’s reports.  Nothing much.  A petty theft on Level Four, a couple of miners on the bottom level sleeping on the job, a child wandering the hallways alone on Level Two.

“What happened with the kid?”  I asked Joe.

“I went personally to check it out, Boss.  I saw her on the cam and she looked lost.  I mean Level Two isn’t where you send your kids to play.”  This was true.  Level Two was Infrastructure - water, air, temperature.  It was off limits to everyone except the maintenance crews who kept the place alive.

“I looked everywhere,”  he said,  “but I never did find her.  I set the cams to search mode, but I came up empty-handed.”

“Do you have the tapes?”  We tape everything, I mean everything, that the cams see.  This amounts to about three thousand hours of information every shift.  It’s not really tape, of course, but the old nomenclature dies hard.  The completed records are kept in the database for twenty-four hours, then stored.  I could access the pictures from my workstation using the report number, but I was grateful to Joe for downloading this incident for me.
 
Joe nodded and handed me a small disk.  “It’s already cued, Boss,”  he said.

I popped it into my workstation and the picture of a corridor on Level Two came into focus.  A child, a skinny girl of about eleven, looked around with a confused expression on her face.  She was dressed in a standard jumpsuit.  She started off uncertainly down the hallway, but the next cam failed to pick her up.  I ran the pictures back and forth a few times.  There was no sign of her on any of the other levels.  She simply disappeared.
 
“Run her picture against the identity database,”  I said.  “See who she is and I’ll talk to the parents.  And have someone check the access grids to Level Two.”

Joe nodded and left.  I didn’t know what a kid would be doing on Level Two, but I was more worried about why none of the other cams picked her up.  I phoned Maintenance.

“Please check the security cams on Level Two,”  I requested of the automated system.  I received a recorded reply.

“Okay,”  I said to myself.  “About those two sleeping on the job.”  I sent a copy of the shift report and a disciplinary report to their supervisor and let him deal with it.

Then I checked out the petty theft.  The report gave a time and location and when I punched it into my workstation, the database pulled up the cam tape.  It was a Level Three theft, not too uncommon.  Level Three was the mall, shops, restaurants, and amusements.  It was where almost all petty theft happened.  This one was a kid, which was strange.  Except for a batch of babies born throughout the previous year, we only had a few kids on base.  I zoomed in for a closer look.  The Tog Shop carried clothes of all kinds, but the favorite of most people at Sagan was a colored jumpsuit in microfiber.

The cam showed a skinny kid grabbing a jumpsuit.  Even more unusual, the kid appeared to be naked.

We expect people to be clothed in the public areas, not that this rule is enforced all the time, especially in the bars, but usually nothing goes too far.  Besides, if that’s what you want, take a shuttle to Tranquillity.  It’s the entertainment capital of the universe, remember?  We’re just basically a workplace that people also live in.  If it seems harsh or restricted, it’s also safe.

A naked kid stealing in the mall - definitely a first.

I sent a report to my boss, the Director of Life Safety, concluding that the two incidents were connected.  The kid who stole the jumpsuit looked suspiciously identical to the one wandering unescorted through Level Two.  I proposed maintenance checks on all the surveillance cameras and alerted my staff with a description of the kid.

“And wake me up, if you have to,”  I told them.  “I want to see this kid, even if you just get a glimpse of her on the cams.”

The next day was a repeat, except the kid didn’t need to steal anything.  She showed up on the cams on Level One, the administrative offices, that same confused look on her little face.  We got a clear shot of her a few minutes later, wandering through the enormous loading bays of Level Seven where the mineral materials were piled into great tubes waiting to be shot directly to the surface port for transport in the shuttles.

I didn’t know what to tell my boss.  We ran the tapes over and over, and there was no mistake.  Her lost little face stared out of every one of them.

I called a staff meeting.  Joe Chang arranged the chairs, poured the tea and took notes.  Emily Watson was there, and Cora Lee, Jeff Grant, Paolo Tsekovich, and Paolo’s rover.  The rover was the closest thing to a pet that was allowed on the station.  It was an artificial dog, a robot dog.  Paolo had modified it to look very real.  It’s tail thumped the floor as we talked.  Paolo scratched its artificial head and it blinked its beautiful brown marble eyes.
 
“Let’s just throw out some ideas,”  I said to get things started.  “What could this be?  Is it a real kid?”

Cora nodded.  She was young, strong, beautiful and about as emotionless as someone could be and still get a job at Sagan.  “The cams don’t lie.  There is something there.  She looks real enough to me.  Did we get any prints or anything from the Tog Shop?”

Jeff shook his head.  He had run the biometric scans.  “No, nothing.  The jumpsuit was gone and we got it on the cams, but she didn’t leave anything behind.  No prints, no bits of hair, no dust, odor, aura, nothing that we couldn’t already identify.”

“I don’t get it,” Paolo said.  “She doesn’t match anyone here.  I ran all the identity checks.  And we haven’t had visitors for three days.  The shuttles have taken off, but they’ve all come back empty.  No one wants to tour beautiful, exciting Sagan.”  He deadpanned that last bit, but I laughed.  We’re not exactly a tourist’s first pick what with Tranquillity on the route.

Emily Watson spoke up.  She was a little older than the others, but still nowhere near my age.  She was generally a pragmatic sort, a show-me person, the kind who works well in security but still can relate to our population.  “Maybe she isn’t real.  Maybe it’s all a hallucination or something, or an electronic glitch in the cam system.  I mean, no one has actually seen her, it’s all been on the cams.  Maybe someone tampered with them to produce her.  It would be the sort of diversion one of the bored engineers might think was fun.”

This idea made a lot of sense to me.  “Joe,”  I said,  “get MIS to check that out.  It’s a pretty neat trick, and if one of our people is capable of breaching the cam system, then I guess I need to have a little talk with them.”  If someone could do that, I wanted them working for me, not against me.

“There is another explanation.”  Jeff Grant, who had run the biometrics, looked a little embarrassed.  “I-I mean, another possible explanation,”  he amended.  “She didn’t leave any biometric residue.  That’s impossible, you know.  Everyone leaves biometric residue of some sort.  That shop was full of it, except that it all matched up to folks who work here.  None of it belonged to a strange kid.  So as far as the biometrics are concerned, she wasn’t there.  The cam says she was there, but nothing else.  None of us, wait, make that no one at all, has seen her in the flesh.  The only records we have are the cams.”

“So?”  Cora inquired coldly.  Her people skills still needed to be developed.  I made a mental note to counsel her about it when I got some time.

“So maybe we’re seeing a ghost.”

Even Emily laughed.  I smiled broadly.  “I don’t know, Jeff.  Ghosts are little out of my line.  A little out of everyone’s line, I would think.  And how do you explain the cams?”

He was red-faced but determined.  “I’m not saying that’s what it is, only that we should look at everything.  Supernatural visitors often leave some kind of electronic signature, or so I’m told.  Why not a picture on the cams?”

“Well, if it’s a ghost, Jeff, why would it need to steal a jumpsuit?”  Emily asked the question in a very matter-of-fact tone.

“I don’t know,”  he confessed.  “I just thought we should consider other possibilities.”

I had heard of ghosts doing very mortal things.  But I didn’t believe in ghosts, so the question was just a formality to me.

“What about the possibility that it’s an alien?”  Cora said.

This was the one that stopped everyone in their tracks.  Intruders, malfunctions, computer viruses, even ghosts, we could cope with all of those things.  But the thing that terrified everyone on or under the lunar surface was the possibility of contact with real aliens.

The metal plaques left on the surface of the moon by all the Apollo landing crews were in the Eugene Cernan Museum in Tranquillity.  As far as anyone could tell, they had never been viewed by anything other than humans.

The moon had never known the touch of a footstep, the heat of a landing craft, that wasn’t of human origin.

The UFO thing on earth had finally been revealed.  It was a major disappointment to a lot of people, and there were still pockets of believers, cultists who claimed that we were not alone in the universe.  But the awful truth was that we really never had been visited by anything more exciting than our own selves.

The idea that the kid could be an alien life form sent a shiver down my spine.  Overnight, she could become the object of a new religion if we weren’t careful.  I put everyone under orders not to divulge any information about our visitor until the origin could be determined.  After all, it might be something as harmless as a weird virus in the cam system.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s get on this.  Keep quiet, but I want everything you can get.”

The next day I came dragging in.  I hadn’t slept well.  Dreams of the little girl kept me tossing and turning and waking fitfully.  I dreaded the shift report.

“Hi, Boss!”  Joe’s cheery greeting failed to comfort me.  I needed my tea, and maybe a hot soak and another shift to myself.  The tea was all I got.

“What’s the bad news?”  I asked, sipping the Earl Grey which took a major chunk of my paycheck to obtain.

Joe grinned.  “No bad news today, Boss.  No kids on the cams, no intruders in restricted spaces, no job sleepers, thefts, brawls or other disturbances.  A perfect shift.”

“No kid?”  I asked.  What had happened to her?  Where had she gone?  I was almost disappointed.

“Nope,”  he said.  “Jeff’s got the entire computer staff looking at the cam systems, too.  Nothing there so far, but they say these things can’t always be detected.  They have virus killers that don’t even tell you what they’ve destroyed.”

Things were quiet for about a week.  Although no one admitted to messing with the systems, the cams were all checked, security access controls were beefed up in all the restricted areas and there were no more pictures of little girls in or out of stolen jumpsuits.

Other topics of conversation occupied my staff and even Jeff’s comments about ghosts were forgotten.

I talked to Cora Lee about developing her interpersonal skills and my boss was satisfied that the problem had been solved by his competent staff.

But I still had trouble sleeping.  The little girl showed up nightly in my dreams to peer at me with that confused face.  During the day shift I spent hours at my workstation running the tapes over and over.  I almost felt as if I knew her. It was time for me to take a break.

Breaks from the work routine were mandated by the company.  We had to take off a full two weeks at least once a year, and a couple of days each quarter.  It was time for my R & R to Tranquillity.

I booked a shuttle that would swing by Tycho for a few hours and then drop me at Tranquillity.  I wanted to drop in on Jared Carson, see how he was doing.  I called him, but his assistant informed me that he already left for Tranquillity for a few days.  It was good timing.  I got the name of his hotel, just in case.  I booked in at the same place, the Diana.

I took the tube up to the shuttle bay and waited in the small passenger area.  Joe and the rest of my staff would be okay for a few days.  Besides, they knew where to reach me if they needed to.  I wasn’t going back to earth or anything.

On the shuttle ride I looked at the observation screen as we hovered over Sagan.  We were high enough that the access port looked like a smudge on the landscape.  As we went higher, I saw the rim of the crater and hit the zoom button on the viewer.  There was something near the rim, something which didn’t look like a part of the usual bleak landscape.  I made a note to have someone check it out when I returned.  The company was very strict about not disturbing the lunar surface, and especially strict about throwing trash out onto it.

I stayed in the shuttle at the Tycho stopover, dozing a bit in the comfortable seat.

I woke up to the recorded sound of the invisible attendant informing me that we were about to land at Tranquillity.  I looked at the view screen and grinned.  The place was alive and above-ground.

I hadn’t been near Tranquillity for months.  I spent my mandatory two week vacation on earth and Tranquillity was just a place to change shuttles, so I hadn’t ever really seen the place.  Like the native who never tours the local attractions, I had neglected Tranquillity.

I was a little nervous as I disembarked and walked through the main concourse, this time turning into the throng of visitors instead of making a beeline for the earth shuttle.  I had a map, but the place was so much bigger than I had imagined.  And the transparent dome that looked out onto the jagged landscape and the black sky scared the daylights out of me.  I missed the confines of my underground world.  This was like walking out into space without a suit.  I started to sweat.

Two days later I was a new person.

Don’t ever let anyone sell short the importance of a little R&R.  I did run into Jared Carson at the hotel, and we did enjoy practically every entertainment possibility Tranquillity had to offer, including a couple of places that nice girls with top-level security clearances shouldn’t even know about.

I rode the shuttle back to Tycho with Jared, sharing a long kiss with him through much of the final landing.  I stayed on board, though, and rode back home to Sagan in a sort of dreamy haze, induced at least partially by a hormonal surge.

I gazed at the observation screen as Sagan crater came into sight and the familiar pangs of homecoming made me forget all about missing Jared.  I zoomed the picture up again.  That distracting little object on the crater’s edge was still there.  I wondered if Joe Chang was even bothering to check Clark’s pictures.  I reverted to my professional self and mentally filed away the happy time in Tranquillity to savor later, when I had time and could be alone.

Joe greeted me with his usual, “Hi, Boss!” and I was back.  The reports for the last few days were on my desk, the tea was fresh and hot and I settled happily into my routine.  Nothing much had happened while I was gone.

“Joe, have you been monitoring Clark?”  I asked later that shift.  I was thinking of the thing by the crater’s edge.

“Yes, Ma’am,”  he answered.  “There’s something out there on the crater, but I thought you might want to check it out personally.”

I pulled Clark’s eye up on my workstation and roved until I saw the object.  I ordered maximum magnification and stared at the screen.  It was a jumpsuit.

“Joe, take one of the others out there and pick it up.”  he nodded and left.

I zoomed in as close as possible.  Clark could make you feel as if you were really on the surface, walking carefully through the loose rock and sharp debris that covered everything.  I looked for tracks, for disturbed patches in the eons-old dust. I looked for a vehicle or a body or something, anything, else.  There was nothing.

I watched the walker come into view.  It was light and flexible on eight long, thin, jointed legs.  It looked very much like a giant spider.  Joe and Cora rode in it, and I could see them clearly through the port.

They strode right up to the crater’s rim and a long, whip-like arm grabbed the jumpsuit and disappeared with it into the interior of the walker.  The walker hesitated then turned around and walked back with an arachnid’s gait.

Joe and Cora presented me with the jumpsuit.  No one said anything as I examined it.  It looked like the one the child had taken, but I wanted Jeff to check it out with the biometrics.

The jumpsuit was the same one, but no one knew how it got out there to edge of the crater.  I ran Clark’s tapes over until I could have reconstructed the entire crater from memory, but the little girl never showed up on the tape.  Just one moment there was nothing there and the next moment the jumpsuit was lying at an angle, flung carelessly to the surface by what?

I have been here for ten years now.  Joe moved on to Tycho when Jared retired and went earthside.  I scan the tapes every day, and Clark watches the horizon for me, watching for the little girl.  But we never see her.

I kept the jumpsuit - I guess I don’t really know why.  And sometimes I dream of her.  Just before I was scheduled to go earthside last time, she hovered at the edge of a dream and told me not to go.  I canceled my flight.  That was when the passenger shuttle, “Harrison Schmitt” was blown to bits by a terrorist just inside the earth’s atmosphere.  But mostly she just looks at me with that sad, confused expression and says nothing.

Copyright 1998 Kate Thornton
 
You can e-mail Kate kittyf@hotmail.com