Farside - By Ben Bova Page 0,3

her light green eyes were kind of nice. Men rarely noticed her, especially tall, handsome guys like McClintock. He’s got no interest in me, Trudy thought glumly. He made conversation with me during the flight, that’s all.

* * *

The trouble with living on the Moon, Trudy quickly decided, was that you never saw the Moon. You were indoors all the time. Trudy stepped from the lobber rocket’s passenger compartment into an access tube that was sealed to its hatch, then along the spongy-floored, rib-walled tube into a reception area where a young man in a slightly ridiculous-looking pumpkin orange jumpsuit took her travelbag from her and handed it to a gleaming white robot that already had a half-dozen other pieces of luggage draped on its many arms. Then the young man led her through a maze of corridors lined with closed doors.

“Your luggage is being sent to your assigned living quarters,” he assured Trudy. “But Professor Uhlrich wanted to see you the instant you arrived.”

The kid was kind of cute, she thought. Curly blond hair, light eyes, kind of chubby, but his round face was smiling pleasantly at her. Probably a freshman, drafted from the university to work for the Farside Observatory. Students made a handy pool of slave labor, Trudy remembered from her own undergraduate days.

She glanced at the name tag pinned to his chest: WINSTON.

The observatory’s living and working areas were underground, of course, like all the human communities on the Moon, built into the side of the ringwall mountains that surrounded Mare Moscoviense. The lunar surface was airless, and subject to temperature swings from nearly three hundred degrees in sunlight to more than two hundred below zero in shadow. Hard radiation from the Sun and stars drenched the ground, together with a constant infall of dust-mote-sized micrometeorites. It was safer underground. Much safer.

But dismally drab, dreary. The corridors were tunnels, really, narrow, their low ceilings lined with pipes and electrical conduits. Trudy wondered if they would turn her into a claustrophobe.

“Be careful how you walk,” her young guide warned. “In one-sixth gravity it’s easy to go staggering around like a drunk rabbit.”

Trudy had paid strict attention to the orientation lectures back in the space station before she’d headed out to the Moon. She very deliberately scuffed the weighted boots she had bought during her brief stopover at Selene along the corridor’s plastic-tiled floor in a bent-kneed shuffle. It reminded her of videos she’d seen of chimpanzees trying to walk on their hind legs.

Her guide stopped at a door marked:

J. UHLRICH

DIRECTOR

ANGEL OBSERVATORY

“Angel Observatory?” she asked.

“That’s the observatory’s official name,” the guide explained. “Named after Roger Angel, an astronomer who built the largest telescopes on Earth, more’n half a century ago. The name makes for a lot of jokes, you know, about angels and all. We just call it Farside.”

He rapped on the door, very gently.

“Enter,” a voice called from the other side of the door.

Her guide slid it open and gestured Trudy through.

It was a small office, its ceiling of smoothed rock depressingly low, its four walls blank but glowing slightly. Wall-sized smart screens, Trudy recognized. A desk painted to look like wood stood across from the door, with a conference table joined to it like the stem of a T. Behind the desk sat Jason Uhlrich, director of Farside Observatory.

Professor Uhlrich rose to his feet as Trudy entered, his head cocked slightly. With a hesitant smile he gestured toward one of the conference table’s chairs.

“Welcome, Dr. Yost,” he said in a nasal, reedy voice. “Please to make yourself comfortable.”

Uhlrich was a small man, a bit shorter than Trudy and very slight in build. His face had the prominent cheekbones and high forehead of an ascetic, although his skin looked waxy, almost artificial. His hair was cropped short, as was his trim beard. Both were a soft gray, almost silver. Narrow shoulders, tiny delicate hands. He was wearing a dark blue cardigan jacket over a white turtleneck, neat and precise. Trudy felt shabby in her dull old shirt and baggy jeans.

It was Uhlrich’s eyes that caught Trudy’s attention. They were as dark as two chips of obsidian. But they seemed blank, unfocused.

She stuck out her hand. “I’m very pleased to meet you, sir.”

Uhlrich’s smile turned slightly warmer, yet he ignored her proffered hand. “Thank you. I hope we can work well together.”

He gestured toward the chair again and sat down behind his desk. Trudy took the chair; it swiveled so that it was easy for her to face