Pave the Universe

Jan had been apprehended while trying to get into LunaBank’s main offices late the night before. She was off duty, and claimed to be investigating a break in there that she had witnessed. No one else was found. Also, she had tripped an electronics sensor but nothing was found on her. She was being detained for questioning.

Yancy did not get into work until late that afternoon, and when I asked if she’d heard about Jan, she just smiled, shook her head, and said, "I think LunaBank got lucky...this time."

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"Well, Amy," she said, "There are some things that even the money movers can’t stop."

The next time I went out with Yancy was a week later. She brought me to an Underfellows rally that she said I would find ‘interesting’. The Lunar Underfellows is a conservation organization that maintains a limited membership while projecting a large image in the media. Their daring attempts at stopping commercial expansion had been well reported. Earlier that year, several of them had got up to the surface in pressure suits painted red and had chained themselves to a huge chunk of rock that lay on the surface near the Port. The boulder stood in the way of a planned pad facility, and was due to be removed. The Underfellows felt that it should have been left alone. The Chief of the Port had waited until the protester’s life supports had reached a critical low before having security clear them out. It made the news and the boulder’s fate had been tied up in the courts ever since.

I was surprised to see Jan at the rally. Yancy and I sat with her and listened to an hour and a half of speeches. Finally the meeting broke and food was served. While eating, I talked with Jan, and again was impressed by her friendly manner.

I asked her about the LunaBank incident, and said it was strange that she had tripped an electronics scanner. "Don’t believe what you hear in the news," she said. "I have a pacesetter. My heart has a irregular beat."

The next day at work I asked Yancy how Jan had gotten out of trouble so quickly. "She never was in real trouble," she said. "That’s the beauty of security. You’re above the law."

Yancy’s other buddy, Wendi, was reassigned to Farside Observatory later that year. Tragically, she had only been there for a month before she was killed in a big hydrogen explosion at the Observatory’s new depot. Almost nothing of her body was left. I cried when I heard the news. It was terrible, but Yancy acted as if Wendi were still alive. "Aren’t you upset by Wendi’s death?" I asked her. "She lives on," was all that Yancy had to say.

The Farms was not in the business of experimenting with animals. There were no ‘lab tests’ done on our livestock; they were treated fairly, and had a good life. We farmed sheep and cattle and fish and poultry to perpetuate their existence, and to harvest for food, clothing and organics. The effects of Luna’s gravity were more pronounced in the animals than in ourselves, but we created no ‘monsters’.

A particularly disturbing new trend on Luna was ‘shelf meat’, the growing of animal tissue in shelf like containers. A person could cut away however much he wanted to cook, and the tissue would grow back to refill the shelf.