She was going to go to the source, to the man who built the mill and set it grinding, to find out one thing: why?.
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Damn near impossible sometimes.īut the rest of humanity? The lovers, the dreamers, the werewolves, the eclipse watchers, all who appreciated and hungered for beauty, what about them? They missed the moon. They never did like the moon’s glare, the way it splashed light all over the sky. About the only people who were happy about the moon slowly slipping from view were the astronomers. The pepper mill had done its job admirably. Her almanac told her it was full, but it took a while for her to find it, barely visible and high in the sky. Nothing but a lowly satellite.Īlice tried to find the moon in the sky. But to do that we have to go to the moon. The print will inspire a new generation of space explorers, that’s what the nerds say. To be put up in a museum, no doubt, maybe the Air and Space in Washington DC. The nerds show you a plan that will dig up the print without disturbing it and bring it back intact to the Earth. There is little time to waste if the print is to be preserved. The nerds tell you that even now it is probably already more blurred than sharp. All the constant heating and cooling of the lunar soil that bears the image of the print, constantly expanding and contracting, loosening and settling, was altering the print. The footprint, the footprint, (actually a boot print, if you really want to be accurate) would not last much longer. People have not been to the moon in decades. The one left by Neil Armstrong when he first stepped off the LEM decades and decades ago. You listen as the nerds tell you about the footprint. Fact is, we should have been right there, on the moon, either observing the process or putting a stop to it. We had to watch from afar, with telescopes, a set of circumstances which disgusted many, including me. No nation had the resources or the guts to send a crew to the moon to investigate. They crawled out of the ships and immediately set to work transforming the moon into a livable planet with vegetation, an atmosphere, and water. The spaceships contained terraforming machines. Over the next few days it became obvious that there were no aliens. After thinking about this for a while, people stopped being insulted and began to worry. The aliens saw fit to go to the moon, but none of them bothered to visit the dominant species on Earth? It was as though humans did not count in the eyes of the aliens. Astronomers everywhere had been tracking the ships for months, so we knew they were coming. The next, spaceships were landing on lunar craters and mountains. There wasn’t a lot of fuss when the aliens arrived. I had embezzled a lot of money and I got caught, fair and square. Unlike most others, I did my watching from inside a correctional institution, the state prison. Like most everyone else, I saw the alien craft arrive on the moon via tv. They said fine non-reflective dust, no matter how abundant, couldn’t quench the light of the moon. A lot of people said its mission was impossible. Alice would get face time with the man who set the pepper mill grinding and seasoning the moon from lunar orbit almost twenty years ago. She asked for an interview with Mollene to get more information. A lot of people said they understood Richard Mollene and his pepper mill.Īlice Creighton did not.
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He had already accomplished the first with his innovative solar cell technology, had made real progress on the second with his universal vaccine, and now, with the pepper mill in orbit around the moon for the past twenty years, he was well on his way to achieving the third.Īlice approved of Mollene’s first two dreams, but was not in favor of the third. Mollene was the richest person ever, a complete recluse, a widower, and dedicated to three things above all else: stopping global warming, halting disease, and making the moon disappear. Why not? No point in being who you are unless you can have some fun once in a while, right? Right?Īlice Creighton knew as much about Richard Mollene as anyone who ever looked at a gossip website, which made sense, since she wrote for one of the most popular. They have money to pay for your legal work. You think this has to be some kind of joke. Lots of kids did that There’s immense power in erasing an object big enough to have its own gravity. Only thing is, the phases of the moon don’t come up in conversation all that often, so the terminology never caught on.Īnother thing I remember about the moon: I used to put my finger over it to make it disappear. I figured all my friends would agree with me and we’d start a new way of talking about the moon. I resolved to use the term when I was quite young.
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TERRAFORMERS READ FULL
I never understood the term “new moon.” When the moon is invisible, how can it be new? “New moon” should be called “empty moon,” the opposite of full moon.