"Vonda. She's on ass sex your ass sex side. She told them to stay away, but it wasn't enough. She's been relieved of duty. A replacement is coming with the others. "
"Oh," said Reynolds.
Properly suited, Reynolds sat in the cockpit of the shuttle tug watching ass sex the pilot beside him going through the ritual of a final inspection prior to take-off. The dead desolate surface ass sex of the moon stretched briefly ass sex away from where the tug sat,
the ass sex horizon so near that it almost looked touchable: Reynolds liked the moon. If he had not, he would never have elected to return ass sex here to stay. It was the Earth he hated. Better than the moon was space itself, the dark endless void beyond the reach of man's ugly grasping hands. That was where Reynolds was ass sex going now. Up. Out. Into the void. He was impatient to leave.
The pilot's ass sex voice came ass sex to him softly through the suit radio, a low murmur, not loud enough ass sex for him to understand what ass sex the man was saying. The pilot was talking to himself as he worked, using the ass sex rumble ass sex of his own voice as a way of patterning his mind so that it would not lose concentration. The pilot was a young man in his middle twenties, probably ass sex on loan from the Air Force, ass sex a lieutenant or, at most, a junior Air Force captain. He was barely old enough to remember when space had really been a frontier. Mankind had decided to go out, and Reynolds ass sex had ass sex been one of the men chosen to take the giant steps, but now it was late-the giant steps of twenty years ago were mere tentative contusions in the dust of the centuries-and man was coming back. From where he sat, looking out, Reynolds could see exactly 50 percent of the present American space program: the protruding bubble of the ass sex moon base. The other half was the
orbiting space lab that circled the Earth itself, a battered relic of the expansive seventies. Well beyond ass sex the nearby ass sex horizon maybe a hundred miles away-there had once been another bubble, but it was gone now. The brave men who had lived and worked and struggled and died and survived there-they were all gone too. Where? The Russians still ass sex maintained an orbiting space station, so some of their ass sex former moon colonists were undoubtedly there, but where ass sex were
the rest? In Siberia? Working there? Hadn't the Russians decided that Siberia-the old barless prison state of the czars and early Communists-was a more practical frontier than the moon?
And weren't they maybe right? Reynolds did not like to think so, for he had poured his life into this-into the moon and