“And we couldn’t modify them—”

“Not quickly. Besides, the performance of those solids sucks. It would make for a huge trans-lunar injection propellant load. You’d need a lot of IUSs to—”

Geena said, “What other upper stage could we use?”

Frank eyed her sceptically. “That’s the spirit. But I think we have a hole here. What we need is a Service Module like Apollo’s, or an OTV, but we don’t have either of those.”

Jays growled, “We don’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“We aren’t the only players here. I remember the security briefings we got during Apollo. I’m talking about “67 or “68. The CIA got worried the Russkies were getting close to a manned circumlunar flight, because they launched this thing called a Zond and reentered it. That was why we bumped Apollo 8 up to a lunar orbit mission; it was slated as an Earth-orbit flight.”

“Oh,” Frank was nodding now. “Oh, you’re right. The Russians were testing an upgraded lunar-mission Soyuz, complete with a new Service Module stage called a Block-D. They launched it on a Proton booster. It all fit in with their lunar landing plans, that they scrapped when their N-l booster kept blowing up on them.”

Geena smiled. “And the Block-D—”

“Is still flying. They use it as an upper stage on their commercial Proton launcher.”

“And so—”

Frank started to sound quietly excited. “And so we could use that, along with a beefed-up Soyuz, as the equivalent of the old Apollo Command-Service Module. In fact, since the Block-D is a kerosene-oxygen, it should have a better performance than Apollo did. For the old Zond missions the stage must have imparted about ten thousand feet per sec. With the added mass of our lander outbound—” He scribbled on another napkin. “You’re looking at plenty of gas for both the lunar orbit insertion and Earth-return burns.” He looked at Geena, eyes wide. “What are we missing? Suddenly this is too easy.”

Jays nodded vigorously. “Soyuz to the Moon. Has a ring to it, doesn’t it? Of course they’re still flying that baby up to Station, but it’s an Apollo-era ship. Shit, I think it predates Apollo.” He laughed. “And believe me, if you find yourself flying one of those, it will make riding down to the Moon without a cockpit look like a cakewalk.”

Geena said, “So now we just have to figure how to get that combination on the way to the Moon.”

Jays said, “The highest performance stage we’ve got is the Centaur.”

Frank shook his head. “Won’t work. Liquid hydrogen. It would take a couple of them — and we’d have to launch on Titan IVs — but anyhow the LH2 on the first one would boil away before we could launch the second. Those stages are only designed for a couple of hours on orbit.”

“How about the IUS?” Jays asked. “They can go up on Shuttles or Titans.”

Frank pulled his lip. “Their performance is poor compared to the Centaur.”

Jays grinned. “So take more. Four, maybe?”

Frank scribbled quickly. “Actually, three would do it. Hmm. I guess you could launch the first on a Shuttle, second on a Titan, and the third on another Shuttle, then use that orbiter to assemble the stages.”

Geena said, “And the Soyuz—”

Frank put down his pen. “Easy. Send it up unmanned with the Block-D on a Proton, like they did with Zond. Autodock to Station—”

“We’ll need the Progress autodock module, then.”

“Yeah. Transfer the crew from Station. Then haul over to the IUS assembly, dock — and go to the Moon…”

Geena asked, “You think the Russians would agree?”

Jays said, “You told us you could command the resources this would need. Anyhow,” he said, eyeing her, “I hear you have contacts of your own over there. Maybe that could, umm, smooth the way.”

He was right, of course. Although it added another layer of complication. Not only was she going to have to campaign for this ridiculous lashed-up lunar mission, but she was also going to have to get her ex-husband and her Russian lover to work together on it…

Frank, frowning, started to sketch in a Soyuz on his napkin: a pepper-pot, with fragile solar wings.

“Holy shit,” he said respectfully. “Maybe it will work. I think we could do it.”

“Hell, of course we can do it,” Jays boomed. “Makes you think, though. What did we learn in all those years of flying Shuttle, all those billions of bucks, to help with this, when the chips are down? I’ll tell you. Diddley.”

Geena said to Frank, “Can you turn this into some kind of formal recommendation?”

Frank said, “For what audience?… Never mind. We can cover that when we have the material. We have a lot of studies to do. The conversion of the Shoemakers. Looking into the IUS. Figuring out the Soyuz option. Confirming the mass estimates. Figuring out what you’d need on the surface — what about EVA suits, for Christ’s sake? — and then there’s the operational stuff. Assembly at the Station. Who and how? Looking at the launch manifest for Shuttle and Titan and Proton, figuring out what can be bumped…” He looked at her nervously. “You know, it doesn’t pay to go into these things just one chart deep.”

“I understand. I’ll start pulling strings. If,” she said heavily, “you think you can do it.”

“Oh, I can do it.” He grinned. “After all, everything’s off the shelf.”

Jays said, “You say you put forward this kind of proposal a few years ago.”

“Yeah,” said Frank. “An internal study. A little less improvised, of course—”

“What happened?”

“It was too expensive. We aimed to get back to the Moon for less than a billion bucks. We still found we came in at nearer two billion.”

Jays belched. “Hell,” he said. “Speaking as an old Air Force man I can tell you that’s the cost of one B-2A Spirit bomber. A return to the Moon, for that. What a waste. What a fucking waste.” He grabbed the empty bottles. “Where’s the waitress? You want another?”

They all did, and before the waitress could clear the tables, Geena took the napkins Frank had sketched on, and folded them carefully, and put them away.

They stayed for more beers, long into the night, and the Outpost got steadily more raucous.

…There was a quake in Seattle, in fact, on June 1st, the day before Joely Stern moved there.

For a vet of LA like her, it sounded like no big deal: Richter five or six, hardly enough to slosh the water in the bathtub, even if it did send enough dilute mud out of Elliott Bay to flood the Waterfront Park and knock out the street-cars. But it sent the locals into a spin, coming so soon after the Rainier eruption.

And anyhow just then Joely had bigger problems on her mind.

Like negotiating her pay at Virtuelle, which still hadn’t been settled even when the company’s big eighteen-wheeler had turned up at her apartment block in LA, and the movers had loaded up everything, right down to her car, for God’s sake.

She had gone in pitching at eighteen hundred bucks a week, but the executive who hired her, in the end, managed to lowball her to fourteen hundred. And on top of that she would lose twenty per cent to the employment agency Virtuelle were recruiting her through, which in turn meant that she was engaged not as a staff employee but as a perma-lancer, no health benefits or pension or stock options. And by the time Uncle Sam had taken his cut she was left with little more than eight hundred a week, which felt like a defeat, even if it was more than she had earned in her twenty-seven years…

But she went to Seattle anyhow.

She spent a day exploring, and she immediately fell in love with the place.

She liked its topography, the way it was folded over the compact hillsides above its bay. She liked being able to drive from snowcapped mountains to a yacht-filled Sound in half a day. She liked the Elliott Bay Book Company, whose boast to stock every book in the world she was not able to invalidate with her standard three-title test set.