“On the far side of the Moon. Flight Lieutenant J. B. ‘Here’s Johnny’ Carson. How could I forget one of the most”—I searched for a word: what’s a polite synonym for “forgettable”?—“agreeable young lunies in the Service. No longer quite so young. And now a civilian, I see.”
“Not exactly, sir,” he said.
“Not ‘sir’ anymore,” I said. “You would probably outrank me by now, and I’m retired anyway. Just call me Colonel Mayor.”
He didn’t get the joke—Here’s Johnny never got the joke, unless he was the one making it; he just stood there looking uncomfortable. Then I realized he was anxious to get in out of the UV, and that I was being a poor host.
“And come on in,” I said. I put aside the radio-controlled model I was building; or rather, fixing, for one of my unofficial grandsons who couldn’t seem to get the hang of landing. I don’t have any grandkids, or kids, of my own. A career in space, or “in the out” as we used to say, has its down side.
“I see you’ve maintained an interest in flight,” Here’s Johnny said. “That makes my job easier.”
That was clearly my cue, and since we lunies never saw much use in beating around the bush (there being no bushes on the Moon) I decided to let Here’s Johnny off the hook. Or is that mixing metaphors? There are no metaphors on the Moon, either. Everything there is what it is.
Anyway, accommodatingly, I said, “Your job, which is—”
“I’m now working for the UN, Captain Bewley,” he said. “They took over the Service, you know. Even though I’m out of uniform, I’m here on official business. Incognito. To offer you an assignment.”
“An assignment? At my age? The Service threw me out ten years ago because I was too old!”
“It’s a temporary assignment,” he said. “A month, two months at most. But it means accepting a new commission, so they can give you clearance, since the whole project is Top Secret.”
I could hear the caps on the T and the S. I suppose I was supposed to be impressed. I suppose I might have been, fifty years before.
“They’re talking about a promotion to major, with increased retirement and medical benefits,” said Here’s Johnny.
“That would be a de facto demotion, since everybody here calls me Colonel already,” I said. “Nothing personal, Here’s Johnny, but you wasted a trip. I already have enough medical and retirement for my old bones. What’s a little extra brass to a seventy-six-year-old with no dependents and few vices?”
“What about space pay?”
“Space pay?”
Here’s Johnny smiled, and I realized he had been beating around the bush the whole time, and enjoying it. “They want to send you back to the Moon, Captain Bewley.”
In the thrillers of the last century, when you are recruited for a top secret international operation (and this one turned out to be not just international but interplanetary; even interstellar; hell, intergalactic), they send a Learjet with no running lights to pick you up at an unmarked airport and whisk you to an unnamed Caribbean island, where you meet with the well-dressed and ruthless dudes who run the world from behind the scenes.
In real life, in the 2030s at least, you fly coach to Newark.
I knew that Here’s Johnny couldn’t tell me what was going on, at least until I had been sworn in, so on the way back East we just shot the bull and caught up on old times. We hadn’t been friends in the Service—there was age and rank and temperament between us—but time has a way of smoothing out those wrinkles. Most of my old friends were dead; most of his were in civilian life, working for one of the French and Indian firms that serviced the network of communications and weather satellites that were the legacy of the last century’s space program. The Service Here’s Johnny and I knew had been cut down to a Coast Guard-type outfit running an orbital rescue shuttle and maintaining the lunar asteroid-watch base I had helped build, Houbolt.
“I was lucky enough to draw Houbolt,” Here’s Johnny said, “or I would probably have retired myself three years ago, at fifty.”
I winced. Even the kids were getting old.
We took a cab straight through the Lincoln/Midtown Tunnel to the UN building in Queens, where I was recommissioned as a major in the Space Service by a bored lady in a magenta uniform. My new papers specified that when I retired again in sixty days I would draw a major’s pension plus augmented medical with a full dental plan.
This was handsome treatment indeed, since I still had several teeth left. I was impressed; and also puzzled.
“Okay, Here’s Johnny,” I said as we walked out into the perfect October sunlight (at my age you notice fall more than spring): “Let’s have it. What’s the deal? What’s going on?”
He handed me a room chit for a midtown hotel (the Service had never been able to afford Queens) and a ticket on the first flight out for Reykjavik the next morning; but he held on to a brown envelope with my name scrawled on it.
“I have your orders in this envelope,” he said. “They explain everything. The problem is, well—once I give them to you I’m supposed to stay by your side until I put you on the plane tomorrow morning.”
“And you have a girlfriend.”
“I figured you might.”
So I did. An old girlfriend. At my age, all your girlfriends are old.