"A Day's Work On The Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moscoe Mike)

A Day's Work on the Moon
Mike Moscoeа
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I just knew IТd work on the Moon, but, like, I never figured on getting a job there before I finished high school. So totally prime! I wasnТt even bummed when it was only delivering pizzaЦit was on the Moon!

Really, Dad started it. I was playing a game, ignoring my room, all pink and frills, a ten-year-old girlТs dream of a womanТs world. I was almost thirteen and beyond that stuff. The game was a cool new one. I was slipping and sliding my way across a marsh, full of lizards, frogs, snails, and other threatened and endangered species. The idea was to avoid running over them while hunting the rogue robots that did. I got points for incapacitating the bad bots long enough for a repair crew to reach them and correct their programming. You lost points if you damaged the bots too badly. Totally ace.

"Good game, Nikki?" Dad asked.

I almost jumped out of my chair. "Great, Dad. Way cool sim. You can almost smell the flowers. Course, bummer, I donТt have a VR helmet," I wheedled.

"Would you like to do it for real? Drive a real robot on the Moon?"

"Way prime," I shrieked. Everybody knew you could rent time on the lunar robot explorers puttering around the Moon. Anybody with the money could drive the bots when they werenТt being used for science. Problem was, they werenТt cheap. "How long could I drive it?"

"Would fifteen minutes be enough?"

I did the math. "Yes!" I was really getting a birthday present this year!

"First, you have to do the research." Dad slipped into lecture mode. "What moon rovers are available? Which one do you think would be the most interesting to drive and why? Pick a preferred option and a few fall back ones and put a report together for Mom."

Neat! Mom and Dad were treating this like a full-fledged project. I slammed out of the game and rolled into the net for research. My birthday was in two days; which rovers would be in daylight? Of the nine on the Moon, three were hibernating for the night. Two more were new arrivals and still tied up with science where theyТd landed. One was nudging its way around Tycho Crater; that looked like the most fun. Two were in the lunar uplands around the seas of Nectar and Serenity. They might be good. Then there was the one shuttling across the south pole, measuring water. That would be my last choice. Then I checked the length of the waiting list. Duh. All were booked solid for the next six monthsЦexcept the polar rover. I outlined the situation to Mom.

"What do you want to do, Nikki?"

"IТd kind of like to drive a rover before I get my driverТs license."

"IТll sign you up for the water survey, dear."

My birthday party was at the local pizza parlor. I had a bunch of the girls over from school, as well as Jer and a couple of his friends. Dad seemed happy that the guys were so few. I think this whole moon rover thing was just his way to get me interested in something before guys started following me home. He was too late; Jer had been carrying my books since third grade, but there are some things you donТt tell your folks.

Anyway, after IТd survived "Happy Birthday to You," in a dozen wrong keys, Dad took me over to the lame Vehicle Remote Controller, just a box with fakie wheels, a tiny 30-inch monitor, a joystick for direction and a pedal for the brake. Who needs a brake? Dad buckled me inЦI needed a seat belt less than a brakeЦsaid "donТt forget to point the camera up," and lowered the lid on the VRC. It still smelled like pizza.

Then the monitor lit up; I was looking at a gray, boulder-strewn field on the Moon. I slapped the joystick for speed, and a crater moved closer, faster. I flipped the joystick to the right. The entire scene changed. I made that little moon buggy do a complete turn and got a view of this entire huge crater with rocks and little craters all over inside it. I did a second turn before I realized I was just doing wheelies on the Moon like some dumb kid. But I wanted to see it all, over and over again!

I remembered to point the camera up. The stars were unblinking pinpricks against a vast, black sky. I felt so tiny. Then I turned the camera down. Water crystals sparkled in my tracks. IТd uncovered a rock in my wheelieЦa rock that had been there since the Moon was made, just waiting for me to come along.

I put the rover in gear, going forward, like its mission plan said on the map in front of me. At the bottom of my screen some instrument reported water content of the dust beneath my rover. I was recording scientific data!

The rover was headed for an ancient crater where a real scientist would take over and do something really scientific. But for the moment, it was mine. I drove foreverЦand in only a second, the screen went blank. I just sat there staring at the gray monitorЦand remembered how to breathe.

I wanted more.

After that, every spare ten bucks I could get my hands on went for another minute on the Moon. Luckily, grunge was making a comeback. Mom never caught on that I outfitted myself for school at the Salvation Army. Clothes money went for rover time. Lunch money too. Anything to spend another five minutes alone on the Moon.

Of course, I usually wasnТt all that alone. Jer got hooked, too. He started designing us our own buggy controller so we could do our time right from my room. You could buy a Kopy Kat? VRC with full emulation for $10,000, but my fourteenth birthday passed without even a party; money was tight. So Jer and I started putting one together up in my room from odd parts.