New Frontiers (2 page)

Sam had built what he euphemistically called an entertainment complex at Hell Crater, a couple of hundred kilometers south of Selene. The thirty-klick-wide crater was named after a nineteenth-century Austrian Jesuit priest who was an astronomer, Maximilian Hell, but in Sam's impish eyes it was an ideal spot for a lunar Sin City. He built a gambling casino, a dinner club called Dante's Inferno (staffed by Hell's Belles, no less), gaming arcades, virtual reality simulations, the works, all beneath a sturdy concrete dome that protected the interior from micrometeors and the harsh radiation streaming in from the Sun and stars.

Underground, Sam had built the first-class Paradise Hotel and shopping mall, plus an ultramodern medical facility that specialized in rejuvenation therapies.

Apparently Sam had financed the complex with money he had somehow crowbarred out of Rockledge Corporation; don't ask me how.

Anyway, his latest idea was to build a golf course out on the floor of Hell Crater, a new attraction to draw customers to the complex. As if gambling and high-class prostitution weren't enough.

“How do you get away with it?” I asked Sam my first night in Hell, as we sat for dinner in Dante's Inferno. The waitresses were knockouts, the entertainers dancing up on the stage were even more spectacular.

“Get away with what?” Sam asked, all freckle-faced innocence.

I waved a hand at the exotic dancers writhing on the stage. “Gambling. Women. I imagine there's a good deal of narcotics moving around here, too.”

With a careless shrug, Sam told me, “All perfectly legal, Charlie. At least, nobody's written any laws against it. This ain't Kansas, Toto. Or Singapore. The New Morality hasn't reached the Moon.” Then he grinned and added, “Thank God!”

Truth to tell, I was temped by one of Hell's Belles, a gorgeous young blonde with the deep-bosomed body of a seductress and the wide, cornflower blue eyes of a
naïf
. But I didn't act on my urges. Not then.

I got to work, instead.

Designing a golf course takes a combination of skills. The job is part landscape architecture, part golfing know-how, part artistry.

The first thing I did was wriggle into a spacesuit and walk the ground where the course was to be laid out. The floor of Hell Crater was pretty flat, but when I examined the area closely, I found that the ground undulated ever so slightly, sort of like the surface of a rippling pond that's been frozen solid. Good, I thought: this would present some interesting lies and challenges for putting.

There were plenty of challenges for me, let me tell you. The Moon's gravity is only one sixth of Earth's, and the surface is airless, both of which mean that a golf ball should fly much farther when hit than it would on Earth. But how much farther? Sam provided physicists and engineers from the faculty of Selene University to work with me as consultants.

The key to the distance factor, we soon found, was the spacesuits that the golfers would have to wear. When Alan Shepard hit his golf ball, back in the old Apollo days, he had to swing with only one arm. His spacesuit was too stiff for him to use both arms. Spacesuit designs had improved considerably over the past century, but they still tended to stiffen up when you pressurized them with air.

Then there was the problem of the Moon's surface itself. The whole darned place was one big sand trap. Walking on the Moon is like walking on a beach on Earth. Sandy. For eons dust-mote-sized micrometeors have been falling out of the sky, hitting the ground and churning its topmost layer into the consistency of beach sand.

I tried some putting tests. I tapped a golf ball. It rolled a few centimeters and stopped dead. I nudged it harder, but it didn't go more than about a meter.

“We'll have to smooth out the ground, Sam,” I said. “The greens, the areas around the cups. So the players can make some reasonable putts.”

“Okay,” he answered cheerfully. “Plasma torches ought to do the job.”

“Plasma torches?”

“Yep. They'll bake the ground to a nice, firm consistency.”

I nodded.

“And once you've got it the way you want it, paint the areas green,” Sam said.

I laughed. “Not a bad idea.”

There was another angle to the distance problem. The greens had to be so far from the tees that some of the cups were over the damned short horizon. You wouldn't be able to see the pin when you were teeing up.

Sam solved that one in the blink of an eye. “Make the pins tall enough to be seen from the tees, that's all. Put lights on their tops so they're easily visible.”

I nodded sheepishly. I should have thought of that myself.

The ground was also littered with lots of rocks and pockmarked with little craterlets and even sinuous cracks in the ground that the scientists called rilles. More than once I tripped on a stone and went sprawling. I found, though, that in the Moon's gentle gravity I tumbled so slowly that I could put out my arms, brake my fall, and push myself back up to a standing position.

Cool. I could be an Olympic gymnast, on the Moon.

But I had to tell Sam, “We'll have to clear away a lot of those rocks and maybe fill in the rilles and craterlets.”

He scowled at me. “Golf courses have roughs, Charlie. Our course will be Hell for them.” Then he broke into a grin and added, “At least we won't have any trees or deep grass.”

“Sam, if we make it too rough, people won't play. It'll be too tough for them.”

He just shrugged and told me to figure it out. “Don't make it too easy for them. I want the world's best golfers to come here and be challenged.”

I nodded and thought that trying to play golf in a spacesuit would be challenge enough, with or without the rough.

I didn't realize that when Sam said he wanted to invite the world's best golfers to Hell, he intended to include the woman who wrecked my life. The woman I loved.

*   *   *

HER NAME WAS
Mai Pohan. We had known each other since kindergarten, back in Singapore. She was a slim, serious slip of a young woman, as graceful and beautiful as an orchid. But with the heart and strength of a lioness. Small though she was, Mai Pohan became a champion golfer, a world-renowned athlete. To me, though, she was simply the most beautiful woman in the world. Lovely almond-shaped eyes so deeply brown I could get lost in them. And I did.

But then my parents exploded all my dreams by announcing they had arranged for me to marry the daughter of Singapore's prime minister, who was known in the newsnets as “the dragon lady.” And worse. I was flabbergasted.

“This is a great honor for our family,” my father said proudly. He didn't know that I was hopelessly in love with Mai Pohan; no one knew, not even she.

For a designer of golf courses—a kind of civil engineer, nothing more—to be allied to the ruling family of Singapore was indeed a great honor. But it broke my heart.

I tried to phone Mai Pohan, but she was off on an international golf tour. With misty eyes, I e-mailed her the terrible news. She never answered.

Like a dutiful son, I went through the formalities of courtship and the wedding, which was Singapore's social event of the year. My bride was quite beautiful and, as I discovered on our wedding night, much more knowledgeable about making love than I was.

Through my mother-in-law's connections, I received many new contracts to design golf courses. I would be wealthy in my own right within a few years. I began to travel the world, while my wife entertained herself back in Singapore with a succession of lovers—all carefully hidden from the public's view by her mother's power.

It was in the United States, at the venerable Pebble Beach golf course in California, that I saw Mai Pohan once again. She was leading in a tournament there by three strokes as her foursome approached the beautiful eighteenth hole, where the blue Pacific Ocean caresses the curving beach.

I stood among the crowd of onlookers as the four women walked to the green. I said nothing, but I saw Mai's eyes widen when she recognized me. She smiled, and my heart melted.

She barely won the tournament, three-putting the final hole. The crowd applauded politely and I repaired to the nearby bar. I rarely drank alcohol, but I sat at the bar and ordered a scotch. I don't know how much time passed or how many drinks I consumed, but all of a sudden Mai sat herself primly on the stool next to mine.

My jaw dropped open, but she gave me a rueful smile and said, “You almost cost me the tournament, Chou.”

“I did?” I squeaked.

“Once I saw you I lost all my concentration.”

“I … I'm sorry.”

She ordered a club soda from the man-sized robot tending the bar while I sat beside her in stunned silence.

“It's been a long time,” she said, once her drink arrived.

“Yes.”

“How is married life?”

“Miserable.”

Those fathomless eyes of hers widened a bit, then she smiled sadly. “I'm almost glad.”

I heard myself blurt, “You're the one I love, Mai. My family arranged the marriage. I had to go through with it.”

“I know,” she said. “I understand.”

“I love you.” It seemed inane, pointless—cruel, almost—but I said it.

Very softly, so low that I barely heard her, Mai replied, “I love you too. I always have.”

I kissed her. Right there at the bar. I leaned over and kissed her on the lips. The first and last time we ever kissed.

Mai said, “Like it or not, you're a married man.”

“And you…?”

“I could never marry anyone else.” There were tears in her eyes.

That was my encounter with Mai Pohan. That was all there was to it. But we must have been observed, probably by one of the paparazzi following the golf tournament. By the time I got back to Singapore my wife was raging like a forest fire and her mother was hiring women to testify in court that I had fathered their illegitimate children. The police produced DNA evidence, faked of course, but my defense attorney didn't dare to challenge it.

My parents disowned me. My contracts for new golf courses disappeared. I was alone, friendless, on my way to jail, when Sam whisked me to the Moon.

Four hundred thousand kilometers away from Mai Pohan.

And now she was coming to Hell Crater!

*   *   *

AS SOON AS
I saw her name on the list of pros coming for the First Lunar Golf Invitational, I rushed to Sam's office.

For the head of a major corporation, Sam had chosen an office that was far from imposing. Modest, even. He wasted no money on the trappings of power. The office was merely a small room in the complex that housed Dante's Inferno on one side and the virtual reality simulations center on the other.

Sam's office did feature one concession to his ego, though. His desk was raised slightly on a cleverly disguised platform. And the chairs before the desk were shortened, their legs sawed down a few centimeters. Sitting in front of him, you had to look up at Sam, while he looked down at you. I heard years later that Sam had picked up that trick from reading about Joseph Stalin, the dictator of the Soviet Union. Sam did a lot of reading about powerful men who were short: Napoleon, Stalin, Alexander Hamilton.

“Sam,” I exclaimed as I burst into his office, “you've invited Mai Pohan!”

Looking mildly surprised, Sam replied, “Sure. She's one of the top golfers on the international tour.”

Before I could begin to thank him, Sam added, “And she's the best-looking woman in the bunch of 'em.” He broke into a leering grin.

Sam's reputation as a woman-chaser was well known. Behind his desk I could see a panoply of photographs of Sam with spectacularly beautiful women, sometimes two or even three of them hanging on him. Most of them were very scantily clad.

“She's young, beautiful, unattached,” Sam went on, his leer widening. “I intend to show her the wonders of lunar living.”

At that instant I began to hate Sam Gunn.

*   *   *

I THREW MYSELF
into building the golf course, while Sam spent most of his time arranging transportation and accommodations for the invited golfers. I've got to admit that a good many tourists did sign up to come to Hell for the tournament; Sam's judgment about its attraction was squarely on the mark.

Once I mapped out the course, the actual construction didn't take very long. I directed a team of human and robot workers who smoothed the greens areas and fairways (and painted them), removed a good deal of the rocks and pebbles that were strewn everywhere, rearranged some of the bigger boulders so they presented strategic problems for the golfers, and leveled off the tee boxes.

It turned out the greens were now too smooth, too fast. Tap a ball and it rolled right across the green and into the deep sand of the rough. So we had to spread a thin layer of sand over them. And spray-paint it green.

We painted the golf balls too, a brilliant Day-Glo orange, so they could be seen against the gray lunar sand of the tees and the rough.

Finally we planted the tall lighted poles at the holes, so the players could see where they should aim their shots.

Sam was buzzing about like a mosquito on amphetamines, meeting and greeting the invited golfers as they arrived on the Moon. They flew from Earth to Selene, of course, and stayed at the Paradise Hotel (all expenses paid by S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited) until the entire fifty professionals—plus their families and/or friends—had arrived. Then they were whisked to Hell Crater on a special passage of the elevated tram line that connected Selene to Hell.

I wondered how Sam could possibly afford all this largesse, but when I asked him about it he simply shrugged and said, “You've got to spend money to make money. Prime rule of business, Charlie.”

I made it my prime business to be at the tram depot when the pros arrived on their special train. Sam was there too, of course, eager as a tail-wagging puppy, leading a small army of guides, robot porters, and news reporters. He had even brought the band from Dante's Inferno to provide lively music.