“And the Mormons,” Kaitlin said. She knew enough history to hold her own against Rob, usually, and she enjoyed a good debate. “Don’t forget the Mormons.”
“Finicky details,” he said, with a dismissive flutter of his hand. “In the grand scheme of things, it was the soldiers who built those outposts, then brought their wives along and started the towns. The settlers moved in to feed the Army. The railroads came through and connected the new towns. The soldiers retired and took up farming cheap land in the area. And that’s what’s going to happen in space.”
“I’m not sure there’ll ever be ‘cheap land’ in space.”
“C’mon, Kate. You see what I mean.”
“Sure. And you might have a point….”
“Might have?”
“What was our biggest problem on the Moon?”
He gave her a weary smile. “You mean, besides the Army?” She nodded, and he shrugged. “Logistics, I guess. Especially water and air.”
“Right. We had working parties at the Lunar north pole the whole time, digging up ice and hauling it back to Picard. Most places in the solar system, it won’t even be that easy.”
“Actually, it might. Y’know, probably the only place in the whole solar system that doesn’t have readily available water somewhere close by is Venus.”
“Mercury?”
“There’s polar ice there, too.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” she said, remembering an article she’d read on the subject.
“And wherever we can find ice, we can make oxygen, drinking water, and rocket fuel. And what I picture, see, is the Army having to set up outposts, like those frontier forts, to guard the water holes.”
“By ‘Army,’ I’m assuming you really mean ‘Marines.’”
He laughed and lifted his cup of o-sake, as if in a toast. “Semper fi, do or die!” he cried. “The Marines will go in first to stake out the beachhead, just like always. As soon as it’s safe, the doggies move in and claim the credit!”
“Okay, okay, I’ll go along with all that. Still, you’ve gotta admit that if it hadn’t been for all the alien stuff we’ve found out there, the space program would be dead on arrival, right now.”
He shrugged. “It still might be, too, if the ET tech doesn’t deliver something pretty spectacular.”
“Like what?”
“Hell, I don’t know. A cure for global warming?”
“That’s a good one.”
“Has to be something more than these crazy new religions. Maybe a new kind of space drive, or a new power source. Anyway, I think we’re going to keep looking now, now that we have a presence out there.”
“So do I,” she told him.
And then she told him her lifelong dream, about how she was going to be among the first to go to the stars….
After dinner, Rob drove them down out of the mountains to Gaviota State Park. As with every other beach in the world, the steady rise of sea levels was slowly devouring the sandy shelf, and the increase in violent storms and El Niño years frequently scoured the surviving sand away to bare rock.
But storms also returned the sand, sometimes, and current beach conditions were posted as fair to good. If the shelf, even at low tide, wasn’t as broad as it had been fifty, or even twenty years ago, it still offered a glimpse of what the wild and spray-drenched interface between land and sea had once been like.
The Moon was well up in the southeast, just past full and gleaming silver in a cloudless sky, when Kaitlin and Rob left his car at the lot and started down the long flight of steps leading to the beach below. Waves crashed and hissed, each incoming roller shattering the dancing pillar of reflected moonlight in the water up the beach.
By day, the park, like all of the state beaches, tended to be jammed with refugees from the city enjoying a spray-laden taste of clothing-optional nature. After sunset, though, the crowds had thinned to a scattering of couples and small family groups, gathered around fires or discreetly making out on blankets scattered among dunes and rocks. The stars were as brilliant as they ever got this close to Los Angeles, which even this far up the coast flooded most of the eastern horizon with warm light.
“So, what’ve you heard about Operation Swift Victory?” Kaitlin asked Rob. They’d talked a little about it during the drive. Lately, Kaitlin had been thinking a lot about the rumored upcoming assault but hadn’t talked to anyone who knew any more about it than she did. Security was extraordinarily tight.
Stopping suddenly, she slipped her shoes off and let her bare feet sink into wet sand. Rob crouched and untied his shoes, pulled off his socks, and rolled up the cuffs of his jeans. He’d brought a towel along, which he kept slung over his shoulder. The air was still hot after a day that had hit thirty degrees, but the sea breeze was refreshingly cool, almost chilly. As always, weather this warm in April made Kaitlin wonder how bad the summer was going to be. Each year, somehow, seemed a bit hotter, a bit stormier, than the last.