You’ll break your elbow. I warn you though. If I get too cold, I’m going to have to crowd you on the lounge.”
“Safe enough,” he said, “with both of us in suits.”
“Ah, there speaks my brave lecher.… How do you feel?”
“All right, I guess. What an experience!”
“What an experience? You set a record for non-falls. Do you mind if I tell the folks back in town about this?”
“No. Always like to be appreciated.… You’re not going to expect me to do this again, are you?”
“Right now? Of course not. I wouldn’t myself. We’ll just rest awhile, make sure your heart action is back to normal, and then we’ll go back. If you’ll reach your legs in my direction, I’ll take your gliders off. Next time, I’ll show you how to handle the gliders yourself.”
“I’m not sure that there will be a next time.”
“Of course there’ll be. Didn’t you enjoy it?”
“A little. In between terror.”
“You’ll have less terror next time, and still less the time after, and eventually you’ll just experience the enjoyment and I’ll make a racer out of you.”
“No, you won’t. I’m too old.”
“Not on the Moon. You just look old.”
Denison could feel the ultimate quiet of the Moon soaking into him as he lay there. He was facing the Earth this time. Its steady presence in the sky had, more than anything else, given him the sensation of stability during his recent glide and he felt grateful to it.
He said, “Do you often come out here, Selene? I mean, by yourself, or just one or two others? You know, when it isn’t fiesta time?”
“Practically never. Unless there are people around, this is too much for me. That I’m doing it now, actually, surprises me.”
“Uh-huh,” said Denison, noncommittally.
“You’re not surprised?”
“Should I be? My feeling is that each person does what he does either because he wants to or he must and in either case that’s his business, not mine.”
“Thanks, Ben. I mean it; it’s good to hear. One of the nice things about you, Ben, is that for an Immie, you’re willing to let us be ourselves. We’re underground people, we Lunarites, cave people, corridor people. And what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing.”
“Not to hear the Earthies talk. And I’m a tourist guide and have to listen to them. There isn’t anything they say that I haven’t heard a million times, but what I hear most of all”—and she dropped into the clipped accents of the typical Earthie speaking Planetary Standard “—‘But, dear, however can all you people live in caves all the time? Doesn’t it give you a terrible closed-in feeling? Don’t you ever want to see blue sky and trees and ocean and feel wind and smell flowers—’
“Oh, I could go on and on, Ben. Then they say, ‘But I suppose you don’t know what blue sky and sea and trees are like so you don’t miss them.’ … As if we don’t receive Earth-television and as if we don’t have full access to Earth-literature, both optical and auditory—and olfactory sometimes, too.”
Denison was amused. He said, “What’s the official answer to remarks like that?”
“Nothing much. We just say, ‘We’re quite used to it, madam.’ Or ‘sir’ if it’s a man. Usually it’s a woman. The men are too interested in studying our blouses and wondering when we take them off, I suppose. You know what I’d like to tell the idiots?”
“Please tell me. As long as you have to keep the blouse on, it being inside the suit, at least get that off your chest.”
“Funny, funny word play!… I’d like to tell them, ‘Look, madam, why the hell should we be interested in your damned world? We don’t want to be hanging on the outside of any planet and waiting to fall off or get blown off. We don’t want raw air puffing at us and dirty water falling on us. We don’t want your damned germs and your smelly grass and your dull blue sky and your dull white clouds. We can see Earth in our own sky when we want to, and we don’t often want to. The Moon is our home and it’s what we make it; exactly what we make it. We own it and we build our own ecology, and we don’t need you here being sorry for us going our own way. Go back to your own world and let your gravity pull your breasts down to your knees.’ That’s what I’d say.”
Denison said, “All right. Whenever you get too close to saying