how we lost the moon,
a true story by frank w. allen
PAUL J. McAULEY
 
 
Born in Stroud, England, in 1955, Paul J. McAuley now makes his home in London. 
A professional biologist for many years, he sold his first story in 1984, and 
has gone on to he a frequent contributor to Interzone, as well as to markets 
such as Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimovs Science 
Fiction, When the Musics Over, and elsewhere.
 
McAuley has a foot in several different camps of science fiction writing, being 
considered one of the best of the new breed of British writers (although a few 
Australian writers could be fit in under this heading as well) who are producing 
that brand of rigorous hard science fiction with updated modern and stylistic 
sensibilities that is sometimes referred to as radical hard science fiction, 
in addition to being one of the major young writers who are producing that 
revamped and retooled widescreen Space Opera that has sometimes been called the 
New Baroque Space Opera. But, something of a literary millipede, McAuley refuses 
to be limited to a mere two camps in which to put his feet, and also writes 
Dystopian sociological speculations about the very near future, some elegant and 
literate Alternate History, and even some unabashed fantasy and supernatural 
horror stories, all with equal fluency and skill. His first novel, Four Hundred 
Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Award. His other books include the novels 
Of the Fall, Eternal Light, and Pasquales Angel; two collections of his short 
work, The King of the Hill and Other Stories and The Invisible Country; and an 
original anthology co-edited with Kim Newman, In Dreams. His acclaimed novel 
Fairyland won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award in 
1996. His most recent books are Child of the River and Ancients of Days, the 
first two volumes of a major new trilogy of ambitious scope and scale, 
Confluence, set ten million years in the future. The third book in the trilogy, 
Shrine of Stars, is due out soon. Currently he is working on a new novel, The 
Secret of Life. His stories have appeared in our Fifth, Ninth, Thirteenth, 
Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Annual Collections. His web site is at 
http://www.omegacom.demon.co.uk.
 
On the busy, bustling, colonized future Moon, McAuley reminds us that although 
everyone makes mistakes, some mistakes have far greater consequences than 
others...
 
* * * *
 
 
      I
 probably think that you know everything about it. After all, here we are, 
barely into the second quarter of the first century of the Third Millennium, and 
its being touted as the biggest event in the history of humanity. Yeah, right. 
But tossing aside such impossibly grandiose claims, it was and still is a hell 
of a story. Its generated millions of bytes of Web journalism (two years after, 
there are still more than two hundred official Web sites, not to mention the 
tens of thousands of unofficial newsgroups devoted to proving that it was really 
caused by God, or aliens, or St. Elvis), tens of thousands of hours of TV and a 
hundred schlocky movies (and I do include James Camerons seven-hour 
blockbuster), thousands of scientific papers and dozens of thick technical 
reports, including the ten-million-page congressional report, and the 
ghostwritten biographies of scientists Who Should Have Known Better.
 
Now you might think that Im sending out my version because I was either 
misrepresented or completely ignored in all the above. Not at all. Ill be the 
first to admit that my part in the whole thing was pretty insignificant, but 
nevertheless I was there, right at the beginning. So consider this shareware 
text a footnote or even a tall tale, and if you like it, do feel free to pass it 
on, but dont change the text or drop the byline, if you please.
 
* * * *
 
It began in the middle of a routine calibration run in the Exawatt Fusion 
facility. All the alarms went off and the AI in charge shut everything down, but 
there was no obvious problem. The robots could find no evidence of physical 
damage, yet the integrity and radiation alarms kept ringing, and analysis of 
experimental data showed that there had been a tremendous fluctuation in energy 
levels just after the fusion pulse. So the scientists sent the two of us, Mike 
Doherty and me, over the horizon to eyeball the place.
 
Youve probably seen a zillion pictures. It was a low, square concrete block 
half-buried in the smooth floor of Mendeleev Crater on the Moons far side, 
surrounded by bulldozed roadways and cable trenches, the two nuclear reactors 
which powered it just at the level horizon to the south. At peak, the Exawatt 
used a thousand million times more power than the entire U.S. electrical grid to 
fire up, for less than a millisecond, six pulsed lasers focused on a target 
barely ten micrometers across, producing conditions which simulated those in 
the first picoseconds of the Big Bang, before symmetry was broken. Like the 
atom bomb a century before, it pushed the envelopes of engineering and physics. 
The scientists responsible for firing off that first thermonuclear device 
believed that there was a slight but definite chance that it would set fire to 
the Earths atmosphere; the scientists running the Exawatt thought that there 
was a possibility that it might burst its containment and vaporize several 
hundred square kilometers around it. That was why they had built it on the 
Moons far side, inside a deep crater. Thats why it was run by robots, with the 
actual labs in a bunker buried over the horizon.
 
Thats why, when it went wrong, they sent in a couple of GLPs to take a look.
 
We went in an open rover, straight down the service road. We were wearing bright 
orange radiation-proof shrouds over our Moon suits, and camera rigs on our 
shoulders so that the scientists could see what we saw. The plant looked intact, 
burning salt-white in the glare of a lunar afternoon, throwing a long black 
shadow toward us. The red-and-green perimeter lights were on; the cooling sink, 
a borehole three kilometers deep, wasnt venting. I drove the rover all the way 
around it, and then we went in.
 
The plant was essentially one big hall filled with the laser-pumping assemblies, 
huge frames of parallel color-coded pipes each as big as one of those old Saturn 
rockets and threaded through with bundles of heavy cables and trackways for the 
robots which serviced them. We crept along the tiled floor in their shadows like 
a pair of orange mice, directing our camera rigs here and there at the request 
of the scientists. The emergency lights were, still strobing, and I asked 
someone to switch them off, which they did after only five minutes discussion 
about whether it was a good idea to disturb anything.
 
The six laser-focusing pipes, two meters in diameter, converged on the bus-sized 
experimental chamber. Containment was a big problem; that chamber was crammed 
with powerful magnetic tori which generated the fields in which the target, a 
pellet of ultra-compressed metallic hydrogen, was heated by chirped pulse 
amplification to ten billion degrees Centigrade. It was surrounded by catwalks 
and hidden by the flared ends of the focusing pipes, the capillary grid of the 
liquid sodium cooling system, and a hundred different kinds of monitor. We 
checked the system diagnostics of the monitors, which told us only that several 
detectors on the underside had ceased to function, and then, harangued by 
scientists, crawled all around the chamber as best we could, sweating heavily in 
our suits and chafing our elbows and knees.
 
Mike found a clue to what had happened when he managed to wriggle into the crawl 
space beneath the chamber, quite a feat in a pressurized suit. He had taken off 
his camera rig to do it, and it took quite a bit of prompting before he started 
to describe what he saw.
 
Theres a severed cable here, and something has punched a hole in the box above 
it. Let me shift aroundOkay, I can see a hole in the floor, too. About two 
centimeters across. Im poking my screwdriver into it. Well, it must go all the 
way through the tiles, I cant see how deep. Hey, Frank, get me some of that 
wire, will you?
 
There was a spool of copper cable nearby. I cut off a length and passed it in.
 
You two get on out of there now, one of the scientists advised.
 
This wont take but a minute, Mike said, and started humming tunelessly, which 
meant that he was thinking hard about something.
 
I asked, because I knew he wouldnt say anything otherwise, What is it?
 
Looks like someone took a shot at this old thing, Mike said. Shit. How deep 
does the foundation go?
 
The concrete was poured to three meters, someone said over the radio link, and 
the scientist whod spoken before said, It really isnt a good idea to mess 
around there, fellows.
 
It goes all the way through, Mike said. I wiggled the wire around and it came 
back up with dust on the end.
 
This is Ridpath, someone else said. Ridpath, you may remember, was the chief 
of the science team. Although he wasnt exactly responsible for what happened, 
he made millions from selling the rights to his story, and then hanged himself 
six months after it was all over. He said, You boys get on out of there. Well 
take it from here.
 
Five rolligons passed us on our way back, big fat pressurized vehicles making 
speed. You put a hair up someones ass, I told Mike, whod been real quiet 
after he crawled out from beneath the chamber.
 
I think something escaped, he said.
 
Maybe some of the laser energy was deflected.
 
There werent any traces of melting, Mike said, with a preoccupied air. And 
just a bit of all that energy would make a hell of a mess, not leave a neat 
little hole. Hmm. Kind of an interesting problem.
 
But he didnt say any more about it until a week later, about an hour before the 
president went on the air to explain what had happened.
 
* * * *
 
The Moon was a good place to be working then. It was more-or-less run by 
scientists, the way Antarctica had been before the drillers and miners got to 
it. There were about two thousand people living there at any one time, either 
working on projects like the Exawatt or the Big Array or the ongoing resource 
mapping surveys, or doing their own little thing. Mike and I were both part of 
the General Labor Pool, ready to help anyone. Wed earned our chops doing 
Ph.D.s, but we didnt have the drive or desire to work our way up the ladder of 
promotion. We didnt want responsibility, didnt want to be burdened with 
administration and hustling for funds, which was the lot of career researchers. 
We liked to get our hands dirty. Mike has a double Ph.D. in pure physics and 
cybernetics and is a whiz at electronics; Im a run-of-the-mill geologist who 
is also a fair pilot. We made a pretty good team back then and generally worked 
together whenever we could, and wed worked just about every place on the Moon.
 
When the president made the announcement, wed moved on from the Exawatt and 
were taking a few days R&R. Id found out about a gig supervising the 
construction of a railway from the South Pole to the permanent base at Clavius, 
but Mike wouldnt sign up and wouldnt say why, except that it was to do with 
what had happened at the Exawatt.
 
Wed been exposed to a small amount of radiation when wed gone into the 
plantMike a little more than me  and had spent a day being checked out before 
getting back on the job. The scientists were all over the plant by then. The 
reaction chamber had been dismantled by robots, and we brought in all kinds of 
monitoring equipment. Not only radiation counters, but a gravity measuring 
device and a neutrino detector. We helped bore a shaft five hundred meters deep 
parallel to the hole punched through the floor, and probes and motion sensors 
and cameras were lowered into it.
 
Mike claimed to have worked out what had happened as soon as he stuck the wire 
in the hole through the foundation, but he wouldnt tell me. You should be able 
to guess from what they were trying to measure, he said, the one time I asked, 
and smiled when I called him a son of a bitch. Hes very smart, but sort of 
fucked up in the head, antisocial, careless of his appearance and untidy as 
hell, and proud that he has four of the five symptoms of Aspergers Syndrome. 
But he was my partner, and I trusted him; when he said it wasnt a good idea to 
take up a new contract, I nagged him for a straight hour to explain why, and 
went along with him even though he wouldnt. He was spending all his spare time 
making calculations on his slate, and was still working on them at the South 
Pole facility.
 
I raised the subject again when news of the special presidential announcement 
broke. Youd better tell me what you think happened, I told Mike, because 
Ill hear the truth in less than an hour, and after that I wont believe you.
 
We were in an arbor in the dome of the South Pole facility. Real plants, cycads 
and banana plants and ferns, growing in real dirt around us, sunlight pouring in 
at a low angle through the diamond panes high above. The dome capped a small 
crater some three hundred meters across, on a high ridge near the edge of the 
South Pole-Aitken Basin and in permanent sunlight, the sun circling around the 
horizon once every twenty-eight days. It was hot and humid, and the people 
splashing in the lake below our arbor were making a lot of noise. The lake and 
its scattering of atolls took up most of the craters floor, with arbors and 
cafes and cabins on the bench terrace around it. The water was billion-year-old 
comet water, mined from the regolith in permanently shadowed craters. A rail gun 
used to lob shaped loads of ice to supply the Clavius base in the early days, 
but Clavius had grown, and its administration was uncomfortable with the idea of 
being bombarded with ice meteors, which was why they wanted to build a railway. 
In the low gravity, the waves out on the lake were five or six meters high, and 
big droplets flew a long way, changing shape like amoebas, before falling back. 
People were body surfing the waves; a game of water polo had been going on for 
several days in one of the bays.
 
Id just been playing for a few hours, and I was in a good mood, which was why I 
didnt strangle Mike when, after I asked him to tell me what he knew, he flashed 
his goofy smile at me and went back to scratching figures on his slate. Instead, 
I snatched the slate from his hands and held it over the edge of the arbor and 
said, You tell me right now, or the slate gets it.
 
Mike scratched the swirl of black hair on his bare chest and said, You know you 
wont do it.
 
I made to skim it through the air and said, How many times do you think it 
would bounce before it sank?
 
I thought Id give you a chance to work it out. And it isnt as if theres 
anything we can do. Didnt you enjoy the rest?
 
Whats this got to do with not taking up that contract?
 
Theres no point building anything anymore. You still havent guessed, have 
you?
 
I tossed the slate to him. Maybe I should pick you up and throw you in the 
lake.
 
I meant it, and Im a lot bigger than him.
 
Its a black hole, he said.
 
A black hole.
 
Sure. My guess is that the experiment caused a runaway quantum fluctuation that 
created a black hole. It had to be bigger than the Planck size, and most 
probably was a bit bigger than a hydrogen atom, because it obviously has been 
taking up other atoms easily enough. Say around ten to the power twenty-three 
kilograms. The mass of a big mountain, like Everest. The magnetic containment 
fields couldnt hold it, of course, and it dropped straight out of the reaction 
chamber and went through the plants floor.
 
I said, The hole we saw was a lot bigger than the width of a hydrogen atom.
 
Sure. The black hole disrupted stuff by tidal force over a far greater distance 
than its Swartzschild radius, and sucked some of it right in. Thats why there 
was no trace of melting, even though it was pretty hot, and spitting out X-rays 
and probably accelerated protons, too cosmic rays.
 
I didnt believe him, of course, but it was an interesting intellectual 
exercise. I said, So where did the mass come from? Not from the combustion 
chamber fuel.
 
Of course not. It was a quantum fluctuation, just like the Universe, which also 
came out of nothing. And the Universe weighs a lot more than ten to the power 
twenty-three kilograms. Something like, lets see  
 
Okay, I said quickly, before Mike lost himself in esoteric calculations. But 
where is it now?
 
Well, it went all the way through, Mike said.
 
Through the Moon? Then it came out, lets see I tried to visualize the Moons 
globe somewhere in Mare Fecunditas.
 
Not exactly. It accelerated in free fall toward the core, went past, and 
started to fall back again. Its sweeping back and forth, gaining mass and 
losing amplitude with each pass. Thats what the president is going to tell 
everyone.
 
I thought about it. Something just bigger than an atom but massing as much as a 
mountain, plunging through the twenty-five-kilometer-thick outer layer of 
gardened regolith, smashing a centimeter-wide tunnel through the basalt crust 
and the mantle, passing through the tiny iron core, gathering mass and slowing, 
so that it did not quite emerge at the far side before falling back.
 
You were lucky it didnt come right back at you, I said.
 
The amplitude diminishes with each pass. Eventually itll settle at the Moons 
gravitational center. And thats why I didnt want to sign the contract. After 
the president tells everyone what Ive just told you, all the construction 
contracts will be put on hold. What you should do is make sure were first on 
the list for evacuation work.
 
Evacuation?
 
Theres no way to capture the black hole. The Moon, Frank, is fucked. But well 
get plenty of work before its over.
 
He was half right, because the next day, after the president had admitted that 
an experiment had somehow dropped a black hole inside the Moon, a serious 
problem that would require an international team to monitor, we were both issued 
with summonses to appear at the hastily set up congressional inquiry.
 
* * * *
 
It was a bunch of bullshit, of course. We went down to Washington, D.C, and 
spent a week locked up in the Watergate hotel watching bad cable movies and 
endless talk shows, with NASA lawyers showing up every now and then to rehearse 
our Q&As, and in the end we had no more than half an hour of easy questions 
before the committee let us go. Our lawyers shook our hands on the steps of the 
Congress building, in front of a bored video crew, and we went back to Canaveral 
and then to the Moon. Why not? By then Mike had convinced me about what was 
going to happen. There would be plenty of work for us.
 
We signed up as part of a roving seismology team, placing remote stations at 
various points around the Moons equator. The Exawatt plant had been dismantled 
and a monitoring station built on its site to try and track the period of the 
black hole, which someone had labeled Mendeleev X-1. Mike was as happy as I had 
ever seen him; he was getting some of the raw data and doing his own 
calculations on the black holes accretion rate and orbital path within the 
Moon. He stayed up long after our workday was over, hunched over his slate in 
the driving chair of our rolligon, with sunlight pouring in through the bubble 
canopy while I tried to sleep in the hammock stretched across the cabin, my skin 
itching with the Moon dust which got everywhere, and our Moon suits propped in 
back like two silent witnesses to our squabbling. His latest best estimate was 
that the Moon had between two hundred and five thousand days.
 
But things will start to get exciting before then.
 
Excitement is something I can do without. What do you mean?
 
Oh, itll be a lot of fun.
 
Youre doing it again, you son of a bitch.
 
Youre the geologist, Frank, Mike said. Its easy enough to work out. Its 
just
 
Basic physics. Yeah. Well, you tell me if its going to put us in danger. 
Okay?
 
Oh, it wont. Not yet, anyhow.
 
We were already picking up regular moonquakes on the seismometer network. With a 
big point mass swinging back and forth through it, the Moons solid iron core 
was ringing like a bell. There were some odd subsidiary traces, too, smooshy 
echoes as if spaces were opening in the mantle hard to believe, because 
pressure should have annealed any voids. I was pretty sure that Mike had a 
theory about these anomalies, too, but I kept quiet. After all, I was the 
geologist. I should have been able to work it out.
 
Meanwhile, we toured west across the Mare Insularium, with its lava floods 
overlaid by ejecta from Copernicus, and on across the Oceanus Procellarum, 
dropping seismometers every two hundred kilometers. We made good time, speeding 
across rolling, lightly cratered landscape, detouring only for the largest 
wrinkle ridges, driving through the long day and the Earth-lit night into 
brilliant dawn, the sun slowly moving across the sky toward noon once more. The 
Moon had its own harsh yet serene beauty, shaped mainly by vulcanism and 
impacts. Without weather, erosion took place on geological timescales, but 
because almost every feature was more than three billion years old, gravity and 
ceaseless micrometeorite bombardment had smoothed or leveled every hill or 
crater ridge. With the sun at the right angle, it was like riding across an 
infinite plain gentled by a deep blanket of snow. We rested up twice at unmanned 
shelters, and had a two-day layover at a roving Swedish selenology station which 
had squatted down on the mare like a collection of tin cans. A week later, just 
after we had picked up fresh supplies from a rocket lofted from Clavius, we felt 
our first moonquake.
 
It was as if the rolligon had dropped over a curb, but there was no curb. I was 
in the driving chair; Mike was asleep in the hammock. I told the AI to stop, and 
looked out through the canopy at the 180-degree panorama. The horizon was drawn 
closely all around. An ancient crater eroded by three billion years of 
micrometeorite bombardment dished it to the north and a few pockmarked boulders 
were sprinkled here and there, including a fractured block as big as a house. 
Something skittered in the corner of my eye  a little rock rolling down the 
gentle five degree slope we were climbing, plowing a meandering track in the 
dust. It ran out quite a way. The rolligon swayed gently, from side to side. I 
found I was gripping the padded arms of the chair so tightly my knuckles had 
turned white. Behind me, Mike stirred in the hammock and sleepily asked what was 
up; at the same moment, I saw the gas plume.
 
It was very faint, visible only because the dust it lofted caught the sunlight. 
Gas plumes were not uncommon on the Moon, caused by pockets of radon and other 
products of fission decay of unstable isotopes overpressuring the crevices where 
they collected. Earth-based astronomers sometimes glimpsed them when they 
temporarily obscured surface features while dissipating into vacuum. This, 
though, was different, more like a heat-driven geyser, venting steadily from a 
source below the horizon.
 
I told the AI to drive toward it. Mike leaned beside me, scratching himself 
through his suit of thermal underwear. He smelled strongly of old sweat; we 
hadnt bathed properly since the interlude with the Swedes. I had a sudden 
insight and said, How hot is the black hole?
 
Oh, the smaller the black hole, the more fiercely it radiates. Its a simple 
inverse relationship. It was pretty hot to begin with, but its been getting 
cooler as it accretes mass. Hmm.
 
Is it still hot enough to melt rock?
 
Mikes eyes refocused. You know, I think it must have been much bigger than I 
first thought. Anyway, anything that gets close enough to it to melt is already 
falling toward the event horizon. Thats why there was no trace of melting or 
burning when it dropped out of the reaction chamber. But theres also the heat 
generated by friction as stuff pours toward its gravity well.
 
Then its remelting the interior. Those anomalies in the seismology signals are 
melt caverns full of lava.
 
Mike said thoughtfully, Im sure well start picking up a weak magnetic field 
soon, when the iron core liquifies and starts circulating. Of course, the end 
will be pretty close by then. Wow. That thing out there is really big.
 
The rolligon was climbing a long gentle slope toward the top of a curved ridge 
more than a kilometer high, the remnants of the rim of a crater which had been 
mostly buried by the fluid lava flow which had formed the Oceanus Procellarum. I 
told the AI to stop when I spotted the source of the plume. It was a huge 
fresh-looking crevice that ran out from a volcanic dome; gas was jetting out of 
the slumped side of the dome like steam from a boiling kettle. Dust fell 
straight down in sheets kilometers long. Already, an appreciable ray of brighter 
material was forming on the regolith beneath the plume.
 
We should get closer, Mike said. He was rocking back and forth in his chair 
like a delighted child.
 
I dont think so. There will be plenty of rocks lofted along with the gas and 
dust.
 
We transmitted some pictures, then suited up and went outside to set up a 
seismology package. The sun was in the east, painting long shadows on the 
ground, which shook, ever so gently, under my boots. With no atmosphere to 
scatter the light, shadows were razor sharp, and color changed as I moved about. 
The dusty regolith was deep brown in my shadow, but a bright blinding white when 
I looked toward the sun, turning ashy gray to either side. The gas plume 
glittered and flashed against the black sky. I told Mike that it was probably 
from a source deep in the megaregolith; pressure increased in gas pockets with 
depth. A quake, probably at the interface between the megaregolith and the 
rigid crust, must have opened a path to the surface.
 
Therell be a lot more of these, Mike said.
 
Itll blow itself out soon enough.
 
But it was still venting strongly when we had finished our work, and we drove a 
long way north to skirt around it, with Mike scratching away on his slate, 
factoring this new evidence into his calculations.
 
* * * *
 
We were out for another two weeks, ending our run in lunar night at the Big 
Array Station at Korolev. It was one of the biggest craters on the far side, 
with slumped terraced walls and hummocky rim deposits like ranges of low hills. 
Its floor was spattered with newer craters, including a dark-floored 
lava-flooded crater on its southern edge which was now the focus of a series of 
quakes of steadily increasing amplitude. Korolev Station, up on the rim, was 
being evacuated; the radio telescopes of the Big Array, scattered across the far 
side in a regular pattern, were to be kept running by remote link. Most of the 
personnel had already departed by shuttle, and although there were still large 
amounts of equipment to be taken out, the railway which linked Korolev with 
Clavius had been cut by a rock slide. After a couple of spooky days rest in the 
almost deserted yet fully functional station, Mike and I went out with a couple 
of other GLPs to supervise the robots which were clearing the slide and 
re-laying track.
 
It was a nice ride: the pressurized railcar had a big observational bubble, and 
I spent a lot of time up there, watching the heavily cratered highland plains 
flow past at two hundred kilometers an hour. The Orientale Basin dominated the 
west side of the Moon: a fissured basin of fractured blocks partly flooded with 
impact melt lava and ringed round with three immense scarps and an inner bench 
like ripples frozen ,in rock. The engineers had cut the railway through the 
rings of the Rook and Cordillera Mountains; the landslide had blocked the track 
where it passed close to one of the tall knobs of the Montes Rook Formation, a 
ten-kilometer-high piece of ejecta which had smashed down onto the surrounding 
plain the impact really was very big.
 
A slide had run out from one of its steeply graded faces, covering more than a 
kilometer of track, and we were more than a week out there, helping the robots 
fix everything up. When we finally arrived at the station in Clavius, it was a 
day ahead of the Mendeleev eruption and the beginning of the evacuation of the 
Moon.
 
* * * *
 
The whole floor of the Mendeleev Crater had fractured into blocks in the biggest 
quake ever recorded on the Moon, and lava had flooded up through dykes emplaced 
between the blocks. Lava vented from dykes beyond the crater rim, too, and 
flowed a long way, forming a new mare. Other vents appeared, setting off 
secondary quakes and long rock slides. The Moon shivered and shook uneasily, as 
if awakening from a long sleep.
 
Small teams were sent out to collect the old Rangers, Lunas, Surveyors, 
Lunokhods, and descent stages of Apollo LEMs from the first wave of Moon 
exploration. Mike and I went out for a last time, to Mare Tranquillitatis, to 
the site of the first manned lunar landing.
 
When a permanent scientific presence had first been established on the Moon, 
there was considerable debate about what to do with the sites of the Apollo 
landings and the various old robot probes and other debris scattered across the 
surface. There had been a serious proposal to dome the Apollo 11 site to protect 
it from damage by micrometeorites and to stop people from swiping souvenirs, but 
even without protection it would last for millions of years, and everyone on the 
Moon was tagged with a continuously monitored global positioning sensor so no 
one could go anywhere without it being logged, and in the end the site had been 
left open.
 
We arrived a few hours after dawn. It was a lonely place, not much visited 
despite its historic importance. A big squat carrier rocket had gone ahead, 
landing two kilometers to the north, and the robots were already waiting. There 
were four of us: a historian from the Museum of Air and Space in Washington, a 
photographer, and Mike and me. The site was ringed around with laser sensors. 
As we loped through the perimeter, an automatic beacon on the common band warned 
us that we were trespassing on a U.N. heritage site and started to recite the 
relevant penalties until the historian found it and turned it off. The angular 
platform of the lunar modules descent stage had been scorched by the rocket of 
the ascent stage; the gold foil which had wrapped it was torn and tattered, 
white paint beneath turned tan by exposure to the suns raw ultraviolet. One of 
its spidery legs had collapsed after a recent quake focused near new volcanic 
cones to the southeast. We lifted everything, working inward toward the ascent 
stage: the Passive Seismometer and the Laser Ranging Retroreflector; the flag, 
its ordinary fabric, stiffened by wires, faded and fragile; an assortment of 
discarded geology tools; human waste and food containers and wipes and other 
litter in crumbling jettison bags; the plaque with a message from a long-dead 
president. Before the descent stage was lifted away, a robot sawed away a chunk 
of dirt beside its ladder, the spot where the first human footprint had been 
made on the Moon. There was some dispute about which print was actually the 
first, so two square meters were carefully lifted. And at last the descent stage 
was carried off to the cargo rocket, and there was only a litter of cleated 
footprints left, our own overlaying Armstrongs and Aldrins.
 
It was time to go.
 
* * * *
 
As the eruptions grew more frequent, even the skeleton crews of the various 
stations were evacuated, leaving a host of robot surveyors in close orbit or 
crawling about the troubled surface to monitor the unfolding disaster. Mike and 
I went on one of the last shuttles, everyone crowding to the ports as it made a 
single low orbital pass before lighting out for Earth.
 
It was six months after the Mendeleev X-1 incident. The heat generated by the 
black holes accretion process and tidal forces had remelted the iron core; 
pockets of molten basalt in the mantle had swollen and conjoined. A vast rift 
opened in the Oceanus Procellarum, splitting the nearside down its northwestern 
quadrant and raising new scarps as high and jagged as those in an old Chesley 
Bonestell painting. The Orientale Basin flooded with lava and the fractured 
blocks of the Maunder formation sank like foundering ships as new lava flows 
began to well up. Volcanic activity was less on the far side, where the crust 
was thicker, but the Mare Ingenii collapsed and reflooded, forming a vast new 
basin which swallowed the Jules Verne and Gagarin Craters.
 
It took two more months.
 
As the end neared, the Moons surface split into short-lived plates afloat on a 
wholly molten mantle, with lava-filled rifts opening and scabbing over and 
reopening along their edges. There were frantic attempts to insure that the 
population of the Earths southern hemisphere would all have some kind of 
shelter, for the Moon would be in the sky above the Pacific in its final hour. 
Those unlucky or stubborn enough to remain outside saw the Moon rise for the 
last time, half-full, the dark part of her disk riven with glowing cracks which 
spread as the black hole sucked in exponentially increasing amounts of matter. 
And then there was a terrific flare of light, brighter than a thousand suns. 
Those witnesses who had not been blinded saw that the Moon was gone, leaving 
expanding shells of luminous gas around a fading image trapped at the edge of 
the black holes event horizon, and a short-lived accretion disk as ejected 
material spiraled back into the black hole, which, although it massed the same 
as the Moon it had devoured, had an event horizon circumference of less than a 
millimeter.
 
The radiation pulse was mostly absorbed by the Earths atmosphere; the orbit of 
the space station had been altered so that it was in opposition when the Moon 
vanished. I was aboard it at the time, and spent the next six months helping 
repair satellites whose circuits had been fried.
 
There are still tides, of course, for the same amount of mass still orbits the 
Earth. Marine organisms which synchronized their reproduction by the Moons 
phases, such as horseshoe crabs, corals, and palolo worms, were in danger of 
extinction, but a cooperative mission by NASA and the Russian and European space 
agencies lofted a space mirror which reflects the same amount of light as the 
Moon, and even goes through the same phases. Therell be a big problem in 5 X 
1043 years, when by loss of mass through Hawking radiation the black hole 
finally becomes small enough to begin its runaway evaporation. But long before 
then the sun will have evolved into a white dwarf and guttered out; even its 
very protons will have decayed. The black hole will be the last remnant of the 
solar system in a cooling and vastly expanded universe.
 
There are various proposals to make use of the black hole as the ultimate 
garbage disposal device (I want to be well away from the solar system when they 
try that), or as an interstellar signaling device, for if it can be made to bob 
in its orbit (perhaps by putting another black hole in orbit around it), it will 
produce sharply focused gravity waves of tremendous amplitude. Meanwhile, it 
will keep the physicists busy for a thousand years. Mike is working at one of 
the stations which orbit beyond its event horizon. I keep in touch with him by 
E-mail, but the correspondence is becoming more and more infrequent as he 
vanishes into his own personal event horizon.
 
As for me, Im heading out. The space program has realigned its goals, and it 
turns out that the black hole retained the Moons rotational energy, so it 
provides a useful slingshot for free acceleration. After all, there are plenty 
of other moons in the solar system, and most are far more interesting than the 
one we lost.
 
(For Stephen Baxter)
 
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