Looking Back:                                                              Home
                                                                                         by Al Grove
.
    As Christa sat back to watch the "Hyper-wave" broadcast, from Earth. of the new mini-drama "Luna" by C. F. Neall, she couldn't help reflecting on her heritage. Her mother had been among the first permanent settlers of Luna City, and Christa herself had been born in Luna City General. In all of her eighteen years she had never been off the moon.
    It was hard to believe that it was less then ninety years ago, that her great, great grand-mother, for whom she had been named, had died in the infamous in-flight explosion of "86". That had been in the early years of space exploration. "God!" she thought "They had still been using hydrogen/oxygen fuel."
   Oh, man had been to the Moon but only to gather information. Now Luna City was one of the great metropolises of the solar system, third in population to only Calcutta & Mexico City back on Earth.
   Christa realized that it had been brave people like her great, great grandmother and the crew of Challenger who had made Luna City possible. Others too had paid dearly. She recalled the Hasenkamp expedition that had been lost on Ganymede (One of the moons of Jupiter). She had gone to school that day with Michelle Hasenkamp. She knew she would never forget the look of anguish on Michelle's face when they had first heard of the loss of her father's expedition. Then she realized "No, not just in space, man has always lived with danger."
   She remembered seeing, on history tapes, how men had crossed vast oceans in small boats. (Vehicles that traveled over water, actually floated on it. she couldn't imagine that much water.) Traveled on foot through dense jungles, filled with wild animals or crossed huge continents covered with ice on sleds pulled by dogs.
   Men had died exploring the lands they found. They had been killed by other men, wild animals, even by the elements. She could fathom men killing other men. It still happened, not very often, but every once in awhile you would see a news flash on the hyper tube, where a man had killed another person. It mostly happened on the prison colonies out in the asteroid belt, but two or three years ago a man had killed another man right here on the moon. Sure, it was later proven at his trial that he had a recessive gene and instead of the colonies he had been altered genetically at L. C. G. 's school of advanced medicine, but that didn't change the fact it had happened, but wild animals and weather!
   Luna City was completely under the surface of the moon and everything was controlled. Why even back on Earth they had weather control and the only wild animals left were on environmental lands or in zoos.
   She thought about how exciting it must have been, to be in new lands with wild animals and uncontrolled weather. True, space exploration was exciting and after she got her degree from Luna City academy of space engineering and physics, she hoped to be accepted by Space Incorporated. She might even get a chance to work on mars or maybe even  Hasenkamp City on Ganymede, but wild animals, not in this solar system.
   Her mind wondered back to the accident. "When your opening new frontiers," She thought "there will always be danger but thanks to brave people, like the crew of the Challenger and others to numerous to mention, they would be less.
   There had been many benefits: Since men had moved into space, they had learned that they were one, not from China, Russia, America or even the Arab States, but from Earth. There hadn't been even a small war in over fifty years. There was just no reason for conflict. Poverty had been wiped out as had almost all disease and religions had finally realized that they all worshipped the same God, only in a different way.
   Her thoughts again wandered back to her namesake. She wondered what she had been like. Christa knew she had been a teacher. "The teacher in space." Chris knew what a teacher was (Teacher: A person who imparts knowledge to another.) How strange it must have been to learn from another person. It was almost romantic, but how long it must have taken. Why in just six, five hour "sleeps" at L. C. C. of Space, she had learned all the important information about basic rocketry. A sleeping pill, if you needed one and a subliminal suggestion tape, how can you learn anything while your awake?
   Her great, great grandmother had been a heroine, a whole country, No! All the people of Earth had mourned her death and the death of her fellow crewmembers, but none more then her students. On history tapes, Chris had seen a world in mourning: Sadness on the faces of children, shock and dismay on the faces of leaders and common men alike. She had seen tapes of the explosion and she knew that the astronauts never knew what had happened, but the human race would never forget. She felt sadness and pride.
   It would have been easy at that time to have given up the quest for space. (In fact there had been a fairly large cult saying that "God caused the accident to keep men away from Heaven." Even today there's a cult of followers of a man called Gabriel, who claims to be a decibel of the Lord, and also claims that man is damning himself by being in space and that all spacers were created by Satan himself and that God will come soon to end the blasphemy.) "but they hadn't quit." Christa thought "Thank God they hadn't quit."
   The hyper-tube flickered on. A view of Cape Canaveral, as it had been in the beginning, lit up the screen. The  announcer stated "Luna City started here, in a small spaceport, in the state of Florida, in the United States of America, on Earth.".