Free Earthbound by Joe Haldeman

nodded, thoughtful. “They could have just killed us.”
    “I’m sure they still have that option. You have to remember that this was all preplanned. The Others can’t beat the speed of light; it will be almost twenty-five years before they actually know of the fleet, and twenty-five more before they could come back and do something about it. So all of their actions—blowing up the Moon, turning off the free power—have been in place for a long time.”
    “Like booby traps, waiting for us to set them off.”
    “That’s right. And who’s to say they don’t have another one, waiting to blow us off the face of the earth if we misbehave?”
    “Or put everything back the way it was, if we don’t.”
    I laughed. “They’re not putting the Moon back together.”
    “You don’t know. Maybe they could.”
    I started to say something about increasing entropy, but let it go. Hell, maybe they could track down all the pieces and rebuild the Moon. And then turn it into green cheese.

7
     
    The landing at Novosibirsk was delayed for an hour while they waited for the afternoon sun to melt the ice off the runway. When we got off the plane finally, there was a small crowd waiting, dozens of people and seven Martians. It wasn’t too cold, about noon, bright sun in a deep blue sky. We hurried inside anyhow.
    Two of the Martians, the ones in blue, wanted to hustle Snowbird away and start working on her injury. She made them wait while she said good-bye and thanked us individually.
    “When I first saw you,” she said to me, “you were also injured, stranded on an alien planet. I hope I do as well as you.” She gestured at one of the blue ones. “We even have the same doctor.”
    The blue one nodded at me. “I fixed your ankle sixty-four years ago.”
    “Don’t do everything he says,” I said to Snowbird. “He’s pretty old.” She favored me with a thumping laugh and was gone.
    The Russians couldn’t let us go without eating. Namir answered their questions about what we knew about the rest of the world while they feasted us on thin pancakes rolled around sour cream and pungent caviar, washed down with icy vodka. The last such meal we would ever have, I assumed. When the power went back off, we would be stranded somewhere, presumably far from caviar.
    We got back on the plane, and Paul tried to raise Camp David. A signal was coming through, but it was unintelligible. We charted a course over the Arctic and took off, slithering a bit on the slush that was forming on the runway.
    While we flew south, Dustin took over a little study carrel in the rear of the plane and tried to find out what had happened to Fruit Farm, the Oregon commune where he’d grown up.
    It was still there physically, if it had survived the Martian abdication. Maybe it was better off than most places, being totally independent of the power and communications grid.
    More than a decade before the Martian free power (the year that Dustin’s family left the commune) they had declared total independence, and shut themselves off from the outside world. They had low-voltage solar power and two wind machines, and an environment that allowed year-round subsistence agriculture.
    Recent satellite photos showed a tall stockade enclosing about eighty acres of orderly plats around a village of about a hundred people. Outside the stockade were fruit orchards and fields of grain.
    One day a year, the vernal equinox, Fruit Farm was open to the public. They sold organic produce and gave tours of their utopian compound. At sundown, they closed the doors for another year. They did maintain an organic produce stand outside the stockade.
    It wasn’t a totally hermetic existence. Individuals and families were allowed to join the commune if they had useful skills, and there always was a waiting list. Dustin’s family had spent eight years there, and he looked forward to visiting. If the place still existed, after the past week’s troubles.
    The twelve passenger seats