Free Apollo's Outcasts by Allen Steele Page A

finally managed to get it there, though, and squeezed the trigger the instant it was lined up. A soft rumble from behind us as the main engine fired, and for a second or two I felt myself being gently pushed back into my seat. I watched the left screen as the little red bar of the fuel gauge inched downward as the little blue bar of the delta-V indicator crept upward. When they met the hash-marks on the side of the screen, I released the trigger.
    "And there we go." Gordie reached past me to snap a couple of toggle switches on the dashboard. "Locked and set. Nice work, kiddo. Couldn't have done better myself."
    "Yeah, right." Although I was relieved that I hadn't put us on course for the Sun, I thought he was being patronizing.
    "Don't believe me? Look for yourself." He pointed toward thewindow above the dashboard, which he'd told me to ignore while I was watching the screens.
    I felt my breath catch in my throat. The last time I'd seen the Moon, it was on the right side of the window. Now it appeared to be almost directly before us. Not only that, but it was many times larger than I'd ever seen it before; it filled the window, sunlight casting dark shadows from its distinct mountains and craters. No longer a small orb in the sky, the Moon had become a vast world toward which our tiny craft was falling.
    "You're almost home," Gordie murmured.
    Despite the amazing beauty of what I saw, I looked away from the window. "That's not my home. I've never been there before."
    "You were born there, weren't you?"
    "Yeah, but..."
    "Then you're a loony, true blue."
    "Sorry, but you're wrong. I grew up in Maryland, not..." I nodded toward the window. "I know nothing about the Moon other than that's where I was born."
    Gordie was quiet for a few moments. Thinking that he wanted his seat again, I unbuckled the harness and carefully pushed myself out of it. He took my place without a word, but as I was about to leave the cockpit he looked back at me. "How did that happen, anyway? I mean, being born on the Moon but winding up on Earth."
    I'd been asked that question so many times that I'd come up with a pat reply: just worked out that way, I guess . But his interest seemed to be genuine, and considering what he'd done to help me escape the feds, I figured that he deserved an explanation. I grabbed hold of a bulkhead rung and turned toward him again.
    "It's a long story..." I began.
    "We got plenty of time." He glanced over his shoulder to make sure the others were still asleep, then lowered his voice. "Really. I'd like to hear it."
    I hesitated, then went on. "I was born on the Moon, yeah, butit was kind of an accident. I was conceived on Earth, but my mother didn't know she was pregnant until she and Dad went to the Moon."
    "Really?" Gordie raised an eyebrow. "She...um, forgive me for saying this, but she must not have been paying a lot of attention."
    "Yeah, well...from what I've been told, I guess she was sort of an egghead, kind of like Dad. She'd already had Melissa and Jan, but they were still very little when Dad asked her to come along with him for a three-month stay on the Moon. Apollo was under construction then, and the ISC wanted him up there to help work out the details of the mining operations. And since Mom was a botanist, she could advise them on what sort of crops they'd need to grow for food and air. So they had friends look after my sisters while they went to the Moon, but it wasn't until they'd been there a few weeks that she discovered that she was pregnant."
    "And she didn't go home?"
    I shook my head. "By then she was well into her first trimester, and the doctors were unsure of how one-sixth gravity would affect my development. There'd been plenty of kids born on the Moon, but they'd never had a case like this before, where a woman is made pregnant on Earth but gives birth up there. The sonograms showed a normal fetus, but no one really knew how I'd turn out. So Mom and Dad talked it over, and in the end they decided