The Menace from Earth
The Menace from Earth
My name is Holly Jones and I’m fifteen. I’m very intelligent but it doesn’t show, because I look like an underdone angel. Insipid.
I was born right here in Luna City, which seems to surprise Earthside types. Actually, I’m third generation; my grandparents pioneered in Site One, where the Memorial is. I live with my parents in Artemis Apartments, the new co-op in Pressure Five, eight hundred feet down near City Hall. But I’m not there much; I’m too busy.
Mornings I attend Tech High and afternoons I study or go flying with Jeff Hardesty — he’s my partner — or whenever a tourist ship is in I guide groundhogs. This day the Gripsholm grounded at noon so I went straight from school to American Express.
The first gaggle of tourists was trickling in from Quarantine but I didn’t push forward as Mr. Dorcas, the manager, knows I’m the best. Guiding is just temporary (I’m really a spaceship designer), but if you’re doing a job you ought to do it well.
Mr. Dorcas spotted me. “Holly! Here, please. Miss Brentwood, Holly Jones will be your guide.”
“‘Holly,'” she repeated. “What a quaint name. Are you really a guide, dear?”
I’m tolerant of groundhogs — some of my best friends are from Earth. As Daddy says, being born on Luna is luck, not judgment, and most people Earthside are stuck there. After all, Jesus and Gautama Buddha and Dr. Einstein were all groundhogs.
But they can be irritating. If high school kids weren’t guides, whom could they hire? “My license says so,” I said briskly and looked her over the way she was looking me over.
Her face was sort of familiar and I thought perhaps I had seen her picture in those society things you see in Earthside magazines — one of the rich playgirls we get too many of. She was almost loathsomely lovely. . . nylon skin, soft, wavy, silverblond hair, basic specs about 35-24-34 and enough this and that to make me feel like a matchstick drawing, a low intimate voice and everything necessary to make plainer females think about pacts with the Devil. But I did not feel apprehensive; she was a groundhog and groundhogs don’t count.
“All city guides are girls,” Mr. Dorcas explained. “Holly is very competent.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” she answered quickly and went into tourist routine number one: surprise that a guide was needed just to find her hotel, amazement at no taxicabs, same for no porters, and raised eyebrows at the prospect of two girls walking alone through “an underground city.”
Mr. Dorcas was patient, ending with: “Miss Brentwood, Luna City is the only metropolis in the Solar System where a woman is really safe — no dark alleys, no deserted neighborhoods, no criminal element.”
I didn’t listen; I just held out my tariff card for Mr. Dorcas to stamp and picked up her bags. Guides shouldn’t carry bags and most tourists are delighted to experience the fact that their thirty-pound allowance weighs only five pounds. But I wanted to get her moving.
We were in the tunnel outside and me with a foot on the slidebelt when she stopped. “I forgot! I want a city map.”
“None available.”
“Really?”
“There’s only one. That’s why you need a guide.”
“But why don’t they supply them? Or would that throw you guides out of work?”
See? “You think guiding is makework? Miss Brentwood, labor is so scarce they’d hire monkeys if they could.”
“Then why not print maps?”
“Because Luna City isn’t flat like–” I almost said, “–groundhog cities,” but I caught myself.
“–like Earthside cities,” I went on. “All you saw from space was the meteor shield. Underneath it spreads out and goes down for miles in a dozen pressure zones.”
“Yes, I know, but why not a map for each level?”
Groundhogs always say, “Yes, I know, but–”
“I can show you the one city map. It’s a stereo tank twenty feet high and even so all you see clearly are big things like the Hall of the Mountain King and hydroponics farms and the Bats’ Cave.”
“‘The Bats’ Cave,'” she repeated. “That’s where they fly, isn’t it?”