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then headed to the showers.

::: FOUR
    E very so often, a burst of deadly radiation would escape from the sun and roar across the inner solar system and scour everything in its path. If you were lucky enough to live on a nice, fat planet with an atmosphere and an intact magnetic field, it was not much of a problem. But if you lived on the Earth’s moon, which had neither one, you had a big problem. To avoid the deadly results of these outbursts, Moontown’s people lived in tubes made of mooncrete set twenty feet underground. Scraper’s Row was the largest of the tube neighborhoods and contained seventy-three tubes of residential dimensions.
    In the neighborhood called Medaris Acres, eight residencesize tubes were set aside for Colonel Medaris’s personal use. Another sixteen tubes in Medaris Acres were assigned to the chief engineer, the doctor, the dentist, the sheriff, and the preacher. Three more residential tubes were set aside for Very Important Visitors.
    The “downtown” or administrative tubes, a cluster of twenty business-size tubes, held the company store, the medical clinic, the sheriff’s office, the chapel, the theater, the library, the art center, and the engineering and business offices. Connected to the downtown tubes were observation towers where, during the two weeks of the long shadow, the people of Moontown could see a sky so filled with stars it was as if God Himself had placed there an infinite ocean of diamonds for them to admire.
    The Dust Palace Bachelor’s Hotel contained a cluster of sixteen tubes. Petro’s mother, known as Queen Bess or, informally, Q-Bess, ran the Dust Palace, and Crater and Petro shared one of its tubes. Single miners occupied the other tubes, sometimes with hot bunks, meaning as soon as one man got out of it, another took his place. Nearby was a tube cluster that contained the Earthrise Bar & Grill, a place where heel-3 miners were allowed to let off a little steam as long as they didn’t get too drunk or too loud or try to kill each other. Petro organized his poker games there but his reputation and ability at cards was such, few Moontown gamblers would play with him anymore, a frustrating situation for the royal boy.
    Extra-large tubes were placed north of town for the foundry and processing plants where titanium, platinum, silicon, and iron, byproducts of heel-3 production, were processed. There was also a tank farm where heel-3 canisters were stored and readied for shipment, and two big maintenance sheds, one each on the east side and the west side of town. Beneath the town were the grease traps and bioseptic tanks that processed the inevitable wastes of human habitation.

    Happy to be alive, the shift that had just survived the two rollers first entered an airlock where they threw off their dustcovered coveralls and boots, and the dustlock crew—dusties as they were known—took them to be washed and cleaned. The miners next passed through a hatch where there were showers that removed the biolastic sheaths. Helmets, along with bio-girdles, were handed over to the dusties for sanitizing. After donning filter masks, the miners moved to the next dustlock and the water showers that removed all vestiges of dust and the biolastic material, and finally through a series of blowers into the changing lock where they changed into their tube clothes.
    In the Dust Palace cafeteria, Crater and Petro and the other first-shift bachelors got their food trays and pushed them down the tubular rack. After a day of being enveloped within the pungent odor of bioprocessed air, the cafeteria’s aroma of hot food was delicious to their noses, and their stomachs growled in anticipation. Crater took the soup, the broccoli, the beans, the cornbread, and also loaded up on the carrot cake Q-Bess was famous for. Petro chose entirely brown food: fried potatoes, fried okra, fried shrimp, and fried bread. Of course, none of it was real, being products of the