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half.
    It was always there, the race thing. Even at MIT the blacks had their own clubs and cliques. Had to. Nobody hung WHITES ONLY signs in the halls, but everybody knew who was who and what was what. The classes and labs were one thing: performance counted there. It was the social life where they cut you. And Paul got cut both ways. He wasn’t black enough to suit the militants; he was too black to please most of the whites. Especially when he dated white women.
    Learning to fly was something else, though. Alone in aplane Paul could get away from everything and everyone, at least for a couple of hours. More than once he would squint up at the blue sky and see the pale ghost of the Moon riding out beyond his wingtip.
    “I’m on my way,” he would say to the distant Moon. “I’ll be with you in a few years.”
    Something was wrong with his left boot. It was rubbing his heel raw. A pang of fear burned through his gut. He saw Wojo again, screaming as the nanobugs ate his suit and his flesh. And Tink, screeching like a terrified monkey in a leopard’s jaws. Forget about the pissin’ nanobugs! Paul raged silently. It’s nothing but a lousy fitting boot, he insisted to himself.
    He was trying not to limp, despite the pain in his left heel every time he set his foot down. It felt awkward, walking that way.
    And then his boot slipped.
    If he had fallen forward, just tripped and gone down face-first, he would have had plenty of time to put out his hands, stop the fall, and push himself up to his feet again. Even in the cumbersome surface suit, the Moon’s gravity was so slight that he could have done that. It was an old trick among the “Lunatics,” done to impress newcomers: pretend you’re going to go splat on your face, then push yourself up to a standing position before the tenderfoot can holler, “Look out!”
    But Paul’s foot skidded out from under him on a suddenly slick piece of exposed rock and he fell over backward, onto his life-support backpack and oxygen tank, banged down heavily and skidded, yowling sudden pain and fear, down a slope so gradual he hadn’t even noticed it a moment before.
    His head banged inside his helmet, his vision blurred. He tasted blood in his mouth. For long moments he lay panting, dizzy, blinking to clear his eyes. Gradually he took stock. He was lying on his right side, his arm pinned under him, the bulky backpack and oxygen tank pressing against the back of his suit.
    Shakily he lifted his left arm to look at the displays. No red lights. Everything still in the green. He listened carefully. Nothing but the air fans whirring and his own labored breathing. No hisses. No leaks. He hoped.
    He pushed himself up to a sitting position, grateful that he weighed only one-sixth of what he would on Earth.
    He was at the bottom of a shallow pit with sides sloped so gradually that you had to be inside it to realize it was a depression at all. Absently, he ran a gloved hand along the stony ground. Smooth as glass. Must be an old crater; a really old one, smoothed down by the infalling meteoric dust for Christ knows how long.
    It was a struggle to get to his feet. Once erect, he saw that the pit was slightly deeper than his own height and some forty-fifty feet across. Got to get up this slippery slope, he told himself. Not going to be easy.
    Shifting the backpack’s weight on his shoulders, Paul crouched over and placed his gloved hands on the bare rock. Four legs are better than two for this, he told himself. Slowly, with enormous care, he picked his way up the gradual slope. It felt like walking on glass. Or ice. For a crazy moment Paul thought back to his one and only ice-skating lesson, when he’d been a teenager. Split his eyebrow open in a fall that ended his interest in skating forever.
    Easy now, he commanded himself. Don’t slide down. You don’t have any time to waste playing around in here.
    His boots slipped and skidded, barely providing any traction at all. Paul bent his face