Niven, Larry - Moonglow

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2024-11-24 0 0 94.62KB 27 页 5.9玖币

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Moon

Larry Niven

What would you do if this were your last night on earth?

I was watching the news when the change came, like a flicker of motion at the corner of

my eye. I turned toward the balcony window. Whatever it was, I was too late to catch it.

The moon was very bright tonight.

I saw that, and smiled, and turned back. Johnny Carson was just starting his

monologue.

When the first commercials came on I got up to reheat some coffee. Commercials

came in strings of three and four, going on midnight. I'd have time.

The moonlight caught me coming back. If it had been bright before, it was brighter

now. Hypnotic. I opened the sliding glass door and stepped out onto the balcony.

The balcony wasn't much more than a railed ledge, with standing room for a man

and a woman and a portable barbecue set. These past months the view had been lovely,

especially around sunset. The Power and Light Company had been putting up a glass-slab

style office building. So far it was only a steel framework of open girders. Shadow-

blackened against a red sunset sky, it tended to look stark and surrealistic and hellishly

impressive.

Tonight . . .

I had never seen the moon so bright, not even in the desert. Bright enough to read

by, I thought, and immediately, but that's an illusion. The moon was never bigger (I had

read somewhere) than a quarter held nine feet away. It couldn't possibly be bright enough

to read by.

It was only three-quarters full!

But, glowing high over the San Diego Freeway to the west, the moon seemed to

dim even the streaming automobile headlights. I blinked against its light, and thought of

men walking on the moon, leaving corrugated footprints. Once, for the sake of an article I

was writing, I had been allowed to pick up a bone-dry moon rock and hold it in my

hand . . ..

I heard the show starting again, and I stepped inside. But, glancing once behind me,

I caught the moon growing even brighter -- as if it had come from behind a wisp of

scudding cloud.

Now its light was brain-searing, lunatic.

The phone rang five times before she answered.

"Hi," I said. "Listen --"

"Hi," Leslie said sleepily, complainingly. Damn. I'd hoped she was watching

television, like me.

I said, "Don't scream and shout, because I had a reason for calling. You're in bed,

right? Get up and . . . can you get up?"

"What time is it?"

"Quarter of twelve."

"Oh, Lord."

"Go out on your balcony and look around."

"Okay."

The phone clunked. I waited. Leslie's balcony faced north and west, like mine, but

it was ten stories higher, with a correspondingly better view. Through my own window,

the moon burned like a textured spotlight.

"Stan? You there?"

"Yah. What do you think of it?"

"It's gorgeous. I've never seen anything like it. What could make the moon light up

like that?"

"I don't know, but isn't it gorgeous"?

"You're supposed to be the native." Leslie had only moved out here a year ago.

"Listen, I've never seen it like this. But there's an old legend," I said. "Once every

hundred years the Los Angeles smog rolls away for a single night, leaving the air as clear

as interstellar space. That way the gods can see if Los Angeles is still there. If it is, they

roll the smog back so they won't have to look at it."

"I used to know all that stuff. Well, listen, I'm glad you woke me up to see it, but

I've got to get to work tomorrow."

"Poor baby."

"That's life. 'Night."

"'Night."

Afterward I sat in the dark, trying to think of someone else to call. Call a girl at

midnight, invite her to step outside and look at the moonlight . . . and she may think it's

romantic or she may be furious, but she won't assume you called six others.

So I thought of some names. But the girls who belonged to them had all dropped

away over the past year or so, after I started spending all my time with Leslie. One could

hardly blame them. And now Joan was in Texas and Hildy was getting married, and if I

called Louise I'd probably get Gordie too. The English girl? But I couldn't remember her

number. Or her last name.

Besides, everyone I knew punched a time clock of one kind or another. Me, I

worked for a living, but as a freelance writer I picked my hours. Anyone I woke up

tonight, I'd be ruining her morning. Ah, well . . .

The Johnny Carson Show was a swirl of gray and a roar of static when I got back to

the living room. I turned the set off and went back out on the balcony.

The moon was brighter than the flow of headlights on the freeway, brighter than

Westwood Village off to the right. The Santa Monica Mountains had a magical pearly

glow. There were no stars near the moon. Stars could not survive that glare.

I wrote science and how-to articles for a living. I ought to be able to figure out what

was making the moon do that. Could the moon be suddenly larger?

. . . Inflating like a balloon? No. Closer, maybe. The moon, falling?

Tides! Waves fifty feet high . . . and earthquakes! San Andreas Fault splitting apart

like the Grand Canyon! Jump in my car, head for the hills . . . no, too late already . . .

Nonsense. The moon was brighter, not bigger. I could see that. And what could

possibly drop the moon on our heads like that?

I blinked, and the moon left an afterimage on my retinae. It was that bright.

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