Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation, 27 Mar 2014.
Anderson, Poul, "Escape The Morning" IN Anderson, Space Folk (New York, 1989), pp. 52-63.
A
Lunar station is an isolated enterprise. Jordan Station mined ice but
exhausted their vein and, in any case, so much water has been found that
the price has gone down so they now mine copper and, when they have
saved enough capital, might extract oil.
Lunar oil is
"'Heterocyclic compounds formed by photochemical reactions in the
original dust cloud that became the Solar System'" (p. 57), and can be
used to make rocket fuel.
Mr and Mrs Jordan died two
years ago in a pit collapse before it had been learned "'...that
ferraloy cross-braces can change into a weaker crystalline form under
Lunar conditions.'" (ibid.) Mark Jordan and his younger brother
and sister now run the automated station, receive education by two-way
television from Tycho Crater and entertainment broadcasts from Earth and
deliver ore to Copernicus Town and Keplersburg. Next year, when Mark
moves to the Tycho University dorm to take lab courses for an
engineering degree, Tom, who is two years younger, will run the station
and hire an assistant.
Thus, Anderson briefly sketches
economic, educational and social features of life on the Moon and
underlines, for his younger readers, that:
"'Pioneers have always had to grow up fast...'" (p. 58)
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