The Vigilant Ones

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ROBOT SEEKS ICE CUBE ON THE MOON, proclaimed the headline in the local section of the Houston Chronicle.

“Ice cube?!” Jan Kostryzinski exclaimed, incredulous. What the lunar rover had been designed to retrieve was more like a giant straw full of Moon-dirt Slurpee. Headline writers could never resist an inaccurate but catchy turn of phrase. Jan took a savage bite of her burrito and checked her watch. She’d leave the house by 6:45; her office was only fifteen minutes away. The signal from the Moon would arrive at 7:13 P.M.

Jan’s burrito had been in the freezer until she hastily microwaved it. Unpalatable cold spots lurked inside the wrapped tortilla. Twining around Jan’s ankles, Nutmeg meowed.

“Cool it, Nutty, you’ll get your supper. That’s why I came home for mine.” Bracing herself in case the contents turned out to be as inaccurate as the headline, Jan read the article.

The Chron’s science writer had interviewed Jan yesterday in her office at the Planetary Science Institute. Evidently he’d taken good notes. Her name was spelled correctly, with y, i, and i in the right order. The article gave a simplified but adequate background for the project for which Jan was Principal Investigator. It continued, In the current frugal budgetary climate, NASA deems it more important to send humans to Mars to look for life than to the Moon to look for ice. Jan mentally added a footnote: “frugal” meant “dirt cheap or no dice on the ice.” The task of sampling ice on the Moon falls to a robotic rover named Cocytus.

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