“Purpose of visit?”
Officer Morita spoke from behind the counter, spine perfectly straight, eyes fixed on the tablet in front of her.
“Uh — base construction work. Setting up the facility.”
Astronaut Kusakabe answered with the face of someone who hadn’t slept in 36 hours. He was still clutching his helmet under one arm, fresh off the lander.
“Construction. Business travel, then. Have you submitted Form B?”
“Form B?”
“The Lunar Business Travel Application, Form B. It’s available on the NASA website.”
“Nobody told me about that. Houston didn’t say anything.”
Morita rotated the tablet and held the screen up. In bold letters: Travelers without Form B on file will not be permitted entry. Below the text, a signature dated last year.
“This rule went into effect before I was even assigned here.”
Kusakabe rubbed his eyes. He’d flown 380,000 kilometers, and paperwork was going to be what stopped him.
“In that case, please wait in the holding area. The application has to go through the Earth servers, so accounting for round-trip transmission delay, the earliest possible processing time is…”
Morita scrolled through the tablet.
“Three business days.”
“Three business days? You’re telling me to sit on the Moon for three days?”
“That’s Earth business days, actually. The Earth servers undergo scheduled maintenance on weekends, so they’re offline Saturday and Sunday. Today is Thursday, which means the earliest you’d hear back is next Tuesday.”
Kusakabe looked up at the ceiling. The lunar base ceiling was low. Oppressively low.
“What about… oxygen?”
“The holding area provides up to 200 liters of oxygen per day at no charge. Any excess is billed separately.”
“Billed.”
“Twelve dollars per liter. Card only.”
Kusakabe reached for his wallet. There were no pockets in a spacesuit.
Morita reached under the counter and produced a stack of papers — maybe twenty sheets, held together with a staple.
“This is the Oxygen Overage Request Form. Please fill it out and transmit it to the accounting department on Earth for approval.”
“Also three business days?”
“No, oxygen is classified as urgent. That one comes back in one business day, at the earliest.”
Kusakabe set his helmet down on the counter. In the low gravity it landed with a soft, hollow thud.
“Morita, out of curiosity — how many people are in this base right now?”
“Just me.”
“Just you.”
“Yes. Until last month there were three of us, but the other two got stuck waiting on their departure-clearance approvals and couldn’t leave. They eventually went home via emergency escape pod under a special exemption.”
Silence. The base’s ventilation system hummed quietly in the background.
”…Those two departure forms — are they still not approved?”
“Correct. But please don’t worry. Their bodies made it back to Earth. It’s a paperwork issue at this point.”
Kusakabe eased himself into a chair. Even that took a moment to figure out — sitting down has a strange learning curve in low gravity.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“How did you get here? Did you submit Form B?”
Morita’s hand stopped for just a moment.
Then she quietly flipped the tablet face-down, and said, in a small voice:
”…Actually, I’m still waiting on approval.”