Read Online Dead Man on the Moon by Steven Harper - Free Book Online

chest, feeling his heart beat slow and steady. Well, he wasn't going back to Earth anytime soon. And there were other complications.
    Linus exited the medical center into the Dome. Although there were several domes in Luna City, there was only one Dome, with its high, arching roof and parklike atmosphere. It was getting on to suppertime, and registration offices were closing, which meant the paths and sidewalks were crowded with students heading home or to their secondary jobs.
    Because of the labor shortage on Luna City, the government had long ago decreed that each resident had to take on a primary and a secondary job. The primary job was always related to the person's main reason for being on Luna. Chemistry students helped out in the chem labs. Botany students kept up the gardens and parks. But other jobs also needed doing—washing dishes, janitorial work, clerical duties, and maintenance, maintenance, maintenance. Many were the sort of jobs that would garner low or minimum wages back on Earth. Except on Luna, you couldn't pay minimum wage for anything. Just transporting the workers to Luna City would cost a small fortune, let alone housing and feeding them. And so the residents were forced to spread the scut work out among themselves.
    Some people had regular secondary jobs based on talents and skills they already possessed. Others simply drew jobs from a weekly pool, like pulling a slip of paper from a household job jar. A few jobs were assigned as punishment for infractions, either civil or criminal. Linus had a jail, but it was small, and he preferred to keep nonviolent offenders busy. Why should they get the chance to lounge around in bed all day when there were air ducts to clean and gardens to fertilize? It wasn't as if prisoners could escape. Where would they go?
    A few people were exempted from secondary jobs. Linus, as Chief of Security and a permanent resident of Luna City, was one of them. Karen ran the medical center, and that was deemed sufficient to keep her busy without another job. Mayor-President Ravi Pandey technically had no secondary job, but if you counted being President of the University as one job and Mayor of Luna City as another, she certainly had more than enough on her plate.
    Linus crossed the Dome on a winding garden path and entered an alphabet-block building. The interior smelled of rubber flooring, and the halls were crowded with people loping carefully in the low gravity. At one time, it would have been impossible for anyone to stay on the moon for more than a few months without suffering a debilitating loss of muscle tissue and bone density. Stem-cell treatments, however, now took care of that—a simple customized injection once a month allowed students to return to full gravity with few side effects and let people like Linus set up permanent residency on Luna.
    Linus bounded up the stairs to the second floor of the building, which was completely occupied by the University's information technology department—computers to everyone else. Tiny offices alternated with giant rooms divided into ever-shifting cubes. An area was set aside for recreation, where two technology students were batting a slow volleyball over a net and using holographic styluses to scribble code in midair between hits. One of the students got so engrossed in his coding that the ball, drifting with low-gravity laziness, tapped the ground before he noticed.
    "Out!" called his opponent.
    Linus hadn't bothered to call ahead and make sure Hector would still be in his office. Hector was always in his office. You couldn't really call it a second home—the man spent more time there than in his apartment. Linus quickly wound his way back to the man's office door, rapped once and entered.
    Hector Valdez, head of Luna University's information technology department, was a dapper, tidy man. Every hair on his head was slicked into place, the handlebars on his mustache turned up with exact precision, and every crease on his