The moon?  It is a griffin's egg,

Hatching to-morrow night.

And how the little boys will watch

With shouting and delight

To see him break the shell and stretch

And creep across the sky.

The boys will laugh.  The little girls,

I fear, may hide and cry ...

VACHEL LINDSAY

This book is dedicated to the Loud Philadelphians:

Tess Kissinger, Bob Walters, Susan Casper, Gardner Dozois, Marianne Porter, Mike Ford emeritus, Greg Frost, Joanne Burke, David Axler, Ray Ridenour (hon.), Tim Sullivan emeritus, and occasionally Janet and Karl Kofoed.

The sun cleared the mountains.  Gunther Weil raised a hand in salute, then winced as the glare hit his eyes in the instant it took his helmet to polarize.

He was hauling fuel rods to Chatterjee Crater industrial park.  The Chatterjee B reactor had gone critical forty hours before dawn, taking fifteen remotes and a microwave relay with it, and putting out a power surge that caused collateral damage to every factory in the park.  Fortunately, the occasional meltdown was designed into the system.  By the time the sun rose over the Rhaeticus highlands, a new reactor had been built and was ready to go online.

Gunther drove automatically, gauging his distance from Bootstrap by the amount of trash lining the Mare Vaporum road.  Close by the city, discarded  construction machinery and damaged assemblers sat in open-vacuum storage, awaiting possible salvage.  Ten kilometers out, a pressurized van had exploded, scattering machine parts and giant worms of insulating foam across the landscape.  At twenty-five kilometers, a poorly graded stretch of road had claimed any number of cargo skids and shattered running lights from passing traffic.

Forty kilometers out, though, the road was clear, a straight, clean gash in the dirt.  Ignoring the voices at the back of his skull, the traffic chatter and automated safety messages that the truck routinely fed into his transceiver chip, he scrolled up the topographicals on the dash.