"And what are the three most important things for prospective buyers of real estate on the Moon?"
"Location ... Location ... Location!"
Mary Ellen Dyer burst into laughter and applause along with the other agents in the room on the Moon. The mood was upbeat. Everyone stood up and slapped each other on the back in a slow-motion sparkling ascent, like champagne coming out of an uncorked bottle, like the Earthrise each of them had seen again just this morning. But underneath, there was a cold, ragged tension. Everyone knew they were running out of time and money.
"I'm not just a real-estate agent," Mary Ellen had said to her husband, Raj, many times. "I'm an agent for the future of humanity in the cosmos."
"Very well and good," Raj would always respond with that smile, just this side of patronizing. "But the future of humanity doesn't put food on our table, now does it, angel?"
And you do? Mary Ellen would think. What kind of money are you bringing in with your out-of-print book trawling service? Most of them had been scanned into the Net of Net or whatever they called it more than a century ago.
But what she usually said to Raj was something like, "To-the-Moon-Alice-to-the-Moon pays a six-percent commission and that's not bad-"
And he'd always interrupt with, "Only if you sell something. Even a hundred-percent commission is worth nothing if you have no sale."
And she'd retaliate with the crack about his book service after all....
But she knew he was right. Not about their family financial responsibilities--jeez, the money she'd earned as a freelance shuttle jockey, her money, just about gone now, had been putting their kids through private school. But Raj was right that the real-estate business on the Moon was drying up. If it ever had been flowing at all.
Underneath the joking with her colleagues, the pats on the backs all around and the dares and boasts and swagger designed to egg them on to make that big sale, she knew that such sales were as difficult to make at the beginning of the twenty-second century as trips to the Moon had been at the beginning of the twenty-first.
Easy enough to travel back and forth to the Moon and Earth now-vacationers did it by the thousands, it was better than the Grand Canyon and the Sphinx by far. Nor was getting people to work a stint on the natural satellite that big a deal anymore. The pay was good and the safety record far better than they had in the rigs under Antarctica. But getting folks to commit to live here, mortgage thirty years of their future for a piece of Earth-prepared land under the dome-neither the sights nor the pay, nor being truly on the cutting edge of humans in the cosmos, seemed good enough for that. Something there was about Mother Earth that seemed not to want her children to stay too long in any place off of her apron.
Mary Ellen stroked the names in her pocket. Twelve sales to nail down. Twelve who had made the prime list by having enough money in the bank to swing the mortgage; twelve who said they were looking to move; twelve who said they were looking to move to the Moon. To-the-Moon-Alice-to-the-Moon.
These were all the most likely prospects, and she had two months to turn one of them into a sale, or lose her job. And if her colleagues did no better, they would lose their jobs too. And the Moon would go on as just a scientific business, a research center full of knowledge but scarce of children and their liquid laughter.
One in twelve could begin to change that. One in twelve among those who had said yes. But talk was one thing, an easy thing, and actually moving to the Moon was quite another.
)
