The Dark Side

by Anthony O'Neill

rock. It’s been dead for nearly four billion years. And—inasmuch as a dead rock wants anything—it wants you dead too. So you can go quickly. A landslide can bury you. A lava tube can collapse on you. You can plunge headlong into a crater. A meteoroid can strike your habitat at seventy thousand kilometers per hour. A micrometeorite can bust open your spacesuit. A sudden burst of static electricity can blow you apart in an airlock. A slip, a cut, a ruptured seal, a faulty oxygen tank can kill you

with climate-control systems. A particularly nasty pathogen—mutant strains of bacteria flourish in enclosed environments—can kill you in days. If you’re out on the surface, the sudden temperature

insomnia, paranoia, claustrophobia, loneliness, hallucinations—that can reshuffle your mind like a deck of cards. On the Moon, in short, you can be killed by the environment. You can be killed by accident. Or you can kill yourself. And then of course you can always be murdered. By gangsters. By terrorists. By

renegade, or a pariah, or a misanthrope, or a risk junkie, or a mass murderer—would live permanently on the Moon.

Nederlandse Volksbond, whose principles he ostensibly supported, in a failed attempt to frame pro-immigration activists and win the party a protest vote. Six people were killed and thirty injured. Later in the same month, infuriated when

number of seats in the House of Representatives, he loaded a Beretta ARX190, shot his way through the security cordon at the Van Buuren Hotel in the Hague, and mowed down forty-seven

missives. Dijkstra, alarmingly magnetic in his way, had already declared that “the battle has just begun,” and that in a hundred years “there will be statues of me on street corners all across Europe.” A solution was found.

habitation were still largely unknown. Surface expeditions were by necessity of short duration and often had disturbing side effects: everything from radiation poisoning and temporary blindness to hallucinations and psychological meltdowns. In one famous incident a miner completely lost