# Golf and Out­gassing: The Sto­ry That Start­ed It All

When I sat down to write the very first tale set in what would become the Fab­u­lae Lunae uni­verse, I knew I want­ed to begin with some­thing per­son­al to the his­to­ry of lunar exploration—something every space enthu­si­ast has smiled about at least once.

Alan Shepard’s golf shot.

On Feb­ru­ary 6, 1971, the Apol­lo 14 com­man­der smacked a six-iron attached to a tool han­dle on the Moon and glee­ful­ly declared that the ball went “miles and miles and miles.” One of those balls is still up there… some­where. And that sim­ple, joy­ful moment gave me the seed for “Golf and Outgassing.”

In this near-future sto­ry, Marine Lieu­tenant Colonel Annie Mac­In­turn­er and rook­ie astro­naut Milt John­son touch down at Fra Mau­ro with three objectives:

1. Deploy pro­to­type “garbage can” reac­tors that cook oxy­gen out of lunar regolith.
2. Retrieve the old Suprather­mal Ion Detec­tor Exper­i­ment (SIDE) from the Apol­lo 14 ALSEP site.
3. Final­ly, solve a fifty-year-old mys­tery: why did instru­ments record unex­plained water-vapor spikes right after the his­toric missions?

What they find instead is one very famous, very bat­tered golf ball… and evi­dence that the Apol­lo era left behind some­thing far more dan­ger­ous than litter.

The ten­sion builds slowly—low-gravity physics mak­ing every task hard­er than it looks, the eerie still­ness of a site untouched for decades, and then the sud­den, heart-stop­ping call from Earth: “Shut every­thing down and get out now. Do NOT trans­mit again until thir­ty sec­onds after liftoff.”

No spoil­ers here (you’ll have to read it), but long­time read­ers know this mis­sion casts a long shad­ow over every book that fol­lows. Some choic­es made on that dusty plain rip­ple all the way through Thun­der Moon Tus­sle and beyond.

“Golf and Out­gassing” is the open­ing sto­ry in my new col­lec­tion The Luna­dyne Inci­dent and Oth­er Sto­ries, and I’m proud that it’s now avail­able in its defin­i­tive, slight­ly expand­ed form along­side four more lunar tales.

If you love hard sci­ence fic­tion that respects the real physics (and the real his­to­ry) of space­flight, I think you’ll enjoy this one.

You can read “Golf and Out­gassing” right now in The Luna­dyne Inci­dent and Oth­er Sto­ries, avail­able in ebook and paper­back on Amazon:

Clear skies and hap­py reading,
Torn MacAlester
tornmacalester.com

Now Available

Torn MacAlester’s Fabulae Lunae

The Lunadyne Incident and Other Stories

Fabulae Lunae 1

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The Mask of the Joyful Moon