Tim Finnegan keyed the radio in his helmet with his chin, and called out, "Ahm fer oop de wool, gemme?"

Maggie O'Connor sat behind the communications suite in the construction control room and shook her head in frustration.

"Say again, Finnegan. Your last was garbled, over," she carefully enunciated.

When she had released the transmit key, she turned to look over at Pat McGee, who was powering up his banks of keyboards and screens.

"Is he drunk," she spat, "or does he just jabber like that to piss me off?"

McGee snorted and touched a control on his console, and one of the monitors held to the cavern wall by bolts and duct tape flickered to life. He fiddled with a tiny joystick and the image on the monitor centered on a figure in a vacuum suit starting to climb a ladder.

The figure was holding what seemed to be a pallet-sized load of lunar basalt bricks, nonchalantly balancing his hod on one shoulder. On Earth, that pile of stones would have weighed over a thousand pounds. Here on the Moon, they still weighed in at more than two hundred

Seemingly oblivious to the weight, the figure started stepping up the ladder, slowly and methodically, the handle of the brick box at times just held in place by leverage. As he took each step, Finnegan's voice came across the radio.

"Ah sayed ... ahm fer oop de wool GEMME?" The words were no more intelligible than before, but each was punctuated by a grunt, and the last was fairly shouted.

Just as O'Connor was about to respond, a resounding belch sounded over the speakers, as if the last word hadn't done the sentence justice.

"He is drunk," she muttered, and watched Finnegan start placing his bricks on the top of the wall next to containers of polymer mortar.

About an hour later, McGee had targeted all of the job monitors and calibrated all vacuum suit telemetry readings. O'Connor had synced up all the various communications channels and sent the data dump to Earth orbit relay satellites. She also made sure each of the surface crews could "speak and be heard," as she liked to say.

Among the dozen or so screens showing crews building tunnels, laying monorail track or scraping regolith, one showed Tim Finnegan stopped halfway up his ladder. McGee exclaimed as Tim started to shake noticeably, and O'Connor piped out a squeaky scream as he lost his grip. They could do nothing but gasp as he slowly toppled backwards off the ladder. One foot momentarily caught in a rung,

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