FROM THE ADAMA JOURNALS:

Nobody likes being called a coward. I didn’t even understand the misconceptions placed on my withdrawal of the Galactica after the Cylon ambush.

There is a legend that goes back so far in space lore no one knows its origin. A moon miner in the original solar system that contained the fabled Earth works the natural satellites of the various planets. A miner is like no other, braving the desolate areas where normal humans would cower in fear, just to dig out materials vital to human progress. Moon miners, according to legend, live more fiercely and celebrate more ferociously than any other heroes in the space fraternity. At a party on some outworld of the system, honoring one of the usual holidays devoted to harvesting or history, a group of moon miners party happily. Suddenly their celebration is interrupted by the roar of a loud, ugly voice. A strange, ugly man, dressed in a bizarrely colorful variation of the basic green mining outfit, strides into the center of the party. No one has ever seen him before or knows where he comes from. Immediately he chides the miners for their cowardice and offers a challenge. They should, he says, choose the bravest of their number and he will allow that designee a shot at him with any weapon he chooses. Our hero, named Gavin in most of the versions of the story, springs forward and makes his choice. In many versions it’s a vehicle, usually a bulldozer equipped with the surface-mining scoop. Aiming the bulldozer at the rude intruder, Gavin runs it at him full force. With the scoop he knocks the villain so high in the sky that the man goes into temporary orbit. But he comes down, lands on his feet, and tells the miner-hero that they’ll meet again, on the next occasion of the holiday, and it will be Gavin’s turn to receive a blow. But where will I find you? Gavin asks. It’ll be your business to discover that for yourself, the villain responds. Among moon-miners the implication of cowardice is the worst insult, and so our hero spends the next year, experiencing many adventures, including the usual romantic dalliances, in search of the domain of the rude intruder. But no one he meets seems to know where the villain lives.

Finally, the legend has it, the moon miner comes to the original moon, the one that circles Earth. He’s never been there before, never known its magical properties, never even glimpsed the planet of humankind’s origin from the vantage point of its own moon. If he finds the villain and lives through the experience, he vows to descend to Earth, perhaps spend his remaining days there.

On the moon his adventures continue, but he begins to despair of ever finding the goal of his quest and taking the return blow. However, on the day fated for their meeting, he encounters an old hag nestled in an abandoned scoop within a manmade crater, and she instructs him. The villain dwells in an orbiting castle in the sky above the moon, and Gavin must launch himself there. Why launch? he asks. Why can’t I just hop the daily shuttle or a passing freighter? She says that the boastful villain claims that the miner will prove himself a coward if he comes up by shuttle or any safe conveyance.

Gavin secures himself upon the track of a mass-driver, a long, beltlike device used to launch products of the mines to a precisely located receiver-scoop vehicle, called a catcher, where it’s transferred to an orbiting space station. He sets the mechanism going, and he begins to be pushed along the mass-driver track. At first slowly, then faster and faster. As his speed increases he gradually rises a few feet above the track of the mass-driver, and then a few feet more, kept from flight only by plates designed to prevent a payload from being flung into space ahead of an exactly computed time. With acceleration he speeds up the final launch slope. Restraining plates drop away and he is thrown into space, into the dark sky above the moon. A living corporeal payload, Gavin speeds through the vacuum of space. His rate of speed increases to six hundred miles an hour. In front of him, the villain’s floating green space castle appears, as if out of nowhere. At the last minute it puts out its own catcher and rudely interrupts the moon-miner’s flight.

Well, of course, our hero would have been broken into a million pieces, just like a mining payload—but this is legend, and he awakens in the bedchamber of his host. The villain now extends his hand in friendship and says that the debt is paid. Gavin has verified his bravery, he is no coward. And—who knows?—in stories where villains are instantly transformed into comradely hosts, perhaps Gavin the moon miner does realize his dream of visiting Earth.

There were times when my own apparent cowardice made me feel like the moon miner, as I faced the destination where I might be broken into a million pieces. However, I could not count on awakening comfortably in my opponent’s bedchamber.