Thanks for the write-up, Vitruvius.

For Paul, our barely explored Moon was a cold, dry vacuum, plain and bicentennial-year simple. No life, no water, no erosion, no caves, a tiny planet frozen in space and time.

We now know it's quite hot in the daylight.
We now know there are minute traces of water in craters and beneath the surface.
We now know there is microbial life, sent to the Moon by our surveyor and Apollo missions, where a slow-moving, very tough "life" exists in an irradiated vacuum.
As you pointed out, we now know of the lava tubes.

...And this piece was written as an intro to Paul Hogan's huge (three-book, 1977 work) "The Giants Novels," as was my entry below entitled "Well, it's another one for James P. Hogan."

I had read this tome around 1983 (Infantry in Panama and a Sci-Fi Book Club member at the time) and it just stuck with me. The book was stolen in 1984 by a close friend PCSing back to the States (I still appreciate his taste in literature). I dug the stories out of me for my two intros to the books.

If you haven't already, give them a read and let me know how my memory held out.

I'll post my next entry in a few days. The prompt is "I've got chills..." Supposed to be a Halloween bit and all entries are supposed to be 800 words or less (that's the hard part and I seldom hit the mark).