Test of Fire (1982)

by Ben Bova

  Suppose they have Oak Ridge defended?

  Douglas knows the value of those fissionables. He might attempt to keep them from us.

  Why?

  Alec stirred uneasily on the narrow bunk. The fabric beneath him was wrinkled and cut into his bare skin annoyingly.

  Why is he doing this? Why didn't he return to us? Why is he trying to kill us all?

  Then a new thought struck him. What if he doesn't show up? That had not occurred to him before. What if I have to choose between returning to the Moon and finding him?

  He lay there in the bunk, eyes watching the scenes of Tennessee's rugged hill country unfolding on the viewscreen. "Speed and firepower," he said aloud, trying to force his mind to focus on the mission. "Terrain is the key to speed. Get in and out before they know you've arrived."

  Do that and you'll never find him, he knew.

  Angrily, Alec reached out and punched the viewscreen's OFF button. He turned over on the lumpy, wrinkled bed and tried to force himself to sleep.

  Briefings. Exercises. Examinations. Training. The days in the satellite station blurred into a continuous round of automatic routine. Morning briefings on tactics. Physical therapy, mainly running along the central corridor of the satellite for an hour. Then medical exams. After lunch, training: weapons, communications, hand-to-hand combat.

  "You're losing weight."

  The medic was a woman, a handsome woman.

  Alec had watched several of the men make fools of themselves, trying to impress her. She was big, with a broad Slavic face and strong, big-boned body that she kept in perfect shape. Her white coverall strained across her bosom and hips.

  "It goes with the job," Alec answered. "Soon I'll start turning gray."

  They were sitting in the tiny alcove off to one side of the medical compartment. The main section of the compartment was filled with the automated examination booth and its sensors and computer terminal. Sitting across the flimsy desk from her, Alec realized why the men chased her.

  But she was looking at him with coolly professional concern.

  "What's bothering you?" she asked.

  You are, he started to say. But instead, "I'm responsible for the lives of fifty men who'll be going Earthside with me. And for the life of the entire settlement, if we don't bring back those fissionables."

  "But you sought out this responsibility."

  "That doesn't make it any easier."

  She eyed him for a long moment, tapping her finger lightly on the tiny desktop, then turned slightly to study the data screen on the wall at her side.

  "I think," she said calmly, "that you are full of shit. Either you're trying to con me, or you're conning yourself."

  Alec broke into laughter.

  "You find that funny?"

  "Sure, why not?"

  She pursed her lips in obvious annoyance.

  "Look," Alec said, "Dr. Sinton . . . um, what is your first name, anyway?"

  "Lenore."

  "Lenore?"

  "As in Poe."

  "What?"

  "Never mind. Am I to assume I may call you Alexander, instead of Commander Morgan?"

  "Alec."

  She still had not smiled. "Very well, Alec. You are losing weight, even though you're not turning gray. To what do you attribute this medical phenomenon?"

  "Are you a psychiatrist as well as a medic?"

  "No. Please answer my question."

  Alec leaned back in the flimsy chair. "The answer is—I don't know."

  "I think you do."

  Without raising his voice, Alec said, "I really don't give a damn what you think."

  Now she smiled. But it wasn't sweetness. "You had better. Because you're not going Earthside until I'm satisfied that your physical condition is up to it."

  Alec glared at her, feeling the heat rising inside him. "The tyranny of the medics."

  She shrugged. Despite himself, he found the movement delicious.

  For a strained, silent moment they sat there trying to stare each other down. Finally she said, "Shall I tell you what my opinion is?"

  "You're the doctor." Alec tried to make it sound casual, but his fists were clenched in his lap.

  "You're not sleeping well. You're not eating properly. You're edgy, moody, irritable."

  "That's your opinion?"

  "No," she said easily. "Those are my observations.

  Now the opinion comes. The reason for your condition is that you're," she hesitated a barest half-heartbeat, " scared."

  Alec fought down an urge to get out of the chair and walk away. He could feel the color flaming in his face.

  "Not in the sense of physical cowardice,"

  Lenore added quickly. "You've been dragging around here under a steady full-Earth g and feeling lousy. All of us have. But you're worrying about how you'll perform on Earth. You know about the heavy atmosphere, the heat, the terrific humidity, and it's got you worried. Too much imagination. Like Lord Jim."

  "Who's he?"

  "God! Don't you read anything?"

  "Sure—military history, meteorology, geography . . ."

  Shaking her head, Lenore said, "Your problem is that you don't know how to unwind."

  "That's your diagnosis?"

  "It is. And I've got a prescription for you." She pushed away from the desk and stood up. Alec realized again how desirable she was.

  "Prescription?" he asked as he got to his feet.

  "Yes," she said, and now she was really smiling.

  "Tonight I'm going to fix a special dinner for you. In my compartment. Twenty-hundred hours. Be there. Doctor's orders."

  Alec grinned at her. "The tyranny of the medics."

  She did fix a special meal. Somehow, out of two standard dinner trays from the galley she managed to add spices, some sort of delicious sauce for the soymeat, and even a golden concoction that tasted almost like lunar brandy.

  "I raided the galley and the medical stores,"

  Lenore admitted.

  She was sitting on the bunk. Alec had the compartment's only chair. Lenore was wearing shorts and a pull-over top, standard off-duty clothes. She filled them magnificently.

  "I like your prescription," Alec said. He spoke slowly and carefully, the brandy was that strong.

  "I haven't felt this relaxed in months."

  "The treatment's just starting," she said, patting the bunk beside her.

  Alec took his glass to the bunk.

  "You do feel good?" she asked.

  Nodding, "Maybe too good."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I want to go to bed with you," he said.

  "Well," she said, "why not?"

  "I don't know. I'm not sure that I ought to."

  "Are you afraid that I deliberately ensnared you? Manipulated you into this?" She was smiling.

  "No, not . . ."

  "Well I did," Lenore said. "I've been planning this for several days."

  "Really?" Something in the back of Alec's mind told him that he should be upset about that, but it was a distant warning. He ignored it.

  She went on, "Ever since I noticed how uptight you were starting to look."

  "I see. I brought out your maternal instincts."

  "Not exa . . . why did you say that?"

  He shrugged. "Dunno. What?" Alec drained his glass and reached for the bottle on the desk.

  But she asked, "How many women have you made love to?"

  He grabbed the bottle. "Thousands. I used to keep a list in my desk back home but it got too long. Had to put it on the computer."

  "Come on, really." She held her glass out and he started to refill it. The liquid flowed so fast under one-g that the tiny plastic cup overflowed and brandy splashed down onto her bare leg.

  "Hey!"

  "Hell! I'm sorry . . ." Alec put the bottle down and took one of the napkins from the desk. He dabbed at the wetness on her leg.

  "That's nice," Lenore said softly.

  He kissed her, but that warning note still sound
ed faintly off in the back of his head.

  "Why did you want to know how many girls I've been to bed with?"

  "H'mmm?" she murmured. Then, pulling slightly away from him, "Oh . . . just professional curiosity."

  "Professional?"

  "Medical," she said. "Psychological."

  "I thought you said you weren't a psychologist."

  "I'm not. But still, it's interesting how people are sexually attracted to those who remind them of their parents."

  He backed off completely. "You don't look anything like my mother."

  Lenore smiled. "And you don't look anything like my father, either. But you have that same coiled-up animal power in you. Just like he did. And I tend to be aggressive, just like ..."

  "That's bullshit!"

  "Such strong language! Really getting to you?"

  She seemed amused. "Would you have invited me to your place for dinner? Would it even have crossed your mind?"

  "I thought about it," Alec said. "But you seemed busy enough."

  "I haven't gone to bed with anyone since we arrived here at the station. Do you believe that? Six women and eighty men, and I get to fondle each man at least twice a week . . . and I waited for you."

  Alec didn't know what to say.

  "I even turned Martin down. Twice."

  The warning alarm rang in his head. "Kobol?"

  She nodded. "Twice."

  "Why did you say even?" Alec demanded.

  "I don't know. I guess because he's sexy. Dark and mysterious. Deadly earnest. He warned me about you . . ." She looked as if she would giggle.

  "Me?"

  "Yes. He said you wouldn't be interested."

  "Did he?" Alec felt the tide of rage building up in him. "What else did he say?"

  Lenore looked at him quizzically. "Nothing," she replied quietly. "He didn't say anything else . . ."

  "No?" Alec gripped her arm. "He didn't say that I'm a classic Oedipal? He didn't tell you that I'd like to screw my mother?"

  "No . . . Alec . . ." Her eyes were wide and frightened now.

  Alec threw his cup down on the floor and stood up. "I don't know what your game is, but you can tell Kobol or anyone else that I'm not afraid of anything. I'm not weak and I'm not scared! Of anything!"

  He turned and reached for the door. She sat huddled in the corner of the bunk. "Alec . . . what did I . . ."

  With one hand on the door handle, he said to her, "For all I know, Kobol put you up to this — to see if I have any balls at all!"

  "Do you?"

  Suddenly he wanted to hit her, smash her face, throttle her. Instead he grabbed her, pulled her off the bunk, tore the clothes from her body. She gasped and swung at him. But it was clumsy, hampered by the torn clothing that hung on her arms. They struggled against each other. She was a big woman but he was furious with a murderous rage. He ripped the rest of her clothes off, pushed her onto the bunk. When she tried to get up he cuffed her, hard, with the back of his hand.

  She recoiled back onto the bunk, then reached for the bottle on the desk. By that time Alec had his jumpsuit unzipped. He knocked the bottle away, turned her on her back and fell on top of her. She snarled at him, teeth bared, "I'll bite your prick off!"

  "Try it."

  She struggled briefly, then stopped trying to push him off. "Wait . . . wait ... at least ..."

  But he exploded inside her, then pulled away and got to his feet.

  "Tell Kobol I'm not dead yet," he said.

  And he left her there.

  Chapter 12

  "And I say we go now!"

  They were sitting in the satellite station's tiny mess hall, which also served as a conference room.

  There were only four tables in the cramped metal-walled room. At this time of night, the other three were empty.

  Sitting around the table with Alec were Kobol, Ron Jameson, and Bernard Harvey. Jameson was one of the few real military men of the settlement, an expert in weapons and tactics who had been a twenty-year-old soldier on duty at the lunar settlement when the sky burned. He had gone Earthside on every expedition since then, and now served as the commander's chief aide, the man who translated strategy into order to the men. He was tall, utterly calm, flat-stomached, with unflinching gray eyes set in a hawk-nosed, hunter's lean face.

  A hard man to panic. Harvey was a round, soft-faced, balding Councilor who would return to the settlement as soon as the expedition touched Earthside.

  "But the schedule," Harvey objected, "calls for your leaving three weeks from now."

  Kobol steepled his fingers in front of his face, hiding his mouth. "That's when the spring rains will be over and the ground dried out," he said.

  "Travel across country will be a lot easier then."

  Alec said, "If we land at the airport we'll only have to travel a couple of kilometers, over paved roadway. We can be in and out overnight."

  "But your own battle plan . . ."

  "Ron, what do the pilots say?" Alec asked Jameson.

  "They'd prefer the airport," he said in his easy drawl. "We've put the high-mag 'scopes on the airfield every time since you suggested it. Runways are in a sorry state, but there's plenty room for both shuttles. It'd be a lot better than trying to land in open country."

  "The shuttles will be sitting ducks at the airfield,"

  Kobol said. "That's how we lost the last one, at an airfield."

  "Any sign of barbarian bands around the airfield?"

  Jameson shook his head.

  Tapping the table with a forefinger to make his points, Alec said, "The spring rainstorms keep the natives holed up, prevent them from travelling. In another three weeks those forests down there will be teeming with them and we'll have to fight our way into Oak Ridge and back out again. Right now the only natives who could be there are the locals, who aren't much of a threat. And no matter where we land the shuttles, they're going to be vulnerable."

  Kobol looked impassive; Harvey upset.

  "If we go now," Alec insisted, "land at the airport, we can have the entire mission accomplished in two days, max. Before any barbarian hordes have had time to mass and reach us."

  "But that's not the way the mission was planned," Harvey pleaded. "It's your own plan! The Council ..."

  "The Council gave me command. My decision is that we go now. Tomorrow, if possible. The next day at the latest."

  "It's a mistake," Kobol said flatly.

  "Maybe," Alec countered. "But it's my mistake."

  They sat there under the bluish fluorescent light panels of the ceiling for a silent few moments.

  "All right," Alec said. "That's it. Ron, please get the men ready for boarding as soon as possible. Inform the pilots and maintenance crews."

  Jameson nodded.

  Turning to Harvey, Alec said, "You can report this back to the Council, if you want to."

  Visibly sweating, the Councilor said, "I guess I'll have to."

  Alec got up from his chair, nodded to them, and walked out of the mess hall. The station's main corridor was dimmed down for night. As he walked through the shadows to his own compartment, Alec told himself, At least I won't have to see her anymore.

  It took two days.

  Two days of checking out the weapons, the communications gear, the food and clothing they would need. Two days of carefully observing the weather patterns across North America and predicting that the Oak Ridge area would be dry and clear. Two days of frenetic calls back and forth from the satellite station to the lunar settlement.

  Men who thought they had three weeks suddenly telescoping their homeward conversations into forty-eight hours. Questions from the Council.

  Technical data from the settlement's main computers to the station's.

  Two days of innoculations and medical checks.

  Alec put off his final medical exam until the last possible moment. Lenore was all business with him, impersonal, clinical. Except as he got up to leave, she said calmly, "Good luck, Alec."

  He mumbled a
thank you and hurried out of the infirmary.

  They filed into the two shuttles, fifty men and four pilots glide-walking through the narrow access tunnels that connected the station's hub to the waiting shuttles' hatches. The pilots went in first, in their usual blue coveralls. Then came the troops, looking weirdly out of place in olive drab uniforms and metal helmets, with bulky packs on their backs and slung weapons poking awkwardly.

  They shuffled uncertainly through the tunnels, hands outstretched so that their fingertips could touch the fabric-covered walls for balance.

  Alec hovered at the station's main hatch and watched his men as they passed him, silent and grim-faced. The only sound was the occasional clink of metal or plastic, the shuffling of booted feet. When the last of them had disappeared into the tunnel, Alec pushed himself in, made his way through and stepped into the shuttle.

  Two dozen men were strapping themselves into their seats. Packs and weapons were unslung and stowed in the special compartments overhead.

  Alec stood at the hatch for a moment. He had inspected the shuttles a dozen times over the previous weeks, but this was the first time he'd seen one occupied since they had arrived at the satellite station. The usual odors of lubricants and plastic and ozone were overwhelmed now by the smell of human sweat and gun oil. As he made his way up to the empty double seat at the front of the passenger compartment, Alec realized with a pang just how old the shuttles were. The plastic flooring was worn thin, the metal walls so scratched that they were starting to look almost polished. The shuttles had been built long before the sky burned, and kept in repair by the lunar engineers with a tenderness that approached blind religious faith.

  Our link with Earth, Alec knew. And our only link back home again.

  As he stopped in the aisle beside the seat and slipped off his own bulky pack, Alec wondered if he should say anything to his men. Many of them would have preferred Kobol's leadership to his own, he knew. Many of them resented, even questioned, his speed-up of the mission schedule.

  "With any luck at all" he said, loudly enough to make them jerk with surprise, halt their whispered conversations, and look up at him.

  "With any luck at all," Alec repeated, "we'll all be back aboard this bucket in thirty-six hours or less. That's why I speeded up the schedule ... so we could all make it back, quick and safe."