Moon Shot

by J. Alan Hartman

  “Ah, no communications available yet then,” she said under her breath.

  “What happened here?” Matt looked around in astonishment at the mess. “Susan? Susan, where are you? What happened?”

  They heard a faint scrabbling sound by the far desk, hidden by the middle pillar in the room, and found Susan under it, scribbling notes with a pencil. She had already used up several sheets of paper which lay scattered around her.

  Matt picked one up and read it: “Final report of the first Mars Mission? Susan, what’s going on?”

  Saskia left Matt to deal with Susan who stared at the paper and was no longer even writing on it, but simply drawing little figure-eights over and over again.

  “Get her some good air. Check the tank first,” Saskia ordered Matt, drawing on her authority as chief engineer.

  Without checking to see if he followed her orders, she accessed the main computer. It showed that everything was working as it should, which it obviously was not. That meant someone had sabotaged the computers too, which meant that Earth Control was getting false readings and would have no idea of what was going on.

  She glanced at the clock over the door to get some idea of when they might be out of the communications shadow and could contact Earth again. It would be at least another half-hour before she could even try, but she wasn’t at all sure she had that much time left. Sweat was starting to bead up on her forehead and she could feel a tightness in her chest every time she took a breath.

  “Damn,” she slammed her fist onto the table. “Matt, can you hack this?” She pointed at the computer which now displayed a large, annoying smiley face. Nothing she did would let her get past it.

  “Let me take a look.” Matt sat down and started hitting the keys. “Good thing I learned hacking from the best.”

  “Yeah, another misspent youth put to good use,” Saskia mused. “But who would so thoroughly lock us out of the computers?”

  “Maybe someone just couldn’t handle space any more. It does happen. A type of madness sets in,” Matt said.

  “I don’t buy that. We were screened too carefully and trained for too long. There’s no way anyone could keep this sort of thing hidden for five years.”

  “I’m betting they could,” Matt said, with a certainty that made the hairs stand up on the back of Saskia’s neck.

  She looked at the man bent over the keyboard, someone she thought she knew after working with him for over ten years, but at that moment she had her doubts. Susan moaned in her mask, startling Saskia. She had to focus, but it was getting harder. Why couldn’t she focus?

  “Air!” she cried. “Matt, we need air.” Moving to the emergency supply cabinet for a mask and a portable tank felt like walking through molasses. Every movement took twice as long and the furniture swam before her eyes. She was unaware of Matt, was he following her or was he trying to stop her? Something heavy hung on her, was it Matt or the bad air pulling her down into oblivion?

  With a tremendous effort she undid the latch on the locker holding the tanks. It felt like it had been glued shut. Nothing else mattered now except getting a mask on and breathing good air.

  Her fingers fumbled on the straps and her movements grew more frantic, but finally she had the mask in place and a small tank strapped to her back.

  She took a few deep draughts of air and could feel her body relax. Her lungs stopped hurting and her movements grew more certain with each lungful of air. She coughed out the bad air in a few painful spasms, but quickly started to feel better.

  It didn’t take her long and she took a moment to congratulate herself on her strong physique, but the moment was very short-lived. Matt was now resting on the keyboard, his breaths short rasping gasps for air.

  Saskia managed to get him outfitted with a mask and air tank. Then she noticed light coming through the portholes. The Martian moons had moved out of view and a hint of another red sunrise promised salvation.

  “Earth!” Saskia cried. “Gotta call Earth.” She left Matt at the main computer terminal, hoping he would get back to normal without further intervention from her and took a seat at the communications board. All the switches had been set to off. Someone didn’t want to talk to Earth. A frantic red flashing drew her attention to the fact that Earth desperately wanted to talk to them.

  “Hang on, I’ll have this baby up and running again in no time,” she said to the red flashing light.

  With deft fingers she turned the dials and switches to the right position and entered the codes to reestablish a connection.

  “Mars Station, do you read?” A steady voice sounded over the speaker. “Mars Station, do you read?” it repeated.

  “Yes, yes, I read you, Earth!” Saskia called out.

  “Mars Station, do you read?”

  “Yes, why can’t you hear me, damn it?” Panic gripped her again, this day was just going from disastrous to catastrophic. Finally she looked under the table and found a wire neatly cut in two. “Damn.” She pulled a pair of pliers out of her pocket and set to repairing the wire. How could that one wire be so important when all the lights and gauges appeared to be working? She’d have to go over the schematic later to determine that, because it was obviously a design flaw.

  “Earth, do you read me?” she tried again.

  “YES!” came the jubilant cry from Earth. “Mars Station, what’s happening there, our readings seem faulty. There’s been no change in any of the data we’re receiving and that’s not normal.”

  “No, it’s not. There’s been sabotage and murder,” Saskia said.

  “Say again, Mars Station?”

  “Murder. I need a master reset on all our computers. Life support is failing and we’ve lost several people to either oxygen poisoning or carbon dioxide poisoning.” She hurriedly explained what she knew of the situation so far.

  “Your saboteur has someone on Earth. We apprehended Craig Smith a few hours ago. He was caught tampering with your computers from here,” the voice said.

  “Craig Smith?” Saskia asked. “Isn’t he Doc Smith’s son? And wasn’t he working in Mission Control?” It didn’t make sense.

  Before the answer could come through the door to the Control Room opened and a person in full evac suit stumbled in. The person was shorter than Saskia, which narrowed it down to three people.

  “Who are you?” Saskia asked.

  The suited person just stood in the middle of the room, flailing his or her arms in a frantic manner. Before Saskia could ask again the person crumpled to the floor and lay there.

  Saskia knelt beside the now quiet figure and carefully slid the visor up to see who it was. The horrified and lifeless face of a young exo-botanist faced her.

  “Oh, not little Ellen,” Saskia whispered, her own mask muffling her words. But, why would she have died inside a suit with sufficient air supply? She rolled the body over after noting that the gauge on the arm indicated good air. The gauge on the back of the tank told a different story. The tank was empty. One of the valves had been loosened to let the air escape and then the arm gauge had obviously been locked somehow. “But who, and why?”

  “Mars Station, are you there?”

  “Yes, sorry, I had another death to deal with,” Saskia explained. “Can you reset? It’s critical as we’re running out of air and many of the spare tanks have been tampered with.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll explain later. Can you reset?” Saskia frantically yelled into the microphone.

  “Yes, yes, we can. Our techs are working on the override now and should be able to reset in half an hour.”

  “Not good enough. We’ll all be dead by then. Let me talk to the techs.”

  “You’re on general speaker now. Everyone can hear you,” the voice said, sounding more tinny now that she was on speaker.

  “Thomas and I built in a master override, we didn’t tell NASA or ESA, but it’s there. Only a few people know about it. Is Thomas there?” She tried to stay calm, but panic was gripping her.

/>   “I’m here, Babe” She let out a sigh of relief upon hearing the warm baritone of her favorite colleague. They had been at NASA for fifteen years and were married for twelve of those. She truly wished to celebrate her next anniversary at NASA with him.

  “Remember that master switch we programmed in as a backdoor failsafe?” she asked.

  “Sure do. Consider it done, and Saskia…” Thomas’s voice now sounded tentative. “Arm yourself. Smith could strike with other weapons.”

  Smith? It couldn’t be Doc Smith. He was so dependable and had flown so many missions to the international space station and to the moon. He’d helped set up the first moon base, why would he now suddenly crack and try to kill everyone?

  She glanced at Matt and felt a pang of guilt for suspecting him. She noticed his chest rose and fell but not in the smooth movement of someone breathing at ease. “Damn, he got a bad tank too.” She checked the gauge and was able to make a few adjustments to make sure he got a good mixture. His tank hadn’t been tampered with as thoroughly as Ellen’s had been.

  That left Susan; she should have snapped out of it by now.

  She found Susan where she’d left her, under the desk. A slow, rhythmic breathing told her the team leader was asleep. Saskia envied her and was almost sorry she had to wake her up.

  A few nudges with her foot to Susan’s thigh roused the woman from what was not a deep sleep.

  “Saskia?”

  “Up and at ’em, boss,” she said. “Earth’s calling and resetting our systems.”

  Susan nodded her head slowly and tried to take off the mask, but Saskia told her “No.” After a further moment of disorientation the Mars Mission Leader crawled out from under the desk and slowly hoisted herself to a standing position. She didn’t feel at all well, but at least she could think straight and breathe.

  “Let me check your tank to make sure you’re getting the right mixture,” Saskia ordered, and twirled Susan around. “You’re OK.”

  “Mars Station, do you read?” Earth sounded over the system again.

  “Mars Station here, Susan speaking. I’ve been informed of the situation. What is your status on reset?” Susan said, taking command.

  “Damn, I’m not ever having tequila again,” Matt said, slowly raising his head off the desk. “What hit me?” He clutched his head as if it needed support.

  “Bad air,” Saskia said.

  “Again?”

  “Someone messed with the tanks.”

  “That someone should be shoved out of the first airlock!” Matt said, clenching his hand into a fist.

  “They will,” Susan said, glancing at her second-in-command.

  “Mars Station, we have completed the reset and for your safety we will maintain control of life-support and other critical systems until you’ve caught the saboteur. All indications are it’s Doc Smith, but we can’t confirm. His son shot himself before we could question him.”

  “Coward,” Susan said to no one in particular.

  The computers clicked back to life and Saskia was able to access the many cameras positioned around the station to get some idea of the number of casualties, though it was hard to tell from the many prone bodies in corridors who was still alive. The scenes on her screen resembled those from of a bad B-movie.

  “Mars Station, what is your status now?” Earth asked.

  “We’re operational again, but we’ll need to find the saboteur,” Susan responded.

  “No need, I just caught him tampering with the air supply in sick bay,” Doc Smith said, marching in dragging a defiant Roman behind him.

  “Roman?” Susan and Saskia said in unison.

  “But why?” Saskia asked. “I thought it was you, Doc.”

  “Me? Never. I love space travel too much to do anything so stupid.” On the last word he shook Roman and glared at him. Roman merely looked dazed and didn’t respond. It seemed he’d gotten a dose of bad air himself.

  “But, I thought you were upset and didn’t want your daughter up here,” Saskia said.

  “Of course not. I want her to explore space to her heart’s content, but not if there’s a homicidal maniac on the loose,” Doc Smith said, again shaking Roman. “Why’d you do it?” He barked at the man still firmly in his grip.

  “Because…Craig said…he said we had no business on Mars. He said we should leave the moon too,” Roman stammered, his eyes still unfocused.

  “Craig? My son, Craig?” Doc asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I knew he was disappointed at not being allowed in space because of his heart defect, but I never suspected it would lead to this. Envy must have torn him apart.” Doc Smith let go of Roman and sank down onto a chair. He buried his head his hands. “I could have prevented this, if only I’d seen it.”

  “No, you couldn’t have,” Roman said. “There are others who feel this way too. There’s nothing for humans out here.” Before anyone could stop him he took a pill from his pocket and swallowed it. Within seconds he crumpled to the floor, lifeless.

  “How did the crackpots get into NASA?” Saskia said. “Don’t they know that by going into space we can learn things that will benefit all life on Earth?” She felt such sadness.

  Doc Smith shook his head slowly. “To some the Earth will always be flat. I just didn’t think my son would be one of them.”

  At the Corner of Night and Nowhere

  By Toby Speed

  There are three kinds of people in the world: those who ask permission, those who seek forgiveness, and those who do neither and don’t get caught. The first I have no use for, and the second sleep better at night than I do. This is why God made beer.

  I was contemplating how good a Guinness would taste right now when she spoke. Her words took me by surprise.

  “I’m leaving you.”

  I looked up from my Hammacher Schlemmer catalog to see my wife hovering over me, her lower lip trembling.

  “Did you hear me? I’m leaving you, Michael. I can’t live like this anymore.”

  The whoosh of oxygen, heat and water vapor being piped in from the power plant suddenly sounded unnaturally loud. She was what? Any thoughts of ordering Chinese takeout that I may or may not have been entertaining dissolved with my appetite. “Darling,” I said, composing myself quickly, “are you feeling all right? If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you sounded serious.”

  “I am serious.”

  “Are you sure this isn’t that cold of yours talking?”

  “It has nothing to do with my cold.”

  “You’ve been working too hard, sweetheart. The Expo can manage without you for one day.”

  “It’s not the Expo. Damn it, Michael, it is so hard to talk to you.”

  I patted the sofa next to me. “Come sit down, Mary Beth.” She didn’t. “You know this is not what you want to do. You have everything you need here—your gardening club, your chickens, my total devotion, not to mention financial expertise.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not enough. I don’t care about money anymore, not here.”

  “Then what do you care about? Tell me, darling, and I’ll try to help.” When she didn’t respond, I plowed on. “You can’t just leave. Where are you going to go?”

  “Back to Earth.”

  “Earth? That’s crazy.”

  “I’m going to New York. I can still get my old job back.”

  “At the museum? They must have hired another curator by now.”

  “I talked to Stan. The door’s open, he said.”

  I looked down at the catalog and sighed. The photo of the freestanding globe in solid maple frame that I was about to order with her money fell out of focus. My arms resting on the leather recliner looked like they belonged to someone else.

  “There’s a ship leaving Friday,” she hurried on. “It’s a freighter, nothing fancy, but they have a few passenger seats left. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, Michael. I hate Mars. There’s nothing to do here but drink and make compost.”
/>   I shut my eyes. “Did you already buy your ticket?”

  “Yes.”

  I opened them and stood up, surprised by the weakness in my knees. “Well, then, there’s nothing left to talk about, is there? It seems you’ve made up your mind.”

  “You can keep all this, I don’t want it.” She waved her hand around the room.

  I looked beyond Mary Beth to the fine paintings we’d collected and suspended from the top of our dome with twine. I took in the fine furniture and sculpture, all weighed down with Gravitrex anchors, and our gleaming kitchen with top-of-the-line fridge and range. Everything had been imported from Earth at top dollar. But money was no object, since it was her money we were spending.

  Only she didn’t know that. She didn’t know I’d been robbing her blind while reassuring her I was investing our money in planetary stock. The market had gone through the roof, sure, but I was no investor, unless you call lining my own pockets investing. And as long as she stayed with me, she’d never find out.

  But now she would. And I’d end up in jail on Mars. Everybody knows they put the worst criminals in Martian jails. I stared through the clear outer wall of our dome to the red dust swirling outside and tried to think.

  “We’ll split the accounts,” Mary Beth said, reading my mind.

  I said nothing.

  “I’ll have my lawyer take care of everything when I get to New York.”

  A knot began to grow in my stomach. It twisted its way up my esophagus and stopped in my throat.

  “I don’t know why you’re so upset,” my wife said. “Now you can do whatever you want. Go crater-racing with the guys, hang out at the gym. You’ll be all right.”

  I said through gritted teeth, “Don’t patronize me, Mary Beth. What happened to, ‘Mars is our great adventure!’? and, ‘’til death do us part’?”

  She shrugged.

  I clumped over to the door in my Heavisteppers and pulled on my parka. Not looking at my wife, I zipped up and lowered the helmet shield. I thrust my fingers into my Heatgloves and grabbed the car keys.

  “Where are you going? The bar?”

  In answer I opened the airlock and stepped through it.