The Precipice (Asteroid Wars)

by Ben Bova

  Dan was not amused. “If you ever do want to sell, you come to me first, understand? I’ll buy at the market price.”

  “Humphries is buyin’ at two points above the fookin’ market price.”

  “Is he?”

  “In some cases, where big blocks of stock are involved “

  “Son of a bitch,” Dan said fervently, pronouncing each word distinctly. “He knows I don’t have the cash to buy out the minor stockholders.”

  “It’s not all that bad,” George said. “I did a calculation. At the rate he’s acquiring Astro shares, it’ll take him two years to buy up a majority position.”

  Dan stared off into space, thinking hard. “Two years. We could be making profits from the Asteroid Belt by then. Should be, if everything goes right.”

  “And if it doesn’t go right?”

  Dan shrugged. “Then Humphries will take control of Astro and throw me out on my butt.”

  “I’ll take his head off his fookin’ shoulders first,” George growled.

  “A lovely sentiment, pal, but then we’d have to deal with his lawyers.”

  George rolled his eyes toward heaven.

  GRAND PLAZA

  This is getting silly, Pancho thought. Humphries doesn’t trust phones or electronic links, too easy to tap, he says. So we have to meet face-to-face, in person, but in places where we won’t be noticed together. And he’s running out of places.

  He had stopped inviting Pancho to his home, down at the bottom level. Worried about somebody seeing her down there where she doesn’t belong, he claimed. But Pancho knew he’d stopped inviting her down there once she’d introduced him to Mandy. So his house was now out.

  Going outside on tourist jaunts is dumb, she thought. Besides, sooner or later some tourist is gonna recognize the high and mighty Martin Humphries on his bus. And how many times can an Astro employee take an afternoon off to go on a bus ride up on the surface? It s silly.

  So now she was strolling along one of the paved paths that meandered through the Grand Plaza. Lots of grass and flowery shrubs and even some trees. Nothing as lush as Humphries had down at his grotto, but the Plaza was pleasant, relaxed, open and green.

  For a town that’s only got about three thousand permanent residents, Pancho thought, there’s an awful lot of people up here sashaying around. The walking paths weren’t exactly crowded, but there were plenty of people strolling along. Pancho had no trouble telling the Selene citizens from the rare tourists: the locals shuffled along easily in the low gravity and dressed casually in coveralls or running suits, for the most part; the few tourists she spotted wore splashy tee-shirts and vacation shorts and hopped and stumbled awkwardly, despite their weighted boots. Some of the women had bought expensive frocks in the Plaza shops and were showing them off as they oh-so-carefully stepped along the winding paths.

  The Selenites smiled and greeted each other as they passed; the tourists tended to be more guarded and uncertain of themselves. Funny, Pancho thought: anybody with enough money and free time to come up here for a vacation oughtta be more relaxed.

  The outdoor theater was jammed, Pancho saw. She remembered a news bulletin about Selene’s dance club performing low-gravity ballet. All in all, it seemed a normal weekday evening in the Plaza, nothing out of the ordinary.

  All the paths winding through the greenery led to the long windows set into the far end of the Plaza dome. Made of lunar glassteel, they were perfectly transparent yet had the structural strength of the reinforced concrete that made up the rest of the dome’s structure. It was still daylight outside, and would be for another two hundred-some hours. A few tourists had stopped to gape out at the cracked, pockmarked floor of Alphonsus.

  “It looks so dead!” said one of the women.

  “And empty,” her husband muttered.

  “Makes you wonder why anyone ever came up here to live.”

  Pancho huffed impatiently. You try growing up in Lubbock, or getting flooded out in Houston, see how much better the Moon looks to you.

  “Good evening,” said Martin Humphries.

  Pancho had not seen him approaching; she’d been looking through the windows at the outside, listening to the tourists’ comments.

  “Howdy,” she said.

  He was wearing dark slacks with a beige pullover shirt. And sandals, no less. His “ordinary guy” disguise, Pancho thought. She herself was in the same sky-blue coveralls she’d been wearing all day, with an Astro Corporation logo over the left breast pocket and her name stenciled just above it.

  Gesturing to a concrete bench at the edge of the path, Humphries said, “Let’s sit down. There are no cameras out here to see us together.”

  They sat. A family strolled by, parents and two little boys, no more than four or five. Lunatics. Selenites. The kids might even have been born here, she thought

  “What have you been up to lately?” Humphries asked casually.

  Truthfully, Pancho reported, “We’ve started the detailed mission planning. Randolph’s picked out a couple of target asteroids for us to rendezvous with, and now Mandy and me are workin’ out the optimum trajectory, trip times, supply needs, failure modes… stuff like that.”

  “Sounds boring.”

  “Not when your life hangs on it.”

  Humphries conceded the point with a nod. “The construction of the propulsion system is proceeding on schedule?”

  “You’d know more about that than I would.”

  “It is,” he said.

  “That’s what I figured. Dan’d go ballistic if there were any holdups there.”

  “Amanda refuses to see me,” he said.

  For a moment Pancho was jarred by the sudden change of subject. Recovering quickly, she replied, “Mandy’s got enough on her hands. This isn’t the time for her to get involved with somebody… anybody.”

  “I want her off the mission.”

  “You can’t do that to her!” Pancho blurted.

  “Why not?”

  “It’d ruin her career, that’s why. Bounced off the first crewed mission to the Belt: how’d that look on her resume?”

  “She won’t need a resume. I’m going to marry her.”

  Pancho stared at him. He was serious.

  “For how long?” she asked coldly.

  Anger flared in Humphries’s eyes. “Just because my first two marriages didn’t work out, there’s no reason to think this one won’t.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  “Besides,” Humphries went on, “if it doesn’t work out she’ll get a very handsome settlement out of me. She’ll never have to work again.”

  Pancho said nothing. She was thinking, If it doesn’t work out he’ll use every lawyer he’s got to throw Mandy out into the cold without a cent. If it doesn’t work out he’ll hate her just as much as he hates his first two wives.

  “I want you to help convince her to marry me,” Humphries said.

  Pancho’s mind was spinning. You gotta be careful here, she warned herself. Don’t get him mad at you.

  “Mr. Humphries, that’s something I just plain can’t do. This isn’t a business deal, I can’t talk her into doin’ something she doesn’t want to do. Nobody can. Except maybe you.”

  “But she won’t see me!”

  “I know, I know,” she said, as sympathetically as she could. “It’s just too much pressure for her, what with the mission and all.”

  “That’s why I want her off the mission.”

  “Don’t do that to her. Please.”

  “My mind’s made up.”

  Pancho sighed unhappily. “Well, you’re just gonna have to talk to Dan Randolph about that. He’s the boss, not me.”

  “Then that’s what I’ll do,” Humphries said firmly.

  “I wish you wouldn’t. Whyn’t you let us go out to the Belt When we get back Mandy’ll be able to give you her full attention.”

  “No.” Humphries shook his head. “You might not get back.”

  “We will.”

 
“You might not. I don’t want to take the chance of losing her.”

  Pancho looked into his eyes. They were still cold, unreadable, like the eyes of a professional card shark she’d known once while she’d been supporting herself through the University of Nevada in Las Vegas by working at one of the casinos. Not the eyes of a lovesick swain. Not the eyes of a man whose heart might break.

  “Better talk to Randolph, then,” she said.

  “I will.”

  Feeling weary and more than a little afraid of what was going to happen with Mandy, Pancho got to her feet. Humphries stood up, too, and she noticed that he was several centimeters shorter than she’d thought him to be. Glancing down at his sandals, she thought, The sumbitch must have lifts in his regular shoes.

  “By the way,” Humphries said, his voice hard-edged, “someone’s hacked into my private files.”

  She was genuinely surprised that he’d found out so quickly. It must have shown on her face.

  “Randolph is a lot smarter than I thought he was, but it won’t do him any good.”

  “You mean he’s the one who hacked you?”

  “Who else? One erf his people, obviously. I want you to find out who. And how.”

  “I can’t do that!” Pancho blurted.

  “Why not?”

  “I’ll get caught. I’m not a chip freak.”

  His eyes bored into her for a painfully long moment. “You find out who did it. And how it was done. Or else.”

  “Or else what?”

  With a grim smile, Humphries answered, “I’ll think of something.”

  ASTRO CORPORATION OFFICES

  “If he finds the account I set up for him to pay the rent on my sister’s dewar I’m toast,” Pancho said as she paced across Dan’s office.

  Sitting behind his desk, Dan said, “I’ll get George to scratch the program. Astro can pay the storage fees for your sister.”

  Pancho shook her head. “That’ll just call attention to what I did.”

  “Not if we erase the subroutine completely. He’ll never know.”

  “No!” Pancho insisted. “Don’t go anywhere near it. It’ll tip him off for sure.”

  Dan could see how agitated she was. “You just want to leave it there? He might stumble across it any minute.”

  “He knows I did it,” Pancho said, crossing the room again in her long-legged strides, “I know he knows. He’s just playin’ cat-and-mouse with me.”

  “I don’t think so. He’s not the type. Humphries is more a sledgehammer-on-the-head kind of guy.”

  She stopped and turned toward Dan, her face suddenly white, aghast. “Jesus H. Christ… he might turn off Sis’s life support! He might pull the plug on her!”

  Dan knew she was right. “Or threaten to.”

  “That’d give him enough leverage to get me to do whatever he wants.”

  “What does he want?”

  “He wants Mandy. He wants her scrubbed from the mission so he can talk her into marrying him.”

  Dan leaned back in his desk chair and stared at the ceiling. He’d had the office swept for bugs only an hour earlier, yet he had the uneasy feeling that Humphries knew everything that he said or did. Pancho’s not the only Astro employee he’s recruited, Dan reminded himself. My whole double-damned staff must be honeycombed with his snoops. Who can I trust?

  He snapped forward in the chair and said into the phone console, “Phone, find George Ambrose. I want him here, now.”

  In less than a minute Big George came through the doorway from the outer office.

  “George, I want this whole suite swept for bugs,” Dan commanded.

  “Again? We just did it an hour ago.”

  “I want you to do it this time. Yourself. Nobody else.”

  Scratching at his shaggy beard, George said, “Gotcha, boss.”

  It took a maddening half hour. Pancho forced herself to sit on the sofa while George went through the office with a tiny black box in one massive paw.

  “Clean in here,” he said at last.

  “Okay,” said Dan. “Close the door and sit down.”

  “You said you wanted the outer offices done, too,” George objected.

  “In a minute. Sit.”

  Obediently, George lowered his bulk into one of the cushioned chairs in front of Dan’s desk.

  “I’ve been thinking. Tonight, the three of us are going to move a dewar out of the catacombs,” Dan said.

  “Sis? Where—”

  “I’ll figure that out between now and then,” Dan said. “Maybe somewhere else on the Moon. Maybe we’ll move her to one of the space stations.”

  “You’ve gotta have the right equipment to maintain it,” George pointed out.

  Dan waved a hand in the air. “You need a cryostat to keep the nitrogen liquified. Not much else.”

  “Life support monitors,” Pancho pointed out.

  “Self-contained on the dewar flask,” said Dan.

  “Not the equipment,” Pancho corrected. “I mean you need some people to take a look every few days, make sure everything’s running okay.”

  With a shake of his head, Dan said, “That’s a frill that you pay extra for. You don’t need it. The equipment has safety alarms built in. The only time you need human intervention is when the flask starts to exceed the limits you’ve set the equipment to keep.”

  “Well, yeah… I guess,” Pancho agreed reluctantly.

  “Okay, George,” Dan said. “Go sweep the rest of the place. We can all meet here for dinner at…” he called up his appointment screen with the jab of a finger, “… nineteen-thirty.”

  “Dinner?” Pancho asked.

  “Can’t do dirty work on an empty stomach,” Dan said, grinning mischievously.

  “But where are we taking her?” Pancho asked as she disconnected the liquid nitrogen feed line. Despite its heavy insulation, the hose was stiff with a rime of frost. Cold white vapor hissed briefly from its open end, until she twisted the seal shut.

  “Shh!” Dan hissed, pointing to the baleful red eye of the security camera hanging some fifty meters down the corridor.

  This late at night they were quite alone in the catacombs, but Dan worried about that security camera. There was one at each end of the long row of dewars, and although the area was dimly lit, the cameras fed into Selene’s security office where they were monitored twenty-four hours a day. Pancho figured that, like security guards anywhere, the men and women responsible for monitoring the cameras seldom paid them close attention, except when a warning light flashed red or a synthesized voice warned of trouble that some sensor had detected. That’s why they had hacked into the sensor controls on Sis’s dewar and cut them out of the monitoring loop.

  Dan and George were sweating with the effort of jacking up the massive dewar onto a pair of trolleys. Even in lhe low gravity of the Moon, the big stainless-steel cylinder was heavy.

  “Where’re we goin’ ?” Pancho repeated.

  “You’ll see,” Dan grunted.

  Pancho plugged the nitrogen hose into the portable cryostat they had taken from one of the Astro labs, several levels below the catacombs.

  “Okay, all set,” she whispered.

  “How’re you doing, George?” Dan asked.

  The shaggy Australian came around the front end of the dewar. “Ready whenever you are, boss.”

  Dan glanced once at the distant camera’s red eye, then said, “Let’s get rolling.”

  The caster wheels on the trolleys squeaked as the three of them pushed the dewar down the long, shadowy corridor.

  “Don’t the security cameras have a recording loop?” Pancho asked. “Once they see Sis’s dewar is missing, they’ll play it back and see us.”

  “That camera’s going to show a nice, quiet night,” Dan said, leaning hard against the big dewar as they trundled along. “Cost me a few bucks, but I think I found an honest security guard. She’ll erase our images and run a loop from earlier in the evening to cover the erasure. Everything will look
peaceful and calm.”

  “That’s an honest guard?” Pancho asked.

  “An honest guard,” Dan said, panting with the strain of pushing, “is one who stays bought.”

  “And I’ll put an empty dewar in your sister’s place,” George added, “soon’s we get this one settled in.” Pancho noticed he was breathing easily, hardly exerting himself.

  “But where’re we takin’ her?” Pancho asked again. “And why’re we whisperin’ if you got the guard bought?”

  “We’re whispering because there might be other people in the catacombs,” Dan replied, sounding a bit irked. “No sense taking any chances we don’t need to take.”

  “Oh.” That made sense. But it still didn’t tell her where in the hell they were going.

  They passed the end of the catacombs and kept on going along the long, dimly-lit corridor until they stopped at last at what looked like an airlock hatch.

  Dan stood up straight and stretched his arms overhead until Pancho heard his vertebrae crack.

  “I’m getting too old for this kind of thing,” he muttered as he went to the hatch and pecked on its electronic lock. The hatch popped slightly open; Pancho caught a whiff of stale, dusty air that sighed from it.

  George pulled the hatch all the way open.

  “Okay, down the tunnel we go,” said Dan, unclipping a flashlight from the tool loop on the leg of his coveralls.

  The tunnel had been started, he explained to Pancho, back in the early days of Moonbase, when Earthbound managers had decided to ram a tunnel through the ringwall mountains to connect the floor of Alphonsus with the broad expanse of MareNubium.

  “I helped to dig it,” Dan said, with pride in his voice. Then he added, “What there is of it, at least.”

  The lunar rock had turned out to be much tougher than expected; the cost of digging the tunnel, even with plasma torches, had risen too far. So the tunnel was never finished. Instead, a cable-car system had been built over the mountains. It was more expensive to operate than a tunnel would have been but far cheaper to construct.

  “I’ve ridden the cable car up to the top of Mt. Yeager,” Pancho said. “The view’s terrific.”

  “Yep,” Dan agreed. “They forgot about the tunnel. But it’s still here, even though nobody uses it. And so are the access shafts.”