Empire Builders

by Ben Bova

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  IT HAD ALMOST come to a fist fight, but finally Dan and Tucker convinced Big George that his beard had to come off. Dan did the honors, sitting George on the toilet in his lavatory and chopping away for what seemed—even to Dan—like hours. Tucker was almost climbing the walls when Dan straightened up, his back popping with strain. “Want me to shave the stubble for you, George?” “I can do it myself,” the big Australian muttered, sullen and subdued. Dan stepped back into the office. Tucker jabbed an impatient finger at the pile of hair clippings on the floor. “You don’t have to be Sherlock goddam Holmes to figure what you guys have been doin’.” With a grin, Dan said, “That’s what the cleaning robots are for. They ought to be popping in here pretty soon; usually come into this office around one a.m. , unless Kate’s reprogrammed them.” Tucker growled, “Like you were in here that late, to see what time they arrived?” “I burned some midnight oil in this office,” Dan said, glancing around. All of a sudden he hated the paintings on the walls, the slightly odd feel of the desk chair. This has been stolen from me, he said to himself. They’ve stolen this office, the furniture, the whole company. Everything I have. “Well, I hope you two are fooking satisfied.” Dan whirled to admire Big George’s freshly shaved face. And understood immediately why the oversized Aussie had grown the beard in the first place. George had a baby’s pink, smooth face; wildly out of joint with his massive physique. “How the hell old are you, George?” Dan asked. “Twenty-three,” mumbled the Aussie. “Holy shit,” said Tucker. “I must’ve been twenty-three once, but it was so damned long ago I forget what it was like.” Laughing, Dan went back to his former desk. what?” Tucker fairly screamed. “I realized,” Dan said, flicking on the computer again, “that if I can get into the company’s system I can also get into some of the personal files I buried in here years ago. If nobody—aha! There it is!” He looked up at his two friends, beaming. “Fellas, we may have been fugitives when we came in here, but we’re going to leave like gentlemen.” Just to be on the cautious side, however, Dan told Tucker and George to leave by the back door, the same way they had come in. “I’m going out the front door, just like I owned the joint.” “Where do we meet up again?” Tucker asked. “At the registration desk of the new Yamagata Hotel.” “What! Are you crazy?” “Like an owl. Give me half an hour. Then come to the registration desk and ask for Roger Wilcox. That’ll be me. I just pulled up Roger’s old file, transferred some of the money he had left in a bank Earthside, and made him a reservation at the Yamagata . Topflight suite; you’ll enjoy it.” “He’s looking nuts,” said George. “You got a better place to squat?” Dan snapped. “They’ll have all the tempos staked out by now, don’t you think? Certainly all the airlocks will be under close surveillance.” Tucker shook his head wearily. “You’re right, Georgie. He’s nuts. But he’s right, too. By now we couldn’t get out of the city unless we had a platoon of U.S. Marines with us.” Dan flipped him a military salute. “See you in half an hour.” There was a human clerk at the registration desk, even at half past midnight , that’s how posh a hotel the Yamagata was. He was Japanese, of course, much too polite actually to ask where in the world Mr. Roger Wilcox was coming from. There were no passenger flights arriving at this time of the early morning. And Mr. Wilcox had no luggage. Yet his reservation was there in the computer, along with Wilcox’s credit data, absolutely authentic. Dan saved the tired young man the embarrassment of asking. “Damnedest thing,” he said, trying to remember what a Texas twang sounded like. “I been coming up here for years. Usually stayed at the Astro habitat, you know, ‘cause I’m on company business. One of their biggest goddamned investors, and I like to see what they’re doing with my money, you better believe. But ever since that GEC gang took over, you know, there’s so many new people over to Astro that they just don’t have room for one of their investors anymore. Can you imagine that! I spent the whole damned day arguing with them, and half the night waiting for them to come up with some decent accommodations for me and my two assistants. Finally I told ‘em, ‘Fuck it! I’ll got over to Yamagata ’s. They know how to treat a visitor.’” He asked where the nearest computer link was. Looking somewhat dubious, the clerk pointed to the phone console at the end of the registration desk. Dan went to it, tapped into the Astro accounting system, and had ten thousand U.S. dollars transferred to the hotel in the name of Roger Wilcox. Then he asked the clerk to give him cash. “Ten one-thousand-dollar bills, please.” The clerk’s expression went from dubious to curious. Hardly anyone used cash on the Moon. But he read his own computer screen carefully, saw that the money was in Mr. Wilcox’s account, then unlocked the cash drawer and counted out the money. “I ‘preciate your help very much, son,” drawled Dan, handing one of the bills back over the counter to the room clerk. He hesitated a heartbeat, glanced over his shoulder as if afraid the manager was watching, then snatched the thousand-dollar note. The young man bowed and smiled with pleasure. friends will be along directly,” Dan said, hoping he wasn’t overdoing the accent. “Please see that they get to my suite.” He said nothing about luggage, leaving the clerk to assume that his two assistants would be carrying it. Like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes he first stared at the Pacific, TV reporter Harvey Yeats struck a pose and gazed out on the glittering blue sea. The other two members of the news crew—cameraman and audio woman—knew that Harvey was already rehearsing how he wanted to look on the videotape they were here to shoot. Their two Eskimo guides paid attention not to Yeats’ pose, but to the shining new space-age parka that each of the news team wore, light yet warm, stylish and brilliant of hue. They were not jealous so much as covetous of those expensive, handsome parkas. It was too warm to keep the hood up. Besides, Yeats knew, he would look better on the tape with the hood down and his golden hair catching the slanting rays of the sun that barely rose above the horizon. “Don’t look like much,” said the cameraman. “Just a stretch of water and some of those flat ice floes out in the distance.” “Moron?’ snapped Yeats. “Up here the ocean freezes over. Open water at this time of the year is unheard of.” The cameraman shrugged. “Still don’t look like much.” “It’s the greenhouse effect. There’s hardly any ice in the whole Arctic Ocean .” “What was all that white stuff we flew over?” asked the audio woman, grinning at the cameraman. They were both accustomed to Yeats’ exaggerations. “Oh, further out, yeah, sure. But it ought to be solid ice all the way up to the shore here.” The reporter turned to the two Eskimos. “Isn’t that right?” One of the Eskimos, who held a degree in climatology from the University of Alaska, nodded solemn agreement. “There hasn’t been this much open water here at this time of the season in the memory of living man.” “See.’?” said Yeats. “It still don’t look like much,” argued the cameraman. “Just some water. We could get a shot like this in New Jersey , for Chrissake.” Yeats screwed up his handsome features into a dark scowl. His crew people knew that he was thinking, not angry. “Okay,” he said, “how about this? I take one of those little kayaks and paddle out to the ice floes. You shoot me from here; show how far away the ice really is.” “I wouldn’t do that ...” said the climatologist. Yeats waved him down. “I’ve done plenty of kayaking. Went down the length of the Grand Canyon last year.” The cameraman brightened. “Yeah. We could set up a remote on the kayak, just like we did then.” The audio woman nodded agreement. The two Eskimos glanced at one another. They tried to argue against it, but Yeats would not listen. “We’ve only got a couple hours of sunlight left, right7 We’re not going to stay here until the sun comes up again, that’d take months, right’?. So stop arguing and get me a kayak.” Thus it was that, as the pale Arctic sun touched the flat horizon of sea and ice, Harvey Keats paddled a kayak out to the nearest of the ice floes, a remote camera attached to the boat’s prow trained on his tousle-haired face, a remote microphone catching every word of his nonstop narration. Thus it was that an orca, driven close to the shore by hunger because the seals had been largely killed off, rushed up from the d
epths, overturned Keats’ kayak, and crushed him in its jaws. The cameraman and audio woman stood on the shore, aghast but recording every instant of Keats’ untimely death. The two Eskimos looked at one another sorrowfully, grieved by the loss of that spanking new parka. The mass driver stretched in a straight line for slightly more than two miles across Mare Nubium, just outside the ringwall mountains of Alphonsus. The original planners of the Alphonsus complex assumed that workers at the mass-driver facility would be quartered in the city and commute to their jobs via the cable-car system that crossed the ringwall. Over the years, however, a small, makeshift, rugged community grew around the mass-driver facility. Men and women lived there for months or even years at a time, going to Alphonsus City only for vacations or to return Earthward. Except for the long straight track of the electric catapult itself, the mass-driver complex was underground, a warren of interconnected shelters and tunnels. One of the shelters housed the complex’s only bar, named Hundred Gees after the nominal acceleration that the mass driver imparted to its cargo containers to fling them into space trajectories. Tamara Duchamps did not feel comfortable at Hundred Gees. She was accustomed to the more refined cabarets of Paris or the quiet lounges of Alphonsus City; the bar felt rough and rowdy to her. The men who gathered there were little better than grease monkeys, for the most part, and miners who drifted in from the camps farther out on Mare Nubium looking for a night’s entertainment. The women were hardly better. Tamara seldom went to the bar, but after weeks of living in this dreary underground nest, exiled from the comforts of the city, she found herself driven by loneliness, the need for some human companionship. The Hundred Gees was crowded, smoky, noisy with raucous talk and blaring canned music. But she went there anyway; there was no place else to go. She never dressed provocatively; usually she wore plain coveralls, as she did this evening. Yet not even the drabbest of outfits could hide the lithe grace of her long-legged body or the sculptured dark beauty of her face. “Hey, princess, you drinkin’ alone?” Tamara looked up from the minuscule table to see a lanky, red-faced guy with a bushy moustache grinning at her. Almost leering at her. The name badge on his breast said Rollins; his shoulder patch identified him as an electrical engineer. “The place is awful crowded,” he said, not giving her a chance to answer. “Mind if I sit with you?” Again without waiting, he took the chair next to hers and pulled it close. He already had a tall drink in one hand. “My name’s Jon. Without an aitch. I’m from Oklahoma , where the wind comes whistlin’ down the plain.” Tamara hesitated, then said, “My name is Tamara.’ ‘Now! Sexy name. Where ya from?” “I was born in Addis Ababa. Ethiopia.” “Wow!” he repeated. “Like out of the Arabian Nights.” Tamara sipped at her drink, thinking how ironic it was that she badly wanted some company but wanted even more badly to be rid of this lout. Scanning the crowd clustered thickly around the bar, her eyes smarting from their smoke, ears hurting from the noise of their so-called music, she desperately wished she were back in Paris. Or at Alphonsus, working for Dan. No matter what his reputation, he was civilized. “Howdja like to take a little walk outside, see the Earth? It’s real romantic.” “From inside a pressure suit?” “Ever done it in a suit?” Tamara put her unfinished drink down on the table. “Excuse me. I’m leaving.” “What? Ya just got here, didn’t ya?” She pushed through the crowd and the smoke and the noise, heading for the door. “Just a minute, lady.” Someone grasped her shoulder. The man turned her around. It was not Jon from Oklahoma . This man had a lean face, like a weasel, and sallow skin. He did not look like one of the workers from the mass driver, and certainly not a miner. Too slick. And he wore a business suit instead of the coveralls that the workers wore. “You’re coming with me. We got things to talk about.” Without a word, Tamara snapped her arm upward, breaking his grip on her shoulder, while simultaneously driving a knee into his groin. The man grunted like a ruptured airlock and doubled over. A couple of the men around the bar laughed. One of the women said, “That’s it, honey, kick ‘em where it hurts.” Nobody else thought much of the brief encounter. Tamara pushed her way toward the door. But now two burly grim-faced men in dark suits grabbed both her arms. “That wasn’t polite, Ms. Duchamps,” said one. “You made our friend look bad.” “What is this? Who are you?” “Never mind. Come on along with us.” “No! I don’t want to!” She struggled but they began to drag her toward the door. The patrons of the bar watched; a couple of the men began to stir. “Security police,” announced the bigger of the two men dragging Tamara, who still struggled furiously to get free. “She’s under arrest.” “The hell she is.” Another man stepped out of the crowd to stand grinning before them. Tamara recognized him: Dan Randolph . “Now look, buddy,” said the bigger of her two captors, “you could get hurt pretty bad sticking your nose into what’s none of your business.” “Let go of her,” Dan said calmly. “If you’re security police, let’s see some ID. And an arrest warrant.” The bigger man let go of Tamara’s arm. Before he could take a step toward Dan, though, a really big man with the smooth-cheeked face of a child came up behind them and—grabbing them both by the backs of their necks—whacked their heads together with a resounding hollow thud that sounded like two billiard balls colliding at high speed. Down they both went, glassy eyes rolling back into their skulls. The crowd cheered. “Thanks, pal,” said Dan to Big George. He offered his arm to Tamara. “Shall we leave this den of depravity? She saw the weasel lurching toward Dan. He spun around, warned by her glance, and smashed an overhand right into the weasel’s chin. He fell forward, flat on his face. “Such violence,” he muttered, turning back to Tamara. Taking her arm in his own, Dan turned briefly back to the onlookers. “If anybody finds a security ID on any one of these clowns, tell them my name is Dan Randolph. That’ll make their day.” And he marched grandly out of the Hundred Gees, Tamara on his arm, Big George following him. “What are you doing here?” Tamara asked, once they returned to her quarters. “Came to find you,” said Dan, flexing the aching fingers of his right hand. At least he hadn’t broken it. Tamara’s room was nothing more than a cramped compartment with a lavatory alcove in one of the buried shelters connected to the rest of the underground complex. Big George waited outside, guarding her door. Pops Tucker had remained at the bar, an inconspicuous little old gnome, to see what developed when the three goons came to. “Nice place you’ve got here,” Dan said sarcastically. “Kate really put you in Siberia , didn’t she?” Tamara felt suddenly weak-kneed. She sat on the edge of her bunk. Dan was already astride the room’s only chair. “Who were those goons, anyway?” Dan asked. “Are you in trouble?” “Yes, I think I am,” she said, surprised at how her voice fluttered. “From Kate?” “No. From—it sounds melodramatic to say it, but I think they’re from the Mafia.” “The Mafia?” “Some variation of it. An international syndicate of organized crime.” “On the Moon?” “Why not? Who do you think you were doing business with when you were smuggling drugs into the city?”