by Ben Bova
I’m dead, he thought. At last it’s over. I’m dead.
He was breathing. He opened his eyes but saw nothing but mist, a gray fog.
“…had his suit radio off.”
“Visor’s fogged over. Turn up his fans, for chrissake.”
“How the hell did he get into this fix?”
“Never mind that! Is he coming around?”
The voices were urgent, frightened; to Doug they sounded like a chorus of angels.
“Can’t tell—”
“I can hear you,” Doug said, coughing. “I can hear you.”
“He’s alive!”
“Barely.”
Their frightened, urgent voices faded and Doug sank into blessed black oblivion.
DAY EIGHTEEN
“You are awake now, yes?”
Doug opened his eyes to see Zimmerman looming over him like a rumpled mountain, his fleshy face deathly serious, his eyes burning with inner fire.
The infirmary, Doug realized. I’m in the infirmary. He could smell the antiseptic, feel the crisp sheets on his skin. The little cubicle was clean and cool, walls and ceiling pastel. Electronic monitoring equipment hummed and beeped softly somewhere behind Doug’s head.
“So,” said Zimmerman quietly, “my little machines have saved your life again.”
The old man’s face wore an expression Doug had never seen before. Not tenderness, not from Zimmerman. But he seemed—concerned. He was standing over Doug’s infirmary bed like a worried uncle or grandfather, looking faintly ridiculous in his disheveled, wrinkled, old-fashioned, three-piece gray suit.
“When are you…” Doug asked, his voice little more than a faint whisper, “When are you going to program nanobugs to keep your clothes pressed?”
“Jokes?” Zimmerman’s shaggy brows shot up. “You almost die and now you make jokes at me?”
“What happened?”
The old man ran a hand across his bald pate. “You had no oxygen for breathing. My nanomachines extracted oxygen from the cells of your body and fed it to your brain, to keep you alive.”
The pain…”
“Both your lungs collapsed, of course. My nanomachines kept your circulatory system going, however.”
“Oxygen from my cells?”
Nodding vigorously, as if glad to get onto an impersonal topic, Zimmerman launched into a minor lecture about the amount of residual oxygen stored in the body’s major organs.
“And the nanobugs extracted the residual oxygen?” Doug asked.
“Yah. And fed it into your bloodstream. That way your brain was kept alive even though your lungs collapsed.”
“How did the bugs know to do that?”
Zimmerman scowled down at him. “You think they are stupid? They sensed your lungs collapsing and acted to keep you alive.”
“You programmed them to do that? All those years ago when you put the bugs in me, you foresaw such a possibility?”
“I programmed the nanomachines,” Zimmerman emphasized the word slightly,’to maintain homeostasis and attack foreign invaders of your body. They sense any deviation from your normal condition and take immediate steps to counter it.”
“They must work pretty fast.”
They react in the millisecond range, usually.”
Doug looked into the old man’s intense eyes. “That’s the third time you’ve saved my life, Professor.”
Zimmerman shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “It gives me the chance to write a new research paper—although who will publish it is a question, with this verdammt war going on.”
“I don’t know what I can do to thank you,” Doug said.
For just an instant, the professor’s expression softened. Then he took in a breath and said sternly, “Try to stay out of mischief.”
With that he turned on his heel and headed out of the cubicle.
“Wait!” Doug called, his voice a painful croak.
Zimmerman looked back over his shoulder, one hand on the sliding partition.
“What’re you doing in your lab? I haven’t seen you in so long—”
“We discuss that later, when you are stronger.”
“But what are you working on?”
With an impatient gesture, Zimmerman said, “This and that. You will see.”
He slid the partition back and left the cubicle. Doug thought that perhaps Zimmerman didn’t want him to see that he actually cared about him. But then he realized:
He hasn’t come up with anything yet. All these weeks tinkering in his lab and he hasn’t accomplished a mother-loving thing.
Before a full minute passed, Edith rushed into the cubicle, up to Doug’s bedside, her green eyes staring at him.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said, reaching out to her.
She leaned into his arms and kissed him hard. “You really okay?”
“A little weak, but I’ll be back to normal in a couple of hours.”
“Hours?”
“The nanomachines work fast,” he said.
Edith sat on the edge of the bed and laid her head on his chest. “Christmas bells, I was so scared! They said your suit had malfunctioned and you might die.”
Holding her tightly, Doug said, “Not yet, Edith. Not for a long time.”
Hours later, after several sessions with the medics and Kris Cardenas, Doug was sitting up in bed, surrounded by Jinny Anson, Harry Clemens and Bam Gordette.
“The cermet suit failed,” Doug said.
“We’ve gone over it,” Clemens said. He was tall and lanky; it always surprised Doug that he spoke with a Down Maine twang instead of a cowboy’s drawl. “Found a rupture along the seal between the air tank and the backpack frame. Looks like a pinhole in the insulation started it, then the pressure inside the tank broke it into a major leak.”
“How could a pinhole get into the insulation?”
“Search me.”
Anson said, “Somebody could’ve put it there.”
Doug turned his head toward her. “Somebody? You mean sabotage?”
She nodded silently.
“I can’t believe that, Jinny.”
“The suit didn’t fail,” she said. “Somebody tampered with it.”
Doug looked back at Clemens. “Harry?”
“I can’t see how it could’ve failed by itself. I even thought maybe a micrometeorite hit the air tank, but when I started figuring out the angle it would’ve had to come in, it would’ve had to come up out of the ground!”
“So it wasn’t a micrometeorite.”
“Somebody dug out a pinhole in the insulation,” Anson insisted. “Somebody who knows enough about suits to understand that the oxygen pressure inside the tank would break through the weak spot in half an hour or so after the tank was pressurized.”
“Nobody here at Moonbase would do something like that,” Doug insisted.
“Oh no?” Clemens countered. “Whoever it was covered up the pinhole with a smidge of foamgel insulation, so the leak wouldn’t start until you’d been out on the surface for a half hour or so.”
“The kind of foamgel the construction crew uses?” Doug asked.
Clemens nodded. “For stiffening temporary walls and stuff like that, right.”
“The foamgel held the pressure in your air tank until it got brittle from exposure to vacuum,” said Anson.
“If your tank had been down at a regular suit’s pressure you would’ve been okay, I think,” Clemens said. “But at fourteen-point-seven p.s.i., it blew out.”
“And what about the emergency fill valve?” Anson added.
Clemens looked almost sheepish as he said, “The threads were smeared with dust. Froze the valve shut just as effectively as if they’d soldered it.”
The realization made Doug’s insides feel hollow. “We’ve got a saboteur among us?”
“A traitor,” Anson snapped.
“But who? Why?”
“That’s what we’ve got to find out. And fast.”
; Doug looked at Gordette, standing slightly behind Clemens, silent, taking in every word.
“Bam, I want you to look into this.”
His eyes went wide. “Me?”
“Jinny and Harry have plenty of responsibilities to keep them busy. I want you to devote full time to this.”
Gordette seemed startled. “But I don’t know enough about spacesuits or any of that stuff. I’m not a cop. That’s what your security department is for.”
Doug shook his head. “Security doesn’t have the personnel for this kind of investigation.”
“But I’m just a glorified plumber.”
“Jinny and Harry will give you all the help they can. You can call on anybody in Moonbase for technical assistance. And I’ll tell security to cooperate with you fully.”
Gordette’s brows knit. It was clear to Doug that the man didn’t want the job, but he couldn’t refuse it.
“Another reason for you to do it, Bam,” Doug added. “I don’t want anybody outside this cubicle to know we’re hunting for a saboteur. No sense stirring up everybody. And it might be easier to catch our traitor if he doesn’t know he’s being tracked down.”
“Or she,” Anson said.
Doug stared at her. Who did she have in mind? “Or she,” he conceded. “Now get out of here and back to work.”
“When are you going back to work?” Anson jibed.
“I’ll be out of here as soon as the medics run one more set of tests. But I can work from this bed, don’t worry.”
“Me worry?” She laughed. “What have I got to worry about?”
“Someone tried to kill you?”
Her son’s revelation shocked Joanna to her roots. She had taken his call in the comfortable little upstairs sitting room of her home outside Savannah. It was early summer beyond her windows: trees were in leaf, birds chirping in the afternoon sunlight. And there was an assassin stalking the confines of Moonbase’s underground corridors.
“That’s what Jinny and the others think,” Doug said. He seemed cheerful and healthy enough, although now Joanna realized that he was sitting up in an infirmary bed.
He assured her that he was all right. “And I’m not completely convinced this wasn’t just a freak accident, Mom.”
Joanna realized she was biting her lip. “No,” she said. “It wasn’t an accident. It’s just the kind of thing that Faure would do, the little sneak.”
Doug smiled when he heard her words. “But how could he get an assassin smuggled in here?”
“That dance troupe,” Joanna replied. “Faure timed all this so that the dance troupe would be stranded up there with you.”
This time Doug actually broke into laughter. “You think one of the ballet dancers tampered with my spacesuit? They don’t even know how to put one on.”
“What about that reporter?”
She saw his eyes go wide once he heard her words. “Edith? She—it couldn’t be her. It couldn’t be!”
“Why not?” Joanna persisted. “You didn’t have this kind of trouble before she talked her way into the base, did you?”
“It’s not her,” Doug said firmly. “It can’t be.”
Joanna did not reply, but her suspicions did not fade an iota.
“What’s happening down there?” Doug asked, changing the subject.
“Lev’s in New York, talking to Faure’s flunkies. I’ve finally gotten Rashid to convene an emergency meeting of the board in two weeks. I have an item on the agenda calling for the board to urge the White House to recognize Moonbase’s independence.”
Doug’s brows rose when he heard her. “Do you think you can carry that?”
“I’ve been counting noses. Tamara will be the swing vote, I’m certain of it.”
“She’ll vote on our side,” Doug said.
“I want you to do everything you can to make sure of that.”
She watched his face closely as he listened to her and digested her meaning.
“Mom,” said Doug,’there’s not much I can do from this distance except talk to her.”
“Use the virtual reality link,” Joanna urged. “Take her for a walk on the beach. Or a swim. She likes you, I’m certain of it.”
From his infirmary bed, Doug stared at his mother’s intense image on the little screen he had propped up on his lap. Good thing we’re not living in the days when families arranged their children’s marriages, he thought.
Then he wondered when he should tell his mother about Edith. And what do I really have to tell her? How serious is our relationship?
Do I love her? The question stunned him. Is this what love is, wanting to share your life with somebody. It’s all happened so quickly, like falling off the edge of a cliff.
Does she love me? Will she want to share her life with me after this war is finished and she can go back Earthside again?
Yet in the back of his mind he realized that there had never been any hint of a traitor in Moonbase before Edith Elgin had arrived.
He heard his mother’s voice, You didn’t have this kind of trouble before she talked her way into the base, did you?
Doug ignored the voice. Or tried to.
DAY TWENTY-FOUR
Jack Killifer found that he was enjoying his visit to Tarawa. Despite his orders.
Outwardly, he was an American tourist taking in the beaches and fishing excursions by day, the gambling casino and musical shows by night. There were plenty of women, especially in the casino, most of them Asian, although he saw a couple of terrific tall blondes that must have been from Sweden or Germany or maybe even the States. Funny that there were hardly any island women in the casino, he thought. But he preferred big broads, anyway, not the dark little wahines.
There was one particular island woman that he had to find, though: Tamara Bonai.
Killifer had balked when General O’Conner told him to take care of Bonai himself. “Why not hire a professional?” he had demanded.
The wizened old man had glared at him from his wheelchair. “God’s work has to be done by God’s people, Jack. It would be wrong to bring in an outsider. Wrong, and dangerous. The fewer people who know about this, the better off we are.”
Killifer had been forced to agree. Get a professional and you’d be blackmailed for life.
“If the woman was in the States, or Europe, or even Japan,” O’Conner had added, “we could get one of our local zealots to do her. But out there on those islands, we don’t have anybody we can depend on. That’s why it’s got to be you, Jack.”
Reluctantly, he had bowed to the general’s order.
“Besides,” the old man had said, a vicious smile on his lips,’this won’t be your first time. You murdered Foster Brennart, didn’t you?”
Sitting at the bar closest to the roulette table, nursing a rye and ginger ale, Killifer thought back to Brennart and the first expedition to the lunar south pole. He’d wanted to kill Doug Stavenger; Brennart’s death was more of an accident than anything else. He’d tried to trap the Stavenger kid up there on the mountaintop during the radiation storm. But Brennart had to be a friggin’ hero and go out there with him. So Brennart died and became a legend while Stavenger pulled through and survived.
It was Joanna Stavenger that he had really wanted to kill. Joanna Brudnoy now. The bitch blamed him for her husband’s death. Paul Stavenger had been killed by nanobugs from Killifer’s lab. So his widow exiled Killifer to Moonbase. Either go to Moonbase or face trial for murder, she had told him. He picked Moonbase. It wrecked his career, ruined his life.
And she’s still running other people’s lives, Mrs Rich Bitch, lording it over everybody else. I’ll get her. One way or the other I’ll get her.
The tall glass in his hand suddenly shattered, spraying rye and ginger ale and ice cubes across the bar. The guy next to him jumped up from his bar stool and wiped at his shirt front, his expression halfway between surprise and anger. Fuck you, Killifer told him silently.
The bartender, a burly Micronesian in a loose fitting
mesh shirt, hurried up to him.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” Killifer said, shaking his drenched hand. “I’m all right, don’t worry.”
“Man, that’s some grip you got,” said the bartender as he quickly set up another drink. “Take it easy, Iron Man, we only got a couple hundred of these glasses!”
“You didn’t cut yourself, did you?”
A delicious redhead in a strapless gown took his hand in her gentle fingers, then looked up at him with big blue innocent eyes.
“Naw,” Killifer said, smiling at her. “I’m okay.”
“You must have some kind of troubles, crushing the glass like that. Like, real tension, huh?”
He admired the curve of her cleavage. “Everybody’s got troubles,” he said.
“Boy, is that true.”
“You too?”
“Don’t even ask,” she said.
“Come on up to my room,” Killifer said, “and we can tell each other about our troubles.”
She didn’t hesitate a microsecond. “Okay. Let’s.”
“Well,” said Lev Brudnoy to his wife, “They agreed to evacuate up to sixty people from Moonbase. They’re calling it a mercy flight.”
Brudnoy had just returned to Savannah from a two-day trip to United Nations headquarters. Joanna met him at the Masterson Corporation airport. Now, in the privacy of their soundproofed limousine, he told her what he’d accomplished in New York.
“A mercy flight,” Joanna echoed.
With a ghostly smile, Brudnoy said, “They intend to get as much publicity out of it as possible: bringing back people from Moonbase who might have been held as hostages.”
“Hostages! Why, that lying little—”
Brudnoy put a lean finger to her lips. “Publicity is very important. Faure is very much aware that public opinion must remain on his side.”
Joanna nodded understanding. “That’s why they tried to make a hero out of that Peacekeeper captain.”
“And why Faure went berserk with anger when the news networks started playing the reports coming out of Moonbase.”
“I hope he bursts a blood vessel.”
“They wanted Moonbase to stop broadcasting news reports,” Brudnoy said, “in return for the evacuation flight.”