Moonwar gt-7

by Ben Bova

  “But I’m okay now, really I am. What do I have to do, jump your bod to show you I’m in good condition?”

  Her green eyes turned thoughtful. “Let’s see if you can get out of bed, first.”

  Doug pushed the swivel table with its emptied food tray away from the bed and swung his legs out from under the sheet. He planted his bare feet on the warmed tile floor and stood up. No alarm bells went off. The monitors showed no change in his condition.

  “See? No hands.”

  She broke into a grin. “That gown looks pretty silly on you.”

  “Go get me some clothes while I peel off these sensor patches.”

  “You’ll really take me with you? Outside?”

  He nodded soberly. “I promise.”

  “And they’ll let you out?”

  “Hey, I’m the chief administrator of this base. Rank has its privileges.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  With a furtive glance at the observation window beside his bed, Doug added, “But you’d better get my clothes before Doc Montana comes back for another check.”

  “This is absolutely crazy,” Edith said. “I love it!”

  She was sitting beside Doug in the open cockpit of a massive lunar tractor, encased in a cumbersome spacesuit, waiting inside the big metal womb of the main airlock while the pumps sucked out the air so they could go outside and track down Bam Gordette. The airlock was suffused with a dull red light, like an old-fashioned darkroom.

  She had figured that if Doug was strong enough to make it down to the garage and actually get himself into a spacesuit, maybe she’d go along with him instead of blowing the whistle and getting him shipped back to the infirmary. It was she who needed help, though, when they started to pull on their spacesuits.

  Edith was surprised when Doug went to the new cermet suit, standing in a locker marked DO NOT TOUCH: EXPERIMENTAL EQUIPMENT.

  “You’re going to use that suit again?”

  He grinned at her. “This is the best tested and inspected suit in the whole Earth-Moon system, believe me.”

  She took one of the regular suits from the row of lockers, muttering, “I never know if I’m a small or a medium.” Doug was already in his leggings and boots when he saw Edith struggling with hers and clumped over to help her.

  At last they got completely suited up, filled the backpack air tanks, and checked out each other’s suits from the safety list Doug called up on their wrist display screens.

  Now Edith sat beside him in the tractor’s unpressurized cockpit. In the eerie light of the airlock, all she could see of Doug was this anonymous lump of reddish-tinged white, like the Pillsbury Doughboy by firelight, topped with a helmet and a gold-tinted visor that reflected her own red-tinged helmet and visor.

  “Are you sure you’re strong enough to do this?” Edith asked as the noise of the pump faded down to silence.

  Doug’s voice said in her earphones, “Listen to me, Edith. My body’s building up my blood supply. I’m a lot stronger now than I was an hour ago.”

  “You’re sure?”

  He laughed. “Yep, I’m absolutely, positively certain. I might be wrong, but I’m sure.”

  Doug had talked their way past the technician on duty at the main airlock, who wondered why the Big Boss was going outside in the middle of the lunar night with the flatlander news reporter and an insulated container big enough to hold a dead body.

  “Lunch,” Doug had explained about the container. It held a dozen quarts of fruit juices and soymilk that they had picked up at The Cave on their way to the garage. They had loaded four spare air cylinders onto the tractor’s bed, as well: two at normal room pressure and two at the low pressure Edith’s standard suit required.

  The display light on the panel set into the scuffed metal wall of the huge airlock next to the outside hatch abruptly switched from amber to green.

  “Here we go,” Doug said as the outer hatch began to slowly slide open. “Once we’re underway I’ll show you how to operate the tractor. That’ll take less than fifteen minutes.”

  “Driving lessons?” Edith’s eyes were focused on the growing gap as the hatch opened wider. It was dark out there, even with her vision already dark-adapted from the red lighting inside the airlock.

  “Yeah,” he replied. That way, in case anything happens to me you can drive back here.”

  “Oh.” Edith realized that beneath his casual demeanor Doug was weighing the risks as carefully as he could.

  The airlock hatch opened fully and Doug put the tractor in gear. Edith heard no sound at all in the dead vacuum, but she felt the electric motors’ vibrations as they turned each of the tractor’s wheels individually.

  I’m out on the surface of the Moon! she exulted. Her first time, with Captain Munasinghe and the Peacekeepers, she’d been too busy recording her story to appreciate the scenery. Now she looked about and saw nothing but stark desolation. Dusty flat ground, cracked here and there. Rocks of all sizes, from pebbles to boulders. Craterlets, too, as if children had been digging into the ground with sticks and shovels.

  Off to one side was the deep pit that would one day be the grand plaza of the Moonbase that Doug envisioned. Maybe, she thought. If we can keep Yamagata from taking over.

  It all looked about as romantic as a slag heap to her, yet Doug loved it.

  “It’s kind of dark right now,” Doug said. “Nothing up there except a crescent Earth. When it’s full, or even gibbous, it’s a lot brighter.”

  “I can’t even see—what’s that?”

  A big round thing was sitting on the ground off to their right, like a giant beach ball the size of their tractor. Peering at it, Edith saw that it was not solid, but built of some kind of wire mesh. And it seemed to be resting on a curved metal track laid across the ground.

  Doug laughed. “That’s the laundry.”

  “Laundry?”

  “Sure. Dirt dries almost immediately in vacuum and detaches from fabric while the ultraviolet from the sun kills germs. We pack the dirty laundry in there when the sun’s up and roll the sphere back and forth along the track for an hour or so. Clothes come out clean and sanitized.”

  “My clothes have been cleaned in there?”

  “Yep.”

  “How do you iron them?”

  “The old-fashioned way,” Doug answered. “With automated ironing machines that use waste heat from the base’s living quarters and machinery.”

  Edith shook her head inside her helmet. Her clothes seemed clean enough when she got them back from the laundry, but rolling them around out here…?

  “I’m switching to the base’s standard comm frequency,” Doug told her. “First keypad on your comm set.”

  It took Edith a few moments to remember which row of pads on the wrist of her suit was the comm set. In the dim lighting, little more than the glow from the tractor’s dashboard instruments, she figured it out after a few moments.

  “…yes, I’m outside with Edith,” Doug was saying.

  “Are you crazy?” Jinny Anson’s voice snapped. “What the blazes are you doing outside?”

  “Trying to get to Gordette before he reaches Yamagata’s people,” said Doug. “Any joy with tracking his tractor?”

  “Hell no.” Anson sounded thoroughly unhappy. “He was smart enough to turn off its transponder and now he’s so far over the horizon that even if he had it on we couldn’t hear it.”

  “Any idea of which way he went?”

  “I checked the automated radar plot,” Anson replied immediately. “Shows he was heading on a bearing of three-forty-five degrees, relative to true north.”

  “Three-forty-five?”

  “That’s out past the mass driver, heading almost due north.”

  “So he’s not taking Wodjohowitcz Pass, then.”

  “Not yet. He’s probably trying to knock out the mass driver first. The magnets, I betcha.”

  Doug’s voice caught in his throat. “The magnets! So we can’t use them to drive Wicksen’s particle
beam gun.”

  “Which means we won’t have any chance at all of stopping an incoming nuke.”

  “I’ve got to stop him.”

  “Get real! He’s got a six-hour lead on you.”

  “I’ve still got to try. Does Wix have any people out at the driver?”

  “Not for the past ten days. His whole crew’s been inside here, working on the new hardware.”

  “Do we have anything at all that we can use to spot his tractor, Jinny?”

  She humphed. “Crystal ball? Tarot cards…” Suddenly her voice brightened. “Hey! What about Kadar’s survey satellite?”

  “Is it still functional?”

  “We can power it up and see. Lemme check on when it’ll swing over Alphonsus again.”

  “Good. Call me as soon as you can.”

  “Will do, boss.”

  Edith asked, “Aren’t we over the horizon from Moonbase?”

  “We will be in another fifteen minutes,” Doug said.

  “Then how will you be able to talk with Jinny? Or anyone at the base?”

  “Antennas up on top of Mount Yeager,” Doug explained. “We can reach more than half of the area within the ringwall, and a considerable amount of territory out on Mare Nubium.”

  “Then why can’t they find Gordetie’s tractor?”

  “The antennas are for communications, not radar tracking.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’ll get him.”

  Edith was worried that he was right.

  Doug began to show her how to run the tractor. It wasn’t much different from driving a car.

  “Not a lot of traffic out here,” he said, “but you’ve got to be on the lookout for craters and rocks that can get you stuck. Stay with the flattest, clearest ground you can find.”

  “Like you’re doing.”

  “Right.”

  “Do you know where you’re going? I mean, without knowing where his tractor is?”

  Doug pointed a gloved finger over the hood of the tractor. “I’m following his trail.”

  “His trail?”

  “Look. The cleat tracks.”

  She saw a maze of tracks running pretty much in the same direction: out to the mass driver, she supposed.

  “His are the brightest,” Doug explained. “Nobody’s been out here for ten days or so, so Barn’s tractor has churned up the newest tracks. Surface dirt is darkened by solar ultraviolet. New bootprints, new tractor marks, they uncover the brighter stuff underneath.”

  “Shades of the Lone Ranger and his faithful Indian companion,” Edith muttered.

  “Who?”

  He knows so much, Edith thought, and there’s so much he doesn’t know. She settled back to watching the landscape, trundling by at a frustratingly slow thirty kilometers per hour or so.

  “Do you really find this rock pile beautiful?” she asked.

  “Don’t you?”

  “It’s so barren! So empty and lifeless. There’s not even air to breathe.”

  It took him a few moments to reply. “It all looks a lot better when there’s a full Earth. Fifty times brighter than a full Moon, back Earthside. It’s breathtaking. Everything glows like silver out here. And you can watch the Earth, see its clouds and oceans, it never stays the same for very long.”

  “It’s only a sliver now,” Edith said, glancing upward at the thin crescent hanging in the starry sky.

  “Take a good look,” Doug said. “Stare at it for a few minutes.”

  There’s nothing better to do out here, Edith thought. She looked at the bright crescent Earth, a scimitar-slim curve of bright blue with flecks of white.

  And saw that there was a blue glow stretching beyond the points of the crescent. The Earth’s air was gleaming, catching the Sun’s light and warmth.

  “Look on the dark side,” Dough told her. “Focus your eyes a little to the left of the crescent’s bulge.”

  She did, and saw nothing but darkness. The night side of Earth, she realized. Dark and-

  There were lights glittering there! At first Edith wasn’t certain she really saw them, but the harder she stared, the more she saw. Cities aglow with light. Thin twinkling threads of highways linking them.

  “Holy cow!” she blurted.

  “See the cities?”

  “It’s like a connect-the-dots map,” Edith said excitedly. “I can see Florida… at least I think it’s—no! That’s Italy! And over there must be Paris! Wow!”

  “And look at—” A sharp buzz interrupted Doug. “Hold it. Incoming message.”

  It was Anson again. “Gotta hand it to Kadar: his bird chirped right up when we interrogated it. It’s at periluna over Alphonsus, of course, so it’ll be zipping by at its fastest when it comes over us.”

  “How soon, Jinny?” Doug asked.

  “Five minutes. No, four-fifty. I’ll get the data wrung out and pipe it to you in half an hour, max.”

  “Good.”

  It took longer. Doug let Edith drive the tractor while he dug into the food box. There was no way to eat solid food in a spacesuit, but he pumped a quart of milk and three containers of juices through the feeding nipple in his helmet.

  “Milk and orange juice?” Edith asked, grimacing. “Chugging them down one right after the other?”

  “The last one was beet juice,” Doug said. “Got to thank Lev for that: he likes to make borscht.”

  Anson called again. “Got him! He’s ’way past the mass driver, out beyond the central peaks. Still heading north.”

  Doug thought a moment. “Jinny, if he’s that far out he couldn’t have stopped for long at the mass driver, could he?”

  “Prob’ly not,” she answered. “I doubt that he stopped at all. He’s been truckin’ right along, I betcha.”

  “Then he hasn’t tried to sabotage the magnets.”

  Anson hesitated, then replied, “Unless he left a bomb there to go off later.”

  Doug started to ask where Gordette would get explosives, then realized that a man with his smarts could convert rocket propellants into a bomb easily enough.

  “The satellite’ll swing by this way again in sixty-three minutes,” Anson said. I’ll update you then.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Jinny.”

  “Just doin’ my job, boss.”

  They drove past the mass driver. It seemed intact to Doug, but he made a mental note to send a team out to look for booby traps, just to be on the safe side.

  Edith rode beside him in silence. She picked a container of fortified dietary supplement and sipped at it unhappily. It tasted somewhere between chalk and sweat socks.

  “I’m glad it was Bam.”

  After the long silence, Edith wasn’t certain she had heard his muttered words correctly.

  “Glad?” she asked.

  “Well… not glad, exactly. But…” His voice faded away.

  The damned spacesuits took away all the visual clues, Edith realized. All she had to go on was his voice in her earphones. She couldn’t see his face, his eyes.

  “You see,” Doug said slowly, as the tractor trundled along the bleak landscape, “we didn’t have any problems with sabotage or attempted assassination until—well, until you came into Moonbase.”

  That jolted her. “You thought I was a hit man?”

  “No, I didn’t. But the possibility was there. And I hated it.”

  “You never -I mean, we were sleeping together! How could you think…”

  “I had to consider it,” he said, his voice sounding miserable. “I never really thought you were the one who tampered with my suit, but I had to consider the possibility. And the possibility that I wasn’t thinking straight because I love you.”

  “You love me?”

  “I had to get my throat slit to finally figure it out. My last conscious thought after Bam cut me was that I was glad it wasn’t you.”

  Edith blinked several times inside her helmet. “Douglas Stavenger, that’s got to be the least romantic announcement a man’s ever made to a woman!”
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  For several moments she heard nothing but her own breathing, magnified inside the helmet. Then Doug burst into laughter.

  “You’re right, Edith,” he said, laughing. “That was about as romantic as reading an inventory list. I’m sorry.”

  She felt a smile tugging at her lips. “Nothing to be sorry about, I guess.”

  “I do love you, Edith. I really do.”

  “And I love you, too,” she said, surprising herself.

  His laughter only increased. “We picked a great time to bare our souls, sealed up in these suits.”

  She began to giggle. “Yep, guess so.”

  Doug reached for her gloved hand and pressed it to the visor of his helmet. “That’s the best I can do right now. But we ought to be coming up on a tempo pretty soon.”

  “Tempo?”

  “One of the old temporary shelters. We keep them stocked with emergency supplies. We can go inside and get out of these damned suits for a while.”

  “Uh-huh. And what about Gordette?”

  She heard his sharp intake of breath. “Gordette,” Doug said, all the laughter gone. “I had almost forgotten about him.”

  “Doug, if we’re going to have to surrender anyway to the Peacekeepers or Yamagata or whoever, why are we chasing after Gordette?”

  It took several moments before he answered, “Because I don’t want to surrender to them, Edith. Deep inside me I’m still hoping for a miracle.”

  “What kind of a miracle?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  DAY FORTY-THREE

  Grand Cayman Island had been a haven for tax-weary investors for more than a century, the Switzerland of the Caribbean, a home away from home for money that was to be hidden, laundered, or otherwise kept out of the sight of the tax collectors of the world.

  Still a Crown Colony of the British Empire, the tiny flat island—a few minutes’ flight from Cuba, less than an hour from Miami—possessed more banks than hotels, more financial offices than brothels, more citizens in business suits than beach wear.

  Yet the beaches were lovely, Joanna thought as she and Lev strolled along the concrete walk from her hotel to the restaurant where she had been told the meeting would take place. It’s a shame we won’t have the time to go snorkeling or enjoy the sunshine.