by Ben Bova
Wicksen seemed to recognize Doug’s suit and held up three gloved fingers. Doug tapped frequency three on his wrist panel.
“I’ve saved this freak for private conversations,” Wicksen’s voice said in his earphones.
“How’s it going?” Doug asked.
“Have they launched yet?”
“Not as of half an hour ago.” Then he added, “I would’ve gotten a call if they’d launched while I was riding out here.”
“We should have this kloodge put together in another ten or twelve hours.”
“Good.”
“But there won’t be any time to test it.”
“Then it better work right the first time,” Doug said.
He could sense Wicksen shaking his head inside his helmet. “Nothing works right the first time. Haven’t you ever heard of Murphy’s Law?”
Ignoring that, Doug asked, “How soon will you have the extra electrical power connected?”
Pointing past the mass driver’s long metal track, Wicksen answered, “The extra men you assigned me are doing that now. You’re going to have a temporary brown-out when we fire the gun.”
“Better than having a nuclear explosion inside the crater,” Doug said grimly.
Wicksen was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “Thanks for putting the construction crew to work for us.”
“The numbers that the safety people ran on their computer said that four meters of regolith rubble should protect you from the radiation blast—if they got the yield from the bomb right.”
“Whether it works or not, we all feel a lot better knowing we can sit in the shelter while we’re running the gun. Thanks a lot.”
“Nothing to it. The construction people have nothing else to do.”
Turning back toward the mass driver, Wicksen made a wistful little sigh. “I sure wish we had time to test this beast.”
“So do I,” Doug said fervently. “So do I.”
SAVANNAH
“But I must speak to Seigo Yamagata,” said Ibrahim al-Rashid. “It is most urgent.”
Rashid’s office had once belonged to Joanna Brudnoy, when she had been chairman of Masterson Corporation’s board of directors. Many was the time that she had summoned him into her sanctum and he had dutifully scurried to her in response. Once he had acceded to the chairmanship, however, Rashid had completely refurnished and redecorated the office. His desk was a sweeping, curving modernistic work of glass, his high-backed black leather chair custom-built to his measurements. The walls were adorned with tapestries from Persia and India, the windows were actually wall screens that could display any of thousands of scenes stored in his personal computer’s memory.
One of those screens now showed the image of a young Japanese man in an open-neck white shirt and tastefully checkered sports jacket, sitting at a desk in an office panelled in what appeared to be teak.
“Seigo Yamagata is not available at present,” he said in the homogenized American English of a television announcer. “I am Saito Yamagata, his eldest son. May I be of assistance to you?”
“I must speak to your father,” Rashid demanded.
The younger Yamagata smiled gently and said, “I regret to tell you once again that he is not available.”
Rashid felt as if he were talking to a brick wall. Or worse, a large soft pillow that absorbed his words without being moved by them in the slightest.
“This is important!”
“Of course it is,” Yamagata agreed readily. “That is why the staff has routed your call to me, rather than some underling.”
Rashid blinked with surprise. “You mean that you are in charge?”
His face going serious, the young man replied, “My father left instructions that you are to be received by his personal representative and no one else. That personal representative is me.”
Sinking back in his cushioned leather chair, Rashid recognized the oriental manner of stonewalling: polite, gracious, accommodating, but stonewalling just the same.
“How may I help you?” Saito Yamagata asked solicitously.
Bowing to the inevitable, Rashid said, through gritted teeth, “I have received information that among the Peacekeeper troops marching on Moonbase there is a special contingent of Yamagata suicide bombers who intend to blow up Moonbase.”
Yamagata’s brows rose a couple of millimeters.
“Destroying Moonbase is idiotic!” Rashid snapped, unable to contain his temper any longer. “Our entire operation, my whole understanding with your father, depends on Moonbase providing helium-three for your fusion generators. How can they provide anything if the base is blown to bits?” He fairly shouted the question.
Saito Yamagata’s expression had gone from polite interest to mild surprise to the absolute blank face of a man who has much to hide.
“Is your information trustworthy?” he asked softly.
“I have my sources both in United Nations headquarters and the Peacekeepers’ chain of command.”
“I see.”
“This is a betrayal of our understanding,” Rashid said harshly. “It also destroys the very thing that your father wants so badly—Moonbase.”
The young man nodded. “The suicide bombers are not Yamagata employees. They are volunteers from the Bright New Sun, an organization of fanatics that is allied with your own New Morality movement.”
“Then how are they allowed to be with the Peacekeepers? Who permitted them to come to Nippon One?”
“My father accepted their…” Yamagata searched for the right word, “…their help, most reluctantly. You must understand that even in Japan, religious zealotry is a very powerful force.”
“But you’re going to allow them to destroy Moonbase!”
Yamagata smiled thinly. “Not at all. My father is not stupid. He bowed to the pressures of the Bright New Sun and allowed them to add a squad of kamikazes to the Peacekeeper force. But they will not be permitted to damage Moonbase. The Peacekepers will take the base and there will be no need for suicide bombers.”
Rashid closed his eyes for a few moments, trying hard to think it all through.
“Suppose,” he said at last,’that the Peacekeepers fail to take Moonbase.”
“Impossible,” said Yamagata.
“They drove off the first attack, didn’t they?”
Yamagata smiled again. “This time there are three hundred troops, armed with missiles and heavy weapons. A nuclear bomb will knock out Moonbase’s electrical supply. This time they will not fail.”
“But those people at Moonbase are very clever,” Rashid insisted. “Suppose they stop the Peacekeepers?”
With a slight shrug, Yamagata said, “Then there will be no option except allowing the kamikazes to blow up as much of Moonbase as they can.”
“But that is lunacy!”
“A clever play on words,” the young man said, although his expression showed no humor.
“You can’t let them blow up Moonbase!” Rashid yelled.
“The forces are in motion,” said Yamagata. “How they will play out remains to be seen. Even if Moonbase is entirely destroyed, it can be rebuilt.”
“But… but—”
“Patience is a virtue, Mr Rashid. Yamagata Industries will receive the U.N.’s mandate to operate Moonbase, no matter what condition the base may be in when the fighting is finished. If necessary, we will rebuild it. The important thing is that Moonbase will be in our hands.”
It was not until that instant that Rashid realized he had put his future into the hands of ruthless men.
Only a few miles away, Joanna paced restlessly through the living room of her home.
“A new exercise regime?” Lev asked, stretched out on the big sofa across from the unused fireplace.
“How can you just sit there?” she blurted. “The Peacekeepers have already started their march to Alphonsus.”
Her husband made a wry face. “What can we do about it? The decisions are in Doug’s hands. Working ourselves into heart seizures
won’t help.”
“If only we could get there…”
“And give Doug two more useless people to worry about?”
She whirled and rushed toward him. “Lev, call him. Talk to him. Make him understand that he’s got to surrender! He can’t fight the Peacekeepers! They’ll kill everyone in Moonbase.”
Slowly, like a weary old man, Lev swung his legs off the sofa and sat up. He grasped Joanna’s wrist and pulled her down onto the cushion beside him.
“Listen to me, dear one. Doug understands the situation as well as we do, or better. He knows what he can do to defend the base—”
“Against missiles and nuclear bombs? You saw the news broadcast!”
Lev put a finger on her lips, silencing her for the moment.
“It isn’t our decision to make,” he said softly. “If I called him, not only would it distract him from the thousands of vital things he must think about, but I would end up agreeing with him—victory or death!”
Joanna stared at him as if he had gone mad. “Victory or… what are you saying?”
“Doug believes in Moonbase with all his soul,” Lev replied. “To him, it is his world, his life. He won’t want to live in a world without Moonbase.”
“No,” Joanna said, feeling weak with shock. “That can’t be. Doug can come back here. He can live with us. I’ll protect him, guard him…” Her voice faded into silence.
Lev shook his head. “Not all the fanatics belong to the New Morality, my darling. In his own very rational way, your son is a fanatic, too. That’s what it takes to fight hopeless odds.”
Joanna sank back into the sofa, stunned with the realization that Lev understood Doug better than she did.
And in the security office in the servants’ wing of the house, Jack Killifer leaned over his partner’s shoulder, grinning at the camera display of the Brudnoys in their living room.
Rodriguez glanced up at Killifer. “You ought to be in the kitchen. That’s your post, not here.”
Killifer grinned at him. “The entertainment’s better in here.”
MOONBASE
“There they are.”
Doug stared at the smart wall display in Jinny Anson’s office. Three columns of tracked vehicles had come up over the horizon and were moving majestically across the barren plain of Mare Nubium, churning up plumes of dust from the regolith. He realized that the dust had lain there undisturbed for billions of years. No, not really undisturbed, he reminded himself. Meteroids fell into the regolith constantly, adding to it, grinding it up, creating the dust that the cleated tracks of the Peacekeeper force were now violating.
The cameras atop Mount Yeager and two other peaks in the Alphonsus ringwall showed the approaching attackers clearly. Ahead of the middle column rode a smaller tractor, clean white except for a blue patch on its side.
“Can we get a close-up of that lead vehicle?” he asked quietly.
Anson worked her keyboard and the view zoomed in on the first tractor. The blue square was the U.N. emblem: a polar projection map of Earth on a sky-blue background, surrounded by a pair of olive branches.
Doug snorted with disdain. Olive branches. The symbol of peace. Leading three columns of soldiers and weaponry devoted to conquering Moonbase.
“We’d better get down to the control center,” Anson said. Her voice was hushed, strained, just as Doug’s.
“Right,” he said tightly.
Robert T. Wicksen got the news in his helmet earphones.
Automatically he looked across the crater floor toward Wodjohowitcz Pass. From where the mass driver stood, the pass appeared as little more than a dimple in the ring of rounded smooth mountains.
“What about the missile at L-1?” he asked, his voice shaking just slightly.
“Still sitting there,” came the voice from the control center.
Wicksen puffed out a relieved breath. “Keep me informed, please.”
“Will do.”
Clicking to the suit-to-suit frequency, Wicksen called out. “Listen up, people. The Peacekeeper troops are coming across Mare Nubium. The balloon will be going up very soon now.”
A dead silence greeted his warning. None of his exhausted team had a word to say.
Vince Falcone was swearing under his breath, but his mut-terings were loud enough for one of his technicians to ask, “Repeat, please. I didn’t get it.”
“You don’t want it,” Falcone said into his helmet microphone.
He and six picked assistants were trying to spread the smart foamgel across the narrowest portion of Wodjohowitcz Pass from storage canisters on the backs of the tractors they were driving. The work was slow, tedious, and made exasperatingly difficult by the fact that the gel tended to clot in the hoses instead of flowing smoothly, as the chemists had promised.
When the clotting problem had first surfaced, hours earlier, Falcone had told his people merely to increase the pressure on the nitrogen gas they were using to force the gel out of the storage tanks. But nitrogen was rare and precious on the Moon, and Falcone quickly saw that they weren’t going to have enough to do the job. He had originally wanted to use oxygen for the pressure gas, it was plentiful and cheap, but the chemists had worried that oxygen would react with the gel and change its chemical properties too much.
“Helium would be best,” the chief chemist had mused. “If only we had enough helium…”
So they had settled on nitrogen, raiding the life support backup supplies for two dozen tanks of it. And now it wasn’t doing the job.
Time and again, Falcone and his cohorts had to stop their tractors and physically clean out the jammed hoses with wire brushes that the chemists had provided them.
“Everything in chemistry comes down to plumbing,” Falcone muttered to himself. “Might as well be cleaning a goddamned latrine.”
A voice crackled in his earphones. “What I don’t understand is why nobody’s hardening the microwave antennas against radiation.”
Falcone looked up from his work and tried to identify the questioner as his voice continued, “I mean, like what good is this goop gonna do if the antennas are knocked out by the nuke’s radiation pulse?”
Newman, Falcone decided. He never could see past his friggin’ nose. “What happens if Wix’s smart guys don’t stop the nuke?” he demanded.
For a moment no one replied, then Newman said, “The warhead goes off above the crater floor, right?”
“And what happens then?”
“Uh… it knocks out the solar farms.”
“And where do the antennas get their electricity?”
“From the… oh, yeah, I get it. If the nuke goes off the antennas are dead anyway, right?”
“So there’s no sense sending anybody up to the top of Yeager to harden the antennas. Capisce?’
No response, although Falcone thought he heard stifled giggling from somebody.
A few minutes later his earphones chimed, so he dropped his brush and let the kinked hose fall gently to the ground as he tapped the keypad on his wrist.
A comm tech’s voice announced, “Peacekeeper vehicles are in sight, crossing Mare Nubium.”
“How long before they reach the pass?” he asked.
“Unknown. The thinking here is that they’ll stop and camp at the foot of the ringwall until the nuke from L-1 hits.”
Grunting an inarticulate reply, Falcone arched his back slightly and looked through his visor up to the top of Mount Yeager, where the microwave transmitters stood. For the first time he realized that this entire ‘blue goo’ business was totally untested.
Christ, I hope it works, he said to himself. If that nuke isn’t stopped by Wicksen’s zap gun, the microwave transmitters’ll be knocked out and all our work will have gone for nothing.
And, he added as he bent stiffly to pick up the jammed hose again, we got a damned good chance of still being out here and getting fried to a crisp by the mother-humpin’ nuke.
The control center was changed. The same hushed intensity, the sa
me low-key lighting, the same hum of murmuring voices and purring electronic machines. Yet the air crackled now; the very smell of the control center was different: nervous, sweaty. It wasn’t fear that Doug sensed from the technicians monitoring their consoles, so much as a focused motivation, anxiety masked by the duties of the moment.
Jinny Anson slipped into an unoccupied chair next to the U-shaped set of communications consoles, while Doug paced slowly through the big chamber, walking behind the seated technicians, glancing at each individual display screen. On one side of the room glowed the huge schematic display of Moonbase’s systems. The opposite wall showed camera views of the approaching Peacekeeper armada and the spacecraft hovering around the L-1 space station.
Doug completed his circuit of the center and returned to Anson’s chair.
“Everything we can do, we’re doing,” he said.
Anson looked up at him. “It’s sweaty palms time now.”
Looking at the view of the approaching Peacekeeper vehicles, Doug said, “The longer they take, the better it is for us. Time’s on our side.”
“For now,” said Anson.
He nodded. “Better put out an announcement that all personnel without specific tasks for the defense of the base should meet in The Cave.”
Anson hiked her brows. “Not stay in their quarters?”
“No, get them into The Cave. Food’s there, and it’ll be easier to deal with them if they’re all together instead of strung out in their individual quarters. There might be fighting in the corridors; I don’t want anybody hurt unnecessarily.”
“Collateral damage,” Anson muttered, turning to the console keyboard.
The editing booth felt hot and stuffy. Edith sat at the big board, watching the array of display screens half-surrounding her, showing views of the approaching Peacekeepers and the spacecraft at L-1.
“The first shot in this battle has already been fired,” she was saying into the microphone that sent her words Earthside. “The U.N. Peacekeepers knocked out a reconnaissance satellite that Moonbase had placed in orbit to observe the Peacekeepers’ movements.”