Kevin reached the tankage complex. It was dark among the long hydrogen tanks. "Ellen," he called.
"I see you," she said. "I think he's straight ahead of you."
"Get away from me," Pacifico screamed. "I'll do it, I swear I will!"
Kevin moved further into the tankage complex. Pacifico's voice came from nowhere and everywhere; it was weird, hearing him but being unable to locate him by sound. Kevin wondered if the lawyer had seen him. He saw no one. Not Ellen, not Pacifico. "You idiot, all the tanks are connected together," Kevin said. "If you puncture one of them, you'll let all the fuel escape."
"I don't believe that," Pacifico said. "It wouldn't make sense as a design. Meteoroids—"
"I'm afraid what Senecal is telling you is the truth," Seymour's voice interjected. "The tanks don't connect normally, but when we make preparation for using the main engines we have to interconnect them. Otherwise the fuel would be burned out of one tank at a time and we'd get off balance."
That makes sense, Kevin thought. I wonder if it's true? The important thing is to get Pacifico talking and keep him occupied until we find him. And then what? Kevin fingered the knife in his pouch. That seemed drastic—
"Kev! I've got him! Aft of where you are and around clockwise sixty degrees!" Ellen's voice came in panting gasps.
Kevin moved in the direction she'd indicated. He saw Ellen and the lawyer struggling like clumsy wrestlers, their bulky suits preventing either of them from getting a decisive hold.
"One minute to burn," Seymour said. "Can you get into the airlock?"
" 'Fraid not," Ellen said. "Maybe we'll be all right here among the tanks—" Her voice rose. "Kevin!" she shouted in terror.
Both of them had moved away from the ship. Somehow they'd both lost their holds on the ship while trying to fight each other, and now they drifted free, a few feet away, unable to get back.
"My God! Help!" Pacifico screamed.
"Burn in forty seconds," Seymour said.
"You can't!" Pacifico screamed. "It's inhuman! You'll kill us!"
"Can't delay," Seymour said.
And he means that, Kevin thought. Not that Ellen would want him to delay. The Belt operation means too much to her. It's up to me, now. He dove forward, through the tankage. His months of practice in somersaulting through the ship let him get through the tanks in a clean arc.
He caught the ladder at the last possible moment, and reached out toward Ellen. "Grab hold!" he called.
She reached for him, missed by inches. He stretched but couldn't catch her.
"Ten seconds," Seymour announced.
"We're drifting free of the ship!" Pacifico screamed. "You can't do this, you can't—"
Kevin grabbed the safety line on his belt and hooked it to the ladder, then, letting the reel run free, leaped out toward Ellen. He grabbed her with both hands, then grunted with relief.
"You damn fool," she said. "You'll kill yourself—"
"Three. Two. One. Ignite," Seymour said.
The ship's engines started. There was no sound and no flame. Hydrogen was pumped from the tanks and into the nuclear pile on its sting at the end of the ship. The nuclear reactor heated the hydrogen and forced it back through nozzles. The ship drove forward at a tenth of a gravity.
Kevin felt Ellen as a sudden dead weight. He threw in the stop on his belt reel, and they dangled from the ladder, with nothing holding them but the thin nylon line. Pacifico, still screaming, vanished behind as the ship drove forward.
As the ship moved, suddenly they and the safety line formed a pendulum. They felt the acceleration as they would a tenth of Earth's gravity as centrifugal force moved them until they swung back and forth in a small arc directly beneath the ladder. Kevin painfully reached up, still holding Ellen's hand with his. She wasn't heavy, only a tenth of what her weight would have been on Earth, but Kevin wasn't used to any gravity. He held tightly, irrationally afraid that the thin nylon line wouldn't hold their combined weight of fifty pounds. He couldn't quite reach the ladder.
"Help! You can't leave me here to die in space! Help!" Pacifico screamed in terror. The ship moved inexorably away from him. Within thirty seconds he would be nearly half a kilometer behind, doomed to the loneliest death possible, alone in a river of stars and the emptiness of space.
"Can you let me down a little further?" Ellen asked. "I can almost reach one of the fuel pipes—"
"No hands." Kevin said. "I've—"
"Here. I've got you," Ellen said. "Now let us down a meter or so."
"How can you be so damned calm?" Kevin snarled.
He let go of her with one hand and reached the ratchet control on his belt line. He let the safety line run free for a second, then locked it again. They both fell toward the aft end of the ship, then were brought up short by the line. The thin nylon held easily.
"There. I've got it," Ellen said. "I've got my safety line clipped to the pipe support. Here—let out more of your line, and I'll pull you over."
Kevin did as he was told. Seconds later he had a purchase on one of the fuel pipes. He looked up—the forward end of the ship was up now, and that was strange, to have a definite up and down. The pipe supports formed a ladder of sorts. It wouldn't be hard to climb back to the regular ladder.
"I guess we're safe," Kevin said.
"Thank God," Seymour said. "You're sure?"
"Yes," Kevin said.
They could still hear Pacifico's screams. His signal was growing weaker as he fell farther and farther behind.
"Pacifico," Ellen called. "Who hired you to sabotage the ship?"
"I didn't do it," Pacifico's voice said. "You've got to come back for me! It's not too late, I can see you, please, my God. Please, please come back for me, I didn't do it, I only wanted to stop this mad—"
His voice faded in and out now. "Come back. Please come back, you can find me, please . . ."
Kevin felt Ellen shudder beside him. He put his arm across her shoulders and felt her trembling. "It's all right," he said. "We're all right now—"
She didn't answer. After a while she pointed up toward the ladder. They began to climb. It seemed to take forever to reach the airlock. They thought they heard the lawyer's screams, ever fainter, the whole time.
Chapter Twelve
The office was Aeneas MacKenzie's only real luxury. It had a real window of thick quartz that overlooked the barren landscape of the Moon, and beyond that the glory of Earth hung suspended in black velvet. He often sat at his desk and stared out at the fragile Earth, a small blue world wrapped in white wispy clouds. He had lived on the Moon for twenty years and would never return to the world of his birth; but he loved Earth, and he missed her.
So little time, he thought. So little time until—he broke off the thought, because he had a vivid imagination, and it would be all too easy to see the fragile Earth covered with pinpoints of brilliant light, lights that would shine more brightly than the Sun until they faded and the ugly mushroom clouds rose through Earth's clean garments.
It would be easy, too, to imagine that he could see beneath the clouds, watch men and women working their lives out to no purpose but continued misery and starvation. That was life now for all too many; in a few years the globe might be covered with people who had nothing left to hope for. Desperation might tempt them to anything.
There were faint sounds in the office: the whine of the air system, the faint rumblings of his miners digging into the lunar regolith, other sounds of construction and expansion; the sounds of success, and they mocked him. The future of Diana Base, and of Earth, did not depend on lunar miners. It depended on hard-eyed men in dark suits who sat in Zurich boardrooms; it depended on the man in the Oval Office in Washington, and another man in the Kremlin, another in Kiev, and a dozen scattered across the Middle East; but mostly it depended on events more than a hundred million miles away, and over those Aeneas had no control.
His reverie was interrupted by a voice in his head. It made no sound, and if there had been an
yone in the room with him, they would not have heard it; the implanted transceiver fed directly into his nervous system, and took its instructions from his thoughts. He had lived with the implant for so long that it was part of him. He would have missed it if it did not work; but he had never liked it.
"THERE IS A MESSAGE FROM CERES," the voice said.
"IS SHE SAFE?" Aeneas thought. It was a ridiculous question; not even the base central computer had been given enough data to know who he meant.
"CANCEL THAT QUESTION. HOW IS THE MESSAGE SIGNED?"
"HOT LIPS."
Thank God, Aeneas thought. He was careful not to think that into the computer. His prayers were not meant for a machine, "I WANT THE FULL TEXT AS A PRINTOUT," he ordered. It would take a little longer, but he would rather read it than hear it. "DECODE AND PRINT. KEEP NO COPY IN MEMORY."
"ACKNOWLEDGED."
"ASK LAURIE JO TO COME TO ME."
—Pause—"DONE."
And now there was nothing to do but wait. He leaned back in the chair, smoothing his shock of white-gray hair with slender fingers. Even in Luna's low gravity he felt his years. He had been forty when he came to the Moon, and even though Lunar gravity did not age men as much as Earth's did, there had been little rest in the last quarter century. Not for Aeneas MacKenzie. Presently he began to doze. Images formed in his mind.
Economists once thought there could never be a period of both inflation and high unemployment. They were wrong. In the last third of the Twentieth Century both were normal conditions. With millions out of work, governments tried to buy their way to prosperity through deficit financing. They printed bonds and certificates and paper money and more paper money, and soon they were all worthless. Wages and prices spiraled. People who had saved all their lives found their savings worth nothing, less than nothing, and simply to live had to turn for aid to governments that had ruined them in the first place. The governments had to find more and more money, and the printing presses were cheap. The results were predictable, but no less disastrous for being so.
The long struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union ended with complete western victory, but the United States, wealthy beyond the dreams of most of humanity, thought itself exhausted. Before 1940 Washington was a sleepy border town, of no great importance. From 1940 to the end of the century Washington expanded, in size and influence, until all roads led there, and all decisions were made there. The result was paralysis just when energy was needed.
All other Earth governments took in money and spent it on what seemed best to government planners; and all over the Earth there was stagnation, regulation, want in the midst of plenty. We all meant well, Aeneas thought. I meant well, and Greg did, at least at first, and everything we did was wrong. We did more harm than good. But we meant well. . . .
All the nations of Earth faced an impossible dilemma. There wasn't enough money to fund both technological research and welfare programs. Technological research was expensive and directly employed comparatively few people. Soon the science and research and space programs were cut back, cut again, cut once more. Meanwhile the anti-technology movements gained recruits. "Only One Earth." "Alternate Technology." "Ecology." Those slogans and a dozen like them became watchwords, and space programs, energy research, electronics research, all began to die.
For a while private industries continued research programs, but soon the governments, desperate for more funds to spend on popular programs, raised taxes so high that there was nothing left for risk investment. The companies cut back as had the governments; especially so as the consumer advocates forced the corporations to accept consumer representatives on their boards of directors, and the consumer representatives were almost universally dedicated against technology and technological "fixes."
Then the United States was rocked by a series of scandals. Watergate began it, but the scars from that had not healed before another scandal emerged, and another after that. The People's Alliance rose to displace the traditional political parties, and swept into Washington as an irresistible reform movement. Its leader, Greg Tolland, and his manager, Aeneas MacKenzie, were the most popular political figures of the century; but then MacKenzie, as Solicitor General of the United States, found the tentacles of the Equity Trust reached even into Greg Tolland's office, and MacKenzie was both implacable and incorruptible. The result was more loss of confidence, more disgust with democracy, more disillusionment among voters who now believed that the citizens could never control their government.
While the United States was paralyzed by scandals, and what had been the Soviet Union was rocked by nationalistic movements and civil wars within the former empire, a few international corporations banded together to create the first industrial satellites and the first laser-launching system. The heiress Laurie Jo Hansen built the Heimdall industrial satellite, and that proved so profitable that other companies first joined with Hansen Enterprises, then set up competing space industries. Based in Zurich and Singapore and Hong Kong and other places of refuge from taxation, the international corporations moved into space even as governments found themselves unable to do so.
Governments looked with envy on the high profits and great potential of space industries. Tolland's lieutenant, Aeneas MacKenzie, led the fight for U.S. takeover of the Hansen empire, ensnarling Hansen Enterprises in a web of legal problems, taxes, regulations, complexities; he might have ended with Hansen nationalized by the United States had not he found corruption in Tolland's staff, and been forced from his office by the President he had created. MacKenzie had to flee for his life, and he had no place to go but to his enemies. From Tolland's Washington MacKenzie went to Laurie Jo Hansen; and because he had known Laurie Jo many years before, and because she with the whole world knew that Aeneas MacKenzie's pledged word was worth more than his life, he became first her consort, then her prime minister, finally her partner.
Yet Tolland and the People's Alliance never forgot who had ruined Tolland's dreams of a country remade by whatever means he thought were needed; his agents had been relentless in pursuit, until Laurie Jo sold out most of her empire to found Diana Station, and took her minister-consort to the Moon. Not even the President of the United States could follow them there.
* * *
And by now no one is interested in killing us, Aeneas thought. Except Greg, and he has no real power. The People's Alliance protected him from the scandals, but the real leadership doesn't trust him. Not anymore.
The office door opened without warning and he swiveled quickly. After more than twenty years he loved the sight of her. He suspected the red hair was dyed now, but he had never asked and never would; and despite all the temptations of low gravity, she had kept her figure. Her smile lit the office.
"She's safe," Laurie Jo said.
"For a while."
"Can't you ever simply be happy without worrying about the future?" She did not wait for an answer. Instead she crossed the office quickly and sat in his lap. They kissed with the affection that comes only from long friendship and love. Then Aeneas opened a desk drawer, took out papers from the computer printer concealed there and began to read.
Although she desperately wanted to know what the message said, she did not read over his shoulder, but waited until he had finished the first sheet. He handed it to her without looking up and read the next. There were only two. Then he waited until she had finished.
"They're on Ceres," Laurie Jo said. "With the cargo safe."
"And someone tried to kill her. At least twice. Someone knows," Aeneas said. He cursed, softly. "I'm a fool. I underestimated the danger."
"She knew the risks," Laurie Jo said. "And who else could we trust with something this important?"
"It was a stupid plan. I should never have let her go."
Laurie Jo laughed. "Could you have stopped her?" she demanded. "No one could control us at her age, and she believes in this. You could not have stopped me when I was her age."
"God knows I couldn't."
&
nbsp; It had been so long ago. She'd been Laurie Jo Preston then, an orphan girl living alone under the guardianship of bankers and supported by trust funds. They'd met at UCLA when Aeneas was political manager for Greg Tolland. No one had ever heard of Greg Tolland then. The young Congressman, just beginning his meteoric career, was one of the founders of the tiny movement that would one day be the People's Alliance, but then it was nothing more than a dream shared by Tolland and Aeneas.
Aeneas and Laurie Jo Preston had two years. They lived together and hitchhiked across the nation, through Mexico and Baja. They sang and drank and made love and were happy with their dreams until her bankers came to tell her that her name was Hansen, not Preston, and that she had inherited one of the largest fortunes on Earth; then everything changed. "I couldn't control you, and I almost lost you forever," Aeneas said.
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