Moonrise gt-5

by Ben Bova

  As he walked toward the waiting limousine, suit jacket slung over one arm, the ground suddenly shook with a growling thunder that drowned out all the other sounds. Turning, Paul saw a Clippership rising majestically on its eight bellowing rocket engines, lifting up into the sky, a tapered smooth cone of plastic and metal that looked like the most beautiful work of art Paul had ever seen.

  He knew every line of the Clippership, every detail of its simple, elegant design, every component that fit inside it A simple conical shape with rockets at the flat bottom end, the Clippership rose vertically and would land vertically, settling down softly on those same rocket exhaust plumes. Between takeoff and landing, it could cross intercontinental distances in forty-five minutes or less. Or make the leap into orbit in a single bound. Everything seemed to stop at the airport, all other sounds and movement suspended as the Clippership rose, thundering slowly at first and then faster anil faster, dwindling now as the mighty bellow of its rockets washed over Paul like a physical force, wave after wave of undulating awesome noise thai blanketed every frequency the human ear could detect anc much more. Paul grinned and suppressed the urge to fling a salute at the departing Clippership. The overpowering sound of those rockets hit most people with the force of a religious experience. Paul had converted four members of the board of directors to supporting the Clippership project by the simple tactic of bringing them out to watch a test launch. And hear it And feel it.

  Laughing to himself, Paul ducked into the limousine dooi that the chauffeur was holding open. He wondered where the Clippership was heading. There were daily flights out of New York to Tokyo, Sydney, Buenos Aires and Hong Kong, he knew. Soon they would be adding more cities. Anywhere on Earth in forty-five minutes or less.

  The Clipperships had pulled Masterson Aerospace out of impending bankruptcy. But Paul knew that he had pushed for them, fought for them, was willing to kill for them not merely because they made Masterson the leader in the new era of commercial transport. He went to the brink of the cliff and beyond for the Clipperships because they could fly into orbit in onehop, and do it more cheaply than any other rocket vehicle. The Clipperships would help to make Moonbase economically viable. That was why Paul rammed them past Masterson’s board of directors — including the late Gregory Masterson II.

  The Clipperships would help Moonbase to break into the black, if Greg Masterson III didn’t kill Moonbase first.

  But as the cool, quiet limousine made its way out of the airport and onto the throughway, crowded with the world’s most aggressive drivers, Paul realized that the Clipperships meant even more to him than Moonbase’s possible salvation. He had made the Clippers a success, true enough. But they had made a success of him, as well. Paul’s skin was no darker than a swarthy Sicilian’s, but he was a black ex-astronaut when he started at Masterson, all those years ago. With the accent on the black. The success of the Clipperships had elevated him to the exalted level of being the black manager of Masterson’s space operations division, in Savannah, and a black member of the board of directors.

  And the black lover of the dead boss’s wife, he added wryly to himself.

  Paul had never liked New York. As his limo headed through the swarming traffic along the bumpy, potholed throughway toward the bridge into Manhattan, Paul thought that New York wasn’t a city, it was an oversized frenetic anthill, always on the verge of explosion. Even twenty years after the so-called Renaissance Laws, the place was still overcrowded, noisy, dangerous.

  Electricity powered all the cars, trucks and buses bound for Manhattan. Old-style fossil-fueled vehicles were not allowed through the tunnels or over the bridges that led into the island. That had cleaned the air a good bit, although hazy clouds of pollution still drifted in from New Jersey, across the Hudson.

  Police surveillance cameras hung on every street corner and miniaturized unmanned police spotter planes were as common in the air as pigeons. Vendors, even kids who washed windshields when cars stopped for traffic lights, had to display their big yellow permits or be rousted by the cops who rode horseback in knots of threes and fives through the crowded streets.

  Yet the streets still teemed with pitchmen hawking stolen goods, kids exchanging packets of drugs, prostitutes showing their wares. All that the Renaissance Laws had accomplished, as far as Paul could see, was to drive violent crime off the streets. There was still plenty of illicit activity, but it was organized and mostly non-violent. You might get propositioned or offered anything from the latest designer drugs to the latest designer fashions, fresh off a hijacked truck. But you wouldn’t get mugged. Probably.

  Still, the limo had to thread its way across the ancient bridges and along the narrow, jampacked streets. The windshield got washed — partially — four different times, and the chauffeur had to slip a city-issued token through his barely-opened window to the kids who Splashed the brownish water onto the car.

  He must use up the whole tank of windshield cleaner every trip, Paul thought as the limo inched downtown, wipers flapping away.

  At one intersection a smiling trio of women tapped on Paul’s window, bending low enough to show they were wearing nothing beneath their loose blouses. Kids, Paul realized. Beneath their heavy makeup they couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. A trio of mounted policemen watched from their horses, not twenty yards away.

  Paul shook his head at the whores. I’ve gotten this far in life without killing myself, he thought. The girls looked disappointed. So did the cops. Then the traffic light went green and the limo pulled away.

  By the time he got to the corporate offices in the Trade Towers, Paul needed a drink. The walnut-panelled board room had a bar and a spread of finger foods set up in the back, but neither a bartender nor waitress had shown up yet. Paul did not see any tequila. He settled for a beer, instead.

  Paul had always been one of the early ones at board meetings, but this time apparently he was the first. The opulent room was empty, except for him. Glancing at his wristwatch, Paul saw that the meeting was scheduled to start in less than fifteen minutes. Usually more than half the directors would be already here, milling about, exchanging pleasantries or whispering business deals to one another, drinking and noshing.

  Where is everybody? Paul wondered.

  He paced the length of the long conference table, saw mat each place was neatly set with its built-in computer screen and keyboard.

  He went to the long windows at the head of the conference room and gazed out at the towers of Manhattan, thinking how much better it was on the Moon, where all a man had to worry about was a puncture in his suit or getting caught on the surface during a solar flare. He craned his neck to see JFK, hoping to catch another Clippership takeoff or, even more spectacular, see one landing on its tail jets.

  “Paul.”

  Startled, he whirled around to see Joanna standing in the doorway, looking cool and beautiful in a beige miniskьted business suit. He hadn’t seen her since the day of her husband’s suicide.

  “How are you?” he asked, hurrying toward her. “How’ve you been? I wanted—”

  “Later,” she said, raising one hand to stop him from embracing her. “Business first”

  “Where’s everybody? The meeting’s scheduled to start in ten minutes.”

  “It’s been pushed back half an hour,” Joanna said, “Nobody told me.”

  She smiled coolly at him. “I asked Brad for a half-hour delay. There’s something I want to discuss with you before the meeting starts.”

  “What?”

  Joanna went to the conference table and perched on its edge, crossing her long legs demurely. “We’re going to elect a new president and CEO,” she said. , Paul nodded. “Greg. I know.”

  “You don’t sound happy about it”

  “Why should I be?”

  “Who else would you recommend?” she asked, with that same serene smile.

  “Greg doesn’t know enough to run a corporation,” Paul said, keeping his voice low. But the urgency came th
rough. “Okay, we’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, I know, but his father nearly drove this company into the ground.”

  “And you saved it.”

  Paul felt uncomfortable saying it, but he agreed. “I had to practically beat your husband over the head before he saw the light”

  Every major airline in the world began clamoring for Masterson Clipperships, once Paul pushed the project dirough its development phase. Yet Gregory Masterson II had almost ruined Masterson Aerospace, despite the Clippership’s success. Maybe because of it, Paul how thought.

  And his son was eager to follow in his father’s mistaken footsteps.

  “He wants to shut down Moonbase,” Joanna said quietly. “He told me so.”

  “You can’t let him do that!”

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “It’s the future of the company — of the nation, the whole goddamned human race!”

  She sat on the edge of the conference table in silence for a moment, her eyes probing Paul. Then Joanna said, “The first order of business in today’s meeting will be to elect me to the board to fill Gregory’s seat.”

  “And then they’ll elect young Greg president and CEO,” Paul said, surprised at how much bitterness showed in his voice.

  “They’ll have to have nominations first”

  “Brad’s going to nominate him.”

  “Yes. But I intend to nominate you,” said Joanna.

  He blinked with surprise. A flame of sudden hope flared through him. Then he realized, To show there’s no nepotism.”

  Joanna shook her head. “I know my son better than you do, Paul. He’s not ready to head this corporation. He’d ruin it and himself, both.”

  “You mean you really want me to be CEO?”

  “I want it enough,” Joanna said, slipping off the table to stand before him, “that I want us to get married.”

  Paul’s insides jolted. “Married?”

  Joanna smiled again and twined her arms around Paul’s neck. “I like being the wife of the CEO. I just didn’t like the CEO very much. With you, it will be different, won’t it? Very different”

  Paul’s mind was racing. CEO. Married. She doesn’t love me, not really, but if we’re married and I’m CEO we can keep Moonbase going until it starts making a profit but she’s probably only doing this so Greg can grow up some and then she’ll want to turn the corporation over to him sooner or later.

  Joanna kissed him lightly on the lips. “Don’t you think marriage is a good idea? Like a corporate merger, only much more fun.”

  “You’d marry me?” Paul asked.

  “If you ask me.”

  “And nominate me for CEO?”

  “You’ll be elected if I nominate you.”

  She’s right Paul realized. If she doesn’t back her own son the rest of the board will turn away from him. Hell, I’m one of the corporation’s leaders. Saved the outfit from bankruptcy. Making them all rich with the Clippership profits. Half of ’em would be afraid to vote against a black man; afraid it’d look like discrimination. And I could protect Moonbase from Greg and Brad. I could keep them from shutting it down.

  “Okay,” he said, surprised at the tightness in his throat. “Will you marry me?”

  Joanna laughed out loud. “How romantic!”

  “I mean — well, will you?”

  “Of course I will, Paul. You’re the only man in the world for me.”

  Paul kissed her, knowing that neither one of them had used the word love.

  MARE NUBIUM

  The edge of the sunlit day came up to meet Paul with the inevitability of a remorseless universe. One moment he was ь shadow, the next in full glaring sunlight. The sky overhead was still black but now the glare reflecting from the ground washec away the few stars that he had been able to see before.

  A pump somewhere in his backpack gurgled, and the air fan in his helmet whined more piercingly. He thought he heard metal or plastic groan under the sudden heat load.

  Paul looked down and, sure enough, the ground was breaking into sparkles of light, like a whole field of jewels glittering for hundreds of meters in front of him. The sunshine triggered phosphorescence in the minerals scattered in the regolith’s surface layer. The effect disappeared after a few minutes, but plenty of the earliest workers on the Moon had actually thought they’d found fields of diamonds: the Moon’s equivalent of fool’s gold.

  There was real wealth in the regolith, but it wasn’t gold or diamonds. Oxygen. The opiate of the masses. Habit forming substance; take one whiff and you’re hooked for life.

  Cut it out, Stavenger, he railed at himself. You’re getting geeky in your old age. Straighten up and concentrate on what you’re doing.

  He plodded doggedly ahead, but his mind wandered to the first time his eyes had opened to the grandeur of the Moon. At the planetarium, he remembered. Couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven. The videos of astronauts walking on the Moon, jumping in low-gravity exhilaration while the lecturer told us that one day we kids could go to the Moon and continue the exploration.

  Levitt, Paul remembered. Old Dr. Levitt. He knew how to open a kid’s mind. The bug bit me then, Paul realized. He had gone up to the lecturer after the show and asked if he could stay and see it again. A round-faced man with a soft voice and big glasses that made his face look like an owl’s, Dr. Levitt turned out to be the planetarium’s director. He took Paul to his own office and spent the afternoon showing him books and tapes about space exploration.

  Paul’s father was away at sea most of the time. His classmates at school were either white or black, and each side demanded his total loyalty. Caught between them, Paul had become a loner, living in his own fantasy world until the bigger dream of exploring the Moon engulfed him. He haunted the planetarium, devoured every book and tape he could find, grew to be Dr. Levitt’s valued protege and, eventually, when he reached manhood, his friend. It was Lev who secured a scholarship for Paul at MIT, who paved the way for his becoming an astronaut, who broke down and wept when Paul actually took off from Cape Canaveral for the first time.

  Paul was on the Moon when the old man died, quietly, peacefully, the way he had lived: writing a letter of recommendation for another poor kid who needed a break.

  I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Lev, Paul knew. Even if I die here, I’ll still owe him for everything good that’s happened in my life.

  He knew it was psychological more than physical, yet with the Sun pounding on him Paul felt as if he had stepped from an air-conditioned building onto a baking hot parking lot. Some parking lot, he told himself as he pushed on. The dusty, gray regolith looked like an unfinished blacktop job, pockmarked and uneven. Mare Nubium, he thought. Sea of Clouds. The nearest body of water is a quarter-million miles away.

  Still, it did look a little like the surface of the sea, the way the ground undulated and rolled. A sea that was frozen into rock. I guess it was a sea once, a sea of red-hot lava when the meteoroid that carved out this basin slammed into the Moon.

  How long ago? Three-and a half billion years? Give or take a week.

  He plodded on, one booted foot after another, trying not to look at the thermometer on his forearm displays.

  His mind started to drift again.

  I never told her that I loved her, Paul remembered. Not then Guess, I was too surprised. Marry me and I’ll make you CEO She never said she loved me, either. It was a business deal.

  He almost laughed. Marriage is one way of ending a love affair, I guess.

  But Greg didn’t laugh about it. Not then, not ever. I don’ think I’ve ever seen him smile, even. Not our boy Greg.

  BOARD MEETING

  The other board members filtered into the meeting room in twos and threes. Greg Masterson walked in alone, his suit a funereal black, the expression on his face bleak. He was a handsome man of twenty-eight, tall and slim, his face sculpted in planes and hollows like a Rodin statue. He had his father’s dark, brooding looks: thick dark hair down to his
collar and eyes like twin gleaming chunks of jet.

  But where his father had been a hell-raiser, Greg had always been a quiet, somber introvert. As far as Paul knew, he might still be a virgin. He had never heard a breath of gossip about this serious, cheerless young man.

  Reluctantly, feeling guilty, Paul made his way across the board room to Greg.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” he said, extending his hand.

  “I bet you are,” Greg said, keeping his hands at his sides. He was several inches taller than Paul, though Paul was more solidly built.

  Before Paul could think of anything else to say, Bradley Arnold bustled up to Greg and took him by the arm.

  “This way, Greg,” said the board chairman. “I want you to sit up beside me today.”

  Greg went sullenly with the chairman of the board. Arnold was the whitest man Paul had ever seen. He looked like an animated wad of dough, short, pot-bellied, wearing a ridiculous silver-gray toupe that never seemed to sit right on his head; it looked so artificial it was laughable. Eagerly bustling, he led Greg up to the head of the table and sat the younger man on his right Arnold’s face was round, flabby, with hyperthyroid bulging frog’s eyes.

  Sixteen men and three women, including Joanna, sat around the long polished table. Paul took a chair across the table from Joanna, where he could see her face. The symbolism of Arnold’s seating Greg next to him was obvious. Paul waited to see how the board would react to Joanna’s less-than-symbolic nomination.

  Arnold played the meeting for all the drama he could squeeze out of it. He began by asking for a moment of silence to honor the memory of their late president and CEO. As Paul bowed his head, he glanced at Melissa Han, sitting down near the bottom of the table.

  Silky smooth, long-legged Melissa, with skin the color of milk chocolate and a fierce passion within her that drove her mercilessly both at work and play. Most board members thought of her as an affirmative action ‘twofer:’ black and female. Or a’threefer,” since she represented the unions among the corporation’s work force. Paul knew her as a fiery bed partner who was furious with him for dropping her in favor of Joanna.