by Allen Steele
“Once he read the …? Jesus and Mary, what was the kid doing before they sent him up here, flying model rockets in his backyard?”
The pad supervisor looked at him irritably. “Now that you mention it, he’s got an NAR patch on his vest.” Casey tapped a finger against the National Association of Rocketry patch on the right sleeve of his jacket. “Just like this one.”
Mighty Joe grimaced. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Just get him to fix my damn ship, all right? That busline bothers me, and I gotta fly with it.” He paused, again watching the activity on the field. “Just tell me one thing. Is the Dreamer going to launch on time?”
Casey waited until he had monitored the securance of the fuel line against the side of the Collins. A moondog climbed a ladder on a landing gear strut to manually push its collar into position and lock it firmly into place; when he was done, he turned and gave Casey a thumbs-up from across the pad. The controller nodded, double-checked his computer screen to make sure the seal was airtight, then touched a couple of buttons on his board to start the pump cycle. “You’re go for launch,” he replied without looking at Young, “but your window doesn’t begin till fifteen-hundred. It’s been moved back.”
Mighty Joe took a deep breath and carefully counted to ten before he replied. He had a bad temper; everyone told him so, and he was trying to overcome a tendency to jump all over people. “May I ask,” he queried as politely as he could, “whatever the hell for?”
Casey didn’t say anything. He studiously watched the post-touchdown procedure until Joe laid a huge hand on his shoulder and squeezed just a little bit. Casey winced and testily shook off Mighty Joe’s paw. “Lay off, willya? It’s not my call. The new GM radioed MainOps just after they landed. He wants a general staff meeting in Mess at thirteen-hundred. We’re all supposed to be there in one hour. No exceptions. So that means you don’t launch till fifteen-hundred.”
“What the fuck?”
“Hell, I don’t know!” Casey snapped. “I’m just telling you what I heard. Anyone who doesn’t show gets their pay docked for the day.” He glanced over his shoulder at Young. “The best I can do is fifteen-hundred if I’m going to get you guys up without a scrub. I ran the flight-plan through the computer. You’ll still make the pickup with the Collins AOMV, no problem.”
“No problem.” Joe let out his breath, then balled his right fist in his left hand and cracked his knuckles. “No problem,” he repeated. “Okay.”
He nodded his head lazily and turned to saunter toward the open hatch of the pressurized passageway leading back to the main building. He waited until he heard Casey’s relieved sigh; then he turned back. “But remember,” he added. “I want a clean launch at fifteen-hundred. Got it? No holds, no scrubs. And I want that main busline fixed. Everything copacetic, right?”
“Uh-huh. Yeah. Right. You got it, Joe.”
“Delightful. I’m ever so fucking glad to hear it.” Mighty Joe bent low and turned his wide shoulders to squeeze through the hatch into the tunnel. Great, he thought. Nothing to do but sit around and beat off until launch-time.
If he had ever doubted it before, he didn’t doubt it now. The new GM was going to be nothing but trouble.
There was a portrait of Alfred E. Neuman, cut from the cover of an issue of Mad, taped to the door of the Lunar Resources lab. Below it was a handprinted sign: “The Usual Gang of Idiots,” with the names of the Descartes Station’s science staff listed underneath. Once there had been five names on the roster, but now there were only two: Susan Peterson, Ph.D., and Lewis Walker, M.D. The three other names had been crossed off the list.
The string of brown prayer beads made a soft, rhythmic snapping noise, like tiny castanets, as they moved through Monk Walker’s fingers: click … click … click … click … click … Butch Peterson usually found it a soothing background sound, like the random music of wind chimes tinkling in a summer breeze. It was the sound of Monk’s mind at work. Now the prayer beads sounded disturbed, restless. Butch stared for a few more moments at the raw data from the most recent local geological survey before she finally gave up. She swiveled her chair away from her desk terminal and stared at Monk Walker.
The chief physician was sitting on a stool next to the window, gazing out at the lunar plain. Windows in Subcomp A were rare; much of the base lay underground and most of the above-ground structures were buried by regolith, so space for windows had to be scalloped out from beneath the soil. They were lucky to have this one window in the science lab, and luckier still to have such a good view. The gentle slopes of Stone Mountain rose on the southeastern horizon, with the crescent Earth hanging overhead, but she sensed that he wasn’t really looking at the scenery. She looked at the small string of beads in his right hand and noted that they were moving outwards from his palm. In the Buddhist tradition it meant that the object of Monk’s meditation was external, outside of himself.
Butch had learned not to interrupt Walker’s meditations; if he wanted to speak, he would interrupt himself. No one else on the Moon received this kind of courtesy from Butch Peterson. Indeed, she itched to make some sort of smartass remark—Playing with yourself again? or Try chewing your nails, it’s quieter—but she deferentially kept her silence.
Monk’s gaze presently moved from the window to her, and the clicking of the beads paused as he raised a questioning eyebrow. “Yes?” he asked.
She smiled and shrugged slightly. “Penny for your thoughts?”
“I’m driving you crazy again? Sorry.” He considered her remark. “They’re probably not worth even a penny.”
“Naah. Your penny-ante thoughts are worth a nickel to anyone else’s.” Butch moved the mouse across the pad so that the cursor touched the SAVE function; then she tapped the button to close the file. Might as well, she thought. Can’t get a damn thing done today, anyway. “How about some tea?”
She stood up from her chair and arched her back as she asked the question, wrapping her arms behind her and letting her head tip back, feeling her breasts stretch against her washed-out Royals sweatshirt. A standard modeling pose, remembered from the old days, but it felt good. A sexy stretch; the grand old dames at the Ford Agency would have been proud. If she had done this outside the privacy of the lab, at least seventy-five guys in Descartes—not counting the small handful of gays—would have been driven apeshit.
But not Monk. The only deliberately celibate man on the Moon was sitting right here in her lab. Butch spied on Lew Walker out of the corner of her eye; his expression was totally neutral. Butch Peterson could have jumped up on her workbench and started a striptease, and Monk would have warned her that she might fall off and bruise herself … or dismissively turned to look out the window and started playing with his beads again. Her stretch didn’t do a thing for him. He nodded his close-cropped head. “Tea sounds good.”
She let out her breath and dropped her arms. “Thanks, Lew,” she murmured gratefully.
He blinked. “What for?”
“Never mind.” Butch walked over to the plastic flask mounted above an electric burner. Their combined daily drinking-water ration was collected in the flask; she picked it up and examined the scale. “Only about a liter left. Want it now or later?”
Monk thought about it. “Now. Just make it a small cup. Use this morning’s tea bag, please. No sense in letting it go to waste.”
“One secondhand cup of tea coming up.” She dropped two moist, leftover tea bags in their respective drinking mugs—his had the seal of the University of Massachusetts stamped on the enamel, hers bore the Cosmopolitan logo—and switched on the burner. As the precious water began to boil, Butch turned and leaned against the bench, folding her arms across her chest. “It’s about the new general manager, isn’t it?”
The beads clicked between his fingers. “Sort of, but not quite …” He shook his head. Click. “I can’t put my finger on it, but I don’t have a good feeling about this meeting.” Click-click. “I don’t know any more than you do about Riddell, but Skycorp c
ouldn’t have picked a worse time to install a new GM. There’s a lot of ill feeling toward the company right now.”
Butch pulled her long hair back behind her neck and reached for a hairband on her desk. “If you’re expecting me to sympathize with Huntsville, you haven’t been paying much attention lately to current events. I’ve been swamped since the purge, and I don’t believe a word Arnie Moss or Ken Crespin says about a new science team.”
“Why don’t you?”
“C’mon. The writing’s on the wall. Basic science is the bottom priority now. The only reason they kept me around is because the legal department couldn’t find a way to wriggle out of the joint-operating agreement with LPI.”
Walker slowly nodded. “Uh-huh … and that’s what’s scaring me. Have you checked the newsfeeds lately?”
She shook her head, and he continued. “I looked at the Wall Street Journal on-line edition yesterday.…”
“You reading the Wall Street Journal?”
He shrugged. “If you want to keep up on the news, you have to read everything. Even if it doesn’t have a crossword puzzle.” He smiled briefly. “Anyway, there was a small item yesterday about some sort of agreement being hammered out between Skycorp and Uchu-Hiko. Nobody seems to know what’s going on. Or if they do, they’re not talking about it.”
Peterson shrugged. “The Korean project? That’s old news.”
Click. “No, it can’t be just the Korea powersat.” Click. “It’s something else again.”
Peterson frowned as she tied back her hair. It could be an expanded powersat construction program … but if it was, Skycorp had picked a strange bedfellow to negotiate an agreement with: The Japanese space company Uchu-Hiko was its closest competitor. Despite its current financial troubles, Skycorp had managed to successfully complete the West European solar power satellite system with its own resources. The capital infrastructure for building the new SPS for the United Republic of Korea was already in place, so the company didn’t need to invite aboard its top rival in the space industry for any future projects, even though Uchu-Hiko had been making noises about expanding its base from launch services and zero g manufacturing to high-space construction. Then again, Korea had become Japan’s closest trade partner in the last few years.…
Butch gave up. She had never been able to comprehend the intricate business dealings of the space industry. “You might have a point,” she conceded. “What is it, then?”
The beads stopped clicking. Monk waved his hand briskly. “Don’t worry about what it is. That’s really not the point. It’s the how that bothers me.…”
She shook her head. “I don’t follow you.”
“Whatever Skycorp has in mind, it’s no small project. And if that’s the case, Descartes isn’t ready to handle it.”
“Uh-huh. Okay …”
“Right. Look at the situation here. We’ve had firings, a bonus freeze, a work slowdown, and an embargo on nonessential goods. That’s all in the last few months. Half of the work force—the ones who survived the purge—is demoralized. They’ve even stopped thinking of themselves as employees. In their minds, they’re wage-slaves being yanked around by the company …”
“I second that emotion,” she interjected.
“… and the other half doesn’t know which end is up,” Monk continued. “Huntsville obviously rushed the new guys through training. Some of these kids must have thought they were taking jobs in the Virgin Islands, they’re so unprepared. I’ve been seeing guys in the infirmary who were suffering from dehydration because no one told them how to handle water-rationing, or nearly breaking their legs because they don’t know how to walk in one-sixth gee.”
He stopped and sighed. “Remember the kid I treated two days ago, the one who blacked out during EVA?” Butch nodded. “Turned out he didn’t know how to interpret the mix indicator in his suit. He thought that his oxygen intake remained constant, no matter how much work he was doing outside, so he overcompensated the nitrogen intake. He was singing ‘Happy Trails’ when they caught up with him. Any longer and he might have tried to take off his helmet. Nobody told him how to watch his levels.”
Butch gazed out the window at the pockmarked plains as Walker went on. “And now there’s some new deal being hatched. We’re going to hear about it in a few minutes, I’m sure. Whatever it is, these kids aren’t ready to handle it.”
“They’re not kids,” she murmured, turning to look at him.
Monk smiled at her. “C’mon, Sue. Some of those guys had your Sports Illo cover stapled to their bedroom walls when they were trying to figure out who to take to the senior prom. We’re not talking about people with acquired wisdom and maturity.”
“And you?” she teased.
“I told you already. I was …”
“Right. Running an antique movie projector in Tibet for the Dalai Lama. He loved Marx Brothers movies. You told me.” Peterson went back to looking out the window. Beyond the domes of the factory subcomplex and the regolith strip mines, she could see the rails of the mass-driver leading westward out into the lunar desert. When she had first arrived here a little more than a year ago, the mass-driver had been operating almost twenty-four hours per Earth day, the spherical cargo cans hurtling down through the electromagnetized track until they reached escape velocity at the ramp at the end of the line. That level of activity hadn’t been seen in the last two months; the mass-driver was only working part time now.
“Ready or not, they’re going to get it,” she said, more to her own reflection in the window than to Walker. “If only we knew what kind of guy the company’s sent us …”
“Hmm?” Click-click. A pensive pause. “Perhaps we could find out,” Monk said slowly. “Maybe we could ask for a private meeting.”
Butch looked sharply at him. “Today?”
“Why not? You’re senior scientist, I’m the chief physician. He should get to know us, right?” Monk hopped off the stool and walked past her toward the workbench. “We could try to catch him right before he goes to the mess hall,” he said as he picked up the flask and poured hot water into his tea mug. “Strictly low-profile, of course. A little get-together in his office, perhaps.”
“Roll out the welcome wagon?” She held out her mug. “Here.”
“It’s the only welcome wagon he’s going to get.” He poured water into her mug. “Someone should talk to him about our problems here. I’m not going to count on the Huntsville boys giving him all the messy details.”
Butch sipped her tea and nodded. The general manager’s office was directly across the corridor from the lab; that was probably his next stop after he desuited in the ready-room. “Sure, why not? Maybe we can ask some straight questions then.”
“Maybe. Just don’t count on straight answers.” Monk tucked his beads into a vest pocket and headed for the door. “Let’s try it anyway. C’mon. Let’s park ourselves over there.”
Peterson blinked. “Your keycard’s set for the GM office door? You never told me.”
“Sure. I’m the doctor, remember? Bo Fisk coded me on the card.” The former holy man shrugged as he opened the door. “This qualifies as a medical emergency. I’m trying to prevent Lester Riddell from cutting his throat at the staff meeting.”
Willard DeWitt’s sleep-niche in Dorm 1-A was the same size as every other individual’s in Descartes: six feet across by eight feet deep by nine feet high. With the bunk folded up against the aluminum wall, there was just enough room for him to sit at his fold-down desk or to open his wall-locker; he couldn’t do both at the same time. He had been in jail cells which were larger … and, indeed, the dorms resembled prison cell blocks: cold, efficient, sterile, meant for sleeping and privacy and little else.
It scarcely mattered to him, though. His niche had one saving grace: a private communications/computer terminal built into the wall above the desk. It had a phone for making long-distance calls to Earth—although comsat-time was rationed, just like everything else, and enormously expensive—and he
had discovered that the terminal had a serial port into which he could jack his Toshiba laptop, the only personal item he had brought with him to the Moon. The computer was meant for mundane tasks like checking the base’s bulletin board and keeping a personal diary, yet he had already found a way, by interfacing his Toshiba through the serial port, to crack into the base mainframe. Through this back door, he could annex the base’s central telecommunications system. A couple of minor systems tests had convinced him that he was capable of uploading and downloading data with any networked computer on Earth; diverting the phone bill somewhere else was simple enough after that.
Sitting now at his desk, gazing silently at the blank surface of his clamshell screen as he absently rubbed his recently bearded chin, Willard had to grin. No one here knew better, but putting him in a room alone with a modemed computer was like leaving a little kid alone with a box of Hershey bars.
Beyond the claustrophic walls of his niche, he could hear the ruckus of the all-male dorm swirling around him. Men talked, laughed, argued, shouted down the narrow aisles to each other. Niche doors opened and slammed shut, the sounds reverberating through the cramped block. At the end of his aisle, there was the hollow sucking sound of a commode being flushed in the head; from the ceiling-mounted speaker above his head, the sexy beauty of an old Koko Taylor number rumbled in from the blues portion of Moondog McCloud’s daily radio show. All the shifts were coming in for the general staff meeting in the mess hall. Descartes Station was jumping at noon, and so was his imagination.
The blank screen stared back at him like a painter’s canvas awaiting the first, crucial brush stroke. He was a quarter of a million miles from home, far out of the reach of the SEC and the FBI and the IRS and everyone else. No one knew anything about Jeremy Schneider, the new third-shift communications officer. His cover was foolproof, at least so far. True, if the hammer came down again, he had nowhere to run or hide, but that was only a minor consideration, really. After two weeks of being here, he was beginning to itch again for another profitable scam. But what to do with so much potential at his fingertips?