by Allen Steele
The camaraderie stopped when Lester reached a short row of lockers, one of which bore the nameplate GENERAL MANAGER. As he entered the area, barely anyone noticed, but when he slipped his keycard into the door’s slot and tapped his ID number into the keypad, moondogs on either side of him suddenly vanished from sight. He shoved his duffel bag into the locker, changed out of his longjohns, and pulled on the light-blue Skycorp jumpsuit he found inside; someone had at least taken the trouble to put a fresh jumpsuit of his size in the locker. He was uncomfortably aware of men furtively walking past, pausing and casting a quick look in his direction, then hurrying on. No one stopped to introduce themselves; there was no overt hostility, but no welcome either.
As he pulled out a pair of high-top sneakers and shut the locker, he noticed something on the outside of the door which he hadn’t seen before: a strip of white plastic tape under the “General Manager” plate, with the name B. FISK printed on it. Scrawled in ballpoint pen below the name: “Gone but not forgotten.”
Lester started to reach up to peel off the tape, then thought better of it, and let his hand drop. He could always get rid of the former GM’s name, but doing it now might send the wrong message.
He sat down on the bench and began to lace up his shoes. As he fitted the laces through the eyes of the hightops, he overheard two men talking on the other side of the row of lockers:
“Goddamn frigging company. I wonder what this shit’s about now.…”
“Yeah. Fuckin’ A.…”
“I swear, if they’re announcing another slowdown or a bonus squeeze …”
“Fuckin’ A, yeah.…”
“I’m gonna quit. I mean it. Call in the Section Four-D clause on the contract and catch the next LTV outta here, man.…”
“Right! Fuckin’ A!”
“Yeah. Right after I collect my six-month bonus …”
Another voice entered the conversation as a low, unintelligible murmur. “Where?” the second voice asked. “Over there? Shit!” And suddenly the gripe session came to an end.
Lester stood up, brushed off the seat of his pants, picked up the attaché case, and headed out of the locker room. He followed the corridor through an open hatch and past the infirmary into the office section, located halfway between the mess hall and the rec room. Once again, he noticed the walls: the handprints, the long-since expired tax notices still taped to the walls, the graffiti—“Skycorp Sux”; “Eat my piss-cup”; “Larry + Amad are queers & so are u”; “Vacuum Suckers! Now and Forever!”; “Blow me!” and so forth. There was litter on the floor, some within reach of recycling chutes. At the intersection of two corridors, near the spiral staircase leading into the atrium and down to the underground level of the subcomplex, he observed that the lighting seemed a little darker; stopping and gazing up, he saw that one of the recessed light fixtures was inoperative, bashed in as if someone had recently punched his or her fist through the panel.
As with everything he had seen since he had arrived, Lester silently took note of the damage, adding it to a general pattern of neglect and abuse. Descartes Station hadn’t looked this bad even when it was being run by junkies. The base resembled a housing project in an urban combat zone. And the company had sent him here to be the new janitor.…
His office was located at the end of the corridor. Lester paused a moment before the door, which was slightly ajar, then pushed it open, and found a lovely young woman sitting behind his desk with her feet propped up on its plastic top.
“Hi,” she said, smiling serenely at him, then self-consciously swinging her feet down. “I’m Butch … um, Dr. Susan Peterson, senior research scientist. I’m …”
“Right.” Lester walked into the office—his office, he reminded himself—allowing the door to stand open behind him. “How did you get in here?” he asked evenly.
“Hmm? Oh. Monk Walker … that’s Dr. Walker, our chief physician … has a keycard coded to your lock.”
“Where’s Dr. Walker now?” The office was small; he was able to walk to the front of his desk in a couple of strides. He deposited the attaché case flat on the desktop and placed both hands on it. “That’s my chair you’re sitting in, by the way.”
Peterson raised an eyebrow, but she stood up. “Sorry,” she said, taking a step around his desk, “but it’s the only chair in here, and we were waiting for you to show up, so …”
“What makes you think you can come in my office any time you want?” Lester tapped his finger on the desktop. “What makes you think you can put your feet up on my desk?”
Butch Peterson’s gaze simmered. “Listen, let’s take this one question at a time.…”
“No, Dr. Peterson,” Lester said, “you listen. One, I don’t like arriving at my office to find some stranger has broken in. Two, I don’t appreciate finding the same stranger sitting in my chair, behind my desk, as if they own the place. And three, I don’t like somebody telling me to listen. Now are we straight on all that …?”
Someone behind him cleared his throat. “If you’re going to chew out anyone, Mr. Riddell, please let it be me. I’m the one who opened the door and let Butch in.”
Lester turned to find a small man with a close-shaven head and a benign smile standing just outside the door. “You’re Dr. Walker?” he asked.
The man nodded briefly. “Yes, I am … but really, we don’t go by formal titles here. I’m Monk and she’s Butch.” He hesitated, then added, “If you wish, we can call you Mr. Riddell, but we’d prefer to call you Lester. If that’s okay with you, of course. May I come in?”
Lester shrugged and sighed in exasperation. “You’ve already unlocked my door and let yourself in. Why not?” He sat down on the edge of his desk and waved his hand to his computer terminal. “Want me to open up my files for you, too? Or do you already know my password?”
Monk Walker smiled and shook his head as he stepped into the room. “I think we’re getting off to a bad start here,” he said gently. “Let’s try this again. I apologize for letting Butch in here. It was entirely my idea. I was here myself for a while, but I was summoned to the infirmary to deal with a few minor injuries. Butch said she’d wait here for you. I thought that would be all right, since it was our intention to welcome you to the base, but …”
He held up his hands. “I can see that was a rash decision. We intruded on your privacy. Again, my most sincere apologies. It won’t happen again.”
Lester studied the mild little man. He was smooth, well-spoken, and disarming, characteristics, sometimes, of a person who cannot be trusted. Lester had encountered his share of bullshit artists, including some who could charm your wallet right out of your back pocket, but in this case, he could detect nothing but sincerity.
He glanced over his shoulder at Butch Peterson. Her dark, narrow eyes—as a guess, he pegged her heritage as part African-American, part Filipino or Malaysian—still smoldered like blue-hot flames from a camp stove. Yet as she caught his gaze she slowly nodded her head, silently adding her own reticent apology. An attractive woman; he now regretted having snarled at her by way of introduction.
He let out his breath. True, this first encounter was off to a rocky start—but these were the only friendly faces he had met since his arrival at Descartes, and his first impressions of the base had been less than kind. “Apologies accepted,” he said. “And I’m sorry for jumping on you both. It’s been a hell of a day.”
Although his chair was now vacant, Lester didn’t sit down right away. Instead, his eyes traveled around the tiny office; little more than a closet, really, but more room than in his first “office” at Descartes Station, a tiny screened-off part of the old command module. There were a few pictures on the wall, mostly leftovers from Bo Fisk’s tenure, but a couple that dated back to eight years ago: a low-orbit photo of the original base—the huddled row of tunnel-connected modules he remembered all too well—and the photostat of an old New York Times newspaper clipping, dry-mounted on a piece of fiberboard, yellow and stained with age. Les
ter stepped closer, a grin involuntarily spreading across his face as he recognized an old memento.
“Aw, I remember this,” he murmured. “I’d forgotten it was up here.”
“Oh?” Monk rested his back against the door and crossed his arms. “I’ve seen it many times, but Bo never said anything about it. I thought it was here just because of the headline.”
The story in the clipping was dated November 16, 1989; it was headlined “Moondog Returns From the Hippie Years.” In the photo below was an old man with a flowing white beard, rapping a drumstick against a kettledrum that was almost as big as he was. His closed eyes and solemn face, the black cap and flowing brown robes, gave him the appearance of a medieval mage. The photo was captioned “Moondog at a rehearsal in Brooklyn.”
Still smiling, Lester tapped a finger against the clipping. “When we started the base, when the first crew was here, somebody started referring to us as ‘moondogs’.… I don’t know who it was, but it wasn’t me. Anyway, it was a good name and it stuck, but although it seemed to ring a bell with everyone, nobody could figure out what it meant.”
“You mean you didn’t invent it yourselves?” asked Butch. “I always thought the term originated here.”
“No, it didn’t originate here,” Lester replied. “Someone picked it up from someplace, but we couldn’t put our finger on where the word came from.” He flashed upon the often-drunken bull sessions in the old wardroom, when the subject of What’s a moondog? had arisen time and again during bored conversation, and chuckled. Those were the good times.
“The best we could figure was that it was an archaic term,” he continued. “Something from the sixteenth century, maybe.”
“The clipping …” Monk prompted.
“Well, one of the crew that was here then decided to research the matter,” Lester continued. “Our resident computer jockey used a few hours of Earth-link time to query the Library of Congress and other databases. It took a while, but eventually he tracked down this old news story.” He gazed fondly upon the old man in the picture. “Turned out there was a blind, eccentric musician in the last century nicknamed Moondog. He was a street person in New York. Liked to walk the streets of Manhattan wearing a Viking helmet, but was known locally as an amazing—if weird—symphonic composer. Sort of a Big Apple legend. Even made a few recordings and once conducted the Brooklyn Philharmonic. We had a tape of his music here for a while.… Have they ever played it on your new radio station here?”
“Moondog McCloud play anything but rock or blues?” Butch snorted. “Are you kidding? This is the guy who once played old Frank Zappa tapes for ten hours straight, nonstop.…”
“And the guys here loved it,” Monk finished.
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Too bad that the tape was lost. Anyway, that’s the closest we came to figuring out the origin of the word ‘moondog.’ We got that guy to generate a photostat of the Times story he found that told about Moondog and we …”
Lester’s voice trailed off as he recalled the hacker who had made the discovery. Sam Sloane. He had unearthed the original Moondog not long before he was lost while exploring the Descartes region on his own. Sam used to go out on solo excursions to get away from stoned-out wrecks like Lester himself—and he’d suffered a long, lonely death because not one of two dozen moondogs at the old Descartes Station happened to notice that he was long overdue from his EVA. Lester was as much to blame for Sam’s death as anyone else, if not more so. He had been the boss back then; it had happened on his watch. If he hadn’t been so fucked up …
“Was it Sloane?” Monk asked. “Sam Sloane?”
“Huh?” Lester was startled from his train of thought. “How did you know that?”
Walker shrugged. “Lucky guess. But we …” He coughed; he seemed reluctant to go further. “Well, we know about Sam Sloane. Kind of a folk legend, you might …”
“C’mon, Lew, don’t be such a schmuck. You can’t believe that, can you?” Peterson crossed her arms and sat down on the edge of the desk. “Some of the guys claim they’ve seen a ghost while on EVA,” she continued impatiently, looking at Riddell now. A cynical grin curled her lips. “A mysterious figure in an old-style suit, wandering the edges of the base at night …” She raised her hands and fluttered them around her face. “Woooo-weeee-wooooooo …”
“Well, I believe it,” Monk said.
“Well, I think it’s a bunch of shit,” Butch shot back. She looked at Lester. “What do you think?”
A ghost on the Moon, he thought. Right. Sam’s ghost …
A faint chill ran down from the base of his neck. He didn’t like thinking about it, and there were far more important matters facing him right now. He glanced at his watch. “Look, we’ve got the meeting coming up in a few minutes,” he said quickly, “and I’ve got to get ready.” Abruptly, he sat down and opened his briefcase. Looking up again, he found Butch and Monk still watching him. “Is there anything else?”
The two scientists glanced at each other. “No, I don’t think so,” Peterson replied. “We thought we might have a few more minutes, maybe get to know each other before …”
“Sorry, no.” Lester shook his head. “It’s nice of you guys to stop by and introduce yourselves, but …” He sighed and spread his hands. “Seriously, I’ve got to get ready for the staff meeting. I wasn’t even planning to hold it until the minute we landed. So, y’know … I need to get prepared.”
Butch blinked, but said nothing. “All right,” Monk said, edging out into the corridor. “We’ll have plenty of time later to become acquainted.”
“Yeah. Okay. Right.” Lester looked first at Monk, then at Butch, then back at Monk again. “See you at the meeting. Right?”
“Right,” Butch said tersely. She turned and marched past Monk out of the office. Monk let her pass, then cast a faint smile upon Lester before he carefully closed the door. The door swung shut behind them, but not before Lester heard Butch whisper: “He’s doomed.…”
He leaned back in his desk chair and let out his breath. Just a couple of minutes until the meeting … barely enough time to prepare himself for the inevitable confrontation.
Doomed? he thought. Christ, lady, by the time I get through with these guys, they’re going to be organizing a lynching party. He let his eyes drift to the narrow window and gazed out over the bleak yet startling landscape.
“Doomed,” he repeated aloud.
Okay, maybe so. Just all I ask, dear God, is please don’t let anyone get killed again like Sam did. Not while I’m here.
7. Attitude Correction
This is, Lester thought as he surveyed the crowd in the mess hall, going to be harder than I expected.
The mess hall was a long narrow room, its Mylar-padded walls painted a utilitarian shade of gray, with hard, sheet-metal tables and benches arranged in straight lines down the cement floor. It was tonelessly lighted by fluorescent fixtures that dangled from the mooncrete ceiling between the omnipresent pipes, conduits, and airducts. A couple of recessed windows looked out onto the drab moonscape; travel posters taped to the walls-San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, Yellowstone National Park and the Great Smoky Mountains, Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, an anonymous beach scene somewhere in Hawaii—fought a lame battle to lend color to the room.
Even more colorless were the faces that turned toward Lester the moment he walked in. Conversation diminished to mutters and grumbles as he strode to the front of the room; not a respectful silence, but rather an obligatory absence of noise. Lester was reminded of a friend’s account of having attended a bullfight in some South American nation when the country’s unloved dictator showed up for the games; no one cheered for the old murderer, but no one dared make catcalls either. The arena had simply fallen silent until el presidente had been seated in his box, then the aficionados resumed their roaring.
The moondogs seated at the tables—most of them male—were a lean and sullen bunch, with hard faces reminiscent of old-time West Virginia coal miners and oil-
rig operators from the Alaskan North Slope. The jumpsuits of those wearing Skycorp blues had been altered, with sleeves cut off at the armpits and various patches sewn on the front pockets. Most of the crowd was dressed in football jerseys and perspiration-stained sweatshirts, frayed jeans and hightop sneakers, baseball caps and bandannas. On most of the tables were empty vegetable and coffee cans, into which, every now and then, someone spit a rancid stream of tobacco juice. Cigarettes were banned on the Moon—smoke tended to gunk up the filters of the air circulation system—but there was enough contraband Red Man and Bull Durham stockpiled in their lockers to last a generation. Brown stains on the floor showed that some of the tobacco-chewers didn’t bother to aim for the cans.
The moondogs sat at the tables and leaned against the walls, watching him watching them, waiting for their new boss to make the first move. Their stoical faces expressed their silent thoughts: What a pain in the ass … Who does this guy think he is?… Okay, let’s get this aver with.… Near the door, Butch Peterson and Monk Walker silently waited for him to start. He caught a quick wink from Walker, but that was the only reassurance he had. Yes indeed, this was going to be a tough audience, and there was nothing to do but brazen it out.
Lester cleared his throat tentatively. “Umm … good afternoon,” he began. “I’m Lester Riddell and … uh, I’m the new general manager.”
“So what?” someone in the back of the room muttered.
Lester ignored it. “I’m … ah, glad to be here.…”
“Big fucking deal.” Scattered laughter.
“And I’m looking forward to working with you over the next year.…”
“Yo’ momma’s looking forward to working with you.…”
The laughter grew louder now; the faces before him went from noncommittal apathy to mean-spirited enjoyment in watching the new GM squirm. Lester fought to contain his temper; he paused and took a deep breath before going on. “And I hope we can …”