Lunar Descent

by Allen Steele

  Moss shook his head impatiently. C’mon, Les, don’t do the dumb routine on me. What your chief scientist found at Byrd Crater was like dropping a nuke on this place, and you know it.

  Peterson had to cover her mouth to muffle her snicker. “Hey hey, whoa there!” Lester held up his hands defensively. “It wasn’t my idea to leak the info to the news media. If you can’t get your PR department to keep a lid on something like that, don’t go blaming me. I’m a quarter of a goddamn million miles away, so I can’t run your show for you.”

  If your pilot hadn’t crashed you in the middle of nowhere … Moss stopped, took another breath and raised a glass of iced tea to take a sip. Lester would have killed and cannibalized his grandmother for a tall, cold glass of tea right then. Never mind. It’s over and done, anyway. He grimaced. Although you’re right about the PR department dropping the ball. Some squirrelly kid on the third floor heard about it and got it in his head to contact the local spacehounds. He had some stupid journalism-school notion about any news being good news. If I know Ken Crespin, the kid’s going to be carrying his stuff out in a cardboard box before lunchtime tomorrow.

  “You guys are so merciful with the entry-level types,” Lester said drily, still eyeing the glass of tea cradled in Moss’s hands. “Spit it out, Arnie. You aren’t racking up your phone bill just to commiserate with me.”

  Moss frowned silently at the camera for a moment. You guys are up shit creek.

  “Tell me about it.”

  Skycorp’s been looking for an excuse to dump Descartes for months, Moss continued. It’s even worse than what I told you before we sent you up there. Trust me on this one, because I’ve seen the internal memos. The powersat operations have been making a mint, but the profit margin’s being eaten away by the overhead costs of maintaining an expanded operation up there. The sale of lunar-oxygen to the other companies isn’t making up for the losses, and …

  “Hey, hold on a minute there.” Impatient with the two-second delay, Lester inched forward in his chair. “Since I’ve been here, we’ve had three shifts working twenty-four hours, seven days a week. It’s Saturday and I’ve got a full second-shift busting their humps out there right this minute. Overall production’s up twenty-three percent, and the lunar-oxygen factory alone is up almost thirty percent. You can’t tell me the company’s sustaining a loss from this base, sport.”

  Okay, okay! Chill out, willya? Moss was visibly backing away from the screen, as if he were afraid that Riddell might somehow jump through the tube and grab the collar of his Izod shirt. I know you’ve been meeting the new quotas. Shit, old buddy, I’m impressed. I told you that the other day. They didn’t think you could do the job when they—

  He halted abruptly. His eyes widened a little and, even across hundreds of thousands of miles of space, his face could be seen turning deep-red. Lester noted, from the corner of his eye, that Butch, too, had caught the slip. “If they didn’t think I could do the job,” he said slowly, “then why did they rehire me?”

  Arnie looked away from the screen; he nervously picked up his glass and took another sip of tea. Lester wasn’t about to let him off the hook. “Answer me, Arnie,” he continued. “If Skycorp didn’t think I could get this base to meet its production schedules, why did they send me up here to run the place?”

  Forget it, Moss muttered. Just forget I said anything. It doesn’t matter.

  “I’m not forgetting shit!” Lester snapped. “Answer the question!”

  Moss’s arm moved forward toward the phone, as if to break the connection. “If you hang up on me again,” Lester warned, “the very next thing I do is to call Crespin and pop that same question to him, letting him know that I just talked to you. So if you don’t want to be emptying your own desk tomorrow, you better start playing straight with me … old buddy.”

  Moss glowered at the screen. He slammed the empty glass down on the desk in front of the phone—Lester could hear the rattle of the ice cubes—and leaned forward as if to huddle with his former NASA crewmate. Okay, listen, he said quietly. It wasn’t my idea, but there was this plan …

  “Skycorp sent me up here to fuck up,” Lester finished. “That’s the plan, wasn’t it?”

  Closing his eyes, Moss shamefully nodded his head. You gotta believe me when I tell you that I didn’t know the score when they sent me to recruit you. But I’ve seen the memos and I’ve heard the talk. You had enough experience to run the base, but you’d had your problems with pills, you had been out of the loop for eight years.…

  He let out his breath. They figured that you couldn’t make the base operate up to par. Especially not with a demoralized team and over fifty new guys on your payroll. They thought you’d screw the pooch, blow the probation period, the quotas, the works. In fact, they were counting on it. That way, they would have an excuse to lay off everyone without ASWI getting in their way.

  “And sell the capital assets to the Japanese with only a minimal loss.” Lester sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Un-fucking-believable.” Then he grinned. “But then I really screwed up, didn’t I?”

  Moss self-consciously grinned back at him. That you did. You did what they thought you couldn’t do. You got the place to run like a top. Production quotas being met, people working their asses off … He laughed and shook his head. And you know that new security chief they sent you? Tina McGraw? They deliberately found the most antisocial hard-ass NASA would lend them, hoping that she’d piss off your guys to the point where they flat-out wouldn’t cooperate with you and make matters worse. But the whole thing backfired on them. It’s almost funny.

  Lester was almost sorry he hadn’t thought to tape this conversation. He would have loved for Quick-Draw to hear this assessment of her character. Yet there was little consolation in the knowledge that she had been set up for a fall just as he had. “You hear me laughing?” he asked Moss.

  No. Sorry. It can’t be funny, not where you’re sitting. Moss collapsed back in his chair. But you’re still not making enough money to satisfy these characters. Gross revenues are fine, but the profits aren’t high enough for them. It’s not like the old days when the space business was just getting started. Remember that? That was when guys like Deke Slayton and George Koopman were willing to endure quarterly losses for years before their companies turned a meager profit, and their employees volunteered to go on working without getting a paycheck, even for months. It’s a whole new breed in there now, man. These guys, they don’t know the difference between a rocket and a refrigerator, and they don’t give a shit either. They don’t have any dreams except being able to buy a gold-plated Lamborghini and …

  “Yeah yeah yeah,” Lester grumbled. And I bet you’re living in a garage yourself, he thought, although he restrained himself from voicing that particular opinion. “Spare me the philosophy, Arnie. I want facts. They want to use the permaice shortage as an excuse to unload Descartes, is that it?”

  Moss slowly nodded. I just got word that Crespin took a flight out of Atlanta this morning to Tokyo. They may not wait until the stock market bottoms out during the week … and you can bet your old campground that’s exactly what it’s going to do. Then he smiled and wagged a finger at the screen. But you can also bet that Uchu-Hiko is going to drive a hard bargain. The Japs want the base, but they’re not going to make a lousy deal with Skycorp. I mean, the fact that Byrd Crater’s drying up is bad enough, but …

  His voice trailed off again, yet this time deliberately. Moss continued to stare at the screen. “But what?” Lester asked.

  If something … y’know, unforeseen were to occur. Moss’s face was a mask now. Something weird. Something beyond their control. You know what I’m saying?

  Riddell darted a look at Butch Peterson. She shrugged and held up her hands; she didn’t know what Arnie Moss was hinting at, either. Lester looked back at the camera. “No, I don’t,” he answered. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  All at once, Moss’s disposition changed. Well, Les, it sure has been nice
talking to you, he said breezily, as if the two of them had been chinning about their old flight-school days. Gotta be signing off now. I think the old lady wants to get me in for lunch and …

  “Goddammit, Arnie, what are you trying to tell me?”

  There was a very long pause from Moss’s end. The debt’s settled, he said at last. His face was expressionless, his thoughts unreadable. You’re on your own now. Let’s see how you manage this one, buck.

  He reached forward again. See you around. Good luck.…

  “Arnie! What are you …?” And then the screen blanked, replaced an instant later by the comsat test-pattern.

  Lester studied the abstract image on the screen for a moment before he reached forward and switched off the phone. Butch Peterson exhaled and leaned against the closed door. “Nice friend you have there,” she said. “What was he talking about?”

  Riddell raised his legs, propped his feet up on the desk, steepled his fingers together and slowly shook his head. “Kiddo,” he murmured, “I haven’t the foggiest. But I don’t think he was fooling when he …”

  There was a buzz just then; Lester automatically reached for the desk phone before he realized that it was his portable beltphone which had sounded. Never a dull moment, he thought as he unclipped the smaller unit and flipped it open. “Riddell here,” he said into the mouthpiece.

  Lester, it’s Tina. He winced at the sound of the security chief’s voice. There’s a situation in Storage Two which looks a little fishy. I’m going to check it out, but I think you ought to be with me when I—

  “Look, Tina, I’m in a meeting right now,” Riddell interrupted. “Can you handle this by yourself? I’ll be down there soon as I’m free. Okay?”

  Yes sir, she said stuffily, obviously miffed. Security out.

  Peterson was gazing idly at the picture of the old Descartes Station. “Quick-Draw?” she asked as he switched off the phone. He nodded. “What did she want?”

  “More of the same,” he said. “Every time there’s some petty theft or a fight that has to be broken up, she thinks I have to be there. I wish she would be a little more independent and handle these things by herself.” He self-consciously cleared his throat and settled back in his chair. “Never mind that now. I want to know what you thought of that conversation.”

  Butch smiled, folded her arms across her plaid shirt, and gently shook her head. “No, you don’t,” she said. She slowly walked across the room until she reached his desk. “I mean, I listened to everything that was said, but …”

  Unexpectedly, she slid onto the edge of his desk, perching there on one thigh. “You’re the GM, after all,” she continued. “You don’t need my two cents, any more than Quick-Draw needs to have you backing up everything she does.” She smiled mischievously at him. “C’mon, Les. What’s really on your mind?”

  Looking at her close up, Lester thought he might go into cardiac arrest. Good grief, woman, you don’t want to know … “No,” he stammered. “Honestly. What did you think of what Moss just said? I mean, they set me up. The company thought I was incompetent enough to drive this base into the ground. They …”

  “And they were wrong, weren’t they?” Her smile grew broader; she tossed back her braided hair in a fetchingly absent-minded way. “What do you want me to say? Do I think you’re incompetent? No. Did I ever think you were going to wreck this operation? It was already wrecked by the time you got here. Everything you’ve done in the last two months has helped to make it run better. Do I like the fact that Uchu-Hiko is probably going to buy Descartes and get rid of everyone here? No, but there’s not much we can do about it, is there?”

  “No!” he snapped. He was pissed off. “For Christ’s sake, Susie! Arnie was trying to tell me something. There’s got to be some way out of this mess. We’ve gone too far just to give up because some corporate greedheads want a few more bucks. We’ve got to …”

  His train of thought wandered. “We’ve got to what?” Butch insisted. “Petition the board of directors? Quit in mass-protest? Take it up with that useless union of ours?”

  She bent over the desk a little closer to him. “C’mon, Les,” she said gently, looking into his eyes. “It’s over. You did the best you could, but they had the deck stacked against you before you got here. If we’re fired, you can go back to running your campground and I can find some teaching job somewhere.” She shook her head. “Sometimes you can’t win,” she added.

  Lester slowly nodded his head. “I know,” he said quietly. “It’s just that … losing like this, it sticks in my craw.”

  He turned his head and gazed out the window next to his desk. The three-quarter Earth hung above the distant, silver-gray slopes of Stone Mountain, casting narrow shadows from the long rails of the mass-driver stretching to the horizon. In the closer distance, the lights of the regolith combines and ’dozers prowled, the worked-over gray-brown lunar soil. Second-shift would be coming in soon, he thought, and the third-shift team would be going out.

  Even now, on a Saturday when most of America was enjoying a late summer afternoon—grilling hamburgers, drinking beer, dozing on the couch, catching a baseball game on TV—there were men and women going to work on the Moon, breathing bottled air and pushing around moonrocks. Maybe those on Earth would look up at the light-purple Moon hanging in the sky and think of a time when it was a place that Americans had once visited and abandoned. Perhaps they wouldn’t think of it at all; take its colonization as a given part of life, just as many turned on their lights and computers and TV’s without considering that the electricity powering these appliances was made possible by a network of solar-power satellites, which, in turn, had been built from the stuff of moondust. Nobody ever thinks about the ones who do the dirty work. No one ever thinks about the sacrifices they have to make.…

  “That’s the way it is,” Butch was saying, unaware of what he was thinking. “Life goes on. Some you win and some you lose. That’s just the way it is.” She paused. “You can’t carry the weight by yourself all the time.”

  “It’s just not fair.” Lester was still looking out the window. “You come up here to get a job done, and the bastards won’t let you do it. That’s all. It’s just not fair.”

  “Whoever said fairness had anything to do with it?” Butch asked. She was silent for a few moments; then, all of a sudden, she reached across the desk and placed her hand over his. “You know what you need, pal?” she said.

  Lester looked away from the window, down at her soft brown hand covering his angry fist. He nodded his head wearily. “Yeah,” he said. “I think I know what I need.…”

  Withdrawing his hand, he pushed back the chair and stood up. “I think I want to go down to Storage Two.”

  The sultry expression on Butch’s face abruptly changed to one of bewildered rejection. Riddell quickly shook his head. “No no no,” he said. “Just come with me. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion I know what’s going on down there. And if it’s what I think it is, that’s what we need a little bit of right now.”

  A confused smile appeared on her face. “I don’t get it,” she said, shaking her head. “What do you think is in a storeroom that we need?”

  He smiled a little. “A party.” He stepped around the desk and took her hand again. “Call it a date. Now c’mon. Let’s go crash it.”

  19. Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw?

  The still wasn’t exactly a masterpiece of engineering. It was in fact, Mighty Joe had to admit, as ugly as anything you could expect to find stashed in the northern Florida woods.

  Yet, despite its old Appalachian “hog” design, it did have a certain high-tech look about it. The fifty-gallon barrel was made of scrap spacecraft oxygen tanks that Honest Yuri had welded together, and instead of a firebox, the mash was cooked with heating elements pilfered from the galley. The rest of the rig—the cap and cap arm, the water tank, the spiral-shaped “worm,” or feed tube, and the filters—had been pieced together from spare parts found or stolen from all over the b
ase. It was big and cumbersome and a bitch to put together, but it would have done a Prohibition-era moonshiner proud. And when Quick-Draw McGraw found the thing, all that Joe or anyone else could do was to grin, stand aside, and let her admire their work.

  In hindsight, they should have expected the security chief to find it. For one thing, the corn that had been swiped from the greenhouse by clean-up crews would have been eventually noticed by Sawyer and reported to McGraw. Also, fifty gallons of water didn’t vanish from the storage tanks without someone taking notice. And there weren’t too many places in Descartes where such a contraption could be safely hidden—especially since McGraw had an all-access keycard that allowed her to open any door on the moonbase. As the chief moonshiner, Mighty Joe had known that he was taking a considerable risk in a storeroom on the lower level of Subcomplex A, right underneath the galley. But it was hardly less risky than building the thing in the bunkhouse or in one of the adjacent radiation shelters on the same level; McGraw regularly checked these places, and would have found the contraption even before the first batch had been made. And considering how word had leaked out among the crew that there was to be a little “tea party” going down Saturday night in Storage Two, they should have just sent her a written invitation. On the other hand, perhaps Quick-Draw had been watching all along, waiting for her chance to catch the Vacuum Suckers in the act. Nothing that happens in Descartes Station remains secret for very long.

  As it was, when she finally raided the covert distillery, there were almost a dozen moondogs sitting around on crates of freeze-dried god-knows-what, holding foam cups of high-potency moonshine and grinning foolishly from various degrees of inebriation. Portable lamps had been set up for the drinking party, with a towel pushed against the crack at the bottom of the door to keep out the light, and admittance was gained by giving three staccato raps, then one slow knock, on the door. They knew it was a bust when the door opened without a single knock and the overhead ceiling lights were suddenly switched on. There was the unmistakable jangle and clank of her equipment belt, and as everyone winced in the abrupt glare of the lights, Quick-Draw McGraw stepped into the storeroom.