Lunar Descent

by Allen Steele

  “All right …” she began.

  For a moment or two, there was dead silence. Annie was the first to recover. “Surprise!” she shouted merrily. She stood up from her crate of freeze-dried eggs and, with the chutzpah only the seriously shitfaced are able to muster, raised her fourth cup of liquor in a mock toast. “Happy birthday to you,” she began to sing. “… Haaappy biiirthday to yooou …”

  Everyone in the storeroom rose to their feet and, holding forth their cups of ninety-proof liquor, joined in: “… Haaaaappy biiirrthday, dear Quick-Draaaaw … Haaappy biiirthday to yooooooou.…”

  “Blow out the candles,” someone muttered.

  “Yeah,” someone else hiccuped, “and shut the friggin’ door. You want the cops to find us or somethin’?”

  They all laughed and sat down again. Mighty Joe, at his post next to the tap, watched Quick-Draw’s face as it went through various states of apoplexy. Some of the best and brightest of Descartes Station’s staff were in here: Tycho Samuels, Rusty Wright, Quack Lippincott, Casey Engel, Seki Koyama, Harry Drinkwater, and a dozen or so more—most of them already zoned beyond any thought of respect for law and order. McGraw’s hand wavered on the butt of her Taser as her eyes swept across the crowd and the vat in the back of the storeroom.

  “Okay,” she said stiffly, taking a deep breath, spreading her feet wide and thrusting her chest forward. “Party’s over, ladies and gentlemen. By authority of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, I’m shutting down this unlawful gathering and …”

  “Aw, give it a rest, willya, Tina?” Mighty Joe said. He would have stood up, but the bandages around his ribs prohibited him from making sudden movements. He remained instead on the upended crate next to the hog. “What are you going to do?” he asked calmly. “Arrest us? Zap everyone in the room?”

  Her eyes narrowed menacingly as her angry gaze shot to him. “I’m willing to forget everything I’ve just seen,” she intoned sternly, “if you’ll calmly disperse and …”

  “What?” Quack interrupted. Lana Smith, the ready-room suit tech, was sitting in his lap; he had to look around her to see McGraw. “And break up a good party? You gotta be shitting me, lady.”

  Everyone laughed again. That only seemed to further infuriate McGraw. “It’s within my authority,” she said as her voice rose to a frustrated shrill, “to have the employment of everyone here terminated, with no possibility of appeal or …”

  “Aw, bullshit,” Harry replied in his sculpted disc-jockey voice. “There’s not a thing you can do to us now.”

  “S’right,” Annie slurred. “We’re termi … terminationated … I mean, we’re fucked already. So beat it, bitch.”

  McGraw looked as if she was about to use her Taser on Annie. “Try a little reality, Tina,” Mighty Joe said reasonably. “If you haven’t been paying attention to the news, Skycorp’s about to sell out to Uchu-Hiko. The smart money says that by Friday that means this place belongs to the Nips.…”

  Seki Koyama haughtily cleared his throat. “Sorry, Seki-san,” Joe quickly added, glancing at the combine operator. “Nothing personal intended.”

  “Apology accepted, gaijin asshole,” Seki said, smiling a little and tipping his cup toward him.

  “Anyway,” Joe continued, looking back at McGraw, “by the end of the week, we’re all going to be laid off anyway. We’re screwed and turned blue. Face it. Your authority and threats don’t mean jack-shit to us anymore.”

  McGraw stiffened and laid her hand on the butt of her Taser, but Joe quickly shook his head. “Now, don’t get all hot and bothered. Nobody’s about to give you a necktie party or anything. But you might as well sit down and have a drink. Hell, there’s nothing else you can do, right?”

  At first it seemed as if Quick-Draw might actually heed his advice. Then her upper lip curled and she shook her head. “I’ve still got a job to do, even if it’s only for a week.”

  “Aw, c’mon, Quick-Draw …”

  Wrong thing to say; nothing irked McGraw more than having her hated nickname used in front of her. She pulled her baton out of her belt and, taking one step forward, patted it meaningfully in her left hand. “All right, Joe, stand up and get out of the way. I’m going to have to …”

  “Hello?” someone said behind her. “Is this the right place?”

  Startled, Quick-Draw spun around and raised her baton defensively, only to find Lester Riddell standing behind her. Just behind him was Butch Peterson; the senior scientist reflexively took a step back, but the general manager simply beamed at the security chief. “Tina!” he said in mock surprise. “How nice of you to come! Have you introduced yourself to everyone here?”

  Annie Noonan looked over at Mighty Joe. “Great,” she muttered, letting her eyes roll up. “There goes the goddamn neighborhood.”

  The storage room had gone quiet, but judging by their expressions, most people had the same thought. Besides Quick-Draw McGraw, Les Riddell was probably the most disliked individual on the Moon; this was definitely the death of the party. Joe, however, shook his head. “Just wait,” he whispered to Annie, not taking his eyes off the GM. “Let’s just wait and see.…”

  Quick-Draw had lowered her baton and relaxed a little. “Mr. Riddell,” she said, formal as always when they were in the presence of other crew members. “As you can plainly see …”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” he interrupted, dismissively waving his hand. “There’s a party going on and they’ve got a still.” He looked over his shoulder at Mighty Joe. “Nice rig you’ve built there, Joe. What have you got in it? Moonshine?”

  Everyone looked at Mighty Joe. The pilot grinned and patted the top of the makeshift still. “Yes, sir,” he replied. “Just a little homemade liquor. A little raw around the edges, but mighty tasty indeed.” He paused, then casually added, “Care for a sip?”

  “Well, I happen to be a teetotaler …” Lester began. Everyone except Joe seemed to sag a little: Aw, shit, here it comes.…

  “But after the week I’ve just had,” he finished, “I could use a drink.”

  And while every person in the storeroom was still trying to pick their jaws up off the floor and force their eyes back in their sockets, Les Riddell calmly pushed past Quick-Draw, walked down the center aisle, took the paper cup of moonshine, which the humongously beaming Mighty Joe held out to him, and took a long, slow sip.

  The room was dead silent as Riddell swallowed, closed his eyes, and hissed between his teeth. “Shiiiiit,” he gasped. “That’s strong!” Then he turned and looked back at Quick-Draw. “Tina, you gotta try this stuff,” he urged, holding out his cup. “It’ll put hair on your teeth.”

  Quick-Draw’s face convulsed and went through various shades of purple; the fist holding the baton seemed to tremble with repressed fury. Her eyes traveled around the storeroom, and it seemed to dawn on her that every man and woman in the party was waiting for her next reaction. She took a deep sigh, resignedly shoved the baton back into her belt loop, and walked across the room to Lester.

  “What the hell,” she muttered. McGraw took the cup from the GM’s hand and killed it in one gulp. As a collective cheer rang out from the gathered moondogs, she thrust the cup back at Mighty Joe, pursing her lips and quickly nodding her head. Joe took the cup and began to refill it from the spigot.

  Amid the applause and whooping and howling, as everyone stood up to surround him—slapping his back, pushing more cups of liquor at him, telling him that he was an all right kinda guy after all—Lester looked through the crowd at the door, raising his hand to coax Butch into the party.

  But she had disappeared from the doorway, and was not to be seen anywhere in the storeroom. Sometime in the last couple of minutes, without his noticing, Butch had left.

  It didn’t take long for word to get out that an open-door party was going on down in Storage Two and that even Quick-Draw McGraw had entered into the spirit. Within an hour, everyone who wasn’t working was in the lower level of Subcomp A, lined up with paper cups in
hand. The party spilled out of the storeroom into the corridor and the central atrium, where people sat on the floors and the main stairwell: talking, joking, laughing, telling each other stupid stories, getting blasted on Mighty Joe’s hellaciously potent moonshine.

  Someone in MainOps informed the boys on the third shift that there was a party going down, and just when it seemed as if the party had reached a comfortable size, thirty more moondogs trooped through the nearby access tunnel from the EVA ready-room in Subcomplex B, still dressed in their hardsuit long johns and demanding their share of the liquor. Even the non-drinkers among the crew—the handful of devout Mormons, Muslims, Buddhists, and sundry health fanatics—decided to come down for the sociality, if not the booze. Quick-Draw soon had to open the door to the adjacent storm shelter just to make room for the spillover.

  Mighty Joe’s still had a fifty-gallon capacity; he had made that much juice, yet it didn’t last for very long with more than a hundred persons drinking from the tap. Shortly after 0100 hours, he announced that the barrel was dry; by then, however, the party was already on its last, teetering legs. It had been a long, long time since most of the men and women of Descartes Station had drunk anything stronger than coffee, and Joe’s ninety-proof liquor had hit most of them harder than a sack of lead. Within a half-hour of last call, almost everyone was gone from the party, having either staggered up the stairs to their dorms to sleep it off or—in the case of a few more inebriated folks-passed out cold on the floors of the corridor and the storm shelters. Quick-Draw might have rounded up those who had passed out, had she not been blitzed herself. Instead, she had last been seen struggling up the stairs, hanging on to the shoulder of some guy named Sid, to whom she’d become romantically attached. Of all the couples who had left the party together, those two would undoubtedly have the most privacy; after all, she had the keycard to the sacrosanct Descartes Hilton.

  In Storage Two, a few of the last conscious carousers were left to stare dizzily at the debris: crumpled cartons of dehydrated crap, flattened paper cups, a few liquor-soaked pieces of discarded clothing (including a pair of men’s shorts and a woman’s bra), and some indispensables like ankle-weights and keycards, which had been discarded and forgotten by their owners. The storeroom stank of booze and tobacco spit; the floor was slick and greasy with moonshine and puke.

  Outside the storeroom and down the corridor, a couple of voices were singing: “This land is their land … it ain’t our land … from the Wall Street office … to the Cadillac car-land.…”

  Mighty Joe, still maintaining his lonely post by the empty vat, managed a perfectly disgusting belch, which made him weave a little on his perch. “That’s depressing,” he grumbled to no one in particular. After concentrating for a moment, he bawled: “Well, standin’ on the corner … with a dollar in my hand … Lookin’ for a woman who’s lookin’ for a man … Tell me how long, do I have to wait?… Can I get you now, or must I hesitate?…”

  He stopped and slurped some more moonshine from his cup. “That’ll show ’em,” he muttered.

  Undeterred, and just a little louder now, the voices down the hall continued singing in off-key a capella: “If this is our land … you’d never know it … so take your bullshit … and kindly stow it.…”

  Listening to the distant voices, Lester, Annie, Quack, and Tycho broke up laughing. Joe scowled and brayed: “Well, the eagle on the dollar … says in God we trust … Woman wants a man, she wants to see a dollar first … Tell me, how long …”

  The discordant voices rose even louder, the bastardization of Woody Guthrie’s anthem drowning out Mighty Joe’s attempt at “Hesitation Blues”: “So let’s get together … and overthrow it … then this land will be for you and me!”

  The song ended with cheering and more laughter. “Give it up,” Lester said, sitting on a collapsed crate of toilet paper. “You’ll never beat ’em.”

  “Nyehh …” Mighty Joe shook his head and sipped again on his drink. Finding his cup near empty, he swiveled around and pushed it underneath the spigot. He had lied about the vat being tapped out. There was just enough left to make a few close friends happy. Quack burped and held out his own paper cup, and Joe managed to take it between the thumb and index finger of his left hand while he refilled his own cup with his right hand. “They got the right idea, anyway … I mean, anyway. I mean, what the fuck’s left?”

  “No,” Lester mumbled. “We still … we still …”

  Defiantly he held up a forefinger and shook it in the air as he stared fixedly between his knees. Something was stirring in his brain, weaving back and forth like a drunk driver trying to make his way home without running into a police roadblock. He remembered something Annie had said to him yesterday. Was it yesterday? A few hours ago—yep, that qualified as yesterday.…

  “We’ve still got an option,” he managed to say clearly.

  “What are you talkin’ about, man?” Tycho was zipped, too, but he was more coherent than anyone else in the room. He stroked the thick black beard he had cultivated over the past few weeks—his skull was still as bald as an eight ball—and peered straight at Lester. “The company? We’re shit out of luck there. One week … two weeks tops … and we’re all on the unemployment line.” He shook his head dolefully. “Man, my father’s gonna kill me. He told me not to come up to the Moon.”

  “Man’s right.” Mighty Joe passed Quack’s cup back to him. “I mean, when he’s right, he’s right. The Japs’ll have this place right in the pockets of their kimodos.…”

  “Kimodo’s a dragon,” Quack said.

  “Their saris …”

  “That’s what they wear in India.”

  “Well, their hibachis or their kamikazes or whatever the fuck they wear over there … Christ, where’s Seki when I really need him?” Joe paused to belch noisily again. “Anyway, they’ll have the base once Skycorp gets rid of it, and you know what’s next? Robots, for the luvagod!” He swept his arm around to encompass the base. “Instead of a hundred hard-working American men and women, we’ve got twenty-five or fifty Japanese guys with VR helmets and wires coming outta their kazoos, sitting around teleoperating a buncha cheap-ass robots.”

  He leaned forward on his box, angrily jabbing a finger at them. “But you think a robot can tell if something’s not right on a job? Hell, you think a robot has a sense of fucking pride in his work? Sure, maybe they’ll save some bucks …”

  “Yen.”

  “Go to hell, Quack. The point is …” He stopped as alcohol-fueled emotion overwhelmed his ability to form his thoughts into words. “Shit. The point is … the point is, people’s what matters in the long run, not money or machines. And this is a place for people. We made this goddamn base, not some doohickey robot from Long Dong Electronics.”

  “Fuckin’ A, bubba,” Tycho said, holding up his cup in a toast. “Got that right in any language.”

  “Damn straight.” Mighty Joe slumped back on his box and took another sip. Then he looked over at Lester. “So what’s our option there, Les? What’ve you got that can save us?”

  Lester opened his mouth to speak. The others turned to listen attentively, and suddenly he stopped short of saying the first words. Jesus Christ, he thought, in the part of his mind that still retained a little sobriety. What the hell am I doing? This shouldn’t be discussed even when I’m not cross-eyed. This isn’t the time, this isn’t the place.…

  And yet, there was the realization that this was the time and the place. And more important, these were the people. More than a hundred people had trooped into this room tonight and gotten themselves rip-shit drunk. Two days ago, he wouldn’t have believed that he could allow this to happen, let alone participate in it. He would have shut down the party the minute he walked through the door.

  But he had been here, had gotten plowed with his crew—no, not his crew, his fellow workers—and what had he seen? Or rather, what had he not seen. Not one argument. Not a single fist fight. There was a sense of …

  He sough
t for the right word, and found it: community. The moondogs of Descartes were, as a whole, loud and obnoxious and weirder than hell. Nonetheless, they were a community. They obviously felt it among themselves, even if it was never articulated. Lester felt it operating—and counted himself a part of it. And true communities don’t take this kind of bullshit lying down.…

  “Les?” Quack asked. “You’ve got something you want to say?”

  Lester sucked in his breath. He knew what Moss had been suggesting; all evening he had been pondering the idea. And here it comes.…

  “Yeah,” he said. “One word …”

  He stood up slowly, tottering on his feet, feeling the vile-smelling little storeroom tilt around him. Eight years on the wagon, pal, and look where it gets you: starting a goddamn worker’s revolt.

  “Strike,” he said. “We’re going on strike.” Then he pitched forward and collapsed on the wet floor.

  And just before he passed out, he heard Mighty Joe say, “Y’know, he might have something there.…”

  20. Pressure Drop

  Brain splitting, eyelids swollen and aching, stomach soured, bowels grumbling, tongue tasting like a rag that a sick dog had whizzed on, Lester awoke to the absolute, positively worst hangover of his life.

  He lay still on the hard surface on which he had regained consciousness, rubbing his hands across his face. Hands still work, and I’ve even got a face left. Doing great so far, kiddo.

  He began to size up his present condition. He was in a dark room, but it wasn’t his niche in the bunkhouse. No, not quite so dark: There was pale silver-blue light streaming through a window just above him. Reggae music blared from somewhere nearby. He was lying on the floor of … Oh, hey, I get it now. I’m on the floor of my office. Someone must have dragged me back here. Opened the door with my keycard and tossed me in. Good deal. Now, how long have I been out like this?