by Ben Bova
But there was work to do, he reminded himself. No time to swim among the star clouds. Not yet.
Ilona Lucacs was barely asleep, miserable and writhing inside her zippered mesh cocoon, alone and longing for the pleasure of her electronic stimulator. Stoner soothed her and she began to dream of her father. Her body relaxed as she saw the man she loved beyond all measure smiling at her approvingly. The man sometimes looked like her father, sometimes like Zoltan Janos. And now and again his face resembled the bearded visage of Keith Stoner.
Janos was deep in dreams, his eyes scanning rapidly back and forth beneath their closed lids. With all of the Hungarian’s conscious defenses down, it was easy for Stoner to look deeply into Janos’s mind and to learn who was behind his abduction and the murder of his daughter.
Stoner’s own eyes widened as he learned the truth. His hands behind his back clenched into fists powerful enough to snap the flimsy chain of the handcuffs. But he caught himself just in time.
It isn’t the moment to strike. Not yet. Get them all together first. All of them. Until that moment, don’t let them know what you can do. Let them keep on believing they’re leading a lamb to slaughter. Don’t show the wolf’s teeth until you can get each and every one of them.
“Can’t I go with you?”
Rickie said it in the semi-whine of a ten-year-old being told to come in from play and wash up for dinner. But Jo saw the fear in his eyes.
He had spent the day exploring the Archimedes facility under the watchful care of two security men, and now he sat unhappily in a big chair in his mother’s office, looking to Jo like a little boy on the verge of tears.
Jo was sitting on the edge of the sofa next to her son. She made a bright smile for him. “It wouldn’t be much fun for you. It’s a business trip. You’ll enjoy staying here at Archimedes more.”
“I don’t want you to go away,” Rickie said.
Even on the Moon Jo had an apartment/office suite that was exactly like her suites at other Vanguard centers. The only difference here at Archimedes was that she wore special weighted boots to counter the gentle lunar gravity and save her from undignified stumbles and hops when she tried to walk.
Nearly everyone wore simple coveralls on the Moon. Most of the Vanguard employees’ outfits were color-coded: tan for administration, coral red for security, yellow for engineering, pumpkin orange for maintenance, blue for research, apple green for safety. Jo was in a metallic silver zippered suit that bore only a faint resemblance to coveralls. And her weighted boots glittered stylishly.
Rickie enjoyed the low gravity. He bounced and leaped across furniture and up the walls. He never walked when he could hop like a kangaroo. Even when he did misjudge and stumble he could put out his hands and right himself before hitting the floor. In less than a day he had become a veteran lunar resident. He loved being on the Moon. But the thought of being separated from his mother clearly troubled him.
“It will only be for a day or two,” Jo told her son. “Aunt Claudia and Max will be right here with you.”
Rickie did not seem reassured. “What’s so special about where you’re going?”
“It’s business, Rickie. Something mother’s got to do.”
“I want to go with you. I’ll be good, I promise.”
Jo got off the sofa and knelt on the carpeted floor. Wrapping her son in her arms, she said softly, “I know you’d be good, dearest. But this isn’t the kind of trip that you’d enjoy. You’d be bored and very unhappy.”
Rickie clung to her.
“Listen,” she said. “While I’m gone, Max can take you up to the flying center. You can rent wings there and fly around the main dome. Would you like that?”
“Can I? And do high dives in the swimming pool?”
She hesitated. “You’ll have to take a few classes in low-gee acrobatics before you can do that.”
Rickie grinned at his mother and agreed to be a good boy while she was gone. She excused him and he dashed happily toward the door and his own room down the underground corridor from her office. There were wall-sized video screens there, and he could go exploring the Moon from the safety of a snug apartment more than twenty meters below the radiation-drenched airless lunar surface.
Claudia’s like a she-wolf when it come to Rickie, she told herself. And Max has two kids of his own back Earthside, so he’ll know how to take care of him while I’m gone. Rickie will be all right. Jo repeated that to herself several times until she almost believed it.
Then she went back in her swivel chair and began completing the arrangements to travel out to Delphi base. She thought about Nunzio. A fatal heart attack while sitting in his hotel room at Hell Crater. No one in that family had ever had heart problems. They died of cancer in their nineties, or shotgun blasts much earlier. Nunzio had been murdered. By Vic Tomasso or the man Vic worked for, Hsen.
Jo felt a brief twinge of guilt. Maybe Nunzio had become too old for such work. Maybe she should have sent a younger man, or at least some backup. But old or not he had located Vic for her, and that was what she had asked him to do. Of course, Vic could lose himself among the tourists coming and going at Hell. He might even double back to Earth. But she knew, and she knew he knew, that if he set foot on Earth there would be Vanguard people to track him down.
No, Jo said to herself, staring up at the featureless smooth ceiling of her office, Vic will stay here on the Moon. Under Hsen’s protection. I’ve got to flush him out. Flush both of them out where I can deal with them. The ceiling was painted plastic sheeting that covered the bare lunar rock from which the room had been carved. Every day Vanguard security personnel checked her suite for electronic bugs. Jo had swept the office herself, with her own pocket-sized detector, barely an hour earlier.
Now she smiled and leaned across her desk to touch the keypad of her phone unit. She told the computerized voice that answered that she would need a cross-country tractor with a driver and two security men.
“I’m going to visit Delphi first thing tomorrow morning,” Jo added. It was a serious breach of her own security regulations to give such information over an ordinary telephone link.
Then she buzzed the chief of Archimedes’s security office and asked her to come to her office. In person. With no tappable communications links between them. Rickie’s protection had to be absolutely foolproof. So did Cathy’s.
They may call this place Hell, thought Vic Tomasso, but it’s more like paradise to me.
He was living out an old fantasy, running up win after win at the craps table while the crowd grew and all eyes focused on him. White dinner jackets were de rigueur at the casino, even though it was permissible to wear baggy gym pants beneath them. Vic glimpsed himself in the big ceiling-high mirror behind the craps table: the lapelless jacket looked terrific with its padded shoulders and his pale-blue shirt with the bow tie painted on it.
He threw the dice again and watched in fascination as they tumbled slowly in the soft lunar gravity and came up eleven. The crowd gasped and applauded. The croupier chanted, “The man wins again!” and pushed a small mountain of chips toward Vic.
Gorgeous women in low-cut glittery gowns with warmly inviting smiles clustered around Vic. He took the dice in hand once more, but before he could throw again, someone tapped him firmly on his padded shoulder.
A blank-faced oriental, small and slight as a child, almost. Yet he looked mercilessly dangerous, the kind who used knives in the dark.
“Mr. Hsen wishes to see you immediately.”
The stress on immediately was very slight, but very noticeable. Vic put down the dice and told the two women on either side of him to split his winnings between them. They squealed with delight.
“Plenty more where they came from,” Vic said lightly to the oriental. The man did not reply.
Swiftly they went down the special elevator to Hsen’s private quarters.
Li-Po Hsen was pacing back and forth in the spartan living room, hands clasped behind his back, so deep in furious
thought that he paid no attention to the holograms of Ming vases and bronze horses that decorated the room. The plastic flooring and ceiling beams lovingly painted to resemble actual wood, the imitation oriental carpets and tapestries, the sweeping video window that showed the Great Wall snaking over hills as far as the eye could see—all were ignored.
“She’s going to Delphi,” Hsen snapped as Tomasso entered the breathtaking room.
“How do you know?” he replied automatically.
“She ordered a cross-country tractor for tomorrow morning.”
“How do you know?” Tomasso repeated.
“The telephone lines!” Hsen nearly shouted. “Do you think I’m without my resources?”
Tomasso stopped a few paces before the Chinese. He knew that Hsen did not like to have taller men standing close to him. It pleased Tomasso to be taller than this powerful, ruthless oriental. But he took his pleasure sparingly; Hsen was obviously upset, and there was no sense turning that anger toward himself.
“I don’t like it,” Tomasso said. “Jo knows better than using phones…”
“Perhaps she feels safe at Archimedes.”
With a shake of his head, “She must know that the old man is dead. Why should she feel safe?”
Gazing up at Tomasso, Hsen stroked his chin thoughtfully. “You suspect a trap?”
“Could be.”
Hsen clasped his hands behind his back again and walked slowly across the carpeting of lunar imitation silk toward the holographic display of the Great Wall.
“What would Sun-tzu have done in a situation such as this?” he muttered.
“Sun-tzu?”
Hsen turned back toward Tomasso with a disdainful look on his face, almost a sneer. “A great general. The first of the great generals, twenty-five centuries ago.”
Tomasso shrugged.
For several minutes Hsen stood stock-still, head bowed. Then he looked up and smiled thinly.
“When facing a trap,” he said, “offer your enemy a piece of bait so that you may trap the trapper.”
Oriental bullshit, Vic said to himself.
“Since you are familiar with the location and layout of this secret Vanguard facility,” Hsen went on, his voice like a cobra’s hiss, “you will follow Ms. Camerata tomorrow. You will spring her trap.”
“Hey, wait a minute! She wants…”
“I will follow with a force large enough to destroy her. Have no fear, you will be perfectly safe at all times.”
Vic Tomasso looked into Hsen’s glittering eyes and knew there was no way to argue him out of his decision. He did not want to face Jo, of course, but he certainly had no way of saying no to Hsen.
BRASILIA
JOÃO de Sagres stood by the window of his office and looked out at the magnificent towers and sweeping curves of the buildings that comprised the capital of Brazil. In a few minutes the cabinet meeting would begin and he had to find an answer to the Horror that had begun its reign of terror in Latin America.
Once, many years ago, when he looked out this window he saw shacks made of hammered tin cans and cardboard huddling on the outskirts of the federal precinct. Now they were replaced by modern housing blocks, concrete, functional. The poor still existed, the problems of poverty and hunger still gnawed, but they were being solved—slowly, with patience. And with love.
De Sagres sighed heavily. Yes, love. It was impossible even to begin to approach the problems of the poor without love. That had been the great revelation: You must love your neighbor as yourself, and you must love yourself as you love your God. Otherwise you get bureaucrats and swindlers and opinion polls and computer-generated graphs in place of helping the needy. Cold impersonal bureaucracies do not solve problems. You must go out into the alleys, out among those old dilapidated shacks, among the poor and filthy and sick, just as did our Lord and Savior.
And now, as things were beginning to get better, just as de Sagres himself was finally understanding what had happened to him and what his true place in the world of his fellow human beings should be, now the Horror had reached its bloody fingers into the heart of Rio, São Paulo, Caracas.
It would reach Brasilia any day now. Unless he acted.
De Sagres squeezed his eyes shut and asked his star brother, What would Stoner do? The man had changed his life forever and then left him to face these crises alone, without help or guidance. What would Stoner do?
His star brother told him.
De Sagres’s eyes popped open and he grinned to himself, almost sheepishly. He could see Stoner staring at him silently. What would Stoner do? He would tell me to stand on my own two feet and stop looking for a crutch.
The president of Brazil squared his shoulders and sighed like a man ready to face an unpleasant duty. He walked across the tiled floor of his office and threw open the double doors that led into the cabinet meeting chamber.
The cabinet members rose to their feet. He took his chair at the head of the table and announced without preamble:
“We must quarantine those who have been close enough to a victim of the Horror to have caught the disease. And we must quarantine all incoming passengers at every international airport and seaport for twenty-four hours, just as they do at the space stations.”
That started a debate that took hours to settle. Cabinet ministers protested that such measures would cost too much, that there were not enough trained personnel to carry out such quarantines, that there were no facilities at the airports to hold incoming travelers for twenty-four hours, that the ports would be deserted and the economy would crash.
De Sagres heard them all, each minister, each objection, and invited them to use their wits to solve the problems they foresaw. Four and a half hours later they had hammered out a plan to contain the Horror. It would require a huge increase in paramedical personnel. It would require a massive rearrangement of the facilities at each of the international airports. It would require the cooperation of the media.
It would be done.
“This Horror comes from the pits of hell,” de Sagres said, his voice trembling with emotion. “But we will show that men of good will and good sense can stop it. We will serve as an example to the rest of the world. We cannot cure the unfortunate wretch who is struck by this Devil’s evil, but we can take the necessary steps to prevent its spread. With God’s help, we will prevail.”
Four of the cabinet members had training in medicine. Two of them had been practicing physicians and the other two research scientists before entering public service. None of them had thought to ask, that, though the incubation time for the disease was apparently less than twenty-four hours, could there be a dormant phase where the disease agent lay quietly within its human victim, waiting to spring up again at a later time?
CHAPTER 31
STONER knew that the spacecraft was heading for Hell Crater and the Pacific Commerce facility there. Janos had been working for Li-Po Hsen all along.
The president of Hungary had been a figurehead, like so many politicians. In this case, the power behind him was the immense financial and political clout of Pacific Commerce Corporation. Li-Po Hsen. How many other governments did he control? Stoner wondered.
It had never been difficult to corrupt the average politician. Money and power are irresistible lures. And in an era where politics is played out on the media’s screens, the most successful politicians are those who could perform before the cameras, those who reveal their need for adulation, their absolute willingness to say anything that the crowd wants to hear in return for the applause, the approval, the worship of the masses.
No wonder most politicians are emotional cripples, Stoner thought. No wonder an egomaniac like Novotny could be seduced by a powerful international corporation’s money and influence. It took a rare person, a de Sagres or Nkona or Varahamihara, to rise above such lures.
Are they enough? he asked himself. His star brother replied, They might have been, if someone had not unleashed the Horror upon the world.
The s
leepers were stirring. Stoner closed his eyes and saw their landing through the mind of the spacecraft’s captain, up in the cockpit surrounded by panels of complex instrument displays as the pinpoint of light set in the dark lunar wasteland grew into a ring of brilliance, domes outlined in colors, landing pad marked with flashing beacons that grew larger and larger as they descended…
Stoner’s mind suddenly filled with his last sight of his daughter floating in the lighted pool, her blood spreading across the crystal water as he was carried aloft by the kidnappers’ rocket pack, her dead young body dwindling, dwindling as he rose higher, higher into the dark night.
Zoltan Janos bears responsibility for Cathy’s death. More than him, though, is Li-Po Hsen. And then Stoner realized there was a third man involved: the traitor whose presence he had felt at his birthday party. Three men.
His star brother replied, At least three. There will undoubtedly be many more.
“How did you know I was here?” asked Cliff Baker. “I mean, you’ve got a big facility here and it seems to be jampacked.”
Jo sat tensely, straight upright in her powered chair. Her office at Archimedes was almost exactly like her offices at Hilo and elsewhere. The major difference was that, deep underground, this lunar office had video screens where windows would normally be. At the moment they showed camera views of the barren surface of Mare Imbrium.
She made herself smile at Baker. “I have a subroutine in my daily program that announces the arrival of VIPs.”
“I’m a VIP?” Baker’s blond eyebrows rose. He was sprawled on one of the small couches, arms spread across its back, slouched halfway down on his spine, booted legs crossed. Instead of the normal lunar coveralls he still wore a sports shirt and chino slacks.
“Don’t be coy with me, Cliff.” Jo was in metallic silver coveralls. Even the lowliest Vanguard employee at Archimedes could recognize her at a distance of a hundred meters.
“Alright, so I’m an important person. Good of you to let me have a suite at the hotel. I understand it’s filled to capacity.”