by John Burke
He stared. He was good at staring, but not at much else. He was the sort of thug who believed that a gun was the best substitute for conversation. It said all he ever needed to say.
We stopped outside the Cellar Suite, and the doors whistled gently open. My friend jerked the gun toward me. I did as I was told, and got out first. On the way I elbowed the DOOR CLOSE button. Very fast and responsive, that lift. As he came after me, the doors began to close on him, and before the automatic stop came into play his gun hand was clouted to one side.
I swung on him. I snatched the gun and pushed him backward. The automatic stop clicked, clicked again, and the doors closed. There was a whine and then another click as he stabbed at the button inside. The doors slid back again, and he came blundering out.
I was waiting for him. He stared into his own gun from a different angle.
“Let’s go see Mr. Hubbard,” I said affably.
He thought there was a catch in it. I waggled the gun at him. He indicated the door behind me, facing the lift. I wasn’t going to turn my back on him. I did a bit more waggling with the gun, and he edged around me. But he wasn’t happy about opening that door and letting us in.
I tilted the gun. “This is a new model. I’m not sure which is the safety and which...”
He pressed the buzzer, a voice muttered something in the door speaker, and we were admitted.
It was a sumptuous room, carved out of the rock in a soothing curve. No harsh edges, nothing to blunt your eyesight on. The colors were pastel, unlike those noisy splotches way upstairs. The chairs were slender, as delicate as a spider’s web. On the Moon, even a 240-pound man puts only forty pounds pressure on a chair.
There was a window, too. It brought me up short. It made no sense, having a window this far down. The view was somewhat remarkable, too: cows grazing around at the foot of the Swiss Alps. It was all so real that I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear cowbells tinkling and to get a whiff of the fresh mountain breezes. They certainly did you proud in this hotel—if you could afford it.
There were three of them there, waiting for us. None of them was getting nostalgic about Switzerland: they were all looking at me.
Between us was a low table. It was graceful, and beautifully set with polished Moon-quartz. What was especially pretty about it was the bottle of Scotch in the middle, surrounded by a little huddle of glasses. Good, big, man-sized glasses.
“Well, why didn’t you say?” I tossed the gun to its owner and poured myself a drink.
Still the other three watched.
Hubbard I remembered. The others hadn’t made any impression on that first brief glimpse. Now I saw that one was a twin to my escort—big and surly and not on the Moon for any intellectual pursuits—while his neighbor was a slimmer, aquiline-featured character who might have considerable thinking powers... though I’d no idea what he might be thinking about.
Hubbard hunched himself over the table. His eyes were dark with a deep, oily darkness. His lower lip was puffy and slack, but there was nothing slack in his short, square hands, which were clenched as though to strangle someone. Me, maybe. Or maybe not. You don’t send for a complete stranger simply in order to strangle him—not unless you’ve got some pretty perverted hobbies.
I looked him in one of those viscous eyes and said: “And tell your errand boy not to play with guns up on the surface floor, will you? One shot and we could have been breathing space.”
Hubbard chuckled. No, it definitely wasn’t me he wanted to strangle. He said:
“Perhaps I should apologize for sending a man like Harry to find a man like you.”
“Like him?” snarled Harry. “What’s so special? Look, boss, just because—”
“What’s so special,” echoed Hubbard with a dreaminess I didn’t much care for, or wouldn’t have cared for if I’d been Harry, “about the pilot who was the first man on Mars?”
Harry looked at me. Not quite the same expression he’d been using so far. “Kemp?” he breathed. “You mean, you’re that... ?”
“All a long time ago,” I consoled him.
“And now you’re flying a ten-year-old space ferry and salvaging dead satellites to sell to the junk yard.”
Hubbard’s thin, sourly contemptuous voice made it sound like an obituary. Which it was, in a way. One day I’d go down just as Otto did, and if ever I was referred to again in the Newsline transmissions or the microfilm histories, perhaps one curious viewer in a million would press the check knob and get an instant obituary reference to put him right. Kemp, William. First man on Mars. Five years as civil spaceline pilot. Resigned to devote himself to flying scrap metal around in search of other, more salable scrap metal. I wondered how they would find a polite way of putting it. Maybe they wouldn’t bother.
Hubbard glanced at the viewing wall, where the cows were still busy cropping the grass. We could have done with some of that green stuff up here.
“The only parts of Switzerland I like looking at are the banks,” he growled. “Try something else.”
Harry’s stand-in prodded a button. The scene changed to a beach with gently waving palms. I liked the look of it.
Hubbard’s head tilted with reptilian slowness. “We did sell Bermuda, didn’t we?”
“Yes, sir. Back to the British. Only on credit, of course.”
“Ah, yes.” Then Hubbard waved a stubby hand. “But I haven’t introduced you. Mr. Kemp—Mr. Whitsun, my financial adviser.”
Whitsun was the slim one and he looked like he could be just that: a financial adviser. A bleached, dehydrated specimen. His eyes were cold gray calculators.
“And that’s Jeff,” said Hubbard.
It was going to be difficult to tell Jeff and Harry apart, if I ever needed to.
“And now,” Hubbard went on, “where were we?”
“I was selling dead satellites, you were selling Bermuda. Seems we’re in the same line of business.”
“Exactly what we hope, Mr. Kemp. I think you knew Otto von Bech?”
“I knew him.” He was dead, but nobody wanted to let him lie down.
“And I believe you’re the only other pilot on the Moon with a ship for charter. Otto was going to do a little job for me. Now...”
He looked me up and down as though having a few last-minute doubts. I gave him ample time for an appraisal, then prompted him: “Now?”
“Do you know the asteroids, Mr. Kemp?”
Quite an insult, really. Every pilot who’d been out in the spaceways knew asteroids. Knew them too well, sometimes. Big ones and little ones—among the greatest menaces to interplanetary travel. Remains of planets which had exploded... or which had never been formed. Some of them grains of dust, some the size of small moons, and everything in between. Most were never named, never charted; but you made up your own names when they were big enough to put a faint gravitational tug on your ship, or small enough to pierce the plating and start a leak.
“I’ve known a few in my time,” I said.
“The orphans of the solar system, Mr. Kemp.”
He must have been watching some corny play-capsule before I got here. Very sentimental. I said: “And you want to become a father? Look, you can’t set up a mine on an asteroid, if that’s what you’re thinking. The cost of flying the equipment up, the supplies, bringing the ore back—it never pays.”
“Not mine it, Mr. Kemp,” said Whitsun bleakly. “Land it. On the Moon.”
“Land it? You mean crash it. And that,” I said, “is against the law in a big way.”
Hubbard waved his hand again, this time airily dismissing the law. “Because some young pilot might drop it on Moon City? We won’t do anything like that, Mr. Kemp. You’ll have the result of two years’ research to help you; we’ll have the most experienced pilot on the Moon.”
“What’s so special about this asteroid?”
“You’ll find out when you get there.” He must have seen I was going to do a bit of waving myself, because abruptly he changed his mind. “
No, if you’re in this with us—”
“I haven’t said I am.”
“No, but you are. And I may as well tell you the lot. Mr. Whitsun!”
Whitsun jumped to obey. The room went dark, the pretty pictures in the viewing slot faded. Instead, we were watching a movie of a starry sky.
Whitsun talked. Or, rather, recited. He’d never have won an elocution prize: his voice just droned on and on, clipped and meticulous and tuneless. “Too small to have a name or number, the asteroid was first photographed in 1998 when it happened to pass close to the Earth, but it was never investigated or plotted.”
“Until two years ago,” said Hubbard gleefully.
“These films,” Whitsun continued, “were taken by Mr. Hubbard’s astronomical division from a spaceliner on the Mars run.” Something blurred across the picture, and then we came into focus on an irregular cylindrical object shining with a hard blue-white glow, distinct from the distant stars. “The asteroid is barely sixty feet by thirty by thirty, estimated mass approximately six thousand tons. Do you read spectographs, Mr. Kemp?”
The picture changed.
I said as confidently as I knew how: “That looks a bit like aluminum.”
Hubbard chuckled. “Chemically you’re right. It is a bit like aluminum. But an aluminum squeezed and roasted in the heart of an exploding planet hundreds of millions of years ago. What is it called now, Mr. Whitsun?”
“A ceramic crystalline form of corundum aluminum oxide.”
It sounded impressive. I waited for enlightenment. Hubbard said softly: “Sapphire, Mr. Kemp. Sapphire. Six thousand tons of gemstone sapphire. That’s what’s special about this asteroid.”
The lights went up, and the palms started waving somnolently again.
“Bermuda bores me,” growled Hubbard. “That’s why I sold it.”
Jeff blundered across the room, and found a sequence showing the towers of New York. This seemed to soothe the tycoon. He sprawled back, gazed at me, and said in a quieter tone: “Well, Mr. Kemp.”
I finished my drink. “Sounds a nice profitable idea. It’s still against the law. Thanks for the Scotch.”
I turned to go.
Whitsun said: “We understand you’re already against the law on safety regulations. The Bureau wants to ground you. A few words from a man of Mr. Hubbard’s standing might make all the difference—either way.”
I turned back. Whitsun was close enough to collect a fist if I moved it with sufficient acceleration. I stepped toward him.
Harry and Jeff, the terrible twins, reached for their pistols as though someone had pressed a button.
Hubbard chuckled again. “Now, now, Mr. Whitsun, that’s no way to address a guest. Mr. Kemp must be quite free to make up his own mind.”
Provided, I thought, I made it up the way he wanted it.
“And suppose,” I said, “just suppose I quite freely make up my mind, like you say, to come in... what profit do I make, Mr. Hundred Percent?”
That wiped the smirk off his face. “I do dislike that nickname. I haven’t done a deal that small in years. But I’ll do one for you. How about”—he took his time in selecting the carrot and dangling it in front of me—“a brand-new space ferry?”
Until then it had been just a lot of talk, as far as I was concerned. I wanted no part of Hubbard and his schemes. But this one winded me. I tried to sound cool. “It... er... could come in handy.”
“Order it tomorrow.”
It didn’t make sense. “At that price you could buy a ship for yourself, get your own crew...”
“But not secretly, Mr. Kemp. If a man like me starts outfitting a space expedition, he gets questions, snoopers, investigations from the Bureau. But you—you just go off on one of your scavenging flights, no questions asked, and a few days later an asteroid happens to land on a certain mining claim on Farside, way over the Moon.”
“And since nobody’s bothered to plot it,” Whitsun droned in, “nobody can say it didn’t land there naturally. Meteors have been known to hit the Moon before. Naturally, all evidence will be removed immediately after the crash.”
You had to hand it to them. They’d done their thinking, all right.
“I hope you’ve got that mining claim sewn up,” I said. “The Moon’s been claimed solid for years, and there’s a waiting list for any claim that goes vacant.”
Whitsun and Hubbard exchanged smug glances. “I think you can trust us to have covered that,” said Whitsun.
I thought. I thought of turning and walking out.
And I said: “I wonder if you’ll tell me the price again?” When they’d told me, and I couldn’t think of any other useful questions or arguments, I went off to tell Dmitri.
He was so drunk by this time that he thought he was hearing things. After I’d tried three times to get the basic facts into his head, I gave up and told him to report to me first thing in the morning, ready to go to the junk yard. He thought I was being nasty, but I assured him I wasn’t thinking of trading him in, soothed him, and steered him roughly in the direction of his much-needed bed.
He showed up on time in the morning, together with his hangover. I felt a bit hazy myself. I’d spent a good part of the night awake, thinking about what lay ahead and wondering if I could still opt out.
But that draft on the Bank of the Moon, promised by Hubbard when I left him, arrived first delivery just as agreed. It was a convincing kind of document.
Sober, Dmitri disbelieved what I told him even more vigorously than he’d disbelieved it last night.
I went over it step by step. We needed four engines. We would carry them out and plant them in the asteroid to knock it into a Moon orbit. They’d operate as retros on the descent, and maneuver the hunk of sapphire into position for a drop plumb on the site. Engines didn’t come cheap or easily here, but Hubbard had thought of that. Or maybe Whitsun had thought of it for him. That’s what he was paid for. Anyway, I was informed that Otto had had an option on some old K-5’s in the junk yard. All we had to do was take up the option.
“I don’t like the sound of it.” Dmitri shook his head, and immediately regretted it.
But he’d like the sound of a new ship, just the way I would.
We went to Joe Mercer’s place, taking the busted communications satellite with us.
Joe carried on his trade in a big, echoing, dusty dome which looked like a mausoleum for everything metallic. All the rubbish of the spacelanes ended up here—when it didn’t fragment to smithereens out in space itself. From a stellar compass to a clapped-out refrigerator, Joe had the lot.
He was small, wiry and wily. The moment you came through the door he could tell whether you were selling or buying, and he adjusted his manner accordingly. Today he watched as Dmitri dumped the satellite on the bench, and his lip got itself into position, ready to curl.
I said: “What’ll you offer?”
“Captain Kemp, with you I must be honest. It is not in perfect condition.”
“If it was, we’d be in jail for bringing it down. Now—what are you offering?”
He bent over it, wagging his head. “But it’s not even in good condition. That meteorite hole...” He prodded the longest antenna as though hoping to make the thing yelp or say something nice to him. “The heating,” he said despondently. “The cooling... No, I cannot offer much.”
“Not enough,” I said.
“I didn’t say a price yet.”
“Still not enough.”
Joe looked reproachful. He was pretty good at that, too. He had a knack of making you feel that you ought to be paying him to take the stuff off your hands.
Dmitri sauntered off, fingering the merchandise. Joe glanced at him once or twice, suspicious as ever.
“Look, Captain Kemp...”
“No, you look.”
Dmitri came back. He jerked his thumb into the middle of a mound of spare parts. Through the lumber I could just make out the shape of an engine lying on a trestle against the wall.
&
nbsp; “Four of ’em,” said Dmitri. “They must be at least seven years old, but they look pretty good still.”
Joe became all smiles and cooperation. “You want engines, Captain? You’re in luck. Those were promised to a man, but—”
“To Otto,” I said. “I know.”
“But what you don’t know, Captain, is how perfect they are. Straight out of a Corporation ship. And they’re famous.”
“Famous?” I said. To me they just looked dusty.
I went around the scrap heap for a better look. The engines were just what we needed—if they worked. Six feet long by two and a half wide, with the old-fashioned bell-shaped exhausts. That took me back some.
“These engines,” said Joe Mercer, with a look that was meant to be innocent but came out all warped, “made the first landing on Mars.”
So they’d scrapped the Mars Explorer. Not even worth a place in a museum. The engines in here, and the hulk somewhere out in his boneyard under the hard stars, I supposed. Or maybe it had been lugged away to the crusher and turned into ashtrays.
“Ah, Captain,” Mercer was saying, “it broke my heart. I tell you, it broke my heart to take them.”
His heart...?
All right, at least she didn’t blow up in space, or bum her backside off with an engine gone amok, or pile up against the Martian foothills. A lot of them didn’t even get this far. But once upon a time...
It made you feel old.
Maybe Liz was right. Maybe I should give in and play along with the big boys. I’d been an explorer, a bloody-minded odd man out, and where had it got me? Oh, to Mars, sure: but how much of Mars did I own as a result? Not an acre. How much had I got from the adoring public? A big dinner at the White House, a ceremonial parade through London, a little badge and a citation from the United Nations (with five abstentions and two countries declaring I was a crypto-capitalist anarchist and a danger to space navigation), and some money for my video’d life story. I’d spent the money long ago, and now all I’d got to be proud of was my name on that commemorative pillar on Mars. Still, it was more than a lot of men could boast, and the only thing I wanted more than that really, was to put the same name on a column on Mercury... and then maybe run a ring around Saturn, and then...