by John Burke
It wasn’t a bad jail as jails go. Just a bit small and a bit claustrophobic for anyone used to strolling under the stars—or flying between the stars. It had four cells, and business was brisk today: they were all occupied. Jeff and Harry were on one side of the corridor; I had a drunken miner as my neighbor on the other.
He fancied himself as a tenor. Out on the claim he must have whiled away many a week wailing at the Moon—or, rather, at the nearest passing comet. It might have kept him sane out there, all on his own. In here, it was liable to drive the rest of us insane.
In a space suit, in a crater,
Excavating on the Moon,
Lived a miner, ninety-niner,
And his daughter, name of June...
Just when it was getting too piercing to be endured, a faint whine in a different key set up a discord with it. The electronic lock at the end of the corridor howled its signal, and a moment later Liz came in with the jailer. And right behind her was Whitsun. Good old Whitsun, galloping to the rescue. You could almost hear the money chinking in his pocket.
He nodded through the bars at Harry and Jeff. “I’ll take those two. What’s the bail?”
“Ten thousand apiece,” said Liz.
“Surely that’s a little expensive?” Even in jail, you could rely on Whitsun to keep up the mental arithmetic.
“This isn’t Earth, Mr. Whitsun,” said Liz frostily. “If they’d busted a window, a lot of people would’ve died. Take ’em or leave ’em.”
“Oh, I shall take them.”
He sorted out the notes, all neatly clipped together. The jailer spun the combination locks on the two cells, waited for the electronic pulse, and then let Harry and Jeff out. They both looked rather battered. I felt a mild glow of satisfaction: I’d given them a good dose of entertainment for their money.
I waited for Whitsun to make an offer for me.
He didn’t even turn around.
Liz jerked a thumb toward me. “You don’t want that one as well?”
Now he condescended to swivel his gray look around at me. There wasn’t even a blink of recognition. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before,” he said indifferently.
“Some people are just born lucky,” said Liz.
Whitsun led his purchases away. Liz leaned against the bars, watching them go; leaned against the bars of my cell.
I said: “You know I can’t find ten thousand, Liz.”
“The name is Agent Murphy. You know, for the first time in years you can’t do anything illegal. Try and get the habit.” She smiled sweetly. “Trial’s set for Saturday.”
And then she left me to it—to my thoughts, and to my neighbor warbling, “And a space suit like a bell-tent was a dress for our dear June...”
My thoughts weren’t so hot, but I preferred them to his lyrics. And to his melody line.
One consoling thought: I was better off here than I’d have been in a lot of places right at this moment. Better off being here and being me than being Harry or Jeff, having to face their boss. He wouldn’t take kindly to the idea of them trying to slaughter his one and only reliable pilot.
And being his one and only, why hadn’t he sprung me when he sent for those other two?
Whitsun’s idea. I’d have bet on that. Whitsun was just the type to recommend leaving me where I was until they needed me. Or until the trial, anyway. If there were any difficulties then, Hubbard could always put up the money for my fine. And in the meantime, like Liz, he’d know where I was. He and Liz had a lot in common. They ought to get together sometime.
The thought was nauseating. I tried to think of something else.
Like Miss Taplin.
But that didn’t help. I’d let her down. She wanted to get around Farside as quickly as possible, and now she didn’t stand a chance. But Harry and Jeff wouldn’t have let me go anyway. That was what had started it all.
Not really my fault. And none of my business, anyway. Hard lines on Miss Taplin. But it was a hard world, and a harder Moon.
I went on thinking about Miss Taplin.
Nice to marry a rich girl.
Not that she looked like getting rich if her brother didn’t pretty soon show up.
Nice to marry a nice girl.
You’re getting maudlin, Kemp.
It was the hard bed that was to blame. Lying sleepless on a hard bed, it was impossible not to think of softer beds, and a softer life, and a gentler voice than the godawful voice that kept howling up in unrhythmic bursts from next door.
I turned over.
Ten minutes later I turned over again.
A suffocating hush lay on the jail. Well, it lay on it for just a while, anyway. The miner had stopped singing. There was nothing else. The jailer would be comfortable in his cozy little room. The air was silently filtered and recirculated. On surface, in the hotel, down here in the rock... everything going on efficiently and silently.
The lights went out.
Darkness and silence. I gulped.
Then the miner started up again. His doze must have been interrupted by the lights going out.
“... relay boxes without soxes...”
I thought for a moment I heard the rustle of feet, and a quickly stifled whisper. It must have been something in the air duct.
Suddenly there was a howl that even my neighbor couldn’t have produced. A long, ululating wail, up and down, the banshee wail of some Moon monster. I fell off the bed and gripped the bars. At the end of the corridor I could see a red sign flashing on and off: AIR LEAK.
A metallic voice responded: “Pressure is falling. Pressure is falling. All personnel into Moon suits immediately!”
A metallic voice, like a loudspeaker—but with an accent I was sure I recognized, even though that made no sense. Dmitri Karminski had never, to the best of my knowledge, been hired to make or record transmission system announcements.
The jailer shot into view beyond the barrier. Then he sagged as somebody coshed him.
I could just see Dmitri bending over him and taking the plastic card from his top pocket to check the lock combinations. A moment later he was outside my cell; and a moment after that, I was outside too.
Dmitri said: “I should never have let you go drinking alone.”
“Cut the clever stuff. We—”
“Remember that time back at Cape Kennedy?”
“Cut it out,” I snapped. “Just get hold of Miss Taplin. I promised her we’d—”
“She’s here.”
I hadn’t realized, until she stepped out from behind him, that she’d already been drifting up and down before my eyes these last few hours. But now she was real.
“If she hadn’t helped,” said Dmitri, “you wouldn’t be out. She... persuaded me to come along.”
If she could persuade Dmitri to do anything, she was more forceful than I’d thought.
“The ship,” I said. “We’ll have to move fast. It’s got to be fueled—”
“It’s fueled,” said Dmitri.
“Have to check—”
“Everything checked,” he said. “Done. All of it.” He waved toward the open gate and the empty passage beyond. “You coming, or just standing there giving orders?”
I led the way.
Behind us, there was a sudden anguished shout. “A pressure leak! I’m suffocating!”
The miner blundered toward the bars.
“You’re drowning,” I yelled back at him.
“Oh, is that all?”
He subsided happily. We left him to it and went out toward freedom. I could only hope I’d be allowed a reasonable ration of it before Liz caught up with me. Liz, I had a feeling, wasn’t going to like this latest exploit at all.
7
WE CLEARED without a hitch. A good job Liz was off duty and nowhere near the control tower. I could imagine her sleeping the sleep of the just, her conscience clear and sunny after an arduous spell persecuting troublemakers.
Then I stopped thinking about Liz. There were more immediat
e things to occupy my mind. We didn’t have the advantage of Whitsun’s computer this time, and we hadn’t had time to work out all our coordinates before blasting off. It was a matter of quick calculation and adjustment. I set a course that made rough sense, then waited for Dmitri to call off corrections from the radarscope until we’d got it right. We sweated at it for five minutes, while Miss Taplin lay trustfully on the least uncomfortable acceleration couch, the most attractive passenger we’d ever carried.
Miss Taplin had faith in us. I hoped it wouldn’t prove misplaced.
“Traces aligned,” said Dmitri at last. “Spot on.”
“Right.”
I gunned her over at full power into a ballistic trajectory and then cut the engines. We were weightless now, and the ship was suddenly quiet.
Miss Taplin floated up through the hatch.
“Careful,” I warned her. “We’ve gone weightless.”
“I know. Just the same as in the Moon Express.” She steadied herself with a graceful tap of the hand against a stanchion, then inspected the dust on her fingertips. “Though your ship’s different in other ways,” she commented.
It was good to be out in space again. Things had been a bit rough this last day or so. Too much noise for my aging nerves. Now there was the hush of infinity. Only die trace on the screen showed that we were locked to our course, curling over toward Farside Five, where I hoped there’d be a Bug for hire. If there wasn’t, then that was that. I wasn’t going to walk. We’d come straight back, and I’d have to rely on Hubbard to buy me out of any trouble that had accumulated in our absence.
A good thing that that communications satellite had packed up when it did. There’d be no messages from Lunar Center to the supply depot at Farside Five. It would take a week to replace the link and set up transmissions again. And we weren’t staying for a week. I intended to be out of there in two and a half days at the outside.
“It’s going to be dark down there,” Dmitri observed. “I think I’ll stay with the ship and do radar overhaul.”
As his heavy eyelids drooped over his sad, lazy eyes I thought maybe he was being tactful, letting me go off alone with Miss Taplin. But although he had eyed her appraisingly, she wasn’t really his type. Not large enough; not voluptuous enough. Anyway, there was only room for two in a Bug, and it was me that Miss Taplin trusted.
Dmitri opened both eyes and stared at me. I’d almost have thought he was reading my mind. But he couldn’t have been—if he’d caught that last stray thought, he’d have laughed out loud... good and loud.
On the screen our path was limned brightly but slowly. We looked like a scrap of bright thistledown descending without hurry, perhaps caught in a faint cross breeze. Actually we were racing along—fast enough to be tom apart in a split second if we were as much as grazed by a meteorite. But it didn’t feel like that
I looked at Miss Taplin’s profile. She had casually looped one arm about the overhead locker brace and was resting her cheek against the cool metal. Her gaze was nostalgic, far away. She might have been daydreaming of the bills and fields and fresh air of Earth; or perhaps of her brother, when they were kids together. Or maybe she was just totting up the profits she hoped to make if the lad’s strike proved genuine.
We made good time. There was a moment’s panic when I turned the ship for descent and found an engine misfiring when we were halfway over. We had to do a fast readjustment, cut engines, then fire again at a force that pounded through every plate and rivet in the old crate. But the panic was all for me and Dmitri: Miss Taplin didn’t even know we’d been in danger of spinning like a runaway top and coming down in a sideways-on smash. She lay there confidently as we plunged into the darkness, juddered above the surface, and then set down with a jolt on the landing pad.
“All right?” I leaned over the hatch and looked down.
Miss Taplin smiled. “Fine.”
She wasn’t even the palest kind of green. At least in this sort of craft you rarely got space-sick. The bigger they were, the more prone you were to change color and throw up into the automatic disposal chutes. In a small job like this one you were too busy holding on to things to have time for queasiness. Headaches, yes; sickness, no.
We unstrapped ourselves. I fed out the flexible entrance connector, and when it was sealed against the nearest dome I checked for pressure and waved the other two out.
Farside Five was one of the most spartan of the frontier trading posts. It consisted of only three interconnected domes, with a clump of radio masts and two ranks of solar power panels. Nobody had been sent out to work on modem murals or to set up an exhibition of contemporary design here. It was there because it was there because it was there; and that was that. The residential dome had an office, a radio panel, and a small sitting room with a bunk for the Supervisor. If he wanted to pace up and down, he had to load himself with a helmet and a couple of air cylinders, and do his pacing in the storage dome next door.
The Supervisor was a small, middle-aged man, with a worried expression. It was better to be small when you had to live in this confined space. Better to be middle-aged, too: you’d learned to be less fidgety and less ambitious than the youngsters. And as for the worry... well, they wore worried expressions in Lunar Center sometimes, too.
I disliked this one at first sight, though. There was something both shifty and fussy about him. I could see him spending the long lunar nights counting his nuts and bolts, measuring the fuel levels in the supply tanks, niggling over the solar supply readings. He was like every storekeeper I’d ever met—only more so.
We asked him about Wally Taplin.
I didn’t care for his reaction to that, either. He bristled, as though it wasn’t his job to know people or to know anything about them. But he couldn’t keep it up for long. The desire to be uncooperative struggled within him with the desire to show that the men on Farside were in the same category as his nuts and bolts and airbottles and fuel tanks: he had them all weighed up, sized up and classified. Sure he knew Taplin. He knew everybody. But he had to admit that he didn’t know much about what had been happening—or not happening—recently.
“Haven’t seen Wally in here in... must be nearly four months now. Tried to radio him a coupla times—just routine, y’now—but it’s always chancey out in the mountain country.”
“How about relaying it?” I asked.
There was a relief map pinned above the radio, crisscrossed with color lines like some subway guide. The Supervisor jabbed a callused thumb toward it.
“I could ask Nick Hunter to ask Louis Grenier to ask Tad Connell to pass a message,” he said. “But Tad’s been in the hospital this last fortnight.” That was the sort of gossip he enjoyed. “In the hospital,” he said knowingly, “with kidney trouble. And I know Nick went over to Moon City on the last convoy. No, not a hope.”
I studied the map. A local might understand it: to me it was the chart of a foreign sea, an alien lunar sea. “You didn’t think of declaring an emergency?” I asked.
“With a six-day delay sending a message by convoy? Hell of an emergency that’d be.”
“The satellite’s only been dead for twelve days.”
“Okay, okay.” He looked argumentative. He didn’t like being told what he ought to have done. Then he glanced at Miss Taplin, and suddenly lowered his voice. “Look,” he said to me. “Nobody dies slow on the Moon. You know that.”
Yes, I knew that.
All the same, somebody ought to have looked. Or started a message on its way. Somebody ought to have done something.
I said: “Can I take a Bug?”
“Well, now, let me see. That’d depend, wouldn’t it?”
“It depends on one thing,” I said as harshly as I dared, “and on one thing only—whether you’ve got one or not.” His ferrety little eyes darted toward the link with the adjoining storage dome. So he had a Bug all right.
“One?” he said at last, pride overcoming caution. “I got two.”
“We’ll ta
ke one.”
“Well... I wanted to do an overhaul on both of them.”
“Keep yourself happy with one while we’re away.”
“I’ll need a thousand-dollar deposit.”
I tried to stare him out, but his eyes wouldn’t stay still. “This could still be an emergency,” I said, “declared or not.”
“If he was in trouble, it’s over now. It’s rough country out there.”
“And not just the country.”
I’d still got a fair wad of Joe Mercer’s change with me. I paid out the bills, and the Supervisor’s eyelids counted them as I slapped them down.
Dmitri abruptly shoved out his hand. I didn’t get the point for a moment. Then I realized he wanted to shake hands before going back to the ship and doing his repairs. It wasn’t like him. If he thought it worthwhile to shake hands with me, he couldn’t reckon much on my chances of coming back. But he hadn’t put it into words, so I couldn’t argue.
The Supervisor checked the Bug and brought it through for us.
They’re nothing much to look at, the Moonbugs. Like the trading posts, they’re there for a purpose, not for decoration. No contemporary stylist designed the bodywork. They’re basically an assembly of mobile armor—defensive, not aggressive. Ten feet high and twelve feet long, they carry a tough pressurized cabin with an airlock door at the back to protect you against an out-sucking of breath, thick glass panels at the front that will resist all the boulders and slivers of rock you chuck up as you go along, a dark glass shield like the peak of a cap to protect you from direct sunlight, and four independently mounted and heavily sprung wheels to protect your anatomy against the jarring and lurching of the truck and the land beneath it. Nobody ever wants to go joyriding in a Bug.
I settled Miss Taplin into her seat and said I hoped she was comfortable. She said she was. I was only being polite, and so was she.
We sealed ourselves in, and drove out of the airlock tunnel.