Moon Zero Two

by John Burke

  We closed the hatch and I drifted up to the control deck.

  Clem was at the controls. She looked around, and when she saw me she began to cry, then stopped, and I kissed her and she showed signs of crying again.

  I said: “How come... ?” I waved at the meters on the panel before her.

  Dmitri said: “She used a telephone connection while I was still lashed up. I told her how to operate the old crate. Not a bad pupil, huh?”

  “And then when we’d got moving I untied him,” said Clem breathlessly, “and then—”

  “Yes,” I said, and kissed her again to stop her talking. I edged into the seat beside her. “Now let’s set up a course, before we chip the edge off a crater.”

  She leaned toward me.

  Dmitri said: “United Nations Space Charter, section— ah—ninty-nine-B: no sex is permitted in space.”

  “Do you make them all up?” I asked.

  “Most. Nobody else has read it, either.”

  I looked at the panel clock. The rate he was going, Hubbard was going to ride his asteroid straight into the Moon four minutes from now.

  Dmitri, reading my mind, said: “On target?”

  “On target,” I said.

  I switched the radio on, and Hubbard’s voice came howling up again.

  “Half a million... all mine. All mine. Do you hear me, you... ? All mine...”

  Clem shivered. I switched off again.

  “No,” I said. “Not all his. Nor his heirs, assigns or successors.”

  Clem looked doubtful. “I thought there was no chance now of—”

  “We can prove your brother was murdered,” I said.

  “And we can prove—have you still got that hunk of rock?”

  She produced the nickel sample from a pouch in her belt.

  “We can prove,” I went on, “that he found something he’d have reported if he hadn’t been murdered. And the law doesn’t let you profit from murder.”

  “So who does own... ?”

  “You do.” I glanced at the clock again. “In just two minutes. Six thousand tons of sapphire. Let me be the first to seduce you.”

  She looked startled, then sly. “Really? What was that little business out in that truck, then, a while back?”

  I nodded warningly toward Dmitri. “Not in front of the staff. Don’t embarrass the man.”

  We plunged in, holding back from the asteroid and picking up its trail on the screen. The Moon was huge now. The pockmarked surface swung below us, gashed by a vast stygian shadow.

  “But what’ll I do with all that money?” Clem asked, dazed.

  “You could lend us about half a ton to pay our fines,” said Dmitri sourly.

  “What fines?”

  “Well, apart from the fight and the jailbreak, they are going to find out I agreed to land an asteroid illegally,” I pointed out.

  “I’ll pay the fines, of course. But what about the rest?”

  I hesitated, then said: “Same as Hubbard planned, almost. Sell the stuff to whoever’s building the first ships to go to Mercury—and so on.”

  She smiled ruefully. “As long as they agree a certain pilot makes the first flight—right?”

  “If you insist.”

  “And a certain engineer,” said Dmitri.

  I was surprised. I hadn’t thought he was still keen. “You want to come?”

  “You haven’t got me killed yet. Not quite.”

  “All right,” said Clem resignedly. “I’ll be waiting.”

  We were in close now. I thumbed a couple of bursts to straighten us out and set us in a tight circle above Spectacle Craters. Dmitri slid back the porthole mask.

  The asteroid went racing in. We could just pick it out as we turned. It vanished for a moment, then glittered again in the starshine.

  And struck.

  From here it was no more than a puff of dust and fragments. An explosion of flying rocks, sapphire, collapsing engines—once and for all the last of my old Mars Explorer—and somewhere in the middle of it, fragments of Mr. Hubbard.

  At last one of his schemes had gone really and truly wrong. No profit on this deal. But you had to admit it: he’d certainly made his mark on the Moon.

  I set course for the city. Clem watched my hands, and when she saw that I’d noticed her watching, she smiled a secret, contented smile.

  “Meant to ask you before,” I said. “How’s your room at the Hilton?”

  “Find out,” she said softly.

  I gunned the engines. I was in a hurry now.

  The claim would wait for us. The sapphire would wait for us. Moon Zero Two raced above the wilderness of Farside, over and around to the domes and comfort and promise of Lunar Center. There were some things that wouldn’t wait.