Test of Fire (1982)

by Ben Bova

  Not every man and woman in the lunar community could face the secret. Some retreated into catatonic shock. A handful committed suicide.

  Others tried suicide, but in ways that easily caught the attention of their friends. Stopped in their attempts at self-destruction, convinced by the psychologists among them that they had no need to expiate their sins, they returned to the ranks of the overtly healthy. Two of them tried to sabotage the life support systems of the underground settlement, attempting to kill themselves and everyone else. Both of them were stopped in time. Both of them died in hospital beds: one received an improper dose of medication, the other had a totally unexpected heart attack. The physician who was in charge of both patients shrugged his shoulders about them and the next morning was found dead of a huge overdose of barbituates.

  Douglas Morgan sat on the edge of the hospital bed, gazing at the sleeping face of his wife. The lunar settlement's hospital was only six beds and a pair of surgery rooms, carved out of the solid basalt of the lunar crust. Before the Sun's flare the most serious medical problems facing the community's four doctors had been broken bones among the miners and depression among those who had difficulty adjusting to an underground life.

  The beds were empty now, except for Lisa's. All mining work had stopped since the flare. The depressions that afflicted everyone were being treated without hospitalization. The last patient to occupy one of the other beds had been the would-be saboteur who had died of a heart attack.

  Lisa's exquisitely sensitive face was pale and drawn. With her eyes closed she seemed almost a mask of death. But if death is so beautiful, Douglas thought, no man should fear it. Her dark, short-cropped hair framed her delicate face and looked more lustrous for the contrast against the white pillowcase and sheets of the hospital bed.

  Douglas looked down and saw that his left hand, pressing against the bed's surface, rested next to Lisa's hand. The contrast between the two fascinated him. Her hand was so tiny, delicate, almost fragile beside his heavy, thick-fingered paw. Her hand was made for a ballerina, a painter, a musician. His was built to carve rock from lunar caves, to punch equations into a computer, to point and command men. But he knew the strength that her china-boned hands were capable of; he had felt those fingers clawing at him even through the thickness of a pressure suit.

  With a reluctant sigh he pushed himself up from the bed and, standing, stretched his tensed back muscles. Tendons popped as his fingers scraped the ceiling.

  Lisa's eyes opened. She was looking straight at him. Her dark smoldering eyes betrayed the delicacy of her features. She was strong. Despite the seeming fragility of her body, she was as strong as a thin blade of steel.

  "You're awake," Douglas said, instantly feeling inane.

  "You're leaving" she countered.

  "Yes." He glanced at his digital wristwatch.

  "The ship leaves in two hours. I've got to get my gear ready and ..."

  "Why you?"

  He blinked at the question. It had never occurred to him that he would not lead the mission.

  "Why take on this expedition at all?" Lisa went on. "It's all nonsense. None of you will get back alive."

  "I don't think that's true" he said.

  Lisa's eyes roamed around the bleak little chamber, the rock walls that had been laser-fused into smoothness and then painted pastel green, the five empty beds sitting stiffly starched and white around them. Finally she looked back at her husband.

  "It's foolishness," she said. "Male foolishness. You're just trying to prove that you're brave."

  He almost smiled. The terrible events of the past few days had not destroyed Lisa's spirit.

  Sitting on the edge of her bed again, he answered carefully, "We are a community of five hundred and seventy-three men and women. Most of us are mining engineers and technicians. We have three physicians, five psychologists . . ."

  "Four physicians," Lisa corrected.

  "Three. Haley OD'd last night."

  She took the news with no discernable reaction.

  Douglas resumed, "As things stand now, we can't survive on our own. And there'll be no further help from Earth—unless we go Earthside and take what we need."

  "If you go to Earth you will be killed."

  "Maybe," he conceded, shrugging. "Maybe you're right and we're all subconsciously trying to kill ourselves in one grand final gesture, instead of waiting around up here in this underground tomb."

  Lisa sighed, a mixture of weariness and impatience.

  "You're always so logical. The Earth has been destroyed, billions of people have died, and you're as cool and logical as one of your computers."

  "We're not dead. Not yet, anyway." His voice was tight, grim. "And I want to live. I want you to live, Lisa. That's why I have to lead this mission Earthside. We'll only go as far as the space station, for sure. We won't go down to the surface unless . . ."

  "I don't want you to kill yourself," Lisa said.

  Her voice was flat, devoid of emotion.

  "Why not?"

  "Because we need you here. / need you here. You're a natural leader. I need you here to hold this community together."

  He thought for a few moments before replying softly, "What you mean is, you want me here so that you can run the community through me."

  Her gaze never wavered from him, but she did not answer. The silence between them stretched achingly.

  Finally Douglas said, "I don't mind, Lisa. You want the power. I don't."

  "You're a fool," she said, unsmiling.

  "Yeah. I know." He got up slowly to his feet.

  Looking down at her, "The baby ... it was Fred's, not mine, wasn't it?"

  The barest flicker of surprise crossed her face.

  Then she said, "What difference does it make now? Fred's dead and I've lost the baby."

  "It makes an enormous difference to me."

  She turned away from him.

  Suddenly his hand flashed out, grasped her slim jaw and wrenched her head around to face him.

  "Why?" he demanded. "Why did you do it? I love you."

  She stared at him, eyes blazing, until he released his grip on her. Then she said, "Go to Earth and kill yourself. Just as you killed him. Just as you killed my baby. You deserve to die."

  Chapter 2

  We can make it," Martin Kobol said, his long face somber. "We can survive—I think."

  Six of them had crowded into the tiny bedroom.

  Like the rest of the underground settlement, it had been carved out of the lunar rock, designed originally as a standard dormitory room for a mining technician or a scientist. Its furniture consisted of a single bed, a wall unit that combined closet, desk, bureau drawers and bookshelf, and the same type of shower stall and toilet system that had been developed for the space station.

  William Demain shared the room with his wife, Catherine. Now it was being used as a meeting place for the Demains, Kobol, and three other men. The Demains and one of the men sat on the narrow bed. Kobol had the room's only chair. The other two men had hunkered down on the thinly carpeted floor.

  "Each of us is in charge of a key section of the settlement," Kobol said, pointing to each individual in turn. "Hydroponics, communications, life support, medicine, mining." He jabbed a thumb at his own narrow chest and added, "Electrical power."

  "You forgot administration."

  They turned, startled, to the accordian-fold door to the corridor outside. Lisa stood there, gripping the door jamb as if she would collapse if she didn't have something to hold onto. Her face was white.

  She wore a jet black jumpsuit, so that it was difficult to see how frail she had become.

  "You shouldn't be out of the hospital!" Kobol was at her side in a single bound. Catherine Demain pulled herself up from the bed and also went to Lisa. Together, they moved her to the chair.

  "I'm all right" Lisa protested. "Just a little weak from being in bed so long."

  "You walked here from the hospital?"

  Catherine D
emain asked. At Lisa's nod she said, "That's enough exercise for one day. You still have a lot of recuperating to do."

  Kobol glanced at her with a curious grin. "How did you know we were meeting here? I mean, we didn't broadcast . . ."

  Fixing her dark eyes on his long, hound-sad face, Lisa answered, "The day that you—any of you — can get together like this without me knowing about it, that will be the day I resign as head of administration."

  LaStrande, the other man sitting on the bed, said gravely, "We're happy to see you up and around."

  The rest of them murmured agreement.

  "Thank you," said Lisa. "Martin, you made a slight misstatement a moment ago. You are not in charge of electrical power; Douglas is."

  Kobol nodded unhappily. "That's right, Douglas is . . . when he's here." His voice was nasal, reedy, and had a tendency toward screeching when he got upset. "But it's been nearly two weeks since he went Earthside. We haven't heard a report from him for three days now."

  "He'll be back," Lisa said.

  "Of course. And when he's back he'll be in charge of electrical power. But until he comes back, I'm in charge."

  Lisa smiled at him. "Naturally."

  Kobol was tall, almost as tall as Douglas, but bone-thin. Cadaverous, Lisa thought. He looks like those mummies the archeologists dig up in Egypt.

  For a briefest moment a hot pang of remorse shot through her as she realized that the temples, the museums, the archeological digs, the people of Egypt and England and everywhere else were all gone, dead, burned, melted by the fury of the Sun and the even hotter fireballs of human retaliation.

  She forced the thought down, just as she forced away the pain that surged through her abdomen.

  Instead she concentrated on the other people in the room, the self-proclaimed leaders of the isolated little colony.

  Demain sat on the bed, his back pressed against the stone wall, his legs pulled up against his chest foetally. His bulging, balding dome gave him an infant's look, but his eyes were crafty. The eyes of a peasant, a farmer. And that's exactly what he is, Lisa thought, even if his farms are complicated hydroponics facilities that use chemicals and electrical energy and sunlight filtered down from the surface through fiber optics pipes.

  His wife was in charge of the hospital. White haired but still radiantly lovely, her skin unwrinkled, her life truly dedicated to caring for others, Catherine had given up a brilliant medical career Earthside to be with her husband on the Moon.

  LaStrande was a little gnome of a man, already half-blind despite the laser surgery performed on his failing eyes. But he was a powerhouse of a personality, argumentative yet never offensive, a genius at maintaining and even enlarging the settlement's vital life support equipment on a shoestring of personnel and materials.

  Blair was dying of cancer. They all knew it, despite the fact that he looked pinkly healthy arid went about his work at the communications center with unfailing good cheer. Marrett was a burly, loud-voiced diamond in the rough who had retired from a career in meteorology to spend his final days on the Moon and somehow—restless, talented, a born leader—had become chief of the tough, no-nonsense miners.

  And Kobol. She looked up at him as he stood next to her chair, automatically taking charge of the meeting, reaching for the power to rule them all the way an eager little boy reaches for a jar of cookies.

  What would they think, Lisa wondered, if they knew that Kobol had fathered the baby I've lost, and not Fred Simpson? What would Douglas do, if I ever told him? She closed her eyes for a moment.

  Catherine Demain noticed and thought that Lisa must be in pain. But Lisa was merely holding tight the anger she felt at Douglas, her husband, the man she had chosen five years ago to mold into a leader, a giant, a commander who could take charge of this pathetic little community on the Moon and use it as a base for political power on Earth.

  She shook her head, trying to dismiss the thoughts from her mind. The Earth was gone now.

  There was nothing left. Not that Douglas would have followed her lead anyway; he had turned out to be far too stubborn and self-centered to be influenced by anyone else. What a mistake I made!

  Lisa told herself. To think that I believed I could mold that domineering, simple-minded bull into a world leader.

  But he's gone too, she realized. He'll never come back. He's probably dead by now. Strangely, the thought saddened her.

  ".. . • and if the hydroponics output can be increased fifteen percent," Kobol was saying, in his reedy twang, "we ought to be able to get along without importing food from Earthside indefinitely."

  If the population stays level, Lisa thought.

  Demain was bobbing his head up and down, over his drawn-up knees. "I can do it," his soft voice was barely audible, "if you can get me more room, more acreage. And more energy. It takes energy."

  "We'll carve out the acreage for you" Marrett assured him.

  LaStrande waggled a hand in the air. "Listen, I know how we can get a leg up on the energy problem. The safety margins we've enforced on the life support systems are ridiculously large. Typical Earthside over-engineering. I can run the air and heating systems on half the energy we now allocate . . ."

  "Half?" Kobol snapped. "You're sure?"

  LaStrande peered at him myopically. "If I say I can, I can. The recyclers don't need all that standby power. There's no reason we can't shunt it off to hydroponics."

  Kobol rubbed his chin in thought.

  Lisa smiled inwardly at him. He's not easy to mold, either, she told herself. But at least he wants power. He has the ambition that Douglas lacks.

  But he's insidious. Like a snake. He'd never challenge Douglas face-to-face. But he didn't mind slipping into my bed when I invited him. And now he's trying to take charge of the community.

  With a weary sigh of regret, Lisa realized, this is all the world we have now. Martin can be made into its ruler. And I will rule him.

  "It's settled, then," Kobol was concluding. "The standby power goes to hydroponics. Marrett, your miners will start enlarging the hydroponics bay immediately. Jim . . ."

  But Blair and the others were looking past Kobol, to the doorway. Lisa turned in her chair and saw a youngster standing there in a drab coverall. She wore the shoulder patch of the communications group.

  "Yes?" Blair said to her. "What is it?"

  Her youthful face seemed flushed with excitement.

  She stepped into the tiny, crowded bedroom, maneuvered past Kobol and Lisa's chair, and handed Blair a flimsy sheet of ultra-thin plastic—the lunar settlement's reusable substitute for paper.

  Blair read the message, his face lighting up.

  "It's from Douglas," he said, his eyes still scanning the typed words, as if he could not believe what they said. "He's on his way back. He'll arrive in forty-five hours."

  They all gasped with surprise. Lisa felt an irrational pang of joy spring up inside her. Idiot! she raged at herself. He'll spoil everything. Everything.

  Yet she could not control the surge of happiness that coursed through her.

  Kobol's face was as gray as a corpse's. His mouth pressed shut into a thin, bloodless line.

  "That's not all," Blair told them, waving the flimsy sheet in his hand. "Douglas says he's bringing twenty-five people back with him. He says most of them are in very bad physical condition and will need hospitalization immediately."

  Chapter 3

  The biggest chamber in the underground community was a combination warehouse, depot, and garage just inside the big double metal hatch of the main airlock leading out to the surface. Vehicles were parked next to the airlock's gleaming, vault-like doors, assembled in precise rows along colored lines painted on the smooth floor: electric forklift trucks, springy-wheeled lunar surface rovers, bicycles for pedalling along the underground corridors.

  Supplies were stacked in equally precise ranks and files, each box or crate carefully labelled and arranged in sections according to what was inside it. Machinery, foodstuffs,
medicines, clothing — all the things that the lunar settlement did not make for itself were stacked there, row upon row, piled up almost as high as the rugged stone ceiling of the cave.

  They are a reminder, thought Lisa as she entered the big chamber, a reminder of how much we depended on Earth. Can we survive without Earth? Kobol says we can, but is he right? Can we survive?

  Kobol stood beside her, and at her other side was Catherine Demain. They waited before the airlock hatch, at the end of the wide aisle separating the stacks of supplies from the rows of parked vehicles.

  Behind them stood a specially-picked team of volunteers, ready to help the survivors from Earth to beds and medical care.

  Kobol studied his wristwatch. "Another few minutes, at most."

  "The radar plot is still good?" Lisa asked.

  He shrugged his bony shoulders. "I could check with Blair" he said, gesturing toward the phone set into the wall next to the hatch.

  "No. Don't bother. If anything goes wrong he'll put it on the public address system."

  She heard the sounds of shoes scuffing on the plastic floor of the cavern, sensed the presence of other people. Turning, Lisa saw that dozens of people were stepping off the powerlift, milling around the cavern expectantly.

  Kobol turned too, and his long face sank into a scowl. "Why aren't these people at their jobs? Nobody's been given permission to come up here except those . . ."

  Lisa laid a land on his arm, silencing him. She saw that still more people were coming up on the powerlift, chatting, grinning to each other, pressing forward to make room for even more. They were dressed in their work fatigues, almost all of them, but the air was like a holiday excitement back on Earth.

  "There must be at least a hundred of them,"

  Catherine Demain said, smiling happily.

  "And more coming."

  "ATTENTION," the loudspeakers in the ceiling blared, echoes reverberating along the rock walls.

  "THE TRANSFER SHIP HAS TOUCHED DOWN AT THE LANDING PAD . . ."

  The growing crowd cheered, drowning out part of Blair's message. Lisa held her hands to her ears; the noise of the crowd was painful as it rang through the cavern.