“Really?” I paused before guiding his knee up. “You’d send coded messages to your mom?”
Now he hesitated. “I shouldn’t have…” Curt let out a sigh and turned his face to the wall. “Yeah. There are some health things at home. She’s very private. She doesn’t like the fact that someone at the IAC has to read her mail in order to key it into the teletype. A code would … you know. I just want to know that she’s okay.”
Oh, I knew that all too well. I squeezed his foot in solidarity. At the same time, I flagged that he, too, had someone who would never be able to leave the planet. It didn’t motivate me to end the space program, but everyone reacted differently to stressors. “They’re working on drone mail drops, I hear. I mean, you can send physical mail now, it just takes longer.”
Curt plucked at his blanket while I continued to put his leg through the paces. Up. Down. In. Out. Up. Down. In—“Hey … they let you go between modules, right?”
“I’m vaccinated, so yes.” I omitted that Frisch had confined me to the SciMod, in lieu of my quarters, because I was curious where Curt was going with this question.
He beckoned me closer and waited until I bent down, which was not at all subtle. “Look … if you really are a spy, could you check a thing for me?”
“Curt.”
He shook his head. “Forget I said it that way. There’s just a thing that’s been bugging me.”
“A thing.” I raised an eyebrow. I’d done this before. Raised a concern that happened to send someone to a place where they could “stumble on” information I needed them to find in order to suspect someone else. “Go on.”
“When you found me … I was really sick, right? I had been walking all over the place, trying to get my legs to stop … you know. I’d tried walking around the track at Midtown. Went to the port. Wandered around there.”
This was where he was going to tell me that he’d lost his Swiss Army knife and give me a pretext to look for it or would say that he’d seen Frisch with it. I kept moving his leg at the same, steady pace.
“Anyway, I tripped on this dark block. And the more I think about it, the more I think that it was a CO2 scrubber filter.” He looked at me, line between his brows. “But why would that have been on the floor? And I’m lying here wondering … What if there’s a problem with the scrubbers?”
“If you think that…” I laid his leg back down on the bed. “Why haven’t you said something?”
“Because until I heard the news story, I was pretty firmly convinced it was delirium talking.” He regarded me with a line above his clear gray eyes. “But there’s something else going on. Isn’t there? Something they aren’t telling us and that makes me think I shouldn’t ignore the stuff that’s weird.”
“I see…”
“It’s nothing. I know. Some tech just dropped it and that’s all. But I can’t stop thinking about it and I can’t check it because of … this.” He gestured grimly at his legs in the only display of bitterness I’d seen in him.
“I’ll check it out.” If he was telling the truth, then it was, indeed, worth looking into. Although I would have to ask the Lindholms or Helen to do it. If he wasn’t, then knowing about a false lead would be useful. The trick would be figuring out which it was.
TWENTY-EIGHT
U.N. PLANS DRIVE TO COLLECT DUES
By Thomas J. Hamilton, Special to the National Times
UNITED NATIONS, Kansas City, May 1, 1963—Secretary General U Thant has decided to open a special campaign to collect overdue assessments for United Nations forces in the United States. The nation was the hardest hit by the effects of the Meteor and has used UN forces to supplement its reconstruction efforts. Unpaid assessments for the peacekeeping force total about $104,000,000. If the assessments remain unpaid, the UN may find it necessary to disband their forces by the end of the year.
N—
Well, we checked the scrubbers. Everything was as it should be. E. was convinced we were walking into a booby trap and took a level of precaution that I will embarrass him about later. Nothing was out of place. There were no fertilizer bombs. No wires cut. No missing filters.
We did find the filter Curt was talking about, kicked back into a corner under the stairs. It was used, so our best guess is that a tech dropped it when taking it up to be processed.
H. wants to know if you can see the port from the lounge in the SciMod. If so, would you count the number of BusyBees currently docked?
—M
* * *
On my next break, I ran up the stairs to the lounge. At a walk, the stairs are the same as they are on Earth, because the anatomy of the leg dictates what is comfortable, but at a run, I leapt them three at a time. I bounded out of the stairwell into the lounge and dawn had come to the Moon.
Long crisp shadows, still black as night, stretched across the landscape. In the light of the early morning sun, the edges of craters blazed white. The surface sparkled with tiny balls of glass from long-ago lava flows and meteorite impacts. And I was not alone.
Frisch sat in a chair by the windows opposite the door, with a blanket drawn up around his shoulders. He looked like he was asleep. There were a lot of confusing things about this and only one simple answer. He was sick. I closed my eyes, hiding from the likeliest illness for a moment longer.
I was furious with him, but I would not wish this on anyone. At least he’d had the sense to come to the SciMod instead of trying to tough it out.
Rising on my toes, I moved as quietly as I could to the window facing the port. Outside, the other modules of the lunar colony looked like a once-grand sandcastle that had been eaten by a sea long-vanished. Buried amid the regolith, the domes and windows sparkled in the morning sun and added their own glow to the dawn. To the northeast the port module lay mostly buried, with just a small viewing area to watch approaches.
I could see four of our eight BusyBees, but the slumped mound of lunar soil that covered the port dome hid everything else. I should have been able to see our rocket, but it was still lying on its side. The other two tall rockets stood on pads around the port, but we couldn’t load any of them while the main launch pad was occupied by the crashed rocket.
Which was probably the goal. I sighed, staring out at things I could not touch or fix.
“Are you all right?” Frisch’s voice creaked.
“We’re concerned about that now?”
His sigh caught and turned into a cough. “Mm.” The hiss of pain that followed made me turn. Frisch’s eyes were closed and he had a hand pressed to his stomach as he spoke. “I am sorry I yelled. I should not have done that, and yes, I do care. I care about everyone that is up here.”
His hand had a reddish-purple rash on the back and he’d lost hair. This did not look like polio. “What’s wrong?”
“Dr. Brandão is not certain.”
I took a step closer, taking in the hollows under his cheeks and the set of pain in his shoulders. “Did you … did you ask her about poison?”
He tilted his head, watching me. “That has not been ruled out.”
Could you calibrate a dose to make yourself sick, but not dead? Sometimes I hate my brain, because I stood there, looking at a man I had known for years, and wondered if he’d poisoned himself to throw us off the scent. I took in a long, deep breath. “Is there anything you want me to do?”
Frisch rubbed his forehead. “I presume you’re not offering to do paperwork.”
“If that were on the table, yes, I would do it.” I chewed the inside of my lip. “Why didn’t you retrieve the codebooks?”
“Codebooks? Mein Gott…” He pulled the blanket about his shoulders, hunching into it like a stork going to nest. “They slipped my mind, I suppose. I have … I have had some trouble concentrating.”
“I see.” I sat on the arm of the chair near him trying to gauge the truth of that. Was he impaired because of poison or was he masking a deliberate effort to obstruct finding Icarus? My best option, either way, was to try to make him
an ally. “How can I help?”
Frisch’s eyes watered. He blinked rapidly, looking away from me. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed and his voice was hoarser when he spoke again. “I need to do a duty roster.” He cleared his throat and straightened a little in his chair. “They’re launching the relief ship tomorrow. Lunetta is doing an expedited cargo transfer to a lunar shuttle Friday, and we should see them land the morning of Tuesday, the seventh. I’ve tapped Eugene to act as interim administrator, but he doesn’t know the forms and I’m … Would you show him the ropes?”
“Of course.” Of course he just needed me as a secretary. Never mind that it would be more efficient to let me do the job instead of training a man. But Eugene was a good man and would do a good job covering for Frisch and it would be good for his career and everything was good.
* * *
The next morning, I was released from my cage in the SciMod to help Eugene with triplicate. He stood next to Frisch’s desk, resting his hand on the back of the chair before he took a breath and sat down. Myrtle gave a nod when Eugene sat, as if to say that this was where he should be. I agreed. Although not under these circumstances.
He drummed his fingers on the desk, looking over the paperwork stacked there. “Silver lining. I have an extra day to get up to speed.”
The cargo launch on Earth this morning had been scrubbed. A sensor reading was not what it should be. It was a mundane reason to scrub. I’d been on a dozen launches that delayed or scrubbed because of a sensor.
I sat down in the chair opposite Eugene and crossed my leg over my knee, trying to make this seem normal. “Does anyone else think that scrub was Earth First?”
“Immediately.” Eugene’s face was grim. “I will not rest easy until Halim lands that thing here.”
“Amen.” Myrtle looked ceilingward. “I have not had this much anxiety about a launch since your first one.”
We always joked about being strapped to a giant bomb and hurled into the vacuum of space to do science. It was less funny now.
“All right…” Myrtle turned to face the filing cabinet. “I’m going to start digging while we talk.”
Helen was leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed, and if someone was playing chess with her, they had already lost. “Nicole? What was the answer to my question about the number of BusyBees?”
“I could only see the southwest side. Four BusyBees were visible in berths one through five.”
“Ha!” Helen slapped her thigh. “Berth five was empty, correct?”
“Yes…” I stared at the glee on her face. “I look forward to hearing about this breakthrough.”
“I wondered how someone could go to The Garden without a ship, which led me to wondering if there was a way to take a BusyBee without it being noticed. The inventory says a ship should be there waiting for maintenance. The hatch indicators show a ship docked there. The porthole is frosted over so you can’t tell what’s on the other side. But … the lighting is wrong. I thought it was not a ship but the only way to be certain was to open the hatch and…” She spread her hands wide, as if drawing a decompression in the air. “That would be a bad day.”
I gave a low whistle. “One more thing there … The approach to that berth drops out of visual range of LGC if you don’t maintain your altitudes correctly.”
At the filing cabinet, Myrtle was nodding, because she flew the same bus routes to the outposts that I did. “A good pilot could stay out of line-of-sight, especially if he were comfortable with night flying.”
“Which is great and all.” Eugene raised a finger. “But where’s the ship?”
The silence sat between us under the whir of fans. That was a darn good question. If Icarus had taken it to The Garden, then why hadn’t he brought it back? We knew exactly where both Curt and Frisch were. But there was a third name on our list. “Does anyone know where Faustino is?”
“No … Although we’ve moved people around so much I don’t know where anyone is.” Eugene turned to the shelf of notebooks on Frisch’s wall, running his finger underneath them. “I’m assuming it’s written down, though.”
“Let me.” I leaned over the desk and pulled the current duty roster from the left side. “If I’m here to be your secretary, let me do this much. Because you don’t want me typing for you.”
As I flipped through the pages, looking for Faustino’s name, Myrtle opened another filing cabinet drawer. “These are a mess … I expected better of a British man.”
“Swiss German. Just has the accent.” I turned another page. “And the pretension.”
“Hence the teakettle, I presume?”
At the desk, Eugene said, “Teakettle?” He spun in the chair and spotted the gleaming chrome appliance. “A pressure kettle? Hot damn.”
“Language.” Myrtle didn’t even look up from the filing cabinet.
“It’s a room full of pilots! Or are you telling me that ladies can’t handle a little salty language?” He picked up the kettle and riffled through the tea things.
“I’m telling you that I want you to watch your mouth. And stop going through the man’s tea stash like you’re a grave rob—” She gasped, spinning to point at the tea. “We need to take all of that to Ana Teresa and have her test it.”
Eugene set down the box of tea bags he was holding. We all stared at it as if it were a bomb waiting to go off. It might be poisoned. Or none of it might be. Or maybe it was the kettle. Or maybe Frisch just got unlucky and randomly developed a liver problem.
“Shit. Goddamn it all to hell.” Eugene rubbed his forehead, pinching his eyes closed. “Nicole, will you take it to SciMod when we’re through here?”
“Yes.” I’d been let out of my cage, but I was still one of the few people vaccinated and Ana Teresa needed me. I reached the last page of this week’s roster and flipped back to the beginning. “Faustino isn’t assigned to any tasks this week.”
That wasn’t odd, in and of itself, since the quarantine meant that a lot of tasks were on hold. Except for one little problem. I looked across to Helen, who appeared to be having the exact same thought I was.
“If he had no assignments, why did he have a spacesuit that needed to be serviced?”
* * *
That night, I dreamed that it was raining. When I woke, my face was pressed into a damp spot on my hammock’s pillow. Truly, the fact that I drool when I sleep is one of my least attractive features and being in 1/6 g should make it happen slower, but alas, does not. My body barely flattened the fabric of my hammock, but fluid dynamics still allowed saliva to escape and saturate my pillow. I was too warm in the small space. Without a fan to circulate the air it felt as warm and muggy as a summer night on Earth. Something plinked in the darkness of my storage locker. From the sliver of light peeking into the room from sickbay, I couldn’t tell the time. But I’d been asleep long enough that the phosphorescent labels had faded to nothing.
I yawned and rolled carefully over to check my Omega watch where I’d propped it on a shelf of saline bags.
Two a.m. I had only been asleep for three hours. I set the watch back down, and the shelf underneath it was damp. Groaning, I sat up. If one of the saline bags had sprung a leak, no telling what other supplies were getting wet.
I stood. The floor was damp too. Water dripped in my face.
“What the…” I turned the light on.
Condensation hung on every surface. As I stood there, dumbfounded, a heavy droplet fell from the ceiling. Beads of water hung from pipes and ran down the metal shelves. Granted, the closet wasn’t intended to have people sleeping in it, but I shouldn’t have created that much moisture with my breath. Something was very wrong with the environmental controls.
I couldn’t help thinking about the CO2 filter Curt had pointed me toward, even though those filters had nothing to do with humidity.
Opening the door, I stepped out into rain. Not real rain, I’ll grant, but any water falling on the Moon was so off-nominal that the emotional impact felt
like rain. The main room of sickbay had only the dim glow of a night-light, but it illuminated enough condensation coating the exposed pipes that water was dripping steadily. Garnet saw me and visibly relaxed on her cot. Her voice was barely a whisper. “Thank heavens. Birgit is on the floor.”
One cot was empty.
“Birgit?” Warm water dripped on my arm and ran down my skin, disappearing when it hit my cast. I grimaced. That was going to be a problem.
“Here.” Her voice came from a puddle of darkness near the wall.
Hurrying, I slipped on the damp floor and caught myself on Wafiyyah’s bed. She was sitting up and wiping water off her face. “What’s going on?”
“It looks like the dehumidifiers have failed.” Humans exhaled carbon dioxide, yes, but also water vapor. It’s why the first generation of space helmets fogged up. “Don’t worry. The folks in ops will be right on this.”
I found Birgit, on her hands and one knee, dragging the other leg behind her. She dropped back to sit with her weak leg stretched in front of her and smiled up at me. “I nearly was there.” She gestured to the wall. “But I have not yet found out how I would to reach the intercom.”
“I’ve got it.” I held out my hands. “Let me get you back to bed.”
Birgit shook her head. “I’m at the moment well. Call ops so they may first start working the problem.”
I nodded, looking around the room for details to tell them. It was much worse out here, with a steady plink, plink of water dripping on metal and plastic. “I’ll let them know you spotted the problem.”
And that made her last name run through my head. Birgit Furst. Swiss. Worked in comms. It was probably a coincidence, but things turned over in my head. Sure, she hadn’t been at the church service, but then neither had Frisch. Perhaps she should have been on my list. Perhaps everyone should have been. Standing, I pressed the intercom button.
A thousand bees stung my hand. Light cracked.
The Relentless Moon Page 26
