He tensed and looked like he was going to yell. Instead, he balled his fists and slowly relaxed back into the chair. “Every protest makes me sound guiltier. I don’t know why she said we were having an affair or that I gave her— Wait. Back up. Is she the one who said she saw me at The Garden?”
I could tell him yes. I could tell him she said he’d flown her there. But I was very interested in what he did when he had nothing to play off, so I simply tapped my pencil against my clipboard. “Why do you ask?”
“Because I did see her that morning.” He compressed his lips and shot a glance at Halim. “She said you’d given her simulator time, and wanted her to apply to be an astronaut. She asked me to show her a BusyBee. My pilot credentials get me in, even when I’m grounded. It seemed harmless, so I did it. But I was … I was already starting to feel sick, so I left her in there, unescorted.”
That could even be true. It was four days before we found him on the floor. The timing on polio meant he could have been having flu symptoms that seemed to clear up before paralysis. Or … admit to something small to distract from the larger thing you’ve done. The question was, which rendition of events was correct?
“Where is the BusyBee?”
Curt wiped his hand down his face. “What BusyBee?”
“The one you stole.”
His shoulders slumped and he looked exhausted. “Listen … I want to help, but honest to God, I have no idea what you’re talking about. None of this. I can make guesses, but every guess I get right makes me look guilty—like, I was right about the emergency lights, wasn’t I?”
I pursed my lips. “All right … I’ll play. What guess would you make now?”
Curt scrubbed his face, and ground the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Okay … Okay, since you think I’m involved, it has to be stuff that happened in April, right after we arrived and before I got sick. There have been problems with environmental controls and power outages. This last one wasn’t sixteen minutes long—and please, please tell me I’m not the only one timing them.”
In truth, I would be surprised if multiple people in the colony hadn’t been timing them. I timed blackouts on Earth, too, just from idle curiosity.
“So we’re talking about things that could have been set up in advance.” He lowered his hands, and scowled at the floor. “Something is happening at The Garden. With Birgit, I guess. There’s a missing BusyBee … Oh, and coded messages, presumably to Earth First. Heck, it could be anything from fouling the water supply to blowing up the base to scuttling the rocke— Oh. Oh … that’s good.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Good? Interesting word choice.”
Curt winced. “A good guess; an appalling thing. BusyBees fit in the cargo bays of the translunar shuttles. Load one up with fertilizer from The Garden, turn it into a bomb, and park it inside a rocket. Now you’ve got the bomb, plus the propellent and oxidizer to ignite. Pick the right rocket, and you could flatten everything.”
“You’re right. That is appalling.” Also, it would involve a BusyBee being parked there for over a month and it seemed unlikely that no ground crew would have noticed. “You’d guess the BusyBee would be booby trapped, I assume?”
“Undoubtedly.” Curt drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Or a lava tube. Like, if there was one running near the base or something. Or … a parking orbit, timed to decay and crash into the main base—although I don’t know how I would have gotten back from that one. Or any of them, really.”
That problem, at least, we thought we understood. Icarus walked back and obscured his footprints with compressed air. For the rest, I wasn’t actually closer to knowing where the BusyBee was than I had been.
At least the lights hadn’t gone out.
FORTY-FIVE
Artemis Base Mission Log, Acting Administrator Eugene Lindholm:
May 28, 1963, 0300—Seventeen hours and thirty-six minutes without contact. Have requested that engineering develop a solution to allow us to flash a Morse message to Earth using the colony exterior lights. They have promised a solution in 24 hours, but cautioned that it would likely not be visible to the naked eye. That is acceptable. I have to believe that at least one Earth-based telescope is trained on the Moon.
“Here’s a thought…” Eugene was lying on the floor of the gallery with his feet up on the bench. “What if Birgit or Curt set up something with the BusyBee and then couldn’t follow through on it after the polio hit?”
Myrtle, who was sitting on the bench, tapped his ankle. “Are you saying we should stop looking for it the same way I should give up about feet on the furniture?”
“Both of them are wishful thinking?” Eugene lifted his hands and covered his eyes. “It’s three in the morning, Myrtle. Let me put my damn feet up.”
Myrtle pursed her lips and inhaled to speak.
I cleared my throat, which was as close to jumping in the line of fire as I was willing to do. “So, Halim. Did you ask Birgit to apply for astronaut training?”
“Yes?” He swept a hand over his hair. “Understand, please, my preference would be for everyone to go through astronaut training because it is more rigorous. Did I ask her specifically … Maybe? Birgit is very good with comms and we’ll need that for future Mars Expeditions.”
Which was consistent with both versions of reality that Curt and Birgit gave us. And being good at comms meant she’d be good at resolving a weak signal or patching into a line she shouldn’t.
Turning that over in my mind, I stared at the moonscape across the gallery from me, with bright orange oxidized regolith at the foot of an astronaut taking a core sample. I was on CAPCOM when Terrazas and Halim had spotted that first patch of orange. Their shock and excitement had been infectious in the main Mission Control room and apparently left the back room of geologists nearly wetting themselves with glee.
I blinked and shook my head, trying to keep from drifting off. “What are the things we need to follow up on?”
In her seat by the door, Helen stretched. “Smartest strategy would be to take a rest period. We are at the point of diminishing returns.”
“Past it, I think.” Halim stood, reaching toward the ceiling with a groan. “All right, people. I am exercising my prerogative as chief astronaut and sending you all to bed.”
I was so tired I could have curled up on the gallery floor and slept while simultaneously sure that my brain would not shut off. “I’m going to spend a little more time with Birgit’s code.”
Helen paused as she was standing, before straightening with something like an ah-ha on her face. “Is there a reason we aren’t using the computer department to decode that?”
I opened my mouth, raised a forefinger, and blinked. “No.” There was no good reason, except I kept forgetting what computers were capable of. “If I say that I think it’s probably a homophonic substitution cipher, would they know what to do with that?”
She shook her head. “But if you give them the steps you would go through to break it, they can do those, but distributed between multiple desks.”
“I’ll write that up and—”
“Excuse me. What part of ‘sending you all to bed’ was unclear?” Halim glowered at us, and the man can smolder. “Out. Sleep. Reconvene at eight hundred, which is less sleep than you need. We’ll meet in the cafeteria because we need to eat.”
That last involved a glance toward me and then studious attention to Helen, as if I wouldn’t notice.
“Could we not—” I bit it off and just started to haul myself to my feet.
“You need to—”
“Stop.” I did not raise my voice. My voice was very level. My voice was dead calm. “Nagging me makes it worse. Could we not add a layer of extra importance every time we talk about food? I had my condition under control for a decade and the circumstances in which I slipped are, I think, entirely reasonable. I know how to manage it. Your concern is appreciated, but you are making me worse.”
Everyone was quiet and I could feel them looki
ng at each other, as if holding a silent conference about who would speak first. Into the midst of this, Eugene snored.
Not a small snore. A snore as if the ground had torn open and swallowed the entire lunar colony.
His arms had relaxed away from his face, and he was lying slack-jawed on the floor. “Sawing logs” is not the correct phrase, unless it is with a diesel-powered saw that has never been tuned.
Helen stared at him with the same horrified amazement that I felt. “You sleep with that?”
“Wax earplugs and love.” Myrtle gazed at him fondly. “I’m going to let him sleep, because if I wake him up to move him, he’ll try to go back to work and I’m too tired to fight.”
Helen said, “I’ll get you pillows and blankets.”
I could not stop staring. “Why don’t I remember this from when we did missions together? The capsules were tiny.”
She shook her head. “It’s only when he has dairy. Which we figured out because the early missions had such a limited menu.”
I winced. “I gave him a ham and cheese sandwich.”
“Oh, don’t worry. This is all on him. The man knows better, but he loves cheese, so … Most days, I figure he’s worth it.”
When we left the gallery, a couple of the engineers were staring toward it with some concern. Halim wandered over to let them know the sound it was man-made and not an equipment malfunction. Helen went to get blankets and a pillow.
I went to the cafeteria. Because I also know better, and if I had problems—if I became a problem this week—it would be entirely on me.
* * *
Five hours later, I was back in the cafeteria, listening to Eugene and Halim work at deconflicting the duty roster, which acknowledged that we still did not have contact with Earth but the regular business of the colony needed to continue.
As I needed to continue. Rehydrated cottage cheese, canned peaches, toast, and scrambled rehydrated eggs with saline, pepper in oil, and hot sauce. Carefully logged.
Beside me, Helen chewed absentmindedly on a piece of toast while she read through my list of instructions for the computers.
“Compare quadgram statistics from the plaintext to quadgram statistics of English text … All right. We’ll have to have them working at the same table so they can compare fitness levels of the text as they work.” She nodded, laying the paper back down. “This is very clear. I’ll pass the algorithms to the computer department with the text. I’m not sure what else they have on the docket so don’t know how long this will take.”
Without looking up from the duty roster, Eugene said, “Tell them I said it was priority.”
“Roger, wilco.” She looked at the sheet of instructions again. “Nicole … One question.”
I swallowed a bit of peach and raised my eyebrows.
“Why were you not a computer?”
“Codebreaking is fun.” I shrugged, stirring the cottage cheese with my fork. “Numbers are just … numbers. I can do them, but they don’t come alive the way they do for you and Elm—”
Across the cafeteria, someone shouted, “Get your goddamned hands off of me!”
Near the line for coffee, a scuffle had broken out. It was hard to see details, as the knot of people surged back and forth, but it clearly wasn’t about a lack of caffeine. Colonists and astronauts scrambled up from their seats around it. Eugene and Halim ran toward the mess, with Myrtle not far behind them.
“HEY! Knock it off!” Eugene’s bellow cut through the noise.
People let him through. The initial pair was on the ground now, kicking and hitting each other in a morass of testosterone. Eugene and another astronaut grabbed one of the guys while Halim subdued the other, who was lying on his back, panting.
“What the hell is going on?” Eugene forced his guy down onto a bench.
It was Kadyn. The tall botanist had a bloody nose and the skin over his eyebrow was split. “He said this was our fault. Not being able to contact Earth. The lights. Everything. That we didn’t belong here.”
My hackles raised. Kadyn was a Black Caribbean British man and the other man was white. Eugene’s jaw clenched, the muscle by his temple pulsing.
Halim knelt by the other man, holding him down with one hand on his chest. I recognized him from the fifth class of astronauts, one of the long-timers on the Moon. His white skin was streaked with blood, but none of it seemed to be from his own wounds.
Keeping a hand on Kadyn’s shoulder, Eugene turned toward the astronaut on the ground, and his voice was frighteningly level. “Care to explain what you meant?”
He glared up at Eugene. “Come on, man. Anyone can do the math. None of this stuff started happening until that ship came in. Every time we get a new bunch of colonists, shit goes wrong. Undertrained, ill-considered—”
“Hold your tongue.” Halim’s voice was a well-placed scalpel. “You are grounded, pending review. And with the state of affairs, a review board is not my top priority.”
* * *
I went to the astronaut-pilot staff meeting, even though I couldn’t fly, because Eugene asked me to. Given my choice, I would rather be in the conference room, trying to work out another strategy for finding the BusyBee. Halim stood at the front of the room next to a whiteboard that was covered with a duty roster. I held my cup of coffee, feeling bloated and gross from breakfast, and sat at the back of the room with Helen and Myrtle. The twelve astronauts around me sat in clumps, men and women, pilots and Nav/Comps alike, shoulders stiff as if they were under attack.
Which, technically, we were.
At 9 a.m. on the dot, the public address system gave three chimes and Eugene’s voice joined us in the room. “This is Eugene Lindholm, acting administrator for Artemis Base. Yesterday, you exhibited the best qualities of the IAC as you worked the multiple problems we faced. Most of those were resolved through your hard work. I’m going to briefly give you the big picture and then your section heads will take over from there on individual assignments.” He paused for a moment as if waiting for everyone’s full attention. “It’s been a full day since we’ve had contact with Earth.”
Everyone in the room knew that, but it’s one thing to guess and another thing to hear it from a voice of authority. The pilots reacted in various ways, heads coming up to look at the speaker, or bowing as if in prayer, or staying rigid in their seats.
“I won’t beat around the bush, we’re in a rough spot right now. The longest communication blackout in the IAC’s history was just over three hours. The engineering team has been working around the clock and can’t find anything wrong on this end, so at this point, we’re considering our options if the problem is on Kansas’s end.”
I noted he said “Kansas” rather than “Earth,” which made the problem seem smaller. Slightly. Until you thought about how many people in the IAC had family who lived and worked in Kansas City.
“What I’d like to address specifically is how I want you to approach this. It is very easy to fall into the trap of blaming someone else for the problem. Blame does not lead to solutions. The IAC sent us here to build a home for the future. We have done that. There are people who want to destroy our work—but I want to be clear. The physical presence of mankind on the Moon is not the accomplishment of which we should be proudest. It is not what frightens them. What we have created here is a community. That is what they want to destroy by making us suspicious and fearful of each other. We have seen this path on Earth. We have seen the wars and injustices that fear leads to. My challenge to you—the problem I want you to work—is how to keep our community whole. I believe that we have the best of humanity here on the Moon and I believe—I know—you are collectively capable of solving the problems ahead of us.”
He would have been a brilliant preacher. I caught one of the male astronauts wiping his eyes furtively as he sat up straighter in his chair.
“Division heads, the floor is yours. Lindholm out.”
Halim stepped to the center of the room and gathered our attention with his
gaze. “Our department, in particular, is going to bear the brunt of the work over the coming period. Without the satellites, navigation will be more complex between the main colony and the outposts. As a first step, while we wait for new satellites from Earth—”
“Hang on.” Aldrin sat forward in his chair. “Lindholm said the engineers ‘can’t find anything wrong.’ Can you explain how that factors in the downed satellites?”
“And the remote fuse.” Mikey was frowning at the board.
“Neither of those affect communications with Earth. The satellites are strictly navigation, and the remote fuse, although concerning, has been removed and deactivated.”
“That’s great, but I’m more than a little concerned about the cause of both.” Liz Hara gestured at the intercom speaker. “Stirring speech aside, there’s a person who did both of those things. This isn’t about blame, but what else is pending?”
Halim nodded, accepting the question as the legitimate concern that it was. “I’m not going to downplay this. We don’t know. What I will tell you is that we have a task force that is specifically addressing it. I am aware you would like to help, but I have also read your files and none of you have worked in intelligence.”
“You can say that again…” Myrtle’s stage-whisper was unsubtle.
“Hey! I represent that remark,” Lovell said, tossing a wad of paper at her.
She snatched it out of the air as it began its slow fall to the floor and mimed throwing it back at him. The levity broke the tension that had been building in the room. But the undercurrent was still there.
I leaned forward. “Seriously, though. I’ve worked with all of you long enough to know that you’re good, intelligent people with an unrivaled strength of character. You’ve also worked with Eugene and Halim long enough that you should know they will not waste your skills.” I hesitated for a moment before saying the next piece, because I was fairly confident I was going to cry and did not want to. But it needed to be said. I studied the edge of the table in front of me with great care. “I think you all know I have a personal investment in finding the people responsible for … all of this. If I am of best use as CAPCOM, I’ll do that. If it’s reading manuals, that’s where I’ll go. I am trusting the people who can see the big picture to make the decisions for the best reasons. And believe me … I do not trust easy. But I trust Eugene. I trust Halim.”
The Relentless Moon Page 42
