The present tense sat there.
Eugene opened his mouth and inhaled, shaking his head as it turned into a yawn. “I didn’t think so.”
“It was suede.”
He choked on nothing. It was impressive. Pounding himself on his chest, he watched me slowly smile. Eugene shook his head. “I am, suddenly, very glad you never played poker with us.”
“Actually, it was zebra.”
He rolled his eyes and went to the intercom. “I’m calling in for food. Hush.”
I settled in the chair, and could feel myself starting to fall asleep, so I sat up and dragged the clipboard onto my lap. As Eugene talked, I went through my notes looking for other discrepancies and information in the gaps of what Curt had told us. The thing I had realized as he talked was that Curt had been improvising wildly since he got sick. If Birgit had decoded that letter for him, I had no doubt he would have used blackmail to get people to do his dirty work for him.
He did do that with Birgit and Fourie, but in both cases, those were blackmail items he’d created on his own. Birgit and the affair … I was sure that was real, even if not the way either of them described it. I’d used seduction in the war. He’d lured her into being a coconspirator, even if she didn’t believe in Earth First’s goals. He’d trapped Philippus Fourie by getting him to make the skis and use them. Both things broke so many rules Fourie would have been sent home immediately if he’d been found out. Unlike Curt, he wanted to be here. Fourie was not innocent, but he was not a danger.
My eyes were crossing, trying to focus on the page. Where the hell had I left my reading glasses? Probably with my logbook. My head dropped forward, eyes drooping. I snapped them open and straightened.
Eugene was sitting in the chair across from mine, with his chin propped on his hand, watching me. I did not remember him sitting down. The corner of my mouth was damp and I wiped it furtively, checking to see if I’d drooled on my clipboard.
I had not. Funny the things we’re grateful for.
He lowered his hand. “You locked the door.”
“I did.” I sat straighter in my chair and tried to come back up to alertness. “I needed to frighten him and had a limited range of threats available.”
“You should have discussed it with me.”
“I know. But please acknowledge that I didn’t disobey anything in the parameters you’d set.” He’d also said I couldn’t take a weapon in, but he hadn’t told me not to improvise one. “At no point was I—”
“You know better than that.”
“Come on, Eugene. It’s a plastic door. If you’d needed to get through, you could have.”
“Are you telling me it wouldn’t have bought you enough time to kill him?”
“I’m telling you I wouldn’t have needed that time.” That was probably not true. When I’d been in the field, in my early twenties, and fast? Sure. In my fifties and exhausted? With a broken arm? With anorexia? I would have needed the time.
“That does not reassure me.”
“You made the consequences clear.” I held up my hand as he drew breath. “Hang on. I resent how right you are about my motivations. My career with the IAC is toast. My reasons for wanting to go back to Earth right now consist of a twenty-year-old cat and a kitten I’ve never met. But you? I wasn’t going to risk you. I skirted the line, but I wasn’t going to cross it. Besides, Myrtle would have killed me dead.”
He laughed. “Yeah, well, she’s going to do that to me when she finds out I sent you in.”
Which she would know because he would tell her. The same way I would tell Kenneth. Delayed and off-handed and underplayed as if it were no big deal. I sighed and shifted the clipboard in my lap. “We need to send someone out to check all the old landing sites.”
Eugene frowned. There was a two-year gap between when I started launching and when he did. He’d never come to the Moon without satellites. Of the people up here currently, only Halim and I had used the old-style landers.
“Before we got the navigation satellites, we had high-gain antennas on the landers.” Later missions had them only on the orbiter because the satellites provided the coverage.
He sat up, eyes widening. “Can we use that to contact Earth?”
“Yes? Maybe. It depends on someone having a way to listen, but—” I shook my head, before I let myself get distracted. “If any of them are missing, then Curt’s threat about a remote signal from Earth might not be a bluff. And they might not need to wait for the IAC to reestablish contact.”
Eugene stared at me as shock slackened his face, followed by widening, horrified eyes, and then his jaw tightened with rage. “I should have let you kill him.”
“He may have uses later.” I rotated my cast as much as I could, picking at the plaster. “But I have another suggestion you aren’t going to like.”
He shook his head. “This isn’t time to play.”
“After we eat.” I said it out loud to remind myself that I could not skip another meal. “Tell Ana Teresa to take my cast off. Halim and I are the only two people on this whole tiny world who are trained on those landers.”
* * *
The problem with my brilliant proposal was it required waiting for Myrtle and Halim to return. More specifically, waiting for Halim to come back wasn’t a problem. It gave me a chance to rest and to eat something. Eugene dispatched Mavis and her team to the lava tube at The Garden. Ana Teresa, with much grumbling, removed my cast. That was all fine.
The problem was that Myrtle came back with Halim and was … displeased.
Halim and I sat in the conference room and tried to pretend as if Myrtle and Eugene had not just left to have an argument. They were in the office next door, and occasionally one of their voices would vibrate down the hall.
“… you did not let her.”
I cleared my throat and pushed my fork around in the boiled dandelion greens on my tray. My left arm was shockingly thin, and gripping the fork made the base of my thumb ache with strain.
The tray contained my second meal today and I had wanted to make certain Myrtle saw me eating. Two problems. She was yelling at Eugene and nothing on the tray looked good.
I abandoned the fork and picked up a cube of bright orange cheddar with my right hand, rolling it between my fingers like a die. They’d been out of cottage cheese and this was the closest option. “I thought we’d start with the landing sites near The Garden and Marius Hills before moving to the ones near the main colony.”
“… think I wanted to…”
Halim paused with a piece of chocolate cake partway to his mouth. The lines from his Snoopy cap and mic had mostly faded, but his hair was still a tangled mess. “More efficient to split us up. Send us each out with a BusyBee loaded with engineers who can safely dismantle whatever we find.”
“Good thought.” The cheese left greasy residue on the ends of my fingers. “Although I’m not sure how many people we have who actually know how to defuse things. We might have to wait for Mavis’s team to come ba—”
The door to the conference room opened. Myrtle stalked in and glared at me, shaking her head. “Pilots.”
Halim looked at the empty door. “Where’s Eugene?”
She straightened the stack of maps on the table, aligning them with the edge in rigid geometry. “If you get him fired, I will … Well, I’ll just have to hope God will forgive me.”
“It’s only a moonwalk.” I set the cheese on the tray and wiped my fingers on my napkin. “It’s not doing anything we haven’t trained for.”
“You know how it will look in the news if you die out there?”
“Yes.” I picked up the cheese again because the last thing I needed was for her to see me not eating. “I’ve spent most of my adult life being evaluated for how I appear in the news. Thank heavens we don’t have to worry about Halim’s appearance in the news.”
Myrtle winced a little. “You know it’s different.”
I was the widow of a beloved politician. I was white. I
was a woman. If Halim died trying to defuse a bomb, he would be heroic. I would just be a tragedy. A senseless tragedy and the blame for it would rest on Eugene. I tore the cube of cheese in half. “Believe me, I considered going out unauthorized so it wouldn’t blow back on him.”
Halim looked aghast at the suggestion of doing a solo moonwalk. Myrtle just looked sad.
“I’m trying very hard not to be stupid.” I put the piece of cheese in my mouth. It had enough lactic acid that my mouth watered a little. “But I do know my judgment is … off. That’s why I suggested it so we can work the problem together.”
Myrtle rested her face in her hands, with her elbows on the table. “He’s calling the department heads. God help us all, but we’re doing this.”
Halim and I exchanged glances. All I’d had time to do was tell them about the idea before Myrtle had hauled Eugene out of the room. Halim’s idea of splitting us up hadn’t been posed to the group yet. “We?”
She lowered her arms and looked at me. “Don’t think for a second I’m letting you go out there without someone who knows you very well.”
I wish that I could unsee the specific fear she carried in her heart. Myrtle was not afraid I would perform badly or that I would make a mistake on the surface of the Moon.
She was afraid because she saw my attempts to gain a modicum of control over my life as attempts to self-destruct. She was afraid that I wouldn’t care enough to be careful. She was afraid of the risks that I would take.
She was afraid that I wouldn’t care if my suit ruptured and hissed out.
FIFTY-ONE
BusyBee 2 Mission Log, EV1 Myrtle Lindholm:
June 2, 1963, 06:00—Completed suit checks. All EMUs are nominal. The suits are rated at eight hours of consumables, so for each site, I’ve allotted a maximum of four hours with a refresh between sites. The overall walkback limit is set at fourteen hours.
My breath was loud in my helmet as I stood in the airlock of the BusyBee waiting for the air to finish cycling out. Myrtle was by my left shoulder, giving a thumbs-up to the three engineers waiting in the main cabin of the BusyBee for us to assess the site. Mavis, Eunice, and Yung-Chiu, who was also rated as a pilot. Just in case.
We were pretty sure that if Curt wasn’t bluffing, the antennae he was using would be at one of the landing sites near the Marius Hills outpost. That’s where Eugene sent Halim. But if we were wrong and something happened to Myrtle or me, the engineers had a way home.
Myrtle checked the indicator on the outer hatch. She wore the red stripes of EV1 and was in command of the mission, which was fine with me. My role was solely to examine the lander, make sure nothing was off-nominal, and then we would move to the next landing site.
Under my Snoopy cap, the comms gear pressed against my ears and cheek. Myrtle’s voice crackled over the tiny speaker. “Airlock pressure going toward zero. Verify suit circuit 36 to 43.”
I used my wrist mirror to check the settings on my suit. “That’s verified.”
“FIPGA pressure above 4.5. Okay. 4.7, coming down. Ready to open the hatch when we get to zero.” Waiting for that needle to move the last fraction always seemed impossibly long. “There we go. 0.1. I’m opening the hatch now.”
The tiny remainder of atmosphere evacuated the airlock, appearing as a brief mist, and was gone before the hatch fully opened. Myrtle climbed down the three steps from the BusyBee to the surface of the Moon. Her shadow stretched long and dark across the ridges of the tiny craters pocking the floor of Mare Crisium.
I clambered down after her, working against the stiff pressurized legs of my spacesuit. Dust puffed around my feet, falling back in perfect trajectory arcs undisturbed by air. The lander module was only ten meters away, all shiny gold and silver, except for the scorch marks where we’d separated the ascent module and launched back into orbit.
Myrtle had set us down so the sun was to our right; that way we didn’t have to walk directly into it on the way there or back. Above us, the sky was velvet black.
“See anything out of place?”
“Negative.” Footsteps ringed the module, marking places where we’d walked to set up experiments or collect samples. Were there new prints? It was impossible to tell. Without wind or weather, the prints I had left years ago were as fresh as the ones I made today. “Let’s take a closer look.”
“Roger.” Myrtle turned to the module and skip-walked toward it.
I leaned forward a little in my suit to counterbalance the Personal Life Support System I wore on my back. The PLSS had thirty-eight kilograms of mass and even if it only weighed six kilos on the Moon, it was still a significant percentage of my mass. For all of that, it felt good to be outside.
Granted, I was in my own person-shaped spacecraft, but there were no walls. Just the black arc of the sky backing the tans and grays and whites of the lunar landscape. I caught a flash of green to my left and my brain automatically went “olivine basalt” the way I had drilled for the early missions.
Up close, the ship was pocked with micrometeorite strikes. Each had raised a tiny ridge of knifelike blades around the impact points.
Myrtle stood in front of the ladder. “I don’t like the idea of climbing that.”
The suits had twenty-one layers, each designed to keep us safe in a different way. In theory, they could stop an 8mm round. But the gloves … those were more vulnerable because they had to be flexible. They were puncture resistant, yes, but this was just our first stop. Spending a day pressing my gloves against tiny knives was not appealing.
“Yeah…” I looked around us at the landing site. “Hang on.”
“What are you thinking?”
“We left a bunch of garbage behind.” My feet sent up their first mild complaints as I walked over to the stack of white bags next to the leg of the lander. I had to bounce up a little to be able to come down with enough force to bend the knees of my suit. I opened the first bag and lifted out one of the plastic packets inside.
“Are you serious?” Myrtle came up behind me.
“I think the correct question is ‘Am I shitting you’ and yes, yes I am.” I held a half-frozen fecal containment bag in my right hand, filled with mashed brown space turds. I rested it on the ground so it could thaw in the sunlight. “The bags are sturdy, and we need something we can shape around the rungs.”
Myrtle’s sigh was loud over the VOX. “I thought I was done with this when the boys were out of diapers.”
“Hey. It’s in plastic. And be happy you joined the program after they built the zero-g toilets.” I laid another bag on the ground. “Taping a bag to your rump is exactly as delightful as it sounds.”
She laughed. “I’ve heard horror stories.”
I grinned through my helmet. “So … funny story. During training, a certain astronaut of our acquaintance did not take the suggestion to shave his nethers seriously. When it came time to remove the tape … I wasn’t in the room, but could hear the screaming. It is one of my fondest memories.”
Myrtle nearly bent double laughing and had to stagger to get her balance back. “You have to tell me who.”
I pressed my left hand to my chest and lifted the right in a Girl Scout salute. “I promised I would not.”
“The temptation to look at who you trained with is very strong…”
I poked the first of the bags to see if the sun’s rays had softened it up enough for use. “He’s lucky it wasn’t en route, or that would be in the transcripts.”
“Don’t make me laugh anymore. I can’t wipe my eyes.”
“All right … but then I can’t tell you about Terrazas and the floating ‘Milk Dud.’”
“No.”
“Yep. That one is in a transcript.” I sighed and looked up, trying to spot Mars amid the millions of stars overhead. “How do you think they’re doing out there?”
She turned so her back was to the sun and stared into the vast space between us and the First Mars Expedition. “Last we heard, they were fine. It’s been a week
without contact … so they may still be trying to troubleshoot the ships.”
I compressed my mouth. Without the Outer Space Tracking Network, the First Mars Expedition would be too far out to pick up anything from home. They didn’t even have the option we had of sending a ship to Earth.
“Nathaniel must be losing his mind.” Assuming the people at the IAC were all right. I poked the plastic bag and my glove depressed it a little. “Poop’s warm.”
Myrtle crouched down to pick up a couple. “Let’s do this shit.”
“Language!” I laughed, even as I was aware that she was trying to keep me from getting melancholy. Unfortunately, I know from experience that telling someone you aren’t in danger of offing yourself has very little impact in the context of behavior like mine.
So I carried warm bags of space poop to the lander and formed them around the rungs. It was like clay. Warm, very brown clay. The tiny abrasions in the surface of the rungs gave traction to the bags and I carefully did not think about the fact that they would start to leak through those little punctures.
I grabbed a rung wrapped in poop. The bag gave a little more than I would have liked. “Brace me?”
“Got you.” Myrtle’s hands balanced the mass of my PLSS as I hoisted myself up. My left hand could barely close on the crosspieces, but it was enough to get me up the nine ladder rungs to the “porch” of the descent stage.
The lander looked solid, but it was really just a bunch of engine parts and tubes wrapped in tinfoil. Excuse me. Wrapped in Kaplon. Still. You had to know exactly where to step or you’d punch through the gold foil and hit one of the “no-go” zones. The danger wasn’t that you would damage the engine, but that you would rip your suit.
And knowing where to step was why I was out here.
I tethered myself to the handrail of the “porch” and balanced very carefully on the support truss as I bent over the Quadrant 1 compartment. When we’d been here, the ascent stage’s command module had been affixed to the lander, providing hand grips. Without it, this was an awkward, painstaking process. There was no scenario in which a human needed to interface with this part of the ship without the lunar module in place.
The Relentless Moon Page 48
