The Precipice gt-8

by Ben Bova

  The bar was several levels down from the Grand Plaza, the size of two ordinary living suites, carved out of the lunar rock. And quiet. No music, unless someone wanted to sit at the synthesizer that lay dusty and rarely touched in the farthest, most shadowy corner of the room. The only background noise in the place was the buzz of many conversations. Pelicans were everywhere. A holographic video behind the bar showed them skimming bare centimeters above the placid waters of the Gulf of Mexico against a background of condo towers and beachfront hotels that had long since gone underwater. Photos of pelicans adorned every wall. Statues of pelicans stood at each end of the bar and pelican mobiles hung from the smoothed-rock ceiling. A meter-tall stuffed toy pelican stood by the bartender’s computer, dressed in garish, outlandish Florida tourist’s garb and peering at the drinkers through square little granny sunglasses.

  Pancho liked the Pelican Bar. She much preferred it to the tidy little bistro up in the Grand Plaza where the tourists and executives did their drinking. The Pelican was a sort of home away from home; she came often enough to be considered one of the steady customers, and she usually bought as many rounds as any of the drinkers clustered around the bar.

  She exchanged greetings with the other regulars while the owner, working behind the bar as usual, broke away from an intense conversation with a despondent-looking little redhead to waddle down the bar and pour Pancho her favorite, a margarita with real lime from Selene’s hydroponics fruit orchard. Although a set of booths lined the back wall, there were no stools at the bar itself. You did your drinking standing up, and when you could no longer stand your buddies took you home. House rules.

  Pancho had wedged herself into the crowd in between a total stranger and a retired engineer she knew only as a fellow Pelican patron whose parents had hung the unlikely name of Isaac Walton around his neck. The word was he had originally come to the Moon to get away from jokes about fishing. Walton’s face always seemed slightly askew; one side of it did not quite match the other. Even his graying hair seemed thicker on one side than the other. Normally a happy drinker, he looked morose as he leaned both elbows on the bar and stared into his tall, frosted drink.

  “Hi, Ike,” Pancho said brightly. “Why the long face?”

  “Anniversary,” Walton mumbled.

  “So where’s your wife?”

  He gave Pancho a bleary look. “Not my wedding anniversary.”

  “Then what?”

  Walton stood up a little straighter. He was about Pancho’s height, stringy and loosejointed.“The eighth anniversary of my being awarded the Selene Achievement Prize.”

  “Achievement Prize?” she asked. “What’s that?”

  The bartender broke into their conversation. “Hey, Ike, don’t you think you’ve had enough for one night?”

  Walton nodded solemnly. “Yup. You’re right.”

  “So why don’t you go home to your wife,” the bartender suggested. Pancho heard something more than friendliness in his tone, an undercurrent of — jeeps, she thought, he almost sounds like a cop.

  “You’re right, pal. Absolutely right. I’m going home. Whatta I owe you?”

  The bartender waved a meaty hand in the air. “Forget it. Anniversary present.”

  “Thank you very much.” Turning to Pancho, he said, “You wanna walk me home?”

  She glanced at the bartender, who still looked unusually grim, then shrugged and said, “Sure, Ike. I’ll walk you home.”

  He wasn’t as unsteady on his feet as Pancho had thought he’d be. Once outside the bar Walton seemed more depressed than drunk. Yet he nodded or said hello to everyone they passed.

  “What’s the Achievement Prize?” Pancho asked as they walked down the corridor.

  “Kind of a secret.”

  “Oh.”

  “I did the impossible for them, y’see, but I did it too late to be of any use and they don’t want anybody to know about it so they gave me the prize as hush money and told me to keep my trap shut.”

  Confused, Pancho asked, “About what?”

  For the first time that evening, Walton broke into a smile. “My cloak of invisibility,” he answered.

  Little by little Pancho wormed the story out of him. Walton had been working with Professor Zimmerman, the nanotech genius, when the old U. N. had sent Peacekeeper troops to seize Moonbase.

  “Stavenger was in a sweat to develop nonlethal weapons so we could defend ourselves against the Peacekeepers when they got here without killing any of them,” Walton said, growing steadier and gloomier with each step along the corridor. “Zimmerman promised Stavenger he’d come up with a way to make our guys invisible, but the bastards killed him when they attacked. Suicide bomber got down to his lab and blew the old man to smithereens.”

  “Himself, too?” Pancho asked.

  “I did say ‘suicide,’ didn’t I? Anyway, the so-called war ended pretty quick and we got our independence. That’s when we changed the name from Moonbase to Selene.”

  “I know.”

  “For a while there I didn’t have anything to do. I’d been Zimmerman’s assistant and now the old man was gone.”

  Walton had doggedly kept working on Zimmerman’s idea of finding a method for making a person invisible. And eventually he succeeded. “But who needs to be invisible?” Walton asked. Before Pancho could answer he went on, “Only somebody who’s up to no damn good, that’s who. Spies. Assassins. Crooks. Thieves.”

  Selene’s governing council decided to mothball Walton’s invention. Bury it so that no one would even know it existed.

  “So they gave me the big fat prize to keep me quiet. It’s a pension, really. I can live in comfort — as long as I stay in Selene and keep my mouth shut.”

  “Sounds cool to me,” Pancho said, trying to cheer him up. But Walton shook his head. “You don’t understand, Pancho. I’m a freaking genius and nobody knows it. I’ve made a terrific invention and it’s useless. I’m not even supposed to mention it to anybody.”

  Pancho said, “Aren’t you taking a chance, talking to me about it?” He gave her a sidelong glance. “Aw, hell, Pancho, I hadda tell somebody tonight or bust. And I can trust you, can’t I? You’re not gonna steal it and go out and assassinate anybody, are you?”

  “ ’Course not,” Pancho answered immediately. But she was thinking that it might be a hoot to be invisible now and then.

  “Wanna see it?” Walton asked.

  “The invisibility dingus?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If it’s invisible, how can I see it?”

  Walton broke into a cackle of laughter. Clapping Pancho on the back, he said, “That’s what I like about you, Pancho ol’ pal. You’re okay, with a capital oke.” Walton turned down the next cross-corridor and led Pancho up to the level just below the Grand Plaza, where most of Selene’s life-support machinery chugged away, purifying the air, recycling the water, rectifying the electrical current coming in from the solar farms. Pumps clattered. The air hummed and crackled. The ceilings of these chambers were rough, unfinished rock. Pancho knew that on their other side was either the manicured lawn of the Grand Plaza or the raw regolith of the Moon’s surface itself. And along a corridor not far from where they walked lay the catacombs.

  “Isn’t the dingus under lock and key?” Pancho asked as Walton led her past a long row of metal lockers.

  “They don’t even know it exists. They think I destroyed it when they gave me their lousy prize. Destroy it, hell! I’ll never destroy it. It’s the only one in the whole wide solar system.”

  “Wow.”

  He nodded absently. “And it’s not a ‘dingus’, it’s a stealth suit.”

  “Stealth suit,” Pancho echoed.

  “Like a wetsuit, covers you from head to toe,” he explained in a hushed voice, as if afraid someone would hear him. Pancho strained to listen to him over the background hum and chatter of the machinery.

  Pancho followed Walton down the long row of metal lockers. The corridor smelled dusty, unused.
The overhead lights were spaced so far apart that there were shadowy pools of darkness every few meters. Walton stopped in front of a locker identified by a serial number. Pancho saw that it had an electronic security lock.

  Feeling uneasy, Pancho asked, “Don’t they have any guards patrolling up here?”

  “Nah. What for? There’s cameras at the other end of the corridor, but this old tunnel’s like an attic. People store junk up here, personal stuff they don’t have room for down in their quarters.”

  Walton tapped out the security code on the electronic lock and pulled the metal door open. It squealed slightly, as if complaining.

  “There it is,” he said in a hushed voice.

  Hanging inside the locker was a limp bodysuit, deep black. “Ain’t she a beauty?” Walton said as he carefully, lovingly, took the suit from the locker and held it up by its hanger for Pancho to admire. “Looks almost like a wetsuit,” Pancho said, wondering how it could make someone invisible. It glittered darkly in the feeble light from the overhead fluorescents, as if spangled with sequins made of onyx. “The suit’s covered with nanocameras and projectors, only a couple of molecules thick. Drove me nuts getting ’em to work right, lemme tell you. I earned that prize money.”

  “Uh-huh,” Pancho said, fingering one of the gloved sleeves. The fabric felt soft, pliable, yet somehow almost gritty, like grains of sand. “The cameras pick up the scenery around you,” Walton was explaining. “The projectors display it. Somebody standing in front of you sees what’s behind you. Somebody on your left sees what’s on your right. Just like they’re looking through you. To all intents and purposes you’re invisible.”

  “It really works?” she asked.

  “Computer built into the belt controls it,” Walton said. “Batteries are probably flat, but I can charge ’em up easy enough.” He pointed to a set of electrical outlets on the smoothed-rock wall of the corridor, opposite the lockers. “But it really works?” she repeated.

  He smiled like a proud father. “Want to try it on?”

  Grinning back at him, Pancho said, “Sure!”

  While Pancho wriggled into the snug-fitting suit Walton plugged the two palmsized batteries into the nearby electrical outlet. By the time she had pulled on the gloves and fitted the hood over her head, he was snapping the fully-charged batteries into their slots on the suit’s waist.

  “Okay,” Walton said, looking her over carefully. “Now pull the face mask down and seal it to the hood.”

  Narrow goggles covered Pancho’s eyes. “I must look like a terrorist, Ike,” she muttered, the fabric of the mask’s lining tickling her lips. “In a minute you won’t look like anything at all,” he said. “Unlatch the safety cover on your belt and press the pressure switch.”

  Pancho popped the tiny plastic cover and touched the switch beneath it. “Okay, now what?” she asked.

  “Give it fifteen seconds.”

  Pancho waited. “So?”

  With a lopsided grin, Walton said, “Hold your hand up in front of your face.”

  Pancho lifted her arm. A pang of shock bolted through her. “I can’t see it!”

  “Damn right you can’t. You’re invisible.”

  “I am?”

  “Can you see yourself?”

  Pancho couldn’t. Arms, legs, booted feet: she could feel them as normally as always but could not see them.

  “You got a full-length mirror in your locker?” she asked excitedly.

  “Why the hell would I have a full-length mirror in there?”

  “I want to see what I look like!”

  “Cripes, Pancho, you don’t look like anything. You’re completely invisible.” Pancho laughed excitedly. She made up her mind at that moment to borrow Ike’s stealth suit. Without telling him about it, of course.

  HUMPHRIES TRUST RESEARCH CENTER

  Covered from head to toes in the stealth suit, Pancho crept slowly, silently along the corridor of Martin Humphries’s palatial underground house. She had come down to the mansion with Amanda, although Mandy didn’t know it. For weeks Pancho had been dying to root around in Humphries’s mansion. The man was so stinky rich, so ruthlessly powerful and sure of himself, Pancho figured that there must be plenty of dirt under his fingernails. Maybe she could find something that would help Dan. Maybe she could find something that would profit her. Or maybe, she thought, burglarizing Humphries’s house would just be a hoot, a refreshing break from the endless hours of study that she and Mandy were grinding through. Besides, it’d be fun to wipe that smug smile off the Humper’s face.

  So she had borrowed the stealth suit from Walton’s locker the very next morning after he’d shown it to her. Pancho had gone to bed that night arguing with herself over whether or not she should ask Ike’s permission to use the suit. She had awakened firmly convinced that the less Ike knew the better off each of them would be. So, with a tote bag swinging from her shoulder, she’d gone to the catacombs instead of to work with Mandy, then detoured to the dusty, seldomused corridor where Walton had stashed the suit. She remembered the singsong of the locker’s electronic security code and tapped it out without a flaw. With a glance at the tiny red eye of the security camera on the ceiling at the far end of the corridor, Pancho quickly bundled the suit into her tote bag. Security people can’t watch every screen every minute, she told herself. Besides, even if one of em’s watchin’, I ain’t doin’ anything to rouse an alarm. Pancho then went back to her quarters. Amanda was busily at work in the simulations lab; Pancho had the apartment to herself. Immediately she started putting on the stealth suit.

  Once she got it on — and saw in the bedroom’s full-length mirror that she was truly invisible — she went out to test the suit. It worked wonderfully well. Pancho walked slowly, carefully, through Selene’s corridors, threading her way through the pedestrian traffic. Now and then someone would glance her way, as if they’d seen something out of the corner of their eyes. A stray reflection from the overhead lights, Pancho thought, an unavoidable momentary glitter off the array of nanocameras and projectors. But no one really saw her; she drifted through the crowds like an unseen phantom.

  She spent the day wandering ghostlike through Selene, gaining confidence in the suit and her ability to use it. The suit fit her snugly, but the boots attached to its leggings were Ike’s size, not her own. Pancho had solved that problem by wadding stockings into the boots. They weren’t exactly comfortable, but she could walk in them well enough.

  For kicks she lifted a soyburger from the counter of the fast-food cafeteria up in the Grand Plaza when no one was working the place except a dumbass robot. She immediately realized, though, that if anyone saw a soyburger floating in midair it would cause a fuss, so she dropped it into the recycler at the end of the counter before anyone noticed her.

  By mid-afternoon Pancho returned briefly to her quarters, took off the suit, and dashed out for a quick meal. She was famished. Being invisible makes you hungry, she joked to herself. By the time Amanda returned from her day’s work and began dressing for her dinner with Martin Humphries, Pancho was back in the stealth suit, standing quietly in a corner of the bedroom, waiting for Amanda to finish her damned primping and go out.

  A cloak of invisibility, Pancho thought as she rode the escalators a few steps ahead of Amanda, down to Selene’s bottom layer. What did they call those fancy suits the toreadors wear? A suit of lights, she remembered. Well, I’m wearing a suit of darkness. A cloak of invisibility.

  She had to keep her distance from everyone. If somebody jostled into her they’d know she was there, invisible or not. Pancho felt glad that Selene did not allow pets. A dog would probably have sniffed her out easily. The escalators got less and less crowded as she went down level after level. By the time she was riding down to the last level, she and Amanda were alone on the moving stairs. Once at the bottom, she waited for Amanda, then fell into step behind her. Mandy was heading for a private little dinner with Humphries. Just the two of them, they thought. Pancho smiled to herself
. If the Humper tries anything Mandy doesn’t like, I’ll coldcock him. I’ll be her guardian angel. Then she wondered just how far Mandy was willing to go with Humphries — and how far she could tease him without getting herself into real trouble. Well, she shrugged to herself, Mandy’s a grownup, she knows what she’s doing. Or she ought to. Mandy looked like a princess in a fairy tale, wearing a short-sleeved frock of baby blue with a knee-length fringed skirt. Modest enough, Pancho thought, although on Mandy nothing could look really modest. Not in the eyes of a man like Humphries, anyway. Pancho couldn’t recall seeing the dress before; Mandy must have bought it in one of Selene’s shops. Everything cost a fortune there, except for stuff actually made on the Moon. Is Humphries buying her clothes? Pancho wondered. He hadn’t given Mandy any jewelry, she was sure of that. Mandy would have showed it off if he had.

  Amanda walked purposively down the length of the corridor and into the grotto that housed the Humphries Trust research garden and house. Humphries was at the front door to greet her, all smiles. Pancho slipped in behind her, nearly brushing Humphries’s hand as he pulled the door shut. If the Humper felt anything, he didn’t show it. Pancho was in the house and he didn’t know it. As Humphries guided Amanda off to the bar, Pancho stood stock-still in the foyer. A man like Humphries would have a state-of-the-art security system in his home, she reasoned. No matter that the house was in Selene; Humphries would insist on topflight security. He might give the human staff the night off for his dates, but he wouldn’t turn off his alarm systems. Motion sensors were her big worry. Humphries obviously wouldn’t have any working in the residential wing of the house. But the offices would be another thing altogether. She could see the long, spacious living room and the corridor that led to the formal dining room and, beyond it, the library/bar. That was the direction Humphries and Amanda had gone.