Wilson took it. “Er … I’m Wilson Ngu, no middle name, although you’ve got a good one. Fallon tells me that you’re all from Pallas, originally.”
“And will be again someday, no doubt. I just didn’t take to all that lumbering and milling and—tell me, did you ever smell a paper factory?”
Wilson shook his head. “I grew up on Pallas, too, in Curringer. I was a surveyor for my dad on Ceres. Now I’m an independent asteroid hunter.”
“Is that so? A hunter! Well, sit down, the both of you, sit down. Oh, my, the stories I could tell you about your father, my boy—and I will, if the skinflint refuses to pay up! In the meantime, would you care for a wee drop of the Bushmill’s—or should we make that a Coke? Coke it is, then. Tell me what you’ve been up to, young lady—but no more than an old man’s tender sensibilities can stand, mind you.”
She blushed. “Old man’s tender sensibilities my—”
“Now, now, let’s keep it clean, my dear, in memory of your sainted mother.”
She turned to Wilson. “Mom, Katie Evelyn O’Driscoll, is in perfect health, and almost certainly at home at this minute, fixing him his dinner.”
Terence shook his head. “No, dear, we’re going out tonight, to a new Vietnamese place—I swear you could put lemongrass and nuoc mam on a cinder block and I’d gulp it down with chopsticks. Most likely she’s picking out a nice, racy dress to distract me from those cute little Asian waitresses.”
“Oh, Daddy!”
“Aha, gotcha! I knew there was at least one more ‘Oh, Daddy!’ in there!”
“Oh, Da—” She stopped herself and they both laughed. Terence went to a bar in the corner, fixed Cokes and something in a glass for himself.
“Now,” he said, “would you rather have a First Class tour of the spaceport or listen to an old man ramble on about his asteroid hunting days?”
“I’d much rather hear about your asteroid hunting if you don’t mind.”
“Is that so, now?” Terence peered suspiciously at Wilson, then turned to Fallon. “You know, daughter, I actually believe the boy’s sincere. I think you’d better contemplate tellin’ him your middle name.”
Wilson gulped. Then Terence and Fallon burst out laughing. “He’s hardly a boy, Daddy. He fought that gunfight on Ceres, he’s been hunting for better than a year, and he even found a garnet the size of a—”
“A Buick. I know. I saw his mother on 3DTV. Quite a find, and a fine thing to do with it, give it to his mother. Next thing we’ll hear he’ll be finding the Diamond Rogue itself. Not a boy, then, Mr. Wilson Ngu?”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I’m not a sir—that’s for all the aristocrats and _nomenklatura_ whom we wisely guillotined in the 18th and 21st centuries. Call me Terence, or Terry. I’ll call you Willy.”
“Wilson.”
“Wilson it is, then. Let’s go down to the Green Cheese Room. It’s a restaurant. I have a table reserved at the back. On the way there’s something I have to check in the main concourse, if you don’t mind a detour.”
Wilson shook his head. Fallon popped out of her chair and took his hand, pulling him from his. Wilson didn’t think he’d ever seen her happier.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON
People never seem to understand that there’s no such thing as “safety”. There never was, and there never will be. It’s no safer now than it was a thousand years ago, or ten thousand. It won’t be any safer a thousand, or ten thousand years from now. Each period of history simply offers different dangers. The world—the universe—is an inherently perilous place.
Ironically, the worst danger we face today comes from those who would sacrifice anything, including their freedom—not to mention yours and mine—for the mere appearance of safety. And yet nobody can make it safe, not government, not religion, not the Wizard of Oz, not even your insurance company. All we can do is make the best preparations we can and then ride out whatever disasters may befall us from time to time. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu
“I’ll just be a minute,” said Fallon’s father. “I have to drop these datachips off at the routing desk, then we’ll go back up to lunch.”
“Now arriving,” said the PA system, “City of Newark, from Mars.”
Fallon and her escort agreed to stay put, more or less, until Terence returned. It was a good place to wait, Wilson decided. The concourse was beautiful, colorful, noisy, and absolutely bustling with cheerful travelers. The ceiling a hundred feet overhead was obscured by a multitude of overlapping sinuous balconies and hanging plants. Pools of water stood everywhere, and waterfalls, and giant, continuous windows wrapped around the area, stretching from the floor up into the rafters.
Beyond the great windows, the sun, unabated by an atmosphere, beat down mercilessly on the southwest quarter of the Sea of Tranquility, where the city of Armstrong and its spaceport were located. The site of mankind’s first landing on the Moon had been preserved here, and was a frequent destination for school children and tourists. Visitors could purchase anything from miniature 50-star American flags with wire stiffeners, to plastic holographic replicas of Neil Armstrong’s footprints, each of which had been carefully recorded and given a numbered label.
Blue Earth, aswirl in white clouds, hung in a sky as black as velvet.
Inside, across a vast expanse of highly polished native granite, the place was filled almost shoulder-to-shoulder with individuals headed to any of a hundred spaceports on Earth, or just arrived from there to stay in the Moon, or to continue to one of the five Lagrange points. Some were outward bound to Mars or Pallas or even the huge O’Neill habitat being built near Jupiter. Wilson tried to imagine what things would be like in here once Ceres had been terraformed and settled.
Or when they finally built the space elevators.
“First call for Nikola Tesla, bound for Venus Observatory Station, now boarding next to the Orange Julius stand.”
Just now, they waited in traditionally uncomfortable seats, dozing fitfully where they sat, talking on their phones, answering e-mail, reading, doing other things with their computers, visiting with their temporary neighbors, reloading personal weapons with ammunition guaranteed to be ship-safe, buying their kids sticky things to eat and drink, cleaning up after them.
The great chamber was bursting with all the excitement of travel to new places and old, let out into the sunshine for everyone to see, although the place was actually seven hundred feet below ground level, and the sunlight and the view from outside were “piped in” from the surface.
Fallon asked, “When you got here, did anyone ever explain to you why this area is buried so deeply? I know the ports on Pallas are very different.”
“From this? They certainly are. But I’ve never seen this place before, Fallon,” Wilson told her. “When we got here, in a Curringer Corporation ship, my sister Llyra and her coach both had severe cases of gravity sickness, and we rushed them from the ship to see some doctors.”
“Now arriving from Lagrange Point Two, Curringer Corporation survey vessel Rosalie Frazier.” Wilson always enjoyed hearing or reading about the scientific exploration vessel named after his famous great grandmother, although East America and the United Nations had noisily condemned the undertaking as a waste of precious resources. Constructed at L-Two, once the Rosalie Frazier left the Moon, where she would be taking on more crew and supplies, she’d be gone for five long years, on an ambitious mission to catalog every asteroid in the Belt.
“Gosh, I’d forgotten about your sister’s illness,” Fallon told him. “Not forgetting Jasmeen. But with so much of the local traffic filled to the brim with various violent and poisonous chemical fuels, and incoming traffic running on fumes ten times as destructive, plus ships from further out, Earth, Mars, Pallas, using several different kinds of nuclear powerplant, and every one of them running at several thousands of miles per second, with our little spaceport as their bull’s-eye … ”
“Digging in starts to make a lot
of sense,” Wilson agreed. “It’s so bright, in here, you’d never know you were actually underground, though. I think even my dad would regard this place as a marvel of engineering.”
“And showmanship,” she nodded. “They spent a lot of money on those windows, believe me. A very lot. And on a bank of a dozen high-speed superconducting magnetic elevators to zip you from the airlock of your ship, directly to this room, or back the other way, in only a couple of seconds. With computer-controlled acceleration, some people never even notice that they’re underground, instead of still outside on the surface.”
Wilson shook his head slowly. “Some people never even notice their own—”
“Gee,” Fallon interrupted him, making Wilson laugh. “I wonder how much longer Daddy’s going to be in there. I’m really starting to get hungry.”
***
Adam caught up with Lindsay when the firebreak around the burning circle was nearly three quarters complete. Both men stood in their envirosuits just outside the rear airlock of the gamera Lindsay was using.
They had a problem.
“What the hell do you suppose that is?” Lindsay asked his brother rhetorically. He didn’t have to point or even nod in the direction he wanted Adam to look. Standing before them was a bizarre pinnacle, two hundred feet tall, placed directly in the path of the firefighting effort.
Adam said, “I don’t have any idea. The geologists will have a field day with this—provided we survive the fire. Look at that slope!”
On the fire side, the peak sloped downward at an angle that would prevent the gamera from cutting the firebreak around the base of the peak. The machines were basically hovercraft, with a maximum altitude of fifty feet unless fitted with special booster packs. To get around the long slope, it would be necessary to cross the existing line of fire.
“We’ve got all the boosters we could ever wish for,” Lindsay observed, knowing what his brother was thinking. “But they’re back at the dome, neatly stored in stacks.” He indicated a glow visible at the horizon. “There isn’t time to go get them. The fire will be here by then.”
Adam thought about it. “The gamera I left there could bring them out.”
Lindsay moved his shoulders in a customary envirosuit gesture intended to convey that he was shaking his head. “I ran the numbers already, Ad. No good. We can’t go around the back, either, because of that.”
Inside his suit mask, Adam’s expression was grim. Behind the peak lay a chasm several hundred feet deep. Something had struck Ceres a billion years ago, plowed the chasm and piled material up into this strange little mountain. Some of it had spilled forward to create the barrier slope. Whatever they did, by the time they finished doing it, the fire would be upon them, and then past them, uncontained and uncontrolled.
“I know what to do.” Lindsay said at last. “I’ll finish the slice, right up to the roots of this thing, then get out and start a new one by hand, burning as I climb. It doesn’t look that steep for a man afoot.”
Adam was skeptical, but nodded. “I’ll go around on the fireside as fast as I can, ask whatever factory ship is nearest locate you, and then climb and cut my way toward you. I don’t think there’s any other way.”
“Let’s do it! When we meet at the top of the promontory, we’ll drive in a golden spike.” Lindsay finished the sentence with his back to Adam, running to his gamera’s airlock. Adam ran to his own and climbed aboard. Lindsay informed Ingrid of the plan. Under her hands, the machine rose to a working altitude and resumed cutting with its lasers.
Adam saw nothing of any of that. Obtaining the maximum altitude and forward speed his machine was capable of, he drove toward the fire and across it until he found a place on the mountain slope low enough for his vehicle to handle. He crossed over the almost bladelike feature, and headed back toward the theoretical line of the firebreak, controlling the gamera with one hand, while the other was occupied with punching up communications with the nearest factory ship in orbit.
“Eugene Shoemaker here. What can we do for —oh, it’s you, Dr. Ngu.”
“I was aware of that,” Adam replied. It had taken him a moment to realize that the man he was speaking to was not a Eugene Shoemaker, but was speaking for his factory vessel, named after the twentieth century astronomer who had proved that craters on the Earth, Mars, and the Moon were not volcanic in origin, but had been made by meteorites. It seemed so simple and obvious now, but it hadn’t been in Shoemaker’s day.
“I’m going to need you to locate a man in an envirosuit, climbing up the west side of that odd little mountain directly to my north. You should be able to see him and my gamera fairly easily from where you are.”
Adam knew that the factory ship crews all kept telescopes aboard, usually equipped with 3DTV cameras. In their leisure hours, they would minutely examine the surface below, submitting names for previously unnoticed features. Most of the time, Adam’s staff accepted these recommendations.
Most of the time .. except for that guy who’d wanted to give all the features in this area Latin names for erogenous zones on the human body.
“We can do that,” said the man on the ship. “Anything else, Dr. Ngu?”
“Yes, there is. I’m going to get out and start climbing toward him, cutting plastic with a hand laser. You can make sure my cuts are aligned with his.” By this time, Adam was around on the other side of the peak. “I guess you could start by telling me where to park this thing.”
“Sure thing, sir. You need to go another … let me switch to the calibrated monitor … another eight hundred eighty yards to the north.”
***
At the opposite quarter of the gigantic spaceport concourse, one of the high-speed elevators Fallon had just mentioned arrived from the Lunar surface, where, according to rows of monitor screens mounted everywhere one looked, shuttlecraft from the East American commercial spaceliner City of Newark, so-called “Queen of the Mars route”, had just landed on the vast Tranquility runway. The stainless doors hissed aside.
Among the first to step out were Krystal Sweet and Brian Downs.
” … except that we were never really on that miserable yellow dustball!” Brian was continuing the tirade he had begun in this very place, even before they had left for what had once been called the Red Planet, a tirade that he had kept up, at frequent intervals, ever since.
After winning its independence, and before it had managed to become the technological center of the Known Universe, cash-poor Mars had first made itself famous, Systemwide, and prosperous, by offering certain fleshly and other delights, every one of which was illegal in East America, guaranteeing themselves a constant stream of wealthy tourists. “Instead of taking the shuttle down from Phobos to Mariner Canyon, say, we just stayed where we were for two days, totally rockbound while they serviced their damn cattle ship, and then came right back here!”
Krystal was tired of it. She’d been tired of it the day it had started.
“Now, honey,” she began in a saccharine tone worthy of her name—one that struck terror in the hearts of everyone who really knew her. “I’ve told you at least a thousand times that neither our employers nor their sponsors are rich enough to pay for vacations on Mars for their employees. I’d like to have a vacation, myself, but I’ll bet you’d just have gotten yourself in trouble anyway, between the whores and the drugs and the gambling. We were there to case the space liner, anyway, don’t you see? Nothing less and nothing more. Understand?”
“I understand,” Brian muttered, “that all of the four-flushers and fat cats in the Solar System—including the suits and ties who run our own chickenshit movement—get to do anything the hell they want, any time the hell they want, and do it on a goddamn company expense account!”
“Brian, I—” She looked around to see if they were being overheard. Invisibility was a major asset in this business, and Brian was—
“I also understand that it’s the working stiffs like you and me, Krystal, the people who do all of the grunt w
ork and take all of the risks, who always end up paying for their good times, one way or another!”
“Keep it down, will you?” Krystal replied in a stage whisper. She nodded toward the carousel baggage conveyor that had suddenly started moving. “There’s my bag, and there’s yours. Grab ‘em quick, please, Brian. I don’t want to wait for this thing to go around again. I want to report in, take a long, hot shower, and sleep the clock around in a bed that isn’t being vibrated by a dozen constant-boost fusion engines being operated out of synch by an incompetent Chief Engineer. Geez, I never thought I’d live to see Affirmative Action applied to refugee Californians.”
Still grumbling, Krystal’s associate retrieved their bags, taking them to one of several small, waist-height tables scattered around the concourse. He and Krystal each opened their luggage the minimum amount possible, and quickly extracted their personal weapons. His, a large, old-fashioned automatic pistol chambered for nine millimeter Mauser, disappeared under his short jacket. He was originally from Ontario, and still believed, at some level, that firearms were the work of the Devil and should be kept out of sight of children and the general public.
Krystal strapped a gunbelt and holster diagonally across her hips and, checking the power supply, dropped a big Westinghouse laser into it.
“When in Luna,” she quipped, “do like the Loon—”
Brian screamed, “There he is, that sonofabitch! This is all his fault!”
“What—?” Krystal looked in the direction Brian was pointing. Sure enough, diametrically across the concourse from them, over the heads of about five thousand unsuspecting travelers, she saw young Wilson Ngu with a pretty, slender, redheaded girl. Before she realized it was happening, Brian had drawn his weapon from under his jacket and was pulling the trigger, over and over again. She knew she should have been deafened, but, suddenly full of adrenaline, she didn’t hear the shots.
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