Moonrise gt-5

by Ben Bova

  If the water tube was no longer properly connected insidi the collar ring, the only way to fix the problem was to re-seal the collar. Inside a shelter, or even in an airlock, Paul would have unlocked the collar seal, taken off his helmet, checked the connection to make certain it wasn’t blocked or broken then put the helmet back on and sealed it tight again.

  Out here in the vacuum of the lunar surface he didn’t have that luxury. But I can do most of it, he told himself. If I’m quick enough.

  Painfully he wormed his arm back into its sleeve and wriggled his fingers back into the glove. Then, still, breathing hard, swiftly going through the emergency procedure in his mind. It works in the procedures he told himself. Now let’s see if it works for real.

  He took one long, last breath, then exhaled slowly. Holding: his breath, he clicked open the seal of the collar ring and slid the helmet half a turn, as if he were going to take it off. A slight hiss of air made every nerve in his body tighten. But he held the helmet for a moment that seemed years long, then twisted it back to the closed position and snapped the seal shut again.

  The hissing stopped and Paul took a big, grateful gulp of oxygen.

  Then he turned his head to the left and found the nipple of the water tube with his lips. Carefully he sipped.

  Water. Just a dribble, and it was warm and flat. But it tasted better than champagne to him.

  He took another sip. Still had to suck hard, but at least some water was flowing now. The connection had been dislodged when he fell and now it was back in place. Okay.

  “Okay,” he said aloud, his throat not so parched now. “Let’s get on with it.”

  He started off again, still using the trail of his own boot prints to point him in the right direction. The glare of the sun made him want to squint, even behind the heavily tinted visor.

  Ten more miles,” he said. “Okay, maybe twelve. Could be less, though. Hard to tell.”

  He trudged on, boots kicking up soft clouds of dust that fell languidly in the gentle gravity of the Moon. His mind turned back to Greg. Nanomachines. The sonofabitch turned them into a murder weapon. Kid’s brilliant. Crazy but brilliant. Will he turn on Joanna? Will he try to kill his own mother? How crazy is he? Or is it all a very clever scheme to get what he’s always wanted — total control of the corporation. Total control of his mother. Total control of Melissa, too.

  Melissa. Paul thought about her as pushed himself across the barren rocky plain. Sweet silky Melissa. I knew she’d be my downfall. I knew it, but I let it happen anyway.

  SAN FRANCISCO

  Paul’s tour of the corporation’s divisions took him to Houston Denver, Los Angeles and finally to the struggling nano technology division in San Jose, squarely in the dilapidated heart of what had once been called Silicon Valley.

  Joanna stayed in Savannah. They had not made love since the ill-starred trip to the space station. The night after Greg’s confrontation over the videodisk, Joanna had flinched when Paul had touched her in bed.

  “Not now,” she said. “I just can’t.”

  Trying not to feel angry, Paul leaned against the pillows and grumbled, “You’re acting as if I did kill Gregory.”

  Joanna turned to face him. “Maybe we did, Paul. In a way.”

  Paul started to shake his head.

  “He found out about us,” Joanna said. “That might have driven him to kill himself. We’re responsible.”

  The hell we are.”

  “Why else would he do it?” she asked, her voice filled with anxiety. Yet her eyes were dry and clear. “Unless Greg’s right and somebody actually did murder him?”

  “He blew his own brains out,” Paul insisted.

  “But why?”

  Paul thought a moment. “Good question. I’ll ask McPherson to look into it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There must have been some reason for Gregory’s suicide. And I don’t mean us. Let McPherson hire some investigators. There’s a lot about Gregory’s life that we don’t know about.”

  Joanna’s face hardened. “There’s a lot about his life that I don’t want to know about. Not the details.”

  “Okay. But I want to know the details. I want to know if there’s anything there that could be a reason for his killing himself.”

  “Such as?”

  “How the hell would I know? Let McPherson look into it.”

  Joanna agreed — hesitantly, Paul thought. But they didn’t make love that night, nor any night afterward until Paul left on his swing of visits to the corporation’s facilities across the country.

  Paul was surprised to see Bradley Arnold at the Houston division. The chairman of the board was sitting in the division manager’s office when Paul arrived. He looked uneasy, his bulging frog’s eyes darting back and forth between Paul and the division chief, who was coming around his desk, his hand extended to Paul.

  “I didn’t know you were coming here, Brad,” Paul said as he shook hands with the youthful division manager. “I could have flown you out in my plane.”

  “I’m on my way to a meeting in Tokyo,” Arnold said, fiddling with his ill-fitting toupee nervously.

  “Tokyo? By way of Houston?” Paul forced himself to chuckle as he sat beside the chairman in front of the manager’s desk. Arnold refused to fly in the Clipperships. He would take all day to get from Savannah to Tokyo on his private supersonic jet rather than make the jump in forty minutes aboard a Clippership.

  “I wanted to stop off here and talk with you,” Arnold replied. Turning to the manager, he added, “In private.”

  The manager took the hint and excused himself. Once he shut the office door behind him, Paul asked, “What’s this all about, Brad?”

  Radiating earnestness out of his florid face, Arnold said, “I know it looked as if I were on Greg’s side, back there at the house—”

  “It sure did,” said Paul.

  “But I’m on your side, Paul. I want you to understand tha and believe it.”

  Yeah, Paul said to himself. And Brutus loved Caesar so much he stabbed him.

  “I wanted that meeting to be a reconciliation between you two. I had no idea Greg was going to make the demand he did.”

  “You didn’t seem terribly surprised,” Paul said.

  “Oh, but I was!”

  “If I remember correctly, you told me that you were going to play Greg’s videodisk for the rest of the board members.”

  “I had no choice!” Arnold pleaded. “Greg’s going to do it anyway, so I went along with him. How can I act as a mediate between the two of you if he doesn’t trust me?”

  Paul looked into Arnold’s hyperthyroid eyes and saw nothing but ambition. He’s playing both sides of the street or trying to. If Greg can shove me out of the corporation, Brad runs the show. Greg’ll be CEO but Brad will be pulling the kid’s strings. If I hang in and beat Greg, the bastard wants me to believe that he’s been on my side all along.

  “All right,” Paul said calmly. “What are you going to do about the disk?”

  Arnold spread his chubby hands in a gesture of helplessness. “What can I do? Greg’s determined to show it to each and every member of the board. All I can do is try to downplay it, tell them that Gregory had turned into a paranoid alcoholic and committed suicide.”

  Pouncing on that, Paul demanded, “You’ll say that to the board?”

  Arnold nodded.

  “In front of Greg?”

  “Yes.”

  Thinking swiftly, Paul said, “All right, then. Can you call an emergency meeting of the board as soon as I get back from this trip? Let’s get this out in the open and finish it, once and for all.”

  Bobbing his head up and down, Arnold said, “The quarterly meeting is due—”

  “I don’t want to wait for the quarterly meeting,” Paul snapped. “Call a special meeting and play the videodisk for them all at the same time, before Greg can get to them.”

  “I think he’s trying to meet each board member individually
,” Arnold said, “and show the disk to each of them in private.”

  “All the more reason for speed, then. Set up an emergency meeting right now.” Paul pointed to the phone console on the manager’s desk.

  “Yes, good thinking.” The board chairman pushed himself out of his chair and went to the phone.

  Nodding, satisfied, Paul got up and headed for the door. “Thanks, Brad,” he called over his shoulder. “Have a good meeting in Tokyo.”

  Arnold waved to Paul, the phone receiver in his other hand. But as soon as Paul left him alone in the office, he phoned Gregory Masterson III in Savannah.

  Melissa Hart was also at the Houston plant. She told Paul she had come to help negotiate new work rules for the factory that was being converted from making commercial airliners to building Clipperships.

  She was at the Los Angeles facility, too. And then, when he got to San Francisco, Paul saw her walk into the lounge at the Stanford Court.

  No one who could afford to avoid it stayed overnight in San Jose: despite all the efforts at rebuilding the area after the economic collapse that had swept the American computer industry at the turn of the century, the slums were still dangerous and dirty. The corporation’s travel office booked Paul into the Stanford Court Hotel in the heart of San Francisco.

  The nanotechnology division was Greg’s special baby; his father had let Greg pump money into a nascent technology even though any hope of profitability was years, maybe decades, away. The board of directors had tried more than once to admit defeat and close the division down. Then they wanted to move it away from San Jose, to a’safer’ location in Nevada.

  Paul had led the fight to keep the nanotech division in San Jose; he had convinced the board of directors that the corporation had a responsibility to keep as many jobs in the region as possible. His strong moral stand — and a stiff helping of government subsidies — swayed the board to do the right thing. And take every public relations advantage of it that they could.

  It was late afternoon. Paul had just arrived in San Francisco; tomorrow morning a limousine would take him to the waterfront, where a helicopter was set to fly him to San Jose for the day’s meetings and inspections of the labs and prototype factory. Then, back to the airport and home to Savannah. And Joanna. And Greg.

  He stopped off in the lounge for a soothing shot of mellow golden tequila. Cool and dimly lit, with soft music purring in the background, the lounge was less than half full; mostly businessmen and women finishing their day with a drink and some chat.

  Then Melissa walked in, tall and beautiful. Men and women both, they all looked her over, from her slick pageboy hairdo to her slitted ankle-length skirt that opened to reveal her long shapely legs as she walked to the bar.

  She went straight to the chair beside Paul.

  “You following me?” he asked as she swivelled the chair and sat on it.

  “I was going to ask you the same question,” she said, smiling slightly.

  “I don’t know of any labor negotiations set for the San Jose division,” he said.

  “My office has a few complaints of discrimination,” Melissa replied. “Thought I’d try to defuse them before they get serious.”

  The bartender came by. She ordered a glass of chardonnay. Paul got a refill on his Tres Generacidns.

  “Discrimination?” Paul asked. “Against who?”

  Melissa took a sip of wine, then answered, “The usual: Asians claiming the Hispanics are picking on them; Hispanics claiming the Asians won’t promote them. Small stuff, but it could get nasty if we don’t take care of it right away.”

  A faint hint of her perfume reached him: subtle, suggestive, it reminded him of the times they had shared.

  “So you’re not following me, after all.”

  Melissa shook her head.

  “Greg didn’t ask you to keep tabs on me?”

  Her eyes widened with surprise. “Greg and I are finished. Didn’t you know that?”

  “Finished?”

  “He dumped me. Just like you did.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “And for the same reason,” Melissa said bitterly. “Joanna.” —

  “What?”

  “He’s jealous of you, Paul. And not just over the CEO job. He doesn’t want you with his mother.”

  Paul downed half his tequila in one gulp. Feeling it burning tinside him, he muttered, “The kid’s crazy.” …’He needs help, I agree,” Melissa said. “He might do something violent.”

  “Violent?”

  “It was scary,” she said. “I thought he was going to turn ton me.”

  “Why didn’t you leave him?”

  She stared down into her wine. “I… To tell you the truth, Paul, I was afraid to. I was almost glad when he told me he wanted to end it.”

  Jesus, Paul thought Her job is to handle cases of discrimination and sexual harassment, and she can’t even take care of herself.

  “He had to get real teed off about it,” she went on, almost in a whisper. “He couldn’t just tell me he wanted to end it He had to get raving and yelling like some monster. I thought he was going to belt me.”

  “Greg?” Paul couldn’t believe what she was saying.

  But Melissa nodded solemnly. “Underneath all that self control he’s a wild man. He’s like a bomb, all wound up tight and ready to explode.”

  “Maybe we ought to get the company shrink to look him over,”

  “You’d have to tie him hand and foot first.”

  Paul finished his tequila and motioned to the bartender foi another. Inevitably he invited Melissa to have dinner with him, and they made their way — Paul just a bit unsteadily — down the stairs to the venerable Fourneau’s Ovens.

  “Like old times,” Melissa said, smiling at him.

  “’Yeah,” Paul agreed. Old times. Life was a lot simpler then. No ties, no responsibilities.

  As they sat across the table from each other Paul thought, It was a mistake to get married. Joanna doesn’t love me. She just wants me to run the company for her until Greg’s old enough to take over. Marrying me kept it in the family, put me under her control. She doesn’t love me at all. We had better sex when we were sneaking around behind Gregory’s back.

  Do I love her? The question startled him. He stared at Melissa, coolly beautiful, just an arm’s length away. The street outside was darkening into evening, people were walking by, the sky was fading from pink to violet. He remembered their times in bed together. No holds barred; no questions asked. Just pure physical pleasure.

  Do I love Joanna? he asked himself again. If you have to ask, the answer must be no. What the hell is love, anyway? Then why did you marry her? He knew the answer, or at least he thought he did. To take control of the corporation. To keep them from scrapping Moonbase.

  But you must have loved her, he insisted to himself. You were wild about her. Yeah, before we got married. Before all this corporate crap got in the way. Before this mess with Greg came up.

  I did love her. Maybe I still do. But Greg’s between us now.

  And then Paul realized the truth. I don’t know if she cares more about him than me. If we get right down to the crunch, would she take me over her son?

  No, he realized. Never. She picked me as a stand-in to hold things together until Greg’s ready to take over. She didn’t realize that he’d challenge me right off the bat. And now that he has challenged me, will she back me or him?

  Paul thought he knew the answer.

  And here’s Melissa sitting close enough to touch, smiling and sad at the same time, talking about old times and looking at me like she needs me again. And I need her. I really do. I need somebody. I’m all alone in this.

  “You’re awful far away,” Melissa said softly.

  Paul drank the last of his wine. “Got a lot on my mind, Mel.”

  She closed her eyes briefly. Then, “You know what I wish?”

  “What?”

  “I wish we had a time machine.’He wanted to laugh.
>
  “A time machine.”

  “Yes. So we could back one year.”

  One year ago he and Melissa were in the midst of their affair.

  “You know,” she said softly. “Before all this other shit happened. When it was just you and me.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “That’d be nice.”

  Neither of them said another word about it, but once they finished dinner Paul brought Melissa to his suite and slowly, deliciously took off her clothes while she nuzzled him and crooned softly and smiled as he lifted her naked body in his arms and brought her to his bed.

  — When Paul woke the next morning to the buzzing of the alarm clock she was gone. Not a trace of her left, except the slight musky smell of her on the pillow he had slipped beneath her hips.

  That was pretty stupid, Paul told himself. If Joanna finds out — Suddenly he realized that he had done to Joanna exactly what Gregory had done. Betrayed her.

  For somebody who doesn’t really love her, he thought, you feel pretty damned shitty this morning.

  SAVANNAH

  Joanna could hear the thumping and banging from Greg’s rooms, even from all the way down the hall. She had gone up to her own sitting room, part of the master bedroom suite, when Greg had shown up with two husky movers and a small van to clean out his rooms.

  “I’m taking all my belongings,” Greg said tightly to his mother. “That includes my furniture.”

  Joanna simply nodded and fled upstairs to her sitting room, not wanting to be in her son’s way, not daring to let him see how miserable it made her to see him moving out.

  But there was no other option. Greg and Paul could not live under the same roof.

  After what seemed like hours, the noise stopped. Joanna looked up from the hand-held screen of her cyberbook reader. It was only midday; Greg had taken less than an hour to remove his belongings — and the furniture that she had bought for him.

  He can’t leave without saying goodbye, she thought. Should I go out and see him before they drive away?

  Then she heard his tap on her door. It hadn’t changed since he’d been a little boy. A single gentle tap. She had always responded to it immediately.