Moonrise gt-5

by Ben Bova

  At least he had the GPS signal to keep him company. Cheerful little chirp in his earphones, almost like a songbird but nowhere near as melodious. Just a monotonous steady set of peeps, repeating over and over again.

  Hey, don’t knock it, he told himself. Long as you can hear that boring little song you’re on the right track. You can listen to Wynton Marsalis some other time.

  Through his dust-smeared visor Paul could make out the bulky shape of a massive boulder rising up on the horizon ahead of him, like a ship coming in from some far-off land. Boulder big as a house, Paul thought. As he got closer to it he saw that it was as big as a shopping mall.

  Got to go around it. Damn! Pissin’ chunk of rock’s gonna force me ten-twenty minutes outta my way.

  Squinting through his dust-covered visor, Paul saw that the huge boulder was pitted and rough, with a fairly flat top. Maybe I can climb over it. Be faster than walking all the way around it.

  But a voice in the back of his mind warned, You got enough troubles out here without rock-climbing. Stay on the flat ground and walk around the damned rock.

  Still, Paul studied the boulder as he came closer to it. I could climb up this side. Looks easy enough.

  And rip your suit? And how do you know what the othei side’s like? Once you get up on top of it, you gotta climb down again.

  I can do it, he insisted silently.

  Don’t.

  “It’ll save me almost half an hour,” Paul said aloud, trying to convince himself.

  The voice in his head reminded him, There are old astronauts and there are bold astronauts, but there are no old, bold astronauts.

  Paul reached the rock. It towered over him as he put out a gloved hand and touched its rough surface. He took a deep breath, then started climbing.

  SAVANNAH

  Through the whole ride back to their house, Joanna stayed coldly silent. A perfunctory peck on the cheek as Paul got into the limo, then not a word. Paul could feel icicles growing from the roof of the car. She can’t be pissed off just because she saw Mel rode back here with me. Somebody’s told her about last night. Who? Who could possibly know? Unless it was all a setup! He felt his stomach go hollow, the way it does the first few minutes in weightlessness.

  A setup. Melissa came on to me deliberately, and she must have reported right back to — who? Greg, most likely. Or maybe Brad; be just like the sneaky little sonofabitch to pull a trick like this.

  Paul waited until they were in the bedroom. He flopped his travel bag on the king-sized bed as Joanna went around to her dresser and sat in front of its triple mirror.

  “I did something I’m ashamed of,” he began, staying on his side of the bed.

  Joanna looked at him in the mirror. Paul could see her face-on, and both profiles. She looked calm, unsmiling but not scowling either. If she was angry she wasn’t showing it on her face. Just sat there, the ice queen: regal and cold, staring at him through the mirror, her back to him.

  “I went to bed with Melissa last night,” Paul said, hoping that confession would ease the tension.

  Her chin went up; her eyes flared.

  “It was a stupid thing to do,” he went on. “I had more to drink than I should have.” No, he commanded himself. Don’t hide behind an excuse.

  “Did you enjoy it?” Joanna asked coldly.

  “Not once I woke up.”

  She turned to face him. “Paul, I want the absolute truth from you.”

  “You’re getting it.”

  “Is this the first time you’ve done this?”

  Instantly he replied, “I haven’t slept with another woman since we first went to bed together, Joanna. Until last night.”

  “You had an affair with Melissa before, hadn’t you?”

  “We were together when I met you. I left her for you.”

  “And now you’ve gone back to her.”

  He stepped around the bed, then sat on its edge, on her side, close enough to Joanna to reach out and touch her. Yet he kept his hands on his knees.

  “Joanna, it wasn’t her. It could’ve been anybody. I was alone. We haven’t made love since we went to the space station. It—”

  “So it’s my fault?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “Nobody’s fault but mine. Not even Melissa’s, really. I should’ve kept my wick in my pants.”

  “Your wick?” Despite herself Joanna smiled a little. “I’ve never heard it called that before.”

  “It was a rotten thing to do,” he said. “It won’t happen again. I promise you.”

  She sighed wearily. “So did Gregory.”

  Paul gritted his teeth. You knew that was going to come up, he said to himself.

  “I’m not Gregory,” he said tightly.

  Joanna’s shoulders slumped. “Maybe it’s me,” she murmured. “Maybe I do something to cause this sort of thing to happen. Maybe I pick out men who’ll betray me.”

  Paul reached out and took both her hands in his. “Christ, Jo, it’s not your fault! I’m the guilty party here.”

  She wouldn’t look into his eyes.

  “You knew about it, didn’t you?” Paul asked. “You knew about it before I landed.”

  “Greg told me that you and Melissa were travelling together.”

  “Greg.”

  “I told him I didn’t believe it, but he said I could check with the travel office. So I did.”

  “She was in several of the same cities I was. I only saw her in the offices, though. We weren’t travelling together. We— weren’t shacking up.”

  “Until last night.”

  “That was a mistake that won’t be repeated.”

  Joanna said nothing. She still would not meet his eyes.

  “I think Greg sent her to nail me,” Paul said. “The bitch did this just to cause trouble between us.” With a weary shake of her head, Joanna replied, “Greg is finished with her. They broke up. He can’t stand the mention of her name.”

  “That’s an act he puts on.”

  “No,” she said. “I know my son better than that. He hates the sound of her name.”

  “Then it had to be Brad who set me up.”

  “Why does it have to be a trap?” Joanna asked. “Why can’t you accept the fact that you’ve made a mess of our marriage?”

  “Don’t say that! I don’t want our marriage to be hurt.”

  “It’s been hurt, Paul. You’ve hurt it.”

  “Okay. I know that. But—”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  It hit him like a physical blow. Paul sat there, hunched forward, holding both Joanna’s hands tightly in his. He blinked several times.

  “Pregnant?” In his own ears his voice sounded a full octave higher than normal.

  Joanna nodded. “It wasn’t just the weightlessness that was making me sick on the space station. I’ve been sick every morning for—”

  “We’re going to have a baby?” Suddenly everything was swept away. A baby! Paul had never even considered the possibility. At his age, at Joanna’s age…

  “Will you be okay? Can you do it without endangering your health?”

  Joanna smiled patiently at him. “It’s not an illness, Paul.”

  “Yeah, I know. Put I mean, isn’t it kind of late in the game for you?”

  “The obstetrician says I’m in fine condition and there reason why I can’t bring the baby to term.”

  “A baby.” Paul glowed with the wonder of it. “I never thought I’d be a father.”

  Her smile widened. “It does happen, you know.”

  He pulled her to him, sat her beside him on the edge of the bed and kissed her on the lips. “We’ve got to take extra-special good care of you.”

  But Joanna had not forgotten anything. “Paul — about this thing with Melissa.”

  “That was finished this morning,” he said quickly. “And nothing like it is going to happen again. Ever.”

  “I want to believe you.”

  “Believe it.”

  “It’s just
that — Gregory started womanizing when I was pregnant with Greg.”

  “I’m not Gregory,” he said firmly. “I told you that and I meant it”

  For several moments Joanna did not reply. Then, “All right, Paul. I’ll believe you.”

  For now, she added silently. I’ll trust you as far as I can watch you. Maybe it will all work out all right, but I’m not going to sit by and watch my second husband humiliate me the way my first one did.

  And Paul was thinking, This changes everything. I’ll have a kid to take care of. A son, maybe. I can’t let Greg gets his hands on the corporation. Not now. It’s going to be my child’s inheritance. A son. I want it to be a son.

  Ed McPherson was a chubby, moonfaced, baldheaded make-believe Texan who dressed like a cowboy instead of the head of a major corporation’s extensive legal department. Bom in New Jersey, educated at Princeton and Harvard Law, he cultivated a handlebar moustache and made a fetish of wearing cowboy boots, suede jackets and bolo ties. Word was around the office that the only time he wore a business suit was when he appeared before the Supreme Court of the United States.

  Which was never. McPherson rarely strayed farther from the headquarters of Masterson Corporation than the corporation’s Wall Street offices in New York.

  Paul was in his office in Savannah when McPherson’s call came through. He put the lawyer’s image on the display screen of his desktop computer.

  “Gregory had prostate cancer,” McPherson said, with no preliminary. “Terminal.”

  Paul sank back in his swivel chair. “You’re certain?” McPherson hardly ever smiled. He tried to keep a stony, hard-bitten look on his face. It was difficult for him, despite the luxurious moustache he sported; his round cheeks and bald dome did not lend themselves to a gunslinger’s beady-eyed glare.

  “The agency I hired tracked down the doctor who diagnosed him. It was so advanced that no treatment was possible.”

  “Christ,” Paul muttered.

  “He’d been seeing half a dozen different doctors over the previous five years or so,” McPherson went on. “He knew about the cancer, looks like, but refused to do anything about it until it was too late.”

  “But there are treatments for prostate cancer,” Paul objected. McPherson made a sour face. “You run the risk of incontinence. And impotence. I doubt that Gregory worried much about peeing his pants, but impotence would have been a big problem to him.”

  “So he just let the cancer go.”

  “And it killed him. Or rather, he killed himself when he found out it was terminal. Must have been giving him a lot of pain.”

  Paul thought for a moment. “You’re certain about all this? You’ve got documentary evidence?”

  McPherson brushed an index finger across his moustache. “I can get written statements from each of the doctors, plus all of Gregory’s medical records, if Joanna will sign a form demanding them.”

  I’ll talk to her about it. Thanks. That was good work.”

  “Wait’ll you see the bill,” McPherson said, cracking one of his infrequent smiles.

  Paul blanked the screen, then sat thinking, Will Joanna be willing to sign such a form? Should I bother her with this? She’s got enough on her mind, and I shouldn’t be upsetting her with old stories about Gregory.

  It’ll come up in the board meeting, Paul told himself. There’s no way I can shield her from Greg’s showing that damned videodisk to the board.

  But now I know what Gregory was muttering about in the video. It wasn’t us. It wasn’t our fault. It was the cancer that was killing him, and the gun was going to protect him from the pain. He was pissed off with the doctors, not us. He knew he was a dead man anyway; he just stopped the pain for himself.

  I’ve got to tell Joanna. She shouldn’t feel any guilt about this.

  Paul nodded to himself, satisfied that he had all the necessary pieces to the puzzle.

  One puzzle, he remembered. There’s still the question of who got Melissa to set me up. Was it Brad? And if it was, how can I prove it?

  He shook his head slowly. It’s gonna be one helluva board meeting. One helluva meeting.

  OVER THE ATLANTIC

  Supersonic aircraft were not allowed to fly above Mach 1 over populated areas, because their sonic booms disturbed people and rattled their homes. Fanners complained of milk cows gone dry because of sonic booms. Environmentalists protested against sonic pollution.

  So Bradley Arnold’s flight angled out over the Atlantic after taking off from the corporation’s private airstrip outside Savannah. Alone in the passenger compartment, sitting in one of the plane’s luxurious padded chairs, Arnold had no time to admire the procession of deep swells on the steel-gray ocean far below him. He had expected Paul and Joanna to come with him to New York, but Stavenger had backed out at the last pьnute.

  “We’ll fly up in my plane,” Paul had told the board chairman.

  “But I thought we would all be going together,” Arnold had said.

  “I’ve got a few things to do here this afternoon. We’ll fly up overnight.”

  What Paul did not tell Arnold was that he wanted to tell Joanna what McPherson had dug up about Gregory’s cancer. Paul had no intention of letting the board chairman in on the news, not until the directors’ meeting, when he would spring it on all of them, including Greg.

  Disappointed, Arnold had grumbled, “This is going to be an extremely important meeting, Paul. We could use the time to get our strategy ironed out”

  But Paul had insisted that he could not fly with Arnold to New York, He had other things to do. More important than strategy session with me, Arnold groused to himself.

  He doesn’t trust me. Arnold frowned with the realization that despite everything he had said to Scavenger, the new CEO still did not trust him. That’s Joanna’s doing, he thought. She’ never liked me. All the years I tried to help her husband, and all the help I’ve given to young Greg, and she still hates the sight of me.

  Well, it’s too bad for them, he said to himself as he swung out the keyboard set into the swivel table built into the plane bulkhead beside him. He stabbed at the telephone key and a soon as the computer’s smoky female voice asked, “How may I help you, sir?” he told the phone to get Greg Masterson. “His private line,” he added.

  Greg’s face appeared on the screen almost instantly, but i was only his recorded answer. With a grave smile his image said, “I am unable to take your call right now, but please leave your name and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can Thank you.”

  Nettled, fuming, Arnold blurted, “Greg, it’s me. Arnold. I need to talk to you now! Wherever you are, call me right—”

  The smiling image was replaced by a more serious Gregory Masterson III. He was sitting in front of a window that looked out on Central Park and the towers of midtown Manhattan.

  “Brad? Where are you?”

  I’m on my way to New York, ” Arnold replied testily. “Where else would I be?”

  “Oh. Of course.” Greg looked relieved.

  “I have some upsetting news.”

  Greg looked more amused than worried. “Really?”

  “McPherson’s come up with evidence that your father was dying of prostate cancer.”

  Greg’s slightly smug smile winked off like a light turned out.

  “It looks as if he committed suicide, after all.”

  “No,” Greg snapped. “That’s crazy. Prostate cancer can be treated. My father wouldn’t allow the cancer to go so far that it was going to kill him.”

  “My source in McPherson’s office tells me that Paul’s getting statements from half a dozen doctors who either examined your father or counselled him.”

  “With enough money you can get anyone to say anything.”

  “But Paul’s going to use these medical statements at the board meeting tomorrow, to show that your father killed himself, after all.”

  Greg fell silent. He glanced at his wristwatch. Then he said, “He wants to use these statements t
o counterbalance the videodisk, is that it?”

  Nodding, Arnold said, “I think he’s outmaneuvered us.”

  Greg’s expression hardened. “Even if my father had cancer he could still have been murdered.”

  “That doesn’t make much sense.”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t think so,” Arnold said. “It doesn’t seem reasonable.”

  “My father would never commit suicide, Brad. I know that. And so do you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Whoever killed my father deserves to die.”

  “But you don’t know that he was murdered,” Arnold said.

  “I know enough,” said Greg. “I may not be entirely certain of who the murderer is, but I know enough to act.”

  “You mean at tomorrow’s meeting? What do you plan to do?”

  Greg looked at his wristwatch again. “Thanks for the information, Brad. It was good of you to call.”

  “What? Is that all you’ve got to say?”

  “That’s all you’ve got time for,” said Greg.

  Arnold blinked his frog’s eyes, puzzled. “What are you talking about? We’ve got to figure out some way—”

  The plane lurched so hard that Arnold was hurled out of his seat and banged against the tabletop keyboard. The sudden pain in his middle made him feel he’d been carved in two. For an instant he hung there, then the plane pitched up sharply anc he was thrown back into his chair.

  “Seatbelts!” the pilot’s frantic shout came over the intercom. “We’ve lost power on—”

  Another staggering tumble, and the plane plunged downward.

  “Mayday! Mayday!” the intercom was blaring. “Lost power on both engines. Going down!”

  Horrified, pinned in his seat, unable even to lift his arms! Arnold saw the steel gray Atlantic rushing up toward him Then a frightful shriek of tortured metal and part of the wing ripped away.

  He was too terrified to scream. But Greg’s face on the little screen smiled grimly and said, “Goodbye, Brad.”

  The screen went blank and then the plane hit the water and exploded.

  MARE NUBIUM

  Paul pulled himself onto the flat top of the huge boulder and lay on his belly panting and sweating for long minutes.