Moonrise gt-5

by Ben Bova

  Joanna had been nursing the same tall fluted glass of champagne for almost an hour now. Gowned in a magnificent silver and taupe brocade jacket over a filmy chiffon skirt, she searched the crowded room. Men in immaculate white dinner jackets, women in glittering jewels and the latest fashions. But the one man she wanted to find was nowhere to be seen.

  Slowly she made her way through the crowd, chatting briefly with a couple here, smiling as she passed a group there. Across the hallway and into the library she went. Still no sight of Quintana. He wouldn’t have left so early, she thought, especially without saying good night to his hostess.

  Through the French windows of the library she saw a solitary figure out on the patio, the gleam of a cigar smoldering in the dark Georgia night. Quintana. Still smoking, despite all the laws against it.

  Joanna slipped through the open doorway and approached Quintana, her high heels clicking on the patio tiles.

  “What you’re doing is illegal, Carlos,” she said softly, smiling as he turned toward her.

  He smiled back. “In Mexico we have much more freedom.”

  “You also have much more pollution. And cancer.”

  Quintana waved his long, slim cigar. “The price of freedom. Will you call the police?”

  Laughing, Joanna said, “No. But I’d prefer that you throw that thing away.”

  “It’s barely started.” Quintana examined his cigar like a man admiring a fine work of art. “But for you, beautiful one, I make the sacrifice.” He let the cigar drop to the patio floor and ground it out with the heel of his highly-polished shoe.

  Even in the shadows of the night Joanna could see his gleaming smile. Carlos Quintana was the kind of man for whom the word dashing had been coined. A mining engineer who parleyed intelligence and daring into a considerable fortune, he was a champion polo player, a yachtsman of note, and a key member of Masterson Aerospace’s board of directors. Handsome, suave, he had the kind of classic Latin male good looks that would remain virtually untouched all his life. No one knew his true age; the guesses ran from forty-five to seventy.

  “My party bored you?” Joanna asked as they strolled side by side toward the garden. Overhead a sliver of a Moon was rising and stars glittered in the dark sky.

  “No, I just felt the need for some nicotine,” Quintana said. “And I knew that as soon as I lit up you would come running at me with a fire extinguisher.”

  “You’re hopeless,” she said, laughing again.

  “On the contrary, I am a man filled with hope.” His voice was soft, gentle, easy to listen to.

  Joanna arched a brow at him. “Hope springs eternal?”

  “Why not? The world is young, the night is beautiful, and I adore you.”

  “I’m not young, Carlos. Neither are you.”

  “I feel young,” he said. “You make me feel rejuvenated.”

  Joanna wished she could say the same to him. Instead, she changed the subject ’I’d like your advice about something, Carlos.”

  “Anything.”

  “You know my son Greg?”

  “I’ve met him once or twice.”

  “It’s time to appoint a new director for Moonbase.”

  He hesitated only a heartbeat ’I thought that decision has already been made.”

  “I’m reconsidering it. Greg has asked for the job.”

  “Ahh.”

  “What do you think about it?”

  This time Quintana’s hesitation was considerably longer. “There are several people on the board who would like to close Moonbase.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ve always fought to keep it going, even though it’s a drain, financially.”

  “Moonbase is in the black,” she said firmly.

  “Barely,” Quintana answered easily. “And when you consider all the little extras that somehow get put into the pot…’ He sighed. “Joanna, you know I support you unstintingly, but if we did an honest bookkeeping job, Moonbase would be in the red.”

  “Perhaps,” she murmured.

  “So you want to send your son there to make certain we keep it going.”

  “Quite the contrary, Carlos. Greg wants to spend his year there deciding whether or not to shut the base down.”

  “Really?” In the darkness she couldn’t see his brows rise, but she heard it in his voice.

  “He wants to make a thorough, unbiased assessment of the base’s prospects and then make a recommendation to the board, one way or the other.”

  It was several moments before Quintana replied, “Well, he’s certainly got the qualifications, based on the work he’s done with the Pacific division.”

  “Yes, I think so too.”

  “Would he really recommend closing the base? And if he did, would you agree to it?”

  Now Joanna hesitated. But she finally said softly, “Yes, to both.”

  “Isn’t he a little old for Moonbase? Most of the personnel we send there are quite a bit younger.”

  “He’s forty-six.”

  Quintana glanced up at the crescent Moon, just clearing the sycamore trees. “There’s always seemed to be — some sort of shadow on his history. Some scandal or something that everyone knows is there, but no one knows what it is. A family disagreement?”

  Tensing, Joanna answered, “You might say that”

  “It must have happened before I joined your board of directors.”

  “Yes. A long time before.”

  “That’s why he’s been kept off the board and away from headquarters all these years?”

  “I think,” Joanna said, “that it’s time to put all that in the past. As you say, it’s family history and it doesn’t necessarily involve the corporation at all.”

  “Doesn’t necessarily involve the corporation?” Quintana’s voice was filled with questions.

  “Carlos, I’m his mother. I think I know Greg’s limitations and his capabilities. I think he can handle the Moonbase job. But I might be too emotionally close to be seeing clearly.”

  “I understand,” Quintana replied. “I think I am too emotionally close to you to render an unbiased judgment.”

  “But if you can’t help me, who can I turn to?”

  He sighed again. “Joanna, I have always considered your intelligence to be of the highest order. Do what you think is best. I will certainly back you on the board, whatever you decide.”

  “Thank you, Carlos,” Joanna said. But she was thinking that unqualified support was no real help at all.

  MT. WASSER

  “There it is! Look!” Doug cried out.

  Turning awkwardly in her spacesuit to follow his pointing hand, Bianca Rhee saw a tall, wide pinnacle of rock jutting up into sunlight from the rugged shadowed mountain range below their ballistic lobber.

  “That’s Mt. Wasser?” she asked,

  “Got to be,” Doug said, nodding inside his helmet. He studied the sunlit jut of rock carefully. Slightly taller than Everest, Mt. Wasser just happened to be situated so close to the south pole that its uppermost reaches were always in sunlight.

  And down below, in those shadows, there’re fields of ice, Doug knew. Areas that are always in shadow, where the temperature is always at least a hundred below zero. Water, covered with dust from the infalling meteoroids, kept frozen in the cryogenic dark.

  Water and sunlight. The two most important resources of the Moon. Water for life. Sunlight for electrical power. Brennart is right, Doug told himself. That’s the most valuable real estate on the Moon, down there. He felt the excitement building in him all over again.

  In the Jobber’s cockpit, Brennart was scanning the readouts on his panel displays.

  “What are the others doing?” he asked Killifer.

  “Right on track. Following us like nice little puppies.”

  “Superb.” Brennart’s gloved fingers flicked along the control panel. “Okay. We’re going in.”

  The lobber tilted back to its original vertical orientation.

  Killifer punched
up the camera view of the ground on the main display screen.

  “Awful dark down there,” he muttered.

  “Infrared,” Brennart snapped.

  The image on the display screen did not change much: still dark, with vague suggestions of shapes looming in the shadows.

  “Braking in ten seconds,” Killifer read from the flight plan display.

  “I know.”

  “Altitude twenty.”

  “I know!”

  Killifer realized that Brennart was jumpy. They both peered hard at the camera display.

  “Lights,” Brennart ordered.

  Too high to do much good,” Killifer muttered, but he turned on the powerful lamps that had been installed on the underside of the lobber’s main platform.

  Brennart’s gloved thumb hovered over the keypad that would override the rockets’ firing. The shadowy ground was rushing up toward them. Killifer could see a jumble of shapes glittering in the reflected light of the landing lamps.

  “Boulders!” he yelped. “Big ones.”

  Smoothly Brennart ignited the main rocket thrusters. Killifer felt a sudden surge of weight, but before he could even take a breath it disappeared and they were falling again.

  “Goldman!” Brennart called into his helmet microphone. “Jump the boulder field. Follow me!”

  “Following,” came Goldman’s voice in their earphones, professionally unperturbed.

  “Reset the braking program,” Brennart commanded.

  Killifer tapped the keyboard. “Reset.”

  The camera view showed a smoother stretch of ground beneath them. Still a great deal of rocks strewn across the area, but they were smaller, less dangerous.

  The hard stony ground rushed up at them, stopped momentarily, then came at them again. The image on the display screen blurred; rocket exhaust, Killifer knew. Then he felt a thump and the familiar sensation of weight returned.

  “We’re down’ he said to Brennart And realized he was sweating inside his suit . “Number two?” Brennait called into his helmet mike.

  “Hundred-twenty… seventy… touchdown. We’re about fifty meters off your left rear. About seven o’clock in relation to your cockpit.”

  Both men turned in their seats but could not see the second spacecraft from their position.

  “The drones,” Brennart said.

  The two unmanned vehicles were programmed to follow Brennart’s craft at a preset distance, and to land a hundred meters on either side of it.

  Killifer glanced at the radar display. “Coming in now,” he said, pointing to the blips their beacons made.

  They could see one of the robot craft descending, its braking rockets winking on and off against the dark shadows of the mountains.

  “Override!” Brennart snapped. “It’s coming down in the boulder field.”

  But it was too late. The unmanned lobber touched one of its outstretched legs on a boulder almost as big as the vehicle itself. The other three landing pads were still a good ten meters above the ground. The attitude-control thrusters tried to keep the vehicle from tipping over for several wobbling, twitching seconds, but they gave out and the spacecraft tilted, tilted and finally struck the ground with a soundless crash. Killifer saw the landing legs crumple and the cargo pods split open; an oxygen tank blew apart in a silent burst of frost-glittering chunks.

  From the passenger module, Doug saw the crash. His first reaction was, My God, that could’ve been us! Then he wondered how much equipment they had lost.

  “Well, we’re down safely, at least,” he said to the others in the bubble.

  They muttered replies, voices hushed, subdued.

  “I think my telescope was in the pod that broke open,”

  Bianca said worriedly. I’ll have to go over and see if it survived the crash.”

  By the time the six of them unstrapped from their seats and wormed through the hatch to stand on the ground, Brennart was already striding toward the crashed craft. Everybody’s spacesuit was basically white, although some of them had been used so hard they were gray with imbedded lunar dust. But Brennart was easy to spot, even in a suit. His was sparkling new, gleaming white, and had red stripes down the arms and legs. For recognition, he had said.

  Doug followed Brennait and his second-in-command, Killifer. He caught up with them as they reached the edge of the wreckage. It was impossible to see their faces, behind their heavily-tinted visors, but Brennart clearly radiated disgust, fists clenched on his hips.

  “See whose equipment’s on this ship and get them to check out this mess,” Brennart commanded. “Determine if any of it’s still usable.”

  “Right,” said Killifer.

  “Is there anything I can to help?” Doug asked.

  Brennart wheeled and leaned down slightly to read the name tag printed on the breast of Doug’s suit.

  “Oh. Doug. I suppose you’re going to remind me that you wanted to land farther out aren’t you?”

  Surprised at the sarcasm in the older man’s voice, Doug said, “No sir, it hadn’t entered my mind.”

  “No,” Brennart said. “Of course not”

  “Were any of our life-support supplies on this ship?” Doug asked.

  Brennart huffed. “Of course there were! The only question is how much of it have we lost. Jack, check it out”

  “Right,” said Killifer.

  “What can I do to help?” Doug asked again.

  “Just keep out of the way,” Brennart snapped. “Like the man said, leave the real work to the professionals.” Then he started walking back toward the first spacecraft, leaving Doug puzzled and feeling more than a little hurt.

  The base that Yamagata Industries established at the beautiful and prominent crater Copernicus, on the Sea of Rains, was called Nippon One. Admittedly, this was an unimaginative name of no intrinsic grace, and would be changed to something more poetic in time. For now, however, its utilitarian nature mirrored the character of the base itself. Nippon One was small, crowded, and unlovely: little more than a collection of huts buried beneath protective regolith rubble, much as Moonbase had been nearly twenty years earlier.

  The worst part of serving at Nippon One was the lack ol water for bathing. Even with nanomachines to ferret out atoms of hydrogen imbedded in the regolith and combine them with lunar oxygen, water was scarce and precious. Yamagata engineers had developed an ultrasonic device which, they claimed, cleaned the skin more efficiently than detergent and water. Nippon One’s inhabitants complained that its ultrasonic vibrations gave them headaches, its vacuum suction sometimes plucked hair painfully from one’s body, and it did nothing to relieve the body odors that made lunar living so unpleasant.

  Still, it was a great honor to be assigned to serve at Nippon One, even if only for a few months. Yamagata’s brightest young men and women eagerly sought lunar postings; this new frontier was the key to rapid advancement up the corporate ladder.

  Miyoko Hornma was the daughter of an old and honored Japanese family. Trained in astronomy and mathematics, she was determined to prove to her elders that a woman can add luster to the family name, just as a man can. She had jumped at the chance to work at Nippon One.

  That was four months ago. Now, sitting in a cramped cubicle, feeling sweaty and filthy in fatigues that she had been wearing for several days on end, all she truly wished for was a steaming hot bath and just a bit of privacy.

  She was checking the telescopes sitting up on the surface of Mare Imbrium, a chore she did daily, patiently studying the images they showed on her display screen as she ran each instrument through its checkout procedures to make certain that it was operating within its designated parameters. Her mind was wandering, though, to thoughts of home and comforts that she would not know for another two months.

  Sitting next to her, close enough to touch shoulders, was Toshihara Yamashita, one of the communications technicians, headphone clamped to his ear.

  “Have you heard the news?” Toshi asked. “The Americans have sent an expedi
tion to the south pole.”

  That jolted Miyoko out of her reverie. “No!” she said.

  “It’s true. The chiefs are trying to decide if we should put up a reconnaissance satellite to watch them.”

  “But we’re sending a team to the pole, aren’t we? I’ve heard about the preparations for weeks now.”

  “The Yanks have beaten us to it,” said Toshi. “Somebody’s head will roll.”

  “Have they gone to the Bright Mountain?” Miyoko asked.

  “Where else?”

  “Ah, that’s too bad. Now they’ll set up a base there, won’t they?”

  “Of course. That’s what we wanted to do.”

  “And there’s water ice there, too,” Miyoko murmured. “Now the Americans will claim it all.”

  Toshi leaned back in his spindly chair, shrugging. “If the ice fields are big enough we can send a crew out there and stake our own claim. Maybe there’s enough for more than one.”

  Miyoko felt doubtful. “Even if there is, the Americans will want it all, they’re so greedy.”

  Laughing, Toshi replied, “We would too, if we got there first.”

  “I don’t believe-’ The image on Miyoko’s screen suddenly caught her eye. Glancing down at the monitor displays, she saw that she was looking at a real-time image of the solar x-ray telescope.

  “Look at that,” she said.

  Toshi glanced at the screen. “At what? It looks like a bunch of noodles, all twisted together.”

  “That’s a sunspot field,” Miyoko said. “It’s gaining energy very rapidly. Ill bet there’s going to be a solar flare eruption within a day or so.”

  “So what?” Toshi said carelessly. “We’re safe down here.”

  “Yes, of course… But no one should be out on the surface if the flare’s plasma cloud reaches the Moon.” Toshi’s face grew serious. “The Americans.” ’Someone should warn them.” ’They have their own observers, don’t they?” ’Yes, I think so. Still…”

  “You’d better let the chiefs know. Let them decide what to do.”

  SAVANNAH

  “The expedition took off at fifteen-twenty-two, Eastern time.”