by Ben Bova
Killifer jumped down from the deck, floating slowly to the ground. Doug noticed that there was hardly any loose dust at all for his boots to kick up.
“Okay, then,” Killifer said as he headed back toward the shelter, “there is something you can do for me.”
“Name it.”
“Drop dead while you’re up there on that friggin’ mountaintop.”
Safely back inside the buried shelter’s airlock, Killifer slowly wormed out of his spacesuit and then ducked through the open hatch into the main section of the shelter. He saw Greenberg huddling with Martin, and Rhee standing worriedly next to the galley, munching on a protein bar. They were both happy to be out of their spacesuits after so many hours.
Once free of the spacesuit, Killifer strode past them swiftly and slipped into the tiny communications cubicle, where Deems still sat at the console. Standing behind Deems, he saw in the main screen the hopper outside where Brennart — with Doug Stavenger standing beside him — quickly ran down the hopper’s abbreviated checklist.
“Ready for takeoff,” Brennart said, his voice edged with tension.
“Clear for takeoff,” said Deems, his own voice high, quavering.
The little hopper disappeared from the screen in a burst of white, smokey rocket thrust.
Killifer smiled to himself as the aluminum vapor swiftly dissipated in the lunar vacuum. In the leg pouch of his spacesuit was a four-inch square of reinforced cermet, the covering for the hopper’s electronic controls for the liqui oxygen pump.
Bon voyage, Killifer said silently. He hadn’t rubbed a magic lamp, but he felt certain that his dearest wish was about to come true.
ACAPULCO
Carlos Quintana stood before the sweeping window of his clifftop hacienda and stared out into the limitless blue of tie Pacific. White cumulus clouds were building out over the horizon, towering up into thunderheads: so beautiful to look at from a distance, so treacherous to fly through.
He held a heavy cut crystal glass of exquisite single malt Scotch in his left hand, a slim black cigar in his right.
Cancer of the lung.
The words had sounded like a death sentence at first. Cancer had taken his father, both his uncles, even his older brother. But that had all happened before Carlos had built his fortune. Now he had the money to bring a few specialists to Mexico and let them inject nanomachines into his lung.
The thought disturbed him, almost frightened him. Nanomachines had killed Paul Stavenger and several others on the Moon. Nanomachines were illegal in the United States, in Mexico, in almost every nation on Earth. They didn’t always work the way they were supposed to. That’s what people said. They ran amok and killed Paul, up on the Moon.
He sipped at the whisky, then inhaled a long delicious drag from the cigar. And coughed.
But we’ve used nanomachines on the Moon for years now. They work as designed. Maybe whatever went wrong back then has been fixed now.
Yes, he argued with himself, but the corporation’s nanotech division has closed, except for the work they’re doing at Moonbase. It’s almost impossible to run a nanotech laboratory in the open — on Earth. And haw there’s talk in the U.N. outlawing nanotechnology entirely.
As the sun slowly settled onto the ocean horizon and the dipped below it, Qujntana stood alone at the window, watchin but not seeing, alternately sipping and puffing, wondering he trusted the scientists enough to let them inject invisible machines into his body.
He knew the answer, of course. Despite his fear of nanomachines, cancer of the lung frightened him more.
The fact that he would have to break the law to receive nanotherapy never impinged on his consciousness. Neither did the fact that a few hundred thousand of his fellow Mexican would die this year of lung cancer because they were too poor to afford nanotherapy.
MT. WASSER
the jump up to the summit was smoother this time. Standing beside Brennart, Doug realized that the man had entered the distance and altitude from their first flight into the hopper’s minuscule computer. Still, it took good piloting. One rather longish firing of the hopper’s rocket engine and they were soaring up, up the face of the mountain, breaking into brilliant sunlight, riding as smoothly as if they were on an elevator.
Everyone else was safely tucked inside the shelters. On Brennart’s orders, Rhee and Greenberg had been allowed to move into shelter one with Killifer and Deems. The two women who had been there had grudgingly pulled on their spacesuits and gone off to the fourth shelter, still only partially covered with protective rubble from the regolith.
Doug knew he should be worried about the radiation he was receiving, especially when they broke out of the shadows of the mountains and into the glaring sunlight. Yet somehow that danger seemed unreal compared to the thrill of flying up to the mountaintop again, the excitement of beating Yamagata to the claim for this rich territory.
This is fun! he told himself. We’re doing something nobody else would do.
Besides, the more sober part of his mind added, I made the rad dose calculations as conservative as I could. The numbers are okay. We’ll make it. We’ll be all right.
Their flimsy craft seemed to hover a hundred meters or so above the mountain’s summit, and Doug marvelled again at Brennart’s finely-tuned piloting. Without saying a word,
Brennart crabbed the craft sideways slightly and let it down almost exactly where they had landed before.
“That was terrific’ Doug said with genuine awe.
Brennart peered over the console at the ground and thi hopper’s broad round feet. “Missed our old landing spot by a good meter,” he muttered unhappily.
Doug laughed.
“All right,” said Brennart, slapping down the platform railing on his side of the hopper, “we’ve got to be quick now.”
Doug knocked down the railing on his side and they both bent to untie the astronomical instruments. Within a few minutes Doug was setting up the telescope and spectrometer while Brennart, kneeling beside him, unfolded the solar panels of the telemetry unit and began plugging wires from its base to the instruments.
It was clumsy work. Doug felt as if he were wearing thick mittens instead of the most flexible gloves that spacesuit engineers could design. He saw that the radiation patch on his sleeve was a deep orange. Brennart’s too.
“Ready to power up?” Brennart’s voice crackled in his earphones.
Doug swallowed hard and nodded inside his helmet ’Ready.”
The tiny display panels on the instruments lit up and the telescope swung automatically to focus on the Sun. Doug had to duck out of the way of its moving tube.
“Okay,” he said. “They’re working. Let’s drag our butts out of here.”
“Get it on tape,” Brennart said. “Make our claim legal.”
Fumbling with the vidcam in his hurry, Doug quickly panned across the little assembly of instruments with Brennart standing tall and unmistakable in his red-striped spacesuit beside them.
“Okay, got it,” he said, tucking the hand-sized vidcam back into his thigh pouch. “Now let’s get back to the shelter.”
“Wait one tick,” Brennart said. “I thought I saw something as we were coming in for the landing…’ And he loped off toward the edge of the summit in long lunar strides, almost oaring.
“Where’re you going?” Doug called, more puzzled than nnoyed or frightened.
“Come here, quick!” Brennart motioned with one long arm.
Doug tried to imitate Brennart’s lunar glide and hopped lumsily to the older man’s side.
“Down there. Can you see it?”
Doug peered into the inky blackness far below. “See what?” le asked.
“Lights. Like landing lights on a spacecraft.”
Doug stared. Far, far below he thought he saw two tiny gleams of lights, one red, one white. But when he looked directly at them, they disappeared.
“Masterson Aerospace to Yamagata lander,” he heard Brennart calling. “Can you hear me?
”
That’s the Yamagata lander? Doug wondered. Down there?
“Masterson to Yamagata. Do you read?”
Doug was about to turn back to their hopper when he heard in his earphones, “Yamagata to Masterson. We read you.” The voice was weak, strained.
“We’ve just established legal claim to the mountaintop and we have a working base down at the ice field,” Brennart said, gloating happily. “You boys might as well pack up and go home.”
“We can’t. We crashed on landing. Both injured.”
Doug suddenly heard the pain in the man’s voice.
Brennart’s attitude changed instantly. “Does your base know of your condition?”
“No. Communications impossible in radiation storm.”
“We’ll try to get a team to you as soon as we can,” Brennart said.
“We are protected from radiation, but one of us is badly injured and needs medical attention.”
“We’ll do our best,” said Brennart. “Sit tight.”
“That is all we can do.”
Doug grabbed at Brennart’s arm. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here.”
“We’ll get help to you as soon as the radiation dies down, Brennart said. “Hang in there, guys.”
“Thank you.”
Without another word Brennart turned and loped back to the hopper. Doug ran alongside, almost matching his long gliding strides. They jumped up onto the platform together and Brennart slid his boots into the foot restraints and pushed the throttle forward in one motion, not even bothering to put up the railings.
But the hopper did not move.
Doug slid his boots into the foot loops and grabbed the edge of the console to support himself.
But the hopper did not move.
MT. WASSER
“Christ on a surfboard,” Brennart yelled. “It’s dead.”
“What’s wrong?”
Brennart swiftly scanned the meager control panel. “Everything’s in the green, but the goddamned engine won’t light.”
Doug felt cold sweat breaking out on him. , “Damn!” Brennart tugged at the throttle again. Nothing happened.
“What’s wrong?” Doug asked again.
Brennart turned toward him. “No time to check it out. Come on.”
And he jumped off the hopper’s platform. Doug followed him without questioning. Brennart was unfastening the empty ’cargo pod.
“Undo the oxy tank,” he commanded. “Get it down on the ground. Fast!”
Doug found the clips that held the bulbous green tank and clicked them open, then rolled the tank off the edge of the platform into his waiting arms. Shocked at how heavy it felt, he let it slip and thump onto the rocky ground. He felt immense gratitude that it didn’t burst apart.
Turning, he saw that Brennart was rolling the canister of nanobugs along the bumpy ground. He wedged it against the hopper’s other side.
“Get under the platform,” Brennart urged, dropping to all fours. “Come on!”
Doug dropped to his hands and knees and crawled beneath the hopper’s platform, between the oxygen tank and thennanomachine canister, nearly banging his helmet on the dangling nozzle of the defunct rocket engine.
“How are we going to fix it from under here?” he asked Brennart. There was Barely room enough to turn on his side, Doug saw. They could never get onto their backs, not with the life-support backpacks they carried.
“We’re not going to fix it,” the older man said. “We’re going to sit out the storm down here. This is our own little radiation shelter. Cozy, huh?”
“We’re going to stay here?” Doug heard a tinge of fear in his own voice.
“Nothing else we can do,” Brennart said calmly. “Can’t poke around trying to check out the hopper’s systems, not in this radiation flux. We’d be fried by the time we figured out where the malf is.”
“Malf?”
“Malfunction.”
“Oh.”
“So we pull down as much mass as we can to shield us from the sides and we hope the platform and rocket plumbing is thick enough to shield us overhead. And we wait.”
“But how can we tell when the radiation’s gone down enough—”
“When we hear a satellite signal. Either our minisats will come back on the air or Moonbase’ll put up a new commsat to re-establish a link with us.”
Doug puffed out a breath. “And in the meantime?”
“We wait.”
Stretched out prone beneath the hopper’s platform with a couple of tanks and cargo pods. It didn’t seem like much protection to Doug.
“Snug as two bugs in a rug,” Brennart said.
“Not quite.”
“Well, we’re better off than those Japs. Crashed on landing. And they need medical attention.”
“So will we,” Doug said.
For a moment Brennart did not reply. Then, quietly, “Yeah, I suppose we will.”
“What do you think happened to the hopper?” Doug asked.
Brennart’s shoulders wormed slightly inside his suit ’Something simple, most likely. Radiation knocked out some primary system, like the computer control or the oxidizer pump.”
“Isn’t the hopper shielded against radiation?”
“Sure, but that doesn’t make much difference now, does it? like the man says, this is where we’re at”
They should’ve been back by now,” Bianca Rhee said to no one in particular.
Roger Deems looked frightened, as usual, as he sat at the silent communications console.
“Shouldn’t they?” Bianca turned to Killifer, standing with Greenberg behind her.
Killifer slowly nodded, looking grim. “Yeah. Something must’ve gone wrong.”
“Can’t we talk with them?” Rhee pleaded.
Deems said shakily, “Up there on the mountain, they’re out of line-of-sight from our antenna, and we don’t have any working commsats to relay a signal to them.”
“But there must be something we can do!”
“Wait,” said Killifer.
Rhee stared at him, aghast.
“That’s all we can do,” Killifer said, almost gruffly. “Unless you want to kill yourself, too.”
“You think they’re dead?”
Killifer grunted, then answered, “As good as.”
“The radiation is definitely receding,” the main communications technician said to Greg. “In another five or six hours it ought to be almost down to normal.”
Greg nodded curtly. He’d been hearing ’another five hours’ for the past six hours, at least.
“You’d better get some rest”
Turning, Greg saw it was Jinny Anson who had just entered the control center.
“You look like hell,” Anson said cheerfully. She herself was fresh and bright-eyed.
“I’ll wait here,” said Greg.
“Get to bed before you fall down and hurt yourself,” Ansoi said firmly. “That’s not advice, it’s an order.” .Greg smiled tiredly at her. “You’re ordering me?”
I’m still director of this rat nest. Get your butt into you bunk. Now.”
For a moment Greg wondered how far he might go in showing her who the real boss was. How far might she go? he asked himself. She’d call security and have me carried to my quarters, he realized, staring into her steady, unwavering steel-gray eyes.
“Okay,” he said, his voice slurring slightly, “but you call me—”
“The instant anything happens,” Anson promised.
Greg trudged off to his quarters, not certain he remembered exactly where they were. He found the door eventually and flopped fully clothed on the bunk.
He dreamed, not of Doug and the others trapped in the radiation storm, but of his mother. The two of them were in The Cave, at the flare party, dancing together.
“Did you mean what you said back in the shelter?” Doug asked.
Lying prone beside him, Brennart said, “What did I say?”
“That you didn’t care if you
lived or died?”
The older man hesitated a moment, then replied, “Yeah, I meant it.”
Doug couldn’t believe it. “Really?”
“Everybody dies, kid. Sorry I let you come along, though. You shouldn’t have been involved in this.”
“You think we’re going to die?”
“I’m already dying,” Brennart said. “Cancer in my lymph nodes.”
Shocked, Doug blurted, “But how could they let you keep on working?”
With a low chuckle, Brennart said, “Because they don’t know. I have my own doctor, my own physical. The corporation records are… well, doctored.”
“Falsified?” Doug had never dreamed such a thing was possible.
“Friends in high places,” said Brennart ’It happens when you’ve been around long enough.” , “You really have cancer?”
“Terminal — unless the radiation treatment we’re getting right now bums it out of me.” He laughed sardonically.
“Cancer,” Doug repeated.
“It’s land of an occupational disease when you spend a lot of time up here.”
“But,” Doug’s mind was churning, “but there are treatments. Nanotherapy could—”
“Find me a nanotherapy clinic that’s still open and I’ll go to it,” Brennart said bitterly. “The ones that haven’t been shut down by the lawyers have been burned down by the mobs.”
“Even in Switzerland?”
“Switzerland, Thailand, Argentina — the only people I could find doing nanotherapy now are crooks and frauds. Black market; you pay in advance and you take what you get. Not for me.”
“But my mother’s talked about clinics in Switzerland.”
“Your mom’s a very rich woman, Doug. I don’t have that kind of money. Or clout.”
“I do,” Doug said.
For a few moments Brennart was silent. Then he said, “I appreciate it, kid, but I think it’s too late for me even with nanotherapy.”
“How do you know—”
“Hey, I’ve had a damned good life. They’ll put up a statue to me here on the Moon after I’m gone. What more could I ask for?”
“How old are you?”
