Moonrise gt-5

by Ben Bova

  “But I’m not the one you want,” Cardenas replied. In the minuscule screen of the armrest her face still looked earnest, intent.

  “Then who?”

  “Zimmerman, at the University of Basel.”

  “I’ve never heard of him.”

  Cardenas almost smiled. “He keeps a very low profile. But he’s the best there is at this kind of nanotherapy.”

  “Can you get him for me?” Joanna asked. “I’m leaving for Moonbase in a few minutes.’?’You mean, talk him into going to the Moon?”

  Nodding briskly, Joanna said, “Offer him anything he wants. The sky’s no limit.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Get him to Moonbase,” Joanna commanded. “And quickly.”

  Cardenas looked bewildered by the idea. I’ll try.”

  “You come, too,” Joanna said. “Both of you. And any equipment you need. I’ll get my people to contact you, make all the arrangements.”

  I’ll try,” Cardenas repeated lamely.

  “Thanks, Kris,” Joanna said as warmly as she could manage. Then she cut the connection and immediately called Ibriham Rashid, back at the office in Savannah.

  The jetcopter was settling on the ground in a flurry of rotor-blown dust and the high keening wail of its engines as Rashid’s dark bearded face appeared on Joanna’s screen.

  “Omar, I don’t have time for details. I’m leaving for Moonbase. Get Kris Cardenas and Zimmerman, at the University of Basel, off to Moonbase as soon as possible. They’ve got to be there in twenty-four hours or less. I’ll call you from the Clippership with more. Understand?”

  Rashid nodded as if he had been expecting such a call, “darkening and obedience,” he said.

  Bianca Rhee finally left Doug’s bunk and trudged wearily to the airlock hatch. She slumped tiredly to the plastic flooring; and started to unseal her boots.

  “Need help?” Roger Deems asked.

  “Thanks,” she said, letting him tug the boots off her.

  Slowly she got to her feet and, with Deems’ help, lifted the upper half of the suit over her head. Deems hung the empty torso on its rack.

  “You’ve been wearing Killifer’s suit,” he said, noting the name stencilled on the chest.

  “Seems like I’ve been wearing it all my life,” Rhee said tiredly.

  “It’s only been a couple of hours.”

  She started worming out of the lower half of the suit.

  “Do you think Doug will live through this?” Deems asked, his soulful brown eyes looking almost tearful.

  Rhee shook her head slowly. “He’s awfully sick. So pale, like there’s no blood in him.” Suddenly she wanted to cry.

  “It’s a shame,” Deems said.

  “Yeah.”

  Rhee finally worked her legs out of the suit and hung it on the rack. Without another word to Deems she padded in her stockinged feet to the toilet When she came out, Deems was gone. She was alone with the row of empty suits. No one could see her sobbing quietly.

  After a few minutes she tried to pull herself together. The vidcam, she remembered. Doug was worried about the vidcam.

  She went to the leggings she had just hung up and searched through the thigh pouches. Sure enough, Doug’s vidcam was there. As she pulled it out, Rhee thought, This is what all the mess is about Doug put our legal claim on disk. This is what’s killed him.

  There was something else in the thigh pocket. Thinking it might be a part of the vidcam that had somehow worked loose, Rhee took it out. It was a flat square of reinforced cermet, about four inches on a side, anodized flat white on one surface, and gleaming gold on the other.

  Rhee felt puzzled. This isn’t part of the vidcam, she told herself. But she took it along with her, back to her bunk, where she stuck both the vidcam and the strange piece of cermet into her personal bag for safekeeping, until they got back to Moonbase.

  VANCOUVER

  “Do I really have to do this?” Kris Cardenas asked.

  Greg Masterson’s image in her desktop phone screen smiled gravely. “How long have you known my mother, Kris?”

  “I owe her, I understand that. But I can’t just pop off to the Moon like I’m going to the mall for groceries.”

  On the wall behind her desk hung the round gold seal of the Nobel Prize. The rest of the wall was covered with photographs, mostly family — husband and children who had grown to adulthood and now had children of their own. A few of the photos were not family, although each of them had Cardenas in them, together with a former President of the United States, a six-time Oscar-winning actress, a group of scientists posing before a splendid vista of the Alps.

  Cardenas herself looked much younger than her fifty-eight years. Much younger. Her hair was still a sandy light brown, no trace of silver. Her bright blue eyes still sparkled youthfully. She looked as if she could spend the day surfing or skydiving or skiing down those snow-covered Alps, rather than delivering lectures to university students.

  Greg’s smile looked strained, she thought He was saying, “Look, Kris, we’re talking about my half-brother here. Mom will kidnap you if she has to.”

  “But I can’t do anything for him! Zimmerman is the man she wants.”

  For almost three seconds she waited for Greg’s reply. Finally, his smile transformed itself into a knowing smirk. “Zimmerman’s on his way here.”

  “He is?”

  Greg continued, not waiting for her reply, “A Masterson Clippership lifted him and four of his assistants half an hour ago on a direct trajectory to Moonbase. They’ll arrive here in about ten hours.”

  Dumbfounded, Cardenas asked, “How on Earth did she swing that?”

  When her question reached him, Greg actually laughed. “Simplest thing in the world. She just threatened to reveal to the media that he’s running a nanotherapy clinic for wealthy foreigners right on the university campus.”

  “Blackmail!”

  “Black and green,” Greg replied after the lag. “She’s also making a hefty donation to his department at the university.”

  Cardenas said, “She hasn’t offered me anything.”

  When Greg heard her words, he replied, “Come on up here, Kris. Bring your husband if you want. Even if it’s just to hold her hand, she needs you. She’s not as strong as she’d like everyone to believe, you know.”

  Who the hell is? Cardenas asked herself. To Greg’s image in the phone screen she said, I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

  Doug swam in and out of consciousness. He seemed to be floating, but that couldn’t be. He dreamed he was drifting in the ocean, bobbing up and down on the long gentle swells of the open sea. Yet somehow he was stretched out on the desert sand, broiling in the sun, every pore sweating and Brennart lay beside him saying, “Like the man says, working out on the frontier is nothing more than inventing new ways to get killed.”

  When he opened his eyes Bianca Rhee was always hovering over him, gazing down at him with an expression that mixed tenderness with desperate fear.

  Is this real or am I dreaming? Doug asked himself.

  “We’re on our way back to Moonbase,” Rhee said to him at one point. “They’re bringing specialists up from Earth to take care of you.”

  Embalmers, thought Doug. Undertakers. Bury me on the Moon, he wanted to say. And don’t forget Brennart’s statue.

  “The Yamagata team?” he heard himself croak.

  “Killifer went out to get them,” Rhee replied gently, soothingly. “Moonbase agreed with you, rescuing them blocks any claim they might have tried to make.”

  “They’re okay?”

  “We don’t know yet Killifer hasn’t reached them, yet”

  “I get all the shit jobs,” Killifer grumbled.

  Deems, wedged into the cramped cockpit beside him, shrugged resignedly. “Well, you’re not alone, are you.”

  They were piloting one of the Jobbers over Mt Wasseir, searching for the crashed Yamagata ship. Killifer had been ordered to do so directly by Jinny Anso
n, Moonbase’s director.

  Two big lobbers had arrived at their south polar camp from Moonbase, filled with oxygen and other supplies, but without a single human being aboard. Killifer had to guide their landings remotely and use the expedition’s remaining personnel to unload them. Instructions — orders, really — from Anson back at Moonbase crackled along the satellite ; relay system: Get Doug Stavenger back to Moonbase immedi ately. Then go find the wrecked Yamagata lander and save its crew.

  Killifer had loaded the Stavenger kid onto one of the lobbers. The astronomer, Rhee, volunteered to go with him. Volunteered hell, Killifer thought Nobody could tear the little gook from the kid’s side.

  The expedition was a mess, but from what Anson told him, the corporation would have a valid claim to the area as soon as Stavenger’s vidcam pictures were verified. As he monitored the Jobber’s automated takeoff for its return flight to Moonbase, Killifer almost hoped that the radiation had ruined the vidcam and the disk would be a blank.

  What the hell, he told himself. It rankled him, though, that even if he died young Stavenger would be a fucking hero. Especially if he died.

  “I’m getting a transponder signal,” Deems said.

  The summit of Mt Wasser was below them. Glancing down through the cockpit’s transparent bubble, Killifer could glimpse the telescope and other gear that Brennart and Stavenger had left on the mountaintop.

  “Show me,” he said to Deems.

  With the tap of a gloved finger, Deems brought up the transponder signal on the cockpit’s starscope display of the deeply shadowed ground below them. The screen showed not much more than a blur, with a red dot winking at them.

  “Let’s take it down to five hundred and hover,” Killifer said.

  “That’ll burn up a lot of propellant.” Deems’ face was covered by his helmet visor, but his voice sounded scared.

  “We gotta see the ground before we set down on it,” Killifer said. “Friggin’ starscope sure isn’t showing much. Switch to infrared.”

  “It’s too cold down there in the dark,” said Deems. “Must be two hundred below, at least.”

  “Switch to infrared,” Killifer repeated, louder.

  Silently Deems touched the keypad and the cockpit’s main screen showed a false-color image of the ground below: mostly deep black.

  “That must be ice,” Killifer said.

  “Yeah, it’s absorbing the infrared.”

  “And the transponder signal’s right in the middle of it”

  “They must’ve landed on the ice,” said Deems.

  Killifer nodded inside his helmet. “Landing jets melted the ice under them and they splashed in. Dumb bastards.”

  “Good thing the ice isn’t too deep.”

  “Nah, it must’ve refrozen as soon as they turned off then-rocket engines.”

  “Then they must be stuck in it”

  “Yeah,” Killifer said disgustedly. “And we better make sure we don’t get caught in the same stupid trap.”

  Killifer was not primarily a pilot, although over the years at Moonbase he had trained in both lobbers and hoppers and flown them many times. But setting down in pitch darkness in totally unfamiliar territory — no wonder the Japs crashed, he said to himself.

  Hovering above the ice field while Deems worriedly stared at their fuel gauge, Killifer jinked the lumbering spacecraft sideways, searching for solid ground to land on.

  “Ice field’s a lot bigger on this side of the mountain,” he muttered.

  “But they wont be able to claim it once we rescue them, huh?”

  “That’s the theory.” The only ground the infrared display showed looked too rough for a landing, strewn with boulders; the size of houses.

  The radio speaker crackled. “Anson to Killifer. Yamagata just launched a lobber from Nippon One on a trajectory for the polar region. Must be their rescue party. Where are you?”

  “Looking for a place to land without breaking our asses,” Killifer replied.

  “It’s important that you get to the Yamagata team before their rescue party does,” said Anson.

  “Yeah, I know. But there doesn’t look like much room to put down safely. That’s why the Japs crashed in the first place.”

  “There must be someplace!”

  “When I find it I’ll let you know.” Killifer punched the radio off. Turning to Deems, he added, “If we can find a landing spot before we run out of fuel.”

  Deems said, “How about right on the edge of the ice?”

  “We’ll melt it, just like they did.”

  “Okay, but it can’t be real deep there. Must be solid ground underneath.” Before Killifer could object he added, “And if there’s boulders big enough to give us trouble, they’d probably be poking up above the surface of the ice.”

  “Probably,” Killifer muttered.

  “I don’t see any other way,” said Deems. “Do you?”

  Killifer stared at the polished visor of Deems’ helmet. He could only make out the vaguest outline of the face inside. For a scared rabbit, Killifer though, he’s getting pretty gutsy.

  “Otherwise we’re just going to run out of propellant jerking around, looking for a flat spot that isn’t here.”

  Unaccustomed to bold ideas from Deems, Killifer grunted and mumbled, “Maybe you’re right.”

  MOONBASE

  It was unusual for a Clippership to land at Moonbase. Usually (the big commercial spaceliners went only as far as the space stations that hugged Earth in low orbits.

  Greg watched the main display screen at the spaceport flight control center as the big, cone-shaped Maxwell Hunter settled slowly, silently on its rocket exhaust. More than a dozen others had crowded into the flight control center, too. Like a cruise liner landing in some out-of-the-way port, Greg thought. The natives go down to the dock to watch.

  A flexible access tube wormed its way to the Clipper’s main airlock while the ship stood on the blast-scarred landing pad, gleaming in the sunlight. Greg knew that the Clipper carried Professor Wilhelm Zimmerman and four of his top aides. Kris Cardenas was on her way to Moonbase, also. And Mom. It’s going to be a busy few hours here, he said to himself.

  Greg was shocked when Wilhelm Zimmerman pushed through the airlock hatch at the underground receiving area. He was grossly fat, almost as wide across his soft sagging middle as he was tall. Bald, jowly, wearing a gray three-piece business suit with the unbuttoned jacket flapping ludicrously, the first thing he did upon setting foot on the underground chamber’s rock floor was to reach into his jacket pocket and pull out a long, black, evil-looking cigar.

  “You can’t smoke in here!” Greg shouted, lunging toward him.

  Zimmerman scowled from beneath bushy gray eyebrows. “So? Then where?”

  “Nowhere in Moonbase. Snicking is strictly prohibited. For safety reasons.”

  “Nonsense!” Zimmerman snapped. “Like the laws in Switzerland. Pure nonsense.” He fished in his side pocket and pulled out a gold lighter.

  Greg gently took the lighter from him. “This is a totally artificial environment,” he said. “Smoking is not allowed.”

  Zimmerman’s scowl deepened. “You drag me up here to this… this… cavern, you ask me to perform a miracle for you, and you deny me my only vice?” His English was heavily accented but understandable.

  “I’m afraid so, Professor.”

  “Professor Doctor!”

  “No smoking,” Greg said somberly, “no matter how many titles you have.”

  Zimmerman looked as if he wanted to turn around and go back to the spacecraft that had brought him. But then he broke into a fleshy grin.

  “Very well,” he said, suddenly amiable. “Since I have no choice, I will refrain from smoking. But you can’t stop me from chewing!” And he clamped his teeth on the fat black cigar.

  Greg raised his eyes to the rock ceiling. “Come this way, please,” he said softly, pointing to the tractor that was waiting to take them to Moonbase proper. “And be careful—”
>
  He realized that Zimmerman was walking perfectly well alongside him. Looking down, Greg saw that Zimmerman’s feet were already shod in weighted lunar boots.

  His grin turning triumphant, Zimmerman said grandly, “I am not a complete… how do you say it, tenderfeet?”

  “Where did you get them?” Greg asked. “I didn’t know they were available on Earth.”

  “Mrs. Scavenger had them aboard the ship that took me here. My abductor is very kind to me.”

  “Abductor?” Greg asked as he helped the obese old man up into the tractor.

  “You think I would come to this bunker of my own volition? I have been kidnapped, young man, by a powerful, vicious woman.”

  Greg gave him a wintry smile. “My mother,” he said as he climbed into the driver’s seat.

  “So?” Zimmerman looked briefly surprised. “But your name is not hers.”

  His smile disappeared. “She remarried after my father… died.”

  “Ah.” Zimmerman nodded, making his jowls jiggle. As Greg put the tractor in gear and started down the long tunnel, he asked, “You have prepared the tissue samples for which I asked?”

  “The medics will have them for you by the time we get to the infirmary.”

  “And blood — whole plasma, hemoglobin, this you have available?”

  Greg shook his head. “The blood bank here is very small. We’re lining up volunteer donors who have the proper ’ blood type.”

  “We will probably have to replace his entire blood supply.”

  “Then we’ll need more brought up from Earth,” Greg said. “In the meantime, you can examine him and get started on your procedures.”

  Zimmerman grunted. “I will have time to wash my hands, perhaps?”

  “It’s my half-brother who’s dying, Professor Doctor. We’ve got to act quickly.”

  “Ah,” the old man said again. “Very well. The tissue samples are needed so that we can imitate them on the surface of the nanomachines. Otherwise what is still functioning of his body’s immune system will attack the machines when they are injected into his blood stream.”