Moonwar

by Ben Bova

  Of all the two thousand, four hundred and seventy-seven men and women at Moonbase, only one had the slightest military experience. One of the construction technicians working on the new aquaculture tanks, a man named Leroy Gordette. His file showed that he had spent four years in the U.S. Army, enlisting when he had been seventeen, nearly ten years earlier.

  His photo on the wallscreen showed a serious, almost grim Afro-American with red-rimmed eyes and a military buzz cut almost down to his scalp. He looks fierce enough, Doug thought, staring at the picture.

  “It’s better than nothing,” Doug muttered. “Phone,” he called.

  “Call please?” asked the computer’s androgynous synthesized voice.

  “Leroy Gordette,” he said to the phone system.

  “No response,” said the computer a moment later. “Do you wish to search for him or leave a message?”

  “Leave a message.”

  “Recording.”

  “Mr. Gordette, this is Douglas Stavenger. Please call me as soon as you can. It’s about the military situation we’re in.”

  With twenty-twenty hindsight, Doug could see that this confrontation had been inevitable from the day Faure had won his campaign to be elected secretary-general of the United Nations; he intended to enforce the nanotech treaty with every weapon at his disposal. None of the others—not even Doug’s mother—had foreseen that it would come down to military force. But Doug had studied enough history to understand that force was the ultimate tool of political leaders. He had no illusions about it, despite his assurances that this “war” was not going to be a shooting match.

  Faure was no military genius, but he was a tyrant. He fully intended to make the U.N. into a true global government. With himself at its head.

  Moonbase stood in his way. The nanotech treaty was just an excuse. As long as Moonbase ignored the U.N.’s authority, nations on Earth could justifiably resist U.N. encroachments on their sovereignty. So Moonbase had to be brought into line. Or destroyed.

  The trouble was, the more Doug studied history, the more he delved into the bloody, murderous track that led to the present day, the more he found himself reluctantly agreeing with Faure’s professed aims.

  Ten billion people on Earth. And that was only the official count. There were probably a billion more, at least, that the various national censuses missed. Ten or eleven billion mouths to feed, ten or eleven billion people to house and clothe and educate. Most of them were poor, hungry, ignorant. And their numbers were growing faster than anyone could cope with. Three hundred thousand babies born every day. All the wealth in the world could barely maintain a minimum level of existence for them.

  The rich refused to help the poor, of course. Not unless the poor reduced their birth rate, lowered their numbers. Starvation swept whole continents; plagues killed millions. Still the numbers grew. The poor of the world increased and multiplied and became poorer, hungrier, sicker.

  Only a world government could hope to deal with the global problem of population. Only a true world government had the faintest chance of redistributing the world’s wealth more equitably. That was Faure’s proclaimed goal, his aim.

  Doug agreed that the goal was worthy, vital, crucial to the survival of the human species. He also knew that it would never be achieved; not the way Faure was going about it.

  The beep of his computer snapped Doug out of his ruminations. Its message light blinked at him.

  “Answer,” he commanded the phone.

  It was not Gordette returning his call. Doug recognized the face of one of the communications technicians, calling from the control center.

  “Doug, we’re getting a transmission from L-1. Single frequency. The secretary-general of the United Nations is about to give a speech and they want us to see it.”

  “Okay,” he said, sagging back tiredly in his chair. “Pipe it through. Might as well put it on the general system, so everybody can see it.”

  “Will do.”

  Then Doug got a better idea. “Wait. Make an announcement that anyone not on essential duty should go straight to the Cave. Put Faure on the wallscreens there. I want everybody to see this.”

  “Will you be going to the Cave, too?”

  “Right,” said Doug, pushing himself out of his chair.

  TOUCHDOWN MINUS 112 HOURS

  Georges Henri Faure felt not the slightest twinge of nervousness as he walked slowly to the podium. The General Assembly chamber was hushed, so quiet that Faure could hear his own footsteps on the marble floor, despite the fact that the chamber was completely filled. Every delegate was in his or her proper seat. The media thronged the rear and overflowed into the side aisles, cameras focused on him. The visitor’s gallery was packed.

  He was a dapper little man, shaped rather like a pear but dressed so elegantly that no one noticed his figure. Nor the slight limp that marred his stride. His thinning dark hair was slicked back from his high forehead, and his face was round, pink-cheeked, almost cherubic except for his old-fashioned wire-brush mustache. On the rare occasions when his iron self-control failed and he became agitated, the points of the mustache would quiver noticeably. It sometimes made people laugh, but it was a bad mistake to laugh at Georges Faure. He neither forgot nor forgave.

  His eyes were small, deep-set, dark and never still. They constantly darted here and there, watching, weighing, probing, judging. Many said, behind his back, that they were the eyes of an opportunist, a climber, a politician. Faure knew what they said of him: that he was a man consumed by ego and vaulting ambition. But no, he insisted to himself; what drove him was not personal ambition but an inner desire, a drive, a sacred mission: to save the world from itself; to bring order and stability to all of humankind; to avert the tragedy of chaos and disaster that threatened the Earth’s misguided peoples.

  He reached the marble podium. The floor behind it had been raised slightly, cunningly, so that no one in the audience could see that he actually stood on a platform. Smiling down on the rows of expectant faces, he leaned his weight on his arms, to ease his aching foot. He waited a moment, feeling the warmth of the undivided attention of every delegate, the glow of the media’s cameras and recorders, the admiration of the public. The first line of his speech was on the electronic prompter; the tumbler on the podium held the Evian water he was partial to. Everything was in its place.

  He began:

  “Delegates of the General Assembly and the Security Council, members of the news media, members of the public and citizens of the world—I stand before you with a heart filled with both sadness and hope.

  “Since seven years ago, all work on nanotechnology has been wisely banned by mutual accord of the member nations of this august organization. I am pleased to report to you that the last remaining nation on Earth to refuse to sign the nanotechnology treaty and accede to its terms has now at last signed that treaty. Kiribati has joined the great commonwealth of nations at last!”

  A storm of applause rose from the floor of the huge auditorium. A sharp-witted observer would have noted that it began in the section where the U.N. staff bureaucrats sat: Faure’s employees.

  In Moonbase, Doug sat at one of the tables in the Cave, the old cafeteria, watching the wall-sized display screen showing Faure. The Cave was jammed with people; everyone who was not needed on duty had packed its cavernous confines. All the seats along the cafeteria tables were filled and people were standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the aisles between the tables; the only open spaces were the squares of lovingly tended grass that were scattered across the rock floor. It was like a flare party, Doug thought, although no one was drinking or dancing. Or laughing.

  Faure’s hugely enlarged features gazed down upon them from the wide Windowall screen up at the front of the Cave like an electronic deity, larger than life.

  “There are those misguided souls,” Faure was saying, unconsciously touching the end of his mustache with a fingertip, “who ask why nanotechnology must be banned. There are those who question o
ur policy.”

  He looked up and smiled mechanically, almost squeezing his tiny eyes shut. “To paraphrase the American revolutionary Jefferson, in respect to the public opinion we should declare the causes that have impelled us to this decision.”

  Jinny Anson, sitting next to Doug at the long cafeteria table, hissed, “That’s a real outgassing, using Jefferson.”

  Doug nodded and said nothing.

  Faure went on, “Nanotechnology offers enormous medical benefits, we are told. Its enthusiasts claim that nanomachines injected into the human body can prolong life and promote perfect health. Yes, perhaps. But for whom? For the starving masses of Africa or Latin America? For those dying of plagues because they are too poor to afford simple medical treatment?

  “No! Nanotechnology would be available only to the very rich. It would be one more method by which the rich separate themselves from the poor. This cannot be allowed! The gap between the rich and poor is one of the most pernicious and dangerous causes of unrest and instability on Earth! We must strive to narrow this gap, not widen it.”

  “By making everybody equally poor,” Joanna muttered, seated on Doug’s other side.

  “Furthermore,” Faure continued, “nanotechnology can be used as an insidious new form of weapon, deadlier than poisonous gas, more difficult to detect and counter than biological weapons. In a world tottering on the brink of catastrophe, the very last thing we desire is a new weapons technology. We have worked for more than ten years now to convince nations to give up their armies and allow the Peacekeepers to protect their borders. We have reduced the world’s nuclear arsenals to a mere handful of missiles. We stand for disarmament and peace! How could we allow scientists in their secret laboratories to design perfidious new weapons of nanomachines?”

  “So,” Zimmerman grumbled, down the table from Doug, “now I am an evil Dr. Frankenstein.”

  Faure took a sip of Evian, replaced the glass delicately on the podium, and resumed.

  “As I said, every nation on Earth has finally signed the nanotechnology treaty. At last, there is no place on Earth where nanotechnology can be practiced or taught.”

  Another burst of applause. But Doug knew what was coming next: the real reason for Faure’s speech.

  “Yet there is a place where nanotechnology is practiced every day, every hour. That place is not on Earth. It is on the Moon, at the privately owned center called Moonbase.”

  “Pass the bread, here comes the baloney,” somebody in the cafeteria said, loudly enough to echo off the rock walls. No one laughed or even stirred to see who said it.

  “The residents of Moonbase have refused to suspend their nanotechnology workings. They have refused to stop their researches into new forms and uses of nanotechnology.” Faure’s face had become grim. “True, they have offered to allow United Nations representatives to inspect their facilities and their laboratories, but they absolutely refuse to abide by the requirements of the nanotechnology treaty.”

  He looked up at his audience. “This cannot be allowed! We cannot permit them to develop further the nanotechnology in secret, some four hundred thousand kilometers away from our supervision!”.

  Faure’s mustache was starting to bristle. “Who knows what kinds of new and dreadful capabilities they are developing in their secret laboratories? Who knows what their intentions are?”

  People in the Cave were jeering now. “The bastard knows we need nanobugs to make the air we breathe!”

  Taking a deep breath, Faure raised his hands as if motioning for attention. “Therefore, I have sent a detachment of Peacekeeper troops to Moonbase to enforce the conditions of the nanotechnology treaty on the lunar residents. They will arrive at Moonbase within slightly more than four days. Their mission is one of peace; but they are, of course, prepared to defend themselves if the Moonbase residents offer resistance.”

  Faure looked up again and peered directly into the camera. He seemed to loom above the people in the Cave.

  “To these renegades of Moonbase I have this to say: Resistance is futile. You must obey the same laws that everyone on Earth obeys. I will employ all the power necessary to enforce the conditions of the nanotechnology treaty, whether on Earth or on the Moon. If in your misguided attempts to defy the United Nations and the will of the peoples of Earth, you use force against our Peacekeepers, you will regret it.”

  The audience applauded wildly. Faure smiled and dipped his chin several times: his way of bowing: Then the screen went blank.

  Doug blinked several times. The crowd in the Cave stirred and rumbled with a hundred conversations.

  “He didn’t mention a word about our declaration of independence,” Joanna said.

  “Nor our request for U.N. membership,” Brudnoy added.

  Doug got to his feet. “And he isn’t going to have a news conference, where reporters can ask him questions, either.”

  “How long until the Peacekeepers land?” Anson asked.

  Doug pressed the face of his wristwatch; the digital readout changed from the local time to a countdown.

  “One hundred eleven hours and forty-eight minutes,” he said.

  “Well,” Anson said, digging her hands into the pockets of her jeans, “you’d better think of something between now and then, boss.”

  TOUCHDOWN MINUS 111 HOURS 48 MINUTES

  “You’re right,” Doug said to Anson.

  He clambered up onto the cafeteria table and raised his arms over his head. “Hey!” he shouted to the murmuring, scattering crowd. “Hold on! I’ve got a few words to say.”

  The crowd stopped heading for the exit and turned toward him, some looking expectant, others puzzled.

  “You Lunatics so eager to get back to work that you can’t hang in here a couple minutes more?” Doug asked, grinning at them.

  “Hell, boss, we’ll stay all day if you want us to,” hollered one of the men in the rear.

  “If you serve some drinks,” another voice chipped in.

  Doug kept his grin in place. “No drinks. And this is only going to take a few minutes.”

  Someone groaned theatrically. A few people laughed at it.

  “I want you to know,” Doug said, scanning their faces, “that we declared Moonbase’s independence a few hours ago. We had to do it, so that as an independent nation we can refuse to sign the nanotech treaty and continue to work here the way we always have.”

  “You mean we’re citizens of Moonbase now?” a woman asked.

  “I have to give up my American citizenship?” another voice from the crowd.

  “That’s all to be ironed out in negotiations with the U.S. government and other governments,” Doug said. “We’re not going to ask any of you to give up your original citizenship, not if you don’t want to.”

  “What about those Peacekeeper troops Faure’s sending here?”

  “We’ll tell them we’re an independent nation now and they have no authority here,” Doug answered.

  “They gonna accept that?”

  “We’ll see,” said Doug.

  “Don’t give up your day job,” somebody said. Everyone laughed—nervously, Doug thought. But when he looked down at his mother, still seated at the table on which he was standing, she was not laughing at all. Not even smiling.

  “We’ll deal with the Peacekeepers when they get here,” Doug promised. “They’re not looking for a fight and neither are we.”

  “Yeah, but they got guns and we don’t.”

  Doug had no rejoinder for that.

  TOUCHDOWN MINUS 110 HOURS 7 MINUTES

  If anyone noticed that Claire Rossi and Nick O’Malley left the Cave together, with equally somber expressions on their faces, no one made a fuss about it.

  Almost everyone in Moonbase knew that Claire and Nick were lovers. She was the base personnel chief, a petite brunette with video-star looks and a figure that men wanted to howl after. He was a big, lumbering, easy-going redhead who ran a set of tractors up on the surface from the snug confines of a teleoperator
’s console down in the control center.

  Nick was happy-go-lucky, and counted the most fortunate moment in his young life as the instant he saw Claire walking down one of Moonbase’s corridors. He smiled at her and she smiled back. Electricity crackled. He stopped looking at other women and she had thoughts only for him. It was like magic.

  But as they walked slowly out of the Cave, neither of them was smiling.

  “We could be stuck here for months,” Claire said as they shouldered their way through the dispersing crowd, heading for her quarters.

  Nick was somber, deep in thought. “My work contract runs out in three weeks. What happens then?”

  “I guess we won’t be heading back Earthside until Doug and the politicians back home settle this thing.”

  “Yeah, but how do I get paid when my contract term ends? What happens then?”

  She tried to smile up at him. “Well, we didn’t want to be separated, did we? Maybe you’ll have to stay here until my tour ends and we can go back home together.”

  Looking down at her, Nick saw that her smile was forced. “You don’t seem so happy about it.”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “It’s …” She fell silent.

  “What?”

  “Wait until we get to my place,” Claire said, so solemnly that it worried Nick.

  Once she shut the door of her one-room compartment, Nick asked almost desperately, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “It’s not wrong, exactly,” she said, going to the bunk and sitting on its edge.

  “Well, what?”

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  He blinked. “You’re going to have a baby?” His voice came out half an octave higher than usual.

  “Yes,” she answered, almost shyly.

  For a moment he didn’t know what to say, what to do. Then the reality of it burst on him and he broke into an ear-to-ear grin. “A baby! That’s great! That’s wonderful!”

  But Claire shook her head. “Not if we can’t get off Moonbase, it isn’t.”