by Ben Bova
He could sense Wicksen smiling gently. “I’ve snowed you with a pile of details. Does any of it make sense to you?”
“Not much,” Doug admitted. “What I really need to know is, can you do it?”
“Turn the accelerator into an anti-missile weapon?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“You can?”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you.”
“How soon?” Doug asked.
Wicksen hesitated a moment, then answered, “Two days.”
“Two days? That’s all?”
“Two lunar days,” Wicksen said.
“Oh. You mean two months, then,” Doug said, crestfallen.
“We might get lucky and have everything work the first time we try it. That could shave a week or so.”
Two months, Doug thought. Will that be soon enough, or will Faure strike before then?
“We’ll need a target satellite to test it against,” Wicksen added. “I was thinking that Kadar’s survey bird would make a good test target. He’s got all the data from it that he needs.”
Doug heard a strange guttural sound in his earphones. Wicksen was chuckling at the thought of zapping Kadar’s satellite.
He thanked the physicist and climbed back onto the tractor, wondering if there was some way to delay the attack that Faure was undoubtedly planning. Maybe Mom can get the World Court to hear our case before November. Or negotiate with Faure and try to settle this without another military confrontation.
His mind was filled with possibilities, alternatives, strategies as he steered the tractor back across the twenty-kilometer distance to Moonbase’s main airlock.
He had only gone a few kilometers, though, when his suit’s emergency alarm shrilled in his earphones.
“What … ?”
Doug glanced down at the tell-tales on his wrist display. Air supply below safety minimum! Impossible, he told himself. I checked the suit out when I put it on. The air tank was full.
Must be a malfunction in the electrical circuitry, he told himself. Still, he jammed the tractor’s throttle to its highest pitch. The ponderous machine lurched forward. There was no speedometer on the control panel; the tractor’s electrical motors could not move the machine more than thirty klicks per hour, Doug knew.
Half an hour to the base, Doug thought. Better top off the backpack.
With his left hand on the T-stick, Doug fumbled for the tractor’s oxygen hose, nested between the two front seats. He located it by feel and pulled it out of its housing. But when he tried to unscrew the cap of his backpack’s emergency fill-up, it would not move.
How could it be frozen? Doug wondered, his mind racing. He could not remember if he’d tested it when he’d checked out the suit. I should have, he told himself. But he doubted that he had. Too goddamned complacent. Taking shortcuts in the checkout routine.
“Air level approaching redline for life support,” the suit’s automatic emergency system warned. “Replenish air supply or change to another suit.”
Good advice, Doug grumbled silently, out here at least fifteen klicks from the airlock.
I can’t be running out of air, he insisted to himself. But he coughed.
Desperately, he flicked to the base frequency and called, “This is Stavenger. I’m almost out of air! Need help!”
“Got your beacon, Doug,” said the technician from the control center. “Hang on, we’ll send a team out for you.”
Won’t do any good, he knew. They’ll be riding tractors, too. They can’t get to me any faster than I can get to them.
His breath caught in his throat. He felt as if he were gagging.
“No … air …”
An incredibly searing pain flamed through his chest. Christ almighty, my lungs are collapsing!
Yet he remained conscious, acutely aware of everything happening to him.
Can’t breathe! He was gasping, his right hand clawing at the collar of his helmet. Can’t breathe! The pain in his chest was excruciating, yet he did not pass out. His mind was still alert, still functioning.
This is what drowning must be like. You try to breathe, but there’s no air.
Deliberately, he turned off his suit radio. They’ve got the tractor’s beacon to track me. Don’t want them to hear me screaming.
But he could not scream. There was no air in his lungs, no air in his throat. Nothing but pain and pain and more pain.
And he could not collapse into oblivion. His legs, his gut, even his hands and arms were flaming with agony now, but the mercy of unconsciousness was not allowed him. Doggedly, tears blurring his vision, pain racking his body, he slumped over the tractor’s controls, too weak to sit upright. But still conscious.
Time lost all meaning. Doug knew he was in hell: endless, eternal suffering. Damned, damned, damned to torment forever. The silent, stark lunar landscape trundled past slowly, maddeningly slowly. Doug felt as if he were mired in quicksand, already sucked down into it, unable to catch a breath, impossible to breathe, to move, to do anything but suffer.
He wanted to faint, he wanted to die and get it over with. He thought deliriously that he must already be dead. Why, this is hell.
He could not breathe. He could not cough or gasp or cry or beg for mercy. Yet he could not end the pain. It went on and on, endlessly, while his mind shrieked and gibbered with horrified terror.
Something banged into his helmet. He felt himself jerked back against the seat.
Slowly the pain eased away. His last touch with the world drifted away from him, leaving him floating in darkness, alone, silent, free of pain and desire and fear.
I’m dead, he thought. At last it’s over. I’m dead.
He was breathing. He opened his eyes, but saw nothing but mist, a gray fog.
“… had his suit radio off.”
“Visor’s fogged over. Turn up his fans, for chrissake.”
“How the hell did he get into this fix?”
“Never mind that! Is he coming around?”
The voices were urgent, frightened; to Doug they sounded like a chorus of angels.
“Can’t tell—”
“I can hear you,” Doug said, coughing. “I can hear you.”
“He’s alive!”
“Barely.”
Their frightened, urgent voices faded and Doug sank into blessed black oblivion.
DAY EIGHTEEN
“You are awake now, yes?”
Doug opened his eyes to see Zimmerman looming over him like a rumpled mountain, his fleshy face deathly serious, his eyes burning with inner fire.
The infirmary, Doug realized. I’m in the infirmary. He could smell the antiseptic, feel the crisp sheets on his skin. The little cubicle was clean and cool, walls and ceiling pastel. Electronic monitoring equipment hummed and beeped softly somewhere behind Doug’s head.
“So,” said Zimmerman quietly, “my little machines have saved your life again.”
The old man’s face wore an expression Doug had never seen before. Not tenderness, not from Zimmerman. But he seemed—concerned. He was standing over Doug’s infirmary bed like a worried uncle or grandfather, looking faintly ridiculous in his disheveled, wrinkled, old-fashioned three-piece gray suit.
“When are you …” Doug asked, his voice little more than a faint whisper, “When are you going to program nanobugs to keep your clothes pressed?”
“Jokes?” Zimmerman’s shaggy brows shot up. “You almost die and now you make jokes at me?”
“What happened?”
The old man ran a hand across his bald pate. “You had no oxygen for breathing. My nanomachines extracted oxygen from the cells of your body and fed it to your brain, to keep you alive.”
“The pain …”
“Both your lungs collapsed, of course. My nanomachines kept your circulatory system going, however.”
“Oxygen from my cells?”
Nodding vigorously, as if glad to get onto an impersonal topic, Zimmerman launched into a minor
lecture about the amount of residual oxygen stored in the body’s major organs.
“And the nanobugs extracted the residual oxygen?” Doug asked.
“Yah. And fed it into your bloodstream. That way your brain was kept alive even though your lungs collapsed.”
“How did the bugs know to do that?”
Zimmerman scowled down at him. “You think they are stupid? They sensed your lungs collapsing and acted to keep you alive.”
“You programmed them to do that? All those years ago when you put the bugs in me, you foresaw such a possibility?”
“I programmed the nanomachines,” Zimmerman emphasized the word slightly, “to maintain homeostasis and attack foreign invaders of your body. They sense any deviation from your normal condition and take immediate steps to counter it.”
“They must work pretty fast.”
“They react in the millisecond range, usually.”
Doug looked into the old man’s intense eyes. “That’s the third time you’ve saved my life, Professor.”
Zimmerman shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “It gives me the chance to write a new research paper—although who will publish it is a question, with this verdammt war going on.”
“I don’t know what I can do to thank you,” Doug said.
For just an instant, the professor’s expression softened. Then he took in a breath and said sternly, “Try to stay out of mischief.”
With that he turned on his heel and headed out of the cubicle.
“Wait!” Doug called, his voice a painful croak.
Zimmerman looked back over his shoulder, one hand on the sliding partition.
“What’re you doing in your lab? I haven’t seen you in so long—”
“We discuss that later, when you are stronger.”
“But what are you working on?”
With an impatient gesture, Zimmerman said, “This and that. You will see.”
He slid the partition back and left the cubicle. Doug thought that perhaps Zimmerman didn’t want him to see that he actually cared about him. But then he realized:
He hasn’t come up with anything yet. All these weeks tinkering in his lab and he hasn’t accomplished a mother-loving thing.
Before a full minute passed, Edith rushed into the cubicle, up to Doug’s bedside, her green eyes staring at him.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said, reaching out to her.
She leaned into his arms and kissed him hard. “You really okay?”
“A little weak, but I’ll be back to normal in a couple of hours.”
“Hours?”
“The nanomachines work fast,” he said.
Edith sat on the edge of the bed and laid her head on his chest. “Christmas bells, I was so scared! They said your suit had malfunctioned and you might die.”
Holding her tightly, Doug said, “Not yet, Edith. Not for a long time.”
Hours later, after several sessions with the medics and Kris Cardenas, Doug was sitting up in bed, surrounded by Jinny Anson, Harry Clemens and Bam Gordette.
“The cermet suit failed,” Doug said.
“We’ve gone over it,” Clemens said. He was tall and lanky; it always surprised Doug that he spoke with a Down Maine twang instead of a cowboy’s drawl. “Found a rupture along the seal between the air tank and the backpack frame. Looks like a pinhole in the insulation started it, then the pressure inside the tank broke it into a major leak.”
“How could a pinhole get into the insulation?”
“Search me.”
Anson said, “Somebody could’ve put it there.”
Doug turned his head toward her. “Somebody? You mean sabotage?”
She nodded silently.
“I can’t believe that, Jinny.”
“The suit didn’t fail,” she said. “Somebody tampered with it.”
Doug looked back at Clemens. “Harry?”
“I can’t see how it could’ve failed by itself. I even thought maybe a micrometeorite hit the air tank, but when I started figuring out the angle it would’ve had to come in, it would’ve had to come up out of the ground!”
“So it wasn’t a micrometeorite.”
“Somebody dug out a pinhole in the insulation,” Anson insisted. “Somebody who knows enough about suits to understand that the oxygen pressure inside the tank would break through the weak spot in half an hour or so after the tank was pressurized.”
“Nobody here at Moonbase would do something like that,” Doug insisted.
“Oh no?” Clemens countered. “Whoever it was covered up the pinhole with a smidge of foamgel insulation, so the leak wouldn’t start until you’d been out on the surface for a half hour or so.”
“The kind of foamgel the construction crew uses?” Doug asked.
Clemens nodded. “For stiffening temporary walls and stuff like that, right.”
“The foamgel held the pressure in your air tank until it got brittle from exposure to vacuum,” said Anson.
“If your tank had been down at a regular suit’s pressure you would’ve been okay, I think,” Clemens said. “But at fourteen-point-seven psi, it blew out.”
“And what about the emergency fill valve?” Anson added.
Clemens looked almost sheepish as he said, “The threads were smeared with dust. Froze the valve shut just as effectively as if they’d soldered it.”
The realization made Doug’s insides feel hollow. “We’ve got a saboteur among us?”
“A traitor,” Anson snapped.
“But who? Why?”
“That’s what we’ve got to find out. And fast.”
Doug looked at Gordette, standing slightly behind Clemens, silent, taking in every word.
“Bam, I want you to look into this.”
His eyes went wide. “Me?”
“Jinny and Harry have plenty of responsibilities to keep them busy. I want you to devote full time to this.”
Gordette seemed startled. “But I don’t know enough about spacesuits or any of that stuff. I’m not a cop. That’s what your security department is for.”
Doug shook his head. “Security doesn’t have the personnel for this kind of investigation.”
“But I’m just a glorified plumber.”
“Jinny and Harry will give you all the help they can. You can call on anybody in Moonbase for technical assistance. And I’ll tell security to cooperate with you fully.”
Gordette’s brows knit. It was clear to Doug that the man didn’t want the job, but he couldn’t refuse it.
“Another reason for you to do it, Bam,” Doug added. “I don’t want anybody outside this cubicle to know we’re hunting for a saboteur. No sense stirring up everybody. And it might be easier to catch our traitor if he doesn’t know he’s being tracked down.”
“Or she,” Anson said.
Doug stared at her. Who did she have in mind? “Or she,” he conceded. “Now get out of here and back to work.”
“When are you going back to work?” Anson jibed.
“I’ll be out of here as soon as the medics run one more set of tests. But I can work from this bed, don’t worry.”
“Me worry?” She laughed. “What have I got to worry about?”
“Someone tried to kill you?”
Her son’s revelation shocked Joanna to her roots. She had taken his call in the comfortable little upstairs sitting room of her home outside Savannah. It was early summer beyond her windows: trees were in leaf, birds chirping in the afternoon sunlight. And there was an assassin stalking the confines of Moonbase’s underground corridors.
“That’s what Jinny and the others think,” Doug said. He seemed cheerful and healthy enough, although now Joanna realized that he was sitting up in an infirmary bed.
He assured her that he was all right. “And I’m not completely convinced this wasn’t just a freak accident, Mom.”
Joanna realized she was biting her lip. “No,” she said. “It wasn’t an accident. It’s just the kind of thi
ng that Faure would do, the little sneak.”
Doug smiled when he heard her words. “But how could he get an assassin smuggled in here?”
“That dance troupe,” Joanna replied. “Faure timed all this so that the dance troupe would be stranded up there with you.”
This time Doug actually broke into laughter. “You think one of the ballet dancers tampered with my spacesuit? They don’t even know how to put one on.”
“What about that reporter?”
She saw his eyes go wide once he heard her words. “Edith? She—it couldn’t be her. It couldn’t be!”
“Why not?” Joanna persisted. “You didn’t have this kind of trouble before she talked her way into the base, did you?”
“It’s not her,” Doug said firmly. “It can’t be.”
Joanna did not reply, but her suspicions did not fade an iota.
“What’s happening down there?” Doug asked, changing the subject.
“Lev’s in New York, talking to Faure’s flunkies. I’ve finally gotten Rashid to convene an emergency meeting of the board in two weeks. I have an item on the agenda calling for the board to urge the White House to recognize Moonbase’s independence.”
Doug’s brows rose when he heard her. “Do you think you can carry that?”
“I’ve been counting noses. Tamara will be the swing vote, I’m certain of it.”
“She’ll vote on our side,” Doug said.
“I want you to do everything you can to make sure of that.”
She watched his face closely as he listened to her and digested her meaning.
“Mom,” said Doug, “there’s not much I can do from this distance except talk to her.”
“Use the virtual reality link,” Joanna urged. “Take her for a walk on the beach. Or a swim. She likes you, I’m certain of it.”
From his infirmary bed, Doug stared at his mother’s intense image on the little screen he had propped up on his lap. Good thing we’re not living in the days when families arranged their children’s marriages, he thought.
Then he wondered when he should tell his mother about Edith. And what do I really have to tell her? How serious is our relationship?
Do I love her? The question stunned him. Is this what love is, wanting to share your life with somebody? It’s all happened so quickly, like falling off the edge of a cliff.
