by Ben Bova
Doug realized it was the beacon light atop the radio mast of tempo six.
We’ll be there in half an hour, he told himself.
Then what?
Doug took in a deep double lungful of canned air. We’ll find out when we get there.
In the airlessness of the Moon Gordette won’t hear us coming up, if he’s inside the tempo. The first warning he’ll get is when I start the airlock cycling. I’ll park the tractor and let Edith keep on sleeping. No sense getting her involved in whatever’s going to happen inside when I confront Bam. Things could get messy.
All of a sudden they were there. The dark hump of dirt that marked the site of the buried shelter loomed in front of Doug’s straining eyes. A single tractor was parked to one side of the airlock.
Doug stopped his tractor and looked over at Edith. Not a stir from her. Good, he thought, she’s sound asleep.
He climbed down slowly from the cab and walked over to the other tractor. One set of fresh boot prints in the sandy regolith led straight to the airlock. Bam’s in there. Alone.
Okay, Doug told himself. This is it.
A gentle slope led down to the airlock’s outer hatch. No wind on the Moon to cover the grade with newly-blown dust; it would remain clear for eons, except for the occasional tracks of boots. Doug slid the hatch open and stepped into the phonebooth-sized airlock. He closed the outer hatch, sealed it, then pressed a thumb against the electronic pad that activated the pumps. The telltale light above the pad immediately went from red to amber.
It seemed to take an eternity. Doug could feel the vibration of the pump working against the soles of his boots, but for several long moments he could hear nothing. Then, as the chamber filled with air, the chugging of the pumps became audible.
He knows he’s got a visitor, Doug thought, clenching his fists involuntarily. The tiny whine of the gloves’ servomotors surprised him and he unflexed his hands. It took an effort of will.
The light turned green. Doug slid the inner hatch open.
Gordette stood at the far end of the shelter, by the two tiers of bunks. He was apparently putting his spacesuit on again; torso, leggings and boots were in place. His helmet rested on one of the lower bunks. Doug could not see his gloves.
Gordette’s brows knit as he recognized the cermet suit that he had once sabotaged.
“Who the fuck are you and what’re you doing in that suit?”
Doug slid his visor up. “It’s me, Bam.”
The man shuddered visibly. He staggered back a step and leaned against the bunks for support.
“You’re dead! I killed you!”
“You tried,” Doug said, stepping further into the shelter. “Why?”
“Stay away from me!”
“Why did you try to kill me, Bam?”
Gordette’s eyes showed white all around the irises. “I cut your fuckin’ throat!”
Doug sighed. “The nanomachines inside me. They closed the wound and kept me from bleeding to death.”
“That’s not possible!”
“Of course it is. There’s nothing supernatural here, Bam. No magic. Just those little nanobugs.”
With the spacesuit on, it was impossible to see Gordette’s chest rising and falling. But his mouth hung open, panting.
“Why’d you want to kill me, Bam? What did I do to you that you wanted to murder me?”
For several heartbeats Gordette said nothing, did not move. Then he sagged down onto the lower bunk.
“It wasn’t you,” he said, sinking his head into his hands. “Had nothing to do with you.”
“It was me you tried to kill.”
“You or me, man. Life or death. I had to do it. Had to. One of us had to go. I should’ve slit my own throat; been better that way.”
“Why?” Doug asked again. “Why did you have to do it?”
“I’m a soldier. I follow orders. Or else.”
“You were sent here to kill me?”
Gordette looked up at Doug with reddened eyes. “You know that little shit Faure’s been planning this for years.”
“You work for the U.N.? The Peacekeepers?”
“Naw. I get paid by Washington. Special security forces. They pulled me out of the army. Trained me to be an assassin.”
“You’ve killed other people?”
His face looked awful. “That’s my profession, man. That’s what they trained me to do. Either that or spend my life in jail.”
“Why jail?”
He laughed bitterly. “Why else? I killed somebody. It was an accident, but I did it and the only way to stay out of jail was to go into the army. They always held that over me; do what they want or they send me to jail for life. No parole. No sweetheart minimum-security farm, either. Jail. In with the perverts and the maniacs.”
Doug unfastened his helmet, pulled it off over his head, then walked the length of the narrow shelter to sit on the bunk opposite Gordette. He placed the helmet on the bedsheet beside him.
“Okay, Bam. That’s all over now. You can live here. You can be free of them.”
The black man stared into Doug’s eyes. “Live at Moonbase?”
“That’s right.”
“I tried to kill you and you’re offering me asylum?”
“That’s what Moonbase is all about, Bam. A place to build a new life.”
Gordette said nothing, but his expression showed doubt, suspicion, scorn.
“I’m a fugitive, too,” Doug said. “On Earth I’d be a marked man waiting for some nanoluddite fanatic to assassinate me. On the Moon I can live—”
“Until some hired assassin knocks you off.”
Doug reached out his gloved hand. “Join us, Bam.”
“I don’t deserve to join you,” Gordette said, recoiling. “I’m a murderer! A killer!”
“You were a murderer. Now you have the chance to change, to start a new life.”
“Doing what?”
Patiently, Doug said, “Doing whatever you do best. It’s up to you.”
“I killed my own mother!” he screamed, leaping to his feet. “I killed her!”
Doug looked up at him and saw fear, guilt, and the depths of hell in Gordette’s red-rimmed eyes.
Gordette bent over him and yanked Doug to his feet so hard that Doug’s helmet rolled off the bunk and bounced on the concrete floor.
“I killed my mother!” he roared into Doug’s face. “Don’t talk to me about starting a new life.”
He pushed Doug down onto the bunk again and went for his own helmet. Doug watched him put it on, seal the neck ring. Then Gordette started to pull on his gloves.
“Where are you going?” Doug asked.
“Out there. Anyplace. I’ll keep going until I run out of air. That’ll put an end to it.”
Doug got up from the bunk. “Bam, you can’t do that! I can’t let you do it.”
Staring grimly at him through his open helmet, Gordette muttered, “How you gonna stop me, man?”
Doug walked toward him. “Don’t kill yourself, for god’s sake. You can start a whole new life here.”
“Yeah? For how long? In a week or so the Peacekeepers are gonna come marching in here and I’ll be on my way back Earthside, heading for jail ’cause I didn’t nail you.”
“We can keep the Peacekeepers out,” Doug said, feeling almost desperate. “We can stay free.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Don’t kill yourself, Bam!”
Gordette looked at him with eyes suddenly grown calm and cold. “One of us has to die, Doug. I’d rather it be me. Even if I killed you, they’d just set me up for some other piece of shit. Let me end it, man. Let me put an end to the whole fucking mess.”
“No!” Doug snapped, and grabbed for Gordette.
Almost by reflex, Gordette backhanded Doug across the jaw, knocking him off balance, staggering in his spacesuit halfway down the length of the shelter.
Gordette slammed his visor down and turned for the airlock hatch. Doug charged after him. G
ordette spun to face him, snapped Doug’s head back with a straight left, then levelled him with a right. Doug’s eyesight blurred as his head hit the concrete flooring, then everything went black.
Edith woke up, stiff and groaning, in the tractor’s seat. She went to rub her eyes, but her hands bumped the helmet visor. Pulling herself up to a sitting position, she saw that the tractor was stopped in front of the tempo and Doug was gone.
He must be inside with Gordette, she thought, suddenly alarmed. Quickly she searched around her seat for something that might be useful as a weapon. If there was a tool kit on the tractor, it wasn’t in sight.
Empty-handed, she started to climb down to the ground. As she put one boot on the sandy regolith she saw a spacesuited figure march determinedly past her, past the other parked tractor, and away from the tempo. It wasn’t Doug’s suit, she knew.
Ignoring the distress signals her bladder was sending, Edith went to the open airlock hatch. Doug must be inside, she thought. It took an eternally long moment for her to find the instructions printed on the inner wall of the airlock, alongside the control keypad. Edith had to turn on her helmet light to read them.
It was simple enough. She slid the hatch shut and activated the pump. When the light turned green she opened the inner hatch and stepped into the shelter.
Doug was on the floor, his helmet off, pushing himself up onto his elbows.
“He wants to kill himself,” Doug said to her. She barely heard him through her sealed helmet.
Sliding her visor up, she knelt beside Doug. “What happened? Are you all right?”
“He wants to kill himself,” Doug repeated.
“Let him,” she snapped. “Better him than you.”
Slowly, Doug pushed himself to a sitting position, shook his head a few times, then started to clamber to his feet. “Where’d my helmet get to?” he mumbled.
“You’re not going out there after him!”
He looked at her. “I can’t let him die out there, Edith. He … I just can’t.”
“I’ll go with you, then.”
“You stay here,” Doug said firmly, walking back to pick his helmet off the floor. “You’re a lot safer here inside the shelter.”
“And you’re going out to catch him?”
“To find him. To help him—if he’ll let me.”
“Not without me!”
“Yes, without you. You stay here. If I’m not back in an hour, get into the tractor and go back to Moonbase.”
Edith started to argue, but one look into Doug’s determined blue-gray eyes stopped her. It would be pointless, she knew.
As soon as Doug left the shelter she went to the toilet, then waited another ten minutes, by the watch on her spacesuit’s wrist. Then she went to the airlock and started after him in the tractor.
From her perch in the driver’s seat she could see two pairs of bootprints clearly etched into the dark sandy ground. I won’t need an Indian guide to help me follow their trail, Edith told herself.
DAY FORTY-FOUR
Doug followed Gordette’s boot prints, gleaming bright and new in the ancient regolith. The only sounds he heard were his own breathing and the comforting soft buzz of the suit’s air fans. He had stopped at the tractor to refill his air tank. Hunger gnawed at him, but there was nothing he could do about that.
How much air does Bam have left in his suit? he wondered. How long can he roam around out here before he runs out?
Gordette’s trail seemed to meander, with no specific aim or purpose. Doug followed it around a house-sized boulder, never even thinking that Gordette could be lurking behind the rock, waiting to ambush him. He wasn’t. His bootprints skirted a worn old crater the size of a baseball diamond, and so deep that its bottom was lost in dense shadow. Meteoroid must have come almost straight down to dig that one, Doug thought.
Soon, though, Gordette’s trail started to run alongside a sinuous rille that snaked along the dusty ground like an arroyo in desert country. Doug remembered his first walk out on the Moon’s surface, his eighteenth birthday. With Foster Brennart. They had come across a rille that had suddenly spurted a ghostly cloud of gasses from deep within the lunar interior. Methane, ammonia, other volatiles. They had glittered in the sunlight like a billion fireflies.
Brennart thought it was a good omen, my first walk on the surface. Maybe it was, Doug thought. I could use a good omen now.
Suddenly Gordette’s bootprints ended. Disappeared. Doug stopped, puzzled. He backtracked a few steps, then saw that Gordette had climbed down into the shallow gully cut into the ground by the rille. Turning on his helmet lamp, Doug spotted faint boot marks heading along the bottom of the rille, some two meters below the surface on which he stood.
The prints still headed in the same general direction that Gordette had been following. Why’d he jump down into the rille? Doug asked himself. Was he afraid I’d follow him and he’s trying to hide his trail? The prints down inside the rille were faint, but still visible.
Staying on the surface, Doug followed the rille as it wound across the regolith. It could be dangerous down there, Doug told himself. The rilles are old fissures where gas from below ground had seeped out. The ground down there can be brittle as glass, and who knows what’s underneath it?
Edith trundled along in the tractor, trying to keep its speed down to the pace of a walking man. The trail of bootprints was easy to see, and she didn’t want Doug to know she was following him. Not yet.
Once she thought she saw the curve of his helmet above the horizon, and she tromped on the tractor’s brakes. If I can’t see him, he can’t see me, she figured. And he sure can’t hear me coming after him, not out here in all this vacuum.
The nearness of the horizon bothered her. It didn’t look right. She knew, consciously, that the Moon was only a quarter of the Earth’s size and the horizon was therefore much closer than it would be on Earth. But still, at a deep, primitive level, it almost frightened her. As if there really was an edge to this barren, desolate world and she might drop off it.
Yeah, she told herself derisively, you’re right in there with Columbus’ crew. Sail on, babe. Sail on.
* * *
Doug didn’t realize he still had the suit-to-suit frequency on until he started hearing strange sounds in his earphones. Gasps? Moans? The sounds came through for a moment, then disappeared, like ghosts vanishing into thin air.
Very thin air, around here, he told himself.
The rille had been getting progressively deeper, sinking more than four meters below the crater floor, Doug guessed. It was hard to tell, and almost impossible to see if Gordette’s boot prints were still marching along down there, even when he leaned carefully over the worn, rounded smooth edge of the rille to shine his helmet lamp on its bottom.
He came to a spot where a meteoroid had slammed into the ground just next to the rille, collapsing its side into a heap of rubble. Doug spent several minutes searching for bootprints; he found none. As far as he could see there were no prints on the other side of the narrow rille, either.
And the eerie sounds in his earphones had stopped, too.
I’ve overshot him, Doug told himself. He’s back behind me someplace. Down inside the rille. Hiding.
Slowly, bending over the edge of the rille to examine its bottom, Doug started backtracking. He couldn’t see the bottom of the arroyo, it was too deep for his helmet lamp to reach.
He stopped and listened. Nothing. Gordette had gone silent. Is he dead? Maybe what I heard was his last gasping for air.
With great reluctance, and more than a little fear, Doug carefully climbed down inside the rille, lowering himself slowly down as far as he could with his arms fully stretched, then letting himself slide the rest of the way down.
He felt the rough side wall grating against the chest of his suit. Couldn’t do this in a fabric suit, he thought. The cermet won’t tear. But he knew that grinding some dust or larger particles of grit into his suit’s joints could immobilize him as th
oroughly as the Tin Woodsman caught in a monsoon rain.
Doug had never felt the panic of claustrophobia, but as he stood shakily inside the narrow rille he saw that the sky above him was nothing more now than a constricted slice of stars cut off on both sides by the steep black walls of the arroyo. Like the view from the bottom of a grave, he thought.
He took a step forward and his boot slid on the glass-smooth rock. He had to grab at both sides of the gully to keep himself from falling. Hardly any dust down here, he realized. This rille must be brand-new, maybe still active.
“New” and “active” were relative terms on the Moon, he knew. A new rille might have opened up only a few thousand years ago. Its activity might be a slight sigh of underground gas every century or so.
A cough. In his earphones Doug heard somebody cough. Couldn’t be anybody but Bam.
Slowly, moving cautiously along the slippery rock floor of the rille, both hands extended to touch its steep confining walls, Doug made his way forward.
Another cough, followed by a quick, desperate gasping.
“Bam!” he called into his helmet mike. “Bam, where are you?”
No response. Standing stock-still, Doug listened hard. Is he holding his breath? No, It’s just so faint I can hardly hear him.
Doug pushed along the slick arroyo and the sound of Gordette’s breathing grew louder. It sounded strained, labored, as if the man were in pain.
“I’m coming, Bam,” Doug called again. “I’ll be with you in a couple of minutes. Hang on.”
“Don’t …” Gordette’s voice was weak. It broke into a gasping cough.
“Save your breath. I’ll be there.”
“Careful … the ground … gives way …”
Doug scanned the ground before him in the light of his helmet lamp. It looked solid enough, glassy and slick, but solid rock. Yet he knew this volcanic vent might be no sturdier than a soap bubble.
More coughing from Gordette. He must be almost out of air, Doug realized. Got to get to him quickly.
The smooth rock floor ended abruptly, like a shattered pane of glass. Black nothingness yawned in front of Doug.
