Moon Zero Two

by John Burke

  Captain Fielder came to attention. He saluted.

  “Good evening, Mr. Hubbard. I hope you enjoyed the trip, sir.”

  Mr. Hubbard was the somebody. He was podgy, his head sat down tightly on his shoulders and you felt that if things went wrong for him he might be able to retract it completely, right down between those well-padded shoulders. Not that things were likely to go wrong for Mr. Hubbard.

  He acknowledged Fielder’s remark with a grunt, and stumped on.

  Yes, sir, no, sir. Hope you enjoyed the ride... may I kiss your feet, sir. That was why I wasn’t going back into the Company. Beg its pardon, the Corporation. I’d never been a passenger pilot, and I wasn’t going to be one.

  “That,” said Fielder as though he really thought I’d revel in the information, “was Mr. Hubbard.”

  “So I gathered.”

  “Mr. J. J. Hubbard.”

  “Oh, that one?” Now it rang a bell. “The big money man—‘Hundred Percent’ Hubbard?”

  “That’s him.”

  “What does he want up here?”

  “Hundred percent of the Moon, maybe.”

  “Mm. United Nations wasn’t selling, last I heard.”

  We strolled together toward the lobby dome. The incoming flight had been neatly sorted out, and little squads of passengers were waiting for the Monorail to Lunar Center. Luggage slid along its tracks and was neatly piled in the loading chutes, ready for the train to come into position. Neat, neat, neat: everything was so neat, you had to hand it to them.

  Fielder said: “Somebody’s got to be a passenger pilot.”

  “Somebody’s got to be an exploration pilot, too. When they stopped exploration flights...”

  But what was the use? Nobody wanted to listen. Nobody wanted to know.

  If they’d felt like this at the start, there wouldn’t have been any start. Couldn’t they see that: was there nobody who could see it?

  Save your breath, Kemp. And save your thoughts: they’ll wear you down.

  “They need a captain on the Mars run.” Fielder was still at it “You could get it... even after all this time.”

  “I’ve been to Mars,” I reminded him.

  “Once. Just once.” He put his hand on my shoulder. He meant well, but I wanted to shake him off. “See you in town—have a drink, right?”

  I nodded.

  He went, and I took my suit and helmet into Personnel Section. It wasn’t quite as plushy in here as it was out there in the public lobbies and waiting rooms. A few lockers, a row of showers... and the illuminated board at the end of the corridor. I didn’t usually spare the board a glance. I knew it off by heart, anyway.

  TO THE MEMORY OF THE SPACEMEN WHO DIED

  THAT MANKIND SHOULD LIVE ON THE MOON

  I could recite the names. Burton, JanMewicz, McClean, Lee Ying, Duvalier...

  But today there was somebody at work on it. An operative with a power-pen was carefully lettering a new name at the foot of the list.

  I felt a chill. We didn’t have accidents nowadays. Not really. Not fatal ones.

  I went slowly toward the board and watched the letters forming—engraved imperishably on that gleaming surface. O.... VON BE...

  “Otto?” I burst out. “Otto von Bech?”

  The workman frowned, keeping his hand steady as he started on the next letter.

  “That’s right.”

  “Otto got killed?” It was no good. I couldn’t believe it.

  “Coupla days ago.”

  “How?”

  “Engine failed on takeoff. That’s what I heard. Went straight in. Crunch.”

  Otto. Swaggering, booming, gusty great Otto. There were so many jokes about him. Can’t kill Otto—he’d bounce. Otto the perfect sphere. Protective coloring... marvels of human adaptation...

  I looked along the corridor, and then back at the board. In here, the only people who would ever see that name would be Otto’s friends—fewer of them now than there used to be—and the new lot, the kids who wouldn’t even bother to spare the list a glance. It ought to be outside, in the main hall, where the public could read those names and remember. Only, of course, they wouldn’t want to remember. They wouldn’t want to know that you could still get killed at takeoff, at landing, or out there in space. Don’t show them the rollcall of the dead. Bad for the image.

  The man with the power-pen edged back to study his handiwork. Casually he said:

  “He flew the same sort of space ferry you got, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. His was a bit newer, that’s all.”

  The man went back to work, and I went out into the lobby again. There was still quite a bit of a space at the bottom of that plaque: enough for the name of W. KEMP to be added when the time came.

  A worried passenger was fussing over his luggage. As one of the porters tried to lift it into position for automatic loading, the man suddenly panicked.

  “No, just a moment, I... I’ll handle it myself. There’s some... er... I’ve got some fragile instruments inside.”

  He reached for the heavy bag and swung it up from the floor.

  It kept moving. Caught off balance, he let go, and the bag sailed gracefully over the trolley and landed on the far side with a crash of breaking glass.

  Tears came into the man’s eyes. “My Scotch! My Scotch!” He tottered round the trolley to assess the damage.

  The porter shrugged. Moon gravity was something you had to adjust to, and the antics of those who weren’t prepared for it were always good for a malicious laugh. Things weighed only a sixth of what they did on Earth. Things—including human beings. The passenger discovered this when, plunging toward his bag, he overshot and went stumbling toward an armchair by the reservation counter. It was a good job the armchair wasn’t occupied at the time.

  I headed for the exit. As I passed the information desk, the clerk hailed me.

  He was dealing with a slim girl dressed in what must be the latest terrestrial fashion. Not an expensive mode, I judged: it looked neat, sleek, and less extreme than some of the pricey pieces that flitted through here on what had become the almost obligatory Moon-month vacation. The girl, too, was unobtrusive—pretty, with slowly blinking eyes and a nicely generous mouth. And, right now, with a worried expression.

  “Captain Kemp flies over to Farside, time to time,” the clerk said. “Bill... this young lady’s looking for her brother. He’s a miner over there. Seems he said he’d meet her on arrival here, but there’s not even a message.”

  I didn’t see it was anything to do with me, but I didn’t mind looking at the girl for a few minutes. She had just that quality of freshness that women lost after they had been on the Moon for any length of time—as though the artificially freshened air and the fresh food and vegetables from the stygian caverns somehow drained them and dulled them.

  “Your brother?” I prompted.

  “Taplin,” she said. “Wallace Taplin.”

  It meant nothing to me. I’d flown supplies for quite a few of the miners—it was just about all that kept me going—but Taplin wasn’t one of them.

  “He’s probably waiting in town,” I tried to reassure her.

  “Just what I was saying,” the clerk chimed in. He was anxious to get rid of her now, and only too willing to hand her over. I saw it coming. “Mr. Kemp’s going into town. I reckon he won’t mind seeing you onto the Monorail.”

  I made some sort of noise, and walked away, with the girl beside me. She was there, but all at once she ceased to exist. Right in the middle of that buzzing, murmuring space, surrounded by these travelers who took so much for granted, I had a clear, overwhelmingly vivid picture of Otto right there in front of me. Otto, waiting with his great ham of a hand shoved out. Waiting to joke, to crack your hand with his grip, to slam you on the shoulder and knock you halfway across the crater.

  But there wasn’t any Otto. Not any more. Just a drift of particles in infinity, now.

  The girl cleared her throat and said something uneasily. I trie
d to snap out of it and get her in focus again.

  “Sorry, Miss Trampoline...”

  “Taplin,” she said.

  “Oh, yes. Sorry.”

  “My luggage,” she said. “How do I collect my luggage?”

  We stepped out onto the platform. The faint tremor of the rail and the hiss of the distant dome lock announced the arrival of the train.

  “All stacked up, ready to go aboard,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  But she was still worrying. She looked like a girl with a lot to worry about

  2

  THEY GASPED, just as I’d known they would, when the train slid from the short tunnel and out across the lunar plain. Newcomers always let out a squeak of some sort when they emerged into the dazzling brightness and saw the slim concrete Monorail curving round the rocky promontory. There was a dizzy moment when you felt yourself in danger of being launched back into space; then the train gathered speed and hummed along the rail, supported on fragile-looking pillars a steady forty feet above the surface.

  Harsh light and harsh shadows and always the backdrop of piercing stars: I’d seen it all, I’d been here too long. I closed my eyes.

  “Is that the city?” asked Miss Taplin.

  Far too soon for the city. I opened my eyes and had a look. What she could see were the towers and gantries of the spaceship yards. She wasn’t so far wrong, though. The area was a city in itself. Few ships were built anywhere else nowadays: with Moon gravity, the movement and assembly of parts were easier, and space was plentiful— space on the ground, and space up aloft for test flying— and experimental blast-offs didn’t produce angry calls from the Noise Abatement Society.

  I mumbled something. And I found myself thinking about Otto again. Miss Taplin shifted resentfully in her seat. Well, if she wanted a tourist guide she should pay for one. It wasn’t my line.

  Suddenly, crossly, she said: “Did you just get bad news or something?”

  “Friend of mine got killed.”

  She was immediately contrite. “I’m sorry. I... what happened?”

  “Crashed a space ferry.”

  “Oh. The sort of thing that goes around to Farside? The sort of thing you do?”

  “Well, not crashing them,” I said. “Not yet.”

  “I didn’t mean... I mean, I’m sorry.”

  She wasn’t having much of a ride, poor kid. I shook myself out of the depression. You took risks, you lived with them; and you died with them. Happened all the time. No point in trying to infect anyone else with the glooms. Not much point in any of it, anyway.

  I started to describe the things we were passing. The monument where the first lunar landing had been made, half a century back. And where they dug the first mine. The mountain power cable, the clifftop observatory, the dent where a meteorite had wiped out the earliest hotel, before men learned to make more sensible use of the sheltering crater rims and fissures.

  The car swung around a tight curve and the cliff face opened a black mouth. We plunged in and through. Miss Taplin grabbed my arm, then let go and gave me a sheepish smile. She had nice long, firm fingers. And her smile was quite something, even when it wavered like that.

  Playing the part of the imperturbable spacehand for all I was worth, I said: “All right, we’re inside now. City Crater. And there’s the big city for you.”

  The cluster of domes swelled as we approached, and separated out into individual bubbles. The power station glinted, turning one of its vast sun-traps slowly as we sped past. Sunlight would be converted into electricity, and filtered rays would be guided through the vast subterranean complex of food processing plants, atmospheric generators and hydroponics farms. One stroke of good fortune had been the discovery of the great ice mine a mile down. Melted into water, it gave us drink. Broken into oxygen, it helped no end with the breathing.

  Miss Taplin was-saying: “You get fourteen days sunlight, then fourteen days night. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  Good girl. She must have been reading the spaceline brochure they handed out along with the anti-G pills and the vomit disposal chute connectors.

  “Right,” I said.

  “How do you get used to it?”

  “You don’t. You stay indoors and work on the Earth clock. You couldn’t stay awake fourteen days and then sleep and then... well, you couldn’t stay awake.”

  We were descending in a long spiral. Another dark hole yawned in front of us and then there was the channel of subdued lights like a dimmed flarepath guiding us into the terminal.

  “Funny to think there’s no air outside,” she said. “Nobody can ever just open a window, or stroll out, or feel rain on their faces.”

  “We’re all foreigners up here,” I said. “We always will be.”

  The train slowed in beside the platform. The mechanical unloaders began to click rhythmically. Porters hauled bags over to where passengers were already fussing and fidgeting. They had come way across the void from Earth to the Moon, and no sooner were they safely landed than they started twitching the way they’d do at any decrepit run-of-the-mill airport in New York, London, or Amsterdam.

  Miss Taplin wasn’t so much concerned with her luggage right now. She looked along the platform and then through the arch into the concourse, trying to spot her brother.

  I wanted a drink. But I didn’t like just to saunter off and leave her.

  Finally, when I thought it was time she faced a few unpleasant facts, I said: “No luck?”

  “No.” She forced a smile. “But he’s never been on time yet.”

  “Let’s try the hotel.”

  “But which hotel? I haven’t heard from him since his cable three months ago, and he didn’t say...”

  She had come a long way on a slender invitation. Or that was how it sounded to me. But I took her arm and steered her across the concourse.

  “This is a small town,” I said. “We have to make do with only the best.”

  We went up the tunnel labeled MOON HILTON.

  The hotel lobby was designed in bright, clamorous primitive style. The clashing colors of the glass bricks provided a garish contrast to the black and white Moonscape outside. You might have thought the whole thing was the work of some gifted, manic native—only there weren’t any lunar natives.

  In the center of the hall, belted in by a circular seat, a slowly revolving globe of the Moon winked with little informative lights. Miss Taplin let herself be hypnotized by it while I went to inquire at the desk.

  No, there had been no reservations for a Wallace Taplin. No reservations, no messages, nothing.

  I went to break the news to her. “He could just be late,” I said. There were one hell of a lot of things that could make a man late getting around the Moon. Or that could stop him getting here at all.

  “When’s the next train?” she asked. “The next train in from... well, wherever?”

  I kept it gentle when explaining that we didn’t go in for railway networks up here. The Monorail between city and spaceport was all we had to offer. If her brother was coming in from Farside he would have to travel either by a space ferry like mine—which came expensive—or by Moonbug, the little pressurized truck that did half the real work on this world of rock and dust. Convoys took stores out to Farside and brought back ore—and brought back men when they’d got tired of breaking their limbs and hearts over fruitless diggings.

  “Where’s his claim?” I asked.

  “He said it was in Spectacle Craters.”

  I waited for the dark side of the globe to heave around, and then indicated the appropriate patch. “They’re in night at the moment. Nearest base is Farside Five, and that’s near two thousand miles from here. Say six days by convoy. Three if he hired his own souped-up Bug and driver, which he couldn’t do over there, anyway.”

  “It takes longer to get from one side of the Moon to the other than it does to get here from Earth?”

  “Sure does.”

  “But what about your spaceship?”


  “I can do it in twenty minutes. But it’s pricey. It’ll cost ten thousand Earth dollars before I make a penny profit. Mostly I do emergency stuff: blood plasma, rescue equipment when a mine’s caved in...”

  She winced. I could have put that more tactfully.

  “I suppose,” she said, “I’ll have to wait for the next convoy. But surely I can send a radio message to him— find out if he’s on his way?”

  “Well...” I hated to be a sour prophet like this, but I had more bad news for the girl. “You could,” I said, “until a week ago. The ring of communication satellites isn’t operating right now. One got hit by a meteorite, and the chain’s busted. We’re out of touch with Farside until it’s fixed.”

  “The twenty-first century!” she said sardonically.

  “It isn’t my Moon. I just work here.”

  She smiled again. A better, friendlier smile this time. The sort of smile that could grow on you if you let it. She said:

  “Sorry. So I suppose I’ll have to book in and wait. Perhaps I’ll see you again?”

  “If I’m not in the bar, I’m usually under it.”

  We shook hands and made polite noises and I watched her go over to the desk. For someone who wasn’t used to Moon gravity she had adjusted to it pretty well. She had instinctively adopted that faintly nautical roll that looks odd when men try it but can work wonders for a woman— particularly when you watch her from behind.

  Somebody cleared his throat. It wasn’t me. I turned to find a uniformed flunkey watching me while I watched. When he saw he’d got my attention, he said in an undertone: “Bureau of Investigation wants to see you, Mr. Kemp.”

  I knew what that meant. “Yes?” I sighed. “Where?”

  “On the pistol range.”

  She would, of course, have to play it for drama. Maybe the pseudo-military atmosphere made her feel safer. Or maybe she thought one day I’d be impressed by it.

  She ought to know better by now.

  I went down to the cavern. Discreet lighting and one almighty resonance of gunfire. The way two of them were firing and reloading, you’d have thought an interstellar war was due to break out any day; or else that the Mafia were on their way to take over the Moon.