by John Burke
The attendant reached out to check my card.
I said: “Understand the Bureau wants to see me.”
He jerked his thumb at the farthest firing table.
“Want to hire a gun?”
“Just lend me your own.”
He shook his head. We had been through this routine before. But he handed over a rocket pistol and made only a token, spluttering protest. “This way I’ll go broke.”
“I’ll see you there.”
I walked over to the table.
She didn’t look around, but I knew that she had registered my arrival. One corner of that shrewish little mouth twitched. It would have been a sweeter mouth if she had let it relax more often.
Her gun came up slowly and deliberately. A flickering figure did an erratic run across the target screen at the end. She fired once, twice... and the stab of light wiped the figure off the screen.
I said formally: “Agent Elizabeth Murphy, I presume?”
“Hello, Bill.”
She fired once more as though to prove something, maybe to me or maybe to herself. Then she looked around and I kissed her and those tight lips softened up quite a way.
She wore the flash of the United Nations Bureau of Investigation above her left breast. I preferred her without it. Indeed, I liked her best when there was no uniform or anything else between her and me. But she was on duty today. And I sensed it was going to be one of those days. She had something to say to me. She’d said it before, but I was going to have to hear it all through again.
She started casually enough. “How did the trip go?”
“Ah, you spend a dollar, you make a dollar. Maybe.”
She nodded wryly. “Big business, huh? You heard about Otto?”
“It happens all the time.”
I checked the magazine on my gun, waited for a target to weave in, and fired.
Liz said: “I wish I had a dollar for every time you’ve said that about a pilot. It doesn’t seem to happen to Corporation pilots.”
“Corporation,” I said. “Yes, I heard about that. Expanding all the time.”
“Exactly. And with opportunities for—”
“Now look, Liz. I am not going back into the Company... even if it has got around to calling itself a corporation. Repeat, not. When they gave up exploration flights—”
“When they gave them up,” she said tautly, “they gave up killing pilots.” She fired again, but this time she missed. Angrily she slammed the pistol down and, with her back to the attendant, took out a piece of paper. “I’d lose my job if I let you see this. So I won’t. But I want you to listen.”
“Don’t let me tempt you to betray your principles,” I said.
It was cheap and sarcastic, and she just paid no attention. She went on:
“It says, ‘Please explain delay submitting evidence for grounding space ferry Moon Zero Two. Urgent repeat urgent.’ Now you know.”
I took my time, firing, and missing as badly as she had done. Now I knew, all right. I said:
“They’re really out to get me, hey?”
“Not you, just your ship. Bill”—she put her hand on my arm, and her grip was a lot stronger, a lot more commanding than nice little Miss Taplin’s had been— “you know it’s not really safe any more. You know it. Space flight’s still pretty new, and the public isn’t sure about it. They can’t see the difference between your old ferries and the Corporation expresses, so any crash is bad news. It loses the Corporation passengers. Otto’s crash has put the heat on. The Corporation chases the Bureau, the Bureau chases me—”
“And suddenly I’m running.”
“Bill, if it was anybody else I’d have grounded them a month back. You know that.”
Sure, I knew that. I kissed her again, but she was holding off this time. I said: “It’s still the only spaceship I’ve got.”
“The Corporation’ll take you back—now.” Here it came, just as I’d predicted it would. “You’re still one of the best pilots they had. But once you get yourself grounded for safety reasons, they won’t touch you with a radar beam. They daren’t.”
“I’m still not a passenger pilot.”
“Bill, the exploration is over. It’s a time now for consolidation, before we can risk any more great big jumps into the dark. Over,” she said again.
But didn’t she know, didn’t she realize? After the way we’d been together, was she still incapable of grasping what made my mind go around—or forward, or sideways? For me it would never be over. There was Mercury, out there waiting. Mercury, and Jupiter’s moons—maybe not Saturn just yet, but Uranus and Neptune. All these pressurized domes and sealed caverns and plushy little home cells and office cells had windows or filter-screen viewers; but people seemed to have got out of the habit of looking out. There were a lot of stars out there. If the Corporation didn’t get to them, somebody else would, sooner or later. I wanted it to be sooner, while I still had the strength.
“You can’t ground me now,” I observed. “Otto’s dead. Who’s going to do the emergency local flights? You need me and my ship.”
“I don’t. There are ways. We’ve got plans. And I might just decide to save your life.”
“For whom?”
She went white. I wanted to tell her to forget it, to stop arguing and stop being a Bureau bird just for a little while. She could come along with me and we’d play some of those games we’d tried out last year—the pleasures that were good on Earth but better here, when you got used to the possibilities of one-sixth gravity.
We’d met in Helicon House, the holiday resort where I’d been treating myself to two weeks of rest and liquor. With its cozy rooms, gentle music, pseudoterrestrial restaurant, its viewing theater and its sun-scorched dome lounge, it was the Moon’s only equivalent of a vacation center. Pilots were granted two weeks there in every three months, to soothe their ravaged nerves. It went with the pension, the mortgage on a box in a terrestrial apartment block, and the topflight, top-price education for the kids, if any. For me, I paid out of my own money. And I found out in due course that this made the Bureau suspicious. It was expensive, that place. How could a small-time, lone-wolf operator like me get that kind of money together? It wouldn’t have occurred to them, of course, that you could just about do it once in a while if you didn’t buy a new uniform or contribute to a pension fund or have a mortgage or think about getting married. Once in a while, just for the hell of it.
And this once, there was Liz Murphy.
She told me she was a geologist’s secretary, taking a rest while her boss went back to Earth with reports on seismic surveys they had been making. I didn’t believe it at first—not a woman with greedy eyes like that, and a slow husky voice like that, and haunches like that There was nothing rocky about her at all: she was soft and pliable and responsive. But then I got to know a certain hard note in her voice, below that smoky purr; and several times I saw her lips tighten involuntarily when I said something snide about the big boys who had taken over the Earth and the Moon and set their seal on the heavens and reduced everything to their own size—a mean, unadventurous size. So I began to believe she could, after all, be quite a tough operator in her own field.
And I was right, and I was wrong. Right to believe she was tough and good in her own field; wrong to believe that she was, really and truly, a geologist’s assistant.
Liz Murphy was Agent Elizabeth Murphy. And she wasn’t taking a vacation at Helicon House. She might not be wearing uniform, but she was on duty all right. She had been assigned William Kemp as a job. It was up to her to find out if I’d been making big money by smuggling, by shoving semiprecious stones into my underwear, by shipping undeclared loads of ore out of Farside, by working some new fast one that they hadn’t got around to yet. Kemp was an oddball, and they didn’t like oddballs clicking around the intestines of their tidy machinery.
So Liz wasn’t there for pleasure. Hard lines on her... because pleasure was what she got. It was part of the job to go to b
ed with me if necessary; and very early on she found it necessary—and after that it became positively obligatory.
She didn’t stop me. Oh, she was shrewd all right. Even while she was making intimate discoveries about me that couldn’t possibly go into any official dossier, she still kept up her mental appraisal. And it told her that, whatever other faults I might have, I was honest. No smuggling, no smart dealing, no little tricks to add to the lunar repertoire. Liz fell for me, and reported back that I was dependable and loyal and wasn’t costing the authorities a penny more than her own expenses at the Helicon.
They moved her out. And I went back to work.
“But I’ll see you,” she said desperately. “I’ll see you in the city.”
“You sure will.”
And that was when she got all pale and girlish—a thing she never ceased to be ashamed of afterward—and broke down and told me what her job was. And after I’d got good and mad, and told her what I thought of her, I told her what I thought of her in other ways, and she cried again, and hated herself for it, and afterward she had one main ambition. Kemp was wonderful, but not quite wonderful enough. Kemp had to be reformed. He had to be made respectable. No more racketing about in a ship that could have won first prize in a vintage vehicle exhibition back on Earth. Kemp had to be coaxed, pressured... and, in the last resort, forced... to be someone worthy of her. If I wanted her, I had to play it her way.
And did I want her? Did I want her that much?
Well...
It was something I hadn’t even decided for my own satisfaction, so I was nowhere near committing myself out loud. Neither one way nor the other. And I wasn’t just playing it cautious so that she wouldn’t bring the whole force of the Bureau down on me. The caution was all concerned with me and her, and what it could all lead to or not lead to if I blasted off my jets in the wrong direction.
“Well?”
There was that rasp in her voice now. It jolted me into wakefulness. There we were on the firing range, and there she was pointing her rocket pistol at me. It was against regulations to wave a gun about like that. But then, a lot of things between us had been against regulations.
I gulped and said: “It’s empty.”
“Sure, but my files aren’t. I’ll... I’ll...” And then she faltered. Poor Liz. She faltered, and backed away. “I’ll give you one week,” she said tightly. “One week before I start really working at my job. Get yourself a major overhaul or a new ship. Or you’re on the ground.”
I could sense that, although she had made a bit of a concession, her own anger with herself would drive her on now: she’d go through with it. I tried to make it deep and sincere and suggestive. After all we’ve been to each other... that kind of thing. I said:
“Now look, Liz my love—”
“The name is Agent Murphy.”
I got the message. Tight lips, defiance, accusation, the lot. Get rich or get out: that was what she was telling me.
I tossed down the pistol and turned to go.
She wavered again. Maybe she thought I’d really made up my mind on the spot, and my decision was to get out.
“Bill, are you eating somewhere?”
“Just drinking,” I said, “with a dead friend.”
I left her to her pistol practice, with just the faintest tremor as I turned my back on her.
Dmitri Karminski was already established on a stool at the bar and looked as though he had been there a long time. Come to think of it, he must have been waiting while I made polite noises at one girl and dubious ones at the other.
He was flushed. But that meant nothing special. If you’ve been cooped up in a devitalized ship for any length of time, you turn sallow and pasty, and the first substantial drink you have heads straight for your face and colors it up. Dmitri’s high cheekbones might have been touched up with red lipstick: you could see every line of the fine bone structure.
The barman leaned toward me and said: “Hi, Bill. Did you hear about Otto?”
Dmitri said: “Yes he heard about Otto. Now go on, Bill. Tell us. Tell us it happens all the time.”
“Mix me a Moonflower,” I said. “Double.”
“First one’s on the house,” said the barman as though he was sorry for me. I don’t like people who are sorry for me.
I drained that first one all at one go. It gave me the shudders right around the edge of my stomach, taking in a bit of my spine as well. It tasted like condemned rocket fuel. In fact, it almost certainly was condemned rocket fuel. Amazing what you could get from a top distillation. Carried out by experts, under the most hygienic conditions, of course. Untouched by human hand. A pity it had to be touched by the human tongue, really. But we were a long way from Scotland, and the real stuff came at thirty-five dollars a shot. I’d like to have said good-bye to Otto in Scotch, but at that price... No, Otto would have understood. On whatever far star he now rested or drifted about as a dust cloud, he’d understand.
Dmitri lifted his glass owlishly toward me, as though catching an echo of my thoughts. He swayed on the stool.
I said: “Isn’t it about time you got hungry?”
“A good point, Captain, O my Captain.” He looked even more owlish when he tried to assume a knowing leer. “I hear the Bureau was looking for you. Are we in trouble?”
“The usual. Only more so.”
He considered this with the earnestness of the halfdrunk. “You know, I’d say ‘more so’ was becoming pretty usual by now. And so”—he slid from the stool and pointed himself at the door, raising his voice histrionically— “the gallant space-engineer passes into the great unknown of Joe’s Olde-Tyme Moon Hash-House, perhaps never to return...”
He slightly spoiled his exit by reeling into two tourists and then bouncing off the swing doors into the lobby. He could have done with a reaction pistol to steady himself.
The barman was pouring me another Moonflower. I paid for this one and carried it to a table in the corner. It was one of the dark corners—very romantic, if you were in the mood. I wasn’t in the mood. I let the harsh spirit course around my mouth, clean the back of my teeth, and then swill itself down to see what further damage it could do.
I hoped Dmitri wouldn’t get too seriously plastered tonight. He had been Otto’s engineer a couple of years before he came with me. Maybe he felt now that if he’d stayed with Otto, Otto would still be alive. Or maybe he was just glad to be alive himself, and no questions asked. Either way, he was likely to hit the cheapest bottle he could find.
Something was flashing and flickering below my eyes. I got it into focus. It was the squat little telephone in the center of the table, playing Christmas fairy-lights with itself.
You just couldn’t find a place nowadays where you’d be left alone. Unless you went where Otto had just gone—and even there, they’d probably have some system for persecuting you.
28
I picked up the phone. “This is Mr. Kemp’s butler speaking. The master is getting drunk. Call again later.” I put it down again.
It went on flashing, and added a little bleeping noise which was very bad for my nerves. I needed the drink left in my glass, but I needed peace and quiet even more. I poured the dregs over the telephone. It shorted with a flash and a fizz.
I sat back for a minute. I was just about to get up and go for another drink when a shadow fell across the table, making the discreet twilight even darker.
“You should have answered that.”
He was a large hunk of humanity with massive fists that even at one-sixth gravity could do a lot of damage if you didn’t adjust your own escape velocity to them. He laid one of his fists on the table, and glared.
“I bought it a drink,” I said. “What else can a man do?”
“A gentleman wants to see you.”
I considered this, thought it wasn’t really worthy of any consideration at all. I said: “He could always go to hell instead.”
“Mr. Hubbard wants to see you.” Very hushed, very reverent.
<
br /> “Old Hundred Percent Hubbard? Why didn’t you say? He can go a hundred percent to hell.”
His face was in shadow, but there was nothing romantic about it. The shadows only emphasized the nasty lines and the hefty chin.
He said: “Let’s just go see Mr. Hubbard.”
“Go on,” I said. “Persuade me.”
There was a faint clink against the table. He could have been reaching for the injured telephone. But he wasn’t. He was tapping the edge of the table to draw my attention to the fact that he was holding a rocket pistol. One of the nice, new, silenced jobs. Like Liz, he shouldn’t have been pointing it. And certainly not here, not on surface. One misguided blast, and there could be a leak through the window which was the pride and joy of the Blue Moon Bar.
I wondered whether to mention this to him. Then I took another look at his face, and at the pistol, and I said:
“I’m persuaded.”
3
EVERY NEW FRONTIER attracts its quota of racketeers. The law enforcement officers settle in as fast as they can, flanked by the Customs and Excise chiselers. But for every legitimate tax-collector—if there is such a thing as a legitimate tax-collector—you’ll find two shysters, trouble organizers, and protection bullies setting up shop. Open up a new world, and watch them seethe in.
I wondered what this slob’s line was. Or, rather, what Hubbard’s line was going to be. It was less than half a century since the Moon had really been opened up, and already we had not only bureaucrats by the score but hired thugs muscling a way in for the Hubbards of the world—the Hubbards who had gutted the world and now wanted... what?
The lift plunged down into the bowels of the hotel, safe and cozy far below the surface. The lift was lighted, the rooms and suites and corridors were lighted; but every now and then you got a visitor who suddenly started thinking about the grim rocky darkness pressing in from all sides, and then the hotel medico would have to reach for his tranquilizers.
I didn’t think about rocks and darkness, though I’d sooner be out in a ship any day or night than down here. I said: “Nice weather we’re having.”
