Moon Zero Two

by John Burke

  “If Number Four fires on the button,” I said.

  “If it doesn’t, the whole scheme is ruined. Look, unless you’re quite sure..

  “Nobody’s ever quite sure,” I said. “Nothing’s ever quite sure. All your little plastic boxes and your microcircuits and your little relays won’t ever make it sure. These were the only engines we could get—the only engines anyone could have got in that time.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Whitsun.

  The seconds were ticking away. I hated to think of him having to undo all his calculations and start his computer sorting it out all over again. Probably give the thing hysterics. Nothing quite so bad for morale as a sulky computer.

  I said: “Just rig it that when Number Four fires, so do all the rest. Gear it on her. And I’ll stay down here and give her a thump when you give me the countdown.”

  I heard Dmitri’s voice from the ship. He had been listening to us all through, and I could tell he didn’t like this bit. “When they do fire,” he said, “she’ll be moving. Not like a spaceship, but moving.”

  “Go and teach your grandmother to mince meteors,” I said. “I’ll be on a long line to the ship. You just haul me in. Simple. Okay?”

  “Well...”

  “Okay,” I said, making it sound like a command.

  Whitsun and Harry slid off up the line to the ship. I settled down beside Number Four and laid my reaction pistol across my knees. I patted the engine gently, now there was nobody to see me do it. When the time came to belt her one, I’d lay it on just there.

  Whitsun began to count in my ears.

  When he got down to thirty seconds, I braced myself.

  “Thirty... twenty-five..

  I tugged on the lifeline to check that they’d got it good and secure at the far end.

  “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one...”

  Up there, Dmitri threw the switch. Down here the firing gear clicked its relays and triggered the engines. And Kemp, William, got on his hind legs and thumped Number Four where it would hurt.

  It spewed blue flame. So did the other three.

  Moon Zero Two began to slide away from us. Or that was how it looked.

  I freed myself from the ground lines, and edged between the flaring engines. Then I stuck. My lifeline to the ship had snarled around a sharp outcrop on the surface. I jerked savagely at it and managed to entangle another loop over the thorny rock. One more tug... and it came free. Free, and twisting right into the flare of the nearest engine.

  It burned through like a shred of paper.

  The stub of line left to me went slack. I tightened my grip on my reaction pistol and turned my back to the searing blaze of the engines. If I was going to jet off in the right direction, I had to aim clear between them. Aim— and pray there’d be no deflection. At least you didn’t get crosswinds way up here.

  I fired.

  I went off through a curtain of flame, and then I was free. No nasty little singes in my suit, as far as I could tell. And if there had been, I could have told all right—in the split second of life I’d have had left.

  Zero Two hung at an angle against the starshine. I writhed into a new position and fired again, and found myself coming in feet-first toward the open hatchway.

  Dmitri hovered across the entrance. “Are you walking home, or would you care for a lift?”

  “I guess I’ll take the lift.”

  He swung aside in time to let me glide through and do a gentle somersault.

  Whitsun seemed unperturbed at the near loss of a great space pioneer. In fact, he wasn’t even looking at me. He was staring through the porthole, with a magnifying pane slotted into place, at the receding asteroid.

  “I can’t be positive,” he said—he wasn’t ever going to shout for joy, that one—“but it seems to be on the right course.”

  “I’m very glad to hear it,” I said. The hatch cover slid over the gap, and there was the click and whirr as the pressurizing procedure started up. “And now... did somebody mention going home?”

  Dmitri and I went up to our chairs. Whitsun and Harry stretched themselves out. No need for strapping down: we had no big gravity, or even a teeny-weeny gravity, to blast away from.

  Zero Two roared gently to itself, we quivered at a frequency somewhere around middle C, and then we were off along Mr. Whitsun’s personally recommended parabola to the Moon.

  6

  I WAS GLAD to get the feel of my Moon-legs again. They led me straight toward the hotel entrance and on, unerringly, toward the bar.

  I said: “I’ll buy the first round.”

  Dmitri was tempted. But the memory of last time stiffened his resolution. “No,” he said. “I think I’ll get a Moonburger first, this time. See you later.”

  It wasn’t a bad idea. A solid foundation (and the stuff that went into those concoctions was solid, all right) was good for the balance when you settled down to an evening’s drinking. But I wasn’t in the mood for all that lead weight. I went on into the bar.

  “Double Moonflower, please, Len.”

  It was a familiar, welcoming face. He was one of the older barmen—a settler, not one of the smart, derisive young go-getters on assignment from Earthport “We’ve still got some Scotch, Bill,” he said.

  “And I’m still waiting to be a millionaire.”

  He started shaking, flicked a translux, nonbreakable, noncontaminable, nonsmearable, nonglass glass along the bar, and said confidentially: “You know we’ve got a guest who drinks nothing but Scotch?”

  “Fact?”

  “Fact. Can’t mention names, of course.” He didn’t have to. I could guess. But I just nodded and let him go on. “Big dealer,” said Len. “The word is he’s putting money into the spaceship yards. We could use that.”

  I took a drink and waited for the goose pimples to settle. He could put money into a distillery, that big dealer: that we could use.

  The barman smiled past me and gave a sort of acknowledging jerk with his head. He said: “Young lady there’s been asking after you the last two days.”

  I turned to have a look. Miss Taplin smiled timidly at me. Still here: that wasn’t such a good sign.

  “What’s she drinking?” I asked.

  “Green Mary.”

  “What?”

  “Rocket fuel and cabbage juice.”

  I wondered which took the taste away from which.

  Len poured another Moonflower and another Green Mary, and I carried them across to the table where Miss Taplin was sitting.

  She looked wan and dejected, and when she smiled at me it was just because I was the only person she’d made any kind of contact with. I hadn’t been any help and I couldn’t be any help; but sitting there in that soulless dump, you could see it cheered her slightly just to see someone who’d made amiable noises in her direction.

  “Convoy not in?” I said.

  “Oh, yes, there was a convoy. But...” She shrugged.

  “Not on it?”

  “Not on it. And not on a small group that came in the next day. And nobody seems to have seen or heard of him for nearly four months.”

  I tried to reassure her. Farside was a big place, and you didn’t just go visiting down the road when it was a hundred miles over rough country and in a Moonbug. You conserved your energies over there. You conserved everything: it wasn’t advisable to turn your back on your claim, anyway, for the sake of an hour or two with a friend. Friends had a habit of not staying friends in that cutthroat world. Not that I emphasized that particular little aspect of it.

  “He’ll get here,” I said meaninglessly, and drank.

  She sipped her drink. I watched for a reaction, but either she wasn’t as sensitive as she looked or else she’d been soaking a lot up while I’d been away and was immunized by now.

  She said: “Mr. Kemp, do you know about Moon mining laws?”

  “Some,” I said. “A bit.”

  “Can you explain the two-year rule?”

&n
bsp; I explained. You got a claim for two years. If you hadn’t found anything in that time, you got thrown off it and somebody else had a crack. There was quite a waiting list. It could cause a lot of hardship. In the last two months, a man could go crazy digging and sweating, using op the hours and himself on a claim that might just, at the very last moment, yield up the mineral indications that would enable him to stay on and get rich. There had been a lot of argument in the Authority Chamber and on the video Newslines: argument that the period should be extended... or that there should be an overlap... or that a two-year investment of time and hard work should automatically carry a dividend if a later prospector struck lucky... or that there should be subsidized exploration and good salaries rather than this free-for-all. But while the arguments went on, the frenzied digging went on, and still what every man hoped for was a huge lode discovery, for himself and himself alone.

  Not that you ever really kept it all. Once a strike had been made, the big operators moved in. You made a fortune, all right—but they made a bigger one. They had the facilities, file organization, the know-how for full-scale exploitation. As time went on, the big combines would have the lot. Let the little man do the dirty work and take all the risks, and then buy him out: it had always worked, and it still worked. Earth was effectively in the hands of not more than ten specialist monopolies. Moon would follow the pattern; and then they’d be reaching out for Mars, ready to tidy that up and sew it up, too.

  I said: “How long’s your brother had his claim?”

  “Two years. I mean, it’ll be two years in three days’ time.”

  No wonder he hadn’t shown up to meet her. He was probably scrabbling his way down to the middle of the Moon right now.

  I said: “Look... right at the end, if they haven’t made a strike—”

  “But he has. He said so in his cable. That’s why I came up here.”

  “You’d better remind him to get over here, then, and prove it before he loses out.”

  “Remind him?” she said. “How?”

  “Radio,” I said automatically. Then I remembered that little chunk of dead metal I’d brought back and presented to Joe Mercer. “No,” I said. “That won’t work. The convoy, when it goes back... but that wouldn’t be quick enough.”

  She was in a spot. Or her brother was in a spot.

  Still out there digging: that was still my theory. Digging to make sure, absolutely one hundred percent sure, that he’d struck a good lode and not merely a vein of Moon-quartz or a few chips from an embedded meteorite. They all got that way. Wherever they came from, they all settled into the same mold.

  Kids, a lot of them, not wanting to take up a steady profession in the human boiler-house blocks of Earth. Make a quick strike, cash in, and become a spaceway playboy. Or put money into one of the pastoral projects or small industries which the government still, for reasons of social health, allowed psychological dropouts to maintain in chosen areas. The older men, too: they came up, embittered with the restrictions of life at home, chancing everything on a last fling that would provide them with something better than their neatly graduated pension and their allotted accommodation space. And all of them adapting, growing alike, getting just as stereotyped as they had been back on Earth—only it was a rougher stereotype.

  Not that they all looked rough when they got here. You had to have a clean record to be allowed to prospect on the Moon. But once you were out there, grubbing around in the darkness or tucked into your tiny shack dome, you toughened and grew savage. There was the constriction of the little dome; the constriction of having to wear a space suit wherever you went; the slogging hardship of the job itself; and the weight of the vast silence that weighed down on you.

  You could get very quarrelsome, if there was anyone to quarrel with.

  You could go out of your mind. Into the Moon, out of your mind.

  Miss Taplin said: “Mr. Kemp, will you fly me over there?”

  She was very soulful. I had a feeling she was putting it on just a bit—those melting eyes, and that lovely mouth, quivering at me. But if I was being taken for a ride, at least it was by a pretty girl. No, not pretty. Beautiful. And not a girl. A woman. They didn’t come that frequently in this place.

  “I know I haven’t got ten thousand dollars now,” she went on pleadingly, “but if Wally’s really found something, then we’ll pay you back. Honestly, Mr. Kemp. As soon as we’ve sold up, we’ll pay you back.”

  I shook my head. “I couldn’t land at your brother’s claim. It’s much too rough around there to put a ship down.”

  “But—”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  She bowed her head over her drink. She was sad and soulful all right; and she wasn’t putting it on. I felt a louse. I felt that I was going to make a fool of myself.

  “I’d have to go in at Farside Five,” I speculated— purely theorizing, of course, to make it quite clear why it couldn’t be done. “And then it’d be twenty-four hours by Bug over the local obstacle course. If there was a Bug to spare. If we could afford the hire fee.”

  “Any expenses,” she said, “anything at all, I know Wally’d agree...”

  “You can owe me for it.” Ruefully I conceded defeat. She had won a speedy victory. And all because of those eyes and those lips. Plus the lovely skin at her throat. And something about the sound of her voice. “I’m nearly rich anyway,” I said. “But I need a drink.”

  Before she could get all her thanks out, I headed back to the bar. Two other customers with the same destination in mind came alongside like tugs closing in to maneuver me into position. You could almost read the names on their hulls: Jeff and Harry.

  Jeff said: “You weren’t thinking of taking the lady for a ride, now?”

  I could have quoted the relevant sections and subsections from the UN Space Charter about the illegality of electronic spy devices or even of ordinary crude eavesdropping. No, let’s be honest: I couldn’t—that was Dmitri’s specialty. I kept it ample. I said: “I’m a pilot. For hire.”

  “You’re hired,” said Jeff flatly. “Drop her.”

  “It’s only a three-day trip. I’ll be back on time.”

  “Drop her.”

  I propped my elbows on the bar. Jeff and Harry squeezed in, and each one put a hand on me—left forearm and right forearm. I didn’t like it I said as mildly as possible:

  “You seem to have your hands on me.”

  Jeff grinned. “Mr. Hubbard’s hands.”

  “Tell him to keep them on things he really owns.”

  I crossed my hands suddenly so that they were tugged inward. Then I stepped back. Jeff and Harry collided neatly in the space I had been occupying.

  Harry swore, and spun around. He took a huge, ham-fisted swing at me. I ducked. Harry was lifted off his feet and went spinning away like a top until he met the bar counter.

  “In low gravity like this,” I advised, “you must brace yourself before you take a swing.”

  “You mean like this?” said Jeff.

  He feinted with his right. I wasn’t quick enough. His left connected with my chin and launched me into space. I described a smooth arc out into the room and back toward the bar, a good twenty feet of it.

  I had to admit it: the man was learning.

  But not fast enough. As I slid down to the floor, letting myself relax, he took a dive at me. A silly thing to do. He overshot by yards and went reeling through the swing doors. It gave me time to get up, amble back to where I’d started, and have a leisurely sip at my drink.

  Miss Taplin was on her feet, horrified.

  The barman was crouching, horrified.

  Harry, shaking himself, was coming in again. I ducked, waited for him, and horrified him with an uppercut that lifted him off the floor and deposited all his weight on a table. In spite of their visual fragility those tables were well made; but not made to support a Harry coming in to land. This one smashed, with a lot of noise.

  “It’s all a question of physics,” I explai
ned. “You get the same power behind a punch but you only weigh one-sixth of what you normally—” I sidestepped Harry as he swung a chair at me. It smashed into pieces on the bar, and the fragments settled slowly all around us. “Try,” I implored him, “to work it out as a problem of mass and velocity...”

  He blundered at me. I threw a right and he took off almost horizontally, collecting a few more tables and chairs as he plowed across the room.

  The barman didn’t look as friendly as he had a little while ago. He kept his head down and reached for the phone.

  Jeff came back through the swing doors, moving so fast that he was in danger of going around with them and disappearing again.

  He jumped at me. Over my shoulder went one care, over my shoulder... and into the bottles behind the bar.

  The swing doors went on revolving. Someone else came to join the party. She came in fast, like Jeff; but, unlike Jeff, she came in skillfully, surefooted and confident.

  Mind you, when you’ve got a rocket pistol jutting out of your right hand, you can afford to be confident.

  Liz Murphy looked me in the eye, and her gun looked me in the eye. And she said: “You’re under arrest. All of you.”

  Harry hauled himself blearily up. Jeff sorted himself out from the bottles, looking like something you might see if you’d mixed yourself a multiple cocktail from all those ingredients.

  “Causing a disturbance liable to breach the pressure in an outside room,” Liz intoned. She was getting an almighty kick out of this.

  It was true. We might have bust the dome. But a citizen like me doesn’t like being pawed by hoodlums. I opened my mouth to explain. Liz jerked the pistol as though to shoot the end of my tongue off if it appeared.

  Mss Taplin said: “But—”

  “On your way,” said Liz. The three of us fell into line.

  “But you can’t arrest him,” said Miss Taplin. “Mr. Kemp was going to take me—”

  “Not anywhere, lady,” said Liz with relish. “Not anywhere.”

  This was the woman who’d sworn that she loved me. Of course, she hadn’t been swathed in uniform at the time. Even so, I thought she could have restrained the glee in her face as she ushered us off to jail. A love-hate relationship is all very well, but you need to keep the proportions right.