Moon Zero Two

by John Burke

  The ground immediately in front of the trading post was rocky but flat. There was no autobahn, but we could make fair progress for five or six miles before the dust came up thicker under the chunky tires, and bits of rock hit the panels at an increasing rate. Every now and then the steering fought to get away from me. We tilted, spun on hidden boulders, and grazed treacherous spurs of rock.

  Once we plunged into a ditch, its edge masked by shale. Miss Taplin darted out a hand to steady herself and grabbed the nearest lever.

  I had to knock her hand away at the same time as I accelerated, crashing us through the ditch and up the farther slope.

  “Don’t touch that!”

  She winced, and huddled back against the seat, trying to brace herself with her feet.

  We wobbled onto an even keel, and then the going was better for another few miles.

  “Sorry,” I said, “but this is a part of the Moon that tourists don’t usually see. If we pull the wrong lever out here, we can’t guarantee being found.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, a bit stiffly. “But I’m not a tourist, Mr. Kemp. I’m here to stay—and to work, if necessary, if my brother needs me.”

  “Fine, glad to have you. But just be careful with the controls until you’re used to it all.”

  She stared straight ahead for a while, then I sensed that she was relaxing. She eased up and stole a glance at me, and then asked deferentially: “How long will it stay dark?”

  I checked day and time on the dashboard. “They’re near the end of night. It’ll be sun-up in about... mm... two days.”

  The starshine edged the mountain range with bleak silver. Ahead of us was stygian darkness, broken only by the gouging beams of the headlights.

  She said: “It looks so... so terribly cold out there.”

  “About two hundred below freezing. And way up above boiling point when you’re in direct sunlight. Don’t worry. These things”—I patted the dashboard above the main switch array—“have pretty strong heaters. And coolers. And we’ve got our Moon suits back there.”

  She watched a dust swirl billow up around us and then drift away. The lights plunged on.

  “I see what you meant about us,” she whispered. “When you said we’ll always be foreigners.”

  We rolled on.

  It was hard driving and it took a lot out of you. There was no way of setting automatic controls and letting the craft go down its appointed path—not down here in this jagged land, most of it still inaccurately charted. Miss Taplin was trying to establish a route across the map which the Supervisor had given us, but even for an expert it wouldn’t have been easy. You just drove on doggedly, choosing the least hazardous inclines and flat patches that opened up under the headlights, and checking your bearings every ten minutes.

  I began to get hungry. Miss Taplin wasn’t used to the blending of the concentrates we carried on trips like this, so it was no use ordering her into the back of the Bug to do the cooking.

  “We’ll stop,” I said, “while I rustle up the grub.”

  “I don’t want to stop,” she said. “We’ve got to go on. Somehow, now we’re out here, in... in all this... I just have to get to Wally.”

  “We’ll get to him.”

  “But quickly,” she said. “Just as quickly as we can.”

  I didn’t tell her that there were so many quick ways of dying on the Moon. Didn’t tell her that if nobody had heard from Wally in all this time, the chances were that there wasn’t any Wally to be heard from. She’d taken some time to get here, and I’d taken some time to get started on this crazy trip with her. Another hour one way or the other wasn’t going to make any difference. The timeless desolation of the Moonscape ought to have made her feel how futile it was to scurry madly around—how futile everything was, maybe. Instead, it was having the opposite effect. It awed her... scared her... made her want to dash on toward her brother and reassure herself he was still alive and kicking.

  “Look,” I said. “We have to eat. I want a break, and I want some food. So we stop.”

  “No,” she said. “You get the food, and I’ll drive.”

  “You’ve never-—”

  “I’ve been watching you.”

  While I stared grimly at the landscape ahead, she recited the whole procedure of operating a Bug. She had been watching, all right. Lightly she tapped each control and identified it.

  But this fact that she had taken in the theory of it didn’t mean she could handle this bucking, jolting little monster.

  All the same, I was getting hungry. Very hungry.

  I waited until we scrambled up a slope onto what looked like a good stretch of plateau. It was lumpy but not too dangerous. I stopped, and said: “Let me have a squint at that map.”

  The plateau was marked clearly enough. Evidently it was a junction for three of the main convoy routes, so its outlines were pretty accurately defined. It was only on its far rim that the contours and geography grew sketchy again. And it was over that far rim that we had to go. The fast Bugs could do forty along the convoy routes, but in the sort of country we’d be tackling we’d be lucky to manage more than twenty.

  “All right,” I said. “You drive. But take it easy. Strictly along this line here—check?”

  “Check.” She looked at the map dutifully, frowning like a child detemined to get the lesson right.

  “I’ll get into the galley. Don’t race—we don’t want the food all over the floor.”

  She set off. I watched over her shoulder for a few minutes to be sure that she had really got the hang of it. She was awkward, and was sitting too tensely, not steering so much as wrenching; but she was safe.

  I flicked the light switch in the back of the Bug and inspected the rack of food bottles.

  “Would you like yours to taste of liver and bacon, curried prawns, or goulash?” I asked.

  The truck lurched slightly. “Goulash, I think, please. I don’t like goulash anyway.”

  She was catching on. In those days of hanging about waiting for Wally she had obviously sampled the Moon menu and discovered its drawbacks.

  I tipped powder into a bowl and then tried to decide what would tempt my own appetite. In the end I chose the curry. When I’d added water to the two bowls, I clambered cautiously back into the front seat.

  “Slow,” I implored her. I didn’t fancy a mixture of goulash and curry all over the seats.

  We changed places. The plateau was still fairly smooth, and I drove with one hand while I balanced the bowl in front of me.

  She said: “I suppose I ought really to have tried to do the cooking, Mr. Kemp.”

  “You always call the head waiter by his first name,” I said. And then I said: “Bill.”

  She held the bowl in her two hands and stared thoughtfully down into it. The light was weird, but I could swear she was going pink.

  “Bill,” I repeated hopefully.

  “All right,” she said. “And I’m... I’m... Clementine.”

  I nearly swung the bowl into our laps, then got the Bug going straight again.

  “My father,” she said helplessly, “was a miner too. Big joke. Make it Clem—that’s what Wally always called me.” Then, realizing what she had said, she added hurriedly: “Calls me.”

  We sipped the hot liquid. After a while, with a forced grin, she said: “If you’re the head waiter, you won’t mind what I say about the chef?”

  “He’s a quarter-million miles away. He won’t hear.”

  “This comes up from Earth?”

  “Most likely. We still import more than half our food, especially this lightweight powdered stuff. But one day there’ll be a big dome—they’re working on it right now— big enough to run a herd of beef cattle. Steaks... and a pond full of Maine lobsters.” It was a lovely dream. It could have been made reality a long time ago if there’d been a big enough profit in it. So far there weren’t enough folk on the Moon, and not enough money in circulation, to pay the construction companies a big enough divid
end. The packaged food boys wanted to keep it that way: they were doing just fine. I thought of a big, succulent steak, and sipped at my bowl, and nearly choked. When I had swilled a few fluid ounces around my back teeth I began to get a nasty suspicion, as well as a nasty taste. I said: “What’s the flavor of yours?”

  She thought carefully. “Iron filings, I’d say.”

  That confirmed it. She’d got my prawn curry. The goulash, as I had just verified, tasted of boot leather.

  Some way off in the distance, a light began to wink at us. As I turned to avoid a hillock, it swung past on our right. I could just make out the shape of a dome flanked by a tall pylon. That was one of the communal efforts—a mining camp that was worth the efforts of several collaborators. It must be the Grenier place, which meant we were nearly halfway. But according to the map it got steeper from now on.

  And not just according to the map. It got steep all right, and then steeper, and then a whole lot steeper.

  Unexpectedly we came on what you might, if you had a fair sense of humor, call a road. It wasn’t one of the main convoy routes, but it had been used quite a bit and wasn’t too cluttered with fragments of rock falling off the mountainsides. I drove under a looming cliff and then followed this tortuous, ascending path. The map showed it as a track that forked some way ahead. We took the left fork and tipped over a ridge to lurch downhill once more.

  It seemed a reasonable moment to ask: “What made your brother pick this end of the Moon?”

  “He didn’t. He said it was the only place left when he got here.”

  That figured. For myself, I wouldn’t have accepted it on a bet. I said: “What’s he been hoping to find?”

  “Anything.”

  “What was he mining on Earth?”

  “Anything. Gold, some silver... last thing, he found copper up in Montana. Sold out cheap to a big company. He always thought there’d be a bigger and better strike over the next hill.”

  “He came over a big hill this time.”

  “Yes,” she said with a tang of bitterness, “on money borrowed from my mother. I’m here to see he doesn’t sell out cheap, or get thrown off his claim, until he’s paid her back.”

  This was a new slant on the story. Not that it was a new story in itself. A lot of those who came up here had been staked by relatives, or suckers... or relatives who were suckers.

  “Your father...?”

  “He blew himself up five years ago, dynamiting for emeralds in the Andes.”

  “Your family gets around.”

  “Father got around about five acres that time.”

  I was a bit shaken by that. I hadn’t sized her up as the callous type.

  Clem caught my glance, and smiled ruefully. “I hardly knew him. He was always off somewhere, digging a new hole over a new hill. Well, if Mother could take it...” She turned her attention back to the map as though it was a safer subject. “Keep on down for another mile, then left and up again.”

  “Message received.”

  My eyes were beginning to bum. The tension of watching this unknown terrain, slashed by headlights, swimming in and then reeling away from us, was beginning to tell.

  Clem said: “You are the Bill Kemp who was the first man on Mars?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Funny, meeting you like this.”

  Funny, I thought. Yes, very funny. The first man on Mars... driving a hired old Moonbug. Not quite the sort of thing I’d visualized for myself, all those years ago.

  “I remember,” she was saying, “when we got the news you’d landed on Mars. I was just a schoolgirl then, I wasn’t interested in space travel. Then the astronomy teacher showed us Mars one night and told us how far it was...”

  “It still is.”

  “I remember your name from then. The man who’d flown a spaceship forty million miles.”

  “Not quite singlehanded.”

  “Oh, I could still recite the names of your crew.”

  I hoped she wouldn’t. It had too many similarities to that roll of the dead they kept tucked out of sight in the spaceport. She must have sensed something, because she looked a bit wary and then said:

  “Why did you give it up?”

  “I haven’t given up. Not so’s you’d notice.”

  “Exploring,” she persisted. “You’ve given up exploring.”

  “It gave me up,” I said. “After Mars, and then after Jack Harvey making it to Venus, the boys with the finance decided passengers were where the big takings’d come from.” It was my hobbyhorse—or my hobby Bug, if you wanted it in modem terms—and I had to be careful not to push it too hard. “Oh, it’ll take a lot of money, and some new inventions, too, to get to Mercury, and Jupiter’s moons: I can see that. Big undertaking.”

  “And nobody wants to try?”

  “Somebody’ll do it,” I said. “Somebody. But not me. Anyway, I wasn’t a passenger pilot, so I quit. As simple as that.”

  She nodded. “I understand.”

  “You do?”

  “Always something over the next hill,” she said wryly. “I know.”

  “And always on borrowed money.” That made her smile; and the smile was wry, too. “But there is something over the hill,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s the trouble. For women, I mean. You know what space travel is? It’s just a big way of getting out of the house on a Saturday evening.”

  She slumped down in her seat. I concentrated on the hazards ahead. For a while we ran out of track, and I asked what the hell had happened to her map-reading. When there was no reply, I took a quick glance at her. She was sleeping, her head hunched uncomfortably against the edge of the seat. I slowed. If we hit a bump now, going fast, she could clout her head a whole decibel too loudly against the side of the truck.

  We lumbered on. Down, up, down again, and then the long haul up the outer rim of a crater.

  Clem murmured in her sleep, but I didn’t try to answer. Maybe she was having some good rich dreams about gold or silver or platinum. It wouldn’t be fair to disturb her.

  Not far now. We were inside Spectacle Craters, and according to my guesswork—it wasn’t much more than that until I could get at the map that was crumpled down on the seat beside her—we were on the edge of her brother’s claim.

  My eyes were tired. My arms were tired. I coasted the Bug slowly to a halt, and still Clem didn’t wake up.

  I sat back and folded my arms, pulling them across my chest to drag the ache out of them.

  The land around us was mainly flat, but spiked with rocks like cathedral spires. If you half closed your eyes you could believe you were in the middle of some celestial city. Celestial... well, looked at from Earth that’s just what it was, I suppose.

  It was all so still and silent. The sheer, awesome inhumanity of it was somehow soothing. I could understand how it got under the skin of men who worked out here. Along with the roughness and toughness went something more insidious—something that a lot of them didn’t know about until they got back to Earth. And then, back home, they found themselves yearning for the cold wastelands or the burning plains, for the remoteness, for the sensation of being on an ultimate frontier. It was a disease, and there was no known cure. One of the dangers of sending men to the Moon was that after six months they didn’t want to go back; or, if they wanted to go back, found when they were home that they’d made a mistake. Quite a few broken marriages had resulted from the defection of husbands who had fallen under the spell. Some wives still believed, in the teeth of all official assurances, that there must be some special, secret race of Moon-women who cast an enchantment over the men who went there. Recruitment into the administrative services got into such trouble at one stage that the Lunar Authority sponsored a whole shipload of women for a fact-finding tour. They returned to Earth unconvinced, and old wives’ tales (and young wives’ tales) went on.

  Moon-women...

  I glanced at Clem. She stirred, and yawned, and mumbled again to herself. Then she opened her
eyes.

  “Where are we?”

  “In Spectacle Craters.” I leaned over her and extracted the map. “Yes, I thought so. On your brother’s claim. And now that you’re awake...”

  I flicked the switch. We ought to be in radio range by now. I swiveled the microphone toward her. She stared at it, then said uncertainly:

  “Wally... Wallace... are you receiving me? Clem. Are you receiving me, Wally? Over.”

  There was no response. She tried again. Still nothing.

  “He doesn’t have to be switched on,” I said. “He could be out working. Or resting.”

  I switched off, and drove forward. It was tricky weaving a way between those distorted rocks. Wallace Taplin’s claim was marked on the map all right, but the convoluted path toward it wasn’t specified. Either you knew the way or, as a rule, you didn’t bother to go there.

  Suddenly, swinging around a great rocky pillar, I saw a shape ahead that didn’t belong here. It wasn’t sharp enough, ragged enough: it was the smooth curve of a man-made dome.

  There was no light inside the dome, and no sign of any working lights in the immediate neighborhood. I operated the spotlight, sweeping its beam across the ground and picking up metallic reflections from a litter of picks and shovels. In the shadow of a mound, again with no lights, was a Moonbug with a bulldozer scoop.

  Clem gasped. She groped for the side of the truck as though expecting to find a handle that would let her step out into the vacuum.

  “Into a suit,” I said.

  She was in a mad hurry, but I wasn’t going to have her dashing out there before she’d gone through the drill and could be trusted. Top priority was the microphone switch on her wrist: if we couldn’t talk to each other out there, we weren’t going to make much progress. Safety zip, helmet lock, airbottle control—in spite of her fuming impatience I made her check each procedure.

  “Four hours’ air in these cylinders,” I concluded, “so don’t go wandering off for a day’s hike.” I turned the knob. “Warm enough? Breathing all right? If the heating busts, you’ll soon know anyway.”

  We eased ourselves into the cramped airlock at the back of the Bug. Clem fidgeted inside her suit, and I knew she was urging the pressure to adjust fast—faster than this— and the lights to change. Red to green. Right!