by Ben Bova
“Pay attention!” she screamed at herself.
“Say again?” came the voice of the flight controller at Malapert.
“Nothin’,” Pancho replied, apologetically. They’ve still got me on their radar, she thought. Good. They’ll know where the body’s buried.
There! Coming up on the right. A fairly flat area with only a few dinky little rocks. It’s sloping, though. On a hillside. Not so bad. If I can reach it.
Pancho nudged the tee-shaped control yoke and the hopper’s maneuvering thrusters squirted out a few puffs of cold gas, enough to jink the ungainly little craft toward the open area she had spotted.
Shit! More rocks than I thought. Well, beggars can’t be choosers. Only enough juice for one landing.
She tapped the keyboard for the automatic landing sequence, not trusting herself to do the job manually. The hopper shuddered as its main engine fired, killed its velocity, and the little craft dropped like a child’s toy onto the stony, sloping ground. All in total silence.
Pancho remembered enough from her old astronaut training to flex her knees and brace her arms against the control podium. The hopper thumped into the ground, one flat landing foot banging into a rock big enough to tip the whole craft dangerously. For a wild moment Pancho thought the hopper was going to tumble over onto its side. It didn’t, but the crash landing was violent enough to tear away the loop that held her right foot to the platform grillwork. Her leg flew up, knocking her so badly off balance that her left leg, still firmly anchored in its foot loop, snapped at the ankle.
Pancho gritted her teeth in the sudden pain of the broken bone as she thudded in lunar slow motion to the grillwork platform.
Feeling cold sweat breaking out of every pore of her body, she thought, Well, I ain’t dead yet.
Then she added, Won’t be long before I am, though.
ASTRO CORPORATION COMMAND CENTER
I might as well move a cot in here, thought Jake Wanamaker as he paced along the row of consoles. A technician sat at each of them, monitoring display screens that linked the command center with Astro ships and bases from the Moon to the Belt. Lit only by the ghostly glow of the screens, the room felt hot and stuffy, taut with the hum of electrical equipment and the nervous tension of apprehensive men and women.
There were only two displays that Wanamaker was interested in: Malapert base, near the lunar south pole, and Cromwell, about to start its runup to the asteroid Vesta.
Wanamaker hunched over the technician monitoring the link with Cromwell. Deep inside the cloud of high-energy particles, radio contact was impossible. But the ship’s captain had sent a tight-beam laser message more than half an hour earlier. It was just arriving at the Astro receiving telescope up on the surface of the Moon.
The screen showed nothing but a jumbled hash of colors.
“Decoding, sir,” the seated technician murmured, feeling the admiral’s breath on the back of her neck.
The streaks dissolved to reveal the apprehensive-looking face of Cromwell’s skipper. The man’s eyes looked wary, evasive.
“We have started the final run to target,” he stated tersely. “The radiation cloud is dissipating faster than predicted, so we will release our payload at the point halfway between the start of the run and the planned release point.”
The screen went blank.
Turning her face toward Wanamaker, the technician said, “That’s the entire message, sir.”
His immediate reaction was to fire a message back to Cromwell ordering the captain to stick to the plan and carry the nanomachines all the way to the predecided release point. But he realized that it would take the better part of an hour for a message to reach the ship. Nothing I can do, he told himself, straightening up. He stretched his arms over his head, thinking, The captain’s on the scene. If he feels he needs to let the package go early it’s for a good reason. But Wanamaker couldn’t convince himself. The captain’s taking the easiest course for himself, he realized. He’s not pressing his attack home.
Turning slowly, he scanned the shadowy room for Tashkajian. She was at her desk on the other side of the quietly intense command center. This is her plan, Wanamaker thought. She worked it out with the captain. If there’s anything wrong with his releasing the package early, she’ll be the one to tell me.
But what good will it do? I can’t get the word to him in time to straighten him out.
Tashkajian got up from her little wheeled chair as he approached her desk.
“You saw the report from Cromwell?” Wanamaker asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“And?”
She hesitated a moment. “It’s probably all right. The missiles are small and Vesta’s radars will still be jammed by the radiation.”
“But he said the cloud was breaking up.”
“Our reports from the IAA monitors—”
A whoop from one of the consoles interrupted them. “They found her!” a male technician hollered, his face beaming. “They found Pancho! She’s alive!”
The first that Pancho realized she’d passed out was when the excruciating pain woke her up. She blinked her gummy eyes and saw that somebody in a bulbous hard-shell space suit was lifting her off her back, broken ankle and all.
“Jesus Christ on a Harley!” she moaned. “Take it easy, for chrissakes.”
“Sorry,” the space-suited figure said. Pancho heard his words in her helmet earphones.
“That leg’s broken,” she said. Nearly sobbed, actually, it hurt so badly.
“Easy does it,” the guy in the space suit said. Through a haze of agony Pancho realized there were three of them. One holding her shoulders, another her legs, and the third hovering at her side as they carried her away from the wreck of the hopper.
“I’ll immobilize the ankle as soon as we get you to our hopper,” the guy said. “I’m a medic, Ms. Lane.”
“I can tell,” she groused. “Total indifference to pain. Other people’s pain.”
“We didn’t know your ankle was broken, ma’am. You were unconscious when we reached you. Almost out of air, too.”
Screw you, Pancho thought. But she kept silent. I oughtta be pretty damn grateful to these turkeys for coming out and finding me. Each step they took, though, shot a fresh lance of pain through her leg.
“We had to land more than a kilometer from your crash site,” the medic said. “Not many places around here to put down a hopper safely.”
“Tell me about it.”
“We’ll be there in ten-fifteen minutes. Then I can set your ankle properly.”
“Just don’t drop me,” Pancho growled.
“The ground is very stony, very uneven. We’re doing the best we can.”
“Just don’t drop me,” she repeated.
They only dropped her once.
When the Selene emergency team brought Fuchs, his three crew, and the Humphries security people to the hospital, Fuchs had the presence of mind to give his name as Karl Manstein. Medical personnel put each survivor of the fire onto a gurney and wheeled them to beds separated by plastic curtains.
Fuchs knew he had to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible, with his crew. He lay on the crisp white sheets staring at the cream-colored ceiling, wondering how far away from him the others were. Nodon’s wounded, he remembered. That’s going to make an escape more difficult.
It’s only a matter of time before they realize Manstein is an alias, a fiction. Then what?
But a new thought struck him and suddenly he smiled up at the ceiling, alone in his curtained cubicle.
When he and the Humphries security chief finally staggered through the hatch and the temporary airlock that the Selene emergency crew had erected, the head of the emergency team had asked them, “Anybody else in there?”
The security chief had shaken his head gravely. “Nobody alive,” he had said.
Humphries is dead! Fuchs exulted. Lying on his hospital bed, his eyes still stinging and his lungs raw from the smoke, he wanted to laug
h with glee. I did it! I killed the murdering swine! Martin Humphries is dead.
Martin Humphries was quite alive, but gnawingly hungry. He had never in his life known hunger before, but as he paced, or sat, or stretched out on the thick carpeting of his closet hideaway, his empty stomach growled at him. It hurt, this hollow feeling in his belly. It stretched the minutes and hours and drove his mind into an endless need for food. Even when he tried to sleep his dreams were filled with steaming banquets that he somehow could not reach.
Thirst was even worse. His throat grew dry, his tongue seemed to get thicker in his mouth, his eyes felt gritty.
I could die in here! he realized. A hundred times he went to the airtight panel, touched it gingerly with his fingertips. It felt cool. He pressed both hands on it. Flattened his cheek against it. The fire must be out by now, he thought. His wristwatch told him that more than twenty hours had gone by. The fire’s got to be out by now. But what about the air? Is there any air to breathe on the other side of the panel?
Somebody will come, he assured himself. My security chief knows about this shelter. If he wasn’t killed in the fire. If he didn’t suffocate from lack of oxygen. Ferrer. Victoria might have gotten out. She’ll tell them I’m here. But then he wondered, Will she? I wouldn’t let her in here with me; she could be sore enough to let me rot in here, even if she got out okay. But even so, somebody will send people to go through the house, assess the damage. The Selene safety inspectors. The goddamned insurance people will be here sooner or later.
Later, a sardonic voice in his mind told him. Don’t expect the insurance adjusters to break their butts getting here.
It’s all that motherless architect’s fault, Humphries fumed. Idiot! Builds this emergency shelter without a phone to make contact with the outside. Without sensors to tell me if there’s air on the other side of the door. I’ll see to it that he never gets another commission. Never! He’ll be panhandling on street corners by the time I get finished with him.
There’s not even a water fountain in here. I could die of thirst before anybody finds me.
He slumped to the floor and wanted to cry, but his body was too dehydrated to produce tears.
BALLISTIC ROCKET
From her seat by the narrow window Pancho could see out of the corner of her eye the rugged lunar highlands gliding swiftly past, far below. She was the only passenger on the ballistic rocket as it arced high above the Moon’s barren surface, carrying her from Astro’s Malapert base back to Selene. Her ankle was set in a spraycast; she was heading for Selene’s hospital, and injections of nanomachines that would mend her broken bones and repair the damage that radiation had done to her body.
Pancho had precious little time to study the scenery. She was deep in conversation with Jake Wanamaker, whose craggy unsmiling face reminded her of the rocky land below.
“… should be releasing the nanomachines right about now,” Wanamaker was saying.
“And everybody on Vesta is belowground?” Pancho asked.
“Ought to be, with that radiation cloud sweeping over them. Anybody up on the surface is going to be dead no matter what we do.”
Pancho nodded. “All right. Now what’s this about Humphries’s mansion burning down?”
Wanamaker grimaced with distaste. “A group of four fanatics infiltrated into the grotto down there on the bottom level. Why, we don’t know yet. They’re being held by Selene security in the hospital.”
“And they burned the house down?”
“Set the whole garden on fire. The place is a blackened wasteland.”
“Humphries?”
“No sign of him. Selene inspectors are going through the place now. Apparently the house is still standing, but it’s been gutted by the fire.”
Strangely, Pancho felt no elation at the possibility that Humphries was dead. “Have they found his body?”
“Not yet.”
“And the people who attacked the place are in the hospital?”
“Under guard.”
Pancho knew only one person in the entire solar system who would be crazy enough to attack Humphries in his own home. Lars Fuchs.
“Was Lars Fuchs one of the attackers?”
Wanamaker’s acid expression deepened into a dark scowl. “He gave his name as Karl. Manstein. I don’t think Selene security has tumbled to who he really is.”
For an instant Pancho wondered how Wanamaker knew that Manstein was am alias for Fuchs. But she put that aside as unimportant. “Get him out of there,” she said.
“What?”
“Get him out of the hospital. Out of Selene. Send him back to the Belt, to Ceres, anywhere. Just get him loose from Selene security.”
“But he’s a murderer, a terrorist.”
“I brought him to Selene to help in our fight against Humphries,” Pancho half-lied. “I don’t want Stavenger or anybody else to know that.”
“How am I supposed to get him past Selene’s security guards?” Wanamaker asked, clearly distressed.
Pancho closed her eyes for a moment. Then, “Jake, that’s your problem. Figure it out. I want him off the Moon and headed back to the Belt. Yesterday.”
He took a deep breath, then replied reluctantly, “Yes, ma’am.” For an instant she thought he was going to give her a military salute.
“Anything else?” Pancho asked.
Wanamaker made a face that was halfway between a smile and a grimace. “Isn’t that enough?”
Ulysses S. Quinlan felt awed, his emerald-green eyes wide with admiration, as he stood in the middle of the huge downstairs living room of the Humphries mansion. Or what was left of it. The wide, spacious room was a charred and blackened desolation, walls and ceiling scorched, floor littered with burned stumps of debris and powdery gray ash.
Born in Bellfast of an Irish father and Irish-American mother, Quinlan had grown up to tales of civil wars. To please his father he played football from childhood, which eventually brought him an athletic scholarship to Princeton University, back in the States—which pleased his mother, even though she cried to be separated from her only child. Quinlan studied engineering, and worked long years on the frustrating and ultimately pointless seawalls and hydromechanical barriers that failed to prevent the rising ocean from flooding out most of Florida and the Gulf Coast regions as far south as Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.
He suffered a nervous breakdown when Houston was inundated, and was retired at full pension precisely on his fortieth birthday. To get away from oceans and seas and floods he retired to the Moon. Within a year he was working in Selene’s safety department, as happy and cheerful as he’d been before the disastrous greenhouse floods on Earth.
Now he whistled through his breathing mask as he goggled at the size of the mansion’s living room.
“The grandeur of it all,” he said as he shuffled through the gray ash and debris.
“Like the old Tsars in Russia,” said his partner, a stocky redheaded Finnish woman. He could hear the contempt in her tone, even through her breathing mask.
“Aye,” agreed Quinlan, thudding the blackened wall with a gloved fist. “But he built solid. Reinforced concrete. The basic structure stood up to the flames, it did.”
His partner reluctantly agreed. “They could have contained the fire to one area if somebody hadn’t allowed it to spread to the roof.”
Quinlan nodded. “A pity,” he murmured. “A true pity.”
They wore the breathing masks to protect their lungs from the fine ash that they kicked up with each step they took. The grotto had been refilled with breathable air hours earlier. Quinlan and his Finnish partner were inspecting the ruins, checking to make certain that no hint of fire reignited itself now that there was oxygen to support combustion again.
They spent a careful hour sifting through the debris of the lower floor. Then they headed cautiously up the stairs to the upper level. The wooden facings and lush carpeting of the stairway had burned away, but the solid concrete understructure was undisturbed
by the fire.
Upstairs was just as bad a mess as below. Quinlan could see the broken and charred remains of what had once been fine furniture, now lying in shattered heaps along the walls of the hallway. The windows were all intact, he noticed, and covered with metal mesh screens. He must have built with tempered glass, Quinlan thought. Bulletproof? I wonder.
Following the floor plan displayed on their handhelds, they pushed through the debris at the wide doorway of the master bedroom suite. Quinlan whistled softly at the size of it all.
“That must have been the bed,” his partner said, pointing to a square block of debris on the floor.
“Or his airport,” muttered Quinlan.
“Hey, look at this.” The Finn was standing in front of an intact door panel. “The fire didn’t damage this.”
“How could that be?” Quinlan wondered aloud, stepping over toward her.
“It’s plastic of some sort,” she said, running her gloved had along the panel.
“Ceramic, looks like.”
The redhead checked her handheld. “Should be a closet, according to the floorplan.”
“How in the world do you get into it, though?” Quinlan looked for a door latch or a button but could see nothing along the soot-blackened door frame.
He tried to slide the door open. It wouldn’t budge. He tapped it, then rapped. “It’s locked from the inside, seems like.”
At that instant the door slid open so fast they both jumped back a startled step or two.
Martin Humphries stood tottering on uncertain legs, glaring at them with red-rimmed blazing in his eyes.
“About time,” he croaked, his voice bricky-dry.
“Mr. Humphries!”
Humphries staggered past them, looked at the ruins of his palatial bedroom, then turned back on them fiercely.
