Empire Builders Page 11

  Cripes, Dan said to himself. Today’s my birthday. Tamara must’ve remembered. He shook his head ruefully. It’s going to be some party. He spent several hours speaking to his managers in their offices all over Earth and in several orbital facilities. In between calls, he chivvied Bert Peel about getting all the space industrialists together for a teleconference. “I’m working on it, boss,” Bert exclaimed, beads of perspiration on his upper lip. “I’ve got about half of ‘em lined up, but every time I call another one he or she wants a different time and I’ve got to recontact all the others.” “You tell them this is an emergency?” “Yes! Sure.” “Okay, keep at it. I’ve only got a few hours, at most.” Bert mumbled what might have been profanity and cut the connection. Dan actually managed to sleep for about twenty minutes. He dreamed he was struggling with someone, a faceless man, or maybe it was a woman. They were on the edge of the roof of some enormous skyscraper back on Earth. They fell off, and suddenly Dan was completely alone, plummeting toward the hard pavement of the street far below. He sat bolt upright in his darkened bedroom, cold with sweat, still in the coveralls he had not bothered to take off when he had flopped on the bed. Casting a quick glance at the digital time displayed on the bedside screen, he peeled off the coveralls as he made his way into the bathroom, showered, shaved and put on a clean outfit: another set of forest green coveralls, but these were new enough so that their color was still vivid. And he left his sandals by the bed; lunar softboots were much more practical. Then he stalked back to his office and went in through his private entrance, avoiding Tamara and anyone else who might be in the outer office. The dumb birthday greeting was on his desktop screen, too. Dan scowled at it as he slumped into his desk chair and flicked on the window all. It was tuned to an outside camera view of the broad, crater-pitted floor of Alphonsus. Factories dotted the plain out to the horizon, with wide spreads of solar energy farms glittering in the sunlight. A few tractors were chugging across the dusty landscape. He told the voice-activated phone to find Peel. Almost instantly, his aide’s face appeared on Dan’s desktop display screen. “Got ‘em all, boss,” Peel said without preamble. “Except Yamagata. His people say he’s out of contact, on a field trip somewhere.” Out of contact, my ass, Dan said to himself. Nobo doesn’t want to talk to me. “Guess we’ll have to settle for number two, then,” he told Peel. “Right. In that case we can get started in about ten minutes.” “Good.” Tamara opened the door from the outer office. “The GEC team will be landing in half an hour,” she announced, looking angry and afraid at the same time. “And you were right: Kate Williams is in charge of the team.” “Has President Scanwell left?” he asked. “Not yet. She decided to wait until the GEC people arrived, and then go back with them. She’s waiting out here.” Dan smiled weakly. “She wants to be here for the kill, does she? Okay, ask her to come in. She might as well see the show.” Tamara ushered Jane into his office. She was still in the same beige slacks and tan jacket. Dan gestured her to a chair as he slid his computer keyboard from its niche in his desk. He spent the next few minutes huddled over his computer display screen while Jane sat silently watching him. Then Peel called in to say that all six of the space-industry corporate chiefs were on-line for the emergency teleconference except for Nobuhiko Yamagata. His chief legal counsel would participate in the conference in his place. The window all broke up into six separate images: four men and two women, representing six of the seven major corporations that dominated space industries. Each of them was on Earth; of the Big Seven, only Dan was off-planet. Dan touched one more key, and two smaller images appeared in the lower right corner of the window all: a view of the landing pad outside, and an empty corridor deep below the office levels of Alphonsus City . Shooing Tamara out with one hand, Dan adjusted the phone camera on his desk so that it showed only a head-and-shoulders view of himself. If Jane wants to join the conversation, I’ll swivel it around, he thought. Then he grinned crookedly at the six electronic images. “I suppose you’re all wondering why I asked you here today.” It took two and a half seconds for Dan’s feeble little joke to reach them and their response to get back to the Moon. They all tried to talk at once. In the sudden torrent of angry, frightened, urgent voices Dan made out the clear fact that all of them were under pressure from the GEC to turn over control of all space industrial operations to the Council. “That means Malik,” Dan said, loud enough to cut through their babble and silence them. “Malik wants to take over all our companies. He’s always wanted to be the commissar of all space operations.” Jane stirred slightly in her chair but said nothing. “I understand,” said the Yamagata lawyer, a sallow-faced Japanese with narrow, suspicious eyes, “that your assets are being confiscated entirely, at this very moment.” “That’s right,” Dan said. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a spacecraft settling down on the landing pad outside. It bore the sky blue markings of the Global Economic Council. “What can we do’ to help?” asked the Argentinean president of Astrofbrica Corporaci6n. “Not a hell of a lot, Jorge,” Dan admitted. “But there’s something even more important that you must be made aware of.” Six faces stared at him, silent, waiting. The spacecraft sat on the landing pad while an access tunnel snaked toward it. Jane watched him too, her face as close to expressionless as she could make it. Dan began to explain to them about the greenhouse cliff. Only one of them had heard of it, the woman who headed Eurospace A.G. “The head of my research staff is working with your chief scientist, I believe, to determine whether this phenomenon is real or not,” she said. “It’s real, Hilde,” Dan replied. “Malik knows it. He’s using it as an excuse to take over all space industries. In the next ten years we either convert the whole spinning Earth away from fossil fuels or we see the ice caps melt and sea levels go up ten meters or more.” He waited the two and a half seconds for their reaction. Then: “In ten years?” “That’s not possible!” “I’ve never heard of such a thing.” “No one informed me!” “How can that be?” “Your scientists can give you the details,” Dan said, flicking the image in the corner of his window all to show the corridor between the landing pad and the main plaza. Sure enough, Kate Williams was leading a dozen grim-faced men and women, all of them dressed in dark gray slacks and jackets bearing the GEC emblem. Quickly, Dan reviewed his discussion—argument—with Malik at Tetiaroa, and emphasized Malik’s decision to take over all the Big Seven space industrial corporations in the name of necessity, due to the impending global disaster. “He can’t force us-” “Yes he can, if he has the Council behind him.” “I never trusted those politicians.” “We’ll lose everything!” “What difference does that make if the world is drowned in ten years?” Dan quieted them down, all the while watching Kate and her band of GEC enforcers making their way toward his office. And Jane sitting almost within his reach, silent, watching, waiting. “Now listen,” Dan told the six of them. “Hilde is right. What difference does anything make if half the world’s going to go underwater? We’ve all got to work together with the GEC to do whatever we can to avert this catastrophe.” Jane looked surprised. He grinned at her. “Work with the GEC?” “Let them take over our corporations?” “Allow them to steal what we’ve earned over all these years?” “No,” Dan said firmly. “We can work with the GEC and hold on to our companies—at least, you can.” Kate and her gang were at the door to his outer office. Tamara was getting up from her desk, ever so slowly, to manually open the door for them. Jane was looking from Dan to the picture in the windowall’s corner and back to Dan again. ‘We’re facing a situation that’s like a major war; the biggest double-damned war anybody’s ever faced. We’ve got to stop thinking of our profits and start working with everything we’ve got to win. It’s victory or death, there’s no middle ground. “What you’ve got to do,” he was saying quickly, knowing that he was running out of time, “is to make a voluntary statement, announce it in the world’s media, shout it as loud as you can, that your corporations will voluntarily place themselves at the command of the GEC for the length of this emergency peri
od. You will follow GEC orders to do whatever is necessary to save the planet from the greenhouse cliff—but without relinquishing ownership or control of your companies. Got that? That’s the only way to work it. Voluntary cooperation. That’s the only way to beat this greenhouse disaster. Cooperate voluntarily with the GEC, let the bastards take all your profits—but run your companies yourselves! You know how to do that better than any desk-bound paper-shuffler.” The door to his office burst open and Kate Williams strode in, with half her team behind her. “Daniel Hamilton Randolph, you are under arrest for kidnapping,” she said. The window all went dark.

  SIXTEEN

  Dan GRINNED AT Kate Williams from behind his desk. “Welcome back, Scarlett. You’re fired.” She almost grinned back at him. “You can’t fire me. I resigned twelve hours ago.” “You never really did work for me anyway, did you?” “We don’t have time for chitchat,” Kate snapped. “You’re under arrest. Get on your feet and come with us.” Dan put his hands flat on the desktop. “Now, wait a minute. I’m being charged with kidnapping, right? Well, here’s my ‘victim.’ Let’s ask her if she was kidnapped or not.” Kate shook her head. “Nice try, Dan, but I’ve already spoken with President Scanwell, while we were on the way here. She’ll testify that you brought her here against her will.” Dan swiveled his chair slightly to face Jane. “Is that true?” Jane hesitated only a fraction of a heartbeat. “Yes. That will be my testimony. That’s what you did, Dan, and we both know it.” He shrugged as if defeated. “Et to, Janie?” “On your feet, Randolph,” snapped one of the young men standing beside Kate. He looked like a jock: broad shoulders, burr haircut, jacket straining across his chest. Dan realized that he was carrying a gun in a shoulder holster. Probably all of them are, except for Kate. Maybe her too; be just like her to have a loaded bra. Slowly, so as not to alarm them, Dan slid open the top drawer of his desk. “Just give me a minute here,” he muttered as he pushed away the papers that covered the slim matte-gray pistol he had put there. “I really have no intention of going anywhere with you, Kate,” he said, leveling the pistol at them with one hand and pulling out his computer keyboard with the other. “This is nonsense,” Kate began. “You can’t-” But the burrhead beside her started to reach into his jacket. Dan fired once, a sudden shocking explosion of noise and smoke. The kid slammed over backward as if hit by a baseball bat and smashed into the couch along the far wall, then slumped to the floor. Before any of the others could react, Dan said, “He’s not hurt much. It’s a tranquilizer dart. He’ll be okay in a few hours.” No one else moved. “I spent a lot of years in Venezuela ,” Dan said, tapping keys with his left hand. “The Indians out in the Orinoco River valley have developed some dandy drugs. They use them for hunting. Once in a while they hunt other people. Still a few cannibals out there, although nobody wants to admit it.” He grinned wickedly. “Dan, you’re crazy,” Jane said. “You can’t expect to get away with this.” He pointed the gun at her. “You’re a hostile witness, Madam President. The jury will disregard your remarks.” “He’s gone insane,” Kate said. “Maybe.” Dan swung the gun back toward her. “Is insanity a valid defense, in my case?” She clenched her fists and took a step toward him. “Don’t let your temper trip you up, Scarlett. I’ll shoot you if you force me to. And I don’t know how the stuff in these darts might affect you. The close is big enough to knock out a horse like your snoozing pal. It might do more damage to somebody of your petite she” “You’re only making things tougher for yourself,” Kate said. But she stood still. “Tougher than a kidnapping charge? Terrorism is punishable by execution. What can be tougher than that?” Jane said, “Dan, please ...” He gave the keyboard one final touch, with a flourish of his left hand, then stood up. A hooting wail clamored out of the speaker set into the ceiling panels. “EMERGENCY!” bellowed a computer-synthesized voice. “LIFE-SUPPORT SYSTEM WILL FAIL IN ONE MINUTE! ONE MINUTE TO LIFE-SUPPORT FAILURE!” Dan hollered over the warning system’s announcement, “In one minute this entire level of offices will be opened to vacuum. I suggest you haul your asses out into the corridor and run like hell to the nearest emergency hatch. Those hatches are programmed to shut automatically when they sense a drop in air pressure. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of a hatch when it slams shut.” “You’re bluffing!” Kate snarled. “FORTY-FIVE SECONDS TO LIFE-SUPPORT FAILURE. FORTY-FIVE SECONDS.” Dan shrugged. “Sure I am. And rain makes applesauce.” He backed away, still pointing the pistol at them, and felt for his private door behind him. The urgent wail of the warning siren seemed to grow louder, more shrill. “FORTY SECONDS TO LIFE-SUPPORT FAILURE.” Jane got to her feet. “I don’t know about the rest of you,” she said, and started for the door to the outer office. “Hey!” Dan called after her. “Don’t you want to come with me?” Jane hesitated only an instant. Then she shook her head and kept on going. “You always were a smart lady,” Dan called after her. “See you!” “THIRTY SECONDS TO LIFE-SUPPORT FAILURE. THIRTY SECONDS.” Kate and the others suddenly bolted for the outer office and safety, leaving the unconscious burrhead sprawled on the floor. Laughing, Dan opened his private door and stepped into the back corridor. He could hear the automated warning voice calling out “TWENTY SECONDS” and then “TEN SECONDS” as he loped down the corridor toward the hatch that led to the ladderway. Tucking his pistol into a thigh pocket and zippering it shut, Dan opened the hatch and started down the steel rungs of the ladder. He heard very faintly, “THIS HAS BEEN A TEST OF THE EMERGENCY WARNING SYSTEM. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION. ALL PERSONNEL MAY RETURN TO THEIR NORMAL STATIONS. THIS TEST IS CONCLUDED.” Chuckling to himself at the picture of Kate Williams’ face when she heard that, Dan clambered down five levels, to the very bottom of the tubelike ladderway. There was no hatch down here; he merely stepped out into the dimly lit bottom level of Alphonsus City , a world of machinery where humans rarely bothered to go. Most of the machinery was for life support: the air scrubbers and fans, electrical inverters and routing substations, water purification systems and recirculators. The very air hummed, throbbed like the giant mechanical heart of the city that it actually was. Dan knew that there were teams of teleoperators up above, sitting in their comfortable offices and keeping tabs electronically on the machines down here. They had video cameras, too, so they could keep the entire section under visual surveillance. He knew also that, like inspectors anywhere, the men and women responsible for monitoring this equipment rarely paid attention to their work, except when a warning light flashed red or a synthesized voice warned of trouble that the computer’s sensors had detected. Until they’re specifically told to search for me, Dan told himself, they won’t be looking for anybody prowling around down here. I hope. He made his way through the shadowy light toward the tunnel that he knew existed at the back end of this bottom level. He had helped to carve it out of the bedrock of Alphonsus’ ringwall mountains, back in the days when he operated a plasma torch and alternately drank and fought with his Japanese co-workers. One of the few mobile maintenance robots suddenly came from behind a ceiling-high electrical transformer. Dan almost bumped into it. The robot was one of the newer models, almost six feet tall and gleaming in the far-spaced overhead lights. Its head bore two round camera lenses where eyes would be, and a speaker grille in place of a mouth. It had four arms, each ending in fully rotatable pincers with the strength to break bones. “Unauthorized personnel are not allowed in this area,” said the robot’s tinny synthesized voice, in Japanese. Crapola! If I exceed this double-damned tin can’s programmed commands, it’ll send a warning buzz to the operators upstairs. Thinking swiftly, Dan replied in Japanese, “This is an unannounced routine inspection tour.” “Authorization code?” asked the robot. Dan pecked at his wristwatch for the last authorization code he had received from the system, months ago His trembling fingers fumbled with the tiny keypad and the phone’s miniature screen lit up with: Bmtlqvy. Dan fumed and tried to find the information he needed. If Bozo here detects the gun in my pocket . . . “Authorization code?” the robot repeat
ed. There it was! Hoping that the code had not been changed over the intervening months, Dan rattled off the numbers. “Thank you,” said the robot. It turned and trundled away. Dan was only slightly shaken when he saw that the machine had an identical face on the other side of its head. “I’ve heard of two-faced women,” he muttered to himself as he resumed his hurried pace toward the tunnel. “But robots? That’s weird.” The tunnel had been started back in the days when Yamagata Industries had first decided to make a major manufacturing center at Alphonsus. Saito’s father had decided to ram a tunnel through the Ringwall Mountains , connecting the floor of Alphonsus with the broad expanse of Mare Nubium. The lunar rock had turned out to be much tougher than expected; the costs of digging the tunnel, even with plasma torches, had risen too far. So the tunnel was never finished. Instead, a cable-car system had been built over the mountains. It was more expensive to operate than a tunnel would have been but far cheaper to construct. It was still in use. But the tunnel was still there; incomplete, unused for nearly two decades, but still there. So were the access shafts that had been drilled upward to the face of the mountain. The first of those access shafts opened into an emergency shelter where there were pressure suits and spare oxygen bottles, in case the cable-car system overhead broke down. That was Dan’s objective. Alphonsus City , like any settlement built in the harsh airless environment of the Moon, was a tightly sealed, closely controlled community. No one got into a cable car or stepped through an airlock without being scrutinized. You could walk for miles inside the main plaza or along the city’s corridors, but there were always video monitors watching. The monitors were there for safety, but they could easily be used to find a fugitive. Dan mused as he made his way toward the tunnel that there had been amazingly few fugitives, to his knowledge. In a community as large as Alphonsus City had grown to be, there were bound to be some thieves or perverts or the occasional case of murderous violence. But living and working on the Moon apparently sorted out the unstable types very quickly. They killed themselves, and often killed those unfortunate enough to be near them when they screwed up. He grinned to himself as he realized that most of the inhabitants of Alphonsus were Japanese. Sure, there might have been a few with larcenous souls among them, but by and large they worked hard, obeyed the regulations, and lived frugally. He remembered the rare thief that had been caught and brought to trial. Usually it was white-collar stuff: a bartender stiffing his employer, a logistics clerk jiggering the computer system so he could sell company equipment on the black market. There is a black market here, he knew. But it’s usually so small and harmless that it’s not worth the trouble going after it. As far back as he could remember, though, there had been no real fugitives from justice at Alphonsus City. Or any other lunar settlement. You can’t go out and hide in the hills. Not on a world where the only air and water is manufactured in the cities. There had been a few disappearances, of course. That was to be expected on a harshly unforgiving frontier world. But no fugitives. Not until now. The tunnel entrance was closed, but the electronic lock on the metal hatch was easy enough to decipher. He had expected the hinges to squeal painfully, since the door probably had not been touched in years. But it opened smoothly, quietly. Are the robots programmed to oil the hinges? Dan wondered. The air inside smelled dusty, stale. He coughed. But it was air. It was breathable, if you didn’t mind the sensation of fine talcum powder choking your throat. There was no light. Dan had forgotten to bring a torch with him, and the dim light from the basement quickly petered out in the depths of the tunnel. He felt his way along the rough side of the tunnel, thankful that this was on the Moon and there’d be no unpleasant critters slithering around in the darkness. Wrong! A pair of tiny burning red eyes stared balefully at him out of the shadows, shoulder high. Dan felt his heart clutch in his chest, then realized that it was the indicator lights of an emergency lamp, left there years ago by the construction gang, still powered by its radioisotope system. His fingers found the lamp’s square shape in the darkness and slid across gritty dust until they touched its activating switch. The sudden light made Dan squint, but his eyes quickly adjusted. It was easier going with the lamp. In a few minutes Dan found the hatch to the access tunnel and started climbing up the ladder toward the emergency shelter up on the surface. As far as he knew, the access tunnel had never been used to rescue stranded cable-car passengers. Never had to be. The cable system had worked fine ever since it had been erected, except for a few minor glitches that stranded cars for an hour or less—well within the air supplies the cars themselves carried. At the top of the access tunnel, the hatch leading into the shelter had no security lock; a simple spin of a well-oiled wheel opened it easily. Dan felt some puzzlement as he pushed the metal hatch back and climbed up into the shelter. The robots from down below didn’t come up here for maintenance work. Would the Yamagata safety people who maintain the cable cars take care of this hatch too? The shelter reminded him of the old days, when construction crews lived in “tempos”: temporary shelters made of expended spacecraft sections, thin aluminum cylinders that they buried under a few feet of rubble scooped up from the regolith. Life in the tempos had been spare and rugged, no place for a person of delicate sensibilities. Or a keen sense of smell, for that matter. Tempos. He had lived in them for nearly three years, and here he was back in one. It was a curved-roof tempo, sure enough. Almost bare inside, Dan saw in the light of his hand lamp, except for tall green cylinders of oxygen, a phone console sitting on an otherwise empty desk, a couple of shelves of emergency medical kits and rations—and a quartet of space suits, standing stiffly in their racks like knightly armor of old, complete with helmets on shelves above the empty torsos. The first suit he picked had only a quarter of its normal supply of oxygen in its tanks. Annoyed, Dan went to the next suit. Its tanks were dry. “They maintain the damned hatches,” he muttered, “but not the suits. That’s brilliant.” The other two suits were almost empty, as well. Fuming now, Dan went to the oxygen cylinders to start refilling one of the suits. They too were low; each of them was missing from half to three-quarters of its normal capacity. This is crazy, he said to himself. It was laborious work even in the low gravity. It took more than an hour for Dan to fill the backpack tank of one of the pressure suits. Then he waited, worriedly, for two hours more, watching the suit’s gauges to make certain that the tank did not leak. No leaks, he decided with relief. But then, how did the tanks lose oxy? And the standby cylinders, too? His wait had accomplished another purpose: the sun should have set by now. Checking his wristwatch computer, he found that it was indeed nighttime outside. It would be more difficult for them to spot him out in the open. Not impossible, by any means. But the cover of darkness gave him a bit more of an edge. If I don’t break my damned neck out there, he groused. Very carefully he stepped into the leggings of the suit he had selected and pulled on the thickly insulated boots. Then he wriggled into the hard-shell torso and wormed his arms through the sleeves. Stomping around the cramped shelter, he tested the suit’s flexibility. Then he backed into the backpack, still hooked to its rack, and felt its latches click against his suit’s fittings. It had been a long time since he’d carried a fully loaded backpack and pressure suit. Even in the Moon’s gentle gravity it felt like a ton of dead weight on his shoulders and back. The damned pistol still in the pocket of his coveralls jabbed against his thigh annoyingly. Dan pulled on the suit’s gloves and sealed them to the wrist cuffs. He flexed his fingers, thinking, They haven’t made much of an improvement on these things. Feels as stiff as rigor morris, and the damned suit’s not even pressurized yet. Finally he slid the helmet over his head and sealed it to his collar ring. He pulled the visor down and locked it, then clumped over to the only oxygen cylinder that still had some gas in it. Fitting its extension hose to the port on his suit, he over pressurized his suit until it bulged out like a balloon, making it awkward to move his arms or legs. Then he waited, watching alternately the watch and the pressure gauge on the instrument cluster on the suit’s left wr
ist. With nobody here to check him out, this was the only way to test that the suit was properly sealed and there were no pinhole leaks anywhere. There are old astronauts and there are bold astronauts, Dan remembered the old saying, but there are no old, bold astronauts. Haste is the enemy of safety, he knew. At last, satisfied that the suit was tight, he let most of the over pressurizing oxygen hiss out of the port and stepped slowly, like some monster from a horror video, to the airlock of the shelter. It took several minutes for the lock to cycle. Then the indicator light turned red and Dan slid the outer hatch open. The smooth gentle slope of Mt.Yeager confronted him. Downslope he could see the humped mass of rubble that covered Alphonsus City ’s main plaza. Directly overhead ran the cable-car line. His wristwatch tingled against his skin. Glancing at the watch on his suit cuff, Dan realized what the programmed wristwatch was telling him. This was the exact moment of his birth, fifty years ago, precisely. “Happy birthday,” Dan muttered as he stepped out onto the glassy, pitted slope of Mt. Yeager .