Moonwar Page 28

  Zimmerman started to take another swig of the fruit juice, then decided against it and put the glass down firmly on their little table.

  “That young man is my long-term experiment. He was dying from radiation overdose when I injected the nanomachines into him, eight years ago—”

  “Eight years?” Inoguchi seemed startled. “Was he at the south pole with Brennart?”

  Zimmerman blinked. “Yes. Brennart died there.”

  “I was there also. Or close by, actually. I broke my ribs in a landing accident. Yamagata and the Masterson Corporation were racing to claim the ice fields discovered at the south polar region.”

  “So. That was when I injected Douglas Stavenger with the nanomachines. Some were specialized, others programmed in a more general way.”

  “And they have been inside him all these years?”

  “They will always be inside him. They have formed a symbiotic relationship with him.”

  “How can inanimate machines create a symbiosis with an organism?” Inoguchi challenged.

  “You see what they have done! What else can you call it?”

  “But true symbiosis …”

  They argued for hours, neither of them raising his voice, both of them waxing passionate for his position and against the other’s. Zimmerman enjoyed the debate immensely; he hadn’t had this kind of intellectual stimulation since he’d left Switzerland.

  “It’s a shame you must return to Kyoto,” the old man said at last.

  “Perhaps I won’t,” said Inoguchi.

  “You want to remain here? You want to work with me?”

  “Most certainly.”

  Zimmerman beamed at him. “Very good! You can ask for asylum and—”

  “No, I’m afraid you don’t understand,” Inoguchi said, smiling politely.

  “What don’t I understand?”

  “My work at Kyoto, fumbling and childlike as it is, must be done in great secrecy because Japan has signed the nanotechnology treaty and therefore such research is technically illegal.”

  “So come here to Moonbase!”

  “Once Yamagata Industries has acquired Moonbase, I will certainly come here and engage in nanotechnology research without all the hindrances I experience in Kyoto. I offer you the opportunity of remaining here even after the others have been removed. You may remain here and work with me.”

  Zimmerman took a moment to digest what he heard, then sputtered, “You would allow me to remain at Moonbase and work under you?”

  “With me,” Inoguchi corrected.

  “We would be working for Yamagata, then?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Zimmerman scowled at the younger man.

  “You could continue your research unhindered,” Inoguchi promised. “There is no need for you to be sent back to Earth, no need for you to stop your work.”

  Coldly, Zimmerman said, “You are assuming that Yamagata will conquer Moonbase.”

  With a wan smile, Inoguchi replied, “That is inevitable, Professor. Regretful, perhaps, but inevitable. There is no way that Moonbase can resist the combined strength of the Peacekeepers and Yamagata’s special forces.”

  “Even if I can make the entire base invisible to you?”

  “What?” Inoguchi’s brows knit with consternation.

  “What are you saying?”

  “Never mind,” Zimmerman replied, shaking his head.

  “Invisible? How?”

  “I will tell you only this much, young man. Your Peacekeepers and Yamagata forces might be able to destroy Moonbase and kill everyone in it, but they will never take us over. We will not be conquered! I will see to it that every man and woman in this base dies before we surrender to you!”

  “You can’t be serious! I’m offering you an opportunity to continue your work as if nothing happened.”

  With an angry snort, Zimmerman said, “You think I am a fool? You think I am an amoral egomaniac like your Georges Faure? Or like some renaissance tinkerer, content to work for any prince as long as he gets paid? I’m not a von Braun, I don’t work for any regime that allows me to pursue my goal. Moonbase is my home and I will defend it to the end! Freedom or death!”

  Inoguchi had never felt so stunningly surprised in his entire life. The man thinks like a samurai, he realized.

  DAY FORTY-THREE

  “You can’t go after him,” Edith said. “You can’t even get out of bed!”

  Doug smiled at her and hiked a thumb at the monitors over his head. “Look at the screens, Edith. Everything’s in the normal range, isn’t it?”

  She glanced upward, then looked back at him. “The doctor told me—”

  “The doctor’s playing it by the book. Zimmerman wants to observe how his nanobugs are working. But I’ve got to find Bam and stop him.”

  “Why you? Why not a security team?”

  “He wouldn’t give up without a fight. I don’t want anybody hurt.”

  “After he tried to murder you?”

  “It’s my job, Edith,” said Doug calmly. “My responsibility.”

  She started to shake her head. “I’m not going to help you risk your butt all over again.”

  “I’ve got to, Edith. Go back to our place and get a fresh set of clothes for me.”

  “No!”

  “You can come with me,” he said, struggling to convince her. “You said you wanted to come outside.”

  “Zimmerman won’t allow it.”

  “He can’t stop us if nobody tells him about it.”

  “Doug, you almost died!”

  “But I’m okay now, really I am. What do I have to do, jump your bod to show you I’m in good condition?”

  Her green eyes turned thoughtful. “Let’s see if you can get out of bed, first.”

  Doug pushed the swivel table with its emptied food tray away from the bed and swung his legs out from under the sheet. He planted his bare feet on the warmed tile floor and stood up. No alarm bells went off. The monitors showed no change in his condition.

  “See? No hands.”

  She broke into a grin. “That gown looks pretty silly on you.”

  “Go get me some clothes while I peel off these sensor patches.”

  “You’ll really take me with you? Outside?”

  He nodded soberly. “I promise.”

  “And they’ll let you out?”

  “Hey, I’m the chief administrator of this base. Rank has its privileges.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  With a furtive glance at the observation window beside his bed, Doug added, “But you’d better get my clothes before Doc Montana comes back for another check.”

  “This is absolutely crazy,” Edith said. “I love it!”

  She was sitting beside Doug in the open cockpit of a massive lunar tractor, encased in a cumbersome spacesuit, waiting inside the big metal womb of the main airlock while the pumps sucked out the air so they could go outside and track down Bam Gordette. The airlock was suffused with a dull red light, like an old-fashioned darkroom.

  She had figured that if Doug was strong enough to make it down to the garage and actually get himself into a spacesuit, maybe she’d go along with him instead of blowing the whistle and getting him shipped back to the infirmary. It was she who needed help, though, when they started to pull on their spacesuits.

  Edith was surprised when Doug went to the new cermet suit, standing in a locker marked DO NOT TOUCH: EXPERIMENTAL EQUIPMENT.

  “You’re going to use that suit again?”

  He grinned at her. “This is the best tested and inspected suit in the whole Earth-Moon system, believe me.”

  She took one of the regular suits from the row of lockers, muttering, “I never know if I’m a small or a medium.” Doug was already in his leggings and boots when he saw Edith struggling with hers and clumped over to help her.

  At last they got completely suited up, filled the backpack air tanks, and checked out each other’s suits from the safety list Doug called up on their wrist display
screens. Then came the interminable wait while Edith eliminated the nitrogen in her blood by pre-breathing the suit’s low-pressure air.

  Now Edith sat beside him in the tractor’s unpressurized cockpit. In the eerie light of the airlock, all she could see of Doug was an anonymous lump of reddish-tinged white, like the Pillsbury Doughboy by firelight, topped with a helmet and a gold-tinted visor that reflected her own red-tinged helmet and visor.

  “Are you sure you’re strong enough to do this?” Edith asked as the noise of the pump faded down to silence.

  Doug’s voice said in her earphones, “Listen to me, Edith. My body’s building up my blood supply. I’m a lot stronger now than I was an hour ago.”

  “You’re sure?”

  He laughed. “Yep, I’m absolutely, positively certain. I might be wrong, but I’m sure.”

  Doug had talked their way past the technician on duty at the main airlock, who wondered why the Big Boss was going outside in the middle of the lunar night with the flatlander news reporter and an insulated container big enough to hold a dead body.

  “Lunch,” Doug had explained about the container. It held a dozen quarts of fruit juices and soymilk that they had picked up at the Cave on their way to the garage. They had loaded four spare air cylinders onto the tractor’s bed, as well: two at normal room pressure and two at the low pressure Edith’s standard suit required.

  The display light on the panel set into the scuffed metal wall of the huge airlock next to the outside hatch abruptly switched from amber to green.

  “Here we go,” Doug said as the outer hatch began to slowly slide open. “Once we’re underway I’ll show you how to operate the tractor. That’ll take less than fifteen minutes.”

  “Driving lessons?” Edith’s eyes were focused on the growing gap as the hatch opened wider. It was dark out there, even with her vision already dark-adapted from the red lighting inside the airlock.

  “Yeah,” he replied. “That way, in case anything happens to me you can drive back here.”

  “Oh.” Edith realized that beneath his casual demeanor Doug was weighing the risks as carefully as he could.

  The airlock hatch opened fully and Doug put the tractor in gear. Edith heard no sound at all in the dead vacuum, but she felt the electric motors’ vibrations as they turned each of the tractor’s wheels individually.

  I’m out on the surface of the Moon! she exulted. Her first time, with Captain Munasinghe and the Peacekeepers, she’d been too busy recording her story to appreciate the scenery. Now she looked about and saw nothing but stark desolation. Dusty flat ground, cracked here and there. Rocks of all sizes, from pebbles to boulders. Craterlets, too, as if children had been digging into the ground with sticks and shovels.

  Off to one side was the deep pit that would one day be the grand plaza of the Moonbase that Doug envisioned. Maybe, she thought. If we can keep Yamagata from taking over.

  It all looked about as romantic as a slag heap to her, yet Doug loved it.

  “It’s kind of dark right now,” Doug said. “Nothing up there except a crescent Earth. When it’s full, or even gibbous, it’s a lot brighter.”

  “I can’t even see—what’s that?”

  A big round thing was sitting on the ground off to their right, like a giant beach ball the size of their tractor. Peering at it, Edith saw that it was not solid, but built of some kind of wire mesh. And it seemed to be resting on a curved metal track laid across the ground.

  Doug laughed. “That’s the laundry.”

  “Laundry?”

  “Sure. Dirt dries almost immediately in vacuum and detaches from fabric while the ultraviolet from the sun kills germs. We pack the dirty laundry in there when the sun’s up and roll the sphere back and forth along the track for an hour or so. Clothes come out clean and sanitized.”

  “My clothes have been cleaned in there?”

  “Yep.”

  “How do you iron them?”

  “The old-fashioned way,” Doug answered. “With automated ironing machines that use waste heat from the base’s living quarters and machinery.”

  Edith shook her head inside her helmet. Her clothes seemed clean enough when she got them back from the laundry, but rolling them around out here … ?

  “I’m switching to the base’s standard comm frequency,” Doug told her. “First keypad on your comm set.”

  It took Edith a few moments to remember which row of pads on the wrist of her suit was the comm set. In the dim lighting, little more than the glow from the tractor’s dashboard instruments, she figured it out after a few moments.

  “… yes, I’m outside with Edith,” Doug was saying.

  “Are you crazy?” Jinny Anson’s voice snapped. “What the blazes are you doing outside?”

  “Trying to get to Gordette before he reaches Yamagata’s people,” said Doug. “Any joy with tracking his tractor?”

  “Hell no.” Anson sounded thoroughly unhappy. “He was smart enough to turn off its transponder, and now he’s so far over the horizon that even if he had it on we couldn’t hear it.”

  “Any idea of which way he went?”

  “I checked the automated radar plot,” Anson replied immediately. “Shows he was heading on a bearing of three-forty-five degrees, relative to true north.”

  “Three-forty-five?”

  “That’s out past the mass driver, heading almost due north.”

  “So he’s not taking Wodjohowitcz Pass, then.”

  “Not yet. He’s probably trying to knock out the mass driver first. The magnets, I betcha.”

  Doug’s voice caught in his throat. “The magnets! So we can’t use them to drive Wicksen’s particle beam gun.”

  “Which means we won’t have any chance at all of stopping an incoming nuke.”

  “I’ve got to stop him.”

  “Get real! He’s got a six-hour lead on you.”

  “I’ve still got to try. Does Wix have any people out at the driver?”

  “Not for the past ten days. His whole crew’s been inside here, working on the new hardware.”

  “Do we have anything at all that we can use to spot his tractor, Jinny?”

  She humphed. “Crystal ball? Tarot cards …” Suddenly her voice brightened. “Hey! What about Kadar’s survey satellite?”

  “Is it still functional?”

  “We can power it up and see. Lemme check on when it’ll swing over Alphonsus again.”

  “Good. Call me as soon as you can.”

  “Will do, boss.”

  Edith asked, “Aren’t we over the horizon from Moonbase?”

  “We will be in another fifteen minutes,” Doug said.

  “Then how will you be able to talk with Jinny? Or anyone at the base?”

  “Antennas up on top of Mount Yeager,” Doug explained. “We can reach more than half of the area within the ringwall, and a considerable amount of territory out on Mare Nubium.”

  “Then why can’t they find Gordette’s tractor?”

  “The antennas are for communications, not radar tracking.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’ll get him.”

  Edith was worried that he was right.

  Doug began to show her how to run the tractor. It wasn’t much different from driving a car.

  “Not a lot of traffic out here,” he said, “but you’ve got to be on the lookout for craters and rocks that can get you stuck. Stay with the flattest, clearest ground you can find.”

  “Like you’re doing.”

  “Right.”

  “Do you know where you’re going? I mean, without knowing where his tractor is?”

  Doug pointed a gloved finger over the hood of the tractor. “I’m following his trail.”

  “His trail?”

  “Look. The cleat tracks.”

  She saw a maze of tracks running pretty much in the same direction: out to the mass driver, she supposed.

  “His are the brightest,” Doug explained. “Nobody’s been out here for ten days or so
, so Bam’s tractor has churned up the newest tracks. Surface dirt is darkened by solar ultraviolet. New bootprints, new tractor marks, they uncover the brighter stuff underneath.”

  “Shades of the Lone Ranger and his faithful Indian companion,” Edith muttered.

  “Who?”

  He knows so much, Edith thought, and there’s so much he doesn’t know. She settled back to watching the landscape, trundling by at a frustratingly slow thirty kilometers per hour or so.

  “Do you really find this rock pile beautiful?” she asked.

  “Don’t you?”

  “It’s so barren! So empty and lifeless. There’s not even air to breathe.”

  It took him a few moments to reply. “It all looks a lot better when there’s a full Earth. Fifty times brighter than a full Moon, back Earthside. It’s breathtaking. Everything glows like silver out here. And you can watch the Earth, see its clouds and oceans; it never stays the same for very long.”

  “It’s only a sliver now,” Edith said, glancing upward at the thin crescent hanging in the starry sky.

  “Take a good look,” Doug said. “Stare at it for a few minutes.”

  There’s nothing better to do out here, Edith thought. She looked at the bright crescent Earth, a scimitar-slim curve of bright blue with flecks of white.

  And saw that there was a blue glow stretching beyond the points of the crescent. The Earth’s air was gleaming, catching the Sun’s light and warmth.

  “Look on the dark side,” Doug told her. “Focus your eyes a little to the left of the crescent’s bulge.”

  She did, and saw nothing but darkness. The night side of Earth, she realized. Dark and—

  There were lights glittering there! At first Edith wasn’t certain she really saw them, but the harder she stared, the more she saw. Cities aglow with light. Thin twinkling threads of highways linking them.

  “Holy cow!” she blurted.

  “See the cities?”

  “It’s like a connect-the-dots map,” Edith said excitedly. “I can see Florida … at least I think it’s—no! That’s Italy! And over there must be Paris! Wow!”

  “And look at—” A sharp buzz interrupted Doug. “Hold it. Incoming message.”

  It was Anson again. “Gotta hand it to Kadar: his bird chirped right up when we interrogated it. It’s at periluna over Alphonsus, of course, so it’ll be zipping by at its fastest when it comes over us.”