Moonwar Page 34

  “Like I’m not?” Killifer snapped, low enough to avoid eavesdroppers, he hoped. His appearance had changed: his gray ponytail was gone; now his hair was dark and clipped short, military style. He had also grown a bushy moustache that he had darkened to match his hair.

  “I found your personnel record,” she said, looking worried, “but, Lord’s sake, it’s almost nine years old!”

  “I don’t want my old record,” he almost snarled. “I want you to generate a new one.”

  “But that would be a total fabrication.”

  “So what?”

  “What if my supervisor checks on it? What could I say?”

  Killifer had thought it all out beforehand. “I won’t be around long enough for anybody to notice. A week, maybe less.”

  “It’s an awful risk,” she repeated. “For both of us.”

  “No risk at all for you,” Killifer said, getting fed up with her fears. “If anybody complains, you just tell ’em I showed you documentation.”

  “Documentation?”

  Killifer pulled a thin sheaf of papers from his jacket pocket. They were not forged, since they were written by a bona fide personnel executive from the Urban Corps’ headquarters in Atlanta. The information in them, however, was completely false.

  “Here, scan these into your records before you piss yourself.”

  “Sir!”

  Killifer sighed. These damned New Morality uptights. Can’t even spit without them getting wired over it.

  “Forgive me,” he said.

  “Forgiveness is the Lord’s work,” she chanted. Then she turned to her keyboard and activated the scanner.

  Good, Killifer thought as he handed her the falsified personnel documents. By the time I walk out of here I’ll be on the payroll as a member of the Masterson security staff. If this uptight little broad doesn’t faint on me first.

  MASS DRIVER

  “Everything takes longer to do in these suits.” Wicksen’s voice was calm, not complaining, not making excuses; it was as if he were reading a report aloud.

  Doug watched the men working at the end of the mass driver. While those who worked on the surface regularly had personalized their spacesuits one way or another, Wicksen’s physicists and technicians were in unmarked, anonymous suits straight off the standby racks.

  At Doug’s insistence, a team of construction engineers was building a makeshift shelter for Wicksen’s people a few dozen meters from where they were busily putting together the equipment for the beam gun. Like one of the old tempos, the shelter was dug into the ground and would be covered with loose rubble from the regolith. Wicksen and his assistants could run the beam gun from there. Maybe the shelter would protect them from the radiation of a nuclear explosion, if the gun didn’t work.

  “How’s it going?” Doug asked.

  “Slowly,” said Wix. “But we’re making progress. We connected the beam collimator this morning. By tomorrow the aiming circuitry should be functional. Day after tomorrow, at the latest.”

  “And then you’re ready to shoot?”

  Wicksen’s flat, unruffled voice came through Doug’s helmet earphones, “Then we’ll be ready to see if anything really works. After testing the assembly we can power up the magnets and see if the circuitry can handle the load without shorting out.”

  “But your calculations—”

  “Mathematics doesn’t necessarily reflect the real world,” Wicksen said. “Physics is more than numbers in a computer.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “I remember when I was a kid in high school, we had a volunteer teacher’s aide come in and help us in our science class. He was retired, used to be a big-time physicist. His daughter was a famous folk singer.”

  Doug wondered what this had to do with the defense of Moonbase, but hesitated to interrupt Wicksen.

  “He took us out to the gym and attached a bowling ball to one of the climbing ropes. The rope was hanging from a beam way up on the ceiling. Then he carried the bowling ball up to the top tier of the benches where we sat during the basketball games.”

  “What was he doing?” Doug asked, curious despite himself.

  “Teaching us physics. The law of pendulums. He held that big old bowling ball a centimeter in front of his nose, and then let it go.”

  “And?”

  “It swung on that rope all the way across the gym, like a cannonball, then swung right back toward him again. We all started to yell to him to duck, to get out of the way. But he just stood there and grinned at us.”

  Wicksen paused dramatically. Doug waited for him to finish the story.

  “The bowling ball stopped a centimeter in front of his nose, then started swinging back again. And he said, ‘See? It works that way every time. That’s physics!’ And I was hooked for life.”

  Doug thought he understood. “The demonstration was a lot more convincing than reading the equations about pendulums, right?”

  “Right,” said Wicksen. “Of course, you’ve got to know what you’re doing. You’ve got to release the bowling ball without pushing it even the slightest little bit. If you push it, it’ll come back and smash your head in.”

  “Is the gun going to work?” Doug asked.

  He could sense Wicksen trying to shrug inside his suit. “We don’t know. All the equations check out, but we won’t know until we try it.”

  “And you probably won’t get a chance to try it until a nuclear warhead is falling on our heads.”

  “Probably.” If that thought perturbed Wicksen in the slightest, it didn’t show in his voice.

  He’s actually happy about this, Doug realized. He’s running an experiment that might get himself and all his people killed, but the whole project excites him. Like a hunter tracking down a lion in thick underbrush: dangerous, but what an adrenaline rush!

  Doug took his leave of the physicist, wishing he could be as fatalistic as Wicksen. As he climbed into his tractor and trundled away from the mass driver, heading back toward Moonbase, he tried to see things the way Wicksen did. Either the experiment works or we all get killed. Is that the way he really thinks? Or is it that he’s so absorbed in the experiment itself that he’s not thinking at all about the consequences?

  Doug’s first stop after getting out of his spacesuit and cleaning it was the control center. Everything looked normal in the big, dimly lit room. The quiet hum of electronics. Rows of consoles monitored by men and women staring at the screens, pin mikes at their lips and earphones clamped to their heads. A controlled intensity, with the big electronic wall displays that showed schematics of the entire base looming over all of them.

  He saw Jinny Anson bending over the shoulder of the chief communications technician.

  Walking over to her, he asked, “What’s up, Jinny?”

  She straightened up and Doug saw that her face was somber. “Lot of activity at L-1,” she said, gesturing toward the comm tech’s center screen.

  Doug saw a radar plot of the space station that hovered nearly sixty thousand kilometers above them. Several additional blips clustered around the red dot marking the station.

  “Resupply?” Doug mused.

  “Not likely,” said Anson. “Their regular resupply run took place on schedule last week. No, they’re delivering something to the station, but it’s not life-support supplies or propellant.”

  Doug took in a deep breath. “The nuclear missile?”

  “Maybe more than one.”

  For a moment Doug was silent, thinking. Then he said, “I’m going to call Harry Clemens. It’s time to pop an observation satellite so we can keep an eye on Nippon One.”

  Anson nodded, then grinned ruefully. “You might not like what you see, boss.”

  Gordette was sitting in the Cave, nursing a mug of the stuff that passed for coffee at Moonbase. It was midday, and the cafeteria was filling up with the lunchtime crowd. But no one sat at Gordette’s table. No one came near it; a ring of empty tables surrounded him.

  Pariah, he said to h
imself. That’s the word. For days he’d been trying to recall the term. At last it came swimming up from his subconscious. Pariah. Outcast. Murderer. Assassin. That’s me and they all know it.

  It would’ve been better if Doug had let me die, Gordette told himself. He says he trusts me, but none of these others do. They all know about me now, or they think they do. And they all hate me.

  Then he saw Paula Liebowitz carrying a tray in both hands, making her way through the crowded tables, heading straight toward him. She walked with a determined stride and an odd, tenacious expression on her face, right up to Gordette’s table.

  “Do you mind if I sit here?” she asked, almost truculently.

  Gordette spread his arms to take in all the empty chairs. “Be my guest.”

  Liebowitz plopped her laden tray on the table and took the chair next to Gordette.

  “Is it true? Did you really try to kill Doug Stavenger?”

  Gordette couldn’t make out what was in her eyes. It wasn’t anger, exactly. But it wasn’t tenderness, either.

  “It’s true,” he said flatly.

  “You’re a hired assassin? A hit man?”

  He puffed out a sigh. “When I first met you I was trying to sabotage Doug’s suit.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Liebowitz said. She wasn’t calling Gordette a name, he realized; merely expressing her emotions.

  He tried to shrug. “That’s what I was sent here to do.”

  “And when you invited me to dinner, that was part of it? You were going to try to use me to help you kill Stavenger?”

  “No,” he answered slowly. “I invited you to dinner because I liked you.”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Even trained assassins need some human companionship now and then,” Gordette told her.

  “Don’t try to make a joke out of this!”

  “It’s no joke, believe me.”

  “Why should I believe anything you say?”

  “Why do you ask me, then?”

  “I liked you,” Liebowitz said. “I was even thinking about going to bed with you.”

  “Get your kicks with a black man, huh?”

  She frowned with puzzlement. “What?”

  “I’m black.”

  “And I’m a Jew. What’s that got to do with anything?”

  Gordette thought it over for a moment. “Nothing. Nothing’s got anything to do with anything.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, getting irritated with her cross-examination. “So I liked you and you liked me. So what?”

  “Stavenger’s letting you stay here? You’re still working with him?”

  Gordette nodded.

  “He trusts you? After you tried to kill him?”

  “I told him the story of my life,” Gordette said, acid in each word, “and he decided he’s gonna reform me. Start me a new life here on the Moon, where everybody loves me and trusts me.”

  “Yeah, you’ve made it so easy to be loved and accepted.”

  “The only thing I’ve made easy is being black, so you can spot me at a distance.”

  “What the hell’s this black business got to do with it?”

  “You see any other black people up here?”

  Liebowitz almost laughed at him. “My supervisor’s black. There’s dozens of Afro-Americans and blacks from other countries here.” She turned in her chair and pointed. “Look. Black people. And Asians. Hell, they even let Italians up here!”

  “Very funny.”

  “The first American astronaut on Mars was black.”

  “Big deal.”

  “Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

  “Okay. Good advice. I’ll do that,” he mumbled.

  Liebowitz glared at him like a disappointed mother. “You really tried to kill him?”

  “I slit his throat. Alright? Is that what you wanted to hear? My fuckin’ confession?”

  He said it loudly enough so that people at the nearest tables turned to stare at him.

  “What I want to hear,” Liebowitz said, her voice low, “is where you’re going from here.”

  “Straight to hell,” Gordette said.

  “So you’re going to isolate yourself, build a wall and not let anybody near you.”

  He pointed to the ring of empty tables around them. “You see anybody trying to make friends with me?”

  “I am,” she said.

  He blinked, uncomprehending.

  “I’m having lunch with you, aren’t I?” Liebowitz said. “Maybe you can tell me the story of your life and make me believe that you’re something more than just a hired killer.”

  SPACE STATION MASTERSON

  Like a growing frontier town, space station Masterson had succumbed to urban sprawl. But now it was starting to look like a ghost town.

  Orbiting some two hundred fifty miles above the Earth, at first glance Masterson looked like a disconnected conglomeration of odds and ends, a junkyard floating in space. The modules where personnel were housed spun lazily on opposite ends of three-kilometer-long carbon filament tethers, like oversized aluminum cans glinting in the sunlight, connected by strings so thin and dark they were for all practical purposes invisible. The modules formed a huge disjointed wheel more than ten kilometers in circumference, with the tethers as spokes.

  Outside the circumference of the habitation modules’ arc floated the factories, labs, repair shops and transfer center, their angular utilitarian shapes dwarfed by huge wings of solar panels and radiators, massive concave solar mirrors that collected and focused the Sun’s heat for smelting and other processing work, and forests of antennas and sensors—all in zero gravity, or the nearest thing to it.

  Like most of the major complexes in permanent Earth orbit, Masterson was a combination of several purposes: part manufacturing facility, part scientific research laboratory, part observation platform, part maintenance and repair center, and part transfer station for people and cargo heading onward to Moonbase. There was even a tourist hotel module, twice the size of all the others.

  Since the U.N.-imposed embargo on Moonbase traffic, however, there were no transfers of people heading out to the Moon and no arrivals of lunar cargo carriers. The manufacturing facility had shut down for lack of raw materials. No lunar transfer vehicles needed maintenance or repair; they were all hanging silent and useless in weightless geodesic cocoons that protected them from incoming radiation and the occasional meteoroids that peppered cislunar space. The tourist hotel was still running, but its business had dropped sharply since the war against Moonbase had started.

  Jill Meyers gazed sadly through an observation port in the hotel module. She had helped to build Masterson, back in the days when she’d been a government astronaut. She was accustomed to seeing spacesuited figures bustling from module to module, jetting along in solo maneuvering units, or riding the bare-bones shuttlecraft called broomsticks. But now the whole region was quiet, empty. This war was costing Masterson Corporation millions of dollars per day, and even though the U.N. promised reparations, Meyers knew that nothing could repay time lost, careers interrupted.

  “There you are!”

  Jill turned from the circular glassteel observation port to see Edan McGrath standing in the hatch. His sizable bulk almost filled the hatchway, the lighting from the central corridor silhouetting him dramatically.

  “You finally got here,” Meyers said, taking a step toward him.

  “I’ve been looking all over this tin can for you,” he replied gruffly. “Come on, let’s eat. I haven’t had a bite since breakfast.”

  The hotel’s restaurant was nearly empty—only two other couples sitting at the elegant tables, and a family of four off in the farthest corner, where the children wouldn’t annoy other diners. They’ve got more waiters than customers, Meyers noticed as she scanned the richly decorated room. Windowall screens displayed astronomical scenes, glorious interstellar nebulas glowing delicate pink and electric blue. Meyers realized tha
t real windows would have shown the scenery outside spinning lazily; not the most soothing background for flatland tourists to eat and drink by.

  McGrath had ordered champagne. They clinked their fluted glasses and toasted each other’s health. Meyers had dressed in comfortable tan slacks and a loose blouse embroidered with flowers. McGrath wore a bulky white turtleneck sweater over jeans that looked stiffly new.

  With a lopsided grin on his beefy face, McGrath asked, “Do you come here often?”

  It was a corny line and they both knew it.

  Meyers laughed politely. “I used to, in the old days.”

  “I understand you were quite a hell-raiser back then,” he said.

  Her smile turned reminiscent. “Back then,” she murmured.

  The waiter brought them oversized menus. McGrath ordered three courses and more wine, Meyers only a salad.

  “Okay,” he said, after the waiter had left, “you asked me to meet you here. What’s up?”

  Meyers looked into his pale blue eyes. “Edan, you know that if I were still in the Senate I’d be raising all kinds of hell about this war against Moonbase.”

  “I’d hardly call it a war,” he said.

  “That’s what your network calls it.”

  McGrath shrugged. “That’s show business, Jill. You know how it is.”

  “I need your help to put pressure on the president,” she said.

  His brows rose slightly. “I thought you were on her side. You’re the same party—”

  “Not on this,” Meyers snapped. “I’ve never been a blind supporter of the New Morality and she knows it. She named me to the World Court to get me out of the Senate because she knew I’d raise hell about going after Moonbase.”

  “Why don’t you raise hell now? I’d give you all the air time you want.”

  “I can’t,” Meyers said, shaking her head. “As a judge in the International Court of Justice I’ve got to stay strictly out of politics.”

  With a laugh, McGrath asked, “What you’re doing now isn’t politics?”

  “This is private, just between you and me.”