Test of Fire (1982) Page 5

  Catherine Demain nodded and murmured, "A pharmaceutical factory would be nice."

  Lisa leaned forward, arms on the polished surface of the conference table. "Each of you . . . I'll need a prioritized list of needs from each of you."

  "I've been thinking," LaStrande said, his voice softer now that he was no longer arguing, "that we could ease the strain on the air systems if we simply grew more grass and other greeneries throughout the settlement. Can't we peel off the flooring in the corridors and plant grass along them?"

  "It'd be trampled down, wouldn't it?" Blair asked.

  "There were resistant strains developed Earthside,"

  LaStrande said. "For lawns where kids would play . . ." He blinked behind his owlish glasses and took a long, deep breath, as if fighting back tears. "Anyhow—if we could find the right seeds, or even strips of sod . . ."

  "Put it on your list," Lisa said.

  Douglas slumped back in his chair, saying nothing, his eyes focused a quarter-million miles away. Lisa glanced at him and knew that he had not accepted defeat; he was merely planning the next round of the battle.

  "Who's going to head this expedition?" asked Blair. "Any volunteers?"

  Inadvertently, even against their conscious wishes, everyone turned to Douglas.

  He nodded. "Sure, I'll do it."

  "No," Lisa said.

  The single syllable filled the conference room with ice. Everyone froze where they were, unable to move or speak.

  Finally Douglas blinked and asked, "What do you mean?"

  Her beautiful face, framed by her black hair, took on the look of a saint facing martyrdom.

  "Douglas has already led one mission Earthside. My husband has taken enough risks for the time being. I won't chance losing him again. It's not fair to ask him to go again."

  Douglas started to reply, but held his silence.

  The others turned to one another, muttering.

  Kobol said languidly, "I'll volunteer for it. It's my idea, basically, so I guess I ought to put my money where my mouth is."

  "You mean, put your ass on the line," Marrett joked.

  A ripple of relieved laughter went around the table.

  "We should take turns on this," LaStrande suggested, "if we're going to send more than one expedition. No one of us ought to be out under the pressure more than anyone else."

  "Take turns, yes. That's fair."

  "That's the democratic way."

  Douglas shook his head. "Running a quasi-military expedition isn't a democratic chore."

  "Come on now, Doug," Catherine Demain chided. "You can't be the hero every time. Give somebody else a chance."

  Walking down the curving corridor that led toward their quarters, Douglas scuffed a boot against the worn plastic flooring.

  "Can you imagine grass growing along these tunnels?" he asked.

  Lisa, walking beside him, looked up at the raw rock of the arched tunnel roof. "We'll need special lights for it. Infrared, I think. Or is it ultraviolet?"

  "Near-infrared," he answered. He mused aloud, "We can get inert gases for fluorescent lamps easily enough. And there's plenty of glass in the rocks."

  "All we need is the grass seed."

  "And fertilizer."

  "Sylvia Dortman, in the bio labs, she might be able to engineer nitrogen-fixing microbes for the grass. It was done on Earth before . . . before . . ."

  Lisa's voice suddenly choked up.

  They walked in silence for a few moments, then Douglas asked, "Why did you object to my leading the next expedition Earthside?"

  She glanced up at him, then pulled her gaze away and looked rigidly straight ahead. "I don't know. The words just blurted out of me."

  Douglas watched her carefully as they walked slowly side by side. This was the Lisa he had known long ago, back on Earth, the vulnerable warm beauty he had fallen in love with. Not the ice-hard statue she had become. Has the ice melted? he asked himself. Has all that's happened over the past few weeks brought her back to me?

  He started to speak to her, but the words caught in his throat. Like a damned schoolboy! he thought. He coughed, swallowed.

  "Lisa," he managed at last, "you ... in there, in the meeting, you said you didn't want to risk losing me again."

  "Yes. I know." Her voice was so low he could hardly hear it.

  "Did you mean that? Did you really . . ."

  She stumbled on a loose bit of floor tile and he put out his hand to steady her. She gripped his arm tightly and he swept her to him, wrapped both his arms around her slim body and kissed her hungrily. Lisa felt warm and vibrant in his arms; he wanted to hold her and protect her and love her forever.

  She clung to him fiercely. "Oh, Doug, don't ever leave me again. Please, please, please. Let's forget the past. Let's hold onto each other from now on."

  "Yes, yes, of course," he said. 'Til never leave you, Lisa. I love you. I've always loved you, every minute of every day."

  He was blinking tears away. She was completely dry-eyed. But he never noticed that.

  Hours later, in the darkness of their room, the musky odor and body heat of passion slowly dissipating into the shadows, Douglas sat up in their rumpled bed.

  "What is it?" Lisa asked drowsily.

  "Fissionables."

  "What?"

  "Uranium, thorium—fissionables for the nuclear generators. We can't run the rock machines or the water factory without them."

  "But I thought we had enough for years and years."

  "About five years," he said.

  "Oh, by that time we'll have found more right here on the Moon."

  He shook his head in the darkness. "Not likely. Nothing heavier than iron's ever been found here. Not in any quantity above microscopic. We'll have to go to Earth for fissionables."

  "They can convert the factories to solar energy."

  With a sigh, he answered, "Wish we could, but that would require conversion equipment that we just don't have. And we don't have the facilities for making it, either."

  "Then we'll send a team down for the fissionables,"

  Lisa said.

  "We'll have to."

  "In five years. Now lie down and go to sleep."

  "Yeah. In five years. Maybe sooner."

  They both knew that he would lead the expedition back to Earth to obtain the fission fuels. Or he would try to.

  Chapter 7

  Five years passed. The lunar community grew both in numbers and living area. Miners quarried rock ceaselessly, expanding the settlement as rapidly as possible. The rocks they carved and lasered and exploded out of the underground spaces became the raw material for the factories.

  Out of that dead rock came aluminum and glass, silicon for solar panels, oxygen for life support, trace elements for fertilizers and vitamins. From the bulldozed surface soil came meteoric iron, carbon, and hydrogen embedded in the soil from the infalling solar wind: hydrogen to be mixed with oxygen to yield water, the most expensive and precious material on the Moon.

  Expeditions went to Earth. At first they went every few months. Then twice a year. Finally, one per year. They modified the Earth-built transfer rockets to burn powdered aluminum and oxygen, then rode the spidery little spacecraft to the giant wheeled station still orbiting a few hundred miles above Earth's blue-and-white surface.

  Everyone at the station had been killed by the superflare, and most of the station's electronics had to be rebuilt because of the radiation damage.

  But there were four space shuttles in the station's docks when the flare had erupted. Four winged reusable ships that could land on Earth and return to the station, time and again.

  The first trips to Earth brought medicines, seeds, electronics parts, fertilizers and tank after tank of nitrogen to the lunar settlement. And people. A few men and women, starving, ragged, sick, who were able to convince the armed visitors from the Moon that they had technical skills that would be valuable in the lunar community.

  It was the sixth expedition that me
t organized resistance for the first time. Twelve men were killed or left behind; four wounded were brought back to the Moon. Kobol led that trip and came back with a gunshot wound in the hip that left him with a slight but permanent limp.

  After that the expeditions became rarer. The landing sites were changed each time. Florida was too obvious. Marauding bands congregated at the old Kennedy Space Center, waiting to ambush the shuttles as they glided down to land at the three mile-long airstrip there.

  But picking the landing sites was no easy task.

  Most of the major airfields were close enough to nuclear-devastated cities so that the dangers of radiation still persisted.

  Four months passed before the next expedition landed at the remains of Dulles International Airport, more than ten miles from the edge of the dully-glowing crater that had been Washington, D.C. The landing team ransacked a nearby Army base for weapons and ammunition, always keeping one careful eye out for marauding gangs, and another on the radiation dosimeter badges they each wore pinned to their shirts.

  That expedition picked up one Earthside survivor; a skinny, raving, white-haired man who insisted he was an astronomer who could tell when the next flare would erupt on the Sun. On the way back to the Moon, once safely past the space station and irrevocably bound for the safety of the underground community, Dr. Robert Lord admitted that he had been lying, there was no foolproof way to predict a solar flare—yet. But he promised to spend the rest of his life studying the Sun to find a way.

  As the lunar community felt safer, and as the armed resistance to their landings grew stronger, the time between expeditions stretched. Six months. Then ten. By the time the fifth anniversary of the flare arrived, it had been almost exactly a full year since the previous expedition.

  "Why go Earthside?" people said. 'There's nothing there but maniacs and death. We're doing all right here. We don't need Earth."

  Douglas tried to convince them that they owed the world of their birth a debt. "We should be helping them to rebuild. We should establish a permanent base on Earth, a base where people can come to and be safe, a foothold where the rebuilding of civilization can begin."

  They smiled at Douglas and congratulated him on his ideals. But they outvoted him at council meetings.

  Midway through the sixth year they sent a small expedition down to what had once been Connecticut.

  Three nuclear powerplants nestled among the rolling hills in the western part of the state, untouched by the bombs that had wiped out New York and Boston. The team met little opposition, but found little nuclear fuel. Only enough uranium to run the lunar factories for a few years was brought back. And two of the team members who handled the fuel rods fell ill almost immediately of radiation sickness. They both eventually died, after long cancerous agonies.

  "I've got to take a team down there myself,"

  Douglas told his wife.

  There were wisps of gray at his temples now, although Lisa's midnight-black mane was as lustrous as ever. She could feel her whole body stiffen; the moment of challenge, the moment she had known would inevitably arise, had come at last.

  "No, Doug," she said softly. "I won't let you go. You're too important to me here."

  They were sitting facing each other across the tiny dining table of their new, enlarged, three-room suite. As chairman of the council, Douglas had been forced to accept the first of the bigger apartments. It included a sitting room where five or six people could be squeezed in for informal meetings, a dining area with its own cooking unit, and an indecently large bedroom.

  He reached across the tiny stone table and grasped her slim hand in his. "Lisa, there's no way around it. I've got to go. No one else can handle the job. It's my responsibility."

  "You have responsibilities here," she said.

  "None of them mean a damned thing if the nuclear generators run out of fuel."

  "There are others who can lead a team Earthside."

  With a dogged shake of his head, "It's my responsibility, Lisa. I've got to do it."

  She looked into his ice-blue eyes for long moments and saw that there was no way to talk him out of his resolve. Except one. Lisa knew she had one final card to play, one unbeatable trump that would bend him to her will.

  "Doug . . . it's not just for me," she said, her voice light, almost girlish. "I . . . well, I'm with child, as they say."

  "You're pregnant?"

  She nodded slowly, and let a happy smile spread across her lips.

  He grinned back at her. "Really?"

  "I had a checkup with Catherine this morning."

  "A son," he said, gripping her hand tighter than ever. "Do you think it'll be a boy?"

  She laughed. "I hope so."

  "A son." He was beaming. "Even if it's a girl, that'll be okay. I won't mind."

  Not much, she said to herself. How transparent you are, Douglas. How malleable.

  Lisa had feared that just the mention of pregnancy might trigger memories of nearly six years ago and the moment they had come so close to tearing each other apart. Her cheek still stung from his hand every time she thought about it. But she had spent the years being faithful to him, being the model wife for the leader of the community, never allowing the slightest hint of a rumor to spring up in this hothouse settlement where gossip flew along the corridors faster than a pistol shot. For nearly six years now she had done everything in her considerable power to keep him happy. And for nearly six years he had jumped through hoops for her in unsuspecting gratitude.

  Douglas Morgan was chairman of the council. Lisa Ducharme Morgan ran it.

  "I . . . Doug," she stammered, "do you think . . . well, could you . . . postpone the expedition Earthside? Until after the baby is born?"

  "Nine months?" The grin on his face slowly dissipated, replaced by an introspective frown. "Nine months," he repeated, almost to himself. "I'll have to check. That's slicing it very thin."

  But she knew he would wait. And after the baby was born she would find other ways to keep him by her side. Especially if it was a son.

  But she reckoned without Martin Kobol.

  Five months passed without incident. Douglas chafed, but kept postponing the Earthside expedition.

  Kobol watched and waited as the nuclear generators' supply of fuel rods slowly dwindled.

  "At this rate," he told Douglas, "we'll be eating into the emergency reserves before the year's out."

  They were standing in the cubbyhole office just off the control room of the nuclear powerplant.

  Through the leaded window Douglas could see the broad sweep of the control board, with its array of dials and switches. Two bored, sleepy-looking technicians sat there. Beyond the massive leadline doors across the chamber from them was the nuclear generator itself, silently converting the energy of splitting uranium atoms to electricity.

  Douglas nodded unhappily.

  "I know. We've got to bring up more fissionables from Earthside."

  "And we can't wait much longer," Kobol pointed out, tapping the computer screen that showed the fuel supply numbers.

  "A few more months . . ." Douglas muttered.

  Kobol sat on the edge of the desk to ease his aching hip. "We should have gone three months ago, in the spring. It's high summer now. In a few more months it'll be winter."

  "I know the seasons!" Douglas snapped.

  Kobol closed his eyes momentarily. He looked almost as if he were praying. "It's Lisa, isn't it? She's making you wait until the baby's born."

  "I want to wait until he's born," Douglas corrected.

  "While we run out of fuel."

  "We won't run out, Martin. Don't try to pressure me."

  "Doug, this is a serious matter. If you won't act, I'm going to have to bring it before the council."

  "Do that," Douglas snapped. "Do anything you damned well please. Lead the expedition Earthside yourself. You tried that once and it didn't work out so goddamned well, did it?"

  His voice had risen to a room-filling roar, he sudde
nly realized. Both the technicians on the other side of the thick window had turned in their chairs to stare at him.

  Kobol said nothing.

  With a self-exasperated sigh, Douglas went over to Kobol and grabbed his bony shoulders. "Marty, I'm sorry. You're right, we should have gone at least three months ago. It's just that . . . Lisa lost her first baby, and the radiation dose she got — well, I just want to be here and make sure this one's okay."

  Kobol pulled free of him and walked, one leg slightly stiff, toward the door. Without looking back at Douglas he said, "Why should this one be so special? She's aborted three or four others."

  It was such a strange thing to say, such an incredible statement, that Douglas did not believe he had heard the man correctly.

  "What did you say?" He heard a weird half chuckle in his own voice.

  Kobol put one hand on the doorknob, then halfturned toward Douglas. "She's keeping this baby to hold onto you. You're the puppet; the baby's the string."

  Douglas could feel his blood turning to ice.

  "What did you say about three of four others?"

  His voice was deadly calm.

  Shrugging, Kobol replied, "Nothing. I shouldn't have mentioned it. It's none of my business."

  "But it's my business, Marty." Without being consciously aware of it, Douglas was advancing on Kobol, fists clenched.

  "It's just . . . something I heard." Kobol's voice quavered. "Ask Catherine Demain about it. She knows."

  He yanked the door open and rushed through it and out into the corridor, leaving Douglas standing there alone.

  "It's true, isn't it?" Douglas said to his wife.

  Lisa lay in their bed, a black robe pulled around her. To Douglas she looked more beautiful than ever, glowing from within. Her belly was just slightly rounded.

  She said nothing, merely watched him with her dark enchantress's eyes.

  "I checked with Catherine. She didn't want to admit it, but she finally did. Four abortions in the past five years. Four sons or daughters we could have had. Why? Why did you kill them?"