Exile-and Glory (44 page)

"We're here," Ellen answered. "We found a bomb—or something that looked like one—attached to the telescope."

"But when was it put there?" Seymour demanded. "I looked at the telescope when I checked the high gain antenna. I'm sure I would have seen anything—"

"I don't know, but it was there," Kevin said. "Ellen threw it off the ship about two minutes ago. It will be a kilometer away by now."

"More like a couple of hundred meters," Ellen said. "It's difficult to throw anything very hard. But I'm sure it's far enough."

"Good. That's not what I called you about," Seymour said. "There are two passengers missing."

"Who?" Kevin asked.

"George Lange and that Pacifico person."

"George?" Ellen was incredulous. "He couldn't possibly have had anything to do with sabotaging the ship."

"He's my boss," Kevin said. "Always trying to get me to work. Ellen's right, he's not the saboteur. Pacifico—well, he's another matter."

"I think you ought to have a look around," Seymour said. "But don't take long. We start the engines in ten minutes, and you'll have to be inside before that."

"We'll go in just before the burn," Ellen said. "Until then—somebody put that bomb on the telescope. We'll watch."

"Right. Out," Seymour said.

Ellen moved closer to Kevin. "Turn off your radio," she said. When he did, she put her helmet against his. "Do you have any kind of weapon?"

"Only the knife in my tool kit."

"I wish we had a pistol."

"But—there aren't any pistols aboard, no guns at all."

"How do you know?" she demanded. "Kevin, I'm worried."

"About Pacifico? He's a pip-squeak."

"He seems to be. But if Lange is missing, someone killed him. He wouldn't have any reason to hide. He must have caught the saboteurs in the act, and they killed him."

Kevin tried to remember what little he knew about Lange. It wasn't much. He'd brought Kevin the tapes and made him study them, and he'd talked in a general way about the work Deadalus Corporation would be doing on Ceres. Nothing definite. "How can you be so sure it wasn't Lange who planted the bomb?" Kevin demanded.

"I'm sure. Kevin, I think we should separate. You go watch the port side, I'll watch the starboard. Burn is ten minutes from now. We have to keep anyone from getting up here during the next five minutes. Then we'll be safe; and we'll be able to put the cargo down on Ceres—"

She started to move away, but Kevin caught her and pulled her back until he could put his helmet against hers. "Be careful," he said.

"Sure."

And, he wondered as he crawled toward the port side of the ship, what the hell is that cargo? Captain Greiner talked about it. So does Ellen. Everyone seems to know but me . . . there had been one series of launch capsules that had been guarded by company police and Mexican Army tanks. What could be that valuable?

He reached the edge and looked along the ship, past the hydrogen tanks to the big ring at the end of the ship. Nothing moved. He wondered if he should show a light. If someone really wanted to cripple
Wayfarer,
it would only take puncturing a couple of those tanks.

But that would completely cripple the ship. It would be suicide for the saboteur, and so far whoever was doing this had been careful not to really damage
Wayfarer,
just put the ship out of operation for a few hours until it would be too late to get to Ceres.

If he could reach the telescope, though, he could still keep them from landing.

Lange. Could it have been George Lange? How likely that Pacifico could knock out the antenna and computer power supply? Or kill Lange? Pacifico wasn't much larger than Ellen, while Lange was bigger than Kevin. Not that that meant anything—being large was no real advantage in free fall. It just meant long legs to bump into things. But Kevin doubted that Pacifico knew enough about the ship to have been the saboteur—

He glanced at his watch. Five minutes to burn: time to be getting inside. Even as he thought it, Seymour's voice came into his headset. "That ought to do it," the First Officer said. "Best get into the airlock. We're going to start rotating ship for the burn."

"Right, Ellen—"

"Kev, there's somebody out here with us!" Ellen shouted. "I saw him move. Just then. He's down by the tanks."

"Good Lord." Seymour sounded worried. "But we've got to start maneuvers. We can't stop now—the burn must be exactly on time—exactly!"

"I know," Ellen said quietly. "I'm going after him. Kevin, get inside."

"Don't be silly." He clawed his way over the bow of the ship as she vanished around the far side.

"Hang on," Seymour ordered. "In one minute and . . . three seconds we start turning ship. We have to."

"Right," Kevin answered. "Ellen. What's happening?"

There was no answer. He reached the place where he'd last seen her and looked aft down the length of the ship. There was a flash of light from down there somewhere. He went over, pulling himself along the ladder, trying to make sure he was always holding it.

"If you start the engines I'll puncture the tanks!" came a high pitched voice. Pacifico's. He sounded determined. Afraid but determined. "I'll do it!" the lawyer shouted.

"But—why do you want to keep us from getting to Ceres!" Seymour asked.

"I don't care about that," Pacifico said. "I want to go to Ceres. But you won't get us there! You can't navigate this ship with a suitcase computer; you've no right to risk our lives that way!"

"If you puncture the tanks you'll kill all of us including yourself," Kevin said.

"No I won't. We don't need all the fuel to get back to Earth. Stay away from me! I'll do it—"

"We're turning," Seympur said.

The ship moved slightly as attitude jets fired. It rotated slowly. Kevin didn't find it hard to hang on, and then the counter-jets fired to stop the turn. The ship was now heading almost exactly away from Ceres.

Kevin reached the tankage complex. It was dark among the long hydrogen tanks. "Ellen," he called.

"I see you," she said. "I think he's straight ahead of you."

"Get away from me," Pacifico screamed. "I'll do it, I swear I will!"

Kevin moved further into the tankage complex. Pacifico's voice came from nowhere and everywhere; it was weird, hearing him but being unable to locate him by sound. Kevin wondered if the lawyer had seen him. He saw no one. Not Ellen, not Pacifico. "You idiot, all the tanks are connected together," Kevin said. "If you puncture one of them, you'll let all the fuel escape."

"I don't believe that," Pacifico said. "It wouldn't make sense as a design. Meteoroids—"

"I'm afraid what Senecal is telling you is the truth," Seymour's voice interjected. "The tanks don't connect normally, but when we make preparation for using the main engines we have to interconnect them. Otherwise the fuel would be burned out of one tank at a time and we'd get off balance."

That makes sense, Kevin thought. I wonder if it's true? The important thing is to get Pacifico talking and keep him occupied until we find him. And then what? Kevin fingered the knife in his pouch. That seemed drastic—

"Kev! I've got him! Aft of where you are and around clockwise sixty degrees!" Ellen's voice came in panting gasps.

Kevin moved in the direction she'd indicated. He saw Ellen and the lawyer struggling like clumsy wrestlers, their bulky suits preventing either of them from getting a decisive hold.

"One minute to burn," Seymour said. "Can you get into the airlock?"

" 'Fraid not," Ellen said. "Maybe we'll be all right here among the tanks—" Her voice rose. "Kevin!" she shouted in terror.

Both of them had moved away from the ship. Somehow they'd both lost their holds on the ship while trying to fight each other, and now they drifted free, a few feet away, unable to get back.

"My God! Help!" Pacifico screamed.

"Burn in forty seconds," Seymour said.

"You can't!" Pacifico screamed. "It's inhuman! You'll kill us!"

"Can't delay," Seymour said.

And he means that, Kevin thought. Not that Ellen would want him to delay. The Belt operation means too much to her. It's up to me, now. He dove forward, through the tankage. His months of practice in somersaulting through the ship let him get through the tanks in a clean arc.

He caught the ladder at the last possible moment, and reached out toward Ellen. "Grab hold!" he called.

She reached for him, missed by inches. He stretched but couldn't catch her.

"Ten seconds," Seymour announced.

"We're drifting free of the ship!" Pacifico screamed. "You can't do this, you can't—"

Kevin grabbed the safety line on his belt and hooked it to the ladder, then, letting the reel run free, leaped out toward Ellen. He grabbed her with both hands, then grunted with relief.

"You damn fool," she said. "You'll kill yourself—"

"Three. Two. One. Ignite," Seymour said.

The ship's engines started. There was no sound and no flame. Hydrogen was pumped from the tanks and into the nuclear pile on its sting at the end of the ship. The nuclear reactor heated the hydrogen and forced it back through nozzles. The ship drove forward at a tenth of a gravity.

Kevin felt Ellen as a sudden dead weight. He threw in the stop on his belt reel, and they dangled from the ladder, with nothing holding them but the thin nylon line. Pacifico, still screaming, vanished behind as the ship drove forward.

As the ship moved, suddenly they and the safety line formed a pendulum. They felt the acceleration as they would a tenth of Earth's gravity as centrifugal force moved them until they swung back and forth in a small arc directly beneath the ladder. Kevin painfully reached up, still holding Ellen's hand with his. She wasn't heavy, only a tenth of what her weight would have been on Earth, but Kevin wasn't used to
any
gravity. He held tightly, irrationally afraid that the thin nylon line wouldn't hold their combined weight of fifty pounds. He couldn't quite reach the ladder.

"Help! You can't leave me here to die in space! Help!" Pacifico screamed in terror. The ship moved inexorably away from him. Within thirty seconds he would be nearly half a kilometer behind, doomed to the loneliest death possible, alone in a river of stars and the emptiness of space.

"Can you let me down a little further?" Ellen asked. "I can almost reach one of the fuel pipes—"

"No hands." Kevin said. "I've—"

"Here. I've got you," Ellen said. "Now let us down a meter or so."

"How can you be so damned calm?" Kevin snarled.

He let go of her with one hand and reached the ratchet control on his belt line. He let the safety line run free for a second, then locked it again. They both fell toward the aft end of the ship, then were brought up short by the line. The thin nylon held easily.

"There. I've got it," Ellen said. "I've got my safety line clipped to the pipe support. Here—let out more of your line, and I'll pull you over."

Kevin did as he was told. Seconds later he had a purchase on one of the fuel pipes. He looked up—the forward end of the ship was
up
now, and that was strange, to have a definite up and down. The pipe supports formed a ladder of sorts. It wouldn't be hard to climb back to the regular ladder.

"I guess we're safe," Kevin said.

"Thank God," Seymour said. "You're sure?"

"Yes," Kevin said.

They could still hear Pacifico's screams. His signal was growing weaker as he fell farther and farther behind.

"Pacifico," Ellen called. "Who hired you to sabotage the ship?"

"I didn't do it," Pacifico's voice said. "You've got to come back for me! It's not too late, I can see you, please, my God. Please, please come back for me, I didn't do it, I only wanted to stop this mad—"

His voice faded in and out now. "Come back. Please come back, you can find me, please . . ."

Kevin felt Ellen shudder beside him. He put his arm across her shoulders and felt her trembling. "It's all right," he said. "We're all right now—"

She didn't answer. After a while she pointed up toward the ladder. They began to climb. It seemed to take forever to reach the airlock. They thought they heard the lawyer's screams, ever fainter, the whole time.

The office was Aeneas MacKenzie's only real luxury. It had a real window of thick quartz that overlooked the barren landscape of the Moon, and beyond that the glory of Earth hung suspended in black velvet. He often sat at his desk and stared out at the fragile Earth, a small blue world wrapped in white wispy clouds. He had lived on the Moon for twenty years and would never return to the world of his birth; but he loved Earth, and he missed her.

So little time, he thought. So little time until—he broke off the thought, because he had a vivid imagination, and it would be all too easy to see the fragile Earth covered with pinpoints of brilliant light, lights that would shine more brightly than the Sun until they faded and the ugly mushroom clouds rose through Earth's clean garments.

It would be easy, too, to imagine that he could see beneath the clouds, watch men and women working their lives out to no purpose but continued misery and starvation. That was life now for all too many; in a few years the globe might be covered with people who had nothing left to hope for. Desperation might tempt them to anything.

There were faint sounds in the office: the whine of the air system, the faint rumblings of his miners digging into the lunar regolith, other sounds of construction and expansion; the sounds of success, and they mocked him. The future of Diana Base, and of Earth, did not depend on lunar miners. It depended on hard-eyed men in dark suits who sat in Zurich boardrooms; it depended on the man in the Oval Office in Washington, and another man in the Kremlin, another in Kiev, and a dozen scattered across the Middle East; but mostly it depended on events more than a hundred million miles away, and over those Aeneas had no control.

His reverie was interrupted by a voice in his head. It made no sound, and if there had been anyone in the room with him, they would not have heard it; the implanted transceiver fed directly into his nervous system, and took its instructions from his thoughts. He had lived with the implant for so long that it was part of him. He would have missed it if it did not work; but he had never liked it.