Island Worlds (11 page)

They passed through a gap in a low ridge and then were looking out onto a broad plain flooring an ancient crater. One high wall of cliffs on the edge of the crater was studded with lights. "That's Armstrong!" Thor said.

"Of course it's Armstrong, you dummy," Mike said disgustedly. "You want to get off Luna, don't you? Well you need a spaceport for that." He drove the buggy onto a crushed-gravel road slanting down the low crater wall. "Amateurs," Mike groused. "I hate dealing with amateurs!" Thor decided to keep his mouth shut from then on. As they crossed the crater floor, a spidery landing craft descended to the floor on a plume of white-hot gas. It settled onto a pad and was lowered beneath the lunar surface.

Instead of heading for the airlocks of the main facility, to which Thor had always returned from his outings, Mike steered for a long row of utility locks near the landing pads. This area was a warren of old warehousing caves, tunnels, abandoned military facilities and other derelict structures. Even the short history of lunar settlement had been sufficient to produce this tangle of semi-abandoned facilities, and Thor suspected that some of the confusion was deliberate. He had studied several maps of this region, and all of them were mutually contradictory.

They passed through an airlock hatch with a number code painted on its face, over several earlier generations of numbers. The machinery was antiquated but well-maintained. Good machinery would last nearly forever on Luna, free from the corrosive effects of an atmosphere and its attendant moisture and microorganisms. Mike left the buggy in the lock and Thor unshipped his kit bag as the inner hatch cycled open. He followed Mike into a long, featureless corridor carved roughly out of the lunar rock and both men pulled off their helmets. Mike was the scar-faced redhead who had sat at the table near Thor and Shaw in the Earth-light room.

They passed into a room where silent men were working busily, packing things into crates and bundles. Thor and Mike climbed out of their suits and Mike called one of the men aside. "Get all the ID numbers off this suit," he held up the suit Thor had been wearing, "and sell it over in Armstrong or someplace." He flashed Thor a very brief, gap-toothed grin. "Moonsuit won't do you no good where we're going. You'll need a rockjumper suit out there."

They passed through a maze of tunnels and rooms. Mike seemed to navigate by cryptic marks painted on the walls in a multitude of colors. Then they were in Warehouse 17. Thor knew that this was a private facility rented by one of the outerworld transportation concerns. "Put your bag there," Mike said, pointing to a wheeled cart stacked with personal kit bags. Thor tossed his on the top of the heap and followed Mike into a small room opening off the main warehouse area. To his surprise, it was a small bar. The tables were thinly occupied by spacers and dock workers, and a few people were playing electronic games at the bar, with the loser paying for the drinks. Mike strode to the rear of the room.

"Here he is, Boss," Mike said.

Martin Shaw looked up from the table where he sat with the other man Thor had seen in the Earthlight Room, the dark one with the stubble of hair and beard. "Have a seat, Taggart," he invited. Thor and Mike both sat.

"You disappoint me, Mr. Shaw," Thor said.

"How so?"

"Well, first the Earthlight Room, now this." He waved at the busy warehouse facility beyond the barroom door. "It's all kind of mundane. The holos back home all have people like you operating out of freewheeling buccaneer ports and clandestine landing sites, not using legitimate facilities."

Shaw showed the very faintest of smiles. "What do they know of people like me? Besides, hidden ports may sound romantic, but the idea is impracticable. There are damn near a century's worth of spy satellites orbiting around this rock. A kid couldn't launch a toy rocket out away from the settlements without something picking it up. No, smugglers have always known that even better than clandestine ports are ports with a large volume of legitimate traffic, so large that official inspection is perfunctory at best. And best of all is official cooperation."

"People are packing up here to leave," Thor said. "Is that why the short notice I got?" A little, wheeled robot waiter came by the table and Thor punched an order.

The drink was duly delivered up from the robot's innards, in an inelegant but unbreakable plastic tube.

"You keep your eyes open," Shaw admitted. "Yes, I'm closing down lunar operations. It's been good here, but the new laws are cracking down hard. Mike will stay back to close down our facilities and sell off everything we're not taking with us. I've decided to clear out now, before they shut off all our exits. Some of my competitors are staying around. People are getting desperate to get out and are paying high prices. That's acting greedy and they're going to regret it. They'll be caught when the net goes out." Shaw seemed to be much more relaxed than the last time Thor had seen him, almost friendly. Perhaps the decision to pack up and go had relieved him of a lot of tension.

"So you think the isolationists and Earth Firsters are going to win?" Thor asked.

"They've won," Shaw said. "They won years ago, but most people are just waking up to it. I saw it coming long before I left Earth. The signs were all there."

Thor nodded, thinking of his casual, popular-media survey. "I know, but they were pretty subtle signs."

Shaw shook his head gently. "Only if you weren't paying attention. Most people weren't. But I was a political activist. Unfortunately, most of my fellow radicals were unable to see beyond their short-term goals. They wanted things better for Singapore, or Zanzibar, or wherever, and to hell with the rest of the world. They picked easy targets like old, bankrupt colonial powers, and big, exploitative corporations. All they wanted to do was drain wealth from some other part of the world to support their own. They talked about saving humanity, but their goals were always limited and local."

"So you headed out," Thor said.

"I was transported," Shaw corrected him, "as I'd planned. Out here, a revolutionary can do some real liberating. We have a long trip coming up. I'll give you some of my work to read along the way. It's not the kind of education you get at Yale."

The man was such a classic pirate chief that it seemed odd to think of him writing political tracts. Yet, how much did he know of Shaw? It was plain that he was a many-faceted man. It would not do to take him at face value. "Do we leave soon?"

"In about an hour. Lazlo here is going with us. Here's your documents." He slid a crystal carrier across the table. "You're going up as a trained vacuum-welder on a three-year contract, along with about a hundred other workers and immigrants. Around half of them really are what they claim."

"Half!" Thor said. "You mean the other half are all illegal?"

"Right around that," Shaw affirmed.

"Is that because of the new laws?"

"No. For the last six decades, at least one third to one half of all outerworld immigrants have been illegal political refugees, escaped convicts, absconding embezzlers, crooks not wanting to face investigations, cashiered military personnel, disgraced younger sons, and just plain cantankerous sons of bitches who don't care to be registered and tracked by various governments. You name it, and chances are good that it's taken the low road to the outerworlds."

"Then the population out there—" visions leaped into Thor's dazzled mind.

"That's right," Shaw nodded. "It's more than twice what the official figures say, a fact that's going to cause Earth authority some real problems one of these days."

A loud bong reverberated through the facility, followed by an artificial female voice. "Passenger freighter L-96 boarding in five minutes." The message was repeated twice more.

"That's your shuttle," Shaw said. "But you won't be going up the regular passenger tube. Mike will take you in a supply van through another check point where one of the guards works for us. That ID won't get you past the passenger check. Our service rocket will take you off the Moon and transfer you to the shuttle in orbit before it reaches the space station. From there, you will be able to board my ship without problem. See you up there."

They shook hands and Mike led him to an obscure corner of the warehouse, where he climbed into the enclosed van amid a pile of unidentifiable gear. Locked inside, he thought of the risk he was taking. What was to keep Shaw from cycling him into space without a suit? Nothing, obviously. But then, Shaw impressed him as something far more than a mere profit-oriented bandit. Besides, had he intended treachery, Mike could simply have killed him and left him out on the lunar surface. So little of the Moon was actually used that a body could lie in the open for centuries without being discovered. He felt vibrations and bumps as the van's module was dismounted and put into the hold of the freighter.

Thor leaned back against a wall of the module, feeling cramped and claustrophobic. Something dug into his back and he switched on his portable light and turned to see what it was. A small, dogged hatch was fitted into the wall. It had no handle on this side and it had been one of the metal dogs that had bothered him. He wondered what a hatch was doing in such an odd location and he had no doubt that it was for some nefarious purpose. After all, he had to get out of this box somehow, and he certainly couldn't walk out through the broad front door into an unpressurized hold.

Sitting tensely in the dark, he felt the vibration and the mild acceleration of takeoff, then freefall. He closed his eyes and managed to doze for a while. A sound jerked him awake and he scrambled to the little hatch. As he had suspected, the dogs were turning. Involuntarily, he held his breath as the hatch began to open. He had a moment of panic as the pressure dropped and his ears popped, but the lowering of pressure was slight. A man wearing a respirator stuck his head through the hatch and waved urgently for Thor to come with him. Thor wormed his way through the hatch and found himself in a short, plastic umbilical tube, apparently part of some escape system leading from the hold to the ship proper.

At the end of the tube, he was pulled into a chamber about the size of the average shower stall. "Fast, into here." The man's voice was muffled by the respirator. He hustled Thor from the little room and into a much larger chamber, crowded with couches in which dozens of men, women and children were strapped. Nobody paid any attention as the man strapped Thor into an unoccupied couch. From the look of their pale, queasy faces, Thor figured that they had woes of their own to worry about. This bunch hadn't been out from Earth long, and they were still suffering from space sickness.

After a few minutes, the same man returned and strapped a man and a woman into other empty couches. Apparently, Thor was not the only passenger enjoying the Shaw cargo express on this flight. A boy of about ten turned and looked at Thor mournfully from a higher tier to his right. "They said free-fall was gonna be fun! First I spend all my time throwing up, and now I'm over that, they keep me strapped in this chair! This ain't fun!" The boy's indignation was truly massive.

"There's plenty of time for that," Thor assured him. "They'll turn you loose in the passenger ship."

"They better," the boy vowed. Sometime later, attendants unstrapped the passengers from their couches and conducted them into a space station that was crowded with emigrants from all nations. This was just a staging area, little more than a warehouse for human cargo, and little had been wasted on comfort or conveniences for those passing through. Thor spent four miserable hours, feeling grubby and unshaven. It had been a long time since he had left his room at the Hilton.

A wizened little black man in the space station's uniform floated up to him. "You Taggart?" he asked.

"That's right," Thor said.

"They'll be calling for people to board the Spartacus in less'n an hour. That's your ship."

"Thanks," Thor said, but the man was already floating away. From a nearby machine he took a freefall bulb of hot coffee. At least his stomach was making the transition from weak gravity to no gravity without mishap. The call for boarding the Spartacus came, and attendants efficiently herded the emigrants into the umbilicus connecting ship to station. As each entered, a crewman checked a name off his list. They were then conducted into the passenger compartment.

"Hold" would be a better word for it, Thor thought. He surveyed the cavernous chamber, crudely partitioned into cubicles with struts and thin plastic sheeting. Each cubicle held four emigrants, although, if desired, sheets could be removed to make room for larger families. The facilities were Spartan in the extreme, but that had been the tradition of emigrant vessels throughout history. A ship's officer was delivering a safety and emergency procedures lecture when Thor felt a touch at his elbow. It was Shaw, now wearing a freefaller's coverall, studded with rings, snap hooks and friction fasteners.

"Come on, Taggart," he said. "I'll show you my ship."

"I could use a bath and a shave first," Thor said.

"Get used to it. You think this is a luxury liner? This is a thirty-year-old freighter sold off by McNaughton when they laid in a new fleet ten years back. Strictly no-frills. We have a chemical bath you can use later on. It's not very satisfactory but your fellow passengers won't be in any better condition." The walls were covered with spongy material and Shaw pulled himself along from the hold into a long tunnel by a series of soft handholds.

"Which way are we going?" Thor asked. "I'm disoriented."

"Aft. I'm going to check the engines now. The control room is the other direction, forward. We're on auto now, just one crewman on watch to keep track of the computers."

"Are we going to get any gravity?" Thor asked.

Shaw laughed derisively. "This ship was made for cargo, not for comfort. No spin. You'll adapt. Once you're used to zero-gee, even a slight artificial gravity is uncomfortable. By the time we reach Avalon, you'll have a spaceman's stomach."

"When do we arrive?" They had reached a hatch blazing with warning signs and Shaw began to key a code onto its lock-plate.