Lunar Descent (13 page)

Lester said nothing. He kneeled and clipped on the ankle-bracelets, which would keep him from bouncing off the floor with each step in one-sixth gee. When he stood up again, another tech was wheeling his suit away to the row of carapaces lined up against a wall, and Smitty was already backing another moondog into a de-suit rack.

He picked up his attaché case and duffel bag and walked across the chill mooncrete floor, passing Tina McGraw as she wormed the rest of the way out of her own hardsuit. He set down his luggage again, unsnapped the unisex urine-collection cup from his groin, and tossed the pissoir into a hamper next to the time clock. His keycard was in a pocket on his right wrist; he pulled it out, passed it in front of the lens of the clock until he heard it beep, then walked toward the open hatch to the narrow tube-shaped passageway to Subcomp A.

Nobody had been waiting to greet him; the two men walking down the passage in front of him and the guy following behind seemed to be keeping their distance.
Uh-huh
, Lester thought as he strode into Descartes Station.
It figures. Now let's see what the locker room is like
.…

The men's locker room was located on the second level of Subcomp A, and could have been transplanted in its entirety from a YMCA in any large city in America, down to the aroma of sweaty socks which permeated the large room.

Rock music from the overhead speakers was all but drowned out by the clamor of moondogs talking and aluminum locker doors being opened and banged shut. CRT's suspended from the low ceiling displayed duty rosters and general announcements; posters of guitar-brandishing rock stars and nude movie starlets were taped to the Mylar-padded walls. The door to the adjacent infirmary was open; inside, a couple of guys were being treated for suit-chafes and minor sprains and bruises. In the shower room at the end of the central aisle, several men were taking lukewarm sponge-baths, rinsing off with quick spurts of cold water from the showerheads. Taped to the door of the women's locker room was a poster of Moon Maid, from the Dick Tracy comic strip; the door cracked open a few inches and a woman with a towel wrapped around her chest peeked through to beg for an extra bar of soap. Whistles and hoots rang through the room; red-faced but grinning good-naturedly, the woman retreated and the door slammed shut.

The camaraderie stopped when Lester reached a short row of lockers, one of which bore the nameplate
GENERAL MANAGER
. As he entered the area, barely anyone noticed, but when he slipped his keycard into the door's slot and tapped his ID number into the keypad, moondogs on either side of him suddenly vanished from sight. He shoved his duffel bag into the locker, changed out of his longjohns, and pulled on the light-blue Skycorp jumpsuit he found inside; someone had at least taken the trouble to put a fresh jumpsuit of his size in the locker. He was uncomfortably aware of men furtively walking past, pausing and casting a quick look in his direction, then hurrying on. No one stopped to introduce themselves; there was no overt hostility, but no welcome either.

As he pulled out a pair of high-top sneakers and shut the locker, he noticed something on the outside of the door which he hadn't seen before: a strip of white plastic tape under the “General Manager” plate, with the name
B. FISK
printed on it. Scrawled in ballpoint pen below the name: “Gone but not forgotten.”

Lester started to reach up to peel off the tape, then thought better of it, and let his hand drop. He could always get rid of the former GM's name, but doing it now might send the wrong message.

He sat down on the bench and began to lace up his shoes. As he fitted the laces through the eyes of the hightops, he overheard two men talking on the other side of the row of lockers:

“Goddamn frigging company. I wonder what this shit's about now.…”

“Yeah. Fuckin' A.…”

“I swear, if they're announcing another slowdown or a bonus squeeze …”

“Fuckin' A, yeah.…”

“I'm gonna quit. I mean it. Call in the Section Four-D clause on the contract and catch the next LTV outta here, man.…”

“Right! Fuckin' A!”

“Yeah. Right after I collect my six-month bonus …”

Another voice entered the conversation as a low, unintelligible murmur. “Where?” the second voice asked. “Over there? Shit!” And suddenly the gripe session came to an end.

Lester stood up, brushed off the seat of his pants, picked up the attaché case, and headed out of the locker room. He followed the corridor through an open hatch and past the infirmary into the office section, located halfway between the mess hall and the rec room. Once again, he noticed the walls: the handprints, the long-since expired tax notices still taped to the walls, the graffiti—“Skycorp Sux”; “Eat my piss-cup”; “Larry + Amad are queers & so are u”; “Vacuum Suckers! Now and Forever!”; “Blow me!” and so forth. There was litter on the floor, some within reach of recycling chutes. At the intersection of two corridors, near the spiral staircase leading into the atrium and down to the underground level of the subcomplex, he observed that the lighting seemed a little darker; stopping and gazing up, he saw that one of the recessed light fixtures was inoperative, bashed in as if someone had recently punched his or her fist through the panel.

As with everything he had seen since he had arrived, Lester silently took note of the damage, adding it to a general pattern of neglect and abuse. Descartes Station hadn't looked this bad even when it was being run by junkies. The base resembled a housing project in an urban combat zone. And the company had sent him here to be the new janitor.…

His office was located at the end of the corridor. Lester paused a moment before the door, which was slightly ajar, then pushed it open, and found a lovely young woman sitting behind his desk with her feet propped up on its plastic top.

“Hi,” she said, smiling serenely at him, then self-consciously swinging her feet down. “I'm Butch … um, Dr. Susan Peterson, senior research scientist. I'm …”

“Right.” Lester walked into the office—
his
office, he reminded himself—allowing the door to stand open behind him. “How did you get in here?” he asked evenly.

“Hmm? Oh. Monk Walker … that's Dr. Walker, our chief physician … has a keycard coded to your lock.”

“Where's Dr. Walker now?” The office was small; he was able to walk to the front of his desk in a couple of strides. He deposited the attaché case flat on the desktop and placed both hands on it. “That's my chair you're sitting in, by the way.”

Peterson raised an eyebrow, but she stood up. “Sorry,” she said, taking a step around his desk, “but it's the only chair in here, and we were waiting for you to show up, so …”

“What makes you think you can come in my office any time you want?” Lester tapped his finger on the desktop. “What makes you think you can put your feet up on my desk?”

Butch Peterson's gaze simmered. “Listen, let's take this one question at a time.…”

“No, Dr. Peterson,” Lester said, “you listen. One, I don't like arriving at my office to find some stranger has broken in. Two, I don't appreciate finding the same stranger sitting in
my
chair, behind
my
desk, as if they own the place. And three, I don't like somebody telling
me
to listen. Now are we straight on all that …?”

Someone behind him cleared his throat. “If you're going to chew out anyone, Mr. Riddell, please let it be me. I'm the one who opened the door and let Butch in.”

Lester turned to find a small man with a close-shaven head and a benign smile standing just outside the door. “You're Dr. Walker?” he asked.

The man nodded briefly. “Yes, I am … but really, we don't go by formal titles here. I'm Monk and she's Butch.” He hesitated, then added, “If you wish, we can call you Mr. Riddell, but we'd prefer to call you Lester. If that's okay with you, of course. May I come in?”

Lester shrugged and sighed in exasperation. “You've already unlocked my door and let yourself in. Why not?” He sat down on the edge of his desk and waved his hand to his computer terminal. “Want me to open up my files for you, too? Or do you already know my password?”

Monk Walker smiled and shook his head as he stepped into the room. “I think we're getting off to a bad start here,” he said gently. “Let's try this again. I apologize for letting Butch in here. It was entirely my idea. I was here myself for a while, but I was summoned to the infirmary to deal with a few minor injuries. Butch said she'd wait here for you. I thought that would be all right, since it was our intention to welcome you to the base, but …”

He held up his hands. “I can see that was a rash decision. We intruded on your privacy. Again, my most sincere apologies. It won't happen again.”

Lester studied the mild little man. He was smooth, well-spoken, and disarming, characteristics, sometimes, of a person who cannot be trusted. Lester had encountered his share of bullshit artists, including some who could charm your wallet right out of your back pocket, but in this case, he could detect nothing but sincerity.

He glanced over his shoulder at Butch Peterson. Her dark, narrow eyes—as a guess, he pegged her heritage as part African-American, part Filipino or Malaysian—still smoldered like blue-hot flames from a camp stove. Yet as she caught his gaze she slowly nodded her head, silently adding her own reticent apology. An attractive woman; he now regretted having snarled at her by way of introduction.

He let out his breath. True, this first encounter was off to a rocky start—but these were the only friendly faces he had met since his arrival at Descartes, and his first impressions of the base had been less than kind. “Apologies accepted,” he said. “And I'm sorry for jumping on you both. It's been a hell of a day.”

Although his chair was now vacant, Lester didn't sit down right away. Instead, his eyes traveled around the tiny office; little more than a closet, really, but more room than in his first “office” at Descartes Station, a tiny screened-off part of the old command module. There were a few pictures on the wall, mostly leftovers from Bo Fisk's tenure, but a couple that dated back to eight years ago: a low-orbit photo of the original base—the huddled row of tunnel-connected modules he remembered all too well—and the photostat of an old
New York Times
newspaper clipping, dry-mounted on a piece of fiberboard, yellow and stained with age. Lester stepped closer, a grin involuntarily spreading across his face as he recognized an old memento.

“Aw, I remember this,” he murmured. “I'd forgotten it was up here.”

“Oh?” Monk rested his back against the door and crossed his arms. “I've seen it many times, but Bo never said anything about it. I thought it was here just because of the headline.”

The story in the clipping was dated November 16, 1989; it was headlined “Moondog Returns From the Hippie Years.” In the photo below was an old man with a flowing white beard, rapping a drumstick against a kettledrum that was almost as big as he was. His closed eyes and solemn face, the black cap and flowing brown robes, gave him the appearance of a medieval mage. The photo was captioned “Moondog at a rehearsal in Brooklyn.”

Still smiling, Lester tapped a finger against the clipping. “When we started the base, when the first crew was here, somebody started referring to us as ‘moondogs'.… I don't know who it was, but it wasn't me. Anyway, it was a good name and it stuck, but although it seemed to ring a bell with everyone, nobody could figure out what it meant.”

“You mean you didn't invent it yourselves?” asked Butch. “I always thought the term originated here.”

“No, it didn't originate here,” Lester replied. “Someone picked it up from someplace, but we couldn't put our finger on where the word came from.” He flashed upon the often-drunken bull sessions in the old wardroom, when the subject of What's a moondog? had arisen time and again during bored conversation, and chuckled. Those were the good times.

“The best we could figure was that it was an archaic term,” he continued. “Something from the sixteenth century, maybe.”

“The clipping …” Monk prompted.

“Well, one of the crew that was here then decided to research the matter,” Lester continued. “Our resident computer jockey used a few hours of Earth-link time to query the Library of Congress and other databases. It took a while, but eventually he tracked down this old news story.” He gazed fondly upon the old man in the picture. “Turned out there was a blind, eccentric musician in the last century nicknamed Moondog. He was a street person in New York. Liked to walk the streets of Manhattan wearing a Viking helmet, but was known locally as an amazing—if weird—symphonic composer. Sort of a Big Apple legend. Even made a few recordings and once conducted the Brooklyn Philharmonic. We had a tape of his music here for a while.… Have they ever played it on your new radio station here?”

“Moondog McCloud play anything but rock or blues?” Butch snorted. “Are you kidding? This is the guy who once played old Frank Zappa tapes for ten hours straight, nonstop.…”

“And the guys here loved it,” Monk finished.

“Yeah, I know what you mean. Too bad that the tape was lost. Anyway, that's the closest we came to figuring out the origin of the word ‘moondog.' We got that guy to generate a photostat of the
Times
story he found that told about Moondog and we …”

Lester's voice trailed off as he recalled the hacker who had made the discovery. Sam Sloane. He had unearthed the original Moondog not long before he was lost while exploring the Descartes region on his own. Sam used to go out on solo excursions to get away from stoned-out wrecks like Lester himself—and he'd suffered a long, lonely death because not one of two dozen moondogs at the old Descartes Station happened to notice that he was long overdue from his EVA. Lester was as much to blame for Sam's death as anyone else, if not more so. He had been the boss back then; it had happened on his watch. If he hadn't been so fucked up …