Lunar Descent (23 page)

Willard DeWitt, sitting behind his desk in his niche, shuffles through a stack of printout next to his Toshiba laptop, scanning information he has already collected and collated over the past couple of weeks. He absently curls his lower lip between his thumb and index fingers. Ah, yes. Most interesting indeed.

DeWitt has been up all night, working through the graveyard shift on his secret plans; he's ready to turn in and catch a few hours of sleep before reporting in at MainOps for duty on the second shift. But his mind continues to work, spinning along the endless permutations of his scheme. He'll stay awake for a little while longer. He turns back to his keyboard and scrolls to the end of the file to enter some new data. At the top of the screen is printed the filename for his latest entrepreneurial endeavor:
MOONTUNES
.…

…
And to really put the cherry on the sundae, there's a new security chief up here. Her name is McGraw
—
nicknamed Quick-Draw, get it
?—
and she seems to regard herself as The Law up here, meaning that she's a pain in the ass. We weren't even sure whether she was a man or a woman when she first showed up … there's something weirdly androgynous about the way she walks, talks, etc., like a bull dyke who was once a national champion on the mud-wrestling circuit
.

The funniest part is her uniform: a dark-blue NASA Space Enforcement Division outfit with a straight black clip-on tie (a tie! Can you believe it?) with every zipper and snap spit-polished and perfectly in place, badge pinned just above the left breast pocket (though she really doesn't have any breasts to speak of), ankle-weights at precise height on her boots, cap set on her head with the bill exactly straight ahead, never tipped back or pulled forward. And her belt! She's always got a riot-stick, Taser, Mace and tear-gas dispensers, first-aid kit, two (count 'em, two) sets of handcuffs, beltphone, flashlight, utility knife, emergency oxygen mask, dosimeter, lock-remover, universal keycard, and God knows what else stashed in the pouches (we're betting a suicide pill, in case we get invaded by aliens). She clanks when she walks down the corridor—like Clint Eastwood, Batman, and your cousin Darienne all rolled into one. Weirder than shit, man
.

But McGraw's all right in some ways. One of the gays—yeah, we got a few up here, but they're all right—told me that she caught him and his friend going at it in the storeroom. He was giving head to his boyfriend when she walked in, and all she did was give 'em a lecture about safe sex and hand Mike a condom (from the pouch on her belt, of course). “I'm glad she didn't make a scene about it,” he told me, “but do you know how nasty those things taste
?”

Tycho Samuels, encased in his hardsuit, stands in the Number Two airlock and waits patiently until the cell decompresses. The status-light over the hatch switches from amber to green; after a quick glance at the digital pressure gauge to make certain that the airlock is in hard vacuum, he grasps the lockbar between his gauntleted fists, yanks it down, and shoves the hatch open.

Beyond the hatch, caught in the shadowless glare of the scaffold-mounted floodlights, is the Moon. Within the privacy of his helmet, Tycho's face breaks into a seldom-seen smile. This is the part of the job he loves the most: stepping
out there
for the first time each day. The strange, pitted landscape below his feet, Earth hovering high above his head …

This is what he came here to find. Its harsh beauty is indescribable; he has tried to put it in words, in his letters to his father back in Nashville, but writing is a skill he has never mastered. But it's a world away from the Jefferson Street projects where he was born and raised; even if he goes back there, he intuitively knows that he will never be the same again.

Tycho steps out onto the Moon, heading for the rover which will take him out to his job at the mass-driver plant … then, impulsively, he bends his knees, swings back his arms, and leaps into the starlighted sky, just the way he used to jump-shoot on the basketball court in his old neighborhood. Straining against his bulky suit, he stretches out a hand and, for just a brief second, touches the blue-green face of the Earth.

Yeah! Dunk-shot! Tycho scores another two points! And the crowd goes wild.…

…
You should see what Earth looks like from up here. You wouldn't believe it. I'll send pictures
.

Love, as always
…

11. Wang Dang Doodle

First-shift began much like any other: in the EVA ready-room, the last few moondogs squirmed and grunted into their sour-smelling hardsuits, waited for the suit techs to check them over, slam shut their back hatches, and wave them along into the line in front of the airlocks. Outside the base, they climbed onto the beds of rovers—shoving against each other for room, swearing at the long-suffering driver, guts roiling from yet another tasteless powdered-eggs-reconstituted-hashbrowns-and-freeze-dried-sausage breakfast hastily shoveled down in the mess deck. Finally the rovers started up and began crawling out to the regolith fields a quarter of a mile away.

The habitat slowly receded in the distance; narrow slits of light from the windows cast long shadows from the nearby fuel tanks and the antenna grove. Floodlights on the landing pads reflected dully off the hulls of spacecraft being worked on by the pad rats. The rovers paused next to the long aluminum rails of the mass-driver, stretching toward the western horizon, to let off a few workers; out behind the rim of Spook Crater to the south, they could see the faint glow of the searchlights on the twin SP-100 nuclear reactors at the bottom of the crater. It was nothing they hadn't seen before; they bumped along in the back of the rover, gripping the bed rail for support, and mentally counted the days until they could get the hell off the Moon.

Over their suit radios, if they switched to Channel Four and pinned the cross-talk switch on Channel Two so that they could still hear one another, LDSM played the blues: “Wang Dang Doodle,” Willie Dixon's ferocious growl coming through the headsets, talking about drinking and brawling down at the local union hall.

Out in the regolith fields, the lights of vehicles slowly roamed across a terrain that vaguely resembled furrowed New England pasture land covered by the first heavy snow of winter. Rovers shuttled men back and forth, bulldozers shoved rocks and boulders aside, immense caterpillar-treaded combines scooped up the tough regolith and deposited the powdery fines into the bins of tractors—to be taken back to the Dirt Factory at the base for processing for oxygen, aluminum, and silicon—leaving behind straight low hedgerows of coarser till-soil.

Beneath the untwinkling starlight, hidden from the Sun, men and machines labored against the ancient topsoil deposited by millennia of meteorite impact and tectonic movement, gradually stretching the expanse of worked-over ground further north, stripmining the rich highlands foot by foot. Dust thrown up by the mining operations lingered above the ground; it gave the fields a perpetual gauzelike haze which coated their white suits with a gray film, making it necessary for everyone to stop now and then to rub the tips of their gloves across their faceplates to clear their vision.

“Christ, I love this job.” Mighty Joe tamped the last knotty bud of his private stash of California sinsemilla into the battered mini-waterpipe he had carried with him since his Navy days and fumbled in a hipside cargo pocket for a lighter. “Y'know that, Seki? I fuckin' love this job.”

“Yeah, uh-huh. I love this job too.” Seki Koyama reached up to the little Sony radio suspended by its strap over his driver's seat and turned down the volume a tad. Through the narrow windows of the combine's pressurized compartment, he could see a 'dozer struggling to move a boulder out of his way. He downshifted to first gear and touched the lobe of his headset. “C'mon, Jenny, get that thing outta there already,” he muttered. A pause, then he added, “Any time and any place, but move the rock first, okay?”

“Don't worry about it.” Mighty Joe held the pipe steady against the sudden forward lurch of the massive vehicle. A tiny speck of marijuana was knocked loose from the pipe's lip and slowly fell toward the floor between his knees; he reached down and caught it before it landed. “No, I mean it. I love having to sneak out in a suit just to smoke a little weed. I love having Quick-Draw kick down my niche door to look for drugs when I'm trying to sleep … and I'm telling you, I really enjoy the presence of your company.”

“Just light the thing, willya? Damn, what takes her so long?” Koyama shifted to neutral, almost causing Joe's helmet to topple from its perch on the sill above the dashboard. “Might as well,” he said, shoving the helmet back in place before it fell. “Gives us a little time to enjoy the last of your stash.” The Japanese-American combine operator inched back his bucket seat a little and loosened the harness. “That
is
the last of it, right?”

“Sad to say, it most certainly is. Treasure it.” Mighty Joe nicked on the butane lighter, held it over the pipe's bowl and gently baked the nub as he sucked on the stem. He took a big hit of the acrid smoke—the pot was more than three months old, hardly fresh at all—and held it in his lungs as he capped the bowl with his thumb and passed it to Seki. He half-closed his eyes and waited till his chest felt like it was ready to explode, then slowly exhaled, letting out a pale stream of smoke, which swirled around the tiny cabin and was promptly sucked through the vent above their heads.

Pretty soon we're going to be scraping the residue from this thing's air-filter and trying to smoke that
, Joe thought.
Goddamn Skycorp. Goddamn NASA
. It had been six weeks since he had crashed the
Dreamer
. Although he and his crew still had their jobs, it had definitely been the end of the party for their smuggling operation. Even if he wanted to attempt getting more dope up here, he couldn't pull it off. Their Cape Canaveral connection had fallen to the feds, and even though Fast Eddie had managed to get away from the NASA investigators, he was unwilling to risk his neck again for a good long time, if ever. The Skycorp inspectors had discovered the pot crop being cultivated in the greenhouse during the purge, and Quick-Draw had been making regular searches of the hydroponics tanks to make certain the new farmers hadn't gotten any frisky ideas. Unless someone else had their own stash hidden somewhere, this was the last marijuana to be found on the Moon.

“Oh, yeah!” Seki exclaimed. The Willie Dixon tune had made a clean segue into the bump-and-grind of the Doors' “Road-house Blues” and Seki reached to turn up the volume. “My theme song,” he said, exhaling through his nose and passing the pipe back to Mighty Joe. “‘Keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the
wheee-ahl,'
wah-
wahh
!” he sang off-key, slapping his bare hands on the thighs of his suit.

“Like the Doors, huh?” Mighty Joe said as he took a last hit and clamped his thumb and forefinger over the bowl and stem to extinguish the pipe. Seki only needed a hit to get him high, and Joe's pot was precious enough to have him stretch the load. “McCloud's got something about the oldies. Sometimes I wish he would play some more new stuff.”

“Fuck all the new stuff. I'm telling you, rock died in '11 when the Beat Snails broke up. But Jim Morrison … man, that's my favorite person in history.” Seki rocked his head back and forth with his eyes closed as his palms kept time with the music. “Y'know, they said that he didn't really die back then? Did you ever hear that story?”

“Yeah, I heard that.” Joe found the film capsule where he had tucked it in the crotch of his suit and began to tap the dregs of the pipe into it. “Naw, he didn't die,” he went on. “At least not when everyone said he did. He ran a seafood joint down in Florida till he died.…”

He stopped to search his memory. “Three or four years ago, I think. Yeah. Just before I signed on with Skycorp.”

“Aw, come off it.…”

Mighty Joe shook his head. “No, I'm not kidding. Jim Morrison was this crazy old dink who ran a beachside seafood shack on Captiva Island, where I used to live. A hangout for the locals, right? He had this recipe for Cajun-style steamed shrimp that would make your eyes water.…”

Koyama laughed. “Can't be the same Jim Morrison.…”

“Sure was. Sometimes on Saturday nights he'd get plowed and bring out this beat-up old Les Paul guitar he kept in the storeroom, sit down at one of the picnic tables outside and start banging out Doors numbers for us. ‘L.A. Woman,' ‘People Are Strange,' ‘Horse Latitudes,' ‘20th Century Fox' … maybe you'd think he was putting you on at first, but when you heard that voice you
knew
it was him.”

“You're a liar.”

“Seriously. Then he would tell us again how he had faked the whole death scene in Paris 'cause he was sick of doing concerts and the press and shit. All that Lizard King crap, the cops always on him 'cause he had flashed his dick once during a show … he'd had enough, that's all.” Joe unsnapped a pocket on his suit and thrust the pipe and his minuscule stash back into it. “We kept trying to talk him into jamming with one of the local bands, just so's we'd get to hear ‘The End' done properly, but he wouldn't have none of it. Nice old' fart, even if he did steal my girlfriend.”

Seki cracked up. “Ah,
c'mon
! He would have been in his nineties.”

“Shit, that didn't stop him. I'm telling you, Old Jim was the sex dynamo of the Gulf Coast. He was bedding ladies young enough to be his granddaughter and they'd always come back the next day saying that he was the greatest lay of their lives. My girlfriend told me he'd …”

“Shh!” Seki suddenly signaled Joe to quiet down as he cupped his right hand over his headset. He listened for a second, then solemnly looked askance at Mighty Joe. “Umm, roger, we copy that, MainOps, he's right here with me … brought out some coffee just a few minutes ago.”