Maelstrom (22 page)

He heard Van Kessel’s voice say, quite distinctly: “. . . confirming you will receive intercept orbit immediately after Leyland passes perigee. Your rendezvous time now estimated at minus one hour, five minutes.”

I hate to disappoint you, thought Cliff, but that’s one appointment I’ll never keep.

Now the wall of rock was only eighty kilometers away, and each time he spun helplessly around in space to face it, it was fifteen kilometers closer. There was no more room for optimism. He sped more swiftly than a rifle bullet toward that implacable barrier, and it suddenly became of great importance to know whether he would meet it face first, with open eyes, or with his back turned like a coward.

No memories of his past life flashed through Cliff’s mind as he counted the seconds that remained. The swiftly unrolling moonscape rotated beneath him, every detail sharp and clear in the harsh light of dawn. No more than three of his ten-second days were left to him. He was turned away from the onrushing mountains, looking back on the path he had traveled, the path that should have led to Earth, when to his astonishment–

–
the moonscape beneath him exploded in silent flame
. Somewhere behind his back a light as fierce as that of the sun instantly banished the long shadows, struck fire from the crests of the surrounding peaks, rimmed the craters which were spread below him in searing brightness. The light lasted only a fraction of a second, and by the time he had turned toward its source it had faded completely.

Directly ahead of him, only thirty kilometers away, a vast cloud of dust was expanding toward the stars. It was as if a volcano had erupted on the flank of Mount Tereshkova–but that, of course, was impossible. Equally absurd was Cliff’s second thought: that by some fantastic feat of organization and logistics the Farside engineering division had blasted away the obstacle in his path.
For it was gone. A huge, crescent-shaped bite had been taken out of the approaching skyline; rocks and debris were still rising from a crater that had not existed five minutes ago. Only the energy of an atomic bomb, exploded at precisely the right moment in his path, could have wrought such a miracle. And Cliff did not believe in miracles.

The bizarre vision slid from his sight as he twisted away into another revolution. He had come all the way around and was almost upon the mountains when he remembered that all this while there had been a cosmic bulldozer moving invisibly ahead of him. The kinetic energy of the abandoned capsule–many tonnes, traveling at almost a kilometer-and-a-half every second–was quite sufficient to have blasted the gap through which he now flashed. Appalled at the scope of the destruction, Cliff wondered what havoc the impact of the manmade meteor had wrought on Farside Base.

Cliff’s luck held. There was a brief patter of dust particles against his suit, but none punctured it–most of the debris had been propelled outward and forward–and he caught a brief glimpse of glowing rocks and swiftly dispersing smoke falling away beneath him. How strange to see a cloud upon the moon!

Then he was through the western mountains, with nothing ahead but empty black sky. For the moment.

Less than a kilometer away, below and to the left of his path, he saw the track of the electromagnetic launcher whipping past like a picket fence beside a racing car. The launcher was a hairline scribed at great length across the floor of the Mare. Here and there a flash of light and a puff of dust erupted in the regolith below, marking the track of flying debris from the explosion.

Cliff twisted through another lazy revolution and when he came around, half the track was behind him and half still ahead. The twin domes above the most densely inhabited parts of the base flicked away under his feet, well off to his right. Straight ahead of him, fifteen kilometers away, were the hundred silver paraboloids of the antenna farm. Suddenly they lit up with little sparks of light, like a momentary Christmas display. . . .

One more turn. Cliff’s view panned like a camera as the base receded behind him, and if Farside had suffered damage, none was visible in his odd and hasty grab shot. But as his eyes came front again, he was passing directly over the great antennas. They were rimmed in sunlight and seemed as broad and round and structurally sound as ever. But Cliff had just the faintest impression that they had been peppered with something black–

–then he was past them. Were those really black spots on the bright dishes? Or were they holes in the shining aluminum? Those bright sparks . . . The lighter shrapnel from the blast had to go somewhere, and the antennas were directly in harm’s way.

“Leyland, come in. Leyland, do you read?”

 

Cliff was suddenly conscious that Van Kessel’s voice had been sounding in his ears for several seconds now. “This is Leyland. I hear you. I hear you.”

 

There was just the briefest hesitation before Van Kessel said, even more gruffly than before, “It’s about time. Take it you’re all right?”

 

“Fine. Under the circumstances,” said Cliff. “Was that bit of fireworks part of the plan all along?”

 

“Frankly I didn’t think it was a good idea to lay it out for you too plainly, Leyland. The whole thing was a long shot.”

 

“Yes, I gather.”

Van Kessel’s tone shifted; he was strictly business now. “While we’ve got you in line-of-sight: in less than an hour you’ll rendezvous with the tug
Callisto
out of L-1. They’ll send a man out on a long tether to grab you. Be aware that there will still be some delta-vee. It should be an easy catch, but for God’s sake pay attention and don’t mess up the contact. Because this really will be your last chance.”

“Don’t worry, Van Kessel, I won’t mess it up. And thanks.”

 

“Don’t mention it,” Van Kessel said. “By the way, if you think you’ve got any panic left in you, you better close your eyes now. . . .

Cliff was coming around to another head-on confrontation with the lunar mountains, this time the eastern rim of the Mare Moscoviense. He had not really forgotten them, but neither had he really wanted to think about them; they loomed as high, as ominous as the western rim, and suddenly his heart was racing again. What would clear the way for him this time?

He was a fragile spacesuited human hurtling toward the sheer, falsely soft cliffs. Surely he would strike the rim. . . . But this time there was no Mount Tereshkova to bar the way. Cliff flicked past the jagged rim with tens of meters to spare.

A moment later he resumed something like his regular breathing. “One more surprise, Van Kessel, and I swear I’ll strangle you.”

 

“No more surprises, Leyl–” Then Van Kessel’s hearty voice was swallowed by interference as Cliff passed into the radio shadow of the eastern rim.

Cliff wasted no anxiety on the loss of radio contact. Somewhere up there among the stars, an hour in the future along the beginning of his second orbit, a tug would be waiting to meet him. But there was no hurry now; he had escaped from the maelstrom. For better or worse, he had been granted the gift of life.

And when he had finally climbed aboard that tug he could make that second call to Earth, to that woman, his wife, who was still waiting in the African night.
XIII

The usual shuttles and tugs took more than a week to reach the L-1 transfer station from low Earth orbit, but a Space Board cutter on an emergency run could make the distance in a day. Sparta’s cutter shut down its plasma torch and sidled up to a ramshackle collection of cylinders and struts and solar panels. The airlock popped and Sparta went through the docking tube into the station, towing two duffel bags behind her. Her ears were ringing and she had a headache that threatened to push her eyes out of her head.

“Welcome, Inspector Troy. I’m Brick, Security.” Brick was black, North American-born like Sparta but with the physical grace of a man who’d spent his life in space.

 

She let the duffels float while she touched his hand lightly, hovering in the cylindrical, padded gate area. “Mr. Brick.”

 

Only a flicker of his lashes betrayed his surprise at her youth and slight build. “Do you want to see Leyland right away?”

 

“I need to get my bearings first. Is there somewhere we can talk?”

“My office. Give me that–so you’ll have a hand to steer with.” He took one of her bags and set off toward the core of the station. They squeezed past other station workers, coming and going. Many of L-1’s inhabited areas were interconnecting steel and fiberglass cylinders, the original fuel-tank casings from which the station had been built fifty years earlier. “This your first visit?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Yes, and not just to L-1. It’s my first trip to the moon.”

 

“But you’re one of, what, only nine people ever to land on the surface of Venus?”

 

“Not a distinction I was seeking.”

 

“Quite a piece of work, if half the viddie stories are true.”

 

“Less than half,” she said. “Tell me something about L-1, Mr. Brick.”

 

“You want the standard spiel, or are you changing the subject so I’ll shut up?”

 

“I’m serious.”

“Okay, the standard spiel. Back in the 1770s, Joseph Louis Lagrange was studying the so-called three-body problem, and he discovered that in a system of two masses orbiting each other–the Earth and the moon, say– there would be certain points in space around them of gravitational stability, such that an object placed there would tend to remain.” Brick paused. “Stop me if you’ve heard all this before.”
“A long time ago. I can use the refresher.”

“Okay, three of these so-called Lagrangian points lie on the axis between the two masses and are only partially stable: an object at one of these points–us, for example–if disturbed along the axis, would tend to fall. In our case, toward the Earth or the moon. Two other points, lying on the smaller mass’s orbit around the larger but sixty degrees ahead and behind, are very stable indeed. These points, L-4 and L-5, are some of the most valuable ‘real estate’ in Earth-moon space.”

“The space settlements.”

 

“Yes. Of course because of the sun’s influence, the settlements don’t sit right on L-4 and L-5, they follow orbits around them.”

 

“So the Earth and the sun orbit each other, the moon and the Earth orbit each other, and the L-5 settlement orbits L-5. Orbits on orbits on orbits.”

“Yeah, Ptolemy called them epicycles, but these are real, not imaginary. They give shape to space. L-3 is on the opposite side of the Earth from the moon and is of no use to anybody, but L-1 and L-2, the quasi-stable Lagrangian points near the moon, are different. Here at L-1, with a little maneuvering fuel, we maintain a strategic position smack above the center of the Nearside. That’s where most of the lunar population is, especially at Cayley. We monitor surface and cislunar navigation and communications. L-2, beyond the moon, was well situated for the transfer of lunar building materials from the mines of Cayley when they were building L-5.”

“Was?”

 

“That station was mostly dismantled when the heavy work at L-5 was finished. When they built the launcher at Farside Base, the spider webs from L-2 were moved here.”

 

“The spider webs?”

 

“Come over here.”

 

He led her to the nearest thick glass port in the cylindrical station wall. She could see, silhouetted against the stars, two huge, delicate-seeming structures, strange tangles of rails and webbing.

“Basically, they’re big cargo nets. You see, we’re about half an orbit away from the Farside launcher. They shoot up a dead load and it gets here going about 200 meters per second. Radar tracks it in and those nets whip around the tracks and grab it out of space and slow it down so it can be unloaded. Sixty nets on each set of tracks. Real Rube Goldberg, aren’t they? They had five sets at L-2, working around the clock, grabbing moon rocks shot up from Cayley. They were always getting tangled, so a couple were always out of commission. We don’t handle nearly as much cargo, mostly liquid oxygen and ice from the mines at Farside.” He turned from the window. “So, at the moment we’re the moon’s only space station. Everything goes through here, up and down. Including illegal drugs. Sometimes I think,
especially
drugs.” Brick led Sparta through several more right-angle turns in narrow corridors to a cramped office with curving walls, his own; it took up a quarter of a slice through one of the cylinders. “Tiny, but it’s got a great view. Any more questions I can answer?”

“What shape was Leyland in when he got to you?”

“Pretty cheerful. The skipper of the tug said he chattered for a couple of hours. Couldn’t sleep, just wanted to talk. He gave him a physical when he arrived and found him in excellent shape, nothing in his system that wasn’t supposed to be there.”

“Who has he talked to?”

“Crew of the
Callisto
, me. Other than official business he’s been incommunicado. Except I let him talk to his wife. We clamped a command-channel coder on that so he could get through without every viddie reporter in the solar system listening in.”

“Good. I assume you listened in, though.”

 

“Standard operating procedure.”

 

“And?”

 

Brick shrugged. “No new facts. His mood was relief–and maybe a little guilt. Nothing he said. The way he said it.”

 

“Just a
little
guilt?”

 

“That’s right, Inspector. He didn’t sound like a man who’d just been caught carrying half a kilo of very expensive white powder in the thigh pocket of his spacesuit.”

 

“What was the analysis?”

 

“Gabaphoric acid.”

 

“That’s a new one to me.”

“Fairly new to us, too. Made on L-5, most likely. Apparently very popular on the moon. Keeps you happy as a clam for six months or so. Then your hippocampus turns to oatmeal–couldn’t recognize your own mother. We’ve had two cases like that.”

“Why was he smuggling it
off
the moon?” “Mmm.” Brick spread the fingers of one hand and bent them down with the other, one by one, as he ticked off the possibilities. “Because he’s hooked on the stuff and doesn’t have a source on Earth. Because whoever was using him as a mule paid him off in kind. Because they wanted him to open a new market Earthside . . .” Brick hesitated.