Moon Zero Two (3 page)

I mumbled something. And I found myself thinking about Otto again. Miss Taplin shifted resentfully in her seat. Well, if she wanted a tourist guide she should pay for one. It wasn’t my line.

Suddenly, crossly, she said: “Did you just get bad news or something?”

“Friend of mine got killed.”

She was immediately contrite. “I’m sorry. I... what happened?”

“Crashed a space ferry.”

“Oh. The sort of thing that goes around to Farside? The sort of thing
you
do?”

“Well, not crashing them,” I said. “Not yet.”

“I didn’t mean... I mean, I’m sorry.”

She wasn’t having much of a ride, poor kid. I shook myself out of the depression. You took risks, you lived with them; and you died with them. Happened all the time. No point in trying to infect anyone else with the glooms. Not much point in any of it, anyway.

I started to describe the things we were passing. The monument where the first lunar landing had been made, half a century back. And where they dug the first mine. The mountain power cable, the clifftop observatory, the dent where a meteorite had wiped out the earliest hotel, before men learned to make more sensible use of the sheltering crater rims and fissures.

The car swung around a tight curve and the cliff face opened a black mouth. We plunged in and through. Miss Taplin grabbed my arm, then let go and gave me a sheepish smile. She had nice long, firm fingers. And her smile was quite something, even when it wavered like that.

Playing the part of the imperturbable spacehand for all I was worth, I said: “All right, we’re inside now. City Crater. And there’s the big city for you.”

The cluster of domes swelled as we approached, and separated out into individual bubbles. The power station glinted, turning one of its vast sun-traps slowly as we sped past. Sunlight would be converted into electricity, and filtered rays would be guided through the vast subterranean complex of food processing plants, atmospheric generators and hydroponics farms. One stroke of good fortune had been the discovery of the great ice mine a mile down. Melted into water, it gave us drink. Broken into oxygen, it helped no end with the breathing.

Miss Taplin was-saying: “You get fourteen days sunlight, then fourteen days night. That’s right, isn’t it?”

Good girl. She must have been reading the spaceline
brochure they handed out along with the anti-G pills and the vomit disposal chute connectors.

“Right,” I said.

“How do you get used to it?”

“You don’t. You stay indoors and work on the Earth clock. You couldn’t stay awake fourteen days and then sleep and then... well, you couldn’t stay awake.”

We were descending in a long spiral. Another dark hole yawned in front of us and then there was the channel of subdued lights like a dimmed flarepath guiding us into the terminal.

“Funny to think there’s no air outside,” she said. “Nobody can ever just open a window, or stroll out, or feel rain on their faces.”

“We’re all foreigners up here,” I said. “We always will be.”

The train slowed in beside the platform. The mechanical unloaders began to click rhythmically. Porters hauled bags over to where passengers were already fussing and fidgeting. They had come way across the void from Earth to the Moon, and no sooner were they safely landed than they started twitching the way they’d do at any decrepit run-of-the-mill airport in New York, London, or Amsterdam.

Miss Taplin wasn’t so much concerned with her luggage right now. She looked along the platform and then through the arch into the concourse, trying to spot her brother.

I wanted a drink. But I didn’t like just to saunter off and leave her.

Finally, when I thought it was time she faced a few unpleasant facts, I said: “No luck?”

“No.” She forced a smile. “But he’s never been on time yet.”

“Let’s try the hotel.”

“But which hotel? I haven’t heard from him since his cable three months ago, and he didn’t say...”

She had come a long way on a slender invitation. Or that was how it sounded to me. But I took her arm and steered her across the concourse.

“This is a small town,” I said. “We have to make do with only the best.”

We went up the tunnel labeled MOON HILTON.

The hotel lobby was designed in bright, clamorous primitive style. The clashing colors of the glass bricks provided a garish contrast to the black and white Moonscape outside. You might have thought the whole thing was the work of some gifted, manic native—only there weren’t any lunar natives.

In the center of the hall, belted in by a circular seat, a slowly revolving globe of the Moon winked with little informative lights. Miss Taplin let herself be hypnotized by it while I went to inquire at the desk.

No, there had been no reservations for a Wallace Taplin. No reservations, no messages, nothing.

I went to break the news to her. “He could just be late,” I said. There were one hell of a lot of things that could make a man late getting around the Moon. Or that could stop him getting here at all.

“When’s the next train?” she asked. “The next train in from... well, wherever?”

I kept it gentle when explaining that we didn’t go in for railway networks up here. The Monorail between city and spaceport was all we had to offer. If her brother was coming in from Farside he would have to travel either by a space ferry like mine—which came expensive—or by Moonbug, the little pressurized truck that did half the real work on this world of rock and dust. Convoys took stores out to Farside and brought back ore—and brought back men when they’d got tired of breaking their limbs and hearts over fruitless diggings.

“Where’s his claim?” I asked.

“He said it was in Spectacle Craters.”

I waited for the dark side of the globe to heave around, and then indicated the appropriate patch. “They’re in night at the moment. Nearest base is Farside Five, and that’s near two thousand miles from here. Say six days by convoy. Three if he hired his own souped-up Bug and driver, which he couldn’t do over there, anyway.”

“It takes longer to get from one side of the Moon to the other than it does to get here from Earth?”

“Sure does.”

“But what about your spaceship?”

“I can do it in twenty minutes. But it’s pricey. It’ll cost ten thousand Earth dollars before I make a penny profit.
Mostly I do emergency stuff: blood plasma, rescue equipment when a mine’s caved in...”

She winced. I could have put that more tactfully.

“I suppose,” she said, “I’ll have to wait for the next convoy. But surely I can send a radio message to him— find out if he’s on his way?”

“Well...” I hated to be a sour prophet like this, but I had more bad news for the girl. “You could,” I said, “until a week ago. The ring of communication satellites isn’t operating right now. One got hit by a meteorite, and the chain’s busted. We’re out of touch with Farside until it’s fixed.”

“The twenty-first century!” she said sardonically.

“It isn’t my Moon. I just work here.”

She smiled again. A better, friendlier smile this time. The sort of smile that could grow on you if you let it. She said:

“Sorry. So I suppose I’ll have to book in and wait. Perhaps I’ll see you again?”

“If I’m not in the bar, I’m usually under it.”

We shook hands and made polite noises and I watched her go over to the desk. For someone who wasn’t used to Moon gravity she had adjusted to it pretty well. She had instinctively adopted that faintly nautical roll that looks odd when men try it but can work wonders for a woman— particularly when you watch her from behind.

Somebody cleared his throat. It wasn’t me. I turned to find a uniformed flunkey watching me while I watched. When he saw he’d got my attention, he said in an undertone: “Bureau of Investigation wants to see you, Mr. Kemp.”

I knew what that meant. “Yes?” I sighed. “Where?”

“On the pistol range.”

She would, of course, have to play it for drama. Maybe the pseudo-military atmosphere made her feel safer. Or maybe she thought one day I’d be impressed by it.

She ought to know better by now.

I went down to the cavern. Discreet lighting and one almighty resonance of gunfire. The way two of them were firing and reloading, you’d have thought an interstellar war was due to break out any day; or else that the Mafia were on their way to take over the Moon.

The attendant reached out to check my card.

I said: “Understand the Bureau wants to see me.”

He jerked his thumb at the farthest firing table.

“Want to hire a gun?”

“Just lend me your own.”

He shook his head. We had been through this routine before. But he handed over a rocket pistol and made only a token, spluttering protest. “This way I’ll go broke.”

“I’ll see you there.”

I walked over to the table.

She didn’t look around, but I knew that she had registered my arrival. One corner of that shrewish little mouth twitched. It would have been a sweeter mouth if she had let it relax more often.

Her gun came up slowly and deliberately. A flickering figure did an erratic run across the target screen at the end. She fired once, twice... and the stab of light wiped the figure off the screen.

I said formally: “Agent Elizabeth Murphy, I presume?”

“Hello, Bill.”

She fired once more as though to prove something, maybe to me or maybe to herself. Then she looked around and I kissed her and those tight lips softened up quite a way.

She wore the flash of the United Nations Bureau of Investigation above her left breast. I preferred her without it. Indeed, I liked her best when there was no uniform or anything else between her and me. But she was on duty today. And I sensed it was going to be one of those days. She had something to say to me. She’d said it before, but I was going to have to hear it all through again.

She started casually enough. “How did the trip go?”

“Ah, you spend a dollar, you make a dollar. Maybe.”

She nodded wryly. “Big business, huh? You heard about Otto?”

“It happens all the time.”

I checked the magazine on my gun, waited for a target to weave in, and fired.

Liz said: “I wish I had a dollar for every time you’ve said that about a pilot. It doesn’t seem to happen to Corporation pilots.”

“Corporation,” I said. “Yes, I heard about that. Expanding all the time.”

“Exactly. And with opportunities for—”

“Now look, Liz. I am not going back into the Company... even if it
has
got around to calling itself a corporation. Repeat, not. When they gave up exploration flights—”

“When they gave them up,” she said tautly, “they gave up killing pilots.” She fired again, but this time she missed. Angrily she slammed the pistol down and, with her back to the attendant, took out a piece of paper. “I’d lose my job if I let you see this. So I won’t. But I want you to listen.”

“Don’t let me tempt you to betray your principles,” I said.

It was cheap and sarcastic, and she just paid no attention. She went on:

“It says, ‘Please explain delay submitting evidence for grounding space ferry Moon Zero Two. Urgent repeat urgent.’ Now you know.”

I took my time, firing, and missing as badly as she had done. Now I knew, all right. I said:

“They’re really out to get me, hey?”

“Not you, just your ship. Bill”—she put her hand on my arm, and her grip was a lot stronger, a lot more commanding than nice little Miss Taplin’s had been— “you know it’s not really safe any more. You
know
it. Space flight’s still pretty new, and the public isn’t sure about it. They can’t see the difference between your old ferries and the Corporation expresses, so any crash is bad news. It loses the Corporation passengers. Otto’s crash has put the heat on. The Corporation chases the Bureau, the Bureau chases me—”

“And suddenly I’m running.”

“Bill, if it was anybody else I’d have grounded them a month back. You know that.”

Sure, I knew that. I kissed her again, but she was holding off this time. I said: “It’s still the only spaceship I’ve got.”

“The Corporation’ll take you back—now.” Here it came, just as I’d predicted it would. “You’re still one of the best pilots they had. But once you get yourself grounded for safety reasons, they won’t touch you with a radar beam. They daren’t.”

“I’m still not a passenger pilot.”

“Bill, the exploration is over. It’s a time now for
consolidation, before we can risk any more great big jumps into the dark. Over,” she said again.

But didn’t she know, didn’t she realize? After the way we’d been together, was she still incapable of grasping what made my mind go around—or forward, or sideways? For me it would never be over. There was Mercury, out there waiting. Mercury, and Jupiter’s moons—maybe not Saturn just yet, but Uranus and Neptune. All these pressurized domes and sealed caverns and plushy little home cells and office cells had windows or filter-screen viewers; but people seemed to have got out of the habit of looking out. There were a lot of stars out there. If the Corporation didn’t get to them, somebody else would, sooner or later. I wanted it to be sooner, while I still had the strength.

“You can’t ground me now,” I observed. “Otto’s dead. Who’s going to do the emergency local flights? You need me and my ship.”

“I don’t. There are ways. We’ve got plans. And I might just decide to save your life.”

“For whom?”

She went white. I wanted to tell her to forget it, to stop arguing and stop being a Bureau bird just for a little while. She could come along with me and we’d play some of those games we’d tried out last year—the pleasures that were good on Earth but better here, when you got used to the possibilities of one-sixth gravity.

We’d met in Helicon House, the holiday resort where I’d been treating myself to two weeks of rest and liquor. With its cozy rooms, gentle music, pseudoterrestrial restaurant, its viewing theater and its sun-scorched dome lounge, it was the Moon’s only equivalent of a vacation center. Pilots were granted two weeks there in every three months, to soothe their ravaged nerves. It went with the pension, the mortgage on a box in a terrestrial apartment block, and the topflight, top-price education for the kids, if any. For me, I paid out of my own money. And I found out in due course that this made the Bureau suspicious. It was expensive, that place. How could a small-time, lone-wolf operator like me get that kind of money together? It wouldn’t have occurred to them, of course, that you could just about do it once in a while if you didn’t buy a new uniform or contribute to a pension fund or have a mortgage
or think about getting married. Once in a while, just for the hell of it.