Moon Zero Two (7 page)

I flicked the microphone switch. “Moon Control, Zero Two. Zero Two requesting takeoff clearance. Round trip, no landing away. As usual.”

Dmitri’s left eyebrow lifted. I answered it with my right. We waited for Control to swallow the lie.

“Zero Two, you’re clear. Remember Mars Express is due in twenty minutes.”

“We’ll try to miss him.” I switched off. “Are you ready for a daring venture into the great unknown, Mr. Karminski?”

Dmitri made a flourish that nearly demolished a bank of switches. “With you to lead me, Captain, even I can be brave.”

It was part of an old ritual which probably didn’t make much sense to our friends on the floor below. It wasn’t meant to make sense.

I leaned toward the hatchway. “Firing in twenty seconds.”

I saw Whitsun settle himself back. He looked pale. But then, he was a very pale man at the best of times.

Main tank pressures... prime... throttles... coordinates...

I pressed home the ignition bar, and the ship began to quiver like a cat sighting a pigeon.

Dmitri did a last, swift, dial check. “All firing,” he confirmed, “at minimum.”

“Well, maybe she’ll actually fly.”

I slammed the throttles full up.

The ship howled. It roared and rattled to itself and within itself and right inside our heads, too. Then we
lifted. I felt the ship sag, wobbling on its legs of flame like an old drunk ready to topple over and give up the struggle. One cutout now, one engine pausing for breath, and we’d be spinning out of control, over and down and nothing but a cloud of Moondust.

Suddenly we were away. Off in a long trajectory, over the hills and far away, off to keep an appointment out in space.

Pressure pinned us back for sixty aching seconds and then gradually eased off. When I could lean over the edge of my chair I called down:

“Got that course yet?”

The machine on Whitsun’s chest hiccuped and then chattered to itself.

He punched a final button and said: “Relative to the ecliptic, we want a course of Alpha three-five-one, Beta one-seven-nine. Speed 17,500 miles an hour.”

Dmitri looked at me. I looked at the control panel. Grudgingly he said: “He sounds as if he knows.”

“He does, doesn’t he?”

“D’you think he means”—Dmitri clowned it, waggling a finger vaguely at one corner of the cabin—“sort of over there?”

“More or less, I suppose.”

Abruptly Whitsun hauled himself up beside us, his head through the hatchway opening like a ghoulish jack-in-the-box without much impetus behind him. “I hope it isn’t too difficult for you?” he said.

“Not at all, Mr. Whitsun.”

He came on up without an invitation. “If you have an orbitograph, I hope I can make the situation clear to you.”

Sure we had an orbitograph. Not that I’d have advertised it as a feature of the Kemp transportation service. It wasn’t new, and it wasn’t infallible. In fact, it worked so erratically that we didn’t use it unless we got tired of each other’s conversation. But I indicated the screen, and Whitsun helped himself to a couple of knobs.

They were a bit dusty, and every time you turned the scanner it let out a piercing squeak. Whitsun winced. He must have sensitive hearing; or else he was allergic to dust.

A blur filled the screen, like the Milky Way gone sour.
Whitsun clicked his tongue and wrenched the knob again. No technique at all. No idea. I leaned back, past him, and clouted the screen mounting.

The Earth came neatly into focus, with the bright blob of the Moon way off to the right.

Whitsun scowled.

“I suppose fine tuning is out of the question?”

“I wouldn’t lay any bets,” I said, “but why not try your luck?”

“Gaming machines beyond the Heaviside Layer are subject to a duty of twenty percent,” intoned Dmitri. “Paragraph—”

“Let the gentleman have his fun,” I said.

Whitsun stabbed at the little keyboard between the knobs. He was delicate and precise in all his movements—sharp, pecking like a hen. And he succeeded. A fine tracer of light curved across between the Earth and the Moon.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Just so. There we are—asteroid on course, making its closest approach since 1998. And our interception point will be...” He waited, fingers poised. “Here,” he said sharply.

I tried to match my coordinates with those at the foot of his screen, but the memory bank in Zero Two’s autosetter was getting a bit slow on the uptake and didn’t respond. Getting downright amnesiac, in fact.

“Forty-five hours from now,” said Whitsun. He didn’t raise his voice, but he made it quite clear that he was effectively in charge of this expedition. “You can maintain speed?”

I nodded.

“You will arrange the engines on the surface,” he said. “We will fire them four hours later, and the asteroid will change orbit... so...” He tapped the keys, and the light pattern changed. I watched the sweep of die new path, gently arching in to the Moon. “You will observe its speed relative to the Moon is quite low, and that it is only visible from Farside. The radar stations on Nearside can’t track it. You appreciate the importance of that?”

I appreciated it, all right. If one of those little detector boys down there got a flicker of our baby, we’d all be in jail the moment we got back.

“After a three-day interval,” said Whitsun, “during which time the asteroid will have come to within
approximately ten thousand miles of the Moon, we return to it, take new measurements, reset the engines and fire them again. Fire them for landing. And the asteroid lands on the Moon.”

It all sounded so simple. Bang bang bang, and a quiet little crunch, and there was a solid fortune chipping a small hole in Farside.

“On course,” warned Dmitri at my elbow. “Engines cutting in... in five seconds. Wait for it.”

Instinctively I reached out and got a hold on a stanchion. The seconds dropped swiftly away, and all at once the trembling and shuddering of the ship stopped and there was utter silence.

I hadn’t thought to say a word to Whitsun. After years in space you made your movements automatically, and forgot that not everybody else was used to it. Whitsun was floating several inches off the floor. He turned slowly in mid-air, and he looked indignant.

“We’ve just gone weightless,” I explained. “Hold
on
to something.”

“I didn’t expect you on course and speed that quickly.”

“Us amateurs are just lucky,” I said.

He’d sooner argue than take orders. He was about to say something else, but found himself doing a contortion that would have given the asteroid the jitters. He finished up drifting around me upside-down, popping his lips like a goldfish.

I tilted my head so that we could be reasonably sociable. “I did say hold on.”

He groped for the back of my chair and managed to get himself right way up. For a minute or so he was like a baby learning to walk; making careful little lunges across the cabin and clinging to anything that might help his progress.

But he caught on fast—in every sense of the word. And in no time at all he was back at the orbitograph. And then studying the control panel and asking questions; and you could almost hear the chink of the answers dropping into the appropriate slots in his tidy mind. I wondered—just vaguely, uneasily wondered—if he had any idea of kicking us off the asteroid once we’d done our bit of the job, and piloting Moon Zero Two back to base on his own.

No. That would take too much explaining. No doubt
Whitsun’s smooth talk and Hubbard’s smooth flow of money would help with the explanations—but it would really be worth the trouble and the risk.

Whitsun went below to see that Harry was all right. We hoped he would stay there, but he was back in no time at all, ready to play some more counterpoint on his computer.

“May as well employ the time usefully,” he said. “I’m trying a prediction of our approach velocity and the asteroid’s gravitational pull. A body as compact as that won’t fit into normal mass category. If we can get the relationship right before we track in, we might get in phase immediately.”

“That’d be nice,” observed Dmitri.

Whitsun meditated and tapped.

“How long did the man say?” Dmitri asked.

“Forty-five hours,” I said.

Whitsun did not even look up from his computer, but said: “Now precisely forty-four hours, thirty-eight minutes, ten seconds.”

Dmitri stared unhappily at the panel lights.

“It’s going to
seem
longer,” he said under his breath.

TIME DIDN’T WORK normally out in space. The clock showed its hours and days, but although you accepted its figures as a working basis you didn’t really believe them. Between blast-off and reentry there was a weightless, timeless suspension in nothingness. The ship didn’t seem to move. You went through regular checks and routines, but there was no sensation of their having any effect on anything. Some of the pioneers went a bit odd after months of it—months on a set course, without any feeling that they were getting anywhere, sometimes panicking from the conviction that the ship had stopped, the stars in their courses weren’t on course any more, nothing was happening or would ever happen again. And me... old pioneer Kemp... had I gone a few degrees off orbit in my old, old age?

Well, my middle age...

Well...

I found I was getting a whole lot more irritable than I used to be. One word could set me off. The mere presence of other people on board rasped on my nerves. It wasn’t the silence—I’d coped with the silence a long while ago, in the past, and learned how to conquer it—but the fidgetings and mutterings and mannerisms of other men in this confined area: that was what scratched at me.

Even Dmitri. We went through our usual joking rituals because they were just unreal enough to stop us taking each other too seriously. We’d learned the roles that you need as much out in space as you need space suits. As a rule we managed fine. But on this trip I was finding his tuneless whistle as exasperating as an unidentifiable whine
inside a control deck. The repeated snatches of familiar songs dinned in on me, amplified from a whisper to a bellow.

Oh, if it is a daughter dress her up in lace,

And if it is a son, send the so-’n-so into space;

Oh, arc me over, arc me over...

Better the complete, eternal silence, when you could lie back and drowse, and think.

Halfway out, Whitsun and Harry started an argument about something crazily trivial on the passenger deck. I stood it for ten minutes, then yelled down to them to shut up. Harry yelled back, and they went on. I shinned down through the hatch and said I was in charge of this ship, I wasn’t going to have dissension, mutiny, or any kind of uproar: it was bad for me. If they kept on, I’d have them walking the plank.

Whitsun laughed. Harry glowered. But they quietened down, and I had that bit of silence in which to think.

Not that there was anything very special to think about.

I wondered, abstractedly, how Miss Taplin was getting on and whether her brother had shown up. Should be a convoy in from Farside by now. Bringing brother or bringing news.

I hoped she didn’t fall for any offer to give her a lift out there. Women were scarce on the Moon, and scarcest of all around Farside. I wouldn’t put it past some frustrated claim-basher to add a girl like that to his list of essential stores.

A bit irresponsible, that brother of hers. Letting her come up here and making no arrangements to meet her or have her met Typical of the wild, feckless, Moon-mad crowd you got out back there.

Irresponsible... ? I could just see the twitch of Liz Murphy’s mouth.
Me
calling some man irresponsible?

Thinking of Liz, I got a distant echo of her parting threat. Because it had been a threat, all right.
So I have to ask around...
And when Liz started asking, she didn’t stop till she had a big fat dossier of answers.

Sooner or later she’d get to Joe Mercer. And when she put two and two together, she’d get four engines.

She’d have a lot more to ask me when we got back.

I sighed.

Dmitri began to chant to himself. It might have been some ancient Slav folksong. On the other hand, it might have been a Martian lament.

I said: “Can’t you stop making that godawful row?” “So,” he said, “it is like that, is it?”

We both sulked for the rest of... well, the rest of what? Some hours that must fit somewhere into what you might loosely call a day.

And in spite of everything, the hours piled up. We got closer. It was like waking from a sleep. Not a long, rich, reviving sleep, but a disturbed afternoon doze. Awake with a bad temper and a lousy taste in your mouth.

But better to be awake, all the same. Better to have something to do.

“Contact!” cried Dmitri, and it was like an alarm clock going off.

Whitsun and Harry were below. I bent over, and said: “Firing in thirty seconds. Using main engines for final approach. Get strapped down.”

I made sure they were settled, and then swung back into my chair.

“Eight miles,” said Dmitri. “Relative speed, three hundred miles per hour.”

We actually went so far as to grin at each other.

I pushed up the throttles, and everything in the place shuddered. The engines fired forward, and once more we knew that we were alive and that things were happening—in here and outside.

“Six miles,” said Dmitri. “Relative about two hundred. Keep her coming.”

I found his voice quite musical again. Different sort of music, mark you. He sounded like a psalmist now. Nice cadences as he counted down—down through the flickering, vanishing miles, until we were braced for the zero.

“Go to one G... thousand yards... five hundred... three... two... give her the works... Cut?'

We jolted to another silence as I killed the engines. Whitsun called something from below, but I paid no attention. I allowed five minutes for drift, checked the meters, and then unbuckled my seat belt. As I slid to the floor, Whitsun got up from the couch and climbed up the ladder. He was a bit impatient, and came through the hatchway fast enough to bang his head on the ceiling. I
took hold of his left ankle and gently maneuvered him into position. He nodded his thanks: he wasn’t going to go as far as putting them into words.