Moon Zero Two (8 page)

I pressed the switch to roll away the porthole mask.

And there it was. Closer than I’d have thought. I felt proud of myself. Whitsun, I imagined, was feeling proud of his computer.

Six thousand tons of sapphire, hanging motionless twenty yards away. A huge chunk of what might have been blue glass, but wasn’t. There were thousands of jagged little crystalline edges, and through the dust you got a glimpse of pinpoints of light, hard little sparkles of reflection.

“A six-thousand-ton jewel,” said Dmitri dreamily. “I’d hate to meet the woman who could wear that around her neck.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What about that dame you picked up at Cape Kennedy a couple of years—”

“She picked
me
! Anyway, it was the daughter I was after. You know that.”

Whitsun’s voice was as cold and tingling as those sapphire ice slivers out there. “Are you ready to do some work now?”

The only answer was a dignified silence. And work.

I supervised the unloading of the engines. Whitsun wanted me outside, doing the shoving and tugging, but this was one thing where I intended to stay in charge. I knew those engines and I knew the dimensions of my cargo deck and I knew how to get freight out of that hatch without taking lumps off the ship.

We got one engine out, and followed it with Harry. He didn’t look too cheerful when he found himself drifting out there in the void, but provided he didn’t panic he was safe enough.

Dmitri paid out a line, and Harry floated down with it to the asteroid. He did some hammering and chipping away to make a secure hold for the line, and I could almost feel Whitsun wince: he hated to think of even a few slices of that sapphire fortune getting sawn off.

When the line was fast, Harry came back up, working harder than he needed to. When he closed in on the poised, waiting engine I said through the helmet radio:
“Don’t wear yourself out. You want to move, fire your reaction pistol—blow yourself along.”

Then I realized he hadn’t got a pistol. We’d taken his gun off him back on Moon base, and we hadn’t replaced it with a reaction job. We hauled him in and I handed one over. He handled it with a satisfaction I didn’t like: it was as though it gave him fresh confidence and made him a big bully-boy again. Harry was better when he was humble.

He set off again, hooking the engine to the line, experimentally firing the pistol, and then drifting down the straight course to the asteroid.

Dmitri hefted the next engine into position by the hatchway. I gave him a hand with the third, and then decided it was time to go down and make sure the organization down on the asteroid was all right.

Harry made the return trip briskly, and you could see he was beginning to think of himself as a great hero. It was all so easy and so exhilarating once you got the knack. I only hoped he wasn’t going to get space-happy and do something stupid out there.

“You can manage?” I said to Dmitri.

He made a grotesque face inside the helmet. He didn’t risk answering, because the others would have heard him in their helmet radios, and maybe he wanted to spare their feelings.

I made sure the next two engines were lined up for easy extraction, and then went down to the asteroid. Whitsun followed. I thought at first he was chasing me, but he had a theodolite under his arm and set to work at once with that same infuriating, soulless calm.

When Harry got the third engine down, I kept him on the surface for half an hour, securing ring bolts in the sapphire. We paid out lengths of line and wove them into a tight symmetrical pattern. I didn’t want that hunk of rock to go careering off toward Arcturus. Mr. Hubbard wouldn’t like it. He might want his money back; and he might not keep his promise to pay up for a new ship.

We positioned the engines according to Whitsun’s instructions. And when I say instructions, I mean orders. But he knew what he was doing. I wondered if he found this more exciting than juggling Mr. Hubbard’s profit and
loss account. From his drab, expressionless face you wouldn’t think so.

“Where do we want Number Three?” I asked.

He had it all figured out. He might have been counting the sapphire stalagmites by the hundred, left to right, he’d got it so exact

“Line it up with me,” he said as Harry lugged it into position—lugging it not because it was heavy, but because if you went too energetically about it you overshot the mark.

Harry- stabilized the engine. Instead of securing it at once, he kicked idly at a tall plume of green stone. It cracked and came away.

“Solid jewelry!” Harry picked it up. “Wonder how much it’s worth?”

He tossed it gloatingly into the air. It went up. And it didn’t come down. Harry stared after it

“Not a thing now,” I said. “Six thousand tons doesn’t make any gravity worth counting. Thought you’d noticed that.”

“Harry”—Whitsun’s voice crackled thinly in our ears— “line that thing up, will you?”

Harry looked at me and shrugged, as though we were pals and Whitsun somehow didn’t belong.

Half an hour later he went off for the last engine, and floated back with it at a hell of a rate. He stopped himself with a long, blazing blast from his reaction pistol, wasting it just for the hell of it He was getting showy.

“Over there!” said Whitsun.

I had already prepared the space in the pattern of hawser lines, and I was waiting.

Harry twisted himself around with a flourish, got a grip on the engine, and fired his pistol. Again he got going too fast. Drifting past me, he was only a few feet above the surface but rising, ready to shoot off the asteroid altogether. He twisted again, pointed his pistol out into space, and fired.

It gave a brief puff, and he and the engine went sailing on.

There was a great blast of anguish in the radio. “My pistol! It’s gone empty!”

My lifeline was tied to one of the ground lines. I knew that, and was thankful for it, when I kicked myself off and
upward, letting it whip out behind me. I was a few yards behind Harry, and catching up, when I was jolted to a stop. The line had paid out to its full extent, and I was anchored.

“Harry—my pistol!”

He curled over on himself, waving a despairing arm. I aimed the gun like a dart and hurled it. It went off with maddening, terrifying slowness. For a second it looked as though it would match Harry’s speed... and stay just that impossible, unbridgeable distance behind him. Then I saw that it was drifting gradually nearer to his outstretched, groping hand.

His glove closed on it. He twisted back, and I heard him grunt. It would serve him right if he wrenched his back or ruptured his spleen, or something.

The pistol spat into space. Harry and the engine slowed and came to a halt. He fired again, and began to drift back toward us.

He landed with a cushioning backward burst of the pistol.

I hauled myself down on the safety line, and bumped to my feet close beside him. I unclipped Harry’s line from the engine and snapped it onto a ground line.

“Not many people get a chance to make that mistake twice,” I snarled, and hoped the rasp in their earholes would do them good. “Don’t waste your pistol charge on acrobatics—and keep tied down! When you’re towing a valuable engine, anyway.”

Crestfallen, Harry bent over the engine and coaxed it along like a kid with an outsize, inflated balloon.

I saw the numberplate on the side. Of course. It just had to be that one! Good old, crooked old Number Four.

I said: “Treat it gently. That one’s as liable to fire early as late.”

We secured it with bracing bars, taking a bit longer over it than we had done over the others. I wanted no last-minute troubles with this one. I checked everything three times, then had another look. Maybe if I stroked it and said soothing words, it’d respond. But I didn’t care to face the expression inside Whitsun’s helmet.

I sent Harry up to fetch the firing gear from Dmitri. This was the absolutely final stage. We hadn’t brought the blast-box down until now because... well, because. I
didn’t trust Whitsun, I didn’t trust Harry, and I didn’t trust Number Four. Or the patron saint of space explorers, whoever he might be. St. Jude, maybe: patron of lost causes.

“Plug in?” I said.

Whitsun thumbed a coda on his little computer, nodded agreement, and began to pack up his theodolite.

I plugged in.

Whitsun said: “If the engines are each set for 100,000 pounds thrust, then we fire in...” He consulted his little answering service. “Three minutes,” he said, “nine seconds. And then, for exactly one hour, eighteen minutes—”

“If Number Four fires on the button,” I said.

“If it doesn’t, the whole scheme is ruined. Look, unless you’re quite sure..

“Nobody’s ever quite sure,” I said. “Nothing’s ever quite sure. All your little plastic boxes and your microcircuits and your little relays won’t ever make it sure. These were the only engines we could get—the only engines
anyone
could have got in that time.”

“I don’t like it,” said Whitsun.

The seconds were ticking away. I hated to think of him having to undo all his calculations and start his computer sorting it out all over again. Probably give the thing hysterics. Nothing quite so bad for morale as a sulky computer.

I said: “Just rig it that when Number Four fires, so do all the rest. Gear it on
her
. And I’ll stay down here and give her a thump when you give me the countdown.”

I heard Dmitri’s voice from the ship. He had been listening to us all through, and I could tell he didn’t like this bit. “When they do fire,” he said, “she’ll be moving. Not like a spaceship, but moving.”

“Go and teach your grandmother to mince meteors,” I said. “I’ll be on a long line to the ship. You just haul me in. Simple. Okay?”

“Well...”

“Okay,” I said, making it sound like a command.

Whitsun and Harry slid off up the line to the ship. I settled down beside Number Four and laid my reaction pistol across my knees. I patted the engine gently, now there was nobody to see me do it. When the time came to belt her one, I’d lay it on just
there
.

Whitsun began to count in my ears.

When he got down to thirty seconds, I braced myself.

“Thirty... twenty-five..

I tugged on the lifeline to check that they’d got it good and secure at the far end.

“Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one...”

Up there, Dmitri threw the switch. Down here the firing gear clicked its relays and triggered the engines. And Kemp, William, got on his hind legs and thumped Number Four where it would hurt.

It spewed blue flame. So did the other three.

Moon Zero Two began to slide away from us. Or that was how it looked.

I freed myself from the ground lines, and edged between the flaring engines. Then I stuck. My lifeline to the ship had snarled around a sharp outcrop on the surface. I jerked savagely at it and managed to entangle another loop over the thorny rock. One more tug... and it came free. Free, and twisting right into the flare of the nearest engine.

It burned through like a shred of paper.

The stub of line left to me went slack. I tightened my grip on my reaction pistol and turned my back to the searing blaze of the engines. If I was going to jet off in the right direction, I had to aim clear between them. Aim— and pray there’d be no deflection. At least you didn’t get crosswinds way up here.

I fired.

I went off through a curtain of flame, and then I was free. No nasty little singes in my suit, as far as I could tell. And if there had been, I could have told all right—in the split second of life I’d have had left.

Zero Two hung at an angle against the starshine. I writhed into a new position and fired again, and found myself coming in feet-first toward the open hatchway.

Dmitri hovered across the entrance. “Are you walking home, or would you care for a lift?”

“I guess I’ll take the lift.”

He swung aside in time to let me glide through and do a gentle somersault.

Whitsun seemed unperturbed at the near loss of a great space pioneer. In fact, he wasn’t even looking at me. He
was staring through the porthole, with a magnifying pane slotted into place, at the receding asteroid.

“I can’t be positive,” he said—he wasn’t ever going to shout for joy, that one—“but it seems to be on the right course.”

“I’m very glad to hear it,” I said. The hatch cover slid over the gap, and there was the click and whirr as the pressurizing procedure started up. “And now... did somebody mention going home?”

Dmitri and I went up to our chairs. Whitsun and Harry stretched themselves out. No need for strapping down: we had no big gravity, or even a teeny-weeny gravity, to blast away from.

Zero Two roared gently to itself, we quivered at a frequency somewhere around middle C, and then we were off along Mr. Whitsun’s personally recommended parabola to the Moon.

I WAS GLAD to get the feel of my Moon-legs again. They led me straight toward the hotel entrance and on, unerringly, toward the bar.

I said: “I’ll buy the first round.”

Dmitri was tempted. But the memory of last time stiffened his resolution. “No,” he said. “I think I’ll get a Moonburger first, this time. See you later.”

It wasn’t a bad idea. A solid foundation (and the stuff that went into those concoctions was solid, all right) was good for the balance when you settled down to an evening’s drinking. But I wasn’t in the mood for all that lead weight. I went on into the bar.

“Double Moonflower, please, Len.”

It was a familiar, welcoming face. He was one of the older barmen—a settler, not one of the smart, derisive young go-getters on assignment from Earthport “We’ve still got some Scotch, Bill,” he said.

“And I’m still waiting to be a millionaire.”

He started shaking, flicked a translux, nonbreakable, noncontaminable, nonsmearable, nonglass glass along the bar, and said confidentially: “You know we’ve got a guest who drinks nothing but Scotch?”

“Fact?”

“Fact. Can’t mention names, of course.” He didn’t have to. I could guess. But I just nodded and let him go on. “Big dealer,” said Len. “The word is he’s putting money into the spaceship yards. We could use that.”