Sex on the Moon (10 page)

Gordon was tapping his fingers against a glass fossil case.

“Moon rocks. From a museum? A private collection?”

Thad shrugged. He didn’t want to go into it any deeper than that. The kid could believe whatever he wanted. That Thad knew about a moon rock locked away in a basement drawer in the same museum they were walking through. Or that some member of the royal family of some South American country had a rock he wanted to fence. Who cared? Thad just wanted to know if Gordon could help him figure out if there was any way to sell a moon rock, if he had one.

“I could probably figure that out,” Gordon finally said. “Do a little research, send out some e-mails. I’m pretty good with the Internet.”

Thad nodded, his excitement rising. Was there really anything wrong with Gordon sending out a few e-mails? Would it really be a big deal? Thad hadn’t done anything wrong yet—and he was probably never going to. Hell, he didn’t even think the moon-rock thing was actually possible. Just thinking about what he would have to pull off, to get inside that vault—no, it was just a mental game. Another fantasy that he was beginning to construct. That was his true talent, fantasy. He had reinvented himself as a social star at NASA, he was impressing everyone there with his adventures and his contests, his enthusiasm—all of it. These thoughts, they were just a natural progression—another adventure, but this one so far-fetched it would likely remain lodged in fantasy.

Thad continued on through the museum, moving from the fossils and minerals to an area filled with precious mosaics that the museum had borrowed from a collector in Turkey. By the time they reached the building’s exit, Gordon had his wool hat pulled down low over his eyes, the thermos out from under his coat. For all Thad knew, Gordon had already forgotten about the exchange. The moon rocks had gone back into the dark, quiet space in the back of Thad’s mind.

And maybe that would be for the best.

Christ, yeah, that would definitely be for the best
.

16

It was a little less than two weeks later that Thad ran into Gordon again, passing by the same library steps; Thad was moving fast, a full load of oversized physics texts cradled in his arms, barely paying attention to his surroundings because he was already ten minutes late for a lecture on quantum mechanics. Moon rocks were the furthest thing from his thoughts; they had been replaced by quarks, neutrinos, and a dozen poorly understood little particles, spinning and twisting through imaginary orbits behind his eyes. Deep into the spring semester, he was beginning to find physics almost as interesting as astronomy.

Even as enveloped in the upcoming lecture as he was, Thad almost dropped his textbooks when he heard the familiar California-stoner voice from the direction of the library steps.

“Train keeps a-rolling, eh, man? You’re liable to run somebody down, moving that fast.”

Thad restabilized the books against his biceps, then looked up, seeing Gordon strolling down the steps in his direction.

“Just heading to a lecture.”

“Right on, brother. You and me both. But when you get a chance, you might want to check your e-mails.”

Thad felt the weight of the textbooks digging into the skin of his arms. He realized with a start that he hadn’t looked at his e-mails in a day, maybe longer. For the first twenty-four hours after his last conversation with Gordon, he’d checked his e-mail account every couple of hours, but in the past few days he had been looking at it less and less often. He had assumed he’d been right, that Gordon had forgotten about his request. But from the grin on Gordon’s face, it was obvious now that he had been wrong.

“I’ll go check it out right now.”

Gordon didn’t stop moving; he just crossed right in front of Thad and gave him a little wink.

“What about your lecture?”

But Thad had already changed directions and was hurrying up the library steps.

Quantum physics could wait.

…

It didn’t take long for Thad to find an open computer terminal in a fairly isolated stall near the back of the library’s 1960s-era research room. The computer wasn’t anywhere near as up-to-date as the one he was used to at NASA, but it was perfectly functional, and more important, the cubicle had high enough walls to obscure the screen from any prying, nearby eyes.

Thad knew he was being paranoid as he hunched over the computer, hitting the keys rapidly, opening his e-mail account. Of course, nobody was going to be the least bit interested in what he was doing. And really, he wasn’t doing anything at all, just checking an e-mail from a friend.

It took less than a minute for Thad to locate the e-mail: the address from which it had been sent was bizarre enough that it could only have come from one person.

[email protected].

And the e-mail itself seemed as disjointed as the address. It was more than a page long, and it was obvious from the start that Gordon had cut and pasted a number of different messages together. Thad counted at least seven addresses within the body of the e-mail, all people that Gordon had either contacted or received some sort of response from.

Some of the missives seemed promising, but none were concrete. It looked as though Gordon had been shooting out almost random feelers into the electronic wasteland—beginning with a private international mineral collectors Web site located in Iraq, from which he’d managed to cull fifty or so e-mail addresses from potential collectors. Using these e-mails as his targets, Gordon had then concocted a short form letter, basically spam, which he’d mass e-mailed to the addresses. The form letter was pretty foolish sounding—especially the fake name Gordon had chosen for himself—but he had managed to get the information mostly correct. It was wild, seeing the spam letter; the idea that it was out in the open, bouncing around the Internet—it was pretty terrifying. But it was also exhilarating; although many of the responses were simply short, sometimes profanity-laced messages explaining that the sale of moon rocks was, indeed, illegal, a handful seemed to be interested.

Thad realized that he’d have to take over from here; Gordon had done his job, had made a few contacts—but Thad was the one who actually knew what they were trying to sell. If, indeed, they were really trying to sell anything at all.

Thad had spent enough time on the NASA computers to know how to set up a dummy e-mail account. As ridiculous as Gordon’s chosen pseudonym sounded, Thad was forced to adopt the new name.

Using the handle, he went to work on a new missive: rereading Gordon’s e-mail, he discovered that a number of the potential targets were related to a certain international Web site for mineral collectors—a sort of club for “rock hounds.” Since the site was in Europe, Thad didn’t feel nervous crafting an advertisement to put on the mineral club’s online newsletter. He had to choose his words carefully—but he knew that the advertisement would reach the entire club at once. If these people took their hobby seriously enough to spend time on a Web site dedicated to rocks, there was a good chance that at least one of them would be interested in what Thad was purporting to sell.

As Thad drafted the ad, he tried to picture the sort of person who might respond to an offer of a chance to buy the most valuable substance on Earth. He knew a lot of people found moon rocks fascinating, but it would have to be a special sort of individual, someone desperate to actually hold a moon rock in the palm of his hand.

He was searching for a true rock hound. Someone who took his hobby seriously enough that he’d read the advertisement and immediately get that burst of adrenaline, that rush that could only come from a true addiction.

Grinning at the thought, Thad hit more keys on the computer. Even though it was little more than a game, for the moment, it was still quite possible that Gordon’s e-mails, and his own crafty advertisement, were about to make some lucky rock hound’s day.

17

Antwerp, Belgium

Greetings.

My name is Orb Robinson from Tampa, FL. I have in my possession a rare, multicarat moon rock I am trying to find a buyer for. The laws surrounding this type of exchange are known, so I will be straightforward and nonchalant about wanting to find a private buyer. If you, or someone you know, would be interested in such an exchange, please let me know. Thank you.

Orb Robinson.

Axel Emmermann watched the green-yellow glow of his computer screen dance around the curvature of his pilsner as he expertly turned the tall glass in front of his eyes. He could even make out a few words from the strange e-mail that had arrived in his in-box just moments ago, but for the moment, his attention was more focused on the contents of the pilsner glass than its surface. The beer was incredibly light, its carefully cultivated golden coloring so profound, it could almost be described as a texture. The deep hue completely overwhelmed the handful of minuscule air bubbles that signified its gentle carbonation. Axel slowly pressed the glass to his lips, taking a small sip, letting the bittersweet, smoky mixture play across his taste buds. He noticed, with no small satisfaction, that the temperature of the beer was just about right, and the pilsner glass had allowed it to breathe well enough to satisfy his practiced palate. Thoroughly pleased, he brought the glass back to his lips and took a deeper drink.

Axel knew that if his wife—or one of his two children, aged twelve and fifteen—had wandered into the first-floor living room and caught sight of him performing the ritual of the pilsner glass and the amber beer, there was no doubt it would have been the cause of much amusement. In Axel’s world, even something as simple and mundane as enjoying a late-night beer had its procedures.
Everything in its place, everything in its way
. A continually examined life, Axel liked to remark, and he really couldn’t help himself: he liked things in his world to behave the way they were supposed to, whether that referred to beer kept at a precise temperature and aerated for exactly the right amount of time, or to the bigger political issues that often seemed so foreign in a place as wonderfully sedate as this quiet corner of suburban Antwerp.

Axel considered himself a self-taught Renaissance man, and he had been collecting knowledge about the way the world was supposed to work for almost fifty years now. His wife and kids liked to say he was a student of everything—which, they often remarked, was a class you could never finish. Axel knew they were probably right, that there was no end point to knowledge for knowledge’s sake. But that’s what made being a student of everything so much more interesting—every day there was a new puzzle you had to try to solve, which only led to the next puzzle, and on and on.

Axel drained the last drops of the wonderful beer and placed the glass carefully back on its coaster, situated near the corner of the small oak desk he had inherited from his father, years ago. To an outside eye, the small office area he had carved out of the corner of his living room might have seemed cluttered; to Axel, everything in the area made perfect sense, from the high stack of manila folders containing spectography data that covered nearly every inch of the compact bureau overlooking his garden via a small, shuttered window, to the loaded-down, handmade wooden shelves that lined the walls, filled to near collapse with cardboard boxes and sealed Tupperware containers.
Everything in its place, everything in its way
.

Except, a little after midnight in the middle of the week as a subtle rain sputtered against the thick glass of the windowpanes above the bureau, there were at least two things that did not seem to be in their place, or way, at all; Axel was awake, for one, which was easily explained, the result of a particularly heavy dinner of
vlaamse stoofkarbonaden
, a Flemish stew made with beer—though in this case not anywhere near as satisfactory a vintage as the amber concoction he had just drained. But the second puzzle seemed much more complex, and Axel knew he would not be joining his wife upstairs until he had at least begun to make sense of it.

Axel leaned forward so that his wire-rim eyeglasses were only a few inches from the computer screen, and reread the e-mail again, mulling over each and every word, like some sort of college professor studying an important and archaic text. Of course, he wasn’t a professor, though his appearance could easily give off that impression: balding, with a rapidly whitening, meticulously trimmed beard, ruddy, rounded cheeks, and sometimes, especially late at night, a spiderweb of fault-line cracks at the corners of his eyes, the result of spending far too much time looking at things that were very, very small.

Greetings.

My name is Orb Robinson from Tampa, FL. I have in my possession a rare, multicarat moon rock …

Axel couldn’t deny the sudden flush he felt in his cheeks as he reread the sentence. Like everyone else in the modern world, he got a fair amount of junk mail, spam, garbage sent to his e-mail address every day, but there was no doubt in his mind that this specific e-mail had been sent to him, specifically, because it would cause just such an excited reaction. He could guess exactly where this “Orb Robinson” had gotten his e-mail address—from the Web page of the Antwerp Mineral Club, where Axel was listed as one of the charter board members.

He was a rock hound. More than that, his obsession with rocks and minerals had been a centerpiece of his life for many years now. He still remembered where it all started: he had been around eight years old and had heard on the radio about a British Petroleum promotion in which they were giving away little boxes of Brazilian minerals with every purchase of gasoline. At the time, only one member of his extended family had owned a car, and it had taken a while to convince his uncle to drive him to the nearest BP gas station, far out on the highway that connected Antwerp to Amsterdam. But the minute Axel had held that box of rocks in his eight-year-old hands, he had become hooked. Twenty-four little pieces of rubble, ugly as hell—and yet they seemed completely magical to Axel, how each one told a story about a time and place, how each one hinted at an orderly and understandable historical record.

By age sixteen, Axel had found and joined the Antwerp Mineral Club, of which he was still a member thirty-four years later. Over the years, he had always maintained a hobbyist’s interest in the things that helped him understand the rocks he collected through the club: chemistry, geology, even a little space science. But after his mandatory army stint, he had begun to find girls and beer a little more exciting. A seven-year job as a DJ in a local disco had made him just successful enough to grow his collection to about nine hundred specimens, none of them very valuable but, on the whole, quite respectable. He had also managed to collect a wife, serendipitously named Christel. It had been Christel’s idea for him to reconnect with the mineral club in a more regular fashion, and by the mid-eighties he was meeting with them every Monday, helping to host visiting rock collectors and geologists from all over the world. Antwerp wasn’t exactly a major stop on any European tour, but it was close enough to Paris and Amsterdam to bring in a few dozen notables over the years. Axel was quite proud of what he and the club had accomplished. Three or four of the club’s more prominent members were actual professors with minerals named after them. And in fact, one of the most prominent members, Professor René Venassle, had been called to the royal palace to give a technical speech when U.S. president Richard Nixon presented an actual lunar sample to the king himself.

Rereading the e-mail, pausing on the words
moon rock
, Axel remembered that episode: how the U.S. ambassador had personally dropped off the heavily guarded sample, how it was displayed by Axel’s very own club at that week’s mineral show. Although at the time Axel wasn’t spending nearly as much time at the mineral club as he did now, he had done a fair amount of reading about lunar samples, to better educate himself about Nixon’s gift. He knew that the rocks were illegal to own, and that they were also very valuable.

Two facts that made the e-mail immediately suspect, but also a little bit exciting.

On a first reading, Axel had even wondered if the e-mailer was referring to lunar samples at all. His first thought was that the seller was actually referring to “moonstone,” which was a variety of feldspar, an uncommon but not incredibly rare type of gem. Of course, the trading of moonstones was perfectly legal. Which made the next line of the e-mail make a lot less sense:

The laws surrounding this type of exchange are known, so I will be straightforward and nonchalant about wanting to find a private buyer.

Which meant that the e-mailer was, indeed, talking about lunar samples. Axel’s next instinct was just to delete the e-mail, without another thought—because if this person was talking about moon rocks, the e-mail was obviously a hoax. Axel had seen how well guarded the moon rock sample that had been given to the king was; no doubt lunar samples everywhere were kept under the same kind of lock and key. If owning a moon rock was illegal, certainly selling one would be even more so. Axel had even reached for the delete key—before stopping himself, more thoughts running through his head.

He realized that it was probably—almost definitely—a hoax. But even so, there was something odd and disconcerting about the message. Axel knew that Christel would think he was simply being his obsessive, inquisitive self, but something in this didn’t seem right.

If you were going to try to sell a fake moon rock, wouldn’t a rock hound such as himself be the last person you would e-mail? Because certainly, it wouldn’t take a man like Axel Emmermann very long to recognize a fake; a few questions, a photograph, or even a moment eye to eye with the item in question, and he’d know its true nature.

No, you’d have to be ridiculously stupid to attempt to sell fake moon rocks to a charter board member of the Antwerp Mineral Club. But rereading the message yet another time, Axel didn’t see any signs of idiocy. The syntax was good, even the man’s name had a certain panache to it: Orb Robinson, like some sort of transposition of Roy Orbison—the dead rhythm-and-blues singer, who, in point of fact, had a degree in geology. It occurred to Axel that the person who wrote this e-mail wasn’t stupid at all.

Which meant that quite possibly he really was trying to sell a “multicarat moon rock.”

Axel was beginning to lose track of the time as he contemplated the curious e-mail, and he realized that he’d never get to sleep if he didn’t investigate further. He knew enough about computers to do a pretty simple search of the originator of the e-mail. To his surprise, he quickly found that “Orb Robinson” had posted his inquiry to a fairly large number of mineral-club bulletin boards across Europe. But even more surprising, Axel found something that caused him to sit straight up in his chair.

Back on March 9, Orb Robinson had posted an advertisement on the Antwerp Mineral Club’s main Web site. Axel quickly followed the link, and there it was, ad number 1275, posted to the Web site’s “Virtual Quarry”:

Priceless Moon Rocks Now Available!!!

“Orb Robinson” [email protected]

If you have an interest in purchasing a rare and historically significant piece of the moon, and would like more information, then please contact me by e-mail and leave your contact information and an explanation of your interest.

Sincerely, Orb

Axel whistled low to himself, then removed his glasses and rubbed them against his sleeve. He glanced at the empty pilsner glass, wishing he still had some of the good amber stuff within arm’s reach, because now he felt like he needed a drink. He was suspicious before, but seeing the ad right there on his own club’s Web site, he was beginning to be convinced. Hoax or not, he was witnessing a crime in progress.

Even though he was an avid collector, the thought of actually attempting to buy what this person was purporting to sell never crossed Axel’s mind. Just as he thought that the world needed to have an order about it, everything in its place, he was a firm believer in right and wrong, that there were lines you couldn’t cross, shortcuts you couldn’t take. He had served in the military because it was expected and also because it was the right thing to do. He wasn’t a rich man by any means, but he lived a good life in his little corner of Belgium, he had a wife who loved him and two kids who didn’t hate him. And he had his hobbies, his puzzles; that, to him, was what this crime really was—a puzzle that he now needed to solve.
Everything in its place, everything in its way
.

The only question that remained was how, exactly, Axel was going to put this Orb Robinson into his proper place.

…

The weekly meeting of the Antwerp Mineral Club was already in full swing as Axel strolled determinedly through the wide, high-ceilinged dining hall of the Antwerp youth center. Even from the back of the hall, he could see that most of the regulars were there, gathered around the dozen or so industrial-looking rectangular tables that took up much of the center of the room. The slide projector had already been turned on, but not advanced to the first slide; the big screen that took up the entire far wall of the cantina glowed a bright, almost solar shade of yellow, backlighting the tables and the conglomeration of middle-aged, mostly bearded men who migrated around them—a herd inspecting a familiar water hole.

It wasn’t the tables themselves that the herd found interesting. On top of the tables were various-sized boxes, ranging from the cardboard variety to more high-tech compartmentalized plastic cases that kind of looked like fishing-tackle containers. It was a weekly ritual; before the slideshow presentation, there was an hour set aside for the buying and selling of specimens. As Axel reached the first table, and reflexively glanced into the nearest set of boxes, he could see that it was the usual fare: shiny pieces of quartz, a few volcanic specimens, a handful of minor gemstones—nothing of particular value anywhere but here. To these men, who would offer up a perfectly good Monday night to spend gathered in a youth-center dining hall—a bit of quartz or a volcanic rock could sometimes seem like a treasure.