Steel Beach (59 page)

The ship was half completed when the Invaders came. Work was naturally abandoned in favor of more pressing projects, like survival of the species. When that seemed assured, there was still very little effort to spare for blue-sky projects like the
Heinlein
.

But work resumed in the year 82, A.I., and went on five or six years before another snag was hit, in the form of the Lunarian Party. The Loonies, or Isolationists, or (to their enemies) Appeasers, as they came to be called, had as their main article of faith that mankind should accept its lot as a conquered race and thrive as best it could on Luna and the other inhabited planets. The Invaders had reduced all the works of humanity to less than rubble in the space of three days. Surely this demonstrated, the Loonies reasoned, the Invaders were a different breed of cat altogether. We had been extremely lucky to have survived at all. If we annoyed them again they might come back and finish the job they started.

Rubbish, responded the old guard, who have since come to be known as Heinleiners. Sure they were stronger than us. Sure they had superior technology. Sure they had bigger guns. God’s
always
on the side of bigger guns, and if we want him back on
our
side, we’d better build even
bigger
guns. The Invaders, the reasoning went, must be a vastly older race, with vastly older science. But they still shit between two…  well, tentacle-heels?

This was the flaw in the Heinleiners’ reasoning, said the Loonies. We didn’t know if they had bigger guns. We didn’t know if they had tentacles or cilia or good honest legs and arms like you and I and God. We didn’t know
anything
. No human had ever seen one and survived. No one had ever photographed one, though you’d think our orbiting telescopes would have; they’d been looking, on and off, for two hundred years, and no one had seen them check out of the little motel known as Earth. They were
weird
. Their capabilities had thus far admitted of no limits. It seemed prudent to assume they
had
no limits.

After almost ninety years of jingoism, of rally-round-the-flag rhetoric and sheer pettifogging bombast, this sounded like a good argument to a large part of a population weary of living on a perpetual war footing. They’d been making sacrifices for nearly a century, on the theory that we must be ready to, one, repel attack, and two, rise up in our wrath one glorious day and stomp the bejesus out of those…  whatever they were. Live and let live made a whole lot of sense. Stop our puny saber-rattling round the ankles of these giants, and we’ll be okay. Speak softly, and
screw
the big stick.

Eventually all our forward listening posts in near-Earth orbit were drawn back—a move I applaud, by the way, since they’d heard nothing and seen nothing since Invasion Day. It was commanded that no man-made object approach the home planet closer than 200,000 kilometers. The planetary defense system was scaled back drastically, turned to meteoroid destruction, where at least it saw some use.

How all this affected the
Heinlein
was in the ban on fission and fusion explosive devices. The
R.A.H.
had been designed as an Orion-type pusher-plate propulsion system, to this day the only feasible drive if you want to get to the stars in less than a thousand years. What you do is chuck A-bombs out of a hole in the back, slam the door, and wait for them to go off. Do that every second or two. The shock wave pushes you.

This needs a big pusher plate—and I’m talking
big
here—and some sort of shock absorber to preserve the dental work of the passengers. They calculated it could reach about one-twentieth of light-speed—Alpha Centauri in only about eighty years. But it couldn’t even leave L5 without bombs, and suddenly there were no more bombs. Work shut down with the main body and most of the shock absorbing system almost complete, still no sign of the massive pusher plate.

For forty years the friends of the
Heinlein
lobbied for an exception for their big baby, like the one granted to the builders of the first disneylands for blasting purposes. Changing political winds and economic pressure from the Outer Planets Confederation, where most fissionables were mined, and the decline of the L.P. combined to eventually bring a victory. The Heinleiners celebrated and turned to the government for funding…  and nobody cared. Space exploration had fallen out of favor. It does, periodically. The argument not to pour all that money down the rathole of space when you could spend it right here on Luna can be a persuasive one to a population more interested in standard of living and crippling taxation and no longer afraid of the Invader boogeyman.

There were attempts to get it going again with private money. The perception was the whole thing had passed its time. It was a white elephant. It became a regular subject in comic monologues.

The ship still had some value as scrap. Eventually someone bought it and strapped on some big boosters and lowered it bodily to the edge of Delambre, where it sits, stripped of anything of worth, to this day.

The first thing I noticed about the
Heinlein
during my explorations was that it was broken. That is to say, snapped in half. Built strongly to withstand the shocks of its propulsion system, it had never been meant to land on a planet, even one with so weak a gravity field as Luna. The bottom had buckled, and the hull had ruptured about halfway back from the stem.

The second thing I noticed was that, from time to time, lights could be seen from some of the windows high up on the hull.

There were places where one could get inside. I explored several of them. Most led to solidly welded doors. A few seemed to go further, but the labyrinthine nature of the place worried me. I made a few sorties trailing a line behind me so I could find my way out, but during one I felt the line go slack. I followed it back and couldn’t determine if I’d simply tied it badly or if it had been deliberately loosened. I made no more entries into the ship. There was no reason to suppose the girl and anyone she lived with would wish me well. In fact, if she did, she certainly would have contacted me by then. I would have to resort to other tactics.

I tried magnetic grapplers and scaled the side of the hull, trying to reach the lighted ports. When I reached them I was seldom sure I had the right one, and in any case, by the time I got there no light could be seen.

It began to seem I
was
chasing ghosts.

I got discouraged enough that, one Friday night, I decided to stay home for the weekend. I was getting quite big, and while one-sixth gee
must
make it easier to carry a baby, we’re none of us as strong as our Earth-born ancestors were, and I’d become prone to backaches and sore feet.

So I decided to rent a rig and take a trip to Whiz-Bang, the new capitol of Texas. Harry the blacksmith had just got a new Columbus Phaeton—$58.00 in the Sears catalog!—and was happy to let me try it out. (Mail-order was our polite fiction for Modern-Made. There would never be enough disneys to manufacture all the items one needs for survival, there’s just too many of them. Most of the things I owned had arrived on the Wells-Fargo wagon, fresh from the computer-run factories.) He hitched a dappled mare he assured me was gentle, and I took off down the road.

Whiz-Bang is in the eastern part of the disney. The interior compresses about two hundred miles worth of environment into a bubble only fifty miles wide, so before I got there I was into a new kind of terrain and climate, one where there was more rainfall and things grew better. Purely by chance I was passing through at the height of the wildflower season. I saw larkspur, phlox, Mexican hat, Indian paintbrush, cornflower, and bluebonnets. Millions and millions of bluebonnets. I stopped the horse and let her graze while I spread my blanket among them and ate a picnic lunch. I can’t tell you what a relief it was to get away from the foreboding hulk of the
Heinlein
and the bitter white rock of the surface, and hear the song of the mockingbird.

I pulled into Whiz-Bang around noon. It’s a bigger town than New Austin—which means it has five saloons and we have two. They get more of the tourist trade, which New Austin does not work to attract, which means they have more small shops selling authentic souvenirs, still the main means of livelihood for two out of five Texans. I strolled the streets, nodding to the gentlemen who tipped their hats, stopping to look into each shop window. The merchandise fell into four categories: Mexican, Indian, “Primitive West,” and Victorian. The first three were all hand-made in the disney, certified genuine reproductions—with a little fudging: “Indian” artifacts included items from all southwest tribes, not just Comanche and Apache. But there were no totem poles and no plastic papooses.

Suddenly I realized I was looking at the answer, if answer there was. I was standing at the window of a toy shop.

I felt like Santa Claus as I drove once more down the mining road and across the rising rim of Delambre early that Sunday morning. I certainly had a sleighful of toys, in a vac-sack tossed on the passenger seat. It was about two days past full noon.

“On Dasher, on Dancer, on Prancer,” I cried. The ride in the country and the new plan of attack had buoyed my spirits, which had been at a low ebb. I stopped the rover and quickly deployed the tent. I spoke not a word but went straight to my work, setting out all my presents…  oh, stop that, Hildy. I laughed, which no doubt caused my big round belly to shake like a bowl full of jelly.

What I’d done was first to make a Whiz-Bang toy-monger a very happy and much wealthier woman. She’d followed me out of the store, carrying my boxes of trifles, not quite kow-towing, stowing them in the buggy for me. Then I’d driven back to New Austin, pausing only to pick a bunch of bluebonnets, which I mailed to Cricket. No, I hadn’t given up yet.

I’d exercised little selection in the toy store, ruling out only the ranks of lead soldiers and most of the dolls. Somehow they just didn’t feel right; maybe it was just personal prejudice. But now I sweated the choice of each of the four items I wanted to lure her with.

First was a tin-and-pewter wind-up of a horse pulling a cart, brightly painted in reds and yellows. All little girls like horses, don’t they?

Next was a half-meter Mexican puppet in the shape of a skeleton, made of clay and papier-mâché and corn husks. I liked the way it clattered when I picked it up, dangling from its five strings. It was old and wise.

Then a Kachina doll, even older and wiser, though carved and painted only months ago. I chose it over the sweeter, safer white man’s dolls, all porcelain and pouty lips and flounces, because it spoke to me of ancient secrets, unknown ceremonies. It was as brashly pagan as my elusive sprite, she of the funny face. Reading up on it, I found it was even better, as the Kachinas were said to exist among the tribe, but invisible.

And last, my most fortuitous find: a butterfly net, made of bent cane and gauze, with a glass Mason jar, wad of cotton, and bottle of alcohol for the humane euthanizing of specimens. Just the sort of toy parents could put together for a pioneer child, if the child had a biological bent.

None of the toys would be much harmed by vacuum, but the sunshine on the surface is brutal, so I placed them where they’d stay in the shade, near the hull of the
Heinlein
, and arranged little lights over them so they’d be easy to find. Then I went back to the tent.

I didn’t have much time to stay if I was to be back for Monday classes, and I spent that time unprofitably. I couldn’t eat anything, and I couldn’t read the book I’d brought along. I was excited, worried, and a little depressed. What made me think this would work?

So in the end I struck the tent and took one last tour of my little toy tableau, which once more was undisturbed.

The next week was hell. Many times I thought of looking for a substitute and getting the hell back. You want a measure of my distraction? Elise caught me dealing seconds, and it’s been seventy
years
since that had happened.

But the week did crawl by, faster than any ordinary garden slug, and Friday afternoon I turned the editorial chores over to Charity with instructions to keep the libel suits down to three or four, and broke all records getting out to Delambre.

The Kachina was gone. In its place was something I didn’t recognize at first, but quickly realized was a Navajo sand painting. These are made by dribbling different colored sands onto the ground and they can be amazingly detailed and precise. This one wasn’t, but I appreciated the effort. It was just a stick figure Indian, with war bonnet and a bow held in one hand, a tipi in the background.

She’d taken the horse and carriage, too, and left a vac-cage about the right size for taking your pet hamster for a stroll on the surface. But inside was a horse. A living horse, ten centimeters high at the shoulder.

I hadn’t seen a horselet in years. Callie had given me one for my fifth birthday, not as small as this one. Not long after that people like David Earth had succeeded in getting that sort of gene tinkering outlawed. You could still buy minis on Pluto, but the most that was allowed on Luna these days were perpetual puppies and kittens. When I was young you could still get real exotics, like winged dogs and eight-legged cats.

Somehow I didn’t think this beast had been purchased on Pluto. I held the cage up and tapped on the glass, and the horselet looked back at me calmly. I wondered what I was going to do with the damn thing.

The butterfly equipment didn’t seem disturbed until I looked at it more closely. Then I saw the monarch at the bottom of the jar, still, apparently dead. I put the jar in my pocket for later examination, left the net where it was, and hurried on to find that my last offering had been taken. The skeleton puppet was gone, and where it had been was a scrap of paper. I picked it up and read the word “thanks,” written in pencil.

I pondered all this on the drive back to King City. I didn’t know whether to be encouraged or crestfallen. Three of my toys had been taken, and three other toys left in their place. I had never expected this. My hope had been to gradually lure her out with gifts; the idea of trading had never entered my mind.