Moonrise (28 page)

“The tough decision?”

“To close it down, once and for all.”

“You can’t do that!”

“Somebody has to,” he snapped. “We can’t let Moonbase keep draining the corporation, year after year.”

“But it’s making a profit …”

Greg’s expression turned sour. “You know that’s not true, Mom. Oh, sure, the bookkeeping shows a small profit, but when you figure in all the seed money we’ve put in for research that’s off the books and all the other hidden costs, Moonbase is an expense we can’t afford.”

Joanna drew in her breath. That’s what he’s really after. He wants to kill Moonbase. He wants to put an end to Paul’s dream.

“Let me put in a year up there,” Greg insisted. “I’ll do my best to find a way to make the base really profitable, without bookkeeping tricks. But if I can’t, after a whole year, then I’ll recommend we close the operation for good.”

“Do you think you can make that decision?”

“After a year of hands-on management up there, yes.”

“What do you see as a potential profit-maker?” Joanna asked. “If anything.”

“I don’t know!” he said, agitated. “They’ve been using nanotechnology up there. Maybe we can turn Moonbase into a nanotech research center.”

“We’ve been through this before, Greg,” Joanna objected. “The public resistance to nanotechnology is too strong. People are frightened of it. The San Jose labs were trashed. We even had to close down the nanofactory in Austin because of the public pressure.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” Greg said impatiently. “And I heard the vice president’s speech last week, too.”

“He’s asking for a U.N. treaty to ban
all
nanotechnology all over the world!” Joanna said.

“He’ll be president after November,” said Greg gloomily. “He’s certain to win.”

“A man like that in the White House.”

With a sardonic smile, Greg said, “He won’t be the first ignoramus to get there.”

“But he’s violently opposed to nanotechnology; he’s making it a religious issue.”

Joanna did not add that the deaths on the Moon caused by “runaway” nanomachines were still prime ammunition for the anti-nanotech Luddites. She did not have to.

“Ambitious politicians always play to the peoples’ fears,” Greg replied impatiently. “Since when do we let that determine corporate policy?”

Joanna shook her head. “It’s like the fear the public had of the old nuclear power plants. It’s irrational, but it’s very real. It generates political power, more power than we can challenge.”

“I don’t agree.”

“We can’t invest major resources in nanomanufacturing, Greg. We haven’t even been able to put medical nanoproducts on the market, and they’ve been proved to save lives. The government, the public, the
media
—they’ve stopped us every time we’ve tried.”

Greg countered, “But maybe if we do it in space … on the Moon or in orbit. Everybody’s afraid of nanobugs getting loose and running wild, so we do it all in space where they can’t get loose.”

“But what will they build? What can you make in space that we can sell here on the ground?”

“I don’t know,” Greg admitted. “Not yet. That’s why I want to spend a year at Moonbase, to see what they can do.”

Joanna stared at her son. He was serious, intent, perhaps even confident. Even though she was afraid of his unconscious desires, she couldn’t refuse him.

“If you can find a product that could make Moonbase profitable,” Joanna said slowly, “or even if you have the strength to recommend closing the base—you’ll have earned your place on the board of directors.”

“You’d really nominate me?”

She could see all the hope, all the need in him. He’s been through so much, Joanna thought. But another part of her mind asked, Can you really trust him? Do you dare to let him shoulder so much responsibility? Can he handle it without breaking down?

“Let me talk with a few people,” she temporized. “In the meantime, I’ll see about getting you the Moonbase job.”

“That’s the best birthday present you could give me,” Greg said.

Doug is at Moonbase, Joanna reminded herself. I don’t want them both up there at the same time.

“I love you, Mom.”

Joanna felt sudden tears blurring her vision. “I love you too, Greg.”

She knew that she meant it with every fiber of her being. She hoped that Greg meant his words, too. Yet she was always afraid that he still didn’t understand what love really was.

He had been so sick, so terribly mixed up. He had never seen a loving relationship in his home until I met Paul, and then …

Joanna shut her eyes inside the VR helmet and refused to cry. This is a step in Greg’s recovery, she told herself. I can’t refuse to let him go to Moonbase.

But if we close Moonbase it will be the end of all Paul’s dreams. Greg will be killing him all over again. And I’ll be helping him.

It was easy for experienced Lunatics to spot newcomers to the Moon. They walked funny. Unaccustomed to the one-sixth lunar gravity, they stumbled or even hopped when they tried to take a step.

But not Doug Stavenger. Even though he had already been to Moonbase once, briefly, he left Savannah a week early
and spent the time at the main Masterson space station, in orbit around the Earth, living in the wheel that spun to simulate lunar gravity. So when he arrived at Moonbase, he did not need weighted boots. Once in a while he forgot himself and went soaring off the floor when he merely wanted to take a long stride, but by and large he fit into the underground life of Moonbase quite smoothly.

Until he ran into the linear football game.

It was almost midnight. Although most of the offices and labs were closed for the night, the tunnels remained as brightly lit as always. Doug had spent the evening in the workshop that Foster Brennart had converted into his office, going over details of the expedition. Brennart was a stickler for detail; he seemed to know every part and piece and item of equipment that had been assembled for the trek to the south pole. He could account for every gram of food, oxygen, water, even the aluminum chips that were used as fuel for the expedition’s rocket craft.

Doug was determined that he would know as much about the expedition as Brennart did, especially the people. He copied all the personnel files and now, carrying the microdisks in his coverall pockets, he was heading for his own quarters and some sleep before setting out to meet each person slated to go on the expedition.

He heard shouting from down the tunnel. And scuffling. A fight?

The tunnels curved slightly and had emergency airtight hatches every twenty yards that remained open unless the sensors detected a drop in air pressure. Stepping through one of the open hatches, Doug jogged along the tunnel until he saw a half-dozen men and women tussling, pushing, kicking—and laughing.

“Outta the way, tenderfoot!” one of the group hollered as he kicked a small round object in Doug’s direction. It was flat and black, like a hockey puck. As it skittered toward him, Paul saw that it was the plastic top from a container.

It bounced off a wall and the whole gang of men and women raced after it.

“Watch out!” yelled a young Asian woman, short and stocky, grinning toothily.

The commotion boiled right into Doug. They were all
young people, he saw, not much more than his own age. The coveralls they wore were mostly the pumpkin orange of the science and exploration group, although there was a medical white and even a management blue among them, the same as Doug’s own jumpsuit. One of the guys brushed past him, pushing him into the rock wall.

“Linear football,” the young woman gasped, by way of explanation. Then they were past him, kicking the black plastic lid down the corridor.

Doug trotted after them. The game seemed to have no rules. Everybody tried to kick the lid; they all scrambled to reach it, pushing and elbowing and laughing every inch of the way. Somebody kicked it into the slight niche of a doorway and they all whooped wildly. In an instant, though, the game continued down the tunnel.

Doug followed them and before he knew it he was part of the game, too. It became obvious that the object was to kick the lid into a doorway. There were no teams, though; it was all against each. And the scorekeeping was casual, at best.

“That’s eight for me!”

“The hell it is!”

“You’ve only got six.”

“No, eight.”

“What’s the difference? Are we playing or doing arithmetic?”

The tunnel ended at the closed hatch that led into the main garage, where the surface tractors were stored and serviced. The six men and women collapsed against the walls and slid to the floor, panting, sweating, all grins. Doug sank into a crouch with them.

“You’re Doug Stavenger, aren’t you?” asked the Asian woman.

He nodded, trying to catch his breath.

One of the young men puffed, “For a tenderfoot … you run … pretty good.”

Doug said, “Thanks.”

After a few minutes, one of the women said, “Hey, it’s past midnight already. I’ve got to be on the job at oh-eight-hundred.”

“That’s where you sleep, isn’t it?”

“A comedian, yet.”

Slowly, laboriously, they clambered to their feet and started trudging back toward the living quarters.

“I’m Bianca Rhee,” the Asian woman said. Built like a fireplug, she barely came up to Doug’s shoulder. “The brilliant and beautiful Eurasian astrophysicist.”

Doug must have gaped at her, because she laughed out loud. Soon they were talking like old friends as they walked along the tunnel.

“Doesn’t anybody complain about the noise you guys make?” Doug asked. “People are sleeping on the other side of some of those doors.”

“Oh, we wake them up, I guess. But the game moves past them so fast that by the time they’re really awake we’ve moved down the tunnel.”

“Nobody’s ever complained?”

“Oh, sure. But we don’t get up a game
every
night.”

They walked in silence for a while. “You’re an astrophysicist, you said?”

Bianca nodded. She had often used that “beautiful Eurasian” line to see what kind of reaction it would cause. In truth, her beauty was not physical. Short, thick-waisted, with a face as round and flat as a pie pan, Bianca was the daughter of a Korean-American father and Italian-American mother. She claimed that she grew up on sushi parmigiana.

She was bored with the astronomical work she was doing at Moonbase. It was strictly routine photometry, using the wide-field Schmidt telescope to make painstakingly accurate measurements of the positions of galaxies, adding another decimal point or two to the details. The kind of work that they stick graduate students with, while the major players get to do the exciting stuff, like scoping out black holes in galactic cores, or searching for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Her work was so routine that she had set up a computer program to run the telescope and catalogue the results, and began to spend her time calculating how to build a giant telescope using liquid mercury for its mirror. And—when she was sure no one else could see her—practicing ballet in the low lunar gravity.

But suddenly, with Douglas Stavenger walking beside her, she got another idea.

“You know,” she said, “I could use your help.”

“Miner?”

“I’d like to come along on Brennart’s expedition.”

Doug stopped walking and looked at her. “Why?” he asked. “Why should Brennart take an astrophysicist along? What good would that do for the expedition? Or for you, for that matter?”

Bianca answered with one word. “Farside.”

Before she could start to explain, he said, “You want to set up an astronomical observatory on the farside, and the expedition to the south pole can be a sort of training mission. Is that it?”

“Exactly!” She was impressed with how quickly he grasped the idea.

With a slow grin, Doug went on, “That’s a pretty flimsy excuse, don’t you think?”

Damn! she thought. He sees right through me. But she found herself grinning back and admitting, “True. But it’s the only one I could think of.”

By the time they reached her door Doug had promised he would speak to Brennart about her. Bianca wanted to kiss him, but decided it was too soon for that. Sternly, she reminded herself that this good-looking young man was five years her junior. She also remembered that men attain the peak of their sexual potency around the age of eighteen.

Doug did not seem to have any romantic intentions. So they merely shook hands, and then he headed down the tunnel toward his own quarters. She dreamed about him that night. She dreamed she was a slender and graceful ballerina and he was hopelessly in love with her.

Almost everyone in Moonbase wore utilitarian coveralls with nametags pinned to their chests. Yet even though Brennart wore a one-piece jumpsuit just as most others did, he needed no nametag. Although he belonged to the exploration and research group, he insisted on wearing pure white coveralls, clean and crisp as if they had just been laundered and pressed, and decorated with shoulder patches and chest emblems from the dozens of missions he had undertaken during his years as an astronaut and lunar explorer.

Doug Stavenger did not consciously think of Brennart as a father figure, but the older man’s single-minded drive to
establish a working base in the south polar region of the Moon impressed Doug forcefully.

“Do you really think Yamagata’s planning an expedition to Aitkin Basin, too?” Doug asked.

“No doubt in my mind about that,” said Brennart in his sweet tenor voice. “They’d be damned fools not to.”

It was the morning after the football game and Doug’s meeting Bianca Rhee. He and Brennart were hunched over a display table in Brennart’s workshop/office, studying the latest satellite photos of the Mt. Wasser area.

“After all,” Brennart went on, “we’re going out there, aren’t we? The Japanese are just as smart as we are. That’s why we’ve got to get there first. Like the man said, the side that wins is the one that gets there firstest with the mostest.”

Doug nodded as he straightened up. Brennart’s office was one of the largest rooms in Moonbase, but still it felt hot and cramped. Most of the equipment that jammed the office was already crated and ready to be loaded on the ballistic lobbers. Doug saw a rumpled cot in one corner and realized that Brennart was sleeping in this room, too.