Moon Zero Two (12 page)

She nodded. “I understand.”

“You do?”

“Always something over the next hill,” she said wryly. “
I
know.”

“And always on borrowed money.” That made her smile; and the smile was wry, too. “But there
is
something over the hill,” I said.

“Yes, that’s the trouble. For women, I mean. You know what space travel is? It’s just a big way of getting out of the house on a Saturday evening.”

She slumped down in her seat. I concentrated on the hazards ahead. For a while we ran out of track, and I asked what the hell had happened to her map-reading. When there was no reply, I took a quick glance at her. She was sleeping, her head hunched uncomfortably against the edge of the seat. I slowed. If we hit a bump now, going fast, she could clout her head a whole decibel too loudly against the side of the truck.

We lumbered on. Down, up, down again, and then the long haul up the outer rim of a crater.

Clem murmured in her sleep, but I didn’t try to answer. Maybe she was having some good rich dreams about gold or silver or platinum. It wouldn’t be fair to disturb her.

Not far now. We were inside Spectacle Craters, and according to my guesswork—it wasn’t much more than that until I could get at the map that was crumpled down on the seat beside her—we were on the edge of her brother’s claim.

My eyes were tired. My arms were tired. I coasted the Bug slowly to a halt, and still Clem didn’t wake up.

I sat back and folded my arms, pulling them across my chest to drag the ache out of them.

The land around us was mainly flat, but spiked with rocks like cathedral spires. If you half closed your eyes you could believe you were in the middle of some celestial city. Celestial... well, looked at from Earth that’s just what it was, I suppose.

It was all so still and silent. The sheer, awesome inhumanity of it was somehow soothing. I could understand how it got under the skin of men who worked out here. Along with the roughness and toughness went something more insidious—something that a lot of them didn’t know about until they got back to Earth. And then, back home, they found themselves yearning for the cold wastelands or the burning plains, for the remoteness, for the sensation of being on an ultimate frontier. It was a disease, and there was no known cure. One of the dangers of sending men to the Moon was that after six months they didn’t want to go back; or, if they wanted to go back, found when they were home that they’d made a mistake. Quite a few broken marriages had resulted from the defection of husbands who had fallen under the spell. Some wives still believed, in the teeth of all official assurances, that there must be some special, secret race of Moon-women who cast an enchantment over the men who went there. Recruitment into the administrative services got into such trouble at one stage that the Lunar Authority sponsored a whole shipload of women for a fact-finding tour. They returned to Earth unconvinced, and old wives’ tales (
and
young wives’ tales) went on.

Moon-women...

I glanced at Clem. She stirred, and yawned, and mumbled again to herself. Then she opened her eyes.

“Where are we?”

“In Spectacle Craters.” I leaned over her and extracted the map. “Yes, I thought so. On your brother’s claim. And now that you’re awake...”

I flicked the switch. We ought to be in radio range by now. I swiveled the microphone toward her. She stared at it, then said uncertainly:

“Wally... Wallace... are you receiving me? Clem. Are you receiving me, Wally? Over.”

There was no response. She tried again. Still nothing.

“He doesn’t have to be switched on,” I said. “He could be out working. Or resting.”

I switched off, and drove forward. It was tricky weaving a way between those distorted rocks. Wallace Taplin’s claim was marked on the map all right, but the convoluted path toward it wasn’t specified. Either you knew the way or, as a rule, you didn’t bother to go there.

Suddenly, swinging around a great rocky pillar, I saw a shape ahead that didn’t belong here. It wasn’t sharp enough, ragged enough: it was the smooth curve of a man-made dome.

There was no light inside the dome, and no sign of any working lights in the immediate neighborhood. I operated the spotlight, sweeping its beam across the ground and picking up metallic reflections from a litter of picks and shovels. In the shadow of a mound, again with no lights, was a Moonbug with a bulldozer scoop.

Clem gasped. She groped for the side of the truck as though expecting to find a handle that would let her step out into the vacuum.

“Into a suit,” I said.

She was in a mad hurry, but I wasn’t going to have her dashing out there before she’d gone through the drill and could be trusted. Top priority was the microphone switch on her wrist: if we couldn’t talk to each other out there, we weren’t going to make much progress. Safety zip, helmet lock, airbottle control—in spite of her fuming impatience I made her check each procedure.

“Four hours’ air in these cylinders,” I concluded, “so don’t go wandering off for a day’s hike.” I turned the knob. “Warm enough? Breathing all right? If the heating busts, you’ll soon know anyway.”

We eased ourselves into the cramped airlock at the back of the Bug. Clem fidgeted inside her suit, and I knew she was urging the pressure to adjust fast—faster than this— and the lights to change. Red to green. Right!

When the flap lifted, I let her get down first.

She stared around the barren, starlit landscape. The rocky pinnacle behind the dome reeled against the sky and seemed ready to topple down on us.

Her voice crackled in my ear. “It’s... quiet, isn’t it?” There was certainly no welcoming music, and nobody hurrying toward us from the dome. I went to the dome and peered in through a porthole. Then I took a look at the Bug.

When I turned around, there was no sign of Gem.

I barked into my helmet mike: “Clem, where are you? Where’ve you got to?”

There was no reply. I was just about to yell something foul, not giving a damn who heard it, when there was a little click as she switched to transmission and said:

“Just around the comer. Behind the rock. I’ve found... something.”

I pounded after her. She looked tiny and insignificant against the petrified ogres above.

“Don’t wander off like that,” I said. “You’ve got to stay in sight.”

“I’m sorry, but... look!”

A shallow pit had been scooped out of the ground, and some yards beyond it was the beginning of a deeper shaft.

“You see,” said Gem, “he
has
been mining.”

I didn’t know we’d ever needed any evidence on that, one way or the other. You didn’t banish yourself to parts like these unless you intended to do some digging.

“Doesn’t mean he’s found anything useful,” I observed. She was looking around. “Where could he have gone?” “Not far, or he’d have taken his Bugdozer.”

We walked on. This time she played the good girl and stayed in step with me, though I could feel her wanting to push on, to hurry over the next ridge and see what was waiting there. Right now was the time for the big happy ending: Wally coming up against the starshine, waving triumphantly, and Gem rushing into his brotherly arms. Happy laughter, and a background of the music of the spheres.

We came around a squat abutment, and I heard Gem shout deafeningly, the echoes ringing around my helmet. “Wally!”

There it was, a figure outlined against the sky, taking a sight through a theodolite.

She bounded toward it.

“Careful!” I went after her. If she tore her suit against any of those jagged edges, there’d be no happy reunion.

Clem slowed, but not all that much. She blundered up to her brother and grabbed him ecstatically by the shoulder.

He stood erect for one more moment, just the way he had been as we approached; and then, slowly and gently, he fell and lay at her feet.

I heard Clem gasp. Then she screamed.

I came up alongside and looked down, and saw what she was seeing. From behind the faceplate of the helmet, what was left of Wally Taplin’s face grinned fixedly back at us.

There wasn’t going to be any happy reunion anyway. And if Wally had discovered anything in the way of riches, he wasn’t ever going to get the chance of spending the profits.

THE BEST I could do in the way of a memorial was a rough cross made of pick-handles lashed together with wire. I had to bash a hole in the harsh ground to take it, and then tamp dust and grit down around the upright. Wally, too, had a covering of dry shale and rock drippings.

“Maybe we can send back and have something better put up, one day,” I said.

Clem shook her head slowly inside her helmet. “No. That’s right for a miner. Poor Wally. I hope he did find something, just for the fun of it... for his own sake... over this hill.”

I shouldered the equipment I’d taken from the body— two airbottles and the tackle that went with them—and eased the rocket pistol into a more comfortable position against my thigh. We walked slowly back to our Moon-bug.

“You couldn’t tell,” asked Clem wretchedly, “what it was... what was it made him die?”

“No idea.”

“I suppose the idiot just made a mistake.”

That didn’t make much sense to me. Wally had managed two years without making one, and in two years you usually got yourself pretty well organized. He had snuffed out with incredible speed—incredible, considering his suit hadn’t been punctured. And to go the way he did, to rot like that, there had to be air inside his suit. Experimentally I thumbed the knob of one of the airbottles on my shoulder. The cylinder was empty. But when I tried the other, it spat a puff of vapor.

“A mistake,” I mused aloud.

“And if we can’t prove he found anything on the claim, we can’t register it, can we?”

“No.”

“So we can’t sell it. We just lose it. And Mother doesn’t get her money back.”

“That’s the way it goes.”

We reached the Bug and loaded the bits and pieces in through the airlock. When I’d adjusted the pressure and | checked the seal, we lifted our faceplates.

Clem looked pale and lost. She said: “I don’t know what to say. Or do. Or... or anything. I won’t be able to pay you for the flight.”

“Not to worry. Better than being in jail, anyway.”

She stared forward through the reinforced pane.

“Couldn’t we have another look around? Around the claim, I mean—just to see if he did find something?”

“All nine hundred square miles of it?” I said. I settled myself into the driving seat and waved her into place beside me. “We’d do better to get back and report this.”

“But if he
had
found something...”

I could sympathize with her. I could feel for her, still clinging to some shred of hope—some belief in a last-minute miracle. But sympathy was one thing and miracles were another; and as far as I was concerned it was time to be moving back to base.

The Bug coughed to itself and then rumbled forward. We swung around the rock that had originally obscured the little dome from our view. I switched the headlights on full.

And there, bathed in the light, three men were waiting for us.

They stood as still as Wally had stood, but I knew they Weren’t dead. There was something menacing in the way jthey were grouped, and in the way their hands rested close to their belts. Hands poised above guns, that was the way it looked to me.

They wore bright, distinctive Moon suits—red, yellow, and green. The best and the newest, showing up against the monochrome landscape, and neatly distinguishing one man from another.

I snapped on the radio. “Who’s that out there?”

The hand of one of them dropped and closed on his gun.

“Who is it?” I demanded.

The gun came up. I slammed the Bug into reverse, and it sprang backward with a tortured scream of transmission mechanism up through the flooring.

His aim was good, though. The window starred and dissolved before my eyes. Air was sucked toward it, and the map churned up in a coil of paper and whipped past my ear. I threw myself across Clem and slammed down the faceplate of her helmet.

No miracles? It wasn’t much less than a miracle that we had kept our Moon suits on while arguing about that little matter of staying or leaving.

The Bug was still careering backward, bouncing off every obstacle. I pushed myself back from Clem and made a grab at the controls again.

There was another protesting whine from below as I threw it into full forward drive. The three men had started to trot toward us, but now they scattered as the Bug’s weight came thundering down on them.

I saw a puff of shots as we went through, and there was a fizz and crackle of electricity from under the dashboard. The whine of the motors became a groan, then a stutter.

I swung the Bug around a rocky steeple, and it coughed and died about twenty-five yards from the base of the cliff.

Clem was still struggling for breath. She mouthed something, realized she hadn’t switched on, and flicked the button on her wrist. “What did they—?”

I grabbed her wrist and switched off again. Then I raised a finger, and said loudly and slowly and clearly: “We’ll stay in here. Safer than outside.”

She couldn’t make out what I was up to. Her eyes widened, she started to talk again, but I kept her fingers away from the mike switch. I jerked my head toward the airlock, and bundled Wally’s airbottles and his pistol belt toward it. Then I got my arm around Clem’s shoulders, bulked out by the Moonsuit, and hustled her into the back of the truck. We went through the procedure at double time. The flap went up, we rolled out, and I slammed the flap shut again. We got under the shadow of the rocks just as the three men came around the corner.

They stopped when they saw the Bug. Then they spread out, rocket pistols thrusting from their fists.

I tugged at the sprung, self-coiling wire in my belt, and plugged one end into the socket of Clem’s suit. She looked down at it. Something else new to her. She knew none of the routines.

I said: “We’re on telephone now, as long as we’ve got this link. Don’t say a word on the radio: they’d pick it all up.”