Lifeline (19 page)

Chapter 25

CLAVIUS BASE—Day 35

The man who stopped in front of McLaris was frowning. “Is Dr. Tomkins around?” The question came as a demand. He tried to peer around the desk to the chief administrator’s chambers beyond.

Sitting in the outer office, McLaris had heard the visitor approach down the muffled corridors. The visitor rolled when he walked, taking each step carefully on the balls of his feet, as if not trusting low gravity. His cheeks showed a gray wash of unshaven stubble. His manner hinted that he was someone who got things done with no nonsense.

“Dr. Tomkins is busy at the moment. May I help you?” He had been reorganizing some of the administrative work in the outer office, but he didn’t like to be treated as a receptionist. He glanced at the name tag sewn onto the jumpsuit’s right breast pocket: CLANCY. He had seen that name before, on another name tag.

McLaris blinked, then smiled to cover his surprise. He stood up behind the administrative desk and console, extending his hand. “Are you the one who pulled me out of the wreckage of the
Miranda?
Thank you. I’m Duncan McLaris. I guess we couldn’t see each other with the suits and all.”

Clancy squinted at him with a puzzled expression, then his eyebrows rose up. “You’re McLaris? I’m surprised to see you here.”

“Rather than in the brig, you mean?”

“Something like that.”

“I’m just helping out.”

The desk in the outer office was cleared of Tomkins’s scientific potpourri; only an empty cup remained, stained with a brown rim of tea. McLaris hadn’t dared to get himself a nameplate for the desk, or even to request an official title. He was happy enough that Tomkins let him do something productive at all.

The rest of Tomkins’s outer office was cluttered with stacks of d-cubes, holo pictures of stars, drawings of radio telescopes, and a few old-fashioned paper textbooks.

McLaris waited for Clancy to take in the situation. He had watched the scene repeat itself over the past week as Tomkins spent less and less time doing administrative duties, leaving McLaris in his place.

He flattened his hands on the desk. “Is there something I can do for you, Mr. Clancy?”

Clancy set his mouth. “My people are still working in the tunnels, on the chief administrator’s orders.” McLaris thought he detected an angry overtone to the last phrase. “I need to show Tomkins something.”

McLaris moved around to the front of the desk with a take-charge expression on his face. “What’s the problem? Is this an emergency?”

Clancy bristled and stared at the left wall, covered by a panoramic photograph of the Milky Way in Sagittarius, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. McLaris could see he was upset about something, frustrated and losing control.

“I’d really rather discuss it with Dr. Tomkins. If I’m going to lose my temper, I might as well do it in front of the right person.”

McLaris smiled. “Maybe it would be better if you did lose your temper in front of me, and saved a little diplomacy for the chief administrator.” He waited a beat. “Why don’t you let me go with you and see what this is all about?”

Before Clancy had a chance to answer, McLaris had started easing him out of the office. It felt good to be managing people again, dealing with their problems and acting as arbitrator—not for any sense of power it gave, but to see things work together.

McLaris motioned for Clancy to lead the way. “Dr. Tomkins left me with explicit instructions not to bother him unless there’s an emergency. I’ve been helping him out with the paper pushing and stuff like that. He hates it—he says it’s my punishment.”

Clancy grunted something noncommittal. The engineer seemed uneasy, not sure how to treat McLaris. He kept conversation to a minimum as they walked. “I heard what happened on
Orbitech 1.”

McLaris didn’t respond.

They left the office complex behind and entered the smooth rock tunnels that connected the administrative, laboratory, and living areas. Their boots clicked down a long passageway. “Where are these tunnels your men are digging?” McLaris asked.

“My
people,
you mean—almost a third of them are women.”

McLaris chuckled. “Touché! I haven’t slipped in years, I don’t think. But that doesn’t answer my question.”

“They’re the far tunnels, away from the main complex.”

Several turns and some minutes later, Clancy stopped before a newly installed airlock, jerked open the door, and stepped into the tunnel. McLaris sniffed the spoiled wet smell of growing wall-kelp. They stepped inside.

Incandescent lamps ran down the length of the murky tunnel. Cut-up pieces of the wall-kelp had been mounted in the brightest yellow patches under the lamps. Looking tiny against the immense volume of the new catacombs, the shreds of wall-kelp grew as fast as they could metabolize.

Clancy extended his arm to show where the incandescent lights disappeared around a bend in the tunnel. “My crew spent the last week tunneling down here. My guess is that we’ve scooped out at least as much volume as was dug for the entire base in the first place. Here, see our chart.”

Clancy took out a pocket flatscreen and punched up a base map, then added an overlay plot of the
Orbitech 2
engineers’ additions.

“We took the debris over to the rubble processor. Don’t ask me why, since we haven’t been doing materials processing anyway—not with construction shut down. And it’ll be a while before the base itself is hurting so much that we need to scale up production again.”

McLaris interrupted. “Mr. Clancy, you’re not giving me very many hints about what’s bothering you. I don’t picture you as the type of man who enjoys playing mind games.” The image of Curtis Brahms flashed across McLaris’s mind, leaving a cold line of fear in its wake; he wondered how Brahms had convinced Ombalal to do his dirty work. “Please tell me what the problem is.”

Clancy put his hands on his hips. McLaris watched his expression change from annoyance to resignation, and then to grudging pleasure at the directness of the question.

“You’re right—I don’t like to beat around the bush. The fact is, McLaris, that I have a highly trained team of construction engineers here. If we weren’t the very best at what we do, we would never have gotten the contract for
Orbitech 2.

“We dug out these tunnels because Dr. Tomkins told us to. Whenever we send him a progress report, he just tells us to keep at it. He doesn’t have any idea how much we’ve done. I wanted to show him all the room we’ve got already. Granted, we needed better quarters for my people to live in, since we’re now permanent inhabitants of the base. And we needed a lot of extra space for that kelp that came from the
Aguinaldo.

“But we’ve gone far past the point where it’s useful anymore. We all know this is just more pointless busy work. That’s worse than just sitting around.”

Clancy met his eyes, and McLaris saw a depth of emotions in them—genuine concern and insight—that he had not expected. He learned from that glance not to underestimate Clifford Clancy.

“Things are going to start getting very restless around here,” Clancy continued. “I don’t want that. We’ve got enough problems just living from day to day. I thought I should let you know while it’s still fixable.”

McLaris knew Clancy was right. Once the initial problem of short-term survival was addressed, the futility began to become more and more apparent. He nodded. “And what would you like to do about it?”

“I don’t know.” Clancy seemed alarmed; he scowled. “You’re the manager type—we just build things.”

McLaris scratched his chin. His beard hardly itched at all anymore, though it still looked patchy and thin in the mirror. “Come on. Let’s go talk to Tomkins.”

McLaris went through the antechamber into the chief administrator’s office. Clifford Clancy followed a step behind him, but an invisible balance had shifted.

McLaris was in charge now.

Around his office Tomkins had pasted up photographs, spectral strip charts, and false-color radio telescope images—so many that McLaris had no idea which were for decoration and which were part of his ongoing work. Coming to
Clavius Base
should have been an astronomer’s dream, but Tomkins had been frustrated by the amount of time he had to spend bean counting and paper pushing.

Now that McLaris was taking care of most of the tasks, Tomkins buried himself in research again. McLaris wondered if it was just a defense mechanism to keep him from thinking about their situation.

They disturbed Tomkins running a computer simulation and comparing his results to the actual spectra of Wolf-Rayet stars. He frowned and barely looked up when they entered.

“I think I’ve come up with something peculiar—either a flaw in our existing theory of these things or a new way of interpreting the data.”

“Dr. Tomkins, we need to speak with you. Mr. Clancy is here with me.”

“Ah, Mr. Clancy.”

“That’s
Dr.
Clancy. My degree’s from MIT and every bit as good as yours.”

Tomkins changed one of the parameters in his study. He stood up, a full head taller than either of them. He looked somewhat perturbed at the interruption.

McLaris spoke quickly to defuse any anger from the head engineer. “Dr. Clancy and his crew have been digging new tunnels for the past week—”

Tomkins held up a dark brown hand and spread his fingers. “I know that, Duncan. I instructed them to do it.” His normally gentle voice carried an edge of strain. “You may think I’ve lost touch with everything, but I still keep tabs. Those tunnels are vital to our survival and our ability to expand here.”

McLaris met the chief administrator’s eyes. He knew Tomkins had been working for hours at his computer problem, frustrated, hunched with a stiff neck in front of the holotank and jabbing his fingers at the keypad. This was not a good time to broach the subject, but they couldn’t turn around and walk out again.

“My people are going to stop digging those tunnels, Tomkins,” Clancy said. “Enough is enough. If you’d bother to check, you could see that we already have more than enough room to last us for a century or so.”

The tall black man blinked his eyes, surprised and then angry. “Mr. Clancy, I think you are forgetting which of us is the chief administrator of this base.”

“If my people keep digging those stupid tunnels, they’re going to go crazy. They’re engineers, not ditch diggers! If you want to turn this base into an ant farm, your personnel can drill those tunnels as well as my crew can.”

McLaris tried to interrupt as their voices rose higher, but Tomkins blanked his holoscreen in cool anger and turned to stare at the head engineer.

“
Clavius Base
was built as a research station, and will continue to function as one. I will not force research physicists, geologists, and astronomers to dig holes, Mr. Clancy.”

“Dr.
Clancy!”

“I think that may be at the heart of our problem, gentlemen!” McLaris stepped between the two men. Both Clancy and Tomkins looked at him with raised eyebrows.

McLaris allowed himself a brief smile and then continued. “Dr. Tomkins, you should not treat the
Orbitech 2
crew as simple laborers.”

“That’s right!” Clancy sputtered. “These are highly trained construction engineers—mechanical, thermal, and structures people. Not rock pile workers.”

“And you, Dr. Clancy,” McLaris said, turning to face the engineer, “must remember who’s boss. Your people are effectively guests here on the Moon, just like I am. Dr. Tomkins tells you what to do, and you do it. If he says keep digging tunnels, then you keep digging tunnels.”

Clancy grumbled and lowered his eyes. Tomkins still looked like a statue, unmoving, which made McLaris uneasier than he would have felt if Tomkins had been fuming with anger.

McLaris sat down, where he could look up at both men. He steepled his fingers, a gesture he realized he had picked up from Brahms.

“But I don’t think Dr. Tomkins is going to tell you to keep digging tunnels. It’s just make-work and it serves no purpose.”

He turned his gaze to Tomkins. “We’re starting to see something that may become a very grave problem for us here at
Clavius Base
. The frustration Clancy’s engineers are feeling is bound to be growing among all the people. It’s cabin fever. We’re all going stir-crazy.”

Tomkins placed his hands behind his back in a Napoleonic pose, but his towering height dissolved any such comparison. “Survival is my prime motivator. My people are working just as hard as Clancy’s.”

“That’s not at issue,” McLaris said. “I’ve got a different idea.” Then he ignored them both for a moment as he went to the tea dispenser and poured himself a cup. He offered one to each of the two stone-faced men.

“We’ve got the
Aguinaldo’s
wall-kelp. If that grows as rapidly as Sandovaal promises, then it should tide us over when our primary supplies run out a few months from now. It will take even longer for our greenhouse gardens to start producing noticeable amounts of food—and most of that will have to be returned as seed stock so we can start planting sizable crops. It’ll be tight, but the curves show we should be able to make it.”

He sat back down in the chair; the other two men remained standing. McLaris tried to take advantage of the momentary calm.

“There are only a limited number of things we can do to help it along. We just sit around and let the stuff grow. Clancy’s engineers aren’t the only high achievers—none of us wants to mope around twiddling our thumbs.”

McLaris could see impatience growing in the two men. Here he was, giving a lecture, just like a manager at a staff meeting. He drew in a deep breath and decided to cut the background patriotic stuff to a minimum.

“We need to take on a new project—a big project. Look forward—spit in the face of our bad situation. We’re sitting on all the industrial resources we could possibly want.” He stamped his foot on the floor. “Maybe we can’t make food, but we can process just about anything else.”

Tomkins stared absently at one of the pictures on the wall. Clancy waved his finger in the air. “Rah rah! But what’s the point? What do we need here?”