Lunar Descent (11 page)

She let out her breath and dropped her arms. “Thanks, Lew,” she murmured gratefully.

He blinked. “What for?”

“Never mind.” Butch walked over to the plastic flask mounted above an electric burner. Their combined daily drinking-water ration was collected in the flask; she picked it up and examined the scale. “Only about a liter left. Want it now or later?”

Monk thought about it. “Now. Just make it a small cup. Use this morning's tea bag, please. No sense in letting it go to waste.”

“One secondhand cup of tea coming up.” She dropped two moist, leftover tea bags in their respective drinking mugs—his had the seal of the University of Massachusetts stamped on the enamel, hers bore the
Cosmopolitan
logo—and switched on the burner. As the precious water began to boil, Butch turned and leaned against the bench, folding her arms across her chest. “It's about the new general manager, isn't it?”

The beads clicked between his fingers. “Sort of, but not quite …” He shook his head.
Click
. “I can't put my finger on it, but I don't have a good feeling about this meeting.”
Click-click
. “I don't know any more than you do about Riddell, but Skycorp couldn't have picked a worse time to install a new GM. There's a lot of ill feeling toward the company right now.”

Butch pulled her long hair back behind her neck and reached for a hairband on her desk. “If you're expecting me to sympathize with Huntsville, you haven't been paying much attention lately to current events. I've been swamped since the purge, and I don't believe a word Arnie Moss or Ken Crespin says about a new science team.”

“Why don't you?”

“C'mon. The writing's on the wall. Basic science is the bottom priority now. The only reason they kept me around is because the legal department couldn't find a way to wriggle out of the joint-operating agreement with LPI.”

Walker slowly nodded. “Uh-huh … and that's what's scaring me. Have you checked the newsfeeds lately?”

She shook her head, and he continued. “I looked at the
Wall Street Journal
on-line edition yesterday.…”

“You reading the
Wall Street Journal
?”

He shrugged. “If you want to keep up on the news, you have to read everything. Even if it doesn't have a crossword puzzle.” He smiled briefly. “Anyway, there was a small item yesterday about some sort of agreement being hammered out between Skycorp and Uchu-Hiko. Nobody seems to know what's going on. Or if they do, they're not talking about it.”

Peterson shrugged. “The Korean project? That's old news.”

Click
. “No, it can't be just the Korea powersat.”
Click
. “It's something else again.”

Peterson frowned as she tied back her hair. It could be an expanded powersat construction program … but if it was, Skycorp had picked a strange bedfellow to negotiate an agreement with: The Japanese space company Uchu-Hiko was its closest competitor. Despite its current financial troubles, Skycorp had managed to successfully complete the West European solar power satellite system with its own resources. The capital infrastructure for building the new SPS for the United Republic of Korea was already in place, so the company didn't need to invite aboard its top rival in the space industry for any future projects, even though Uchu-Hiko had been making noises about expanding its base from launch services and zero g manufacturing to high-space construction. Then again, Korea had become Japan's closest trade partner in the last few years.…

Butch gave up. She had never been able to comprehend the intricate business dealings of the space industry. “You might have a point,” she conceded. “What is it, then?”

The beads stopped clicking. Monk waved his hand briskly. “Don't worry about
what
it is. That's really not the point. It's the
how
that bothers me.…”

She shook her head. “I don't follow you.”

“Whatever Skycorp has in mind, it's no small project. And if that's the case, Descartes isn't ready to handle it.”

“Uh-huh. Okay …”

“Right. Look at the situation here. We've had firings, a bonus freeze, a work slowdown, and an embargo on nonessential goods. That's all in the last few months. Half of the work force—the ones who survived the purge—is demoralized. They've even stopped thinking of themselves as employees. In their minds, they're wage-slaves being yanked around by the company …”

“I second that emotion,” she interjected.

“… and the other half doesn't know which end is up,” Monk continued. “Huntsville obviously rushed the new guys through training. Some of these kids must have thought they were taking jobs in the Virgin Islands, they're so unprepared. I've been seeing guys in the infirmary who were suffering from dehydration because no one told them how to handle water-rationing, or nearly breaking their legs because they don't know how to walk in one-sixth gee.”

He stopped and sighed. “Remember the kid I treated two days ago, the one who blacked out during EVA?” Butch nodded. “Turned out he didn't know how to interpret the mix indicator in his suit. He thought that his oxygen intake remained constant, no matter how much work he was doing outside, so he overcompensated the nitrogen intake. He was singing ‘Happy Trails' when they caught up with him. Any longer and he might have tried to take off his helmet. Nobody told him how to watch his levels.”

Butch gazed out the window at the pockmarked plains as Walker went on. “And now there's some new deal being hatched. We're going to hear about it in a few minutes, I'm sure. Whatever it is, these kids aren't ready to handle it.”

“They're not kids,” she murmured, turning to look at him.

Monk smiled at her. “C'mon, Sue. Some of those guys had your
Sports Illo
cover stapled to their bedroom walls when they were trying to figure out who to take to the senior prom. We're not talking about people with acquired wisdom and maturity.”

“And you?” she teased.

“I told you already. I was …”

“Right. Running an antique movie projector in Tibet for the Dalai Lama. He loved Marx Brothers movies. You told me.” Peterson went back to looking out the window. Beyond the domes of the factory subcomplex and the regolith strip mines, she could see the rails of the mass-driver leading westward out into the lunar desert. When she had first arrived here a little more than a year ago, the mass-driver had been operating almost twenty-four hours per Earth day, the spherical cargo cans hurtling down through the electromagnetized track until they reached escape velocity at the ramp at the end of the line. That level of activity hadn't been seen in the last two months; the mass-driver was only working part time now.

“Ready or not, they're going to get it,” she said, more to her own reflection in the window than to Walker. “If only we knew what kind of guy the company's sent us …”

“Hmm?”
Click-click
. A pensive pause. “Perhaps we could find out,” Monk said slowly. “Maybe we could ask for a private meeting.”

Butch looked sharply at him. “Today?”

“Why not? You're senior scientist, I'm the chief physician. He should get to know us, right?” Monk hopped off the stool and walked past her toward the workbench. “We could try to catch him right before he goes to the mess hall,” he said as he picked up the flask and poured hot water into his tea mug. “Strictly low-profile, of course. A little get-together in his office, perhaps.”

“Roll out the welcome wagon?” She held out her mug. “Here.”

“It's the only welcome wagon he's going to get.” He poured water into her mug. “Someone should talk to him about our problems here. I'm not going to count on the Huntsville boys giving him all the messy details.”

Butch sipped her tea and nodded. The general manager's office was directly across the corridor from the lab; that was probably his next stop after he desuited in the ready-room. “Sure, why not? Maybe we can ask some straight questions then.”

“Maybe. Just don't count on straight answers.” Monk tucked his beads into a vest pocket and headed for the door. “Let's try it anyway. C'mon. Let's park ourselves over there.”

Peterson blinked. “Your keycard's set for the GM office door? You never told me.”

“Sure. I'm the doctor, remember? Bo Fisk coded me on the card.” The former holy man shrugged as he opened the door. “This qualifies as a medical emergency. I'm trying to prevent Lester Riddell from cutting his throat at the staff meeting.”

Willard DeWitt's sleep-niche in Dorm 1-A was the same size as every other individual's in Descartes: six feet across by eight feet deep by nine feet high. With the bunk folded up against the aluminum wall, there was just enough room for him to sit at his fold-down desk or to open his wall-locker; he couldn't do both at the same time. He had been in jail cells which were larger … and, indeed, the dorms resembled prison cell blocks: cold, efficient, sterile, meant for sleeping and privacy and little else.

It scarcely mattered to him, though. His niche had one saving grace: a private communications/computer terminal built into the wall above the desk. It had a phone for making long-distance calls to Earth—although comsat-time was rationed, just like everything else, and enormously expensive—and he had discovered that the terminal had a serial port into which he could jack his Toshiba laptop, the only personal item he had brought with him to the Moon. The computer was meant for mundane tasks like checking the base's bulletin board and keeping a personal diary, yet he had already found a way, by interfacing his Toshiba through the serial port, to crack into the base mainframe. Through this back door, he could annex the base's central telecommunications system. A couple of minor systems tests had convinced him that he was capable of uploading and downloading data with any networked computer on Earth; diverting the phone bill somewhere else was simple enough after that.

Sitting now at his desk, gazing silently at the blank surface of his clamshell screen as he absently rubbed his recently bearded chin, Willard had to grin. No one here knew better, but putting him in a room alone with a modemed computer was like leaving a little kid alone with a box of Hershey bars.

Beyond the claustrophic walls of his niche, he could hear the ruckus of the all-male dorm swirling around him. Men talked, laughed, argued, shouted down the narrow aisles to each other. Niche doors opened and slammed shut, the sounds reverberating through the cramped block. At the end of his aisle, there was the hollow sucking sound of a commode being flushed in the head; from the ceiling-mounted speaker above his head, the sexy beauty of an old Koko Taylor number rumbled in from the blues portion of Moondog McCloud's daily radio show. All the shifts were coming in for the general staff meeting in the mess hall. Descartes Station was jumping at noon, and so was his imagination.

The blank screen stared back at him like a painter's canvas awaiting the first, crucial brush stroke. He was a quarter of a million miles from home, far out of the reach of the SEC and the FBI and the IRS and everyone else. No one knew anything about Jeremy Schneider, the new third-shift communications officer. His cover was foolproof, at least so far. True, if the hammer came down again, he had nowhere to run or hide, but that was only a minor consideration, really. After two weeks of being here, he was beginning to itch again for another profitable scam. But what to do with so much potential at his fingertips?

The fact is, Will—he reluctantly admitted to himself—you're addicted to this sort of thing. You've got money squirreled away in several discreet bank accounts back on Earth, probably as much as Jeremy Schneider may earn in the next year in this hellhole. Yet the acquisition of wealth has never been the point, has it? You
like
your complex game of cops-and-computer-robbers, don't you? Hell, you
love
it!

And that's what it all comes down to, isn't it? Sure, you could lie low in this place for the next twelve months: doing Jeremy Schneider's boring job, playing poker for tobacco chews with the boys, watching dumb TV shows in the rec room, griping about the terrible food, going out for an occasional stroll on the surface, waiting for the heat to die down back home. But you'll probably go crazy that way, won't you? Because, in your own way, you're an artist, and artists go nuts when they can't practice their art. Face it, pal, you need to …

The Koko Taylor number ended and Moondog McCloud growled through the ceiling speaker.
Oh, lordy lordy yeah, Missus Koko Taylor, rounding off the Blues Hour here at LDSM, the voice of Descartes Station. Now listen here, boys and girls, don't forget the general staff meeting at thirteen-hundred hours in the mess hall. You know where that is, now, don't you? If you've forgotten, better ask your buddy, 'cuz the new GM tells us he ain't gonna accept no excuses for bein' tardy or absentee, if y'know what I mean
.…

A deep-throated chuckle.
But if you're one of our occasional listeners out there who just so happens to pick up our signal quite accidentally … that's right, Olympus Station, we're talking about you … don't worry. None of you freeloaders are required to attend
. Another chuckle.
Just think about it, folks! We're going out at the speed of light throughout the universe! This radio show will someday, somehow, be heard across the galaxy! I'm FAMOUS! I'm BAD! And I'm not even in the Arbitron books! I'm
…

The voice suddenly dropped to a disappointed mutter.…
Moondog McCloud, here at the last radio station in the solar system. Drop a note in the box in the rec room if you have any requests, okay? Until I get a real job, here's the Rolling Stones with the theme song of our little mandatory meeting today, by request from Slow Mo and the Bulldozer Patrol
.…