Lunar Descent (27 page)

“But I read the papers,” Harry admits, “and I keep my ear to the ground. I know what people in the community are saying at the lunch counters and the mass-transit stations. They want a voice. They
need
a voice, and not one that's going to be silenced just because the owner of the local Pizza Trough gets pissed off. As a lawyer, I would have been mediocre …”

He pauses and waves his hand around the air-studio of WBTV-FM, a small-market radio station in Cedar Key, Florida, where he is the current overnight jock (as Sugar Ray Monsoon). “But as a DJ,” he continues, “I can reach the ears of many more people than I could make speeches to in some dead courtroom. I can keep up the good fight. Sure, it always cost me, but I can change some minds.…”

The Homeboys CD which was been playing in the CD rack begins to fade. Harry Drinkwater quickly excuses himself, swivels back to the console, clears his throat, and switches on his mike. The management at his current post has already become weary of his monologues about the hardships of the local shrimp-fishing industry; they may have him canned by the time this article sees print.

Where will Harry Drinkwater go next? He's beginning to use up all his medium-market stations in the South; he's
persona non grata
throughout major-league Dixie radio. Yet it's difficult to ignore a copy of the current issue of the
R&R
which lies open on the counter next to a stack of CD's. It's turned to the classifieds page in the back; a display ad, with a photo of the Moon, has been circled with red ink from Harry's logbook pen.…

13. Radio Free Luna

Long before Harry Drinkwater said No—absolutely, positively, without exception
no
—Willard DeWitt knew that he was looking upon the face of a soulmate: a person who had hardwired reality
his
way.

While DeWitt—that is, Jeremy Schneider, hopeful media broker and entrepreneur—recited his spiel about establishing Moondog McCloud as the host of a new syndicated alternative-AOR radio program called MoonTunes, he watched Drinkwater carefully. Moondog McCloud's hands prowled restlessly across the mixing board, potting up one CD deck to segue in a new Flaming Carrots number while potting down “Lost in the Supermarket” by the Clash, shoving a PSA tape (Gina LaMotta on safe-sex habits) into the cart machine, then abruptly changing his mind and hastily replacing it with another PSA (Albert Crenshaw on watching your cholesterol); now nervously adjusting the big Electrovoice mike dangling in front of his face, then hunting through the box of CDs at his feet, apparently searching for something to match the Flaming Carrots, even though there was a stack of unused albums by everyone from the Who to the Yummy Nummins to Dagwood Bumstead right next to his elbow. All the while saying
no
…
no
…
no
… as if it were a mantra.

Even as DeWitt talked, keeping on with the now-useless prattle about estimated audience penetration and possible Arbitron ratings escalation, he let his own eyes roam around the studio. LDSM had been established in a vacant office in Subcomp A, almost directly adjacent to the mess hall. The smallest available office, it was in fact little larger than a walk-in closest. The narrow room barely had enough space to contain a tiny wraparound console, a shelf of CD's and tapes, a single chair, the transmitter rack behind the console, and the ceaselessly buzzing Associated Press line-printer. Scrolled paper was heaped on the floor around and behind the chair, with pertinent scraps of news piled high on the desktop in front of the six-channel soundboard, burying the FCC-required logbooks. The mooncrete walls were lined with sheets of pitted foam-rubber which DeWitt recognized as having come from the insides of cargo canisters: crude but effective acoustic baffles. On top of the foam were stapled promotional posters of a dozen throwaway one-album rock bands—Area 18, Veronica and the Bar Sluts, Cleveland, Wha???, Bathtub Slime, the Dinks—some of whom were never played on the station.

Drinkwater was heavyset, with the build of a welterweight boxer past his prime. He had a mop of curly black hair and a greasy beard just beginning to turn gray at the jawline, framing the expressive mouth of a professional talker. His eyes, though, were what captured DeWitt's attention the moment he walked into the studio. Drinkwater had the hooded eyes of a perpetually angry young man who was not going quietly into middle age. He was, Dewitt decided, a person much like himself. A rebel. Yet while DeWitt was exercising his own anger at the system by covertly robbing it blind, Harry Drinkwater was tilting at windmills. Maybe he had destroyed a few windmills in his time, too … but there were a lot of windmills, and some of them had awfully big vanes.

“Be quiet a minute,” Drinkwater said. “I've gotta make an ID.” He switched on the mike, suddenly silencing the thud-and-blunder of the Flaming Carrots on the monitor speakers, and waited a few moments until the song began to fade out. “Yesirree bob!” he abruptly chortled as he potted up the mike. “The Flaming Carrots here on LDSM, the moon rock sound of the high frontier! We got some moldy goldy oldies by the Talking Heads and R.E.M. comin' up in just a few seconds, right after this important, I mean
urgent
, public service announcement!”

He stabbed the
PLAY
button on the cart machine, potted down the mike and switched it off, then turned down the volume on the PSA tape. “Christ almighty,” he grumbled as he shrugged off the headphones, “even if they won't send me any new CD's, you'd think the damn company would at least ship up some new PSA's. Getting sick of hearing this cholesterol shit over and over.” He waited a half-minute until the PSA had stopped, then cleanly segued in R.E.M.'s “Stand.”

As McCloud turned to grab a Talking Heads CD out of the stack on his desk, he added, “That's some interesting idea you have about syndicating my show, Jeremy, but I'm afraid I'm not real keen on being a big-time jock. I'm just some guy who likes doing this on a small-scale level, if you know what I mean.”

“Uh-huh,” DeWitt replied. He had already gotten the message. Yet, instinctively, he knew that it wasn't for the reasons that Harry Drinkwater had cited. Not that DeWitt had ever seriously intended to market Moondog McCloud as a syndicated radio announcer; Drinkwater's cooperation had only been necessary to add credibility to the scam he had been perpetrating.

The idea was complex, but it had begun with a fairly simple observation. The paychecks issued every two weeks to Descartes Station personnel were direct-deposited into banks of their choice on Earth. But Skycorp also had a group-investment program in place; its employees were offered the opportunity to have money taken from their checks, before they were deposited, and put into stock investments handled by Skycorp's primary broker, the multinational New York firm of Empire Securities.

At least half of Descartes Station's moondogs took advantage of the deal, in hopes of increasing their income by playing the stock market. Yet, DeWitt had noted, none of them paid the slightest bit of attention to
exactly
what their money was doing in the market. Empire Securities was investing their cash in everything from maglev-train projects in Germany to housing projects in Chicago to a chain of pool halls in London, buying and selling like maniacs on half-a-dozen exchanges worldwide. This was the way the stock market usually worked; no surprise there.

DeWitt had studied the last six-month prospectus from Empire and had noticed these things; he had also noticed that the moondogs rarely glanced at their stock reports. More than half of the time, the prospectus each one received by fax went straight into the recycling bins. The rest of the time, they glanced at the reports in the rec room or in the mess hall, grunted without understanding the material, and tossed them into an unread pile of other reports in their niches. They didn't care where the money was invested, as long as the balance sheets showed a positive result, even if it was measured only by pennies.

All great scams begin with a simple notion. Willard's began with a deceptively easy question:
How can I get them to invest their money in something which belongs to me
? Which led to the next question:
What do I have which they will want to buy
? Just by listening to the radio, he found the answer.

First, he would get McCloud hooked on the idea of becoming a syndicated DJ, establishing him as the on-air talent for Radio Free Luna, billed as the “world's first rock show from outer space.” Then DeWitt would establish Radio Free Luna as the first product of MoonTunes Ltd., a private commercial radio syndicate. On the surface, MoonTunes would be offering Radio Free Luna to radio stations back on Earth. This was calculated to stir up some excitement among the moondogs at the base, once the news was deliberately leaked. One of their own was about to make the big time. Hometown boy makes good and all that stuff.

Once the excitement had built to a fever pitch, Jeremy Schneider would make his surprise announcement: Stock in MoonTunes Ltd. would be offered to prospective investors among the crew. In fact, they could purchase shares from a small yet established New York brokerage called Gamble, Hutton & Schwartzchilde, which was handling transactions for MoonTunes. And as it happened, Gamble, Hutton & Schwartzchilde was an associate brokerage of Empire Securities. Therefore, all the moondogs had to do was instruct Empire to invest part of their investment capital with Gamble, Hutton & Schwartzchilde; this was as simple as touching a couple of keys on the terminals in their niches when the biweekly pay notices were faxed by the company.

All it took was a certain amount of hubris and sweet-talking by Jeremy Schneider. He had little doubt that he could convince people that MoonTunes was a viable investment. Moondog McCloud was beloved by the station's crew; if they were sure that their own DJ would be a big hit with the folks back home, the Descartes Station investors were certain not only to get their money back, but also to turn a considerable profit on the deal. And since they needed only to invest a fraction of their hard-earned money from each pay period—DeWitt had learned how deceptively small “five percent” could sound—no one would feel that their stake in this venture put them at great risk.

Except that Gamble, Hutton & Schwartzchilde existed only as an account number within the vast memory of Empire Securities' computers. It had taken DeWitt a considerable amount of hacking, using his Toshiba laptop computer to establish a secret back door into Empire's computers through the comsat system. Yet once he had managed to do so, it had been relatively simple to ferret out the information he desired. Gamble, Hutton & Schwartzchilde had been a minor company specializing in penny stock until it had gone bankrupt six weeks ago. The company had been dissolved and its meager capital assests sold to another brokerage. Yet, through the negligence of some overworked systems keypuncher, its name and account number had not been eradicated from the memory of Empire's computer mainframe. In name only, therefore, it still existed.

DeWitt secretly purchased the defunct company for exactly one dollar, then created an entirely fictitious board of directors and listed the revived firm as a company dealing in “space and media futures.” He had then patiently waited to see what might happen, but nobody at Empire Securities appeared to notice: Gamble, Hutton & Schwartzchilde continued to exist as a tiny, unnoticed cog in a vast machine stretching from New York to London to Tokyo to Rio to Johannesburg.

The alleged president and CEO of Gamble, Hutton & Schwartzchilde, Elliot Entwhistle, was one of DeWitt's phony identities, created long ago as a standby entity. Entwhistle was supposedly a wealthy investment banker in Houston, complete with an account in a large Texas bank. A secret, well-guarded subroutine in the Empire Securities computer was programmed so that the money received from investments in Gamble, Hutton & Schwartzchilde would automatically be transferred via computer network to the Houston bank, into Entwhistle's account.

The New York computers did not know that Gamble, Hutton & Schwartzchilde and Elliot Entwhistle existed only as ghosts; they would obediently follow instructions planted in advance by DeWitt. The legitimate flesh-and-blood bankers who rubber-stamped the transactions would never notice the primary transaction; Empire Securities bought and sold, on a daily basis, stock in excess of several billion dollars on behalf of their clients. A couple of hundred thousand bucks diverted, over a year's time to a small brokerage handled by their own holding company, would be ignored, lost in the fathomless paperwork and number-crunching. And the investment-minded moondogs at Descartes Station would receive a regular series of faxed letters from radio stations on Earth, all of whom wanted to syndicate Radio Free Luna—all completely fictional, of course, but necessary to maintain the verisimilitude of the bogus company.

The moondogs would also receive authentic-looking stock certificates from Gamble, Hutton & Schwartzchilde; these would be ground out by a desktop-publishing program that DeWitt had managed to steal from a California software firm which specialized in such things. Only a skilled security hacker hired by Empire Securties could ever crack the elaborate system DeWitt had established, and DeWitt had taken pains to eliminate any loose ends that might draw the attention of Empire's counter-hackers.

The whole thing would look, sound, and feel like a completely legitimate stock transaction … but all the money invested in MoonTunes through Gamble, Hutton & Schwartzchilde would be electronically transmitted to the Texas bank account of Elliot Entwhistle. In the meantime, the puppet strings would be manipulated from DeWitt's comsat-linked laptop computer on the Moon, protected by layer upon layer of cutouts. If all worked well, this scheme would take almost exactly twelve months to complete. Then, after those twelve months, Jeremy Schneider's contract with Skycorp would expire. He would not renew his contract, but instead would ship back to Earth … and disappear from existence almost as soon as he touched ground on the shuttle landing strip at Cape Canaveral.