Lunar Descent (38 page)

Withdrawing his hand, he pushed back the chair and stood up. “I think I want to go down to Storage Two.”

The sultry expression on Butch's face abruptly changed to one of bewildered rejection. Riddell quickly shook his head. “No no no,” he said. “Just come with me. I've got a sneaking suspicion I know what's going on down there. And if it's what I think it is, that's what we need a little bit of right now.”

A confused smile appeared on her face. “I don't get it,” she said, shaking her head. “What do you think is in a storeroom that we need?”

He smiled a little. “A party.” He stepped around the desk and took her hand again. “Call it a date. Now c'mon. Let's go crash it.”

19. Why Don't We Get Drunk and Screw?

The still wasn't exactly a masterpiece of engineering. It was in fact, Mighty Joe had to admit, as ugly as anything you could expect to find stashed in the northern Florida woods.

Yet, despite its old Appalachian “hog” design, it did have a certain high-tech look about it. The fifty-gallon barrel was made of scrap spacecraft oxygen tanks that Honest Yuri had welded together, and instead of a firebox, the mash was cooked with heating elements pilfered from the galley. The rest of the rig—the cap and cap arm, the water tank, the spiral-shaped “worm,” or feed tube, and the filters—had been pieced together from spare parts found or stolen from all over the base. It was big and cumbersome and a bitch to put together, but it would have done a Prohibition-era moonshiner proud. And when Quick-Draw McGraw found the thing, all that Joe or anyone else could do was to grin, stand aside, and let her admire their work.

In hindsight, they should have expected the security chief to find it. For one thing, the corn that had been swiped from the greenhouse by clean-up crews would have been eventually noticed by Sawyer and reported to McGraw. Also, fifty gallons of water didn't vanish from the storage tanks without someone taking notice. And there weren't too many places in Descartes where such a contraption could be safely hidden—especially since McGraw had an all-access keycard that allowed her to open any door on the moonbase. As the chief moonshiner, Mighty Joe had known that he was taking a considerable risk in a storeroom on the lower level of Subcomplex A, right underneath the galley. But it was hardly less risky than building the thing in the bunkhouse or in one of the adjacent radiation shelters on the same level; McGraw regularly checked these places, and would have found the contraption even before the first batch had been made. And considering how word had leaked out among the crew that there was to be a little “tea party” going down Saturday night in Storage Two, they should have just sent her a written invitation. On the other hand, perhaps Quick-Draw had been watching all along, waiting for her chance to catch the Vacuum Suckers in the act. Nothing that happens in Descartes Station remains secret for very long.

As it was, when she finally raided the covert distillery, there were almost a dozen moondogs sitting around on crates of freeze-dried god-knows-what, holding foam cups of high-potency moonshine and grinning foolishly from various degrees of inebriation. Portable lamps had been set up for the drinking party, with a towel pushed against the crack at the bottom of the door to keep out the light, and admittance was gained by giving three staccato raps, then one slow knock, on the door. They knew it was a bust when the door opened without a single knock and the overhead ceiling lights were suddenly switched on. There was the unmistakable jangle and clank of her equipment belt, and as everyone winced in the abrupt glare of the lights, Quick-Draw McGraw stepped into the storeroom.

“All
right
…” she began.

For a moment or two, there was dead silence. Annie was the first to recover. “Surprise!” she shouted merrily. She stood up from her crate of freeze-dried eggs and, with the chutzpah only the seriously shitfaced are able to muster, raised her fourth cup of liquor in a mock toast. “Happy birthday to you,” she began to sing. “… Haaappy biiirthday to yooou …”

Everyone in the storeroom rose to their feet and, holding forth their cups of ninety-proof liquor, joined in: “… Haaaaappy biiirrthday, dear Quick-Draaaaw … Haaappy biiirthday to yooooooou.…”

“Blow out the candles,” someone muttered.

“Yeah,” someone else hiccuped, “and shut the friggin' door. You want the cops to find us or somethin'?”

They all laughed and sat down again. Mighty Joe, at his post next to the tap, watched Quick-Draw's face as it went through various states of apoplexy. Some of the best and brightest of Descartes Station's staff were in here: Tycho Samuels, Rusty Wright, Quack Lippincott, Casey Engel, Seki Koyama, Harry Drinkwater, and a dozen or so more—most of them already zoned beyond any thought of respect for law and order. McGraw's hand wavered on the butt of her Taser as her eyes swept across the crowd and the vat in the back of the storeroom.

“Okay,” she said stiffly, taking a deep breath, spreading her feet wide and thrusting her chest forward. “Party's over, ladies and gentlemen. By authority of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, I'm shutting down this unlawful gathering and …”

“Aw, give it a rest, willya, Tina?” Mighty Joe said. He would have stood up, but the bandages around his ribs prohibited him from making sudden movements. He remained instead on the upended crate next to the hog. “What are you going to do?” he asked calmly. “Arrest us? Zap everyone in the room?”

Her eyes narrowed menacingly as her angry gaze shot to him. “I'm willing to forget everything I've just seen,” she intoned sternly, “if you'll calmly disperse and …”

“What?” Quack interrupted. Lana Smith, the ready-room suit tech, was sitting in his lap; he had to look around her to see McGraw. “And break up a good party? You gotta be shitting me, lady.”

Everyone laughed again. That only seemed to further infuriate McGraw. “It's within my authority,” she said as her voice rose to a frustrated shrill, “to have the employment of everyone here terminated, with no possibility of appeal or …”

“Aw, bullshit,” Harry replied in his sculpted disc-jockey voice. “There's not a thing you can do to us now.”

“S'right,” Annie slurred. “We're termi … terminationated … I mean, we're fucked already. So beat it, bitch.”

McGraw looked as if she was about to use her Taser on Annie. “Try a little reality, Tina,” Mighty Joe said reasonably. “If you haven't been paying attention to the news, Skycorp's about to sell out to Uchu-Hiko. The smart money says that by Friday that means this place belongs to the Nips.…”

Seki Koyama haughtily cleared his throat. “Sorry,
Seki-san,
” Joe quickly added, glancing at the combine operator. “Nothing personal intended.”

“Apology accepted,
gaijin
asshole,” Seki said, smiling a little and tipping his cup toward him.

“Anyway,” Joe continued, looking back at McGraw, “by the end of the week, we're all going to be laid off anyway. We're screwed and turned blue. Face it. Your authority and threats don't mean jack-shit to us anymore.”

McGraw stiffened and laid her hand on the butt of her Taser, but Joe quickly shook his head. “Now, don't get all hot and bothered. Nobody's about to give you a necktie party or anything. But you might as well sit down and have a drink. Hell, there's nothing else you can do, right?”

At first it seemed as if Quick-Draw might actually heed his advice. Then her upper lip curled and she shook her head. “I've still got a job to do, even if it's only for a week.”

“Aw, c'mon, Quick-Draw …”

Wrong thing to say; nothing irked McGraw more than having her hated nickname used in front of her. She pulled her baton out of her belt and, taking one step forward, patted it meaningfully in her left hand. “All right, Joe, stand up and get out of the way. I'm going to have to …”

“Hello?” someone said behind her. “Is this the right place?”

Startled, Quick-Draw spun around and raised her baton defensively, only to find Lester Riddell standing behind her. Just behind him was Butch Peterson; the senior scientist reflexively took a step back, but the general manager simply beamed at the security chief. “Tina!” he said in mock surprise. “How
nice
of you to come! Have you introduced yourself to everyone here?”

Annie Noonan looked over at Mighty Joe. “Great,” she muttered, letting her eyes roll up. “There goes the goddamn neighborhood.”

The storage room had gone quiet, but judging by their expressions, most people had the same thought. Besides Quick-Draw McGraw, Les Riddell was probably the most disliked individual on the Moon; this was definitely the death of the party. Joe, however, shook his head. “Just wait,” he whispered to Annie, not taking his eyes off the GM. “Let's just wait and see.…”

Quick-Draw had lowered her baton and relaxed a little. “Mr. Riddell,” she said, formal as always when they were in the presence of other crew members. “As you can plainly see …”

“Yes, yes, yes,” he interrupted, dismissively waving his hand. “There's a party going on and they've got a still.” He looked over his shoulder at Mighty Joe. “Nice rig you've built there, Joe. What have you got in it? Moonshine?”

Everyone looked at Mighty Joe. The pilot grinned and patted the top of the makeshift still. “Yes, sir,” he replied. “Just a little homemade liquor. A little raw around the edges, but mighty tasty indeed.” He paused, then casually added, “Care for a sip?”

“Well, I happen to be a teetotaler …” Lester began. Everyone except Joe seemed to sag a little: Aw, shit, here it comes.…

“But after the week I've just had,” he finished, “I could use a drink.”

And while every person in the storeroom was still trying to pick their jaws up off the floor and force their eyes back in their sockets, Les Riddell calmly pushed past Quick-Draw, walked down the center aisle, took the paper cup of moonshine, which the humongously beaming Mighty Joe held out to him, and took a long, slow sip.

The room was dead silent as Riddell swallowed, closed his eyes, and hissed between his teeth. “
Shiiiiit,
” he gasped. “That's strong!” Then he turned and looked back at Quick-Draw. “Tina, you gotta try this stuff,” he urged, holding out his cup. “It'll put hair on your teeth.”

Quick-Draw's face convulsed and went through various shades of purple; the fist holding the baton seemed to tremble with repressed fury. Her eyes traveled around the storeroom, and it seemed to dawn on her that every man and woman in the party was waiting for her next reaction. She took a deep sigh, resignedly shoved the baton back into her belt loop, and walked across the room to Lester.

“What the hell,” she muttered. McGraw took the cup from the GM's hand and killed it in one gulp. As a collective cheer rang out from the gathered moondogs, she thrust the cup back at Mighty Joe, pursing her lips and quickly nodding her head. Joe took the cup and began to refill it from the spigot.

Amid the applause and whooping and howling, as everyone stood up to surround him—slapping his back, pushing more cups of liquor at him, telling him that he was an all right kinda guy after all—Lester looked through the crowd at the door, raising his hand to coax Butch into the party.

But she had disappeared from the doorway, and was not to be seen anywhere in the storeroom. Sometime in the last couple of minutes, without his noticing, Butch had left.

It didn't take long for word to get out that an open-door party was going on down in Storage Two and that even Quick-Draw McGraw had entered into the spirit. Within an hour, everyone who wasn't working was in the lower level of Subcomp A, lined up with paper cups in hand. The party spilled out of the storeroom into the corridor and the central atrium, where people sat on the floors and the main stairwell: talking, joking, laughing, telling each other stupid stories, getting blasted on Mighty Joe's hellaciously potent moonshine.

Someone in MainOps informed the boys on the third shift that there was a party going down, and just when it seemed as if the party had reached a comfortable size, thirty more moondogs trooped through the nearby access tunnel from the EVA ready-room in Subcomplex B, still dressed in their hardsuit long johns and demanding their share of the liquor. Even the non-drinkers among the crew—the handful of devout Mormons, Muslims, Buddhists, and sundry health fanatics—decided to come down for the sociality, if not the booze. Quick-Draw soon had to open the door to the adjacent storm shelter just to make room for the spillover.

Mighty Joe's still had a fifty-gallon capacity; he had made that much juice, yet it didn't last for very long with more than a hundred persons drinking from the tap. Shortly after 0100 hours, he announced that the barrel was dry; by then, however, the party was already on its last, teetering legs. It had been a long, long time since most of the men and women of Descartes Station had drunk anything stronger than coffee, and Joe's ninety-proof liquor had hit most of them harder than a sack of lead. Within a half-hour of last call, almost everyone was gone from the party, having either staggered up the stairs to their dorms to sleep it off or—in the case of a few more inebriated folks-passed out cold on the floors of the corridor and the storm shelters. Quick-Draw might have rounded up those who had passed out, had she not been blitzed herself. Instead, she had last been seen struggling up the stairs, hanging on to the shoulder of some guy named Sid, to whom she'd become romantically attached. Of all the couples who had left the party together, those two would undoubtedly have the most privacy; after all, she had the keycard to the sacrosanct Descartes Hilton.

In Storage Two, a few of the last conscious carousers were left to stare dizzily at the debris: crumpled cartons of dehydrated crap, flattened paper cups, a few liquor-soaked pieces of discarded clothing (including a pair of men's shorts and a woman's bra), and some indispensables like ankle-weights and keycards, which had been discarded and forgotten by their owners. The storeroom stank of booze and tobacco spit; the floor was slick and greasy with moonshine and puke.