Moon Zero Two

GIANT CORPORATIONS CONTROL THE COLONIES ON THE MOON AND MARS TRAVEL IS LIMITED TO A FEW SAFE “MILK RUNS”. EXPLORATION IS ENDED—PERHAPS FOREVER.

BUT ONE MAVERICK PILOT, BILL KEMP, STILL DREAMS OF REACHING THE OUTER PLANETS BEYOND THE ASTEROID BELT. EVEN THOUGH HIS LEAKY SPACE-FERRY IS CONDEMNED AND THE CORPORATIONS ARE TRYING TO HAVE HIM GROUNDED, KEM HAS A PLAN—A BOLD PLAN THAT WILL CHANGE THE VERY SHAPE OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM AND CATAPULT HIM TO JUPITER AND BEYOND!

There it was, a figure outlined against the blackness of space, taking a sight through a theodolite.

She bounded towards it. 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.

I heard Clem gasp. Then she screamed.

I ran up to her 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.

© John Burke, 1969
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publishers.
SIGNET TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES
REGISTERED TRADEMARK-MARCA REGISTRADA
HECHO EN CHICAGO, U.S.A.
SIGNET BOOKS are published by
The New American Library, Inc.,
1301 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10019
First Printing, February, 1970
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

IT WAS a metal ball three feet in diameter, sprouting spiky antennae like a rolled-up hedgehog. It was no more than a speck of dust out there against the reeling suns and planets, a speck even against the asteroids. But it had a job to do.

And it had stopped doing it.

We came in as close as we could get. The old tub was not the easiest thing in the world to maneuver—not in the world, and not in the heavens. Dmitri tried to hold us steady, while I prepared to get out. One little stutter from a leaky jet, and we had overshot. We had to come around again in a long parabola, adjusting the drift. Easy enough on one of the newer models, but this hadn’t been a new model since the days when Moon exploration began.

Dmitri said: “Ready for retrofire. All set?”

“All set,” I said.

The ship jolted and shuddered along its whole length, all forty feet of it. I opened the cargo hatch. Quite a neat positioning this time. We were only twenty feet away.

I checked the fastening of the safety line. Then I put one foot on the chipped letter N in the name along the side—MOON 02—and thrust myself away.

The satellite rolled slowly as I hit it. I curled around and let myself float in a lazy circle, taking care not to snarl up the safety line. The little ball was dead, all right. Not a pulse. Not a flicker.

This was going to cause some irritation across Farside. The chain of satellites was the only way of keeping up communication between Lunar Center and the scattered miners and explorers of Farside. This little blob here was
one of the boosters, an essential link in the chain. Things were going to be awfully quiet until it was replaced. No reports from prospectors, no relays from home; and no entertainments channel—they’d miss their daily Moon-Mood Music.

I pulled my reaction pistol from its holster, tapped the satellite off orbit, and then fired the pistol. We floated back toward the hatch, and I played the metal orb neatly through the opening.

The usual routine. Airlock check. Pressure safety check. Orbit calculation. Log-book entry. And I do mean log-book: we couldn’t afford one of those electronic recorders, and it would have looked pretty silly in this confined space.

Dmitri turned his dark, melancholy face toward me over his shoulder. He eyed the satellite with the kind of skeptical hopefulness that only a true pessimist can achieve.

“Salvage?”

“Scrap, more likely,” I said.

He held up his right thumb. I braced myself. The steering jets coughed and puffed, the ship pivoted downward, and then the main engines fired and we were on our way.

We came down in a long arc over the Southern Highlands. Craters gaped blackly under the silver-tipped ranges. The cruel blaze of Earthlight sharpened the mountains to razor savagery. You felt they were waiting the chance to tear you apart, to slice along the belly of your ship and spill everything out into the deadly vacuum. There had been quite a few ships carved up in the past. But not nowadays. Not here, anyway. The Moon today was well-nigh foolproof.

The coordinates were set on the control panel. We latched ourselves onto the outer approach beam, and the radio crackled into life.

Dmitri gave me a nod. I leaned forward and said: “Moon Control, this is Moon Zero Two, in outer approach. Request landing instructions.”

“Zero Two, we have you on line. Steer one-five-seven at steady deceleration of one-point-eight G.”

“Zero Two, understand one-five-seven at one-point-eight.”

Dmitri’s fingers played their silent little tune on the panel.

Abruptly another voice broke in through a mush of static. “And snap it up, Zero Two. This is the Moon Express and we’re just ten minutes out.”

I glanced at the clock. The liner was running a bit late. A fault in the engines of that supposedly perfect ship? More likely delayed takeoff because of some little jack-in-office back on Earth making pretty patterns with his red tape. I’d been through that more than once.

“Hard luck,” I said. “First come, first down.” And I couldn’t resist adding: “You’re an hour behind schedule, anyway.”

“That’s none of your concern, Zero Two. Just get down and out of the way.”

Moon Control came in, icily authoritative. “All, repeat
all
, messages on this channel will be directed to Moon Control only.”

“Get that, Moon Express?” I said.

“Look, if you don’t get that flying junk heap out of our—”

“This is Moon Control. Will you please confine all messages on this...”

Dmitri thumbed a button and our braking jets struck up their usual shattering noise. We lost any more pearls of wisdom that might have been dropped about the space-ways.

I felt a twinge of pity for that captain. Poor bastard. His ship was the most delicate, most splendid, most sophisticated bit of equipment in the heavens, but its automatic controls hated to have to change their minds at the last minute. A small readjustment cost a small fortune. Any delay, any resetting, and there were innumerable query cards to be punched and questions to be answered in quadruplicate. Still, it was all part of his job and he got paid for it. The Company paid his fuel bill. My own third-grade stuff had to be paid for by me and me alone; and I wasn’t going to give way to him and spend another fifteen minutes or so touring the craters while he came in to land.

Dmitri jabbed another retro button. We bounced and swayed. The ship strained and squeaked protests to itself:
it was no use protesting to Dmitri and me—we’d got used to not listening.

The beacon was below us now. The domes of the spaceport administration looked smooth and incongruous against the backdrop of jagged mountains.

“Easy, now,” I said.

Dmitri grunted.

The bigger ship would have been riding smooth by now. Engines blasting, all right—but inside you’d hardly have heard a whisper. Not that you could hear a whisper here in Zero Two: you couldn’t have heard anyone yelling at the top of his voice, the racket that was going on.

One fine day the whole crate was going to fall apart. I had a nasty feeling that the day was getting closer.

We came juddering down toward the landing pad of the spaceport.

The commemorative column, no bigger than a match-stick a few minutes ago, was now a huge spear thrusting up as though to impale us if we slid off beam.

Back we came. Back to the routine, the familiar faces and voices and stock phrases, the familiar rooms and carpets and colors and official handouts and officially approved furnishings and officially decreed living space and the rest of it. This was the Moon, but it might just as well have been Earth. So there was no air to breathe unless you made it yourself, and the gravity was a whole lot different But men were already setting their mark on it, and it was the same dull old mark. The spaceport here looked like the one on Earth, apart from the lack of giant launching ramps, which were not needed in this low gravity. Its buildings were the same, and the column commemorating the first Moon landing fifty years ago wasn’t much more original in concept than the column on Earth, or the one that had just been put up on Mars. The beacon light was a declamatory extra. You didn’t need lights to guide ships in: it was all done invisibly, inexorably.

And once you were down on the ground, entering the domes, the pattern was the same. The same bossy, make-believe courteous voices over the speaker systems, the same purring efficiency everywhere. And the same, inevitable Customs officers and other nigglers. Open up a new land, a whole new world, and the parasites are there almost before you’ve run the flag up the pole.

We went to the Customs bench and lifted our helmets off. We took a good deep breath of fresh air—air drawn up from the processing caverns, controlled and cleaned and pressurized and humidified and circulated, cleaned, and recirculated. Fill your lungs: it’s guaranteed harmless.

We put our helmets on the bench, and between them I set the satellite. Now that we’d got it down here I could see a hole in its shiny surface—no more than a large bullet hole, but obviously just as lethal.

One of the dome girders way above our heads lit up in sudden hospitality.

And a Customs officer with a face as friendly as a computer dial was making us welcome in his own characteristic way.

“The regulations are perfectly clear.” He jabbed a finger at the satellite, and I prayed he’d do himself an injury on one of the spikes. “There is a thirty percent import duty on any electronic equipment, which”—he allowed himself a smile—“this obviously is.”

“Electronic equipment?” I said. “With a meteorite hole like that in it? It’s legitimate salvage. United Nations Space Charter, section 37B—the bit about objects which may prove a danger to navigation. Er... how does it go?”

Dmitri took his cue. “‘Which shall include any communications or other satellite which shall have ceased to function.’ That thing hasn’t given a squeak in a week. Haven’t you noticed that nobody’s been able to radio around to Farside for the last week?”

“I notice you’ve read the book,” said the officer sourly.

“Sure. And it isn’t even my job.”

I gave him a warning frown. Theoretically I was all in favor of being rude to these dehydrated slobs, but in practice it didn't pay. You score one point now, they find a way of scoring ten off you later.

A metallic, amplified voice announced: “The Moon Express from Earth will be landing in one minute. I repeat...”

We all turned our heads to look. No matter how often you’d seen it, it was still a pretty impressive sight.

There was a blaze of sunlight across the landing pad, softened from here by the shielded windowglass. Into the heart of the brightness, like a star performer caught in a spotlight, dropped the sphere of the great ship. Its jets blazed flame, but still the Express managed to look placid: it was just too efficient and undramatic and safe to be true.