Who gives a flyin’ fuck? he said to himself as he pushed himself to his feet and staggered, limped, hopped on his one good foot, holding his breath, reaching out with both hands and flopped into the open airlock that stood in front of the buried shelter.
He pounded the yellow-glowing phosphorescent button that activated the lock. The outside door creaked shut, although Paul could hear no sound in the lunar vacuum. He imagined the creaking as the curving door slid shut on its track, grinding stray dust particles in its path.
Bracing himself inside the phonebooth-sized airlock, Paul heard the hissing of air and even the chug of the pump. Most beautiful sounds in the world, he thought Beats Duke Ellington any day.
The overhead light went on and the indicator panel’s green light glowed to life. Trembling, hoping this wasn’t the last hallucination of a man dying of oxygen deprivation, Paul fumbled with the catch of his visor and slid it up. Sweetest air in two worlds.
He took deep lungfuls of the stuff. Next sonofabitch complains about canned air is gonna get my knuckles in his mouth, Paul promised himself.
The indicator pad told him the pressure in the airlock was high enough for him to open the inner hatch. He knew he should clean the suit first. Must be carrying six hundred pounds of dust on me.
But he was too tired, too exhilarated, too anxious to get inside the shelter and out of this foul-smelling suit even to begin vacuuming.
He opened the inner hatch, clumped in his boots down the steps into the shelter’s single compartment, wincing every time he stepped with his right foot.
It was a typical temporary shelter. A long aluminum cylinder’tthat had been laid down in a trench scooped out by a bulldozer and then buried beneath a couple of feet of loose regolith rubble to protect it from the meteoroids that pelted the Moon’s surface and the harsh swings of temperature from daylight to Anight. And from the radiation pouring in unimpeded from deep space.
Radiation. Paul wanted desperately to flop on one of the lovely, beckoning bunks that lined the far end of the shelter, I but he knew he had to worm himself out of his suit first. And check his radiation patch.
It seemed to take hours, removing the helmet, then the backpack, the gloves, boots, leggings and finally wriggling out of the suit’s torso. The dust was thick enough to make him cough. Hope it doesn’t foul up the air vents, Paul thought.
His radiation patch had turned yellow. Not good, but not as bad as red would have been.
Hey, you’re alive and safe with nothing worse than a sprained ankle and a radiation dose that’ll take a year or so off the ass end of your life. Count your blessings, man.
He limped to the nearest bunk and flopped onto it But before he could close his eyes he thought of Greg.
I’m not home free yet He might still win this.
I should have known he’d try to kill me. All those weeks of his smiling and working with me. Started when I agreed to the nanotech demonstration. He’s hated me all along, every inch of the way. I should have known.
Ought to call the base, get them to patch me through to Joanna. The kid’s tried to kill me. Already murdered Tink and Wojo. I ought to warn Joanna. He might turn on her, try to kill my child.
But he was too exhausted to do anything but close his eyes and sleep.
ALPHONSUS
Paul had been in good spirits when he arrived at Moonbase. The transfer spacecraft that took him from the space station in low Earth orbit to the giant crater Alphonsus was an ungainly collection of tankage, antennas, cargo containers and a spherical passenger module with two bulbous observation ports. With its spindly, spraddling legs the craft looked like a huge metallic spider about to pounce on some hapless insect.
As the lander literally fell toward the Moon’s surface, Paul commandeered a spot at one of the observation ports and hung there weightlessly, watching Alphonsus rush up at him. The crater’s ringwall mountains looked deceptively soft, tired and slumped from eons of erosion by dust-sized meteorites that sandpapered their slopes to almost glassy smoothness.
It was hard to get any sense of scale staring out at the barren, pockmarked face of the Moon. He knew Alphonsus was more than seventy miles across, a crater big enough to swallow all of Greater New York, from Newark to Bridgeport. But as he hovered in free fall, watching, it merely looked like a big circle of mountains with a dimple in its middle.
The floor of the crater was cracked, criss-crossed with sinuous rilles. Once in a while a whiff of ammonia or methane or one of the noble gases would seep out from the Moon’s deep interior through those cracks. It was one of the reasons Moonbase had been sited inside Alphonsus’s circling mountains: one day they would drill for the methane and ammonia, valuable sources of life-supporting volatiles.
Paul saw the unfinished oxygen plant and a crew of construction technicians milling around it like spacesuited ants.
Oxygen was the most valuable resource of them all, in space. If Moonbase ever became profkable, it would be by selling oxygen to the factories and other facilities in Earth orbit.
The spacecraft tilted over so that it could land on its rocket exhausts, and the/funar landscape shifted out of Paul’s view. Clasping the handgrips on either side of the port, he felt the slightest of pressures, just a gentle nudge. And then the soft thump of landing. Weight returned, but it was only a sixth oi the weight he felt on Earth. This was the Moon. Paul felt as if he were returning home.
It took less than ten minutes for the spacesuited ground crew to connect the flexible tunnel to the lander’s hatch. I wish the ground crews at commercial airports worked so fast, Paul thought as he made his way, slightly bent over, through the ribbed tunnel and into the main entrance of Moonbase.
It was hardly grand. Moonbase consisted of a dozen ‘temporary’ shelters, each buried beneath piles of regolith rubble and interconnected by tunnels barely high enough to stand in. The tempos, developed out of modules for space stations, reminded Paul of mobile homes: long and narrow cramped and confining, buzzing with electrical machinery and the constant rattle of air pumps, lit by ghastly overhead fluorescents that made everyone’s complexion look sickly, smelling of sweat and machine oil and microwaved fast food and too many people crowded too close together.
Paul loved it.
Wojo was at the receiving desk, checking out the cargo that the lander was unloading, his computer screen split between the invoice list and a camera view of the spacesuited ground crew hauling out the crates from the lander’s cargo platforms.
“So you’ve decided to come live with the proletariat for a while,” Wojo said pleasantly. He was a bulky man, big in the shoulders, with a beer gut and the glittering eyes of a seeker after truth. Roughly Paul’s age, Wojo’s hair and ragged beard were already dead white and thinning. He insisted that it was from the radiation dosage he received when he worked out on the lunar surface.
“How’re you doing, Wojo?” Paul asked, sliding his one travelbag from his shoulder and letting it thump softly on the plastic flooring.
“Still trying to get those narrow-minded bean counters in the insurance office to admit that the company owes me premium pay,” Wojo grumbled, not taking his eyes from his display screen.
It was an old, old argument. Wojo demanded compensation for his tractor maintenance work out on the surface, over and above the hazardous duty pay called for in his employment contract.
Paul had steered clear of the fight while he’d been Wojo’s division manager. Now that he was CEO he feared the man would ask him to intervene.
But Wojo had not done that, so far. “They got a new manager in the so-called human resources department. A man so narrow-minded he can look through a keyhole with both eyes.