Moonrise (23 page)

Like Moses on the pissin’ mountain, Paul thought. I can see the promised land, but I’ll never get to live in it.

He thought again of what Moonbase could become someday. He saw a future that beckoned, with humankind spreading across this new frontier and heading outward for new worlds. A future that would never happen if Moonbase was destroyed.

Paul sighed. “If it is to be,” he said softly, “it’s up to me.”

With a sudden, quick move he yanked open the visor of his helmet.

It had been two days since Joanna last slept. Most of that time she had spent on the videophone with Kris Cardenas in San Jose, making arrangements for a team to be sent to the Moon to deactivate the nanomachines that had killed her husband and the two other men.

And she made other arrangements, as well.

“I want to know who allowed those killer machines to be mixed in with the other nanobugs,” Joanna said, as implacable as an ocean tide.

Cardenas’s image in the phone screen nodded somberly.
“I’ve already started an investigation. That kind of stupidity verges on the criminal.”

“It
is
criminal,” Joanna said. “But I don’t intend to press charges or bring the law into this. I just want to know who those people are.”

“You won’t press charges?” Cardenas brightened.

“No. I want them transferred to Moonbase, once we find out who they are.”

Cardenas blinked her cornflower blue eyes. “Why would you send them to Moonbase?”

Grimly, Joanna replied, “So they can see the consequences of stupidity. So they can live in a place where one little mistake, one moment of stupidity, can kill you.”

“How long will they have to stay?”

Joanna shook her head. “Until my husband comes back to life.”

She still had not slept when she had her meeting with Greg. Joanna had decided to meet her son at the house, rather than the office. She sent two hefty security guards to escort him to the meeting.

Greg looked subdued when he stepped into the living room, flanked by the two uniformed men. Joanna dismissed them and told her son to sit on the sofa, facing her.

“You killed Paul,” she said, once she was certain that they were alone.

Greg evaded her eyes. “Suppose I did. What of it? It’s over and done with. You can’t bring him back and that’s that.”

Joanna studied her son. He seemed tense, but the fury that had exploded in him now was gone, spent, dissipated.

“What do you intend to do now?” Joanna asked calmly.

Greg cocked an eyebrow. “Take my rightful place as president and CEO.”

“Really?”

He leaned forward intently, suddenly flushed with prospects for the future. “Don’t you see, Mom? Now it’s just you and me, the way it ought to be. We can run everything together, just the two of us. It’ll all work out, you’ll see.” He even smiled that same old boyish smile at her.

“But there’s not just the two of us,” Joanna said.

Greg pulled back from her slightly. “What do you mean?”

“I’m carrying Paul’s baby. Paul’s son.”

“Oh, that.” Greg flapped one hand in the air dismissively.

“You don’t care anymore?” Joanna asked, caught unprepared for his casual attitude. “A few days ago you wanted me to abort it.”

“I was foolish,” Greg said. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“Really?”

“By the time he grows up enough to join the corporation I’ll be ready to retire,” Greg said.

Be careful, Joanna told herself. He knows how to play on your feelings.

“Greg, you’re a murderer.”

For an instant she saw fear in his eyes. But then his smile returned. “Are you going to turn me over to the police?”

“I’m getting the names of the people who allowed those killer machines to be sent off to the Moon. They’ll implicate you to save themselves.”

“So you
are
going to hand me to the police, after all.”

Joanna shook her head. “I should,” she said. “But I can’t. I can’t hurt you more than you’ve already been hurt.”

“I knew it!” he said triumphantly. “It’s going to be just the two of us! I knew it would work out this way!”

“Greg …” Joanna took in a deep breath. This is going to be painful, she knew. “Greg, I’m sending you to a place where they can help you.”

His brows knit. “Sending me? Where?”

“It’s like a hospital. Very private. Very discreet. They’ll be able to help you there.”

“I don’t need anyone’s help! I’m not sick!”

“I’m not asking for your opinion,” Joanna said firmly. “I’m telling you. You’re going there and that’s all there is to it.”

“I want to be with you!”

Joanna felt her heart clutch within her. “I know, Greg. I know. I’ll come and visit you. Often.”

“I want to be with you all the time!”

“Later,” Joanna said. “When you’re better.”

He sat there, looking perplexed, for several moments. Then, sullenly, “You want to play with your new baby and forget about me.”

“No!” Joanna blurted. “I could never forget you. You’re my baby boy and I’ll love you forever, no matter what.”

“Then don’t send me away.” Greg fell to his knees in front of his mother and buried his face in her lap. “Please, Mom, don’t send me away.”

A wild thought raced through Joanna’s mind. “What if …” She hesitated, searching for an answer. “Greg, what if you stayed here at the house, with me?”

“Yes!” he said fervently.

“And I can bring the doctors and their assistants here to stay with us.”

“Yes! Yes!”

“And we’ll be together while they help to make you well again.”

“Anything,” Greg sobbed, “as long as we can be together.”

Joanna stroked her son’s midnight dark hair, thinking, That will be the best way. Keep him here, where I can watch him. Bring the medical help to him.

She realized that Greg had fallen asleep with his head cradled in her lap. He probably hasn’t slept for the past couple of days, either, Joanna thought.

I can’t turn him over to the police. What good would that do? It won’t bring Paul back and it will destroy Greg completely. Not the police. No scandal. No one must know what he did.

She sighed. It’ll be difficult, especially when the new baby comes. Douglas. She already had his name picked out. Greg will be insanely jealous of the baby. But I can protect him. I can do it. I can take care of both my sons. I can. I will.

The subject is a twenty-eight-year-old male in good physical health. He is deeply disturbed and potentially violent, although like many schizophrenics he can cloak his misapprehensions and delusions with extremely logical and plausible-sounding rationalizations. He is in private care at the home of his mother. Deep hypnotherapy is recommended, together with chemo-suppressants to regulate his mood swings.

After two years of hypnotherapy the inescapable conclusion is that the primary focus for the subject’s neurosis is the morbid fear of losing his mother. Although the Freudian concept of an Oedipus Complex has long been discredited, the subject sees his mother as a symbol of safety and well-being, hence an object of intense desire. While this desire is primarily connected to his fear of loss of maternal protection, there is also a decidedly sexual component involved.

The subject is now thirty-five years old and freely able to admit that he has harbored murderous rages against the men with whom he was forced to share his mother’s affection: i.e., his father and his step-father, both of whom are now deceased. Even in deep hypnotherapy sessions he evades any mention of his seven-year-old half-brother who, quite obviously, has also taken a share of his mother’s attention and affection.

“I don’t like the looks of this,” said Kris Cardenas.

She was standing on the roof of the two-story nanotechnology building, her chief of security beside her, watching the stream of picketers being whipped up into an angry mob.

At the security chiefs earnest suggestion, she had sent most of the working staff home when the mob began to gather outside the main gate. She hadn’t really believed him when he warned her there was going to be trouble; now, hours later, she realized that she hadn’t wanted to believe.

From up on the roof, with the warm wind at her back, she couldn’t hear what the woman with the bullhorn was telling the picketers, but by the way they surged around her and roared incoherently every few minutes Cardenas knew she was working them up into a frenzy.

And more demonstrators were arriving, cars and minivans and even busloads of them.

“This is organized as all hell,” Cardenas muttered.

Her security chief scanned the growing crowd with electronically boosted binoculars, his mouth set in a grim line.

“Take a look,” he said, looping the strap of the binoculars around Cardenas’s neck. Then he fished a palm-sized phone out of his shirt pocket.

“Got those fire hoses ready?” he asked into the phone.

Cardenas searched through the placards that bobbed drunkenly in the sea of bodies. Professionally printed, she saw.

Jesus, she thought, this isn’t just one gang of nut cases.
They’ve got organized labor, religious zealots—it’s a coalition of pressure groups.

“Look!” the security chief shouted.

Cardenas lowered the binoculars to see where he was pointing. A black pickup truck was speeding across the nearly empty parking lot, straight for the crowd. The people parted like the Red Sea, on cue she thought, and the truck raced straight up to the main gate of the wire security fence and crashed through. One of the uniformed guards was knocked down as the truck roared by without slowing, jounced over the circular plot of flowers in front of the building’s front entrance and smashed into the glass doors of the building’s lobby.

The crowd poured through the open fence, roaring like a white-water river.

“Get the fire hoses on ’em!” the security chief screamed into his phone.

Cardenas’s legs felt rubbery. If that truck had been filled with explosives it would’ve killed us all!

Streams of high-pressure water were spraying the oncoming crowd, knocking people off their feet, pushing them back away from the shattered entrance to the building. But other groups were skirting around the sides of the building in flanking movements. Cardenas knew that the back doors and the loading gates were not protected as well as the front entrance.

She shook herself. It’s a battle now, she realized. A battle to save the labs.

They lost the battle. Police helicopters eventually arrived to evacuate Cardenas and the few remaining security people from the roof. The building was gutted: lab equipment smashed, computers professionally destroyed by magnetized wipers that jangled disk memories into useless hash, offices torn apart.

The news headlines that evening concentrated on the three demonstrators who were injured by the streams from the fire hoses. Masterson Aerospace was going to be sued for police brutality and excessive force. The security guard who died as a result of being hit by the pickup truck was hardly mentioned at all.

It has become possible—and even desirable—to transfer at least part of the subject’s feelings for his mother to a desire for security and self-esteem through success in the world of business and commerce. Therefore he has been encouraged to restart his career in Masterson Aerospace Corporation and to establish his own residence near his place of employment.

At age forty, this sublimation procedure is proceeding with apparent proficiency, although careful watch must be maintained since the subject is intelligent enough to know what his therapists desire and to parrot the responses they wish to observe—even under hypnotherapy.

However, his relationship with his twelve-year-old half-brother has apparently stabilized. The subject spent the Christmas holidays at home with his mother and sibling. Post-holiday interviews and testing showed no outward manifestations of hostility, although latent resentment is of course still present.

It has been four years since the subject’s last hypnotherapy encounter. As expected, his success in the corporate world has enabled him to build a new structure of self-esteem. His sexual feelings for his mother have not been eradicated, of course, but now he is able to usefully channel such feelings into accomplishment and respect from his peers. Although he still has some difficulties in forging relationships with peers, it is recommended that all therapy sessions be discontinued and the subject merely visit this practitioner on a semi-annual basis.

Two years of semi-annual visits have convinced this practitioner that the subject can function adequately in society.
He is still something of a “loner,” and will undoubtedly need more time to adjust his feelings toward women who might be sexual partners, but it is apparent that he is now a competent, even quite extraordinarily competent, fully functional adult. His relationship with his mother is, at least outwardly, quite normal. His relationship with his eighteen-year-old half-brother, while strained, is apparently no worse than most family relationships under similar circumstances.

Douglas Stavenger visited Moonbase for the first time on his eighteenth birthday.

His mother had been against it. She would not say why, but Doug knew her reason. His father had died on the Moon before he had been born. It was an accident, as far as Doug knew, a freak accident involving nanomachines that had been improperly programmed.

“That was eighteen years ago,” Doug pleaded with his mother. “And besides, I won’t be using nanobugs. I just want to see Moonbase with my own eyes.”

Joanna offered him a trip around the world, instead. But Doug insisted on Moonbase.

Not that he had quarrelled with his mother. Doug never quarrelled. Since elementary school he had made his smiling way through bullies among the students and the faculty alike, never fighting, never raising his voice, never losing his temper. He seemed to lead a charmed life. Everything came his way, seemingly without his needing to raise even a finger. People wanted to please him.