Moonrise (5 page)

“I’m on my way,” he would say to the distant Moon. “I’ll be with you in a few years.”

Something was wrong with his left boot. It was rubbing his heel raw. A pang of fear burned through his gut. He saw Wojo again, screaming as the nanobugs ate his suit and his flesh. And Tink, screeching like a terrified monkey in a leopard’s jaws. Forget about the pissin’ nanobugs! Paul raged silently. It’s nothing but a lousy fitting boot, he insisted to himself.

He was trying not to limp, despite the pain in his left heel every time he set his foot down. It felt awkward, walking that way.

And then his boot slipped.

If he had fallen forward, just tripped and gone down face-first, he would have had plenty of time to put out his hands, stop the fall, and push himself up to his feet again. Even in the cumbersome surface suit, the Moon’s gravity was so slight that he could have done that. It was an old trick among the “Lunatics,” done to impress newcomers: pretend you’re going to go splat on your face, then push yourself up to a standing position before the tenderfoot can holler, “Look out!”

But Paul’s foot skidded out from under him on a suddenly slick piece of exposed rock and he fell over backward, onto his life-support backpack and oxygen tank, banged down heavily and skidded, yowling sudden pain and fear, down a slope so gradual he hadn’t even noticed it a moment before.

His head banged inside his helmet, his vision blurred. He tasted blood in his mouth. For long moments he lay panting, dizzy, blinking to clear his eyes. Gradually he took stock. He was lying on his right side, his arm pinned under him, the bulky backpack and oxygen tank pressing against the back of his suit.

Shakily he lifted his left arm to look at the displays. No red lights. Everything still in the green. He listened carefully. Nothing but the air fans whirring and his own labored breathing. No hisses. No leaks. He hoped.

He pushed himself up to a sitting position, grateful that he weighed only one-sixth of what he would on Earth.

He was at the bottom of a shallow pit with sides sloped so gradually that you had to be inside it to realize it was a depression at all. Absently, he ran a gloved hand along the stony ground. Smooth as glass. Must be an old crater; a really old one, smoothed down by the infalling meteoric dust for Christ knows how long.

It was a struggle to get to his feet. Once erect, he saw that the pit was slightly deeper than his own height and some forty-fifty feet across. Got to get up this slippery slope, he told himself. Not going to be easy.

Shifting the backpack’s weight on his shoulders, Paul crouched over and placed his gloved hands on the bare rock. Four legs are better than two for this, he told himself. Slowly, with enormous care, he picked his way up the gradual slope. It felt like walking on glass. Or ice. For a crazy moment Paul thought back to his one and only ice-skating lesson, when he’d been a teenager. Split his eyebrow open in a fall that ended his interest in skating forever.

Easy now, he commanded himself. Don’t slide down. You don’t have any time to waste playing around in here.

His boots slipped and skidded, barely providing any traction at all. Paul bent his face closer to the stone, looking for rough patches, bumps, anything that could provide purchase. He was grateful that the Sun was still low enough in the sky to throw long shadows; made it easier to see where he could plant his feet and get something to push against.

Just as he reached one hand across the rim of the crater his foot slipped and he started to slide backward. He clung desperately to the slightly raised edge of the crater, grabbed with his other hand and hung on to keep himself from sliding all the way back to the bottom.

For several moments he stayed there, strung out, gasping, while his booted feet searched for something to hold them. He gave it up and hauled himself upward, letting his legs go limp. He got his belly over the edge, trying not to think of what would happen if he tore the fabric of his suit. One leg over the rim. Then the other.

At last he climbed to his feet. Wish I had a marker beacon, he thought. There ought to be a warning here.

Okay, get moving. Enough time wasted.

But which direction? He turned a full three hundred sixty degrees. Mare Nubium looked the same in all directions. Flat bare plain of dust-covered rock. The hump that marked the shelter he had fled was nowhere in sight now, but neither was the next shelter, nor the ringwall mountains of Alphonsus.

“Talk about the middle of nowhere,” Paul said aloud.

He checked the GPS receiver on his suit’s forearm. Nothing. The display was dark. No signal chirped in his earphones. Satellite’s too low for my suit antenna to pick up the signal.

Paul stared out at the horizon. For the first time he felt truly afraid. He was alone and lost and miles from any possibility of help.

“Murder?” Paul felt his insides go hollow.

“That’s what Greg said,” Melissa Hart told him.

It was Paul’s first day in his new office as CEO of Masterson Aerospace. He had been in the midst of setting up his personal mementos on his broad ebony desk: a fist-sized chunk of Moon rock; a solid mahogany model of a Clippership in the red, white and blue colors of American Airlines; a framed photograph of Joanna smiling at him from beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat.

It had taken more than a week to get his new office suite squared away. Paul had wanted to stay at his old office, but it was in the manufacturing plant out where I-16 intersected with I-95. Corporate headquarters was in the old historic section of Savannah, down by the riverfront, where the docks and warehouses had been largely replaced by tourist hotels and upscale restaurants. At least he could walk to work, just a few blocks along Bryan Street.

He had felt uneasy about taking over Gregory’s suite, but finally decided he shouldn’t let old guilts stand in the way
of doing his new job. So he had his secretary totally redecorate the office; a chore she delighted in, for six whirlwind days of painters and carpet installers and electricians and decorators.

And now Melissa had walked unannounced into his office, so spanking new it smelled of paint and freshly sawn wood. She stood before his desk, arms clasped tightly across her chest, looking wired tight.

Paul sank into his stylishly modern caramel leather swivel chair, staring open-mouthed at Melissa.

“Murder?” he repeated.

She pulled up the upholstered chair in front of his desk. “Greg’s got a videodisk that his father made just before he died. He says it proves Gregory didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered.”

“Holy shit,” Paul groaned.

Melissa said nothing.

“Did you see this videodisk?”

“Greg played it for me,” she said.

“What’s on it?”

“Gregory’s sitting at his desk. Right here in this office. It must’ve been late afternoon, right before he was killed.”

He was supposed to have been at the executive committee meeting, Paul remembered. But Gregory had walked out on the rest of the committee halfway through the agenda and returned to his office. Nothing unusual in that; he had done it often enough in the past. Meetings usually made him more irritable than usual, especially when there were unpleasant decisions to be made that he wanted to avoid.

“He looked drunk to me,” Melissa went on. “Smashed. Muttering into the camera. He must’ve set it up on his desk.”

“What did he say?”

She made a little shrug. “Most of it was hard to understand. He did a lot of mumbling. But he had that Magnum on his desk and he said something about somebody trying to kill him. ‘The gun’s for protection,’ he said. ‘This gun’s going to save me.’”

“And?”

“That’s about it. A lot of it was incomprehensible. Greg says he’s going to get some experts to go over the disk and extract as much from it as they can.”

“Has he shown it to the police?”

“Not yet. He just got it himself; it was delivered through the interoffice mail.”

“It took more than a month to get a videodisk fifty feet down the hall?”

Melissa almost smiled. “Greg’s been in New York all this time. He just got back yesterday and started going through his mail.”

“Oh. I see.” Paul looked out the picture window toward the riverfront, then turned back to Melissa. She seemed tense, wary. But not angry, the way she’d been at the board meeting.

He asked her, “Why are you telling me this?”

“Figured you ought to know.”

“You’re not sore at me? About Joanna, I mean?”

A flicker of something crossed her face, but she regained her self-control almost immediately. “It hurt when you dumped me, Paul.”

Feeling flustered, he spread his hands and said defensively, “I didn’t exactly dump you, did I?”

Her voice deathly calm, Melissa replied, “Call it what you want. Soon’s you started after the boss’s wife you didn’t have any time for me.”

“I fell in love,” Paul said.

Melissa swept her almond eyes around the big office in a long, exaggerated inspection. “Yeah,” she said finally. “I can see that.”

Paul wished he could get angry at her, but he was terribly afraid that she was right.

“Well, anyway, thanks for the news.”

“Sure.” She got up to leave and for the first time Paul noticed the forest green miniskirt that clung to her hips and her long slim legs encased in patterned green stockings.

“Who in the hell would want to kill Gregory?” he muttered as she headed for the door.

Melissa turned back toward him. “Maybe it was the guy who took over his job. And his wife.”

Paul sagged back in his chair, stunned. “You don’t mean that!”

She shrugged again. “That’s what Greg thinks. That’s what he’s going to tell the police.”

*       *       *

For a long while Paul sat at his desk, staring out the window, looking at nothing. In his mind’s eye he saw Gregory sitting in this same room, with a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum from his gun collection in the wall cabinet sitting on the desk in front of him and a half-empty decanter of Gentleman Jack beside it.

He put the gun in his mouth and blew his head off, Paul told himself. Nobody murdered him. The bastard committed suicide, but first he made that pissing disk to leave as much trouble behind him as he could. He knew about Joanna and me. The disk’s his revenge on us.

But why did Joanna have his body cremated? You can’t exhume a cremated body and look for evidence of murder.

Paul shook his head, trying to clear the suspicions away. Slowly he got up from his chair and walked to the big window overlooking the riverfront. He glanced at his wristwatch, then looked past the docks and boats, past the river itself, out into the clear blue sky, just starting to darken with twilight.

And there it was, a bright gleaming star moving rapidly from west to east, cutting across the sky in silent purposefulness. The Rockledge space station. It seemed to beckon Paul like a steady, unwavering hope.

Tonight, Paul said to himself. I’ll be up there tonight. I’ll leave all this shit behind me and be up there where everything’s clean and uncomplicated.

He had decided that, as the new CEO, he should visit all the corporation’s operating divisions, starting with the research labs and prototype factory facility that Masterson rented aboard the Rockledge Corporation’s space station. He had wanted to go on to the scattering of underground shelters on the lunar surface that was Moonbase, but the pressures of his new responsibilities had forced him to postpone that pleasure.

Instead, he decided to take Joanna to the space station with him.

“A honeymoon in zero gravity,” he had told her.

“Aboard a space station?” Joanna had seemed startled at the idea.

“You’ll love it,” Paul had coaxed. “Zero gravity is better than waterbeds.”

She had finally agreed. Reluctantly, it seemed to Paul.

The intercom buzzer yanked his thoughts back to the present.

“What?” he called from the window.

“Mr. Arnold to see you, sir.”

Paul turned back toward the desk. “Send him right in.”

He started for the door, wondering why his secretary allowed Melissa to waltz in unannounced but held up the chairman of the board.

Bradley Arnold came smiling into the office, looking around at the new decor appreciatively. “I wouldn’t recognize the place,” he said in his heavy croaking voice.

Paul showed him to the round conference table in the corner, next to the built-in bar.

“Ah, this corner I do recognize,” Arnold said, lowering his chunky form into one of the chairs slowly, painfully. “Gregory was here more than at his desk, his last few months.”

“Would you like something … ?” Paul asked.

“No, no, no,” Arnold replied, waving both hands vigorously in front of his face.

He protests too much, Paul thought. But he pulled out the chair next to the chairman’s and sat in it.

“You’re scheduled for a flight to the space facilities this evening, aren’t you?” Arnold asked.

Paul nodded. “Joanna and I are set to leave in about an hour.”

Arnold’s bulging eyes widened slightly. “Joanna’s going with you?”

Forcing a smile, Paul said, “A sort of honeymoon. Only three days, but that’s all I can squeeze in.”

“A honeymoon in space,” Arnold murmured. “Leave it to a former astronaut to think of that.”

“You ought to try it—a trip into orbit, I mean.”

“Me?” Arnold looked genuinely startled. “In space? No thank you! I’ll stay right here with my feet on solid ground. I don’t even like to go to California, the ground shakes too often.”

“Do wonders for your arthritis,” Paul said. “Zero gee can be very therapeutic.”

Shaking his head hard enough to make his toupée jiggle, Arnold said, “I’m doing fine here on Earth.”

Paul was tempted to say that the chairman wouldn’t have to worry about his weight in zero gravity, but he bit it back. Arnold was sensitive about his poundage. In between meals and snacks, Paul thought.

“I’ll come straight to the point, Paul,” the old man said. “You’ve heard about this disk that young Greg has?”

All thoughts of levity vanished from Paul’s mind. He nodded in silence.