Moonrise (6 page)

“Have you seen it?”

“No.”

“Neither have I.”

That surprised Paul. He said, “I’ve heard what’s on it. Gregory says somebody was out to kill him.”

“Yes, that’s what I heard.”

“I guess Greg will be taking it to the police.”

Arnold’s frog eyes narrowed. “Eventually, I suppose. Don’t know how believable it is. The ravings of an obviously drunken man. He was getting quite paranoid, you know.”

“Was he?” Paul said carefully.

“Yes. He had all sorts of suspicions. About everyone around him.”

Arnold did not have to say that Gregory knew his wife was having an affair with Paul. The implication was perfectly clear.

“Well,” Paul said, “I’m not sure of what I ought to do about this. Ask Greg about it, I suppose.”

“I’d speak with McPherson first.”

The corporation’s counsel. “You really think I should talk to the lawyers?” Paul asked.

Arnold started to nod, but broke it off to say, “Paul, you know that I nominated Greg for CEO only out of family loyalty. That’s all it was, believe me. I had no idea that you and Joanna were going to be married. I was merely being loyal to the family.”

Before Paul could reply, Arnold rushed on, “I want you to know that I’m one hundred percent behind you, Paul. One hundred percent! I think you’re going to make a fine CEO and I’ll do whatever I can to help and support you. Even if it comes down to a murder investigation.”

Paul looked into the chairman’s earnest, florid face and did not believe a word of what he said. You’ll be right behind me, all right, Paul thought. With a hatchet.

But he made himself smile and clasped his hands together in front of his face and said mildly, “I appreciate that, Brad. I really do.”

Arnold looked satisfied. “I merely wanted you to go off to the space station with as clear a mind as possible. Don’t worry about Greg at all. I’ll hold the fort while you’re gone.”

“I’ll be back by Friday.”

“Good,” said Arnold. “Don’t worry about a thing while you’re up there.”

“Sure. Thanks a lot.”

“Why did Greg show the disk to Melissa?” Joanna wanted to know.

They were in the limousine, heading for the company airfield, where a Clippership was waiting to boost them to the Rockledge space station. They both wore utilitarian coveralls: Paul’s were drab green; Joanna’s coral red. And form-fitting.

Paul blinked with surprise at his wife’s question. “I never even thought to ask.”

Joanna said, “I’d have thought he’d bring it to Brad Arnold. Or straight to the police.”

“Brad hasn’t seen it.”

“So he says,” Joanna muttered.

“Greg’s having the disk analyzed,” Paul said. “Wants to extract all the information he can. Make sense out of Gregory’s mumblings, if he can.”

“He’s not turning it over to the police?” she asked sharply.

“Not yet.”

With a shake of her head, Joanna said, “It’s going to be useless as evidence, then. Once he lets anyone tamper with it—”

“They’re not tampering.”

“Legally, the disk will be compromised. The technicians can make it show or say anything they want, once they get their hands on the original.”

With a feeble smile, Paul said, “That’s your expert legal opinion, is it?”

“I could have taken a law degree,” Joanna said, straight-faced. “I’ve spent enough time with lawyers, god knows.”

They drove on in silence through the deepening twilight, Paul playing his wife’s question over and over in his head. Why
did
Greg show the disk to Melissa and not to Arnold? The chairman of the board would be a natural ally for Greg in this. What’s the kid up to? And what’s Brad up to? Are the two of them working together on this?

Then a new thought struck him: Is Melissa sleeping with Greg now? Somehow that idea bothered him.

“You have to be careful of Brad,” Joanna warned.

“I know.”

“He had just about taken over the whole corporation,” she went on, “during Gregory’s last few months. That’s why he wanted Greg to be CEO; he thought he could run everything and have Greg sitting there as a figurehead.”

“Maybe he’s the one Gregory was mumbling about, then,” said Paul. “On the disk.”

“Gregory? Afraid that Brad was trying to kill him?”

“Not physically. Business-wise.”

“Then why the gun?” Joanna asked.

Paul shrugged. He had no answer for that.

“You just be careful of Brad,” she repeated. “If he says he wants to be your friend, you don’t need an enemy.”

The limo slowed at the security gate, then headed toward the airfield’s terminal building. In the distance Paul could see the graceful conical shape of the Clippership outlined in spotlights against the darkening evening sky, a wisp of white vapor drifting from its liquid oxygen feed line.

Trying to summon up a confidence he didn’t feel, Paul said to Joanna, “Well, let’s forget about it for now.”

“Forget about it?”

“We’re on our way to our honeymoon, remember? And besides, there’s not much we can do about all this. The ball’s in Greg’s court.”

Joanna nodded tightly. “That’s what bothers me.”

They rode the open-cage elevator to the Clippership’s hatch, ducked through and climbed the ladder between the passenger rows to their reclining seats. Only six passengers this trip; Paul recognized four of them, including Hiram Tinker, the astronomer who tended the orbital telescopes that the corporation operated on contract from a consortium of universities.

“Hi, Hi!” Paul said brightly as he helped Joanna into her
chair. Everyone called the man Tink, but Paul always made a pun out of his first name, even though he dreaded the flood of puns Tinker poured out in return.

“Hello, boss boss.”

Paul slid into his own chair, across the ladderway from Joanna, and started strapping in before lowering the chair to its full reclining position. “Boss boss?” he asked Tinker, over his shoulder. “You stuttering?”

Tink had always called Paul the boss, since he worked in Paul’s space operations division.

“Well, now you’re my new boss’s boss, aren’t you?” Tink countered. “That makes you boss boss.”

“Boss squared,” said one of the other technicians, from a back row.

“Running dog capitalist expropriator of the workers,” came another voice. Paul knew whose, without having to turn around: Alex Wodjohowitcz, tractor teleoperator and technician, on his way to a three-month tour of duty on the Moon.

Paul jabbed a finger toward Joanna. “Here’s the real boss,” he said. Then wondered how humorous the remark really was. Joanna cocked an eyebrow at him, barely smiled.

Once he was settled in the seat next to her, Joanna leaned across the aisle separating them to ask in a whisper, “Who are those people?”

“Our employees,” Paul whispered back. “Some of the best people in the world. In the whole Earth-Moon system, as a matter of fact.”

“And that one who called you a running dog? Why do you let him speak to you like that?”

“Wojo?” Paul laughed. “Wojo’s the most creative cusser I’ve ever met. I’ve known him more than six years now and I’ve never heard him resort to profanity or repeat himself. But he sure can burn your ears off.”

“Liftoff in two minutes,” came a voice from the cockpit, over the intercom speakers.

Paul knew that the astronaut pilot and co-pilot were in the cockpit strictly as redundancies. The Clippership was preprogrammed and monitored from the ground, just as it would be if it were carrying all freight and no people at all. Only if something went disastrously wrong would the human crew have anything to do. And then, Paul thought, it would probably
be too late. But the government agencies had insisted on a human crew when human passengers were going aloft. Takes two paying seats out of our cash flow, Paul fumed whenever he thought about the outmoded regulation.

Then one of the astronauts came clambering down the ladder to check that all the passengers were properly strapped in and had cranked their seats back to the full reclining position for takeoff. He said a brief hello to Paul, smiled at Joanna, and then climbed back up into the cockpit and closed the hatch above Paul’s head.

Paul glanced across the narrow aisle and saw that Joanna looked pale. She’s never been in space before, he knew. He reached out his hand and touched her shoulder. She clasped his hand in hers. Her palm felt cold, clammy.

Grinning at her, Paul whispered, “You’ll love it.”

She nodded, but looked extremely dubious.

She was the first person to suffer a heart attack on the Moon.

Dr. Lana Goodman was a tiny wisp of a woman, a brilliant fifty-two-year-old with degrees in medicine, physiology and biophysics. She was rumored to be on track for a Nobel, and could have had her pick of any university in the world. Indeed, she was teaching and conducting research in low-gravity physiology at Johns Hopkins when she applied for a position with Masterson Aerospace.

“I want to go to the Moon,” she told the corporation’s astonished personnel director. “I’ve always wanted to go there. I’ve had experience aboard space stations, but I haven’t gotten to the Moon yet and I want to do it before I get too old.”

Masterson took her on as a consultant, making maximum public relations mileage out of it, and sent her on a well-publicized tour of duty at Moonbase.

Dr. Goodman was expected to look after the medical needs of the twenty-eight men and women who happened to be working at Moonbase at the time, as well as continue her own research on how the human body adapts to low gravity.

Her heart attack was totally unexpected, caused by a clot that lodged in one of the smaller coronary arteries. She was eating breakfast when she felt a terrific pain in her chest, vomited up everything in her stomach, and half-collapsed on the galley table. Her skin turned gray and sweaty.

Since she was Moonbase’s resident doctor at the time, she was attended by two of the base’s paramedics—both of them engineers with other duties who stood by for medical emergencies. They slapped an oxygen mask over her nose; one of them shot a load of clot-busting tissue plasminogen activator into her arm, while the other pushed aspirin and nitroglycerin tablets through her pain-clenched teeth.

The paramedics contacted Masterson’s medical staff in Savannah, who plugged them in to the finest cardiac centers in Boston, Houston and even Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Within hours Dr. Goodman was out of danger, thanks mainly to the clot-dissolving properties of the TPA.

Within three days she could walk around almost normally, in the gentle gravity of the Moon.

But she could not return to Earth.

Part of the problem was the acceleration of the rocket boost from the lunar surface, she knew, although that was only a minor part of it, since the liftoff was much less stressful than a takeoff from Earth would have been. There were gee stresses in re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, too. They were greater, but she felt confident that she could handle them.

The real problem was the condition of her heart, weakened by weeks of living in low gravity and now damaged by the infarction. She feared that she would be a cardiac cripple on Earth, with its high gravity.

After days of consulting with her Earthbound medical colleagues, Goodman decided she would have to stay on the Moon for weeks, perhaps months, while slowly building up her cardiac strength through exercises specially designed to strengthen her heart muscle.

She wanted to resume her medical duties, but the corporation had sent up a strapping young M.D. to replace her as
medical officer—and to watch over her while she recuperated. Looking more like a football hero than a physician, the young man supervised her exercise regimen with ruthless tenderness.

Dr. Goodman continued her research, but this was not enough to fill her increasingly boring days in the cramped underground warrens of Moonbase. She had brought her camera with her, though, and started taking photographs. Not of the busy, harried, sweaty people who lived cheek-by-jowl in Moonbase. She got into a spacesuit and went out on the surface to take photos of the grandeur of the Moon itself.

She had no intention of showing her work to anyone but her fellow Moonbase residents. But one of them electronically relayed back to Savannah a few choice shots of the Sun rising over Alphonsus’s ringwall mountains. A minor executive in the public relations department showed them to an editor of a photography magazine. Within a month several other magazines were asking for her work.

She had started with ordinary color film, but soon asked her new-found friends in the world of photography to send her black-and-white film, instead. It seemed made to order for the black-and-gray world of the Moon.

With dizzying suddenness, Lana Goodman became an artist of global renown. Her photos of the Moon showed all the barren splendor of this new world in its rugged challenge. Her work adorned the covers of newsmagazines. Media personalities clamored to interview her, live, from the Moon.

The handsome young football hero of a physician left after his three-month tour ended. The next doctor was a woman, just as qualified, just as determined to see that Goodman continued her exercise routine, but nowhere near as emotionally interesting.

When medical tests showed she was physically able to return to Earth, she asked for a postponement. I’m not ready, she said. Psychologically, I’m not prepared to face the return trip.

On the first anniversary of her heart attack she decided to quit the subterfuge and asked her contacts in the corporation’s personnel office to allow her to stay on the Moon indefinitely.

The decision went all the way up to Paul Stavenger, head of Masterson’s space division. In full sympathy with her desire, and prodded by the corporate public relations director,
he decided to allow Lana Goodman to stay at Moonbase as long as she wished.

She never returned to Earth.

Lana Goodman become the first person to live on the Moon permanently.

The Clippership took off with a thundering roar that was only slightly muted by the passenger cabin’s acoustical insulation. The ship rattled hard enough to blur Paul’s vision for a moment. Pressed flat against the reclined seat, he turned his head to see how Joanna was taking it. Her eyes were squeezed shut, hands clutching the armrests with whitened knuckles.