DS02 Night of the Dragonstar (11 page)

“Ah, here we go, sir,” he said brightly as Neville drew up next to him. “Sorry to bundle you off to this lecture as soon as you set foot on the Moon, but it was the colonel’s orders. Priorities, you know.”

“Fuck his priorities,” Neville said. “He didn’t tell us anything that isn’t contained in his silly fact sheets.”

“Mr. Neville, please,” his nurse whispered.

Man, this guy was going to be a character, Dave Lowen thought as he reached out and took the old gent’s arm. “I realize you may have been inconvenienced, sir, and Colonel Kemp foresaw the problem too. That’s why he prepared a special treat for you.”

Neville’s wild-eyed look seemed to soften a bit. “A special treat? For me?”

Lowen smiled. “That’s right. Won’t you please follow me down to the shuttle deck?”

“But we just came from there. We’re not going back into
space
again, are we? Right now, I mean?”

Lowen laughed easily. “Oh no, sir, you’ll see.” Dave recalled how out of shape Neville had been during the shuttle flight from Vandenberg. For a guy who’d been writing about this stuff all his life, he wasn’t very prepared to accept the reality of spaceflight. He was the first guy Lowen had ever seen who tried to puke his way to the Moon.

Dave exited the briefing room and walked toward the elevators, with Neville and his nurse slightly behind him. They entered the lift and headed up toward the shuttle deck.

“You know,” Neville said with a nervous edge in his voice, “they say that we SF writers were never in the prediction business, but that’s a lot of bullshit.”

“Really?” Dave said, trying to stifle a yawn.

“Bet your ass, sonny! Whenever I wrote a book, I crammed as much hard science as I could into it. And I hoped that everything I dreamed up would come true. Make me look like a genius, right?”

The elevator doors opened and they stepped out into the reception lounge by the pressurized doors. There was a crowd of people already there
—
news crew members armed with cameras and lights. Kathleen Ennis was standing by the double doors with a microphone in her hand. Her fashionably cut raven-black hair shone brilliantly in the hot lights; her dark eyes were like polished stones.

“What’s going on here?” Neville asked as he spied the NBC media crew.

Kate Ennis moved to the old man’s side quickly and smoothly. One smile totally disarmed him. She was a very attractive woman
—
tall, lean, long legs. “Hello, Dr. Neville. I’m Kate Ennis from NBC Satellite News. It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.”

Neville smiled broadly and leaned forward to kiss Kate wetly on the lips. He attempted to pull her close to him, but she expertly pulled away just in time. “It’s always a pleasure to meet a woman as beautiful as you, Ms. Ennis. To what do l owe this occasion
—
other than the fact that I am a famous old fart that everybody likes to interview?”

“This is the surprise I was talking about, Dr. Neville,” Dave Lowen said. “When the shuttle docked and everyone was hustled off to the assembly, Colonel Kemp realized that we were missing out on a historic event—the first trip to the Moon by America’s foremost science fiction writer.”

“And so,” Kate Ennis continued, “the colonel arranged for us to ... ah, restage your arrival on the Moon. That’s what all this crew is for.”

“Yes,” said Captain Lowen. “I’ll escort you through the double doors in the airlock corridor as though we were just arriving, and Kate Ennis will conduct a small interview, recording the historic event.”

Neville nodded appreciatively, smiling and leering at Kate Ennis. “A great idea. Absolutely inspired.”

A man in headphones, connected to a portable control console, signaled to Kate. “Okay, Ms. Ennis. Ready when you are.”

Lowen keyed open the double doors and moved inside with Neville. They waited for another signal, and then reentered the shuttle deck reception area, where the lights were trained upon them. Kate Ennis, standing in front of the cameras, was already talking.

“ ... and the Earth shuttle
Campbell
has just touched down in the hangar, ladies and gentlemen. Any moment now, honored author, scientist, and elder statesman Dr. John T. Neville will be stepping down to the lunar surface and coming through these doors directly behind me.”

The doors whooshed open as Kate continued, “And here he is. Dr. John T. Neville.”

Neville did a good imitation of being surprised to see the media crew. He quickly recovered and smiled into the lens of the closest camera. He was a longtime veteran of interviews and media coverage, that much was clear.

“Dr. Neville, I am Kate Ennis from NBC Satellite News, and I would like to congratulate you for making your first trip to the Moon. After all these years of writing about space travel, I’m sure it must be quite a thrill to have your dream come true.”

“You bet it is, honey.” Neville turned and looked into the camera. “And I’d like to tell everyone around the world watching this broadcast that I could have made the trip thirty years ago if I had wanted to. It’s just that I didn’t have any real reason to be here until now.”

“How would you describe flight up from the Earth?” Kate asked, smiling smoothly and professionally.

“You
know, I’m glad you asked me that question,” Neville said. “I was sitting in my seat on the shuttle, watching the Earth drop away, and I was thinking how it reminded me of my novel
The Secret of the Moon Marauders.
Strange as it may seem, way back in 1951, I envisioned a shuttle almost exactly like the one I was riding on.”

“Was the experience of being in outer space itself in any way like you imagined it?”

Dave Lowen was listening to the whole load of bullshit off camera, trying to keep from laughing out loud. He kept recalling Neville’s green, panic-stricken face on the video monitor during the shuttle flight. He didn’t look like he was noticing anything except the condition of his stomach.

“Katie,” said Neville. “Let me tell you
—
I had always imagined that space travel would be an arduous task, a real challenge to the mind and body, but I have to admit that at least in this instance my instincts and my predictive abilities were way off base.”

“In what way, Dr. Neville?”

“Our technology has made space travel such a painless, almost effortless endeavor that, I’ll tell you, I hardly noticed the flight.”

Kate smiled. She felt that the interview was going badly but had no idea how to improve her subject’s responses. “I was wondering, Dr. Neville, since you are a man of words, if you said anything of significance when the ship first touched down on the lunar surface or when you first stepped out of the ship?”

“You mean if I said anything like the old ‘One small step for man’ business?”

Kate cleared her throat and smiled weakly. “Yes, something like that.”

Neville looked directly into the camera, and an expression of total seriousness clouded his doughy features. “You know, Katie, I’m going to tell you something
—
I was so glad to be out of that ship that I think the first thing I said when I stepped down was ‘Christ, am I glad
that’s
fucking over with!’” And with that, Dr. Neville threw back his head and laughed long and loud. It was a braying, hyenalike laugh that became infectious, and without warning everyone on the set, including Kate Ennis herself, erupted into laughter.

It seemed the more people laughed, the worse it became, and Kate had to force herself to address the camera to conclude the interview. “Well, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen
—
the historic first visit of the world’s most famous living science fiction writer, Dr. John T. Neville, to IASA Copernicus Base on the Moon. We now take you back to our studios in New York.”

Kate dropped her microphone and leaned back against a bulkhead as she again burst into laughter, which set off another round among her crew.

Neville looked around and joined in the laughter. When it died down he looked about innocently and muttered, “Was it something I said?”

And the crew again erupted into laughter.

* * *

It was a very old wall. And it was in constant need of maintenance.

Xick knew that his job would never end, that the Barrier would always be there, slowly disintegrating. He was the supervisor of a group of young Saurian males
—
fresh from the nurseries and as yet untrained or selected for their serving classes. All young males were employed as laborers until they were selected for training in one of the society’s castes.

Being a warrior, Xick was always watching out for good military prospects, but he had little to do with the selection process. He used his squad of fighters to keep the laborers in line and to protect them as they worked on a crumbling section of the Barrier.

The Saurian stood upon a rickety-looking scaffold on the outside of the Barrier where the laborers worked quickly. They were surrounded by the watchful eyes of the warriors who guarded the area from any curious predators.

Work on this particular section had been going slowly. It had been discovered that a large colony of burrowing lizards had been infiltrating this part of the Barrier, lacing it with tunnels and holes. This had weakened the structural elements to a great degree, and now this entire section of the Barrier cried out for replacement. Xick had decided to do the outside work first to be done with it and not have to anticipate dangerous work later.

His crew had just finished flushing out and poisoning the colony of burrowers, and they were now beginning the actual repairs. But he felt there was something wrong with this particular crew. Although they wore the tunics signifying they were in rational states of mind and thereby not eligible for the Dark Fold, they seemed quite irritable and not finely attuned to their duties.

Xick had heard about the violence and near riot in the mercantile center, and he hoped his laborers were not drifting into a similar situation. He watched the young males below him struggle with a glazing pot full of mortar, and he wondered why so many things seemed to be going wrong now, more than ever before
—
before the humans had come with their strange machines and their quick-death weapons. He could not help thinking that the humans had brought many new problems to his world. He didn’t trust the humans, and no amount of lecturing by the priests would ever change his mind.

Feeling paranoid and skittish, he barked at his charges, urging them to work more quickly, with more energy. Some of them looked up with listless expressions; others hissed openly at him. He had never known such defiance from males fresh from the nurseries. He would show them not to speak to a warrior like that!

Just as Xick stepped forward, planning to strike the most defiant of the young males, a fight broke out in their ranks. One of the workers was shoved into a pot of mortar, and the melee was suddenly on. At least a dozen of the laborers began striking each other with tools. Xick signaled to the warriors who had been guarding the area to intervene, and immediately most of his squad began climbing down into the scaffolding to bash some heads. The supervisor had never experienced such troubles, and it was most embarrassing
—
he hoped none of the other squad leaders got wind of this incident.

The warriors were quick and efficient, doing what they were trained to do, but in the confusion, they did not notice the Stegosaurus until it was almost upon the scaffolding. It must have rambled out of the edge of the forest and crossed the intervening clearing to the Barrier with surprising speed.

The Stegosaurus was honking, bleating as though in great pain. Xick looked down in shock to see it charging toward the base of the temporary ramparts. In that moment he could see that this was no normal herbivore. Its eyes were rimmed in blood, and foam bubbled from its twisted mouth. Its plates were skewed at odd angles, and its flanks were ravaged by oozing sores.

Shouting out a warning that was too late, Xick jumped up the scaffolding. He reached the edge of the Barrier railing and pulled himself up, but many of the others were not so fortunate.

At full charge, with amazing speed, the Stegosaurus careened into the supports of the scaffolding, its five tons of bulk breaking everything like so many matchsticks. The sound of snapping beams and groaning wood filled the air, mixing in with the terrible cries of the laborers who plummeted down from their perches.

The maddened Stegosaurus did not stop until it had smashed into the base of the Barrier, crushing many of the Saurians against the wood and stone like pieces of overripe fruit. It recoiled from the neck-snapping collision, lashing its spiked tail about. Debris rained down upon it, crushing its tiny head, and yet its hind legs still danced and struggled, not yet receiving the message that it was dead. It staggered back, away from the Barrier, finally falling into the dust, twitching and spasming.

Xick stood atop the Barrier, stunned by the sudden destruction.

His scaffolding was gone, many of his workers and guards had been killed or injured, and the Barrier had been damaged further. He could see a large crack in the outer mortar, radiating up from a red splotch on the wall where the Stegosaurus had crashed. Worse yet, there was a bloody carcass down there. Scavengers would make it impossible to resume the repair work until the bones were picked clean.

* * *

Later that evening, Ian Coopersmith escorted Rebecca Thalberg back to her quarters in the biomedical wing of Copernicus Base. They had spent a few hours in the Village Pub, not reminiscing over old times but getting their feelings out on the table, sharing the anxieties both had experienced since the end of the “Dragonstar war,” and making an honest attempt to map out what the future might hold for the both of them.