Farside (7 page)

“You can build new cities right here,” his stepfather had insisted. “God knows we’ve got enough homeless coolies pouring into South Africa. Blacks, Arabs, even refugees from Israel. Can’t keep ’em out. They need shelter almost as much as they need food.”

His stepfather was a blustering shopkeeper who bullied Grant’s mother and everyone else around him. But although Grant would not be bullied, he still recognized the truth behind the old man’s words. He saw the need in the weary, frightened eyes of the helpless, homeless, hopeless immigrants.

Grant tried. He tried very hard. He set aside his dreams of working on the Moon and took on the task of building housing for the desperate, bewildered people who had lost everything. The only challenge in the work was to get the units built faster and cheaper, always faster and cheaper.

Grant warned his superiors that they were taking too many shortcuts. They ignored him. He went to the construction company’s management, and all that earned him was their cold disdain and the active hostility of his fellow workers.

“Don’t get yourself all lathered up, Grant,” his supervisor told him. “We’re building for dumbass migrants, not the royal family, for chrissakes.”

Offended by his coworkers’ slipshod efforts, and incensed even more by their careless attitude, Grant found himself isolated, friendless, alone in his fears that their sloppy work would lead to disaster.

When the company’s latest and shoddiest apartment block collapsed, killing seventy-three sleeping men, women, and children, Grant got blamed. Somehow the company’s records showed that it was Grant Simpson who drew up the faulty design, Grant Simpson who approved the unreliable reinforcing bars and the fatally weakened concrete mixture.

His stepfather regarded him with ill-concealed contempt. “Don’t look to me for help, young man. You made your bed, now you’ve got to lie in it.”

Die in it, Grant thought. The courts are working up an indictment for mass murder. Any moment now the police will come to take me away.

Grant had to run for his life. He fled to the Moon, where the men and women governing Selene at least listened to his side of the story and reluctantly gave him a chance to make good on his never-used job permit.

South Africa tried to have him extradited, but Selene—independent since its short, sharp war against Earth’s United Nations—refused to cooperate. Grant immediately applied for citizenship, which was eventually granted. Selene’s need for men and women who were willing to work outweighed the tragedy in South Africa.

Grant worked. Very hard. Outside, for the most part, out on the airless lunar surface. Building the solar farms that provided Selene’s electrical power. Constructing the second electrical catapult that hurled cargoes of lunar ores off the Moon to the space stations in Earth orbit. Erecting factories on the floor of Crater Alphonsus, factories that produced—among other things—the Clippership rockets that became the backbone of transportation between the Moon and Earth and, in slightly modified form, hypersonic aircraft that brought every place on Earth no more than an hour’s flight from any other place on Earth.

Out in the open on Alphonsus’s dusty, rock-strewn floor, Grant could look up and see the blue-and-white sphere of the Earth hanging above him. He willed himself to feel no remorse; he told himself that he had cut all his ties with the world of his birth.

He knew he would never again see the dim-witted, know-nothing tyrant who had married his mother, or the mother who allowed the lout to dominate her, or the regimentation of a government that grew more restrictive, more authoritarian, with each new wave of desperate millions migrating into South Africa. He didn’t have to deal with the fools and opportunists and out-and-out thieves who grasped at power and money for themselves at the expense of everyone else.

He had left Earth far behind him. Forever. Or so he told himself.

He worked in a space suit, of course. He learned to accept the restrictions imposed by the burdensome, awkward suits: gloves that needed tiny servomotors just to flex the fingers adequately; canned air that chilled his lungs; lunar dust that crept into the suits’ joints and made them grind to an arthritic halt if you didn’t clean the suits thoroughly every time you used them.

The biggest danger of working outside was the radiation, of course. Invisible, impalpable subatomic bullets rained down from the Sun and stars, blanketing the lunar surface every moment of every day and night.

The suits protected their wearers against radiation, but only up to a point. A person was allowed to spend only so many hours outside on the surface; exceeding that limit meant that even with the suit’s protection, the wearer was accumulating a dangerous dose of radiation. Selene’s safety department had very strict rules about radiation exposure.

But a hard-working engineer who had jobs to complete could be clever enough to evade the rules. Records could be doctored. Radiation dosage badges could be switched or even lost. Getting the job done was more important than allowing the nitpicking safety prigs to force you off the project.

Grant worked hard, very hard, out on the Moon’s radiation-drenched surface. Happily, most of his fellow workers were almost as hard-driving as he was. Most of them. And even the medical staff who monitored the workers’ health status were lenient enough to let them get away with bending the safety regulations.

Besides, there were medications to be had that could protect you from the damaging effects of long-term radiation exposure. Grant Simpson got those medications from fellow workers who knew where and how to obtain them. He took steroids, too, to improve his stamina out there in the open.

He worried about taking such medications. Drugs, really, he thought. What am I putting into my body? he asked himself. At first. Once he found that the meds allowed him to work longer, harder, he put such worries behind him. Getting the job done was the important thing.

Within a year Grant was dependent on those medications. They didn’t interfere with his work; they enhanced his performance. Steroids could be dangerous, he knew. But he soon realized that he couldn’t survive without them. What choice do I have? he asked himself.

He worked hard. He got the job done.

One of the side effects of the steroids, though, was a heightened tendency to anger: ’roid rage. All his life, Grant had kept his emotions bottled inside him. Now, with the steroids coursing through his blood, the anger burst out. He got into fights—real, bloody-knuckled, body-battering fights. He expected the people around him to do their jobs, and most of them did. But the few goof-offs and goldbrickers among his crew infuriated him beyond his self-control.

After a wild brawl that smashed up the bar he and his crew frequented, Grant was brought before Selene’s personnel board and expelled from the technical staff.

Devastated, Grant pleaded that he could not return to Earth, where an indictment for mass murder still hung over him. “You’ll be killing me,” he begged.

After two excruciating days of deliberation, the board informed Grant that he could apply for a position with the technical staff that was building the astronomical facility on the far side of the Moon. He swiftly, gratefully, accepted.

But he could not avoid a routine physical examination when he arrived at Farside, carried out by Farside’s resident physician, Dr. Ida Kapstein, a heavyset woman with hard ice-blue eyes.

“Your liver function is deteriorating, you know,” she said, coolly unconcerned.

The ache in my back, Grant realized.

“It’s from all the shit you’ve been putting into yourself. Your blood sample looks like a pharmaceutical company’s product list, for god’s sake.”

“I, uh … I’ve been taking … medications,” he stammered.

“I’ve heard about your getting into fistfights at Selene. ’Roid rage, isn’t it?”

Ohmigod, Grant thought. She’s going to redline me. If I can’t work here at Farside they’ll ship me back to Earth. Back to South Africa.

Sullenly, he muttered, “I can control it.”

“Sure you can.”

It took Grant several minutes before he understood that Dr. Kapstein wasn’t threatening to redline him. She was offering to sell Grant the steroids and anti-radiation medications he had become dependent on. Dr. Kapstein had a thriving little business going, and Grant would swiftly become her steadiest customer.

“I’ll take good care of you,” Dr. Kapstein told him. “You just put yourself in my care and you’ll be okay. The safety department’s rules are way too restrictive, anyway.”

Grant agreed mutely.

“I’ll take good care of you,” she repeated.

For a price.

BROKEN MIRROR

Grant felt tired and irritable as he pulled the hard-shell torso of his space suit over his head and slid his arms through the flexible sleeves.

Frigging suit smells like old sweat socks, he grumbled to himself. It’s time to requisition a new one. The Ulcer’ll hit the ceiling; I bet he hired McClintock to help keep the program’s costs down.

It was an hour after his meeting with McClintock.
You do the work, and I’ll take the credit,
the man had said. Great, thought Grant. What choice do I have? Well, anyway, I ought to get a new suit out of it.

The woman who was going outside with him was already suited up, helmet and all. She checked out his suit, then Grant checked out hers. The old buddy system. Never go out on the surface alone. Good rule. Except there were times when you had to. Rules are made to be broken, or at least bent.

“Let’s make this quick,” the woman said as Grant fastened his fishbowl helmet to his suit’s neck ring. “I’ve got a date for dinner.”

With their highly tinted helmets over their heads, neither person could make out the face of the other. Together they clomped heavily to the airlock, got the go-ahead from the excursion controller, snug and happy in her booth deep inside, and finally stepped out onto the surface of Mare Moscoviense.

It was still daylight out there, although the Sun was dipping down toward the slumped old ringwall mountains. Long shadows were stretching across the dusty undulating floor of the Sea of Moscow.

Grant took it all in with a glance, then stepped out of the airlock and headed toward the cracked mirror.

“Into the valley of death,” muttered his companion, “rode the six hundred.”

Grant shook his head inside his helmet. “We’re missing five hundred and ninety-eight guys.”

“Yeah. I know.”

The damned mirror was sitting out there, next to the big airlock of the mirror lab, slightly tilted on the uneven ground. Its delicately figured glass was covered by a thin sheet of metal that was obviously warped.

Grant stared at the damaged mirror inside its protective casing. Not protective enough, he knew.

Why’d you have to crack? he asked the impassive mirror. Why’d you have to ruin all our work?

“How’re we gonna get this puppy back into the lab?” his companion asked.

Grant had to concentrate for a moment to remember which of his crew was with him. The bulky space suits removed all traces of individuality; if you weren’t close enough to read the name stenciled on the torso, you couldn’t recognize who was inside the suit.

She checked you out in your suit, for chrissakes, Grant berated himself. Are you getting early onset Alzheimer’s? Then he remembered: Josie Rivera. Smokey Jo. Good-looking Latina, sharp engineer, bosomy and friendly, especially after a couple of drinks. With a pang, Grant realized that it had been months since he’d gotten laid. He hadn’t even thought much about sex lately. A side effect of his medications? he wondered.

“It doesn’t go back into the lab,” Grant replied. “Not yet. Not until we finish the mirror we’re working on now.”

“So we just leave it out here?”

Shaking his head inside the helmet, Grant said, “We build a roof over it, protect it from temperature swings and micrometeorite abrasion. I’ll have to requisition the honeycomb sheets, then you and Harvey Henderson’s gang can put ’em up.”

“Hurry-up Harvey.” Josie sounded a little resentful, Grant thought. Nobody likes working outside unless they really have to. He knew what was going through her mind: The damned mirror’s ruined; what’s the sense of putting up a protective roof when we’re just going to melt the thing down and start all over again with it?

He said to her, “The Ulcer’s thinking about using nanomachines to build a new mirror.”

“Nanos? Really?”

“That administrator of his—McClintock—he’s talking about it with Dr. Cardenas back at Selene.”

“Could it work?” Josie asked.

Grant knew better than to try to shrug inside the bulky suit. “Cardenas seems to think so.”

“Well, she would, wouldn’t she?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” Grant started pacing around the mirror’s edge. It was still mounted on the transporter, clamped rigidly in place. Not rigidly enough, he told himself. Otherwise it wouldn’t have cracked.

To Josie, he said, “I want you to take snaps of the ground along the perimeter of the mirror, so Henderson and his guys have a full picture of the ground out here. They’ll need to build a foundation for the roof.”

“I’ll have to go in and get a camera,” she said.

Shaking his head, Grant said, “I’ll tell the controller to get somebody to put a camera in the airlock. All you’ll have to do is step in and pick it up.”

“Okay.”

Still pacing along the edges of the mirror, Grant called in to the controller for a camera. Once the controller told him that the camera had been placed on the airlock’s floor, he told Josie to pop in and get it.

She came back with the credit-card-sized camera engulfed in one gloved hand. “You want me to take your picture, boss?” Before Grant could reply, Josie added, “Give the guys inside an idea of the scale.”

“Sure,” he said. “Why the hell not?”

So he stood beside the mirror while Josie snapped several images of him.

“Better take shots of the transporter’s wheels, too,” he suggested. “Get close enough to see if any of ’em cracked or bent.”

Josie got busy and Grant felt unneeded, but he hesitated to go inside and leave her alone. He knew that subatomic particles from the distant stars were machine-gunning him. His suit protected him from most of them, but there were always some extra-energetic ones that got through and burrowed into the atoms of his body, killing cells or mutating them. He started to feel almost naked beneath their constant, deadly, invisible rain.