Maelstrom (16 page)

The lower section of the capsule was surrounded by a doughnut-shaped strap-on fuel module; the capsule’s retrorocket poked through the doughnut hole. Cliff and Katrina slid down the narrow ladder to the ground three meters below.

The loose moondust of the landing field was plowed in crazy waves of tire-tracks, crossing and recrossing in loops and tangles. A big-tired tractor from the antenna array was bounding over them like a motorboat over ships’ wakes, leaving a wake of its own. The tractor skidded to a stop beside the shuttle in a cloud of quicksettling dust.

When the ready light came on over the tractor’s rear hatch, Katrina pulled it open and shoved Cliff in ahead of her. She climbed in and pulled the hatch shut behind them.

 

“Ho, Piet,” Katrina said on the suitcomm. “Did they demote you to tractor driving during my leave-taking?”

 

“Most amusing,” the driver grumbled.

 

“This is Cliff,” Katrina said. “I told him you’d drop him by Maintenance.”

 

“Why not? As you point out, I’m simply a chauffeur.”

 

“Piet is a signal analyst, actually,” she said cheerfully. “My new chum Cliff here is in Agro. Cliff Leyland, Piet Gress.”

 

Gress twisted in his seat to extend a gloved right hand. Cliff shook it. “Pleasure,” Cliff said.

 

Gress grunted agreement. He shoved the throttle forward and the tractor bounded off again, throwing Cliff and Katrina against each other in the unpadded back of the tractor.

 

“I notice that your famous uncle’s in the news again, Piet,” said Katrina, when she’d recovered her poise.

 

“Really?”

 

“You of course never waste time watching the viddie.” She turned to Cliff. “His uncle is Albers Merck.”

 

Cliff was politely interested. “The archaeologist? The one they pulled off the surface of Venus a few weeks ago?”

 

“The very Merck. Him with the most definite ideas about extraterrestrial beings.”

 

Cliff said, “He translated the thing they found on Mars?”

“Translated!” Katrina hooted. The suitcomms transmitted with equal volume in everyone’s ears, painfully. “Certainly he did. And a most full and large translation it was. As you say, the ‘last will and testament’ of a dying civilization.”

“You may save the irony, Katrina,” said Gress. “That was a long time ago. He made a beginning. Several useful hypotheses.”

 

Katrina laughed. “Translating a text in an unknown–not to mention an alien–language needs something more than a hypothesis. But far be it from those of us who actually know something about frequency analysis . . .”

 

“Who know rather less about natural languages, perhaps.”

“Please do not misunderstand me, Piet. I’m glad they saved your uncle’s life.” She turned her helmet to look at Cliff. “It is a family tradition, you see. Piet’s uncle digs up the past and imagines he reads messages in old bottles, while Piet looks to the future, eager to decipher the first message from the stars.”

“There will be one,” Gress said simply.

 

“If your uncle is right, there already was, but you missed it,” Katrina responded. “Your Culture X has been dead a billion years.”

 

Gress twisted his helmeted head and looked over his shoulder at Cliff. “You mustn’t pay too much attention to her. She’s not the cynic she pretends to be.”

 

“Not a cynic at all,” Katrina replied. “A realist. Never mind, we are sneaking in some good astronomy on these most expensive telescopes while you waste your time eaves-dropping on a vacant phonelink.”

The tractor was quickly approaching one of the big double-domes of the central base. A ring of vehicle-sized locks surrounded the base of the dome, and Gress headed toward the nearest open door. As the tractor rolled into the dusty lock, the clam-shell hatch automatically closed behind it. A pressure tube trundled out of the wall and fastened its aging polyrubber lips around the rim of the tractor’s back hatch. The tractor spent a few moments stealing air from the dome; sensing pressure, the hatch popped. The riders unsealed their helmets.

“Thanks again,” Cliff said. “See you around the Mall?”

 

“Me?” Katrina said. “Certainly. Not him, though. He spends all his spare time trying to extract meaning from nova blips and other such things.”

 

Piet Gress shrugged, as if to say it was hardly worth replying to his colleague’s distortions. As if on an impulse, Katrina plucked at Cliff’s sleeve. “Before you go . . .”

 

“Yes–”

 

“I am thinking of having some people over to my place later. To celebrate my safe return. Will you come? It is so nice to make new friends.”

 

“Thanks, I . . . I’d better say no. I didn’t sleep all that well on the way back.”

 

“Just drop in. Do me a favor.” She glanced sideways. “You’re invited too, Piet.”

Cliff looked at her. Her pale eyes were quite striking. He’d been trying not to admit that for the past couple of days, ever since chance had thrust them together on the same shuttle. He shrugged. “For you I’ll stay awake a few hours.”

“That’s a promise, Cliff,” she said. “About nineteen hundred, then.” As she leaned away the change in her expression was subtle, carrying a hint of triumph.

 

Cliff clambered into the tube. He glanced backward. Piet Gress waved a brusque goodbye; Katrina was still staring at him with her soulful eyes.

When Cliff reached the inner door, the creaking mechanism bumped and wheezed and released its sucking grasp on the tractor. Through the thick glass port of the lock, Cliff watched the tractor back out into the lunar day and wheel around, heading for the distant antenna farm. He regretted his mock flirtation. He was, after all, a happily married man.

* * *

 

The big tractor sped along beside the linear launcher, toward the distant radiotelescopes.

 

“Quite a performance you just put on,” Gress muttered. “Watch you don’t overdo it.”

 

Katrina yawned noisily, ostentatiously ignoring him. “Asleep for a whole day! I’m so full of energy.”

 

“Did you really want to invite me to this party of yours?” Piet Gress asked.

 

“Don’t be silly. You had your chance with me. More than once.”

 

“I don’t know whether to pity the poor man or envy him.”

 

“If you had any imagination, Piet, you would envy him. But we’ve already established that you don’t know what you’re missing. He’s rather cute, don’t you think?”

 

Gress grunted gloomily and concentrated on his driving. After a while he asked, “Are you going to keep me in suspense forever?”

 

“Very well–since you are so impatient.” Her tone became more serious. “The news is not exactly ideal.”

 

“What sector?”

 

“As we suspected, the one we are scheduled to search next,” she said. “Crux.”

He drove silently for a moment. “You seem quite cheerful about it,” he burst out bitterly. “Do you really care for the real purpose of this operation? Or is your interest really purely astrophysical, as you keep telling everyone who will listen?”

Katrina said gently, “I care, Piet. Doesn’t it excite you to know we are that much closer to our goal? All of us?”

 

“Crux, then.” His voice was filled with cool weariness. “I cannot say I was unprepared.”

 

“Of course you are prepared. Don’t worry, all will be well.”

Cliff Leyland pulled his helmet off his head and tucked it under his arm. In his right hand he had a firm grip on the big briefcase he’d brought at considerable cost from L-5. He slid the case into a slot in the wall and waited for passive inspection. A second later the lock’s inner door opened and Cliff stepped into the interior of the dome. That was all there was to it: there were no body searches at Farside.

The two big domes were the oldest structures on the base. Originally they had housed the construction workers and their machinery, but as soon as possible the people moved underground. The dome Cliff was in now was a garage, hangar, and repair shop for big equipment, busy with men and women swarming over broken moon buggies, defective transformers, sections of launcher track that needed repairing. The flash and glare of welding torches cast strange shadows on the curving interior of the dome, a colder place than its twin, which had been converted to a recreation area and garden and was thus filled with plants hardy enough to stand up to surface-level radiation, which could be intense where no atmosphere intercepted the solar wind and the constant bombardment of cosmic rays.

Cliff walked to the nearest trolley stop. In a few seconds one of the open cars rolled up, beeping a monotonous warning, and he climbed aboard, seating himself beside a couple of ice miners he recognized but had not met. Farside Base wasn’t large even by small-town standards, but in a population of almost a thousand, most of them adults, newcomers can stay strangers for a long time.

The trolley hummed along through a low, wide corridor of compacted gray moon gravel, past smaller side corridors leading to dormitories, offices, dining halls, racquetball courts, restaurants, theaters, meeting halls. . . . Most of the base was like this, buried five meters underground, well shielded against the random energies of raw space. People got on and off at every stop, some in spacesuits, most in shirt-sleeves. The ice miners got off near their rooms; Cliff continued on to the agronomy station.

A man in transport technician’s coveralls was waiting for him when he got off the trolley. “You’re Leyland? I’ve got a load of the dry black stuff for you.”

 

“You do? How’d you know I’d be here?”

“Don’t be funny,” he said. Cliff didn’t recognize the fellow, although as he entered his acknowledgment on the manifest pad the man stared at him intently. He was a young man with thick black hair, carefully smoothed back, and the shadow of a dark beard beneath the transparent skin of his smoothly shaven jaw. He didn’t look much like a low-grade technician.

Cliff handed the manifest back and started to turn away.

 

“Hey. You’ve got something for me,” the man whispered urgently.

 

Cliff turned back. “What?”

 

“You’ve
got
something.”

 

“Not that I know of,” Cliff said, puzzled.

 

“Oh, man . . . You ’re Cliff Leyland, right?”

 

“Yes, I am.”

The man leaned his head back, open-mouthed, disbelieving. “Leyland, don’t you remember a little conversation we had in the lounge a couple of days before you left for L-5? You were going to look up a friend of some friends of mine.”

“Oh.” Cliff’s face froze. “That was you. You look different when you’re not wearing glitter.”

 

“Save the comedy, man, just give me the stuff.”

 

“I thought about the proposition. I decided against.”

 

The disbelieving mouth threatened to fall open wider this time, before it snapped shut. “You what?”

 

“You heard me. Tell your friends, whoever they are, that I thought about their proposition and decided against.”

 

“Do you know what you’re saying, man?”

 

Cliff’s face brightened with anger. “Yes, I think I do. Man.”

 

The fellow appeared sincerely concerned. “No, man, do you know what this
means
?”

 

Cliff took a step forward. “Look, you, I want you out of here now. Stay away from me. Tell your friends to stay away from me, too. Or I’m turning you in.”

 

“Oh, man . . .”

 

“You don’t have anything to worry about if you just stay out of the way. Nothing that’s been said to me will be repeated. But I want no one, no one at all, ever to bring this subject up to me again.”

 

“Oh, man, you don’t know what you’re asking for . . .”

 

“Get out of here.” Cliff turned back to his rows of plants.

“Oh, man, ohhh . . .” The words came out almost crooning. The transport worker seemed as upset as if he were mourning the loss of a friend. He gave Cliff one last stricken look and walked slowly away, leaving the shipment of night soil beside the door.

Cliff watched him go, then pushed his way through the double doors of Agro, into the square bright caves of the experimental greenhouses. Someone else could take care of the unsolicited black stuff.

 

* * *

By the time he’d planted the delicate shoots of the new rice strain, it was seventeen hundred hours; Cliff discovered he was hungry. He cleaned up and went to the dining hall favored by the other singles and separates. It was a luxurious place by the standards of similar facilities on Earth, with levels and alcoves and indirect lighting, and food superbly prepared even if it was served on a cafeteria line. Cliff ate by himself at a table for four; the linen and candles, the brocade and velvet walls, the deep pile carpet kept meticulously clean, the redwood-textured ceiling and the warm light only served to remind Cliff that he was trapped underground on an alien world.

After the hasty dinner he went to his shared cubicle and tapped out letters to be sent by radiolink to Myra and the children. He would have spoken to them by videolink if he could have afforded to do so, but the family resources were limited. So he painfully wrote out the words that would be transmitted in fragmented bits, bits that would be reassembled on a space-available basis at the fax unit at Cliff and Myra’s apartment in Cairo. . . .

“My dear Myra. I’ve made another successful trip to L-5 and back. They have developed a high-yield strain of rice there that has done well for them and we are going to have a go at it here. The trip was uneventful I suppose although I must admit that after many such trips I have still not got used to the changes. Lonely as ever. I love you and I pray I will be with you soon. Love too to our newest, as only you can give it. With much love from your Clifford. . . .”

And in the second part of the message:

“Hello Brian and Susie! I have some good samples of moondust from many localities, Brian, and many rocks too that I have traded for with people who have been to other parts of the Moon, some of which you can see from where you live when the Moon is full, although you cannot see where I am living just now. Susie, when I can come home which will be soon I am bringing you some moonsilk, which is made by silkworms who live here on the Moon and is different from anything on Earth. I love both of you very much and it will not be as long as it seems until we are together again. Take care of your mother. I love you, your Dad.”