Moonbase - Moonwar Part 41

"I'm a fugitive, too," Doug said. "On Earth I'd be a marked man waiting for some nanoluddite fanatic to a.s.sa.s.sinate me. On the Moon I can live-"

"Until some hired a.s.sa.s.sin knocks you off."

Doug reached out his gloved hand. "Join us, Bam."

T don't deserve deserve to join you," Gordette said, recoiling. "I'm a murderer! A killer!" to join you," Gordette said, recoiling. "I'm a murderer! A killer!"

"You were a murderer. Now you have the chance to change, to start a new life."

"Doing what?"

Patiently, Doug said, "Doing whatever you do best. It's up to you."

"I killed my own mother!" he screamed, leaping to his feet. "I killed her!"

Doug looked up at him and saw fear, guilt, and the depths of h.e.l.l in Gordette's red-rimmed eyes.

Gordette bent over him and yanked Doug to his feet so hard that Doug's helmet rolled off the bunk and bounced on the concrete floor.

"I killed my mother!" he roared into Doug's face. "Don't talk to me about starting a new life."

He pushed Doug down onto the bunk again and went for his own helmet. Doug watched him put it on, seal the neck ring. Then Gordette started to pull on his gloves.

"Where are you going?" Doug asked.

"Out there. Anyplace. I'll keep going until I run out of air. That'll put an end to it."

Doug got up from the bunk. "Bam, you can't do that! I can't let you do it."

Staring grimly at him through his open helmet, Gordette muttered, "How you gonna stop me, man?"

Doug walked toward him. "Don't kill yourself, for G.o.d's sake. You can start a whole new life here."

"Yeah? For how long? In a week or so the Peacekeepers are gonna come marching in here and I'll be on my way back Earthside, heading for jail 'cause I didn't nail you."

"We can keep the Peacekeepers out," Doug said, feeling almost desperate. "We can stay free."

"Yeah. Sure."

"Don't kill yourself, Bam!"

Gordette looked at him with eyes suddenly grown calm and cold. "One of us has to die, Doug. I'd rather it be me. Even if I killed you, they'd just set me up for some other piece of s.h.i.+t. Let me end it, man. Let me put an end to the whole f.u.c.king mess."

"No!" Doug snapped, and grabbed for Gordette.

Almost by reflex, Gordette backhanded Doug across the jaw, knocking him off balance, staggering in his s.p.a.cesuit halfway down the length of the shelter.

Gordette slammed his visor down and turned for the airlock hatch. Doug charged after him. Gordette spun to face him, snapped Doug's head back with a straight left, then levelled him with a right. Doug's eyesight blurred as his head hit the concrete flooring, then everything went black.

Edith woke up, stiff and groaning, in the tractor's seat. She went to rub her eyes but her hands b.u.mped the helmet visor. Pulling herself up to a sitting position, she saw that the tractor was stopped in front of the tempo and Doug was gone.

He must be inside with Gordette, she thought, suddenly alarmed. Quickly she searched around her seat for something that might be useful as a weapon. If there was a tool kit on the tractor, it wasn't in sight.

Empty-handed, she started to climb down to the ground. As she put one boot on the sandy regolith she saw a s.p.a.cesuited figure march determinedly past her, past the other parked tractor, and away from the tempo. It wasn't Doug's suit, she knew.

Ignoring the distress signals her bladder was sending, Edith went to the open airlock hatch. Doug must be inside, she thought. It took an eternally long moment for her to find the instructions printed on the inner wall of the airlock, alongside the control keypad. Edith had to turn on her helmet light to read them.

It was simple enough. She slid the hatch shut and activated the pump. When the light turned green she opened the inner hatch and stepped into the shelter.

Doug was on the floor, his helmet off, pus.h.i.+ng himself up onto his elbows.

"He wants to kill himself," Doug said to her. She barely heard him through her sealed helmet.

Sliding her visor up, she knelt beside Doug. "What happened? Are you all right?"

"He wants to kill himself," Doug repeated.

"Let him," she snapped. "Better him than you."

Slowly, Doug pushed himself to a sitting position, shook his head a few times, then started to clamber to his feet. "Where'd my helmet get to?" he mumbled.

"You're not going out there after him!"

He looked at her. "I can't let him die out there, Edith. He... I just can't."

I'll go with you, then."

"You stay here," Doug said firmly, walking back to pick his helmet off the floor. "You're a lot safer here inside the shelter."

"And you're going out to catch him?"

"To find him. To help him-if he'll let me."

"Not without me!"

"Yes, without you. You stay here. If I'm not back in an hour, get into the tractor and go back to Moonbase."

Edith started to argue, but one look into Doug's determined blue-gray eyes stopped her. It would be pointless, she knew.

So she waited ten minutes, by the watch on her s.p.a.cesuit wrist, after Doug left the shelter. Then she went to the airlock and started after him in the tractor.

From her perch in the driver's seat she could see two pairs of bootprints clearly etched into the dark sandy ground. I won't need an Indian guide to help me follow their trail, Edith told herself.

DAY FORTY-FOUR.

Doug followed Gordette's boot prints, gleaming bright and new in the ancient regolith. The only sounds he heard were his own breathing and the comforting soft buzz of the suit's air fans. He had stopped at the tractor to refill his air tank. Hunger gnawed at him but there was nothing he could do about that.

How much air does Bam have left in his suit? he wondered. How long can he roam around out here before he runs out?

Gordette's trail seemed to meander, with no specific aim or purpose. Doug followed it around a house-sized boulder, never even thinking that Gordette could be lurking behind the rock, waiting to ambush him. He wasn't. His boot prints skirted a worn old crater the size of a baseball diamond, and so deep that its bottom was lost in dense shadow. Meteroid must have come almost straight down to dig that one, Doug thought.

Soon, though, Gordette's trail started to run beside a sinuous rille that snaked along the dusty ground like an arroyo in desert country. Doug remembered his first walk out on the Moon's surface, his eighteenth birthday. With Foster Brennart. They had come across a rille that had suddenly spurted a ghostly cloud of ga.s.ses from deep within the lunar interior. Methane, ammonia, other volatiles. They had glittered in the sunlight like a billion fireflies.

Brennart thought it was a good omen, my first walk on the surface. Maybe it was, Doug thought. I could use a good omen now.

Suddenly Gordette's boot prints ended. Disappeared. Doug stopped, puzzled. He backtracked a few steps, then saw that Gordette had climbed down into the shallow gully cut into the ground by the rille. Turning on his helmet lamp, Doug spotted faint boot marks heading along the bottom of the rille, some two meters below the surface on which he stood.

The prints still headed in the same general direction that Gordette had been following. Why'd he jump down into the rille? Doug asked himself. Was he afraid I'd follow him and he's trying to hide his trail? The prints down inside the rille were faint, but still visible.

Staying on the surface, Doug followed the rille as it wound across the regolith. It could be dangerous down there, Doug told himself. The rilles are old fissures where gas from below ground had seeped out. The ground down there can be brittle as gla.s.s, and who knows what's underneath it?

Edith trundled along in the tractor, trying to keep its speed down to the pace of a walking man. The trail of boot prints was easy to see, and she didn't want Doug to know she following him. Not yet.

Once she thought she saw the curve of his helmet above the horizon, and she tromped on the tractor's brakes. If I can't see him, he can't see me, she figured. And he sure can't hear me coming after him, not out here in all this vacuum.

The nearness of the horizon bothered her. It didn't look right. She knew, consciously, that the Moon was only a quarter of the Earth's size and the horizon was therefore much closer than it would be on Earth. But still, at a deep, primitive level, it almost frightened her. As if there really was an edge to this barren, desolate world and she might drop off it.

Yeah, she told herself derisively, you're right in there with Columbus's crew. Sail on, babe. Sail on.

Doug didn't realize he still had the suit-to-suit frequency on until he started hearing strange sounds in his earphones. Gasps? Moans? The sounds came through for a moment, then disappeared, like ghosts vanis.h.i.+ng into thin air.

Very thin air, around here, he told himself. thin air, around here, he told himself.

The rille had been getting progressively deeper, sinking more than four meters below the crater floor, Doug guessed.

It was hard to tell, and almost impossible to see if Gordette's boot prints were still marching along down there, even when he leaned carefully over the worn, rounded smooth edge of the rille to s.h.i.+ne his helmet lamp on its bottom.

He came to a spot where a meteoroid had slammed into the ground just next to the rille, collapsing its side into a heap of rubble. Doug spent several minutes searching for bootprints; he found none. As far as he could see there were no prints on the other side of the narrow rille, either.

And the eerie sounds in his earphones had stopped, too.

I've overshot him, Doug told himself. He's back behind me someplace. Down inside the rille. Hiding.

Slowly, bending over the edge of the rille to examine its bottom, Doug started backtracking. He couldn't see the bottom of the arroyo, it was too deep for his helmet lamp to reach.

He stopped and listened. Nothing. Gordette had gone silent. Is he dead? Maybe what I heard was his last gasping for air.

With great reluctance, and more than a little fear, Doug carefully climbed down inside the rille, lowering himself slowly down as far as he could with his arms fully stretched, then letting himself slide the rest of the way down.

He felt the rough side wall grating against the chest of his suit. Couldn't do this in a fabric suit, he thought. The cermet won't tear. But he knew that grinding some dust or larger particles of grit into his suit's joints could immobilize him as thoroughly as the Tin Woodsman caught in a monsoon rain.

Doug had never felt the panic of claustrophobia, but as he stood shakily inside the narrow rille he saw that the sky above him was nothing more now than a constricted slice of stars cut off on both sides by the steep black walls of the arroyo. Like the view from the bottom of a grave, he thought.

He took a step forward and his boot slid on the gla.s.s-smooth rock. He had to grab at both sides of the gully to keep himself from falling. Hardly any dust down here, he realized. This rille must be brand-new, maybe still active.

"New' and 'active' were relative terms on the Moon, he knew. A new rille might have opened up only a few thousand years ago. Its activity might be a slight sigh of underground gas every century or so.

A cough. In his earphones Doug heard somebody cough. Couldn't be anybody but Bam.

Slowly, moving cautiously along the slippery rock floor of the rille, both hands extended to touch its steep confining walls, Doug made his way forward.

Another cough, followed by a quick, desperate gasping.

"Bam!" he called into his helmet mike. "Bam, where are you?"

No response. Standing stock-still, Doug listened hard. Is he holding his breath? No, it's just so faint I can hardly hear him.

Doug pushed along the slick arroyo and the sound of Gordette's breathing grew louder. It sounded strained, labored, as if the man were in pain.

"I'm coming, Bam," Doug called again. "I'll be with you in a couple of minutes. Hang on."

"Don't...' Gordette's voice was weak. It broke into a gasping cough.

"Save your breath. I'll be there."

"Careful... the ground... gives way..."

Doug scanned the ground before him in the light of his helmet lamp. It looked solid enough, gla.s.sy and slick, but solid rock. Yet he knew this volcanic vent might be no st.u.r.dier than a soap bubble.

More coughing from Gordette. He must be almost out of air, Doug realized. Got to get to him quickly.

The smooth rock floor ended abruptly, like a shattered pane of gla.s.s. Black nothingness yawned in front of Doug.

And clinging to the edge of the break like a s.h.i.+p-wrecked sailor desperately clutching a piece of flotsam, was the s.p.a.ce-suited figure of Leroy Gordette.

He had one forearm hooked on the crumbling edge of the precipice, and the gloved fingers of his other hand. Doug could see the top of his helmet.

"Hold on," he said, and immediately felt foolish. What else was Bam trying to do?

"Don't!" the black man warned. "f.u.c.kin' rock breaks. It's as thin as tissue paper. Brittle, too."

Doug lowered himself to his knees, then got down on his belly and wormed his way toward Gordette.

"Got no purchase for my feet," Bam said, panting. "Every time... I try to haul my a.s.s up... f.u.c.kin' rock crumbles more."

"How deep is the hole?" Doug asked. "Can you see the bottom?"

Gordette coughed. "Must go... all the way down... to Chicago. No bottom..."

Inching closer to the man, Doug felt the brittle rock beneath him crack, like thin ice.

He stretched out his arm as far as he could. "Can you grab my hand?"

"I'm runnin' out of air," Gordette said, gasping. "Forget it. Get outta here."

"Grab my hand!" Doug insisted.

"Can't."