Lunar Descent Page 2

  The last was utter hypocrisy because there were two secrets in Eugene Kastner’s life, and one of them was that when he completed his meticulous inspection of the contents of the cargo bays of outbound shuttles—usually at 3 A.M., if there were no severe holdups in the launch cycle—he would retire to his office, close the door, and steal a half-hour of sleep in his desk chair. You could tell it was coming when he yawned. Fast Eddie had to smile as he watched the Dork slowly walk away from the Sally Ride and head for the door to Bay Four. Just before he reached the door, Eugene stopped in his tracks and yawned. He then glanced at his watch before opening the door. Lord, Eddie thought as he headed down the stairs, I love a man who keeps to a tight schedule. Shows strength of character.

  But there was another, darker secret which Eugene kept: He had been bribed a long time ago to ignore certain outbound payload canisters. As unbelievable as it seemed, this prosaic Baptist Republican no-nonsense family man was on the take from someone. The trick to finding out which Spam-can, Fast Eddie mused as he jogged down the stairs, is to watch the Dork carefully when he makes his inspections.

  Eddie made it to the floor just as the Dork was heading for the mobile ladder leading up into the Puttkamer’s payload bay. “Morning, Gene,” he called out over the barrage of noise, pulling the ear protectors down around his neck. “Ready for your look-see?”

  The Dork turned and cast a disdainful look at the approaching bay foreman. It was Eddie Delany’s job to accompany the cargo supervisor during the inspection. Eugene knew that, but it didn’t mean he had to like it, or like Eddie either for that matter. The Dork just nodded, then glanced down at his datapad. “You had trouble earlier getting the pallet into the cargo container,” he said, peering over his horn-rimmed glasses at Eddie.

  “Uh-huh.” Eddie pointed up at the shuttle; the bridge crane had lowered the pallet the rest of the way into the payload bay and the two cargo grunts were disengaging the cables. “A couple of bolt holes were misaligned in the forward section by about a quarter of an inch either way.…”

  “About a quarter of an inch?” The Dork couldn’t tolerate generalizations. He preferred people to speak to him in metric terms—this was a person who, if asked on the street by a driver for directions to the nearest charge station, would tell the man how far it was in kilometers—but he had come to reluctantly accept the fact that he was working with other Americans.

  “Three-point-four tenths of an inch,” Eddie automatically replied. “Anyway, we got NASA to give us a waiver to drill new holes, so it isn’t a problem anymore.”

  The Dork nodded his head, moved his lightpen across the pad and double-checked to see if a NASA waiver had indeed been issued, and nodded again. “Okay. Send me a memo on this so we can bill the supplier for the work.” Then he turned and began walking up the ladder.

  Eddie was about to follow him up when he heard a sharp whistle. He glanced over his shoulder and spotted Lynn Stoppard standing in the doorway to Bay Three. The other foreman quickly shook his head, then ducked back out of sight. Eddie got the message; Eugene had thoroughly inspected the payload canisters in the Sally Ride. If there was contraband in any of the Skycorp shuttles, it had to be in the Puttkamer.

  The Dork was in the bucket of the cherry picker by the time Fast Eddie made it up the ladder. As Eddie watched, Eugene checked the serial number stenciled on the outside of the first of the two cargo canisters strapped to the pallet—nicknamed Spam-cans because of their general shape—against the list on his datapad, then reached down and unlocked the hatch. He pulled a tiny flashlight out of the penholder in his shirt pocket, bent over the railing and shined the beam across lashed-down plastic crates containing ball bearings, spare computer breadboards, toilet paper, glove linings, and whatnot destined for Olympus Station, the powersat construction base in geosynchronous orbit. He glanced up at Eddie, then pulled a jackknife out of his pocket, selected a box at random and sliced open the plastic sealing tape. His flashlight roved briefly over stacks of folded paper underwear. The Dork looked at his datapad again—no unauthorized jockstraps were going to make it into orbit if he could help it-then he clicked off the penlight and stood up. “Reseal that box and have the hatch locked down,” he commanded Eddie as he moved to the second Spam-can.

  Eddie watched the Dork carefully now. Ah, yes, it was happening just as it had the last time, six weeks earlier. Eugene looked at the serial number on the Spam-can, checked it against his list … then furtively glanced at the serial number again, slowly reading its designation as if to refresh his memory. He opened the hatch and looked inside—more crates, apparently containing more of the same stuff as in the first canister—but this time the flashlight and the knife didn’t make an appearance. The Dork wasn’t quite so meticulous in inspecting this particular Spam-can. Instead, he shut the hatch, and even made the uncharacteristic effort to lock down the latches himself this time.

  Eugene stood up, briefly moved the lightpen across his datapad, made a grunt which was lost in the din of the hangar bay, and turned to move past Eddie. “It’s okay,” he said briefly—was there a vaguely guilty expression on his face?—then went tromping down the ladder again.

  Eddie carefully restrained the smile he felt creeping across his face. Bingo! He looked down at the Spam-can the Dork had just “inspected,” and committed its serial number to memory; S31CO18 … S31CO18 … S31CO18 … That’s the ticket. Then he followed Eugene off the cherry picker.

  “Make sure you get that memo to me,” the Dork said to Eddie at the bottom of the ladder, tapping the edge of his data-pad against Eddie’s chest. Fast Eddie nodded his head, just the way the Dork himself usually nodded, and Eugene made a brief display of looking at his watch. “I’ll be in my office doing some paperwork,” he added. “Call me on the phone if you need me for anything.” Then off he went, waddling out of the open hangar door to the prefab office complex next to the SPC, undoubtedly to consume some double-fudge cookies and to catch a few winks on company time. Yeah, Eddie thought as he watched the Dork walk away into the humid night. Sure thing, Gene …

  Once the supervisor had disappeared, Fast Eddie walked outside and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his vest pocket. Rubbing the end of one against the bottom of the pack, he lit up, took a deep drag, and leaned back against the hangar door. Several hundred yards away, the mammoth white cube of the Vehicle Assembly Building gleamed under spotlights; a couple of miles distant from the VAB, a mobile launch platform was slowly carrying a Grumman HLV-121 Big Dummy to its launch pad in the distance. Closer by, a couple of pad rats lounged next to the big diesel tow-tractor and ground-support trucks, waiting for their cue from the Bay Four crew to haul the Jesco von Puttkamer over to the VAB for mating with its reusable flyback booster. By the end of next week, good old Jesse would be in orbit, making another milk run to low orbit.

  Fast Eddie smoked and listened to the nightbirds in the surrounding wetlands. He loved this time of the morning, the serene cool hours before first light and the beginning of another scorching, runamok day at the Cape. God, he thought, please let me stay on the graveyard shift till they retire me, because this way I don’t have to deal with too many anal retentives like the Dork.

  And speaking of His Royal Dorkiness … Eddie checked his watch and saw that fifteen minutes had gone by since Gene had left the OPC. He’s asleep by now, Eddie decided as he crushed his cigarette out beneath his shoe and walked back into the hangar. Even if he’d left his computer terminal on, he wouldn’t notice the little bitty change about to be made to the Puttkamer’s cargo manifest.

  His own office was a small, messy cubicle located in the rear of the hangar bay. On top of the stand-up desk was an oil-stained Digital terminal with a plastic drinking bird taped to the top of the monitor. Fast Eddie tossed aside the dogeared copy of Penthouse someone had left open on the keyboard and punched up the records for the Puttkamer. It took just a few seconds for him to locate the Humpback’s cargo manifest, and there it was: cargo canister S31CO18, allegedly
containing MISC. CONSMB., its destination listed as OLY. VIA OTV/PS. Beside it, in bright gold letters, was an appendix: OK/EK/5-17-24 0310.

  In plain English, the line of type meant that the Spam-can contained miscellaneous consumables bound for Phoenix Station in low-orbit, where it was destined to be transferred to an orbital transfer vehicle which would carry it to Olympus Station. The gold-lettered appendix was Eugene Kastner’s assurance that the Spam-can had been checked and okayed for flight. He was the only person on the graveyard shift capable of registering that appendix, since it required him to first logon a secret code number which caused the approval to be lettered in gold. Which was just fine with Fast Eddie, because everything else in the manifest could still be altered.

  It took only a few deft keystrokes to change the manifest from OLY. VIA OTV/PS to DES. VIA LTV/PS and to seal the bargain with a quick stab of the ENTER key. And that was it.

  Eddie cracked his knuckles and smiled with satisfaction as he studied his handiwork. Now this particular Spam-can would be taking a longer ride than anticipated by whoever had packed the thing in the first place—probably some guys on the second shift who had been paid off by the beamjacks on Olympus, just as the Dork had been bribed to overlook their little smuggling scam. The data was now in all the NASA and Skycorp databanks, and Eddie knew that Eugene wouldn’t look at the manifest again; for all of his fussiness, the Dork was too busy with juggling different cargo schedules to waste time on double-checking yesterday’s lists. Once he had okayed a Spam-can for flight, the case was closed.

  Sure, word would soon get back to Eugene from Skycan that its illicit cargo hadn’t arrived, but what was the Dork going to do about it? Calling NASA’s Space Operations Enforcement Division would only serve to incriminate himself, and wouldn’t the boys and girls in his Sunday-school class be shocked if Mr. Kastner got busted? Besides, once the Puttkamer was launched, all Fast Eddie had to do was to go back into the system and change the manifest back to the way it had been written originally, thereby confusing poor Eugene and his pals even more thoroughly. NASA and Skycorp wouldn’t know the difference.

  Eddie escape-keyed back to the main menu, spent fifteen minutes checking over the rest of the Puttkamer’s status lists, then picked up the phone and tapped the two digits that connected him with the pad rats waiting outside. “Marty?” he said into the receiver. “It’s Eddie … yup, we’re ready for rollout. Bring in the mules any time you’re ready.”

  He hung up and walked out into the bay. Beyond the nose of the Humpback, he could hear the deep-throated growl of the tow-tractor’s engines as it began backing into the door of the hangar. His team was scuttling out from underneath the fuselage, where they had been making last-minute checks. One man stood by each of the landing-gear wheel chocks, ready to pull them out once the tractor’s yoke had been attached to the shuttle, as the rear work-platform slowly began to swing away from the back of the Humpback. The Dork was still catching zee’s in his office. Fast Eddie searched in his pocket for another stick of gum and smiled again.

  It was another morning in the life of a Vacuum Sucker.

  The Purge (Interview.1)

  Ron Gora; former Descartes Station chief dietician:

  The purge? Don’t talk to me about no purge, man. I don’t wanna talk about no purge. You wanna talk to me about pizza, we’ll talk about pizza. We got cheese pizza, pepperoni pizza, sausage pizza, anchovy pizza, vanilla fudge pizza, any kind of pizza you want, but don’t ask me about no purge ’cause I don’t remember shit about …

  What’re you doing this for? A novel? Like you mean a book? Okay, okay, maybe I can remember a little bit, but only if you get my name in the book, right? That’s Ron Gora, G-O-R-A, as in Ron’s Genuine Italian Pizzeria. That’s at 922 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., right down the street from the White House, and we deliver to your doorstep except on Sundays and holidays, just look it up in the phone book under P as in “Pizza,” R as in “Ron’s.” Okay, now you can ask me about the purge. Turn that muthafuckin’ thing on.…

  See, every six months up there, like, we’d have some executive-type persons from the company come visit us. Now, most of the time we’d get plenty of warning that they were on the way, so we could get our shit together on the base for them. Y’know, clean up the dorms and the rec room, take the girlie pictures down off the walls, get rid of the still, hide the … well, y’know what I mean … and put away the cutoffs and T-shirts and pull out the regulation coveralls, take baths and maybe shave, shit like that. Make the place look good so they wouldn’t get upset.

  ’Course, we hardly ever saw ’em once they got there. I mean, they’d get off the lander, walk through the place, take a peek in your cube, and shake your hand (imitates a stuffy Caucasian voice) … “Glad to meet you, Mr. Gora, good work you’re performing here, well done” … (normal voice) yeah yeah yeah, and then they’d head for the Hilton and we wouldn’t see ’em again till they left. (shrugs) I mean, shit, they’d spend three days getting to the Moon, and once they were here they’d go hide in the Hilton—that’s what we called the guest-quarters, the VIP dorm, ’cause it looked like a fucking hotel over there—for a couple of days. Yeah, okay, maybe you’d see ’em out on EVA once in a while, looking at the mine sites or the mass-driver. You knew it was them because those were the guys in the red-striped helmets who walked funny and fell down a lot and shit … y’know, fuck, why did they bother? They coulda stayed in goddamn Huntsville. But they were harmless, basically, so most of the time it was just a pain in the ass when they showed up.

  But anyway, one day some of the guys came in on a lander. Like, just came in, boom, no warning at all. Three guys, one of ’em NASA, the other two company hotshots we never seen before. And ’cause we didn’t get no warning, we didn’t get a chance to clean up the place, okay? And it’s right after the end of second-shift when they appear, so nobody except third-shift’s working and the whole place is fucked up. I mean, they started walking through the station, and there’s three-card monte going on in the rec room, some guys’re getting drunk in the mess hall, and there’s reefer-smoking in the greenhouse … maybe I shouldn’t tell you about that … and when they get to the Hilton they find somebody screwing a girl in one of their rooms. (laughs) I mean, seriously, it’s just the usual good-time-after-work for us, but they weren’t supposed to know about any of this, right?

  Right. So they hole up in the Hilton and we think the worst is over. We’re thinking, y’know, they’ll warn us to chill our action, dock our bonuses for the month, some shit like that, okay? But the next morning, Bo—Bo Fisk, the general manager, right?—he gets summoned over to the hotel to see ’em. They wouldn’t go to MainOps, uh-uh. They carpeted him on their own turf. He’s in there two, three hours, right? When he comes out he’s white … (snickers) well, he was always white, but when we see him coming back through the dorm from the Hilton he’s pale, okay? But he doesn’t say anything. Won’t tell us what’s going on.

  So the company guys and the NASA stiff are with us two more days, but they’re crawling all over the base like cockroaches. I mean, some guy would be in the ready-room, suiting up for the next shift, and he’d look around and there’s one of them watching him, writing stuff down in their little notebooks. And they spent half a day in MainOps, looking at everything in the computers. Went through my stockroom, my kitchen … man, pisses me off when someone I don’t know goes through my kitchen … but nothing I could do about it, right? And all the while, they never said anything to anyone, so you didn’t know if you were doing right or wrong. Not a word. Even the lander crew couldn’t tell us anything, or wouldn’t, at any rate. All one of ’em said to me was, “You better get your résumé in order, buddy.”

  Three days after they showed, there’s a few of us talking it over in the rec room just before second-shift, when we knew they were by themselves in the Hilton. One guy says, “Man, it’s a purge, I can feel it. We’re all going to lose our jobs.” Nobody really believed him, y’know. Not i
n the realm of possibility. But later that day, during third-shift, they take off. I mean, bang, just as sudden as they were in, they were out. The next thing we knew, they were on their way up to orbit where their AMOV’s parked.

  But by then, we knew what was happening, ’cause right after they launched, Bo hit the locker room, where the mailboxes were located, and stuck little envelopes in everyone’s boxes. When we heard what was going on, everybody rushed in there and dug out their envelopes. If you got a white slip in your envelope, it meant your contract had been renewed, but your bonuses were suspended effective immediately. And if you got a pink slip, you didn’t have to read the rest. It meant your contract was terminated and your last quarterly bonus had been annulled, and in fourteen days you were expected to climb into a zombie tank for a ride on the next LTV home. You were tuna.

  Fifty-six guys got pink slips … half the crew, axed all at once. That included me, most of the science team, two-thirds of the miners. Even Bo himself got the bullet. Fucking goddamn moondog massacre. And Asswipe—that’s ASWI, the union—wouldn’t do a damn thing about it, but that was just like our worthless dickhead union for you, right? I still couldn’t fucking believe it.

  And that was the purge … huh? (shrugs) What do I think now? Fuck ’em with a Coke bottle, that’s what I think. Hey, I can’t complain in the long run, right? I still made it out of there with eleven months pay. Better than what I brought home from the Navy. I was ready to come home, man. Living on the Moon sucks, I gotta tell you. I was ready to get out of there, anyway. Three years later, and now look at me. (laughs and slaps the counter with his fist) I’m a successful businessman. Eleven months pay in the bank and I get to come home and start my own business, and it beats making brown rice for a buncha … y’know, fuck that shit. I ain’t never going back to the Moon, man. Fuck that place.…