Lunar Descent Read online

  You like that picture? Yeah, I’m in that … uh-huh, that’s me, the colored guy in the middle. Yeah, that’s in the rec room, and that’s Quack, that’s Mighty Joe, that’s Butch, that’s …

  Hey, look, it’s been nice talking to you, but I got some customers waiting for slices here. Interview’s over, okay? You wanna buy a pizza? Special for writers today, ten percent discount on pizzas with two toppings or more. I’m serious. And remember that name. That’s Ron Gora, G-O-R-A, as in Ron’s Genuine Italian Pizzeria. We deliver. Remember that. Ciao, dude …

  2. Camping, Cold Beer, Ice, Good Food

  Bears had raided the garbage cans again last night. Lester didn’t need to find their tracks to know it had been bears. Raccoons or skunks might have tipped over the cans and strewn plastic wrappers, bottles, and paper cups all over the ground, but they couldn’t have moved the broken cinder blocks he had placed on top of the lids. Only bears could do that; the long winter was finally over, and they were emerging from their dens hidden along the Presidential Range, lurching down from the mountains to the campgrounds in Crawford Notch like furry muggers looking for tourists to accost. Soon, once they had reacquired a taste for half-eaten hot dogs and unwanted Wing-Dings, they wouldn’t be settling for furtive midnight forages. Lester figured that by Independence Day weekend, at least, he would be chasing one of the big bastards out of somebody’s tent.

  He righted the cans, then squatted down on his haunches and began to gather up the crap, dumping fistfuls of ripped, mildewed foodwrap into the cans. He was almost through with the cleanup when he heard a child giggle. Looking around, Lester saw a little boy standing next to the outhouse: about five years old, blond hair, wearing hiking shorts and a Bugs Bunny T-shirt. The index finger of his grubby right hand was exploring a nostril.

  “Messy,” the kid commented.

  “Yep,” Lester agreed. “It’s a mess, all right.”

  The boy was with the family in Site Three, the people from New York City who had checked in two days ago. They had spent some time yesterday in the camp store, waiting out a midday rain shower; Dad had bragged that he was an investment broker from some Wall Street securities firm, trying to impress Lester with his suave urbanity, while Mom bought a load of cheap Visit New Hampshire crap: coffee mugs, a bird feeder, a couple of quarts of Ye Olde Fashioned Homemade Maple Syrup, which was actually Aunt Jemima repoured into rustic-looking porcelain jugs manufactured in Taiwan. Later that afternoon, Lester had caught the kid’s older brother trying to sneak out the door with a couple of candy bars stuck down the front of his jeans. Typical early-summer car campers—Lester would be seeing more by Memorial Day, next weekend—but the youngest was all right. Probably the only decent member of the family.

  The boy stared at the garbage. “Didja do that?”

  “Nope. The bears did. You shouldn’t pick your nose.”

  The kid pulled his finger out of his nose, peered with scientific interest at the booger, and wiped it off on the back of his shorts. “Bears?” he asked timidly.

  “That’s right. Huge black bears.” Lester spread his arms as far as he could reach. “Bigger than this.”

  The boy looked appropriately startled.

  “Tell your folks to make sure they put all their trash up here and not to leave any food around your tents, or”—Lester dropped his voice menacingly—“they might come around to visit you tonight. Those bears are hungry. Real hungry.”

  The kid immediately turned and dashed into the outhouse, slamming the wooden door behind him. Lester grinned as he gathered up the rest of the trash. The boy would probably stay in the outhouse for the rest of the morning, or at least until one of his parents came searching for him.

  He was replacing the cinder blocks on top of the cans when he heard car tires scrunching on the gravel in the front lot. He brushed his hands across the seat of his jeans and walked to the back door of the camp store. He paused in the storeroom to rush his hands under the sink’s faucet—a vague rotten-egg odor from the water reminded him that it was time to get the well chlorinated again—then walked out into the front of the store, drying his hands on a rag.

  The store was empty. Perhaps whoever had just arrived hadn’t seen the self-service sign over the battery charger. Lester walked around the glass-front counter and pushed open the screen door.

  A car was parked in front of the charge station: a ’23 Datsun Millennium, its silver body gleaming in the morning sun, the driver’s door gull-winged open. The charge cable was still on the terminal; nobody was in sight. Lester let the door slam shut behind him as he sauntered out into the gravel lot. The Millennium had Massachusetts plates; an Avis rental sticker on the rear bumper told him that it had been leased at Logan Airport. On the dashboard rested a thin, black-plastic binder; embossed on the cover was the Skycorp corporate logo.

  Lester took one look at the binder and muttered, “Aw, shit.”

  The screen door opened, then slammed shut. Lester looked around; someone had entered the camp store behind him. As he strode back to the store, he heard the beer cooler hum a little louder as it was momentarily opened. Lester irritably pulled open the screen door and walked inside.

  “That’ll cost you a dollar, Arnie,” he said.

  Arnie Moss was leaning against the counter, tilting back the Coors he had filched from the cooler. His eyes darted toward Lester Riddell as he took a long swig; then he lowered the can and smacked his lips with exaggerated gusto. “Been on the road for four hours, Les,” he drawled. “The least you can do is give me a beer.”

  “The least you can do is pay for it,” Lester replied, standing in the doorway. “I’m on a low budget. No giveaways for anyone.”

  Moss belched. “Jesus. What a tightwad.” He shook his head in disgust, but reached into his wallet and pulled out a dollar. He dropped it on the glass counter. “If you’re that hard up, maybe I’ve come at the right time.”

  “Wait another eight years, then come ask me again.”

  “Maybe. Hey, join me for a cold one?” Moss cocked his head toward the cooler. “I hate drinking alone. Hell, it’s your beer.”

  “No thanks.”

  Moss raised an eyebrow. “Too early?”

  “No, they’d just get pissed at me at the next double-A meeting.” Lester walked behind the counter and sat down on the stool next to the cash register. “And who says I’m hard up? I’d be crazy to give away beer for free.”

  Moss shrugged. He finished his beer with another long, open-throated swig, then set the empty can down and wandered away from the counter, looking around the store. Lester could see the place through Moss’s eyes: a single long room, with dark, unpainted pine walls and a low ceiling, floor bare and dusty, narrow shelves stuffed with potato chips, canned Vienna sausage and instant coffee, batteries and paper napkins. A wire rack near the door held used paperbacks Lester had already read, marked down to half-price; an ancient TV set was on a shelf above the counter.

  “Crazy isn’t the word for it,” Moss said, scanning the place. “Christ, what a letdown. All that training and experience, and where has it landed you? Selling toilet paper to tourists. I don’t get it.…”

  His voice trailed off as he spotted the corner of the store where an airtight wood stove had been installed. It was the most comfortable side of the store, the nook that served as Lester’s parlor during the day: a frayed woolen rug, a pair of overstuffed chairs and a second-hand rocker, a wooden wire-spool that served as a table, an antique iron coal scuttle filled with magazines and more paperbacks—and the pictures on the walls.

  Moss sauntered over and peered at the framed photos, then glanced at the map of the Moon tacked to the wall just above the rocker. “Now this is more like it,” he said appreciatively. His gaze roamed to an old picture of Lester, taken with Beth outside the front entrance of the Johnson Space Center. “Where’s Beth these days, anyway?”

  “Back in Minneapolis,” Lester answered stiffly.

  “Uh-huh. Heard from her lately?”<
br />
  “Not since she remarried. Seven years at least.” Lester didn’t like talking about his ex-wife. “Why are you here, Arnie?” he asked, more to change the subject than anything else.

  Moss didn’t reply right away. Instead, he peered closer at another picture, almost rubbing his nose against the glass: a group of spacesuited men standing on the Moon. “Yeah, I remember this one,” he chuckled. “There’s me and you, and Henry Wallace and … aw, gee, I never can remember his name. The mission specialist.” He snapped his fingers a couple of times, trying to conjure the forgotten name. “You know, the ESA geologist. French guy.”

  “Dupree.” Moss was like one of the outlaw bikers who occasionally stopped by the campground, usually on the way to the annual motorcycle races downstate in Loudon: an unwanted, bullying presence you can’t get rid of but can only coldly tolerate until he decides to move on again. “Jacques Dupree.”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Jacques Dupree.” Moss pronounced the first name as Jock, with an irreverent hard J. He studied the picture. “The Descartes highlands. I was just back there recently, too.”

  He looked over his shoulder, as if expecting a response from Lester. Riddell wouldn’t give him the satisfaction; he carefully kept his face neutral. After a moment, Moss turned his eyes back to the picture. “So, Les,” he inquired, “did you get my letter?”

  “Uh-huh.” Lester nodded toward the woodstove. “It got kind of chilly the other night, so I used it to help fire up the stove. Thanks for the kindling.”

  “‘Thanks for the kindling,’” Moss repeated. He laughed and sat down in the rocker. “That’s cute, Les. Mighty cute. I bet you say that to all the people who send you bills, too. Probably the reason why your credit rating is so bad.”

  Lester started to ask the obvious question, then stopped. Skycorp had its resources. If it wanted to get background on someone, little if anything was out of the reach of Arnie’s department. Credit rating, school records, police and FBI files, marriage licenses, tax returns—the usual paper trails everyone leaves behind as their footprints through life. “Go fuck yourself,” he simply replied.

  Moss ignored the insult. “The salary’s seventy-five thousand a year. That’s not including the usual bonuses and semiannual performance risers, once monthly quotas are being met again. Half goes to you on contract-signing; the other half is payable to an escrow account at the bank of your choice. Major medical and life insurance is optional, of course, but I’m sure we can work something out. Annual contract, and that’s negotiable, too. You can buy an awful lot of bug spray for seventy-five grand a year. Maybe pay off a few bills, keep the bank from foreclosure on this place. Are you sure you burned that letter, Les?”

  Lester was sure that he wanted to lob an economy-size can of bug spray at Arnie’s head. He was familiar with Moss’s game: winning through intimidation, the subtle game of getting someone into a defensive position, then allowing that person to vindicate himself or herself by agreeing to whatever position Moss desired. Lester had seen Arnie use that ploy many times when they had worked together; first for NASA, later for Skycorp. It was no wonder that Moss had risen so far, so quickly, up the rungs of Skycorp’s management ladder. He had become Skycorp’s vice-president of lunar operations through an innate talent for being an asshole.

  “If it’s such a great job,” he said, “why don’t you take it yourself? You’ve got Moon experience, too. Descartes could use a nice guy like you as station general manager.”

  Moss snickered. “True … except what the station doesn’t need is a nice-guy like me. What it needs is a s.o.b. like Lester Riddell.”

  Riddell shrugged. “There’s plenty of s.o.b.’s around. Ask one of them, why don’t you?” He paused. “Besides, what’s wrong with Bo Fisk? He was running things up there the last time I checked.”

  The rocker creaked as Arnie leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and cupping his hands together. “Well, that kind of cuts to the heart of the matter, doesn’t it?” he said slowly. “Bo’s not up there anymore because we shitcanned him. Along with half the crew, in fact.”

  “Half the crew? That’s about fifty people.”

  “Fifty-six, to be exact. The biggest housecleaning since …” Moss stopped himself.

  “Since the company fired me,” Lester finished.

  Moss didn’t say anything. Riddell tsked as he reached to the counter for a cheese snack. “That’s great, Arnie. That’s fucking superb. You’re offering me back my old job because the company fired someone without first considering who was going to replace him.” He shook his head as he unpeeled the wrapper. “Now that’s what I call progressive management.”

  “It was a matter of necessity.” Arnie rocked back in his chair and rested his legs on the spool-table. “We had to think in terms of long-range goals. It wasn’t something that was pleasant. We didn’t want to do it, but …”

  “Spare me the horseshit, willya?” Riddell angrily wadded the wrapper and chucked it into the nearest waste can. “You probably went up there and did the job yourself. My guess is that’s why you were at Descartes again recently. And now you’re trying to find a way to cover yourself. ‘Matter of necessity,’ my ass. You fired fifty-six guys because something was broken, and you didn’t think about how to fix it until after you had pink-slipped ’em. Tell me that’s not the truth, Arnie.”

  “That’s not the truth,” Moss said, unconvincingly.

  “Yeah, and you’re a liar.” Lester pushed back his stool and restlessly paced around the counter. “You know what got to me up there? Yeah, you’ve read my file. Extraterrestrial stress syndrome, or whatever the shrinks are calling it now. Two-week nights, water shortages, monotony, plus all the dope I was taking. But stress-out and substance-abuse were the symptoms, not the disease. I also didn’t care for working for dickless wonders like …”

  “Me?” Arnie completed. He shook his head. “Jeez, Les. I thought you knew me better than that.”

  “That right? Well, somebody went to the Moon to fire Bo and those guys. Tell me it wasn’t you.”

  Arnie didn’t say anything. Lester exhaled sharply. He looked down at his curled fists, discovered that he had pulped the cheese snack in his right hand without realizing it. He dropped the mess on the counter; later, he could stick it in the bird feeder by his house-trailer. Waste nothing: one of the few useful things he had learned on the Moon. “Why do you want me back up there, anyway?” he asked. “I wouldn’t think Huntsville would want to send up a detox case. Aren’t they afraid I’m going to start raiding the infirmary for pills again?”

  Moss shook his head. “We checked you out. In fact, I stopped by the VA hospital in Manchester on the way up. No lapses, no busts, no lost weekends.” A canny smile touched his lips. “And the old Les Riddell wouldn’t have turned down a morning beer. One little test on my part.”

  “Thanks for invading my privacy. You’re a real pal. You haven’t answered my question, though.”

  Arnie Moss hesitated, then stood up and sauntered toward the door. “It’s getting a little stuffy in here. Let’s take a walk around your campground and clear the air a bit, shall we?”

  A thunderstorm swept over the mountains late that night, one of the wild, fast-moving boomers that blitz through the White Mountains in the early summer months like an ill-tempered giant throwing a tantrum. The storm awakened Lester; for a while he lay in his narrow bed, listening to the rain as it beat fiercely on the metal roof of his trailer. When the rain quit and he could no longer see the lightning flash though the fly-specked windows of his bedroom, he tried to go back to sleep, but found that his mind wouldn’t quit working. After another restless twenty minutes he gave up; he shoved back the covers, sat up in bed, and reached for the lump of clothes on the floor.

  The house-trailer was parked behind the camp store. Lester had turned out the store lights when he had locked up, but as usual he had left the sign switched on: a white-and-blue Pepsi sign on a post next to the road—LESTER’S CAMPING,
COLD BEER, ICE, GOOD FOOD. The sign stayed on so that stranded motorists could find their way to the pay phone next to the front door, where they could call an all-night Shell station in North Conway for help if their cars broke down.

  Standing out on the center line of Route 302 in the middle of the night, Lester guessed that his sign was the only light visible for at least ten miles. The last of his campground guests had tucked themselves into their tents, and not even the long-haul truckers were on this particular highway at this time of the night. He could hear the soft gurgle of the Saco River behind him; on the other side of the highway, Mt. Bemis loomed as an indistinct hump against the, dark sky. In the long, deep valley of Crawford Notch, the sole light came from a Pepsi sign, and the only thing that moved was himself.

  The rain had brought out the crickets and bullfrogs; they chorused together, staccato chirps competing against sullen grumps, like nature’s own jazz band working out a riff for only him to hear. Lester stuck his hands in his trouser pockets, closed, his eyes, arched his back, and let his head fall back on his neck. God, the air tasted sweet: cold, like an oxygen-nitrogen mix through a hardsuit helmet, yet scented with wet pine and wildflowers. It had taken a long time for late spring to come to northern New Hampshire; the warm months didn’t last long up here, and like, all natives, Lester had learned to relish each moment. He took a long, grateful draw of the night air, then let it out as a steamy plume.