Dark Benediction

It was August on Luna too. The Perseids rained down with merciless impartiality; and, from his perch atop the hundred-foot steel skeleton, the lineman stopped cranking the jack and leaned out against his safety belt to watch two demolition men carrying a corpse out toward Fissure Seven. The corpse wore a deflated pressure suit. Torn fabric dragged the ground. The man in the rear carried the corpse’s feet like a pair of wheelbarrow handles, and he continually tripped over the loose fabric; his head waggled inside his helmet as if he cursed softly and continuously to himself. The corpse’s helmet was translucent with an interior coating of pink ice, making it look like a comic figure in a strawberry ice cream ad, a chocolate ragamuffin with a scoop for a head.

The lineman stared after the funeral party for a time until the team-pusher, who had been watching the slack span of 800 MGM aluminum conductors that snaked half a mile back toward the preceding tower, glanced up at the hesitant worker and began bellowing into his micro-phone. The lineman answered briefly, inspected the pressure gauge of his suit, and began cranking the jack again. With every dozen turns of the crank, the long snaking cable crept tighter across the lunar plain, straightening and lifting almost imperceptibly until at last the center-point cleared the ground and the cable swooped in a long graceful catenary between the towers. It trembled with fitful glistenings in the harsh sunglare. The lineman ignored the cable as he turned the crank. He squinted across the plains at the meteor display.

The display was not spectacular. It could be detected only as a slight turbulence in the layer of lunar dust that covered the ground, and an occasional dust geyser where a pea sized bit of sky debris exploded into the crust at thirty miles per second. Sometimes the explosion was bright and lingering, but more often there was only a momentary incandescence quickly obscured by dust. The lineman watched it with nervous eyes. There was small chance of being hit by a stone of consequential size, but the eternal pelting by meteoric dust, though too fine to effect a puncture, could weaken the fabric of a suit and lead to leaks and blowouts.

The team-pusher keyed his mic switch again and called to the lineman on the tower. “Keep your eyes on that damn jack, Relke! That clamp looks like she’s slipping from here.”

The lineman paused to inspect the mechanism. “Looks OK to me,” he answered. “How tight do I drag this one up?”

The pusher glanced at the sagging span of steel-reinforced aluminum cable. “It’s a short stretch. Not too critical. What’s the tension now?”

The lineman consulted a dial on the jack. “Going on forty-two hundred pounds, Joe.”

“Crank her up to five thousand and leave it,” said the pusher. “Let C-shift sag it in by the tables if they don’t like it.”

“Yokay. Isn’t it quitting time?”

“Damn near. My suit stinks like we’re on overtime. Come on down when you reel that one in. I’m going back to the sleep wagon and get blown clear.” The pusher shut off his oxygen while he transferred his hose connections from the main feeder supply to the walk-around bottles on his suit. He signaled “quitting time” at the men on the far tower, then started moon-loping his way across the shaggy terrain toward the train of rolling barracks and machinery that moved with the construction crew as the 200 kilovolt transmission line inched its way across the lunar landscape.

The lineman glanced up absently at the star-stung emptiness of space. Motion caught his eye. He watched with a puzzled frown, then hitched himself around to call after the departing team-pusher.

“Hey, Joe!”

The pusher stopped on a low rise to look back.

“Relke?” he asked, uncertain of the source of the voice. “Yeah. Is that a ship up there?” The lineman pointed upward toward the east.

“I don’t see it. Where?”

“Between Arcturus and Serpens. I thought I saw it move.”

The pusher stood on the low tongue of lava and watched the heavens for a time. “Maybe—maybe not. So what if it is, Relke?”

“Well…” The lineman paused, keying his mic nervously. “Looks to me like it’s headed the wrong direction for Crater City. I mean—”