Dark Benediction

Joe: “It’s bad enough listening to a bunch of jerks in a locker room bragging about the dames they’ve made. But Braxton! Braxton’s got to brag about his dreams. Christ! Send me back to Earth. I’m fed up.”

“Aww, Joe, we got nothin’ else to talk about up heah.”

They drove for nearly an hour and a half without locating the outage. Novotny pulled the runabout off the hot trolleys and coasted to a stop. “I’m deflating the cab,” he told them. “Helmets on, pressure up your suits.”

“Joe, weah not walkin’ back from heah!” Bama said flatly.

“Oh, blow yourself out, Brax!” the pusher said irritably. “I’m getting out for a minute. C’mon, get ready for vacuum.”

“Why?”

“Don’t say why to me outside the sleep-tank, corn pone! Just do it.”

“Damn! Novotny’s in a humah! Les say ‘yessah’ to him, Bama.”

“You too, Lije!”

“Yessah.”

“Can it.” Novotny got the pressure pumped down to two pounds, and then let the rest of the air spew out slowly into vacuum. He climbed out of the runabout and loped over to the low-hanging spans of the communication circuit. He tapped into it with the suit audio and listened for a moment. Relke saw his lips moving as he tried a call, but nothing came through the lineman’s suit radio.

After about five minutes, he quit talking and beckoned the rest of them back to the runabout.

“That was Brodanovitch,” he said after they were inside and the pressure came up again. “So the circuit break must be on up ahead.”

“Oh, hell, we’ll nevah get a look at those ladies!”

“Calm down. We’re going back—” He paused a moment until the elated whooping died down. “Suds says let them send a crew out of Copernicus to fix it. I guess there’s no hurry about moving those people out of there.”

“The less hurry, the bettuh… hot dawg! C’mon, Joe, roll it!” Bama and Lije sat rubbing their hands. Only Relke seemed detached, his enthusiasm apparently cooled. He sat staring out at the meteor display on the dust-flats. He kept rubbing absently at the ring finger of his left hand. There was no ring there, nor even a mark on the skin. The pusher’s eye fell on the slow nervous movement.

“Fran again?” Joe grunted.

The lineman nodded.

“I got my Dear John note three years ago, Relke.”

Relke looked around at him in surprise. “I didn’t know you were married, Joe.”

“I guess I wasn’t as married as I thought I was.”

Relke stared outside again for awhile. “How do you get over it?”

“You don’t. Not up here on Luna. The necessary and sometimes sufficient condition for getting over a dame is the availability of other dames. So, you don’t.”

“Hell, Joe!”

“Yeah.”

“The movement’s not such a bad idea.”

“Can it!” the pusher snapped.

“It’s true. Let women come to Crater City, or send us home. It makes sense.”

“You’re only looking at the free love and nickel beer end of it, Relke. You can’t raise kids in low gravity. There are five graves back in Crater City to prove it. Kids’ graves. Six feet long. They grow themselves to death.”

“I know but…” He shrugged uncomfortably and watched the meteor display again.

“When do we draw?” said Lije. “Come on Joe, less draw for who goes to talk ouah way onto the ship.”

Relke: “Say, Joe, how come they let dames in an entertainment troupe come to the moon, but they won’t let our wives come? I thought the Schneider-Volkov Act was supposed to keep all women out of space, period.”

“No, they couldn’t get away with putting it like that. Against the WP constitution. The law just says that all personnel on any member country’s lunar project must be of a single sex. Theoretically some country—Russia, maybe—could start an all-girl lunar mine project, say. Theoretically. But how many lady muckers do you know? Even in Russia.”

Lije: “When do we draw? Come on, Joe, less draw.”

“Go ahead and draw. Deal me out.”

Chance favored Henderson. “Fastuh, Joe. Hell, less go fastuh, befo’ the whole camp move over theah.”

Novotny upped the current to the redline and left it there. The long spans of transmission line, some of them a mile or more from tower to tower, swooped past in stately cadence.

“There she is! Man!”

“You guys are building up for a big kick in the rump. They’ll never let us aboard.”

“Theah’s two more cabs pahked over theah.”

“Yeah, and still nobody in sight on the ground.”

Novotny pulled the feelers off the trolleys again. “OK, Lije, go play John Alden. Tell ‘em we just want to look, not touch.”

Henderson was bounding off across the flats moments after the cabin had been depressurized to let him climb out. They watched him enviously while the pressure came up again. His face flashed with sweat in the sunlight as he looked back to wave at them from the foot of the ladder.

Relke glanced down the road toward the rolling construction camp. “You going to call in, Joe? Ought to be able to reach their antenna from here.”

“If I do, Brodanovitch is sure to say ‘haul ass on back to camp.’”

“Never mind, then! Forget I said it!”

The pusher chuckled. “Getting interested, Relke?”

“I don’t know. I guess I am.” He looked quickly toward the towering rocket.