Lifeline

Two weeks ago, they had been up sealing the framework of the second industrial colony, floating by themselves, watching blueprints turn into reality. And then they had all been ordered to return to Clavius Base, to cool their heels while Orbitechnologies Corporation and its consortium of European investors worked out the details to shuttle the crew home. With world tensions heating up, the main contractors thought it best to back away, to hold their breath and wait a few weeks. Clancy hated to see the big project brought to a standstill. He had kept everything close to schedule up until then. What did Earth politics have to do with the peace and silence of L-4?

He’d had a very narrow view of things before the War. Now Orbitech 2 was going to be on hold for a lot longer than a few weeks.

Clancy sniffed inside his helmet. Dirty socks. Why does this suit always smell like dirty socks? No matter how much he cleaned, rubbed, and soaked the tape-wrapped phenolic, he couldn’t get rid of the smell. It had never bothered him out in the “open air” at L-4, working and living in the suit eighteen hours every day of the week. A person could get used to nearly anything after that much time. But once he’d been stranded at Clavius Base with the rest of the engineers, he began to notice it.

At first he ignored the smell, trying to convince himself that it wasn’t there, that he’d get used to it if he wore his suit more often. But it didn’t work. Probably psychosomatic. And if he didn’t watch out, somebody would send him to a shrink. Psychiatrists! He didn’t trust scientists who couldn’t give hard answers.

The gravel path swung hard to the right, bringing them out of the curtain of shadow and into sunlight. His visor darkened instantly, reflecting half of the unpolarized light away from his eyes. Suddenly, the shadows all around them looked like a bottomless black maw. He could read the fluorescent letters of the crew members’ names across their chests.

“Homann and Wooster, come with me. The rest of you take the other six-pack and follow. Shen, you drive today.”

“Right, boss man,” she answered.

“There you go, Cliff, making points with the ladies again.” Homann’s Arabic accent was barely noticeable.

Shen snapped back, “Open your faceplate, Petey, and I’ll give you a big fat kiss!”

The others snickered, and Clancy felt another thread of relief. Banter. He liked that they could tease each other.

All of them knew they might never get off the lunar surface. Clavius Base could just about support itself with its five hundred permanent members; but with the extra two hundred engineers who had been unexpectedly recalled from Orbitech 2, the Moon base was in just as bad a situation as any of the Lagrange colonies.

One by one, they swung up into the lunar rovers, stepping onto the overinflated wheels. Clancy scooted into the driver’s compartment in front of the passenger seats, three in front, three in back. Behind the passenger area a wide cargo platform made the vehicles look like old flatbed trucks created with giant Tinker toys.

Homann and Wooster strapped into the seats behind Clancy. After the other three had climbed aboard the second six-pack, Clancy gave them a thumbs-up. “Ready to roll?”

Shen’s voice came over the comm-link. “Lead on, MacDuff.”

He reached down and pressed the starter. The rover shook, and Clancy let up on the regulator, easing the six-pack into motion. Like a child’s overgrown play vehicle, it lurched around the boulders and sinks on the crater floor, heading out.

After they had left the low markings of Clavius Base behind and begun to work their way across the lunar surface, Clancy switched on the Doppler guidance system. He entered the coordinates for the crash site, then trusted the rover’s computer-driven radar to take them there.

Across the great flat sea of the crater glinted the six-mile track of the railgun—the mass launcher that hurled lunar material to the collecting stations at L-2. Under normal circumstances, the rock would be routed off to its rendezvous at L-4 for smelter processing into construction material for Orbitech 2. During peak periods, the mass launcher operated continuously, throwing five buckets of rock per second away from the surface, accelerating the material above the Moon’s escape velocity so that it would drift precisely toward the catchers in space.

Now, though, the mass driver looked empty and alone, an archaeological relic glinting against the deep-black sky. The single mass launcher had provided the material for all the colonies—Orbitech 1, the Aguinaldo, the Soviet Kibalchich, and most of Orbitech 2. Now everything had been mothballed. Before long, the delicate laser gyros and velocity regulators of the induction motors would lose their calibration, making the mass launcher useless.