Lifeline

Clancy felt warm in his suit, but all the gauges read normal. He wanted to find the package and start the journey back. After two days moving out in the rovers, he was getting a little tired of the tedium. The smell of dirty socks seemed to grow stronger. It had never felt like this up at Orbitech 2. There they at least had modular living quarters, so they could take off the suits after a long day’s work. He was tired of sucking on the suit nutrients, of using the piddlepack. He desperately wanted a shower.

Below him, the team of six-packs spread out and moved along the popcorn-powdery floor of the crater. Their big wheels rolled along, grinding the surface to dust in silence.

The second lunar rover lay fifty yards away on the crater floor. The rest of the crew was hidden by jutting rocks. He activated his chin mike and hoped the others were within line-of-sight transmission.

“Any luck?”

“The beeper’s pretty much useless now, Cliff. Just a ping or two. It’s more confusion than help.” Shen’s voice sounded loud in his helmet.

“Find anything, Homann?” He could see the silver of the other man’s suit as he bounded ahead.

“You’d hear the hollering if I did.”

“Get to a higher spot so you can see better—but be careful.” The skipping track of the package’s landing had been obvious from a distance, but on the jumbled crater floor it was indistinguishable. Clancy worked his shoulders back and forth to reach an itch on his back. Comfortable again, he looked up at the crater walls towering over him. They jutted into the star-filled sky, hiding their fissures and jagged edges.

“Looks like it skidded into the crater wall and bounced back,” Homann said. “Five hundred pounds of packaged seaweed. Blooey! So much for ‘Fragile—handle with care.’ Ever see any of those classic Roadrunner cartoons? I wonder if it’s Acme wall-kelp.”

“Okay, okay, just direct us to the terminus of the skid path. Come on, Pete, I’m getting tired of being out here.” Clancy tried to keep the impatience out of his voice. There’s got to be an easier way to find this stuff, he thought. He’d calculated enough scattering cones at MIT to be able to guess where the package would land.

“I’ll give you a nice long back rub when we get back, boss,” Shen said.

“Ooooh!” Homann broke in. “You could give me one!”

“Quit clowning, you guys.”

Homann directed them across the crater floor. Even from the inconvenient vantage point, now Clancy could see the skid tracks from the impact. “X marks the spot!” Homann radioed.

“Shen, listen for beeps.”

After a few more minutes of searching, Clancy brushed fine lunar dust off the pitted surface of the package. Buried under three centimeters of dust, the desk-sized container was bashed on one end from its collision with the rock, but the outer wall seemed to be unbreached. The kelp was intact.

He radioed, “Merry Christmas, everybody!”

“Easy, easy!” Philip Tomkins hovered over the construction workers like a mother hen. Duncan McLaris stood on his tiptoes away from the crowd, watching. The rest of Clavius Base observed through personal holoscreens. The ConComm link to the Aguinaldo showed the Filipino Council of Twenty, with Dr. Sandovaal in the foreground.

Clancy pried at the container until the seal suddenly burst open. “Ooof.” He went sprawling backwards.

Shen caught him and propped him back up, patting his shoulder. “I told you you’d be throwing yourself at me after a year, boss.”

Clancy ignored her and motioned to Dr. Tomkins. “All yours, sir.”

Tomkins straightened and peered into the hololink with the Aguinaldo. “I sincerely thank our Filipino friends for this gift of food, this opportunity. If it fulfills only a fraction of your expectations, Dr. Sandovaal, it will indeed save our lives here at Clavius Base.”

With Sandovaal nodding sagely in the background, Tomkins cracked open the main chamber of the container. “It appears to be intact!” Tomkins turned to the holotank. He grinned, and his big body seemed to be filled with a greater excitement than Clancy had ever seen him display.

Sandovaal’s voice came across the three hundred thousand kilometers from the Aguinaldo. “When your lunar tunnels are filled with wall-kelp, just remember me.” He moved out of sight of the holotransmitters, the bare hint of a smile on his face.

Clavius Base got its first look at the wall-kelp. Clancy sniffed the air, frowning, and looked into the wet, green receptacle of wall-kelp.

Perhaps this substance was going to save them, but for now, it smelled even worse than the dirty socks in his space suit.

Chapter 22

From L-4 to L-5—Days 18–27

Encased in the vast solar sail-creature, Ramis watched through the monitors, studying his course. The awesome face of Earth seemed like an oil painting below him, reaching up to swallow him in its oceans.