Colony, page 18
“I’ll speak to him tonight at dinner,” he told David.
David nodded and let the guard usher him to his makeshift quarters: a coffin-sized room barely larger than the pod he had ridden in on. The guard promised once again to speak to Grady, then left David alone in his cubbyhole room.
As soon as the door shut behind the guard, David clicked on his communicator. He heard the singsong beeping of the mining complex’s non-vocal computer, and he instructed it to connect him with the main computer at Island One.
It took several tries to get into Pete Grady’s personnel file, but David finally hit on the right sequence of numbers for the key to unlock the computer’s records. Ever since childhood he had thrilled with forbidden pleasure whenever he had mastered the computer’s reluctance to tell him what he wanted to know. It was much better than stealing cookies.
After an hour’s study of the readout that flashed across the viewscreen set into the wall of his bunk, David sent a phone message to Grady. The mine foreman wasn’t in his quarters, so David ordered the computer to leave the message on Grady’s screen:
Mr. Grady,
I hope you’re still not angry at me for sneaking in here the way I did. Honestly, I didn’t think it would mess up your mining work. [“Your” mining work: appeal to his vanity.] It was the only way I could get here. I’ve been watching the mining operations all day, and it’s so fascinating that I think maybe I’d like to become a mining engineer someday myself—if I could make the grade, that is. I realize how tough it must be. I’d really like to see the pit operation up close, if it’s all right with you. But if it’s too risky for you to show me, if it would hurt your work or put you in any danger, I’ll understand. [Challenge his machismo.] Thanks for listening, and no hard feelings.
Which was a patent lie. But all David thought about as he whistled down the cramped corridor toward dinner was the possibility of getting his hands on one of those huge nuclear-powered tractors.
David awoke to a blinking red light on his viewscreen, which meant there was a message for him. Sleepily, he sat up in the narrow bunk and banged his head against the ceiling. He hunched down a bit and touched the message button.
Pete Grady’s intense, tight-lipped face appeared on the screen. “Okay, kid,” he said, “if you want to see what real work is like, you be at the tractor airlock at oh-eight-hundred, exactly. I’m not going to wait one minute for you, so be on time.”
The numbers in the lower corner of the screen showed that Grady had sent the message a few minutes after midnight. Touching the TIME button under the screen, David saw it was 0645. Plenty of time to have a good breakfast and get to the airlock to meet the mine foreman.
He reached the airlock ten minutes early, after a full breakfast of juice, eggs, sausages, waffles, muffins, jam, and coffee. His security guard, a different man from the day before, had watched sourly as David ate.
“Don’t they feed you guys back at Island One?”
“Sure,” David said between gulps. “But you people eat a lot better than we do.” And this might be my last meal for a while, he added silently. Maybe my last meal, period.
The airlock was set into the curving wall of a dome that poked up above the lunar surface. Most of the dome’s worn, scarred cement floor was filled by rows of the huge, massive tractors. Their heavy caterpillar tread cleats had gouged deep tracks into the floor. Dinosaur footprints, David thought, remembering the paleontology tapes he had studied.
The airlock itself looked like the heavy chrome-steel door to a giant bank vault. Twenty men could have walked through it arm in arm and still have room for a half-dozen more rows of twenty, one on top of the other.
“You’d better get suited up,” Grady said by way of greeting. He seemed almost disappointed that David had shown up.
He pointed to a row of lockers off to one side of the airlock. David saw that there were empty pressure suits of various bright colors hanging on racks in front of each locker, with their bubble helmets suspended on hooks just above them. The suits had names stenciled on their chests.
“Not those!” Grady snapped. “Can’t you see they belong to people? The white ones, down at the end.”
Is he always angry? David wondered. Or is it just me?
He went quickly down to the end of the row and stepped into the open back of a white suit. The security guard helped to seal the seams as David pulled the helmet down and attached it to the metal neck yoke.
“I’ll wait for you here,” the guard said as David clumped back toward the airlock.
Grady was in a garish green suit, perched up in the cab of the yellow tractor nearest the airlock hatch. David climbed up the metal rungs to the cab clumsily in his heavy boots and sat next to the foreman. He waved a farewell to the guard, who seemed too embarrassed to wave back.
“Took you long enough,” Grady muttered. “Get into this life-support pack.” He jabbed a gloved finger toward the white metal backpack resting between their seats.
“Isn’t the cabin pressurized?” David asked as he struggled to get his arms through the pack’s harness.
“Hell, no,” Grady answered. “You think we spend all day sitting up here like chauffeurs? We gotta get out of the cab and get our gloves dirty—ten, twenty times a day. Can’t spend all day depressurizing the damned cab every time we gotta get out.”
“I see.” David had been counting on it. “But these tanks behind the seats here, they’re a spare supply of air, aren’t they?”
“Yeah, yeah. Now, get your visor down and let’s get moving.”
David said, “I can’t seem to connect the hoses.”
With an exasperated grunt, Grady grabbed the air lines from David’s backpack and plugged them into the fittings in his suit’s collar. “There. Want me to wipe your nose for I you, too?”
“Thanks,” David said, ignoring the sarcasm. He checked the gauges on his suit’s wrist and slid his visor down and sealed it shut. “I’m all set.”
Grady did the same and started up the tractor’s heavy electric motors. They were nuclear-powered, rather than battery-fed. Each tractor had its own miniature isotope power system buried deep in its guts behind heavy lead shielding.
Grady started working the tractor’s steering levers. David watched him carefully as the foreman snapped commands into the radio microphone inside his helmet. The airlock’s inner hatch swung ponderously open and the tractor lurched forward into the dark, gaping hole beyond the hatch. The airlock was a huge metal womb. Once the inner hatch shut and the pumps started evacuating the chamber, there was no light except the dim red glow from the tractor’s control panel.
David looked at Grady’s face, glowering in the sullen red light. What if you kill him? he asked himself. And answered, He won't die. At the most, he’ll be unconscious for a few moments and embarrassed afterward. It'll serve him right.
The airlock chamber was emptied of air at last, and the outer hatch started to swing open. David glanced at the dials on the tractor’s control panel. The digital clock showed exactly 0800. Then he looked up at the airless surface of the Moon.
Utter desolation. As far as the eye could see, nothing but emptiness, bare, dead stone. A flat, slightly rolling plain pitted, by thousands—no, millions—of craters, some no bigger than a finger-poke. A black-and-gray world set into a dead-black sky studded with stars. A weary, old world without air, without water, exposed to billions of years of grinding erosion from infalling meteors. Off on the left were a few tired-looking hills, worn smooth by eons of meteoric sandpapering that had slumped them down into soft, curving lumps of rock. They looked as if they had been made of wax and left in the sun to melt.
Yet it was breathtaking. Open, empty space, with no one to clutter it. Out as far as the horizon, no sign of the works of man. And silent. The only sounds David could hear were the faint electrical hums of the tractor and his own steady whisper of breath.
David had never seen a horizon before, except in pictures. It really looks like the edge of the world. Beyond it was nothing but the emptiness of space and the solemn, unblinking stars.
Then Grady jinked the tractor around to the right and David could see the mines. As they approached the open pit, David began to realize how small it was. The farmlands inside the colony are bigger than that.
It was merely an open pit, dug down a few meters from the surface. Two tractors with bulldozer blades on their snouts were pushing mounds of dirt toward a potbellied ore carrier that was hooked behind a third tractor.
“Is that... it?” David asked.
Grady’s chuckle rattled in his helmet earphones. “That’s it, kid. All the material for your nice fancy colony comes from that hole in the Moon.”
David looked at the foreman. He was actually smiling. He looked relaxed, even happy. I wonder if he changes like this every time he goes through the airlock?
The tension and anger that he had shown inside the base just weren’t there anymore.
They rumbled up to the edge of the pit and before David knew it, they were heading down the packed-dirt ramp into the mining area.
“The material to build Island One in the first place,” Grady said, “came from a pit just about this size... over on the other side of the dome. The mass accelerator’s on that side, too.”
“I know,” David said. “I saw it yesterday, from the control booth.”
“Yeah. Well, now we’re going over to take a look at the sites for new pits. Got a survey team coming out in”—he glanced at the dashboard clock—”twelve minutes....”
He chattered on like a tour guide. Damn it! David thought. Why couldn't you have stayed rotten and angry? It would've made things a lot easier for me.
Grady guided their tractor up the incline at the far side of the pit and they were surrounded by barren emptiness again. It was like being at sea: nothing but horizon in every direction, and the dark sky overhead.
He stopped the tractor.
“Want to get out and walk around? Plant your footprints on the Moon?”
He started to slide out from under the controls, and David moved over into his seat.
“No, dummy, go out your own side,” Grady said, halfturning toward David.
He was crouched over, framed by the open hatch, one booted foot on the topmost rung of the ladder, the other on the hatch’s sill. David leaned across, and grabbed him under the armpits.
“Hey! What the hell...”
In the light lunar gravity it was easy to lift him off his feet entirely, even from a sitting position. David yanked him free of the tractor and then gave a slight push and let him go. Grady’s green-suited figure flailed for what seemed like an eternity before it hit the ground, boots first, and kicked up a lazy cloud of dust. He tumbled backward, over his life-support pack, and came up in a spraddle-legged sitting position.
“You goddamned son-of-a-bitch!” roared in David’s earphones. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? I’m gonna break every goddamned bone in your goddamned body....”
He was clambering to his feet. David sat himself solidly in the driver’s seat and grabbed the control levers. He tromped on the power pedal and the tractor lurched forward.
“Come back here, you bastard!”
Leaning partway out of the cab to look back at the foreman, David saw the green pressure suit dwindling behind him. Grady was literally hopping up and down in a fury, waving both arms heavenward and screaming with frustrated anger.
“Grady, what’s going on?” a third voice asked. The control center, back at the base. “What’s your problem?”
But all Grady could utter was a roaring string of profanities.
“Grady, where are you? What’s wrong?”
“I’ll kill the stupid son-of-a-bitch! I’ll tear you apart, Adams! I’ll skin you alive!”
David leaned back in the driver’s seat. He smiled. That's better. That's more like the Pete Grady I've grown to know and love.
In a few minutes, other voices crackled over the communications net.
“He stole the tractor?”
“Where the hell does he think he’s going with it?”
“The only other place he can go is Selene.”
David nodded. Right on, friend.
“Selene? He can’t make it there. It’s more than a thousand klicks!”
“He’s got air enough... maybe.”
“Yeah, but there’re no navigation aids between here and Selene. Nobody makes the trip on the surface. He’ll be dead-lost in a couple of hours.”
“Good,” Grady’s voice snapped. “I hope the little bastard chokes on his own juices out there. I only wish we had some buzzards to feed his body to.”
~~~
The anomalous weather conditions over most of the Northern Hemisphere this past winter and spring have been caused by a reversal of the usual polar low that predominates the Arctic airflow under normal conditions. A rather static high-pressure system has replaced the normal polar low, causing a consequent shift in the Northern Hemisphere jet streams and resulting in anomalous wind patterns and storm tracks in the troposphere. Thus, we have extensive flooding in the North American Midwest and on the Scandinavian peninsula, with drought conditions spread generally at lower latitudes.
If these anomalous conditions have been triggered by human intervention, the deliberate weather modifications must have been made on a scale so massive that the International Weather Services' computers cannot predict the end of the chain of interlinked anomalies. In layman's terms, the weather may settle down to its normal pattern in a matter of weeks, or months, or years—or not at all. We simply do not have enough information to make valid predictions.
—Or. R. Copeland III,
Chief Coordinator,
International Weather Service, in testimony to the World Government ad hoc committee on disaster relief,
22 June 2028
~~~
SEVENTEEN
Hamoud stood on the rooftop and looked out over the city.
Basra had once been a busy, bustling port, back in the days when oil exports had brought so much gold into Iraq.
But now the port was hardly used. Most of the piers lay rotting under the high summer sun. The old oil refinery’s towers, crumbling from neglect, stood like blackened ruins against the sky. Only two freighters, tired and rust-stained, were in the harbor, taking on loads of dates and wool. The same cargoes that Sinbad took with him, Hamoud thought bitterly.
The oil was gone and so was the gold that it had brought. Where had the gold disappeared to? Into the coffers of men like Sheikh al-Hashimi. Into the hands of foreigners who now came back to build tourist centers so that the rich Westerners could come and smile at the wretched, backward Arabs.
Hamoud’s fists clenched. To them we are all Arabs. Kurds, Pakistanis, Lebanese, Saudis, Hashimites—all Arabs. Camel drivers and rug merchants. That is how they see us.
Hardly anything moved in the drowsing, sun-baked afternoon. But Hamoud peered into the bright sky and waited. Beside him, Bahjat paced nervously, almost frantically.
It had been simple to smuggle her out of her father’s house and then return to his own quarters so that suspicion fell on others. Al-Hashimi turned Baghdad upside down searching for her, but Hamoud had gotten her safely off to Shiraz, across the Iranian border, before the dawn had broken. Then the sheikh had summoned him and asked—actually asked, rather than ordered—Hamoud to use his PRU contacts to find her. He seemed to know that she was Scheherazade, although he never mentioned the fact outright.
“There it is.” The pilot poked at Denny’s shoulder, then pointed.
Denny followed his arm and saw a spread of ruins across the bare desert floor. “Babylon?” he yelled over the helicopter’s whirring rotors.
“Babylon!” the pilot shouted back, grinning toothily.
“Can you take it lower?”
“We haven’t much fuel to spare if you want to make it to Basra without stopping.”
Still he swooped down and Denny studied the crumbling pillars and scattered stones of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Babylon lay sprawled in the engulfing sands like the bleached bones of a prehistoric monster.
I'll bring you back to life, Denny promised the dead stones. I’ll make them come from all around the world to stare in awe at you again.
Mentally, he laid out plans for the temple here, and the colonnaded walkways there, with the palace and the hanging gardens at the end....
The helicopter rose like a leaf in a swirl of wind and angled away from the ruins, heading south. Denny leaned against his shoulder harness for a last look at Babylon, then settled back in his seat.
Bahjat had reached him by phone, breathless and urgent. Her instructions were specific. Rent a car and drive north to Mosul. Don’t try to use the airport at Baghdad; it’s being watched. In Mosul, find a teacher at the university named Professor as-Said. He will help you to take the next leg of the journey. And she had hung up before he could say a word.
The professor turned out to be a young, bearded, fiery-eyed mathematician who regarded Denny with great suspicion, if not distaste. Denny had heard that the university was a hotbed of PRU radicalism, and he thought that as-Said might well be one of the revolutionaries. Why would Bahjat have anything to do with him?
PRU or not, the professor drove Denny to a private helicopter pad out in the hills and packed him aboard the red-and-white chopper he was now flying southward to Basra. To Bahjat.
Briefly he thought about his work on the Caliph’s palace back in Baghdad. It would grind to a halt with him not there. So what? Bahjat was more important, all-important. The work could wait. He would fly her to Messina and ask to be taken off the Baghdad project for personal reasons. When they saw her in Messina, they would understand.
How will I do Babylon if her father's still sore at us? Grinning, he answered, Who cares? As long as Bahjat is with me, who cares what we do or where? We've got the whole world!
