KOROLEV
Grant came to slowly. His head thundered with pain, his vision was blurred. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. Trudy’s face came into focus, taut and white with anxiety. She was bending over him, holding a towel or something to the back of his head.
“What happened?” he asked thickly.
Trudy replied, “Oberman found a wrench from the tool closet in the lav and hit you with it.”
Grant tried to sit up, but the world swam dizzily around him and his guts heaved.
“Stay down, Grant,” Trudy urged. “You must have a concussion. Maybe he fractured your skull.”
“Where … where is he?”
“He ripped up the sleeves on our suits! The emergency suits in the locker, too! We can’t go outside! We’re stranded here!”
Grant saw that she was trying to control herself, trying to hold down the fear, the panic.
“It figures,” he said, his voice weak from the pain. “They don’t want … any witnesses. Halleck … told us too much.”
“Then they put on their suits and left,” Trudy went on. “They just went into the airlock a second ago.”
With an effort, Grant focused his eyes on the airlock control pad. He saw its light flick from green to red.
“They’ve gone outside,” he said.
“Nate was really distressed, kind of wild. He said he’s taking Mrs. Halleck to Gagarin, they’ll stay in the shelter there until she can get Selene or the IAA or somebody to send a rescue flight to them.”
“And they left us here to die,” Grant muttered. Yeah, he told himself, that’s what Nate would do. Run away and hide. Then he remembered.
“Trudy … have you told Cardenas … about the gobblers? What Halleck told us?”
“No. There hasn’t been time.”
“You’ve got to call her.”
“How?” she asked. “The phone’s smashed.”
“Thanks to me.”
“Could we use the radio in one of the space suits?”
Grant started to nod, but the movement sent white-hot streaks of pain through his head. “Maybe,” he said weakly, wondering, Is the signal from the suit radio strong enough to get through the shelter’s concrete shell and the rubble piled on top of it?
“I don’t know what else we can do,” Trudy said.
“Pull my suit torso … over here and connect … the backpack to it. Maybe there’s enough juice … left in the batteries … to get through to the commsats.”
Suddenly all the lights in the shelter turned off.
* * *
Nate Oberman nodded inside his bubble helmet as he disconnected the power cable leading from the array of solar cells to the shelter.
“That’ll do it,” he muttered, more to himself than Anita Halleck, standing in her space suit between him and the hopper. “The shelter’s batteries’ll only last a few hours.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Halleck urged.
“Right.” Oberman straightened up and headed for the hopper.
She followed him, thinking, We’ve taken care of Simpson and Dr. Yost, but now this man is a witness to everything.
Oberman reached the hopper and started up its ladder without a backward glance at her.
On the other hand, Halleck told herself as she put a booted foot on the ladder’s first rung, he’s a party to the crime. He’s helped me from the beginning, and he actually did attack Simpson.
“You may have killed him, you know,” Halleck grumbled as they clambered up to the hopper’s grillwork platform.
“They’re as good as dead, one way or the other. Their electric power’ll run out in a couple hours.”
And Halleck thought, He’ll be able to hold this over me for the rest of my life. I’ve got to find a way to get rid of him.
“We’ve got to get over to Gagarin,” Oberman was saying. “There’s a shelter there just like the one here.”
I can accuse him of murdering Simpson and Yost, Halleck told herself. I never told him to do that. I can show myself as the innocent victim of a homicidal madman.
Oberman clomped to the control podium and lifted up its cover.
“What are you doing?” Halleck asked.
“Hot-wiring the ignition. I don’t want to turn on the normal controls. Soon as we do, the hopper’s beacon will automatically turn on. Then the controller at Farside will know exactly when we left here.”
“So what?”
“So they’ll be able to figure out that Grant and Yost were still alive when we left, that’s what. This way, we can fudge our departure time, tell them they were already dead and we got away from here to save our own lives.”
Halleck thought his reasoning was very thin, but Oberman was at least partially right: they had to cover up the two deaths. Two murders, she realized. I’m a murderess! But no, it’s not me. He did it, I didn’t. I’m going along with him because he might kill me too if I don’t do what he wants.
She was still rehearsing the story she would tell the investigators when her suit radio pinged.
“Someone’s calling,” Halleck said, sounding alarmed.
Oberman heard it, too. “It’s gotta be Grant. Ignore it.”
But Halleck tapped the radio control on her suit’s wrist keypad.
* * *
The shelter’s lights came on again in a heartbeat, but they seemed dimmer.
“We’re on battery power,” Grant said weakly. “Nate’s disconnected … the solar cells.”
“How long will the batteries last?” Trudy asked, her voice trembling slightly.
“Five hours, max.”
“Then we’ll be out of power? The lights, the air recirculator, the heater?”
“Better get the suit radio working,” Grant said.
Trudy dragged the suit torso and backpack across the room to where Grant lay on his back, feeling like a helpless invalid, while she connected the backpack.
She looked up from the suit with a little smile. “The lights are all green.”
“Okay, good.” The pain came in waves, making him almost giddy. “Hand me the … the sleeve with the keypad on it.”
Trudy grabbed the sleeve and held it over Grant’s face. He saw that the sleeve had been methodically ripped to tatters, making the suit useless. Almost useless, he corrected himself. Blinking his eyes, Grant tried to focus on the keypad. Very carefully he tapped out the communications link with Farside. Each movement of his fingers brought a fresh surge of pain washing over him.
“Farside,” a voice issued from the speakers in the suit’s neck ring.
With an enormous effort, Grant said, “This is … Grant Simpson. Patch me through to Dr. Cardenas. Right away. Top emergency priority.”
A moment’s hesitation. “Dr. Cardenas isn’t in her quarters, Grant.”
He recognized the man’s voice. “Find her, Sherry. Call her pocketphone. Life and death, man.”
“Right.”
Within moments, Cardenas’s voice, high with anticipation, called, “Grant?”
“It’s me,” he answered weakly.
“What’ve you found out?”
“They’re gobblers. They attack vanadium atoms.”
“Vanadium! Of course. Pull the vanadium out of the alloy and the molecules collapse.”
“Right,” he breathed. “UV doesn’t kill them.”
“What’s their lifespan?”
“Four weeks, maybe a little more.” He took a painful breath. “Tell Uhlrich he’ll have to … get everybody out of the base until—”
“No, no, we won’t have to do that.” Even in the tiny speakers of the space suit, Cardenas’s voice sounded bright, strong. “We’re covering every metal surface in the place with oil. That’ll protect it from the disassemblers. I’ve put in a call to Selene for more oil.”
“They won’t send a flight—”
“Unmanned lobber,” Cardenas interrupted. “One-way flight. I talked with Doug Stavenger. He’ll get it done.”
“Good,” Grant said, with the last of his strength.
“We need medical help,” Trudy said urgently. “Grant’s got a bad concussion. Maybe a skull fracture.”
Cardenas immediately replied, “I’ll see to it.”
“We’re running on battery power here,” Trudy added. “We’ve only got a few hours left.”
“I’ll get help to you right away,” Cardenas said.
As she signed off Grant eased his head back on the towel or whatever Trudy had wadded on the back of his head. She’ll be okay, he told himself. Farside will send a hopper out to here to pick us up. Trudy’ll be okay. He closed his eyes. All Grant wanted was to sleep, to tumble into blessed oblivion, to have the murderous pain go away.
But suddenly he snapped his eyes wide open.
“Nate’s taking the hopper?” he asked Trudy. “The one you rode in here on?”
She looked perplexed. “I guess.”
“Get him on the radio! Freak two. Now!”
As Trudy obediently picked up the space suit sleeve again she said to Grant, “Lie back. You need to rest.”
“Get Nate on freak two,” he insisted. “He can’t use that hopper. I disabled it.”
“Then he’ll use the one you came in on,” she said.
“If he’s smart … that’s what he’ll do. But Nate isn’t that—”
Halleck’s impatient voice came through the speakers. “What do you want?”
* * *
Oberman heard Grant’s voice in his suit speakers.
“Don’t try to take off … in that hopper!”
“So you’re awake, huh?” Oberman said. “I always thought you had a thick skull.”
“Nate, don’t light up … that hopper! There isn’t enough oxy to—”
“No use begging me, Grant. I’m not taking you or Miss Goody-Goody with us.”
“You can’t—”
Oberman held his gloved thumb over the control panel’s ignition button. “So long, pal,” he said to Grant. “Hope I didn’t crack your skull.”
“Don’t!”
To Halleck, Oberman said, “Hang on.” And he leaned his thumb against the ignition button.
The hopper lurched off the ground in total silence. The ground fell away.
“We’re off!” Oberman said. “Next stop, Gagarin!”
Suddenly the thrust cut off. For a terrifying instant the hopper seemed to hang in space, hovering a few hundred meters above the hard, stony ground.
Then it plunged downward, falling like a stone.
Halleck screamed. Oberman had time to screech “Shit!” before the hopper hit the ground and smashed into pieces.
* * *
Grant stared at Trudy as he heard Oberman’s arrogant, “We’re off! Next stop, Gagarin!”
He thought, Maybe there’s enough LOX in the pipeline to—
Then he heard Halleck’s scream and the radio link abruptly cut off. On the airless Moon, the hopper’s crash made no sound at all.
Trudy looked stricken. “Are they…?”
“They’re dead,” Grant said, miserable with sudden guilt. “I killed them.”
The last of his strength seemed to leave him. He faded into unconsciousness.