“I’m honored, Miss. But you can’t be Bill’s daughter; you’re too young. Besides, you’re pretty. And he is—Well, look at him.”
“Stop it, boys. I’m his mother, Captain. You really are the captain of the Moonship? I’m impressed.”
Captain LeCroix sat down with us. I saw that his “redeye” was another tall, clear drink. He said to me, “No need to be impressed; the computer pilot does it all. But I’m going to ride her…if I can avoid Bill long enough. Have a chocolate éclair, Bill.”
“Smile when you say that, stranger!”
“A cheeseburger? A jelly doughnut? A stack of wheats with honey?”
“Mom, do you see what that scoundrel is doing? Trying to keep me from dieting just because he’s scared I might break his arms. Or his neck.”
“Why would you do that, Woodrow?”
“I wouldn’t. But Les thinks I would. He weighs just one hundred and twenty-six pounds. My best weight, in training, is one forty-five, you may remember. But by liftoff day and H-hour I have to weigh exactly what he does…because, if he catches a sniffle or slips in the shower and breaks something, God forbid, I have to sit there in his place and pretend to pilot. I can’t avoid it; I accepted their money. And they have a large, ugly man following me around, making sure I don’t run.”
“Don’t believe him, Ma’am. I’m very careful going through doors and I won’t eat anything I don’t see opened. He intends to disable me at the last minute. Is he really your son? He can’t be.”
“I bought him from a Gypsy. Woodrow, what happens if you don’t make the weight?”
“They slice off one leg, a bit at a time, until I’m down to exactly one twenty-six. Spacemen don’t need feet.”
“Woodrow, you always were a naughty boy. You would need feet on the Moon.”
“One is enough there. One-sixth gravity. Hey, there’s that big, ugly man they got watching me! He’s coming this way.”
George Strong came over and bowed. “Dear lady! I see you have met our Moonship captain. And our relief pilot, Bill Smith. May I join you?”
“Mom, do you know this character? Did they hire you to watch me, too? Say it ain’t so!”
“It ain’t so. George, your relief pilot is my son, Woodrow Wilson Smith.”
Later that night George and I had a chance to talk privately and quietly. “George, my son tells me that he must get his weight down to one hundred and twenty-six pounds in order to qualify as relief pilot. Can that be true?”
“Yes. Quite true.”
“He hasn’t weighed that little since his junior year in high school. If he did get his weight down to that and if Captain LeCroix fell ill, I suspect that Woodrow would be too weak to do the job. Wouldn’t it make more sense to adjust weights the way they do with race horses? Add a few lead weights if Captain LeCroix flies; take them out if the relief pilot must go?”
“Maureen, you don’t understand.”
I admitted that I did not.
George explained to me just how tight was the weight schedule for the ship. The Pioneer was stripped down to barest essentials. She carried no radio—only indispensable navigational instruments. Not even a standard pressure suit—just a rubber acceleration suit and a helmet. No back pack—just a belt bottle. Open the door, drop a weighted flag, grab some rocks, get back in.
“George, this doesn’t sound to me like the way to do it. I won’t tell Woodrow that—after all, he’s a big boy now”—assumed age, thirty-five; true age, fifty-three—“but I hope Captain LeCroix stays healthy.”
Another of those long waits in which George pondered something unpleasant—“Maureen, this is utter, Blue Star secret. I’m not sure anyone is going to fly that ship.”
“Trouble?”
“Sheriff trouble. I don’t know how much longer I can hold off our creditors. And we haven’t anywhere else to turn. We’ve pawned our overcoat, so to speak.”
“George, let me see what I can do.”
He agreed to live in my apartment and look after Princess Polly while I was away—okay with Princess Polly, as she was used to him. I left for Scottsdale in the morning, to see Justin.
“Look at it this way, Justin. How bad will the Foundation be hurt if you let Harriman Industries collapse?”
“The Foundation would be hurt. But not fatally. We would be able to resume full subsidy in five years, ten at the outside. Maureen, one thing is certain: A conservator of other people’s money must never throw good money after bad.”
Eight million was the most I could squeeze out of him, and I had to guarantee it. Half of it was in CDs, some of which had due dates as long as six months away. (But a certificate of deposit can always be used in place of cash, although it may cost you points.)
To accomplish that much I had to tell Justin, first, that he would never get another “Theodore” tip out of me if he didn’t produce the money, and, second, that if he laid the money on the table, I would place beside it a full and complete transcript of those notes I had taken in the middle of the night on the twenty-ninth of June, 1918.
In the Broadmoor the next morning George would not accept the money from me but took me to Mr. Harriman, who seemed detached, barely able to recognize me, until I said, “Mr. Harriman, I want to buy some more participation in the Lunar launching.”
“Eh? I’m sorry, Mrs. Johnson; there is no more participation stock for sale. That I know of.”
“Then let me put it this way. I would like to lend you eight million dollars as a personal loan without security.”
Mr. Harriman looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. He had grown gaunt since the last time I had seen him and his eyes burned with fanatic fervor—he made me think of those Old Testament prophets.
He studied me, then turned to George. “Have you explained to Mrs. Johnson what a risk she would be taking?”
George nodded glumly. “She knows.”
“I wonder. Mrs. Johnson, I’m cleaned out and Harriman Industries is a hollow shell—that’s why I haven’t called a directors’ meeting lately. I would have to explain to you and to the other directors the risks I’ve been taking. Mr. Strong and I have been trying to hold things together on jawbone and sheer nerve, long enough to get the Pioneer off her pad and into the sky. I haven’t given up hope…but, if I take your money and I am forced into bankruptcy and my senior company into receivership, my note to you could not be in a preferred position. You might get three cents on the dollar; you might not get anything.”
“Mr. Harriman, you are not going to be bankrupt and that tall ship out there will fly. Captain LeCroix will land on the Moon and return safely.”
He smiled down at me. “It’s good to know that you have faith in us.”
“Its not just faith; I’m certain. We can’t fail now for the lack of a few pennies. Take that money and use it. Pay it back when you can. Not only will Pioneer fly, you also will send many ships after her. You are manifest destiny in person, sir! You will found Luna City…freeport for the Solar System!”
Later that week George asked me if I wanted to be in the blockhouse during the launching—Mr. Harriman had said to invite me. I had already considered it, knowing that I could demand it if I cared to push it. “George, that’s not the best place to watch the liftoff, is it?”
“No. But it’s the safest. It’s where the VIPs will be. The governor. The president if he shows up. Ambassadors.”
“Sounds claustrophobic. George, I’ve never been much interested in the safest place…and the few VIPs I’ve met struck me as hollow shells, animated by PR men. Where are you going to be?”
“I don’t know yet. Wherever Delos needs me to be.”
“So I figured. You are going to be too busy to have me hanging on your arm—”
“It would be a privilege, dear lady. But—”
“—you are needed elsewhere. Where is the best view? If you weren’t busy, where would you watch it?”
“Have you visited the Broadmoor Zoo?”
“N
ot yet. I expect to. After the liftoff.”
“Maureen, there is a parking lot at the zoo. From it you would have a clear view to the east from a spot about fifteen hundred feet higher than Peterson Field. Mr. Montgomery has arranged with the hotel to place some folding chairs there. And a radio link. Television. Coffee. If I weren’t busy, that’s where I would be.”
“So that’s where I will be.”
Later that day I ran across my son Woodrow in the lobby of the Broadmoor. “Hi, Mom! They got me working.”
“How did they manage that?”
“I didn’t read my contract carefully enough. This is ‘educational and public communication activity associated with the Moonship’—meaning I have to set this thing up to show people how the ship works, where it will go, and where the diamonds are on the Moon.”
“Are there diamonds on the Moon?”
“We’ll let you know later. Come here a sec.” He led me away from the crowd in the lobby into a side hall by the barbershop. “Mom,” he said quietly, “if you want to do it, I think I have enough bulge around here to get you into the blockhouse for the liftoff.”
“Is that the best place to see it?”
“No, it’s probably the worst. It’ll be hot as a June bride, because the airconditioning isn’t all that good. But it’s the safest place and it’s where the high brass will be. Visiting royalty. Party chairmen. Mafia chiefs.”
“Woodrow, where is the best place to watch? Not the safest.”
“I would drive up Cheyenne Mountain. There is a big paved parking lot outside the zoo. Come back into the lobby; I want to show you something.”
On a giant (four-foot) globe that made my mouth water, Woodrow showed me the projected path of the Pioneer.
“Why doesn’t it go straight up?”
“Doesn’t work that way. She goes east and makes use of the Earth’s rotation…and unloads all those extra steps. The bottom one, the biggest one, number five, drops in Kansas.”
“What if it landed on the Prairie Roadway?”
“I’d join the Foreign Legion…right behind Bob Coster and Mr. Ferguson. Honest, it can’t, Mom. We start out here, fifty miles south of the road, and where it lands, over here, near Dodge City, is over a hundred miles south of it.”
“What about Dodge City?”
“There’s a little man with a switch, hired solely to push that switch and bring step five down in open country. If he makes a mistake, they tie him to a tree and let wild dogs tear him to pieces. Don’t worry, Mom. Step four lands around here, off the coast of South Carolina. Step three lands in the Atlantic north of this narrowest place where the nose of South America faces the bulge of Africa. Step two lands in the South Atlantic near Capetown. If it goes too far, we’ll hear some interesting cussing in Afrikaans. Step one—ah, that’s the one. With luck it lands on the Moon. If Bob Coster made a mistake, why, it’s back to the old drawing board.”
It will be no news to anyone that Pioneer lifted off to plan and that Captain Leslie LeCroix landed on Luna and returned safely. I watched from Cheyenne Mountain, the zoo parking lot, with such a fine, horizon-wide view to the east that it seemed to me that I could stand on my tiptoes and see Kansas City.
I’m glad that I got to see one of the great rockets while they were still in use—I know of no planet in any patrolled universe where the big rockets are still used—too expensive, too wasteful, too dangerous.
But oh, so magnificent!
It was just dark when I got up there. The full Moon was rising in the east. The Pioneer was seven miles away (I heard someone say) but the ship was easy to see, bathed in floodlights and standing tall and proud.
I looked at my chrono, then watched the blockhouse through binoculars. A white flare burst out its top, right on time.
Another flare split into a red and green fireball. Five minutes.
That five minutes was at least a half hour long. I was beginning to think that the launching was going to abort—and I felt unbearable grief.
White fire lapped out of the base of the ship and slowly, lumberingly, it lifted off the pad…and climbed faster and faster and faster and the whole landscape, miles and miles, was suddenly in bright sunlight!
Up, up, and up, to apparent zenith and it seemed to have bent back to the west and I thought it was falling on us—
—and then the light was not quite as bright and now we could see that this “sun” overhead was moving east…and was a moving bright star. It seemed to break up and a voice from a radio said, “Step five has separated.” I remembered to breathe.
And the sound reached us. How many seconds does it take sound to go seven miles? I’ve forgotten and, anyhow, they weren’t using ordinary seconds that night.
It was “white” noise, almost unbearable even at that distance. It rumbled on and on…and at last the turbulence reached us, whipping skirts and knocking over chairs. Someone fell down, cursed, and said, “I’m going to sue somebody!”
Man was on his way to the Moon. His first step to his Only Home—
George died in 1971. He lived to see every cent paid back, Pikes Peak Space Catapult operational, Luna City a going concern with over six hundred inhabitants, more than a hundred of them women, and some babies born there—and Harriman Industries richer than ever. I think he was happy. I know I miss him, still.
I’m not sure Mr. Harriman was happy. He was not looking for billions; he simply wanted to go to the Moon—and Daniel Dixon euchered him out of it.
In the complex maneuverings that got a man to the Moon Dixon wound up controlling more shares of voting stock than Mr. Harriman controlled, and Mr. Harriman lost control of Harriman Industries.
On top of that, in lobbying maneuvers in Washington and in the United Nations, a Harriman daughter firm, Spaceways, Ltd., became the “chosen instrument” for the early development of space, with a rule, “The Space Precautionary Act,” under which the company controlled who could go into space. I heard that Mr. Harriman had been turned down physically, under this rule. I’m not certain what went on behind the scenes; I was eased off the board of directors once Mr. Dixon was in control. I didn’t mind; I didn’t like Dixon.
In Boondock, centuries later or about sixty-odd years ago on my personal time line, I listened to a cube, Myths, Legends, and Traditions—The Romantic Side of History. There was a tale in it concerning time line two that asserted that the legendary Dee Dee Harriman had managed, many years later, when he was very old and almost forgotten, to buy a pirate rocket, in which he finally made it to the Moon…there to die in a bad landing. But on the Moon, where he longed to be.
I asked Lazarus about this. He said that he did not know. “But it’s possible. God knows the Old Man was stubborn.”
I hope he made it.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
Decline and Fall
I am not certain that my situation was improved when these ghouls grabbed me away from those spooks. I suppose that almost everybody has fantasies about making the punishment fit the crime or about some scoundrel who would look his best in the leading role at a funeral. It is a harmless way to kill time during a sleepless night.
But these weirdos mean it.
Murder is all they think about. The first night I was here they listed fifty-odd people who needed to be killed, itemized their crimes, and offered me the honor of being the next member to count coup—pick a client, do! One whose crimes are particularly offensive to you, Milady Johnson—
I admit that the listed miscreants were a scrofulous bunch over whom even their own mothers would not be likely to weep but, like Mr. Clemens’s favorite son, Huckleberry Finn, I am not much interested in killing strangers. I am not opposed to the death penalty—I voted for it every time the matter came to a vote, which was frequently during the decline and fall of the United States—but in killing pour le sport I need to be emotionally involved. Oh, forced to a choice I would rather shoot a man than a deer; I can’t see the “sport” in shooting a gentle v
egetarian that can’t shoot back.
But, given full choice, I would rather watch television than kill a stranger. Some, at least.
I said, “I don’t see anyone on that list who is to my taste. Do you happen to have in your file of better-deads someone who abandons kittens?”
The fat chairman smiled at me under his dark glasses. “Now that’s a delicious idea! No, I think not…unless by chance there is someone nominated for other reasons who also abandons kittens. I will have Research set up an inquiry at once. Madam, what would be an appropriate termination for such a client? Have you studied it?”
“No, I haven’t. But his death should involve homesickness…and loneliness…and cold…and hunger…and fear…and utter despair.”
“Artistic. But perhaps not practical. Such a death might stretch out over months…and we really do not have the facilities to permit a deletion to last more than a few days. Ah, Bluebeard—you have something to add?”
“Do what our sister suggests for as many days as we can afford the space. Then surround the client by a holo of enormous trucks, giant holos, the way traffic must look to a kitten. Have the images bear down on him, with overpowering sound effects. Then hit him with a real truck—a glancing blow to maim him. Let him die slowly, as is often the case with a road-killed animal.”
“Madam, does that appeal to you?”
(It made me want to throw up.) “Unless something better comes along.”
“If we can find such a client for you, he will be saved and held at your disposal. In the meantime we must find you someone else for coup, not let you sit among us naked of proper pride.”
That was a week ago and I have begun to feel just a hint of the idea that if I do not promptly find on their list a client I wish to terminate, then…just possibly…we don’t want to hurry you…but still…if I don’t make blood coup soon, how can I be trusted not to betray them to the Supreme Bishop’s proctors?
On that Time Corps mission I carried out in Japan in the 1930s, I wish I had investigated those reports of another woman who might be me. If I had proved to myself that I was indeed tripled for 1937-38, then I would sleep better here-now, as that third loop would have to be farther ahead on my personal time line…which would prove that I will get out of this mess still breathing.