Ben Bova - Moonwar

“We’ll have to think of something,” said Doug, trying to show a cheerfulness he did not feel.

“If we can keep on generating electricity…”

Doug pushed his chair back from the table. “I want to talk to the head honcho of the physicists about this particle beam idea.”

“The new guy,” Anson said. “He came up here on the last flight before this mess started.”

“What’s his name,” Doug asked, “Wickens?”

“Wicksen,” Paine corrected. “Robert T. Wicksen.”

After the meeting Doug went straight to the office of Robert T. Wicksen. The physicist was a small, slight man, built like a sparrow, but with large, intelligent, gray eyes magnified by old-fashioned rimless glasses.

“Focus the particle beam on an incoming missile warhead?” Wicksen asked. His voice was flat and calm. He was not perturbed by Doug’s question, he merely repeated it to be certain he understood what Doug was asking. Physically he reminded Doug of a tarsier: little, cautious, big staring eyes. Yet he seemed composed, unruffled, perhaps unflappable.

Wicksen’s office was a cubbyhole crammed with electronic gear. No desk, not even any chairs; only a pair of stools that looked as if Wicksen had crafted them himself out of lunar metals. Yet everything was as neat as a picture out of a sales catalogue. Everything in its proper place. All the equipment humming reassuringly. All the screens displayed data curves that flickered and shifted as they spoke. Wicksen himself was equally neat, in a crisp open-necked white shirt and perfectly creased dark gray trousers.

“We need to know if it’s possible to convert your particle accelerator into a beam weapon,” Doug said, sitting on one of the room’s two stools.

Sitting on the other stool, facing Doug like an elfish wizard in modern clothes, Wicksen nodded somberly. “It’s possible. Anything is possible.”

“But can you do it, Dr Wicksen?”

“Wix.”

“Excuse me?”

“Wix. Everyone calls me Wix.”

“All right… Wix. Can you do it?”

Wicksen extended one arm and tapped idly on the keyboard nearest him. “Have to increase the power output, of course,” he muttered, more to himself than his visitor. “And focusing the beam isn’t a trivial problem.”

Doug asked his question again, silently, with his eyes.

Wicksen scratched his pointed chin a moment, then said, “Meet me at the mass driver tomorrow at ten. I’ll be able to answer you then.”

Doug sensed that trying to urge this man or hurry him would be a waste of breath. Wicksen understood the situation they were in. Doug had noticed him at the meeting in The Cave the previous week. Yet the physicist showed neither worry nor disappointment at being asked to break off his experiments and convert his accelerator into a weapon. He seemed more curious than upset.

“He’s a strange duck,” Doug said to Edith that night, in his quarters. She had moved in her meager possessions after their first three nights together.

“I’ve interviewed lots of scientists,” Edith said, unzipping her white coveralls. “They’re all pretty weird, one way or the other.”

“I’ve got to make a call Earthside,” Doug said, padding barefoot to his desk on the other side of the room partition. “Won’t take long,” he called to Edith.

“I’ll keep the bed warm,” she called back.

Grinning, Doug called Tamara Bonai at Tarawa. She was his one sure source of news about how things were going Earthside. His mother’s calls were tapped, both Doug and Joanna were certain, so she had to be careful about how much she told her son.

But Tamara, as head of both the Kiribati Corporation and the island nation itself, could speak much more freely.

“You owe me a fishing trip,” her image on the wall screen teased.

She was on the beach, obviously just after a swim in the lagoon. Her flowered pareo clung wetly to her graceful figure; drops of water beaded her bare shoulders; her long dark hair glistened in the high afternoon sun.

“As soon as I can get Earthside,” he promised anew. Then he asked, “How’s our publicity campaign?”

As he waited for her reply, Doug admired her long slim legs and the nipples that pushed against the pareo’s thin fabric. Since he’d started sleeping with Edith he’d been noticing a lot more about the women he saw.

“Every network is carrying your reports from Moonbase now,” Bonai said, smiling brightly as she sat cross-legged before the phone camera set on the sand before her. The camera automatically moved to keep her in focus.

“And there is considerable turmoil among the board of Masterson Corporation. Now that your mother is here on Earth, she’s demanding a special meeting to take up the question of Moonbase’s political independence.”

“How’s Rashid reacting?”

Bonai turned to look out at the lagoon as she waited for Doug’s words to reach her. Then she turned back to the phone and said, “It’s difficult to read his reaction. I’m sure he wants to push through a merger with Yamagata, but that possibility could cause a major rift on the board and he’d prefer to avoid a confrontation, if he can.”

Within a few seconds Doug forgot how enticing Bonai looked and fell deeply into a discussion with her about the politics of Masterson Corporation, the United Nations, and world public opinion.

“Faure has not said a peep about Moonbase for more than a week now,” she reported. “He’s trying to ride out the waves your broadcasts have created.”

Doug replied, “He’s planning another attack on us. I’m certain of it.”

Once she heard him, Bonai shrugged her bare shoulders. “Could be, I suppose.”

“Can you try to get closer to Rashid, Tamara? I need to know what he’s thinking, what he’s planning to do.”

When her reply came to him, it was, “Are you asking me to use my feminine wiles on him?”

“No, I—”

But Bonai hadn’t waited for his response. She continued, “He has some reputation, you know. There are rumors he keeps a harem over in North Africa somewhere.”

“I didn’t mean—”

She kept on, “It might be fun to see what he’s really like. Maybe I’ll invite him here for a private get-together.”

“Tamara, I didn’t mean you should try to seduce him,” Doug said.

She laughed. “Don’t be so uptight! He won’t be able to turn down a chance to win me over to his side.”

“But—”

“It’s nothing I won’t do for you when you come here for your fishing trip,” she added, mischievously.

Feeling perplexed, Doug didn’t know what to say.

Still smiling, Bonai said, “Don’t worry, Doug. I know what I’m doing. And I have plenty of big, strong bodyguards here to protect me—if I ask them to.”

She clicked off the connection before Doug could reply.

Frowning at the empty wall screen, Doug got to his feet. Edith was standing by the partition, wrapped in a towel, eying him.

“Should I be jealous?” she asked.

“No!” Doug blurted. “Of course not.”

“She’s awful purty.” Edith used her Texas accent.

“She’s the CEO of Kiribati Corporation,” Doug said. “She’s the person who got your first news report on the air Earthside.”

“She’s still awful purty,” said Edith, reaching for him.

Doug thought he should feel annoyed. Instead, he felt almost pleased with himself.

As Doug rode on the tractor across Alphonsus’s cracked and pockmarked floor, he realized that this was the first time he’d been outside in weeks.

He took a deep breath of canned suit air and felt his spirits rise. Strange, he thought, even sealed inside a spacesuit I feel free out here, happy. He looked up at the worn old mountains of the ringwall marching off across the horizon and recognized each rounded hump as an old friend from his childhood.