Ben Bova - Moonwar

“Oh. I see.”

“I remember when I was a kid in high school, we had a volunteer teacher’s aide come in and help us in our science class. He was retired, used to be a big-time physicist. His daughter was a famous folk singer.”

Doug wondered what this had to do with the defense of Moonbase, but hesitated to interrupt Wicksen.

“He took us out to the gym and attached a bowling ball to one of the climbing ropes. The rope was hanging from a beam ’way up on the ceiling. Then he carried the bowling ball up to the top tier of the benches where we sat during the basketball games.”

“What was he doing?” Doug asked, curious despite himself.

“Teaching us physics. The law of pendulums. He held that big old bowling ball a centimeter in front of his nose, and then let it go.”

“And?”

“It swung on that rope all the way across the gym, like a cannonball, then swung right back toward him again. We all started to yell to him to duck, to get out of the way. But he just stood there and grinned at us.”

Wicksen paused dramatically. Doug waited for him to finish the story.

“The bowling ball stopped a centimeter in front of his nose, then started swinging back again. And he said, “See? It works that way every time. That’s physics!” And I was hooked for life.”

Doug thought he understood. “The demonstration was a lot more convincing than reading the equations about pendulums, right?”

“Right,” said Wicksen. “Of course, you’ve got to know what you’re doing. You’ve got to release the bowling ball without pushing it even the slightest little bit. If you push it, it’ll come back and smash your head in.”

“Is the gun going to work?” Doug asked.

He could sense Wicksen trying to shrug inside his suit. “We don’t know. All the equations check out, but we won’t know until we try it.”

“And you probably won’t get a chance to try it until a nuclear warhead is falling on our heads.”

“Probably.” If that thought perturbed Wicksen in the slightest, it didn’t show in his voice.

He’s actually happy about this, Doug realized. He’s running an experiment that might get himself and all his people killed, but the whole project excites him. Like a hunter tracking down a lion in thick underbrush: dangerous, but what an adrenaline rush!

Doug took his leave of the physicist, wishing he could be as fatalistic as Wicksen. As he climbed into his tractor and trundled away from the mass driver, heading back toward Moonbase, he tried to see things the way Wicksen did. Either the experiment works or we all get killed. Is that the way he really thinks? Or is it that he’s so absorbed in the experiment itself that he’s not thinking at all about the consequences.

Doug’s first stop after getting out of his spacesuit and cleaning it was the control center. Everything looked normal in the big, dimly lit room. The quiet hum of electronics. Rows of consoles monitored by men and women staring at the screens, pin mikes at their lips and earphones clamped to their heads. A controlled intensity, with the big electronic wall displays that showed schematics of the entire base looming over all of them.

He saw Jinny Anson bending over the shoulder of the chief communications technician.

Walking over to her, he asked, “What’s up, Jinny?”

She straightened up and Doug saw that her face was somber. “Lot of activity at L-1,” she said, gesturing toward the comm tech’s center screen.

Doug saw a radar plot of the space station that hovered nearly sixty thousand kilometers above them. Several additional blips clustered around the red dot marking the station.

“Resupply?” Doug mused.

“Not likely,” said Anson. “Their regular resupply run took place on schedule last week. No, they’re delivering something to the station, but it’s not life support supplies or propellant.”

Doug took in a deep breath. “The nuclear missile?”

“Maybe more than one.”

For a moment Doug was silent, thinking. Then he said, “I’m going to call Harry Clemens. It’s time to pop an observation satellite so we can keep an eye on Nippon One.”

Anson nodded, then grinned ruefully. “You might not like what you see, boss.”

Gordette was sitting in The Cave, nursing a mug of the stuff that passed for coffee at Moonbase. It was midday, and the cafeteria was filling up with the lunchtime crowd. But no one sat at Gordette’s table. No one came near it; a ring of empty tables surrounded him.

Pariah, he said to himself. That’s the word. For days he’s been trying to recall the term. At last it came swimming up from his subconscious. Pariah. Outcast. Murderer. Assassin. That’s me and they all know it.

It would’ve been better if Doug had let me die, Gordette told himself. He says he trusts me, but none of these others do. They all know about me now, or they think they do. And they all hate me.

Then he saw Paula Liebowitz carrying a tray in both hands, making her way through the crowded tables, heading straight toward him. She walked with a determined stride and an odd, tenacious expression on her face, right up to Gordette’s table.

“Do you mind if I sit here?” she asked, almost truculently.

Gordette spread his arms to take in all the empty chairs. “Be my guest.”

Liebowitz plopped her laden tray on the table and took the chair next to Gordette.

“Is it true? Did you really try to kill Doug Stavenger?”

Gordette couldn’t make out what was in her eyes. It wasn’t anger, exactly. But it wasn’t tenderness, either.

“It’s true,” he said flatly.

“You’re a hired assassin? A hit man?”

He puffed out a sigh. “When I first met you I was trying to sabotage Doug’s suit.”

“Son of a bitch,” Liebowitz said. She wasn’t calling Gordette a name, he realized; merely expressing her emotions.

He tried to shrug. “That’s what I was sent here to do.”

“And when you invited me to dinner, that was part of it? You were going to try to use me to help you kill Stavenger?”

“No,” he answered slowly. “I invited you to dinner because I liked you.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Even trained assassins need some human companionship now and then,” Gordette told her.

“Don’t try to make a joke out of this!”

“It’s no joke, believe me.”

“Why should I believe anything you say?”

“Why do you ask me, then?”

“I liked you,” Liebowitz said. “I was even thinking about going to bed with you.”

“Get your kicks with a black man, huh?”

She frowned with puzzlement. “What?”

“I’m black.”

“And I’m a Jew. What’s that got to do with anything?”

Gordette thought it over for a moment. “Nothing. Nothing’s got anything to do with anything.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know,” he said, getting irritated with her cross-examination. “So I liked you and you liked me. So what?”

“Stavenger’s letting you stay here? You’re still working with him?”

Gordette nodded.

“He trusts you? After you tried to kill him?”

“I told him the story of my life,” Gordette said, acid in each word, “and he decided he’s gonna reform me. Start me a new life here on the Moon, where everybody loves me and trusts me.”

“Yeah, you’ve made it so easy to be loved and accepted.”

“The only thing I’ve made easy is being black, so you can spot me at a distance.”

“What the hell’s this black business got to do with it?”

“You see any other black people up here?”

Liebowitz almost laughed at him. “My supervisor’s black. There’s dozens of Afro-Americans and blacks from other countries here.” She turned in her chair and pointed. “Look. Black people. And Asians. Hell, they even let Italians up here!”