Ben Bova - Moonwar

“I mean it, Luce,” her staff chief said,’this has turned into real trouble.”

“What about the New Morality?” she asked, still without looking at him.

He did the unthinkable. He got up from the rocking chair and walked around her desk, forcing her to face him.

Bending his knees slightly and leaning his liver-spotted hands on them so his eyes were on the same level as hers, he said gently, “They’re not going to be enough, Luce. The public’s demanding that you do something.”

She glared at him and swung back to the desk. He returned to the rocking chair.

“Are you telling me that O’Conner and Previs and all the other New Morality leaders are abandoning me on this?”

“No, not at all,” he said, raising his hands. “The hard core of the Faithful are with you as much as they’ve ever been. They see this fight on the Moon as the battle between the forces of good and the evils of nanotechnology.”

“So where’s my problem?”

“It’s the peripherals,” he said with a sigh. “You’ve got the hard core, they’re solidly with you. But the hard core isn’t that many votes, Luce! The New Morality’s real strength has been in its numbers, yeah, but most of those numbers aren’t fanatics. They’re ordinary folks who think the New Morality’s ideas about cleaning up crime and vice are pretty good.”

“And now?”

“Now they’re looking at their television screens and seeing the big, bad U.N. attacking poor little Moonbase. And most of those people at Moonbase are Americans.”

“Who use nanomachines.”

The staff chief shook his head. “The voters don’t care that much about the nanomachines. What’s getting them worked up is the sight of a bunch of Americans getting attacked by the Peacekeepers—who are mostly foreigners.”

“But they elected me because I pushed the nanotech treaty.”

“That’s not important to them now. As long as the Moon people keep their nanomachines on the Moon, the average American voter doesn’t care a gnat’s fart about it.”

The President glared at her staff chief for long icy moments.

He gave her a weak grin. “Don’t blame the messenger for the message,” he said.

She huffed at him, then reached out and flicked on her desktop computer. “I want to see these numbers for myself.”

The staff chief leaned back in the rocker and watched her face as the data from the constantly ongoing public-opinion poll flickered across her screen.

When she finally looked up at him she asked, “What should I do?”

“Call Faure and tell him to back off, maybe?”

“Don’t be ridiculous! It’s much too late for that.”

“At least tell him that you’re concerned about the safety of the American citizens at Moonbase.”

“But they’ve declared their independence! They don’t want American citizenship!”

“We don’t know if that’s just a ploy or not. Either way, there’re probably a lot of men and women up there who want to keep their citizenship and come back to the States as soon as they can.”

The President shook her head. “I can’t weasel on Faure. I’ve been one of his strongest supporters! If I turn on him now, the word of this Administration will be worthless all around the world. Nobody would trust us again.”

“I’m thinking about your re-election campaign.”

She waved a hand in the air. “That’s next year, for God’s sake. By that time Moonbase will be under U.N. control and this whole flap will be forgotten.”

Her staff chief still looked worried.

“All right,” the President said,’so Yamagata will be running Moonbase and taking over the spacecraft market. If Masterson Corporation goes for it, what am I going to do about it?”

“Once the opposition starts gnawing on that bone…”

She shook her head stubbornly.

“They’re already starting to make noises in the Senate,” he insisted. “Joanna Brudnoy’s been talking with half the committee chairmen on the Hill.”

“It’s a fait accompli,” the President said curtly. “In another forty-eight hours or so the Peacekeepers will have taken over Moonbase and this whole problem will resolve itself.”

“Maybe,” the staff chief said softly. “But what happens if Moonbase drives the Peacekeepers off? They did it once, you know.”

She scoffed at him. “That’s impossible and you know it.”

“Yeah. But still…”

“Don’t you intend to sleep?” Lev Brudnoy asked his wife.

Joanna sat in the exact center of the largest sofa in their living room, her eyes riveted to the big Windowall screen above the dark fireplace.

“I couldn’t sleep if I tried, Lev,” she replied. “Not with this going on.”

The screen showed the view from the cameras atop Mount Yeager. The Peacekeepers’ vehicles were slowing to a halt at the base of Alphonsus’s ringwall mountains. They were arranging themselves in a single thin, undulating line that snaked along the flank of the mountains, each newly arriving tractor taking its position at the end of the constantly growing line. The cameras’ resolution was fine enough to spot individual soldiers, if any appeared, but the vehicles stayed tightly buttoned up. Joanna could see the spokes of their springy wheels and the cleats on the tractors’ treads, but no person got out of the vehicles.

They’re waiting, Joanna thought. Waiting for the missile that will be launched from L-1. Then they’ll attack. They’ll storm Moonbase, and Doug will try to stop them and they’ll kill my son and destroy everything.

Brudnoy sank his lanky frame onto the sofa next to her, murmuring, “At least we could go upstairs and watch from bed. Nothing is going to happen for another nine or ten hours, at least.”

“You go if you’re getting sleepy,” Joanna said, not moving her eyes from the screen. Edie Elgin had been speaking for nearly an hour, but now her voice had stopped and the screen was silent.

He shrugged and sat beside her for several minutes. “This is like watching ice melt,” he grumbled. “It’s hypnotic. Don’t you feel your eyes growing heavy? Sleepy? Drowsy?”

Joanna poked at him with her elbow. “Stop it, Lev!”

“At least come up to bed,” he urged. “The screen up there will show the same picture, I assure you.”

“No.”

Brudnoy got slowly to his feet, then bent down to put his bearded face in front of Joanna’s, noses almost touching.

“My darling wife,” he said, blocking her view of the screen. “I have seldom insisted on my rights as your lord and master—”

“My what?”

“But there comes a time when a man must do what a man must do. Either you come up to the bedroom with me or I will be forced to carry you.”

“We’re not on the Moon, Lev,” Joanna said, smiling at him despite herself. “You’ll give yourself a hernia.”

“That will be entirely your fault, not mine,” he said, very seriously. With that, he reached one arm around her shoulders and the other beneath her legs.

“All right!” Joanna yelped. “All right! I’ll go upstairs. I’ll go with you.”

Brudnoy straightened up. “Good,” he said, offering her his hand.

And as she allowed her husband to help her up from the sofa and started for the bedroom, Jack Killifer—watching from the dining room door that he had opened a crack—also said, “Good,” in a whisper that only he could hear.

Doug was nervously munching a sandwich, sitting on one of the spindly chairs in front of a console in the control center. Like his mother, like the millions of people Earthside watching Global News, like the men and women who had gathered in The Cave to wait out the battle, Doug was watching the camera views from Mount Yeager.

“They’re not doing anything,” he murmured.