Ben Bova - Test of Fire

Douglas Morgan was chairman of the council. Lisa Ducharme Morgan ran it.

“I… Doug,” she stammered, “do you think… well, could you… postpone the expedition Earthside? Until after the baby is born?”

“Nine months?” The grin on his face slowly dissipated, replaced by an introspective frown. “Nine months,” he repeated, almost to himself. “I’ll have to check. That’s slicing it very thin.”

But she knew he would wait. And after the baby was born she would find other ways to keep him by her side. Especially if it was a son.

But she reckoned without Martin Kobol.

Five months passed without incident. Douglas chafed, but kept postponing the Earthside expedition.

Kobol watched and waited as the nuclear generators’ supply of fuel rods slowly dwindled.

“At this rate,” he told Douglas, “we’ll be eating into the emergency reserves before the year’s out.”

They were standing in the cubbyhole office just off the control room of the nuclear powerplant.

Through the leaded window Douglas could see the broad sweep of the control board, with its array of dials and switches. Two bored, sleepy-looking technicians sat there. Beyond the massive leadline doors across the chamber from them was the nuclear generator itself, silently converting the energy of splitting uranium atoms to electricity.

Douglas nodded unhappily.

“I know. We’ve got to bring up more fissionables from Earthside.”

“And we can’t wait much longer,” Kobol pointed out, tapping the computer screen that showed the fuel supply numbers.

“A few more months…” Douglas muttered.

Kobol sat on the edge of the desk to ease his aching hip. “We should have gone three months ago, in the spring. It’s high summer now. In a few more months it’ll be winter.”

“I know the seasons!” Douglas snapped.

Kobol closed his eyes momentarily. He looked almost as if he were praying. “It’s Lisa, isn’t it? She’s making you wait until the baby’s born.”

“I want to wait until he’s born,” Douglas corrected.

“While we run out of fuel.”

“We won’t run out, Martin. Don’t try to pressure me.”

“Doug, this is a serious matter. If you won’t act, I’m going to have to bring it before the council.”

“Do that,” Douglas snapped. “Do anything you damned well please. Lead the expedition Earthside yourself. You tried that once and it didn’t work out so goddamned well, did it?”

His voice had risen to a room-filling roar, he suddenly realized. Both the technicians on the other side of the thick window had turned in their chairs to stare at him.

Kobol said nothing.

With a self-exasperated sigh, Douglas went over to Kobol and grabbed his bony shoulders. “Marty, I’m sorry. You’re right, we should have gone at least three months ago. It’s just that… Lisa lost her first baby, and the radiation dose she got — well, I just want to be here and make sure this one’s okay.”

Kobol pulled free of him and walked, one leg slightly stiff, toward the door. Without looking back at Douglas he said, “Why should this one be so special? She’s aborted three or four others.”

It was such a strange thing to say, such an incredible statement, that Douglas did not believe he had heard the man correctly.

“What did you say?” He heard a weird half chuckle in his own voice.

Kobol put one hand on the doorknob, then halfturned toward Douglas. “She’s keeping this baby to hold onto you. You’re the puppet; the baby’s the string.”

Douglas could feel his blood turning to ice.

“What did you say about three of four others?”

His voice was deadly calm.

Shrugging, Kobol replied, “Nothing. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. It’s none of my business.”

“But it’s my business, Marty.” Without being consciously aware of it, Douglas was advancing on Kobol, fists clenched.

“It’s just… something I heard.” Kobol’s voice quavered. “Ask Catherine Demain about it. She knows.”

He yanked the door open and rushed through it and out into the corridor, leaving Douglas standing there alone.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” Douglas said to his wife.

Lisa lay in their bed, a black robe pulled around her. To Douglas she looked more beautiful than ever, glowing from within. Her belly was just slightly rounded.

She said nothing, merely watched him with her dark enchantress’s eyes.

“I checked with Catherine. She didn’t want to admit it, but she finally did. Four abortions in the past five years. Four sons or daughters we could have had. Why? Why did you kill them?”

“I didn’t want them,” she said, her voice as flat and controlled as if she were reading off a list of numbers. “Other things were more important.”

“And for five years I worried that the radiation you’d been exposed to in the flare… Jesus Christ, Lisa, why didn’t you at least ask me?”

“It was none of your business. It was my decision to make.”

He sank onto the end of the bed, head bowed, tears of frustration welling up in him. “Four children,” he muttered. “Four children of mine… and you never even said a word to me about it.”

“We had more important things to do than to argue about having babies,” Lisa said.

He looked up at her. She was perfectly calm, totally in control of herself.

“They were mine, weren’t they?” he heard himself snarl at her. “Not Demain’s or Blair’s or Marty’s. Or maybe some of the miners? Do you know who the fathers were?”

Even that failed to crack her facade. “They were yours, Douglas. Only yours. But the decision to keep them or not was mine.”

Nodding bitterly, he hauled himself to his feet.

He swayed there at the end of the bed for a moment, as if drunk.

“Okay,” he said. “You made your decisions. Now I’m making mine. I’m taking an expedition Earthside as soon as we can get it ready. You can lie there and swell up and burst, for all I care. I don’t believe it’s my kid. I’ll never believe a word you say to me, never again!”

He stamped out of the bedroom. Lisa lay unmoving, listening to him rummaging around the other rooms for a few moments. Then she heard the corridor door slide open and slam shut.

He’ll be back, she thought. He’s angry now, but he’ll cool down. He’ll come back, feeling sheepish.

And I’ll ask him to forgive me. He will, and then I’ll forgive him. We’re having a son. I’ll tell him that all the tests indicate that. He’ll stay to see his son born. He’ll be back. Soon. He won’t stay away long.

But he never returned to her.

It took three months to organize the Earthside expedition to Douglas’ satisfaction: three months of frantic preparation, of meticulous detail work, of unceasing training for the men he hand-picked to go with him, of driving, flogging everyone— himself most of all.

Lisa watched the takeoff of his spidery transfer craft on the video screen in her bedroom. Every ship in the settlement was needed to lift the expedition members toward the Earth-orbiting space station. Douglas, she knew, was in the very last spacecraft. When its rocket engines ignited and it leaped off the Moon’s dusty surface and out of view, she felt a sudden, searing pain in her abdomen.

Her son was about to be born, five weeks prematurely.

Alec stood at the observation dome’s main window and gazed across the tumbled, broken wingwall floor to the bleak horizon.

Hanging above the weary, slumped mountains of Alphonsus, floating softly in the blackness, shone the blue, beckoning crescent of Earth. It glowed, catching the light of the now-quiet Sun on bands of glistening white, casting vivid shadows across the pitted gray lunar floor.