Ben Bova - Test of Fire

“It can’t be…” he muttered to himself. But even as he said it, he stumbled through the shadows to one of the low-powered binoculars set into steel swivel stands along the balustrade. They had been put in place for visitors, a sop to keep them from pestering the staff to look through the big telescope. They were ideal for gazing at the Moon.

Hands trembling, Lord focused the binoculars on that point of light. It resolved itself into several rings of lights: the surface domes of the lunar colony.

“They’re alive up there,” he whispered to himself, almost afraid that if he said it too loudly the lights would wink out. “Of course… they live underground all the time. The flare wouldn’t have affected them, only their instruments on the surface.”

He stood erect and stared naked-eyed at the Moon. “They’re alive!” he shouted. The lights did not disappear.

Babbling with nearly hysterical laughter, Lord staggered to the stone stairs that led down to the observatory’s parking lot. A dozen cars were there, surely at least one of them would have enough fuel in its tank to take him as far as… where?

He stopped halfway down the winding stairs, panting and trembling on wobbly legs. Where?

Most of the cities were radioactive rubble. Barbarian gangs roamed the countryside. But somewhere there must be a scientific outpost that still survives. With a radio powerful enough to reach the lunar colony.

“Greenbelt, Maryland!” Lord exclaimed. “The NASA Goddard Center. They’re far enough away from Washington to have escaped the blast. Radiation may have been heavy, but most of it should have dissipated by now.”

Nodding eagerly, he resumed his descent of the stairs. “Greenbelt,” he muttered over and over again, convincing himself that it was true. “I can call them from Greenbelt. They’ll have rocket shuttles up there. They’ll come to pick up survivors.

I’ll call them from Greenbelt.”

Once they were alone in their one-room quarters, Lisa turned to her husband and said, “So now you’re a hero.”

Douglas almost laughed. The wild joy of his reception at the airlock had been completely unexpected.

For more than two weeks he had shouldered the responsibilities of the leader of an expedition into hell. He had seen more of death than any man wanted to see, had forced himself to accept it, to deal with it. He had even steeled himself to killing a few of the wild marauders who had attacked his men almost as soon as their shuttle had touched down on the long airstrip in Florida.

Then came the long return back to the Moon, with the sick and starving survivors they had picked up. And the memories of the others they had been forced to leave behind, too weak to make the trip, too old to be useful once they got back home, too sick to be saved by the lunar settlement’s limited medical staff.

Douglas felt he had aged ten years in less than a month. His nostrils still smelled the stench of decaying corpses; the smell seemed to cling to his clothing, his skin.

And then the outburst of welcome, the hero’s return, the tumultuous enthusiasm of his friends and colleagues, carrying him on their shoulders, praising him, laughing, cheering, blessing him.

For what? Douglas had wondered. For adding two dozen casualties to their already-strained facilities? Or for giving them Kope that they might return to Mother Earth some day?

Now Lisa faced him, lithe and deadly in her severe black jumpsuit, her expression unreadable.

He had never understood her, he realized. He loved her, but he could not for the life of him fathom her moods. Or maybe, said a mocking voice within him, maybe you love not her, not the real Lisa Ducharme Morgan, but your own idea of what she should be. That would be just like you, Douglas: in love with the theory and trying to force reality to fit your flight of fancy.

“How does it feel?” Lisa asked. “Being a hero, I mean. Having men hoist you up on their shoulders.”

All the excitement of the reception drained out of him. He replied defensively, “But they put you up on their shoulders, too.”

Her dark eyes glittered coldly. “Yes, didn’t they? But they didn’t kiss my hand. They didn’t fall to their knees and worship me as their savior.”

“Nobody did that.”

“Not quite,” she said, turning toward the desk unit, putting her back to him. “Almost, but not quite.”

Their room was a duplicate of all the other living quarters in the underground settlement.

Spartan utility, nothing more.

Lisa pulled out the chair, looked down at it for an uncertain moment, then let it go and sat instead on the edge of the bed. Her back was ramrod straight, her hands clenched with tension. Douglas stood just inside the door, knowing that if he went to sit beside her she would move away from him.

“We have a lot to talk about,” he said.

“I don’t feel like talking.”

“Sooner or later…”

She looked up at him. “What would you have done if Fred hadn’t died out there? Would you have killed him?”

Douglas searched his mind for an answer.

“Well?”

“There’s been enough of death,” he said, seeing the blood-soaked remains of the towns around Cape Canaveral. The radiation level had quickly tapered off, but the towns had self-destructed in orgies of terror and greed. There was no place to dig in Florida, no place to hide from the fallout.

But even in the blast-hardened blockhouses of the space center human beings had clawed each other to death over scraps of food or a safer corner to huddle in.

“Is your honor satisfied?” Lisa asked scornfully.

“He’s dead, and so is the baby.”

“What does honor have to do with it?” he snapped. “When did you become interested in honor? Did you do it in this bed, right here? Or over in his quarters?”

A bitter smile turned the corners of her lips.

“What makes you think we did it in either place? Or that we did it only once. It’s only in melodramas that a single copulation gets the maiden pregnant.”

He snorted with disgust. “Maiden. Who else have you been doing it with?”

“Before I met you or since?”

He took an involuntary step toward her, his fists clenched.

“Would you like me to evaluate them for you? On a scale of one to ten, you come pretty close to zero, you know.”

He swung without realizing it and only at the last instant did he open his hand. The slap rang through the tiny room, knocking Lisa over backward across the narrow bed, halfway over its far side.

She pulled herself up slowly, the side of her face burning with the red imprint of his fingers.

“Thank you,” she said slowly. “That’s precisely what I expected from you.”

He turned and stamped out of the room.

For hours Douglas strode the underground corridors, walking blindly through the rough-hewn tunnels that laced the various parts of the settlement together. Past the long, pipe-fed vats of the hydroponics farms he strode, looking neither right nor left, seeing nothing and no one except his wife’s shocked face with the imprint of his angry hand on it.

I could have killed her, Douglas told himself.

How can I come so close to murdering her if I love her?

He stopped briefly at the rock processing facility, soaking up the clamoring noise and bone-jarring vibration of the big grinding machines. It blotted other thoughts from his mind. The heavy machinery was fully automated: lunar rock went into one end of the massive crushers and grinders, out the other end came pulverized separated powders of aluminum, silicon, titanium, oxygen, and other ores. Some of them were channeled to the metal refineries. Others were fed through conveyor belts into the copper-clad electrolyzers of the water factory.