Cristopher Stasheff - Escape Velocity

“Not at all,” Fess assured her. “It is simply a matter of adjusting our trajectory with the attitude jets, according to the irregularities in the landscape indicated by the sensors. At this low a speed, I always have several milliseconds to react.”

“Piece of cake, huh? I think you’d better keep the con for this one.”

“As mademoiselle wishes,” Fess murmured.

He finally brought them to rest when the glittering lights of a spaceport appeared over the horizon. The burro-boat sank to the dust in the shadow of a huge crag, with the weary, thankful groan of engines idling down.

“I detected an airlock hatch in this outcrop,” Fess informed them. “There is an electronics kit in the cabinet below the console; can any of you bypass the telltale on the hatchway, so that Spaceport Security will not know the lock has been opened?”

“Duck soup,” Lona affirmed, “the instant kind. Where’ll you be while we’re gone?”

“In the shadow of a ring-wall, in a remote crater,” Fess answered. “I will move as the shadows move. Next to the electronics kit, you will find a small transmitter of convenient size for a pocket. Press the button on it, and it will send a coded pulse to me. When I receive it, I will determine your location from its vector and amplitude, and bring the boat to you.”

Lona opened the cabinet, pulled out the electronics kit, and flipped the recall unit to Whitey. He caught it and slipped it into a pocket inside his belt. “What’s its range?”

“A thousand kilometers,” Fess answered. “If you call from Serenitatis Spaceport, I will hear you.”

“How about if we have to call you from Terra?”

“You will have to feed the signal through a stronger transmitter.”

“We can’t ask for a complete guarantee.” Father Marco rose and turned toward the companion way. “I think I can remember where I left my pressure suit.”

“There are ten air bottles in the locker with them,” Fess noted.

“Well, thanks for all the help.” Lona shooed the rest of the crew aft. “If anyone knocks while we’re gone…”

“I will not let them in,” Fess assured her.

The airlock hatch had a panel with a button inset beside it. Lona pulled out a screwdriver, tightened in the appropriate blade, and set it into the screw. It whined twice, and she lifted the panel away, handing it to Dar. Dar watched her clip a couple of leads in.

Above them, a twelve-foot parabolic dish moaned as it rotated a few degrees, and stopped.

Lona leaped back as though she’d been stabbed. Dar didn’t blame her; it was all he could do to keep from dropping the plate. He wished he had; then he couldn’t have heard the antenna’s moan, since the sound conducted into his suit through the wires holding the plate.

Whitey leaned over, touching his helmet against Lona’s. After a minute, she nodded, then stepped grimly back to the airlock. She took the plate from Dar and replaced it. Then she pressed the button, and the hatch slowly swung open. She gestured to Dar, and he stepped in. The others followed, Lona last. Whitey pressed a plate in the wall, and the hatch swung shut. Dar waited, fidgeting. Finally, the inner hatch opened. He stepped through into darkness, cracked his helmet seal, and tilted it back. He turned as a glow-light lit in Whitey’s hand, saw Lona tilting her helmet back as Father Marco closed the airlock.

“What’re we gonna do about the bypass?” Dar asked.

“Leave it there.” Lona shrugged. “Can’t be helped.”

“Security patrols all the locks regularly,” supplied Sam the bureaucrat. “They’ll find it within a few days.”

“Not exactly what I’d call a cheery thought, but it lightens the conscience. What’d you do to make that microwave dish swing around, Lona?”

“Nothing,” Whitey answered. “That dish was beaming commercial 3DT programming down to the Terran satellites. When it gets done feeding its schedule to one satellite, it rotates to lock onto another one, and starts the whole feed all over again.”

“3DT?” Dar frowned. “Why do they feed it from the moon?”

“Because that’s where they make the programs, innocent!” Sam snorted.

Whitey nodded. “It takes a lot of room for enough 3DT sound stages to make new programming for a hundred twenty channels each, for twenty-six main cultures—and they have to make new stuff constantly. There just wasn’t enough room for it in the major cities. So, bit by bit, the production companies shifted up here to Luna, where real estate was very cheap. The whole entertainment industry for the entire I.D.E. is in the moon now.”

“Some say it belonged there all along, anyway,” Lona muttered.

“Oh.” Dar mulled it over. “So your publisher’s offices are up here, too?”

“No, the print industry stayed Earthbound.”

“Oh.” Dar looked around at the rough-hewn tunnel walls scored with the screw-tracks of a laser-borer. “Well, not much we can do here, is there? I suppose our next step is to hop a shuttle to Terra.”

“Wrong.” Whitey shook his head. “That asteroid miner has probably sung the Solar Patrol a whole opera by now. Every security guard on the moon will have memorized little sketches of us. We’ve got to establish some kind of cover identities first, not to mention something by way of disguises.”

Dar felt his stomach sink. “I should’ve known it couldn’t be something straightforward and simple.”

“Not on Terra,” Sam agreed, “and the moon’s just as bad.” She turned to Whitey. “What kind of cover did you have in mind?”

“I didn’t.” Whitey started climbing out of his gear. “I recommend we rack these suits and find some place to hole up while we think about it.”

Whitey had indeed emptied out his purse for the old miner—but he had another one hidden inside his belt. A brief stop at a department store turned up a coiffeured wig and translucent dress for Sam, some hair dye and baggy tunic-and-trousers for Lona, some more hair dye and business outfits for the men. A somewhat longer stop at a comfort station produced remarkable changes in their appearance.

Whitey lined them up in the hallway, looked them over, and nodded. “You’ll do. Just barely, maybe, but you’ll do. Now, the odds are that your prints are on file somewhere—oh, you’re sure of it, Dar? Well, the rest of you don’t take chances, either. Don’t put your thumbprint to anything. Don’t look into anything that might want to scan your retinas, either—no peekholes in amusement galleries, eyepiece 3DT viewers, or lens-fitting scopes. Understand? Good. Because you’re in the Big Sapphire’s computer net now, folks, and every step you take is liable to monitoring by a computer tied into Terra Central.”

“Is it really that bad?” Dar asked.

“Worse,” Sam confirmed.

Whitey nodded again. “Have no illusions, folks. Our chances of getting away free, back to the colony planets, are slightly worse than a dinosaur’s caught in a glacier. I can only hope the gamble’s worth the share-time. Okay—from now on, we’re a free-lance production crew, looking for work. Anything I say about you, just confirm it, and don’t look surprised. That includes your names; I’ll be thinking up new ones for you as we go along. Ready? March!”

The “march” took them to a twenty-foot-high façade sheared out of the lunar rock, decorated with the modest gleam that comes of vast wealth, and the words “Occidental Productions, Inc.” carved over the doorway and sheathed in platinum.

“This’s just the production house,” Whitey explained. “Manufactures most of the entertainment for one of the anglophone channels.”

As they passed through the door, Dar found himself somehow totally certain that each person’s height, weight, build, and coloring was registering in a computer somewhere deep inside the complex, which was trying to correlate it with the descriptions of all known criminals who might have a grudge against OCI. It was almost enough to make him turn right around and try to hijack the next outgoing spacer.