Ben Bova - The Rock Rats

To Charles N. Brown and the Locus team.

Amanda clutched at her husband’s arm when Martin Humphries strode into the wedding reception, unannounced and uninvited.

The Pelican Bar went totally silent. The crowd that had been noisily congratulating Amanda and Lars Fuchs with lewd jokes and lunar “rocket juice” froze as if somebody had doused the place with liquid nitrogen. Fuchs patted his wife’s hand gently, protectively, as he scowled up at Humphries. Even Pancho Lane, never at a loss for a quip, simply stood by the bar, one hand holding her drink, the other balling into a fist.

The Pelican wasn’t Humphries’s kind of place. It was the workers’ bar, the one joint in Selene’s underground warren of tunnels and cubicles where the people who lived and worked on the Moon could come for relaxation and the company of their fellow Lunatics. Suits like Humphries did their drinking in the fancy lounge up in the Grand Plaza, with the rest of the executives and the tourists.

Humphries seemed oblivious to their enmity, totally at ease in this sea of hostile stares, even though he looked terribly out of place, a smallish manicured man wearing an impeccably tailored imperial blue business suit in the midst of the younger, boisterous miners and tractor operators in their shabby, faded coveralls and their earrings of asteroidal stones. Even the women looked stronger, more muscular than Humphries.

But if Humphries’s round, pink-cheeked face seemed soft and bland, his eyes were something else altogether. Gray and pitiless, like chips of flint, the same color as the rock walls and low ceiling of the underground bar itself.

He walked straight through the silent, sullen crowd to the table where Amanda and Fuchs sat.

“I know I wasn’t invited to your party,” he said in a calm, strong voice. “I hope you’ll forgive me for crashing. I won’t stay but a minute.”

“What do you want?” Fuchs asked, scowling, not moving from his chair beside his bride. He was a broad, dark-haired bear of a man, thick in the torso, with short arms and legs heavily muscled. The tiny stud in his left ear was a diamond that he had bought during his student days in Switzerland.

With a rueful smile, Humphries said, “I want your wife, but she’s chosen you instead.”

Fuchs slowly got up from his chair, big thick-fingered hands clenching into fists. Every eye in the pub was on him, every breath held.

Amanda glanced from Fuchs to Humphries and back again. She looked close to panic. She was a strikingly beautiful woman, with a wide-eyed innocent face and lusciously curved figure that made men fantasize and women stare with unalloyed envy. Even in a plain white jumpsuit she looked utterly stunning.

“Lars,” Amanda whispered. “Please.”

Humphries raised both hands, palms out. “Perhaps I phrased myself poorly. I didn’t come here for a fight.”

“Then why did you come?” Fuchs asked in a low growl.

“To give you a wedding present,” Humphries replied, smiling again. “To show that there’s no hard feelings … so to speak.”

“A present?” Amanda asked.

“If you’ll accept it from me,” said Humphries.

“What is it?” Fuchs asked.

“Starpower 1.”

Amanda’s china blue eyes went so wide that white showed all around them. “The ship?”

“It’s yours, if you’ll have it. I’ll even pay for the refurbishment necessary to make it spaceworthy again.”

The crowd stirred, sighed, began muttering. Fuchs looked down at Amanda, saw that she was awed by Humphries’s offer.

Humphries said, “You can use it to return to the Belt and start mining asteroids. There’s plenty of rocks out there for you to claim and develop.”

Despite himself, Fuchs was impressed. “That’s… very generous of you, sir.”

Humphries put on his smile again. With a careless wave of his hand, he said, “You newlyweds need some source of income. Go out and claim a couple of rocks, bring back their ores, and you’ll be fixed for life.”

“Very generous,” Fuchs muttered.

Humphries put out his hand. Fuchs hesitated a moment, then gripped it in his heavy paw; engulfed it, actually. “Thank you, Mr. Humphries,” he said, pumping Humphries’s arm vigorously. “Thank you so much.”

Amanda said nothing.

Humphries disengaged himself and, without another word, walked out of the bar. The crowd stirred at last and broke into dozens of conversations. Several people crowded around Fuchs and Amanda, congratulating them, offering to work on their craft. The Pelican’s proprietor declared drinks on the house and there was a general rush toward the bar.

Pancho Lane, though, sidled through the crowd and out the door into the tunnel, where Humphries was walking alone toward the power stairs that led down to his mansion at Selene’s lowest level. In a few long-legged lunar strides she caught up to him.

“I thought they threw you out of Selene,” she said.

Humphries had to look up at her. Pancho was lean and lanky, her skin a light mocha, not much darker than a white woman would get in the burning sunshine of her native west Texas. She kept her hair cropped close, a tight dark skullcap of ringlets.

He made a sour face. “My lawyers are working on an appeal. They can’t exile me without due process.”

“And that could take years, huh?”

“At the very least.”

Pancho would gladly have stuffed him into a rocket and fired him off to Pluto. Humphries had sabotaged Starpower 1 on its first—and, so far, only—mission to the Belt. Dan Randolph had died because of him. It took an effort of will for her to control her temper.

As calmly as she could manage, Pancho said, “You were pretty damn generous back there.”

“A gesture to true love,” he replied, without slowing his pace.

“Yeah. Sure.” Pancho easily matched his stride.

“What else?”

“For one thing, that spacecraft ain’t yours to give away. It belongs to—”

“Belonged,” Humphries snapped. “Past tense. We wrote it off the books.”

“Wrote it off? When? How in hell can you do that?”

Humphries actually laughed. “You see, Ms. Director? There are a few tricks to being on the board that a greasemonkey like you doesn’t know about.”

“I guess,” Pancho admitted. “But I’ll learn ’em.”

“Of course you will.”

Pancho was newly elected to the board of directors of Astro Manufacturing, over Humphries’s stern opposition. It had been Dan Randolph’s dying wish.

“So we’ve written off Starpower 1 after just one flight?”

“It’s already obsolescent,” said Humphries. “The ship proved the fusion drive technology. Now we can build better spacecraft, specifically designed for asteroid mining.”

“And you get to play Santy Claus for Amanda and Lars.”

Humphries shrugged.

The two of them walked along the nearly-empty tunnel until they came to the power stairs leading downward.

Pancho grabbed Humphries by the shoulder, stopping him at the top of the moving stairs. “I know what you’re up to,” she said.