Dark Benediction

THE LINEMAN

It was August on Earth, and the newscast reported a heat wave in the Midwest: the worst since 2065. A letter from Mike Tremini’s sister in Abilene said the chickens were dying and there wasn’t enough water for the stock. It was the only letter that came for any of Novotny’s men during that fifty-shift hitch on the Copernicus Trolley Project. Everybody read it and luxuriated in sympathy for Kansas and sick chickens.

It was August on Luna too. The Perseids rained down with merciless impartiality; and, from his perch atop the hundred-foot steel skeleton, the lineman stopped cranking the jack and leaned out against his safety belt to watch two demolition men carrying a corpse out toward Fissure Seven. The corpse wore a deflated pressure suit. Torn fabric dragged the ground. The man in the rear carried the corpse’s feet like a pair of wheelbarrow handles, and he continually tripped over the loose fabric; his head waggled inside his helmet as if he cursed softly and continuously to himself. The corpse’s helmet was translucent with an interior coating of pink ice, making it look like a comic figure in a strawberry ice cream ad, a chocolate ragamuffin with a scoop for a head.

The lineman stared after the funeral party for a time until the team-pusher, who had been watching the slack span of 800 MGM aluminum conductors that snaked half a mile back toward the preceding tower, glanced up at the hesitant worker and began bellowing into his microphone. The lineman answered briefly, inspected the pressure gauge of his suit, and began cranking the jack again. With every dozen turns of the crank, the long snaking cable crept tighter across the lunar plain, straightening and lifting almost imperceptibly until at last the center-point cleared the ground and the cable swooped in a long graceful catenary between the towers. It trembled with fitful glistenings in the harsh sunglare. The lineman ignored the cable as he turned the crank. He squinted across the plains at the meteor display.

The display was not spectacular. It could be detected only as a slight turbulence in the layer of lunar dust that covered the ground, and an occasional dust geyser where a pea sized bit of sky debris exploded into the crust at thirty miles per second. Sometimes the explosion was bright and lingering, but more often there was only a momentary incandescence quickly obscured by dust. The lineman watched it with nervous eyes. There was small chance of being hit by a stone of consequential size, but the eternal pelting by meteoric dust, though too fine to effect a puncture, could weaken the fabric of a suit and lead to leaks and blowouts.

The team-pusher keyed his mic switch again and called to the lineman on the tower. “Keep your eyes on that damn jack, Relke! That clamp looks like she’s slipping from here.”

The lineman paused to inspect the mechanism. “Looks OK to me,” he answered. “How tight do I drag this one up?”

The pusher glanced at the sagging span of steel-reinforced aluminum cable. “It’s a short stretch. Not too critical. What’s the tension now?”

The lineman consulted a dial on the jack. “Going on forty-two hundred pounds, Joe.”

“Crank her up to five thousand and leave it,” said the pusher. “Let C-shift sag it in by the tables if they don’t like it.”

“Yokay. Isn’t it quitting time?”

“Damn near. My suit stinks like we’re on overtime. Come on down when you reel that one in. I’m going back to the sleep wagon and get blown clear.” The pusher shut off his oxygen while he transferred his hose connections from the main feeder supply to the walk-around bottles on his suit. He signaled “quitting time” at the men on the far tower, then started moon-loping his way across the shaggy terrain toward the train of rolling barracks and machinery that moved with the construction crew as the 200 kilovolt transmission line inched its way across the lunar landscape.

The lineman glanced up absently at the star-stung emptiness of space. Motion caught his eye. He watched with a puzzled frown, then hitched himself around to call after the departing team-pusher.

“Hey, Joe!”

The pusher stopped on a low rise to look back.

“Relke?” he asked, uncertain of the source of the voice.

“Yeah. Is that a ship up there?” The lineman pointed upward toward the east.

“I don’t see it. Where?”

“Between Arcturus and Serpens. I thought I saw it move.”

The pusher stood on the low tongue of lava and watched the heavens for a time. “Maybe—maybe not. So what if it is, Relke?”

“Well…” The lineman paused, keying his mic nervously. “Looks to me like it’s headed the wrong direction for Crater City. I mean—”

The pusher barked a short curse. “I’m just about fed up with that superstitious drivel!” he snapped. “There aren’t any non-human ships, Relke. And there aren’t any non-humans.”

“I didn’t say—”

“No, but you had it in mind.” The pusher gave him a scornful look and hiked on toward the caterpillar train.

“Yah. If you say so, Joe,” Relke muttered to himself. He glanced again at the creeping point of light in the blackness; he shrugged; he began cranking up the slack span again. But the creeping point kept drawing his gaze while he cranked. When he looked at the tension indicator, it read 5,600 pounds. He grunted his annoyance, reversed the jack ratchet, and began letting out the extra 600 pounds.

The shift-change signal was already beeping in his headsets by the time he had eased it back down to 5,000, and the C-shift crewmen were standing around the foot of the tower jeering at him from below.

“Get off it, boy. Give the men a chance.”

“Come on down, Relke. You can let go. It ain’t gonna drop.”

He ignored the razzing and climbed down the trainward side of the tower: Larkin and Kunz walked briskly around to meet him. He jumped the last twenty-five feet, hoping to evade them, but they were waiting for him when his boots hit the ground.

“We want a little talk with you, Relke, my lad,” came Larkin’s rich, deceptively affable baritone.

“Sorry, Lark, it’s late and I—” He tried to sidestep them, but they danced in and locked arms with him, one on each side.

“Like Lark told you, we want a little talk,” grunted Kunz.

“Sure, Harv—but not right now. Drop by my bunk tank when you’re off shift. I been in this straight jacket for seven hours. It doesn’t smell exactly fresh in here.”

“Then, Sonny, you should learn to control yourself in your suit,” said Larkin, his voice all mellifluent with, smiles and avuncular pedagoguery. “Let’s take him, Harv.”

They caught him in a double armlock, hoisted him off the ground, and started carrying him toward a low lava ridge that lay a hundred yards to the south of the tower. He could not kick effectively because of the stiffness of the suit. He wrenched one hand free and fumbled at the channel selector of his suit radio. Larkin jerked his stub antenna free from its mounting before Relke could put in a call for help.

“Tch tch tch,” said Larkin, waggling his head.

They carried him across the ridge and set him on his feet again, out of sight of the camp. “Sit down, Sonny. We have seeeerious matters to discuss with you.”

Relke heard him faintly, even without the antenna, but he saw no reason to acknowledge. When he failed to answer, Kunz produced a set of jumper wires from his knee pocket and clipped their suit audio circuits into a three-way intercom, disconnecting the plate lead from an r.f. stage to insure privacy.

“You guys give me a pain in the hump,” growled the lineman. “What do you want this time? You know damn well a dead radio is against safety rules.”

“It is? You ever hear of such a rule, Kunz?”

“Naah. Or maybe I did, at that. It’s to make things easy for work spies, psych checkers, and time-and-motion men, ain’t that it?”

“Yeah. You a psych checker or a time-and-motion man, Relke?”

“Hell, you guys known damn well I’m not—”

“Then what are you stalling about?” Larkin’s baritone lost its mellowness and became an ominous growl. “You came nosing around, asking questions about the Party. So we let you in on it. We took you to a cell meeting. You said you wanted to join. So we let you in on two more meetings. Then you chickened out. We don’t like that, Relke. It smells. It smells like a dirty informing rat!”

“I’m no damn informer!”

“Then why did you welsh?”

“I didn’t welsh. I never said I’d join. You asked me if I was in favor of getting the Schneider-Volkov Act repealed. I said ‘yes.’ I still say ‘yes.’ That doesn’t mean I want to join the Party.”

“Why not, Relke?”

“Well, there’s the fifty bucks, for one thing.”

“Wh-a-a-at! One shift’s wages? Hell, if that’s all that’s stopping you—Kunz, let’s pay his fifty bucks for him, okay?”

“Sure. We’ll pay your way in, Relke. I don’t hold it against a man if he’s a natural born tightwad.”

“Yeah,” said Larkin. “All you gotta do is sign up, Sonny. Fifty bucks, hell—that’s less than union dues. If you can call that yellow-bellied obscenity a union. Now how about it, Relke?”

Behind the dark lenses of his glare goggles, Relke’s eyes scanned the ground for a weapon. He spotted a jagged shard of volcanic glass and edged toward it.

“Well, Relke?”

“No deal.”

“Why not?”

“That’s easy. I plan on getting back to Earth someday. Conspiracy to commit mutiny rates the death penalty.”

“Hear what he said, Lark? He calls it mutiny.”

“Yeah. Teacher’s little monitor.”

“C’mere, informer.”

They approached him slowly, wearing tight smiles. Relke dived for the shard of glass. The jumper wires jerked tight and broke loose, throwing them off balance for a moment. He came up with the glass shard in one fist and backed away. They stopped. The weapon was as good as a gun. A slit suit was the ultimate threat. Relke tore the dangling wires loose from his radio and backed toward the top of the ridge. They watched him somberly, not speaking. Larkin waved the lineman’s stub antenna and looked at him questioningly. Relke held out a glove and waited for him to toss it. Larkin threw it over his shoulder in the opposite direction. They turned their backs on him. He loped on back toward the gravy train, knowing that the showdown had been no more than postponed. Next time would be worse. They meant to incriminate him, as a kind of insurance against his informing. He had no desire to be incriminated, nor to inform—but try to make them believe that.

Before entering the clean-up tank, he stopped to glance up at the heavens between Arcturus and Serpens. The creeping spot of light had vanished—or moved far from where he had seen it. He did not pause to search. He checked his urine bottle in the airlock, connected his hoses to the wall valves, and blew the barn-smell out of his suit. The blast of fresh air was like icy wine in his throat. He enjoyed it for a moment, then went inside the tank for a bath.

Novotny was waiting for him in the B-shift line crew’s bunkroom. The small pusher looked sore. He stopped pacing when Relke entered.

“Hi, Joe.”

Novotny didn’t answer. He watched while Relke stowed his gear, got out an electric razor, and went to the wall mirror to grind off the blond bristles.

“Where you been?” Novotny grunted.

“On the line where you saw me. I jacked that last span up tighter than you told me. I had to let her back down a little. Made me late getting in.”

The pusher’s big hand hit him like a club between the shoulder blades, grabbed a handful of coverall, and jerked him roughly around. The razor fell to the end of the cord. Novotny let go in back and grabbed a handful in front. He shoved the lineman back against the wall, Relke gaped at him blankly.

“Don’t give me that wide blue-eyed dumb stare, you sonofabitch!” the pusher snapped. “I saw you go over the hill with Kunz and Larkin.”

Relke’s Adam’s apple did a quick genuflection. “If you saw me go, you musta seen how I went.”

Novotny shook him. “What’d they want with you?” he barked.

“Nothing.”

Joe’s eyes turned to dark slits. “Relke, I told you, I told the rest of my men. I told you what I’d do to any sonofabitch on my team that got mixed up with the Party. Pappy don’t allow that crap. Now shall I do it to you here, or do you want to go down to the dayroom?”

“Honest, Joe, I’m not mixed up in it. I got interested in what Larkin had to say—back maybe six months ago. But I never signed up. I never even meant to.”

“Six months? Was that about the time you got your Dear John letter from Fran?”

“Right after that, Joe.”

“Well, that figures. So what’s Larkin after you about now?”

“I guess he wonders why I asked questions but never joined.”

“I don’t want your guesses. What did he say out there, and what did you say to him?”

“He wanted to know why I didn’t sign up, that’s all.”

“And you told him what?”

“No deal.”

“So?”

“So, I came on back and took a shower.”

Novotny stared at him for a few seconds. “You’re lying,” he grunted, but released him anyway. “OK, Relke, but you better listen to this. You’re a good lineman. You’ve stayed out of trouble. You get along with the rest of the team. If you got out of line in some other way, I’d figure it was about time you let off some steam. I’d stick up for you. But get mixed up with the Party—and I’ll stomp you. When I’m through stomping you, I’ll report you off my team. Understand?”

“Sure, Joe.”

Novotny grunted and stepped away from him. “No hard feelings, Relke.”

“Naah.” The lineman went back to the mirror and started shaving again. That his hand remained steady was a surprise to him. Novotny had never before laid a hand on him, and Relke hoped the first time would be the last. He had watched Joe mop up the dayroom with Benet for playing fast and loose with safety rules while working a hotstick job, and it put Benet in sick bay for three days. Novotny was small, but he was built like a bunker. He was a fair overseer, but he handled his men in the only way he knew how to handle them on such a job. He expected self-discipline and self-imposed obedience, and when he didn’t get it, he took it as a personal insult and a challenge to a duel. Out on the lava, men were pressure-packed, hermetically sealed charges of high explosive blood and bone; one man’s folly could mean the death of several others, and there was no recourse to higher authority or admonitions from the dean, with a team on the lava.

“What’s your grudge against the Party, Joe?” Relke asked while he scraped under his neck.

“No grudge. Not as long as Benet, Braxton, Relke, Henderson, Beasley, Tremini, and Novotny stay out of it. No grudge at all. I’m for free love and nickel beer as much as the next guy. But I’m not for getting my ass shot off. I’m not for fouling up the whole Lunar project just to get the Schneider-Volkov Act repealed, when you can’t get it repealed that way anyhow. I’m not for facing a General Space Court and getting sentenced to blowout. That’s all. No grudge.”

“What makes you think a general strike couldn’t force repeal, Joe?”

The pusher spat contemptuously at the disposal chute and missed. “A general strike on the Lunar Project? Hell, Relke, use your head. It’d never work. A strike against the government is rough to pull off, even on Earth. Out here, it’d be suicide. The Party’s so busy yelling about who’s right and who’s wrong and who’s getting a raw deal—and what they ought to do about it—that they forget the important point: who’s in the driver’s seat. So what if we shut down Copernicus and all the projects like this one? Copernicus has a closed ecology, its own plant animal cycle, sure. We don’t need much from Earth to keep it running—but there’s the hitch: don’t need much. The ecology slips out of balance now and then. Every month or two it has to get a transfusion from Earth. Compost bacteria, or a new strain of algae because our strain starts mutating—it’s always something like that. If a general strike cut us off from Earth, the World Parliament could just sit passing solemn gas through their waffle-bottom chairs and wait. They could debate us to death in two months.”

“But world opinion—”

“Hell, they make world opinion, not us.”

Relke stopped shaving and looked around. “Joe?”

“Yah.”

“Kunz and Larkin’d kill me for telling you. Promise not to say anything?”

The pusher glowered at him for a moment. “Look, Relke, nobody brutalizes Joe Novotny’s men. I’ll handle Kunz and Larkin. You’d better spill. You think it’s informing if you tell me?”

Relke shook his head. “Guess not. OK, Joe. It’s this: I’ve been to three cell meetings. I heard some stuff. I think the strike’s supposed to start come sundown.”

“I heard that too. If it does, we’ll all be—” He broke off. The cabin’s intercom was suddenly blaring.

Attention, all personnel, attention. Unidentified bird at thirty degrees over horizon, south-southwest, braking fire for landing in our vicinity. All men on the line take cover. Safety team to the ready room on the double. Rescue team scramble, rescue team scramble.

Relke rolled the cord neatly around the razor and stared at it. “I’ll be damned,” he muttered. “It was a ship I saw. What ship would be landing way the hell out here?” He glanced around at Novotny.

The pusher was already at the periscope viewer, his face buried in the sponge rubber eyepieces. He cranked it around in a search pattern toward the south-southwest.

“See anything?”

“Not yet… yeah, there she is. Braking in fast—now what the hell!”

“Give me a look.”

They traded turns at the viewer.

“She’s a fusion furnace job. Cold fusion. Look at that blue tail.”

“Why land way out here?”

The hatch burst open and the rest of the men spilled in from the dayroom. A confused babble filled the cabin. “I tole ya and I tole ya!” said Bama Braxton. “That theah mine shaff at Tycho is the play-yun evvy-dance. Gennlemen, weah about to have stranjuhs in ouah midst.”

“Cut that superstitious bullspit, Brax,” Novotny grunted. “There aren’t any aliens. We got enough bogeys around here without you scaring the whoop out of yourself with that line of crap.”

“Theah ahn’t no aliens!” Braxton howled. “Theah ahn’t no aliens? Joe, you blind?”

“He right, Joe,” said Lije Henderson, Bama’s chief crony. “That mine shaff speak fo’ itself.”

“That mine’s a million years old,” Joe snorted, “and they’re not even sure it’s a mine. I said drop it.”

“That ship speak fo’ itself!”

“Drop it! This isn’t the first time a ship overshot Crater City and had to set down someplace else. Ten to one it’s full of Parliament waffle-bottoms, all complaining their heads off. Maybe they’ve got a meteor puncture and need help quick.”

The closed-circuit intercom suddenly buzzed, and Novotny turned to see the project engineer’s face on the small viewer.

“Are all your men up and dressed, Joe?” he asked when Novotny had answered the call.

“EVERYBODY PIPE DOWN! Sorry, Suds. No—well, except for Beasley, they’re up. Beasley’s logging sack time.”

“The hell Beasley is!” complained Beasley from his bunk. “With you verbing nouns of a noun all yapping like—”

“Shut up, Bee; Go on, Suds.”

“We got contact with that ship. They’ve got reactor troubles. I tried to get Crater City on the line, but there’s an outage on the circuit somewhere. I need some men to take a tractor and backtrack toward Copernicus. Look for a break in the circuit.”

“Why call me?”

“The communication team is tied up, Joe.”

“Yeah, but I’m not a communic—”

“Hell!” Brodanovitch exploded. “It doesn’t take an electronics engineer to splice a broken wire, does it?”

“OK, Suds, we’ll go. Take it easy. What about that ship?”

The engineer paused to mop his face. He looked rather bleak suddenly. “I don’t know if it’s safe to tell you. But you’ll find out anyhow. Watch out for a riot.”

“Not a runaway reactor—”

“Worse, Joe. Women.”

“WOMEN!” It was a high piping scream from Beasley. “Did he say women?” Beasley was out of bed and into his boots.

“WOMEN!” They came crowding around the intercom screen.

“Back off!” Novotny barked. “Go on, Suds.”

“It’s a troupe of entertainers, Joe. Clearance out of Algiers. They say they’re scheduled for a performance in Crater City, come nightfall. That’s all I know, except they’re mostly women.”

“Algiers! Jeez! Belly dancers…” The room was a confused babble.

“Wait a minute,” said Suds. His face slid off the screen as he talked to somebody in the boss tank. Moments later he was back. “Their ship just put down, Joe. Looks like a safe landing. The rescue team is out there. You’ll pass the ship on the way up the line. Get moving.”

“Sure, Suds.” Novotny switched off and looked around at the sudden scramble. “I’ll be damned if you do!” he yelled. “You can’t all go. Beasley, Henderson—”

“No, bigod you don’t, Joe!” somebody howled. “Draw straws!”

“OK. I can take three of you, no more.”

They drew. Chance favored Relke, Braxton, and Henderson. Minutes later they crowded into the electric runabout and headed southeast along the line of stately steel towers that filed back toward Copernicus. The ship was in sight. Taller than the towers, the nacelles of the downed bird rose into view beyond the broken crest of a distant lava butte. She was a freight shuttle, space-constructed and not built for landing on Earth. Relke eyed the emblem on the hull of her crew nacelle while the runabout nosed onto the strip of graded roadbed that paralleled the transmission line back to Crater City. The emblem was unfamiliar.

“That looks like the old RS Voltaire,” said the lineman. “Somebody must have bought her, Joe. Converted her to passenger service.”

“Maybe. Now keep an eye on the telephone line.”

The pusher edged the runabout toward the trolley rods. The overhead power transmission line had been energized by sections during the construction of it, and the line was hot as far as the road had been extended. Transformer stations fed energy from the 200 kilovolt circuit into the 1,500 volt trolley bars that ran down the center of the roadbed. Novotny stopped the vehicle at the end of the finished construction and sidled it over until the feeler arms crackled against the electrified bus rods and locked in place. He switched the batteries to “charge” and drove on again.

“Relke, you’re supposed to be watching that talk circuit, not the ship.”

“OK, Joe, in a minute.”

“You horny bastard, you can’t see their bloomers through that titanium hull. Put the glasses down and watch the line.”

“OK, just a minute. I’m trying to find out who owns her. The emblem’s—”

“Now, dammit!”

“No marking on her except her serial number and a picture of a rooster—and something else that’s been painted over.”

“RELKE!”

“Sure, Joe, OK.”

“Girls!” marveled Lije Henderson. “Whenna lass time you touch a real girl, Brax?”

“Don’ ass me, Lije! I sweah, if I evum touch a lady’s li’l pink fingah right now, I could—”

“Hell, I could jus’ sittin’ heah lookin’ at that ship. Girls. God! Lemme have those glasses, Relke.”

Novotny braked the runabout to a halt. “All right, get your helmets on,” he snapped. “Pressure your suits. I’m going to pump air out.”

“Whatthehell! Why, Joe?”

“So you can get out of this heap. You’re walking back. I’ll go on and find the break myself.”

Braxton squealed like a stuck pig; a moment later all three of them were on him. “Please, Joe…. Fuh the love a heaven, Joe, have a haht…. Gawd, women!”

“Get off my lap, you sonofabitch!” he barked at Braxton, who sat on top of him, grabbing at the controls. “Wait—I’ll tell you what. Put the damn binoculars down and watch the line. Don’t say another damn word about dames until we find the break and splice it. Swear to that, you bastards, and you can stay. I’ll stop at their ship on our way back, and then you can stare all you want to. OK?”

“Joe, I sweah on a stack of—”

“All right, then watch the line.”

They drove on in silence. The ship had fired down on a flat stretch of ground about four miles from the construction train, a few hundred yards from the trolley road. They stared at it as the runabout crawled past, and Novotny let the vehicle glide to a halt.

“The ramp’s out and the ladder’s down,” said Relke. “Somebody must have come out.”

“Unglue your eyes from that bird and look around,” Novotny grunted. “You’ll see why the ladder’s down.” He jerked his thumb toward a row of vehicles parked near the massive ship.

“The rescue team’s wagons. But wheah’s the rescue team?”

No crewmen were visible in the vicinity of the ship or the parked runabouts. Novotny switched on the radio, punched the channel selector, and tried a call, reading the call code off the side of the safety runabout.

“Double Able Niner, this is One Four William. Talk back, please.”

They sat in silence. There was nothing but the hiss of solar interference from the radio and the sound of heavy breathing from the men.

“Those lucky ole bastands!” Braxton moaned. “You know wheah they gone, gennlemen? I know wheah they gone. They clambered right up the ladies’ ladduh. I taya, alright—”

“Knock it off. Let’s get moving. Tell us on the way back.”

“Those lucky ole—”

The runabout moved ahead across the glaring land. Relke: “Joe?”

“Yeah?”

“Joe, on our way back, can we go over and see if they’ll let us climb aboard?”

Novotny chuckled. “I thought you were off dames, Relke. I thought when Fran sent you the Dear John, you said dames were all a bunch of—”

“Damn, Joe! You could have talked all day without saying ‘Fran.’”

The lineman’s throat worked a brief spasm, and he stared out across the broken moonscape with dismal eyes.

“Sorry I mentioned it,” Novotny grunted. “But sure, I guess one of us could walk over and ask if they mind a little more company on board.”

Lije: “One of us! Who frinstance—you?”

Joe: “No, you can draw for it—not now, you creep! Watch the line.”

They watched in silence. The communication circuit was loosely strung on temporary supports beside the road-bed. The circuit was the camp’s only link with Crater City, for the horizon interposed a barrier to radio reception, such reception being possible only during the occasional overhead transits of the lunar satellite station which carried message-relaying equipment. The satellite’s orbit had been shifted to cover a Russian survey crew near Clavius, however, and its passages over the Trolley Project were rare.

“I jus’ thought,” Lije muttered suddenly, smacking his fist in his palm.

Relke: “Isn’t that getting a little drastic, Lije?”

“I jus’ thought. If we fine that outage, ’less don’ fix it!”

Joe: “What kind of crazy talk is that?”

“Lissen, you know what ole Suds want to call Crater City fo’? He want to call ’em so’s they’ll Senn a bunch of tank wagons down heah and tote those gals back to town. Thass what he want to call ’em fo’!”

Braxton slapped his forehead. “Luvva God! He’s right. Y’all heah that? Is he right, Joe, or is he right?”

“I guess that’s about the size of it.”

“We mi’not evum get a look at ’em!” Braxton wailed. “Less don’ fix it, Joe!”

“I sweah, if I evum touch one of theah precious li’l fingahs, I’d—”

“Shut up and watch the line.”

Relke: “Why didn’t he use a bridge on the circuit and find out where the break was, Joe?”

“A bridge won’t work too well on that line.”

“How fah we gonna keep on drivin’, Joe?”

“Until we find the break. Relke, turn up that blower a little. It’s beginning to stink in here.”

“Fresh ayah!” sighed Braxton as the breeze hit them from the fan.

Relke: “I wonder if it’s fresh. I keep wondering if it doesn’t come out foul from the purifier, but we’ve been living in it too long to be able to tell. I even dream about it. I dream about going back to Earth and everybody runs away from me coughing and holding their noses. I can’t get close to a girl even in a dream anymore.”

“Ah reckon a head-shrinker could kill hisself a-laughin’ over that one.”

“Don’t talk to me about head-shrinkers.”

“Watch the damn line.”

Braxton: “Talk about dreams! Listen, I had one lass sleep shift that I oughta tell y’all about. Gennlemen, if she wasn’t the ohnriest li’l—”

Novotny cursed softly under his breath and tried to keep his eyes on both the road and the communications circuit.

Relke: “Let ’em jabber, Joe. I’ll watch it.”

Joe: “It’s bad enough listening to a bunch of jerks in a locker room bragging about the dames they’ve made. But Braxton! Braxton’s got to brag about his dreams. Christ! Send me back to Earth. I’m fed up.”

“Aww, Joe, we got nothin’ else to talk about up heah.”

They drove for nearly an hour and a half without locating the outage. Novotny pulled the runabout off the hot trolleys and coasted to a stop. “I’m deflating the cab,” he told them. “Helmets on, pressure up your suits.”

“Joe, weah not walkin’ back from heah!” Bama said flatly.

“Oh, blow yourself out, Brax!” the pusher said irritably. “I’m getting out for a minute. C’mon, get ready for vacuum.”

“Why?”

“Don’t say why to me outside the sleep-tank, corn pone! Just do it.”

“Damn! Novotny’s in a humah! Les say ‘yessah’ to him, Bama.”

“You too, Lije!”

“Yessah.”

“Can it.”

Novotny got the pressure pumped down to two pounds, and then let the rest of the air spew out slowly into vacuum. He climbed out of the runabout and loped over to the low-hanging spans of the communication circuit. He tapped into it with the suit audio and listened for a moment. Relke saw his lips moving as he tried a call, but nothing came through the lineman’s suit radio.

After about five minutes, he quit talking and beckoned the rest of them back to the runabout.

“That was Brodanovitch,” he said after they were inside and the pressure came up again. “So the circuit break must be on up ahead.”

“Oh, hell, we’ll nevah get a look at those ladies!”

“Calm down. We’re going back—” He paused a moment until the elated whooping died down. “Suds says let them send a crew out of Copernicus to fix it. I guess there’s no hurry about moving those people out of there.”

“The less hurry, the bettuh… hot dawg! C’mon, Joe, roll it!” Bama and Lije sat rubbing their hands. Only Relke seemed detached, his enthusiasm apparently cooled. He sat staring out at the meteor display on the dust-flats. He kept rubbing absently at the ring finger of his left hand. There was no ring there, nor even a mark on the skin. The pusher’s eye fell on the slow nervous movement.

“Fran again?” Joe grunted.

The lineman nodded.

“I got my Dear John note three years ago, Relke.”

Relke looked around at him in surprise. “I didn’t know you were married, Joe.”

“I guess I wasn’t as married as I thought I was.”

Relke stared outside again for awhile. “How do you get over it?”

“You don’t. Not up here on Luna. The necessary and sometimes sufficient condition for getting over a dame is the availability of other dames. So, you don’t.”

“Hell, Joe!”

“Yeah.”

“The movement’s not such a bad idea.”

“Can it!” the pusher snapped.

“It’s true. Let women come to Crater City, or send us home. It makes sense.”

“You’re only looking at the free love and nickel beer end of it, Relke. You can’t raise kids in low gravity. There are five graves back in Crater City to prove it. Kids’ graves. Six feet long. They grow themselves to death.”

“I know but…” He shrugged uncomfortably and watched the meteor display again.

“When do we draw?” said Lije. “Come on Joe, less draw for who goes to talk ouah way onto the ship.”

Relke: “Say, Joe, how come they let dames in an entertainment troupe come to the moon, but they won’t let our wives come? I thought the Schneider-Volkov Act was supposed to keep all women out of space, period.”

“No, they couldn’t get away with putting it like that. Against the WP constitution. The law just says that all personnel on any member country’s lunar project must be of a single sex. Theoretically some country—Russia, maybe—could start an all-girl lunar mine project, say. Theoretically. But how many lady muckers do you know? Even in Russia.”

Lije: “When do we draw? Come on, Joe, less draw.”

“Go ahead and draw. Deal me out.”

Chance favored Henderson. “Fastuh, Joe. Hell, less go fastuh, befo’ the whole camp move over theah.”

Novotny upped the current to the redline and left it there. The long spans of transmission line, some of them a mile or more from tower to tower, swooped past in stately cadence.

“There she is! Man!”

“You guys are building up for a big kick in the rump. They’ll never let us aboard.”

“Theah’s two more cabs pahked over theah.”

“Yeah, and still nobody in sight on the ground.”

Novotny pulled the feelers off the trolleys again. “OK, Lije, go play John Alden. Tell ’em we just want to look, not touch.”

Henderson was bounding off across the flats moments after the cabin had been depressurized to let him climb out. They watched him enviously while the pressure came up again. His face flashed with sweat in the sunlight as he looked back to wave at them from the foot of the ladder.

Relke glanced down the road toward the rolling construction camp. “You going to call in, Joe? Ought to be able to reach their antenna from here.”

“If I do, Brodanovitch is sure to say ‘haul ass on back to camp.’”

“Never mind, then! Forget I said it!”

The pusher chuckled. “Getting interested, Relke?”

“I don’t know. I guess I am.” He looked quickly toward the towering rocket.

“Mostly you want to know how close you are to being rid of her, maybe?”

“I guess—Hey, they’re letting him in.”

“That lucky ole bastuhd!” Bama moaned.

The airlock opened as Lije scaled the ladder. A helmet containing a head of unidentifiable gender looked out and down, watching the man climb. Lije paused to wave. After a moment’s hesitancy, the space-suited figure waved back.

“Hey, up theah, y’all mind a little company?”

The party who watched him made no answer. Lije shook his head and climbed on. When he reached the lock, he held out a glove for an assist, but the figure stepped back quickly. Lije stared inside. The figure was holding a gun. Lije stepped down a rung. The gun beckoned impatiently for him to get inside. Reluctantly Lije obeyed.

The hatch closed. A valve spat a jet of frost, and they watched the pressure dial slowly creep to ten psi. Lije watched the stranger unfasten his helmet, then undid his own. The stranger was male, and the white goggle marks about his eyes betrayed him as a spacer. His thin dark features suggested Semitic or Arabic origins.

“Parlez-vous français?”

“Naw,” said Lije. “Sho’ don’t. Sorry.”

The man tossed his head and gave a knowing snort. “It is necessaire that we find out who you are,” he explained, and brandished the weapon under Lije’s nose. He grinned a flash of white teeth. “Who send you here?”

“Nobody send me. I come unduh my own steam. Some fell as in my moonjeep pulled cands, and I—”

“Whup! You are—ah ein Unteroffizier? Mais non, wrong sprach—you l’officiale? Officer? Company man?”

“Who, me? Land, no. I’m juss a hot-stick man on B-shif’. You muss be lookin’ fo’ Suds Brodanovitch.”

“Why you come to this ship?”

“Well, the fellas and I heard tell theah was some gals, and we—”

The man waved the gun impatiently and pressed a button near the inner hatch. A red indicator light went on.

“Yes?” A woman’s voice, rather hoarse. Lije’s chest heaved with sudden emotion, and his sigh came out a bleat…

The man spoke in a flood of French. The woman did not reply at once. Lije noticed the movement of a viewing lens beside the hatch; it was scanning him from head to toe.

The woman’s voice shifted to an intimate contralto. “OK, dearie, you come right in here where it’s nice and warm.”

The inner hatch slid open. It took Lije a few seconds to realize that she had been talking to him. She stood there smiling at him like a middle-aged schoolmarm. “Why don’t you come on in and meet the girls?” Eyes popping, Lije Henderson stumbled inside.

He was gone a long time.

When he finally came out, the men in Novotny’s runabout took turns cursing at him over the suit frequency. “Fa chrissake, Henderson, we’ve been sitting here using up oxy for over an hour while you been horsing around…” They waited for him with the runabout, cabin depressurized.

Lije was panting wildly as he ran toward them. “Lissen to the bahstud giggle,” Bama said disgustedly.

“Y’all juss don’ know, y’all juss don’ KNOW!” Lije was chanting between pants.

“Get in here, you damn traitor!”

“Hones’, I couldn’ help myself. I juss couldn’.”

“Well, do the rest of us get aboard her, or not?” Joe snapped.

“Hell, go ahead, man! It’s wide open. Evahthing’s wide open.”

“Girls?” Relke grunted.

“Girls, God yes! Girls.”

“You coming with us?” Joe asked.

Lije shook his head and fell back on the seat, still panting. “Lawd, no! I couldn’t stand it. I juss want to lie heah and look up at ole Mamma Earth and feel like a human again.” He grinned beatifically. “Y’all go on.”

Braxton was staring at his crony with curious suspicion.

“Man, those must be some entuhtainuhs! Whass the mattah with you, Lije?”

Henderson whooped and pounded his leg. “Woo hoo! Hooeee! You mean y’all still don’ know what that ship is?”

They had already climbed out of the tractor. Novotny glared back in at Lije. “We’ve been waiting to hear it from you, Henderson,” he snapped.

Lije sat up grinning. “That’s no stage show troupe! That ship, so help me Hannah, is a—hoo hoo hooee—is a goddam flyin’ HO-house.” He rolled over on the seat and surrendered to laughter.

Novotny looked around for his men and found himself standing alone. Braxton was already on the ladder, and Relke was just starting up behind.

“Hey, you guys come back here!”

“Drop dead, Joe.”

Novotny stared after them until they disappeared through the lock. He glanced back at Lije. Henderson was in a grinning beatific trance. The pusher shrugged and left him lying there, still wearing his pressure suit in the open cabin. The pusher trotted after his men toward the ship.

Before he was halfway there, a voice broke into his headsets. “Where the devil are you going, Novotny? I want a talk with you!”

He stopped to glance back. The voice belonged to Brodanovitch, and it sounded sore. The engineer’s runabout had nosed in beside Novotny’s; Suds sat in the cab and beckoned at him angrily. Joe trudged on back and climbed in through the vehicle’s coffin-sized airlock. Brodanovitch glared at him while the pusher removed his helmet.

“What the devil’s going on over there?”

“At the ship?” Joe paused. Suds was livid. “I don’t know exactly.”

“I’ve been calling Safety and Rescue for an hour and a half. Where are they?”

“In the ship, I guess.”

“You guess!”

“Hell, chief, take it easy. We just got here. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Where are your men?”

Novotny jerked his thumb at the other runabout. “Henderson’s in there. Relke and Brax went to the ship.”

“And that’s where you were going just now, I take it,” Suds snarled.

“Take that tone of voice and shove it, Suds! You, know where you told me to go. I went. Now I’m off. We’re on our own time unless you tell us different.”

The engineer spent a few seconds swallowing his fury. “All right,” he grunted. “But every man on that rescue squad is going to face a Space Court, and if I have any say about it, they’ll get decomped.”

Novotny’s jaw dropped. “Slow down, Suds. Explosive decompression is for mutiny or murder. What’re you talking about?”

“Murder.”

“Wha-a-at?”

“That’s what I call it. A demolition man—Hardin, it was—had a blowout. With only one man standing by on the rescue gear.”

“Meteor dust?”

“Yeah.”

“Would it have made any difference if Safety and Rescue had been on the job?”

Suds glowered. “Maybe, maybe not. An inspector might have spotted the bulge in his suit before it blew.” He shook an angry finger toward the abandoned Safety & Rescue vehicles. “Those men are going to stand trial for negligent homicide. It’s the principle, damn it!”

“Sure, Suds. I guess you’re right. I’ll be right back.”

Henderson was sleeping in his pressure suit when Novotny climbed back into his own runabout. The cab was still a vacuum. He got the hatch closed, turned on the air pumps, then woke Henderson.

“Lije, you been with a woman?”

“Nnnnnngg-nnnng! I hope to tell!” He shot a quick glance toward the rocket as if to reassure himself as to its reality. “And man, was she a little—”

Joe shook him again. “Listen. Brodanovitch is in the next car. Bull mad. I’ll ask you again. You been with a woman?”

“Woman? You muss of lost yoah mine, Joe. Lass time I saw a woman was up at Atlanta.” He rolled his eyes up toward the Earth crescent in the heavens. “Sure been a long ole time. Atlanta… man!”

“That’s better.”

Lije jerked his head toward Brodanovitch’s jeep. “What’s ole wet blanket gonna do? Chase those gals out of here, I ’spect?”

“I don’t know. That’s not what he’s frothing about, Lije. Hardin got killed while the S&R boys were shacking up over there. Suds doesn’t even know what’s in that ship. He acts like he’s got about a dozen troubles running loose at once, and he doesn’t know which way to grab.”

“He don’t even know? How we evah gonna keep him from findin’ out?” Lije shot another glance at the ship and jumped. “Uh-oh! Looka theah! Yonder they come. Clamberin’ down the ladies’ ladduh. Theah’s Joyce and Lander and Petzel—other one looks like Crump. Half the Safety team, Joe. Hoo-eee! They got that freshly bred look. You can evum tell it from heah. Uh-oh!”

Brodanovitch had climbed out of his runabout. Bellowing at his mic, he charged toward the ship. The S&R men took a few lopes toward their vehicles, saw Brodanovitch, and stopped. One man turned tail and bolted for the ladder again. Gesturing furiously, the engineer bore down on them.

“Leave the radio off, Joe. Sure glad we don’ have to listen to that bull bellow.”

They sat watching the safety men, who managed some-how to look stark naked despite their bulgey pressure suits. Suds stalked toward them like an amok runner, beating a gloved fist into his palm and working his jaw at them.

“Suds don’ know how to get along with men when he want to get along with ’em, and he don’ know how to fuss at ’em when he don’t want to get along. Man, look how he rave!”

“Yeah. Suds is a smart engineer, but he’s a rotten overseer.”

The ship’s airlock opened again and another man started out. He stopped with one foot on the top rung of the ladder. He looked down at Brodanovitch and the S&R men. He pulled his leg back inside and closed the hatch. Novotny chuckled.

“That was Relke, the damn fool.”

Lije smote his forehead. “Look at Suds! They tole him! They went an tole him, Joe. We’ll nevah get back in that ship now.”

The pusher watched the four figures on the plain. They were just standing there. Brodanovitch had stopped gesticulating. For a few seconds he seemed frozen. His head turned slowly as he looked up at the rocket. He took three steps toward it, then stopped.

“He gonna have apoplexy, thass what he gonna have.” Brodanovitch turned slowly. He gave the S&R men a blank look, then broke into a run toward his tractor. “I’d better climb out,” Joe said.

He met the engineer beside the command runabout. Suds’s face was a livid mask behind the faceplate. “Get in,” he snapped at the pusher.

As soon as they were inside, he barked, “Drive us to Crater City.”

“Slow down, Suds.”

“Joe. That ship. Damn brothel. Out to fleece the camp.”

“So what’re you going to do in Crater City?”

“Tell Parkeson, what else?”

“And what’s the camp going to be doing while you’re gone?”

That one made him pause. Finally he shook his head. “Drive, Joe.”

Novotny flipped the switch and glanced at the gauges. “You haven’t got enough oxygen in this bug to last out the trip.”

“Then we’ll get another one.”

“Better take a minute to think it over, Suds. You’re all revved up. What the hell can Parkeson do?”

“What can he do? What can—migawd, Joe!” Suds choked.

“Well?”

“He can get that ship out of here, he can have those women interned.”

“How? Suppose they refuse to budge. Who appointed Parkeson king of creation? Hell, he’s only our boss, Suds. The moon’s open to any nation that wants to send a ship, or to any corporation that can get a clearance. The W.P. decided that a long time ago.”

“But it’s illegal—those women, I mean!”

“How do you know? Maybe their racket’s legal in Algiers. That’s where you told me they had clearance from, didn’t you? And if you’re thinking about the Schneider-Volkov Act, it just applies to the Integrated Projects, not wildcat teams.”

Brodanovitch sat silent for a few moments, his throat working. He passed a shaky hand over his eyes. “Joe, we’ve got to keep discipline. Why can’t I ever make the men understand that? On a moon project, it’s discipline or die. You know that, Joe.”

“Sure I know it. You know it. Parkeson knows it. The First Minister of the Space Ministry knows it. But the men don’t know it, and they never will. They don’t know what the word ‘discipline’ means, and it’s no good trying to tell them. It’s an overseer’s word. It means your outfit’s working for you like your own arms and legs. One brain and one body. When it cracks, you’ve just got a loose handful of stray men. No coordination. You can see it, but they can’t see it. ‘Discipline’ is just a dirty word in the ranks, Suds.”

“Joe, what’ll I do?”

“It’s your baby, not mine. Give it first aid. Then talk to Parkeson later, if you want to.”

Suds sat silent for half a minute, then: “Drive back to the main wagon.”

Novotny started the motors. “What are you going to do?”

“Announce Code Red, place the ship off limits, put an armed guard on it, and hope the Crater City crew gets that telephone circuit patched up quick. That’s all I can do.”

“Then let me get a safe distance away from you before you do it.”

“You think it’ll cause trouble?”

“Good Lord, Suds, use your head. You’ve got a campful of men who haven’t been close to a dame in months and years, even to talk to. They’re sick, they’re scared, they’re fed-up, they want to go home. The Party’s got them bitter, agitated. I’d hate to be the guy who puts those women off limits.”

“What would you do?”

“I’d put the screws on the shift that’s on duty. I’d work hell out of the crews that are supposed to be on the job. I’d make a horrible example out of the first man to goof off. But first I’d tell the off-duty team-pushers they can take their crews over to that ship, one crew at a time, and in an orderly manner.”

“What? And be an accomplice? Hell, no!”

“Then do it your own way. Don’t ask me.”

Novotny parked the runabout next to the boss-wagon. “Mind if I use your buggy for awhile, Suds?” he asked. “I left mine back there, and I’ve got to pick up my men.”

“Go ahead, but get them back here—fast.”

“Sure, Suds.”

He backed the runabout out again and drove down to B-shift’s sleep-wagon. He parked again and used the air-lock phone. “Beasley, Benet, the rest of you—come on outside.”

Five minutes later they trooped out through the lock. “What’s the score, Joe?”

“The red belts are ahead, that’s all I know.”

“Come on, you’ll find out.”

“Sleep! I haven’t had no sleep since— Say! You takin’ us over to that ship, Joe?”

“That’s the idea.”

“YAYHOO!” Beasley danced up and down. “Joe, we love ya!”

“Cut it. This is once-and-once-only. You’re going once, and you’re not going again.”

“Who says?”

“Novotny says.”

“But why?” Benet wailed.

“What did you say?”

“I said ‘why!’”

“OK. I’ll tell you why. Brodanovitch is going to put the ship off limits. If I get you guys in under the wire, you’ve got no gripe later on—when Suds hangs out the big No.”

“Joe, that’s chicken.”

Novotny put on the brakes. “Get out and walk back, Benet.”

“Joe—!”

“Benet!”

“Look, I didn’t mean anything—”

Novotny paused. If Brodanovitch was going to try to do things the hard way, he’d lose control of his own men unless he gave them loose rein for a while first—keeping them reminded that he still had the reins. But Benet was getting out of hand lately. He had to decide. Now.

“Look at me, Benet.”

Benet looked up. Joe smacked him. Benet sat back, looking surprised. He wiped his nose on the back of a glove and looked at the red smear. He wiped it again. The smear was bigger.

“You can stay, Benet, but if you do, I’ll bust your hump after we get back. You want it that way?”

Benet looked at the rocket; he looked at Joe; he looked at the rocket. “Yeah. We’ll see who does the busting. Let’s go.”

“All right, but do you see any other guys taking their teams over?”

“No.”

“But you think you’re getting a chicken deal.”

“Yeah.”

The pusher drove on, humming to himself. As long as he could keep them alternately loving him and hating him, everything was secure. Then he was Mother. Then they didn’t stop to think or rationalize. They just reacted to Mother. It was easy to handle men reacting, but it wasn’t so easy to handle men thinking. Novotny liked it the easy way, especially during a heavy meteor fall.

“It is of no importance to me,” said Madame d’Annecy, “if you are the commandant of the whole of space, M’sieur. You wish entrance, I must ask you to contribute thees small fee. It is not in my nature to become unpleasant like thees, but you have bawl in my face, M’sieur.”

“Look,” said Brodanovitch, “I didn’t come over here for… for what you think I came over here for.” His ears reddened. “I don’t want a girl, that is.”

The madame’s prim mouth made a small pink O of sudden understanding. “Ah, M’sieur, I begin to see. You are one of those. But in that I cannot help you. I have only girls.”

The engineer choked. He started toward the hatch. A man with a gun slid into his path.

“Permit yourself to be restrained, M’sieur.”

“There are four men in there that are supposed to be on the job, and I intend to get them. And the others too, while I’m at it.”

“Is it that you have lost your boy friend, perhaps?”

Brodanovitch croaked incomprehensibly for a moment, then collapsed onto a seat beside the radar table that Madame d’Annecy was using for an accounting desk. “I’m no fairy,” he said.

“I am pleased to hear it, M’sieur. I was beginning to pity you. Now if you will please sign the sight draft, so that we may telecast it—”

“I am not paying twelve hundred dollars just to get my men out of there!”

“I do not haggle, M’sieur. The price is fixed.”

“Call them down here!”

“It cannot be done. They pay for two hours, for two hours they stay. Undisturbed.”

“All right, let’s see the draft.”

Madame d’Annecy produced a set of forms from the map case and a small gold fountain pen from her ample bosom. “Your next of kin, M’sieur?” She handed him a blank draft.

“Wait a minute! How did you know where my ac-count—”

“Is it not the correct firm?”

“Yes, but how did you know?” He looked at the serial number on the form, then looked up accusingly. “This is a telecopy form. You have a teletransmitter on board?”

“But of course! We could not risk having payment stopped after services rendered. The funds will be transferred to our account before you leave this ship. I assure you, we are well protected.”

“I assure you, you are all going to jail.”

Madame d’Annecy threw back her head and laughed heartily. She said something in French to the man at the door, then smiled at the unhappy engineer. “What law prevails here, M’sieur?”

“UCOJE does. Uniform Code of Justice, Extraterrestrial. It’s a semi-military—“

“U.N.-based, I believe?”

“Certainly.”

“Now I know little of thees matters, but my attorneys would be delighted, I am certain, if you can tell me: which articles of thees UCOJE is to be used for inducing us to be incarcerated?”

“Why… Uh…” Suds scratched nervously at one corner of his moustache. He glanced at the man with the gun. He gazed forlornly at the sight draft.

“Exactly!” Mme. d’Annecy said brightly. “There have been no women to speak of on the moon since the unfortunate predicament of les enfants perdus. The moon-born grotesque ones. How could they think to pass laws against thees—thees ancien establishment, thees maison intime—when there are no women, eh M’sieur?”

“But you falsified your papers to get clearance. You must have.”

“But no. Our clearance is ‘free nation,’ not ‘world federal.’ We are an entertainment troupe, and my government’s officials are most lenient in defining ‘entertainment.’ Chacun a son gout, eh?”

Suds sat breathing heavily. “I can place this ship off limits.”

“If you can do dat, if the men do not come”—she shrugged eloquently and spread her hands—“then we will simply move on to another project. There are plenty of others. But do you think thees putting us off limits will make you very popular with your men?”

“I’m not trying to win a popularity contest,” Suds wheezed. “I’m trying to finish the last twelve miles of this line before sundown. You’ve got to get out of here before there’s a complete work stoppage.”

“Thees project. It is important? Of an urgent nature?”

“There’s a new uranium mine in the crater we’re building toward. There’s a colony there without an independent ecology. It has to be supplied from Copernicus. Right now, they’re shooting supplies to them by rocket missile. It’s too far to run surface freight without trolley service—or reactor-powered vehicles the size of battleships and expensive. We don’t have the facilities to run a fleet of self-powered wagons that far.”

“Can they not run on diesel, perhaps?”

“If they carry the oxygen to burn the diesel with, and if everybody in Copernicus agrees to stop breathing the stuff.”

“Embarras de choix. I see.”

“It’s essential that the line be finished before nightfall. If it isn’t, that mine colony will have to be shipped back to Copernicus. They can’t keep on supplying it by bird. And they can’t move out any ore until the trolley is ready to run.”

Mme. d’Annecy nodded thoughtfully. “We wish to make the cordial entente with the lunar workers,” she murmured. “We do not wish to cause the bouleversement—the disruption. Let us then negotiate, M’sieur.”

“I’m not making any deals with you, lady.”

“Ah, but such a hard position you take! I was but intending to suggest that you furnish us a copy of your camp’s duty roster. If you will do that, Henri will not permit anyone to visit us if he is—how you say?—goofing off. Is it not that simple?”

“I will not be a party to robbery!”

“How is it robbery?”

“Twelve hundred dollars! Pay for two day-hitches. Lunar days. Nearly two months. And you’re probably planning to fleece them more than once.”

“A bon marche! Our expenses are terrific. Believe me, we expect no profit from this first trip.”

“First trip and last trip,” Suds grumbled.

“And who has complained about the price? No one so far excepting M’sieur. Look at it thus; it is an investment.” She slid one of the forms across the table. “Please to read it, M’sieur.”

Suds studied the paper for a moment and began to frown. “Les Folies Lunaires, Incorporated… a North African corporation… in consideration of the sum of one hundred dollars in hand paid by—who?—Howard Beasley!—aforesaid corporation sells and grants to Howard Beasley… one share of common stock!”

“M’sieur! Compose yourself! It is no fraud. Everybody gets a share of stock. It comes out of the twelve hundred. Who knows? Perhaps after a few trips, there will even be dividends. M’sieur? But you look positively ill! Henri, bring brandy for the gentleman.”

“So!” he grated. “That’s the way it goes, is it? Implicate everybody—nobody squawks.”

“But certainly. It is for our own protection, to be sure, but it is really stock.”

“Blackmail.”

“But no, M’sieur. All is legal.”

Henri brought a plastic cup and handed it to him; Suds shook his head.

“Take it. M’sieur. It is real brandy. We could bring only a few bottles, but there is sufficient pure alcohol for the mixing of cocktails.”

The small compartment was filled with the delicate perfume of the liquor; Brodanovitch glanced longingly at the plastic cup.

“It is seventy-year-old Courvoisier, M’sieur. Very pleasant.”

Suds took it reluctantly, dipped it toward Mme. d’Annecy in self-conscious toast, and drained it. He acquired a startled expression; he clucked his tongue experimentally and breathed slowly through his nose.

“Good Lord!” he murmured absently.

Mme. d’Annecy chuckled. “M’sieur has forgotten the little pleasures. It was a shame to gulp it so. Encore, Henri. And one for myself, I think. Take time to enjoy this one, M’sieur.” She studied him for a time while Henri was absent. She shook her head and began putting the forms away, leaving out the sight draft and stock agreement which she pushed toward him, raising one inquisitive brow. He gazed expressionlessly at them. Henri returned with the brandy; Madame questioned him in French. He seemed insistently negative for a time, but then seemed to give grudging assent. “Bien!” she said, and turned to Brodanovitch: “M’sieur, it will be necessary only for you to purchase the share of stock. Forget the fee.”

“What?” Suds blinked in confusion.

“I said—” The opening of the hatch interrupted her thought. A dazzling brunette in a filmy yellow dress bounced into the compartment, bringing with her a breath of perfume. Suds looked at her and emitted a loud guttural cluck. A kind of glazed incredulity kneaded his face into a mask of shocked granite wearing a supercilious moustache. The girl ignored his presence and bent over the table to chat excitedly in French with Mme. d’Annecy. Suds’s eyes seemed to find a mind and will of their own; involuntarily they contemplated the details of her architecture, and found manifest fascination in the way she relieved an itch at the back of one trim calf by rubbing it vigorously with the instep of her other foot while she leaned over the desk and bounced lightly on tiptoe as she spoke.

“M’sieur Brodanovitch, the young lady wishes to know—M’sieur Brodanovitch?—M’sieur!”

“What—? Oh!” Suds straightened and rubbed his eyes. “Yes?”

“One of your young men has asked Giselle out for a walk. We have pressure suits, of course. But is it safe to promenade about this area?” She paused. “M’sieur, please!”

“What?” Suds shook his head. He tore his eyes away from the yellow dress and glanced at a head suddenly thrust in through the hatch. The head belonged to Relke. It saw Brodanovitch and withdrew in haste, but Suds made no sign of recognition. He blinked at Madame again.

“M’sieur, is it safe?”

“What? Oh! I suppose it is.” He gulped his brandy and poured another.

Mme. d’Annecy spoke briefly to the girl, who, after a hasty merci and a nod at Suds went off to join Relke outside. When they were gone, Madame smilingly offered her pen to the engineer. Suds stared at it briefly, shook his head, and helped himself to another brandy. He gulped it and reached for his helmet. Mme. d’Annecy snapped her fingers suddenly and went to a locker near the bulkhead. She came back with a quart bottle.

“M’sieur’ will surely accept a small token?” She offered the bottle for his inspection. “It is Mumms 2064, a fine year. Take it, M’sieur. Or do you not care for champagne? It is our only bottle, and what is one bottle of wine for such a crowd? Take it—or would you prefer the brandy?”

Suds blinked at the gift while he fastened his helmet and clamped it. He seemed dazed. She held the bottle out to him and smiled hopefully. Suds accepted it absent-mindedly, nodded at her, and stepped into the airlock. The hatch slid closed.

Mme. d’Annecy started back toward her counting table. The alarm bell burst into a sudden brazen clamor. She looked back. A red warning signal flashed balefully. Henriburst in from the corridor, eyed the bell and the light, then charged toward the airlock. The gauge by the hatch showed zero pressure. He pressed a starter button, and a meter hummed to life. The pressure needle crept upward. The bell and the light continued a frenetic complaint. The motor stopped. Henri glanced at the gauge, then swung open the hatch. “Allons! Ma foi, quelle merde!”

Mme. d’Annecy came to peer around him into the small cubicle. Her subsequent shriek penetrated to the farthest corridors. Suds Brodanovitch had missed his last chance to become a stockholder.

“It wasn’t yo’ fault, Ma’am,” said Lije Henderson a few minutes later as they half-led, half-carried her to her compartment. “He know bettuh than to step outside with that bottle of booze. You didn’t know. You couldn’ be ’spected to know. But he been heah long enough to know—a man make one mistake, thass all. BLOOIE.”

Blooie was too graphic to suit Madame; she sagged and began retching.

“C’mon, Ma’am, less get you in yo hammock.” They carried her into her quarters, eased her into bed, and stepped back out on the catwalk.

Lije mopped his face, leaned against a tension member, and glanced at Joe. “Now how come you s’pose he had that bottle of fizzling giggle water up close to his helmet that way, Joe?”

“I don’t know. Reading the label, maybe.”

“He sho’ muss have had something on his mine.”

“Well, it’s gone now.”

“Yeah. BLOOIE. Man!”

Relke had led the girl out through the lock in the reactor nacelle in order to evade Brodanovitch and a possible command to return to camp. They sat in Novotny’s runabout and giggled cozily together at the fuzzy map of Earth that floated in the darkness above them. On the ship’s fuselage, the warning light over the airlock hatch began winking, indicating that the lock was in use. The girl noticed it and nudged him. She pointed at the light.

“Somebody coming out,” Relke muttered. “Maybe Suds. We’d better get out of here.”

He flipped the main switch and started the motor. He was backing onto the road when Giselle caught his arm.

“Beel! Look at the light!”

He glanced around. It was flashing red.

“Malfunction signal. Compressor trouble, probably. It’s nothing. Let’s take a ride. Joe won’t care.” He started backing again.

“Poof!” she said suddenly.

“What?”

“Poof. It opened, and poof—” She puckered her lips and blew a little puff of steam in the cold air to show him. “So. Like smoke.”

He turned the car around in the road and looked back again. The hatch had closed. There was no one on the ladder. “Nobody came out.”

“Non. Just poof.”

He edged the car against the trolley rails, switched to autosteering, and let it gather speed.

“Beel?”

“Yeah, kid?”

“Where you taking me?”

He caught the note of alarm in her voice and slowed down again. She had come on a dare after several drinks, and the drinks were wearing off. The landscape was frighteningly alien, and the sense of falling into bottomlessness was ever-present.

“You want to go back?” he asked gloomily.

“I don’t know. I don’t like it out here.”

“You said you wanted some ground under your feet.”

“But it doesn’t feel like ground when you walk on it.”

“Rather be inside a building?”

She nodded eagerly.

“That’s where we’re going.”

“To your camp?”

“God, no! I’m planning to keep you to myself.”

She laughed and snuggled closer to him. “You can’t. Madame d’Annecy will not permit—”

“Let’s talk about something else,” he grunted quickly. “OK. Let’s talk about Monday.”

“Which Monday?”

“Next Monday. It’s my birthday. When is it going to be Monday, Bill?”

“You said Bill.”

“Beel? That’s your name, isn’t eet? Weeliam Q. Relke, who weel not tell me what ees the Q?”

“But you said Bill.”

She was silent for a moment. “OK, I’m a phony,” she muttered. “Does the inquisition start now?”

He could feel her tighten up, and he said nothing. She waited stiffly for a time. Gradually she relaxed against him again. “When’s it going to be Monday?” she murmured.

“When’s it going to be Monday where?”

“Here, anywhere, silly!”

He laughed. “When will it be Monday all over the universe?”

She thought for a moment. “Oh. Like time zones. OK, when will it be Monday here?”

“It won’t. We just have periods, hitches, and shifts. Fifty shifts make a hitch, two hitches make a period. A period’s from sunrise to sunrise. Twenty-nine and a half days. But we don’t count days. So I don’t know when it’ll be Monday.”

It seemed to alarm her. She sat up. “Don’t you even have hours?” She looked at her watch and jiggled it, listened to it.

“Sure. Seven hours in a shift. We call them hours, anyhow. Forty-five seconds longer than an Earth hour.”

She looked up through the canopy at the orb of Earth. “When it’s Monday on Earth, it’ll be Monday here too,” she announced flatly.

Relke laughed. “OK, we’ll call it that.”

“So when will it start being Monday on Earth?”

“Well, it’ll start at twenty-four different times, depending on where you are. Maybe more than twenty-four. It’s August. Some places, they set the clocks ahead an hour in Summer.”

She looked really worried.

“You take birthdays pretty seriously?” he asked.

“Only this one. I’ll be—” She broke off and closed her mouth.

“Pick a time zone,” Relke offered, “and I’ll try to figure out how long until Monday starts. Which zone? Where you’d be now, maybe?”

She shook her head.

“Where you were born?”

“That would be—” She stopped again. “Never mind. Forget it.” She sat brooding and watching the moonscape.

Relke turned off the road at the transformer station. He pulled up beside a flat-roofed cubicle the size of a sentrybox. Giselle looked at it in astonishment.

“That’s a building?” she asked.

“That’s an entrance. The ‘building’s’ underground. Come on, let’s seal up.”

“What’s down there?”

“Just a transformer vault and living quarters for a substation man.”

“Somebody lives down there?”

“Not yet. The line’s still being built. They’ll move somebody in when the trolley traffic starts moving.”

“What do we want to go down there for?”

He looked at her forlornly. “You’d rather go back to the ship?”

She seemed to pull herself together professionally. She laughed and put her arms around him and whispered something in French against his ear. She kissed him hard, pressed her forehead against his, and grinned. “C’mon, babee! Let’s go downstairs.”

Relke felt suddenly cold inside. He had wanted to see what it felt like to be alone with a woman again in a quiet place, away from the shouting, howling revelry that had been going on aboard the ship. Now he knew what it was going to feel like. It was going to feel counterfeit. “Christ!” he grunted angrily. “Let’s go back!” He reached roughly around her and cut on the switch again. She recoiled suddenly and gaped at him as he started the motor and turned the bug around.

“Hey!” She was staring at him oddly, as if seeing him for ‘the first time.

Relke kept his face averted and his knuckles were white on the steering bar. She got up on her knees on the seat and put her hands on his shoulders. “Bill. Good Lord, you’re crying!”

He choked out a curse as the bug hit the side of the cut and careened around on the approach to the road. He lost control, and the runabout went off the approach and slid slowly sideways down a gentle slope of crushed-lava fill. A sharp clanking sound came from the floor plates.

“Get your suit sealed!” he yelled. “Get it sealed!”

The runabout lurched to a sudden stop. The cabin pressure stayed up. He sat panting for a moment, then started the motor. He let it inch ahead and tugged at the steering bar. It was locked. The bug crept in an arc, and the clanking resumed. He cut off the motor and sat cursing softly.

“What’s wrong?”

“Broke a link and the tread’s fouled. We’ll have to get out.”

She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. He was glowering. She looked back toward the sentrybox entrance to the substation and smiled thoughtfully.

It was chilly in the vault, and the only light came from the indicator lamps on the control board. The pressure gauge inside the airlock indicated only eight pounds of air. The construction crew had pumped it up to keep some convection currents going around the big transformers, but they hadn’t planned on anyone breathing it soon. He changed the mixture controls, turned the barostat up to twelve pounds, and listened to the compressors start up. When he turned around, Giselle was taking off her suit and beginning to pant.

“Hey, stay in that thing!” he shouted.

His helmet muffled his voice, and she looked at him blankly. “What?” she called. She was gasping and looking around in alarm.

Relke sprinted a few steps to the emergency rack and grabbed a low pressure walk-around bottle. When he got back, she was getting blue and shaking her head drunkenly. He cracked the valve on the bottle and got the hose connection against her mouth. She nodded quickly and sucked on it. He went back to watch the gauges. He found the overhead lighting controls and turned them on. Giselle held her nose and anxiously sipped air from the bottle. He nodded reassuringly at her. The construction crews had left the substation filled with nitrogen-helium mixture, seeing no reason to add rust-producing moisture and oxygen until someone moved into the place; she had been breathing inert gases, nothing more.

When the partial oxygen pressure was up to normal, he left the control panel and went to look for the communicator. He found the equipment, but it was not yet tied into the line. He went back to tell the girl. Still sipping at the bottle, she watched him with attentive brown eyes. It was the gaze of a child, and he wondered about her age. Aboard ship, she and the others had seemed impersonal automata of Eros; painted ornaments and sleekly functional decoys designed to perform stereotyped rituals of enticement and excarnation of desire, swiftly, lest a customer be kept waiting. But here in stronger light, against a neutral background, he noticed suddenly that she was a distinct individual. Her lipstick had smeared. Her dark hair kept spilling out in tangled wisps from beneath a leather cap with fleece ear flaps. She wore a pair of coveralls, several sizes too large and rolled up about the ankles. With too much rouge on her solemnly mischievous face, she looked ready for a role in a girls’ school version of Chanticler.

“You can stop breathing out of the can,” he told her. “The oxygen pressure’s okay now.”

She took the hose from her mouth and sniffed warily. “What was the matter? I was seeing spots.”

“It’s all right now.”

“It’s cold in this place. Are we stuck here?”

“I tried to call Joe, but the set’s not hooked up. He’ll come looking for us.”

“Isn’t there any heat in here? Can’t you start a fire?”

He glanced down at the big 5,000 kva transformers in the pit beyond the safety rail. The noise of corona discharge was very faint, and the purr of thirty-two cycle hum was scarcely audible. With no trucks drawing, power from the trolley, the big pots were cold. Normally, eddy current and hysteresis losses in the transformers would keep the station toast-warm. He glanced at a thermometer. It read slightly under freezing: the ambient temperature of the subsurface rock in that region.

“Let’s try the stationman’s living quarters,” he grunted. “They usually furnish them fancy, as bunk tanks go. Man has to stay by himself out here, they want to keep him sane.”

A door marked PRIVATE flipped open as they approached it. A cheery voice called out: “Hi, Bo. Rugged deal, ain’t it?”

Giselle started back in alarm. “Who’s there?”

Relke chuckled. “Just a recorded voice. Back up, I’ll show you.”

They moved a few paces away. The door fell closed. They approached it again. This time a raucous female squawked at them: “Whaddaya mean coming home at this hour? Lemme smell your breath.”

Giselle caught on and grinned. “So he won’t get lonesome?”

“Partly, and partly to keep him a little sore. The stationmen hate it, but that’s part of the idea. It gives them something to talk back to and throw things at.”

They entered the apartment. The door closed itself, the lights went on. Someone belched, then announced: “I get just as sick of looking at you as you do looking at me, button head. Go take a bath.”

Relke flushed. “It can get pretty rough sometimes. The tapes weren’t edited for mixed company. Better plug your ears if you go in the bathroom.”

Giselle giggled. “I think it’s cute.”

He went into the kitchenette and turned on all the burners of the electric range to help warm the place. “Come stand next to the oven,” he called, “until I see if the heat pumps are working.” He opened the oven door. A libidinous purr came from within.

“Dah-ling, now why bother with breakfast when you can have meee?”

He glanced up at Giselle.

“I didn’t say it,” she giggled, but posed invitingly. Relke grinned and accepted the invitation.

“You’re not crying now,” she purred as he released her.

He felt a surge of unaccountable fury, grunted, “Excuse me,” and stalked out to the transformer vault. He looked around for the heat pumps, failed to find them, and went to lean on the handrail overlooking the pit. He stood there with his fists in his pockets, vaguely anguished and enraged, for no reason he understood. For a moment he had been too close to feeling at home, and that brought up the wrath somehow. After a couple of minutes he shook it off and went back inside.

“Hey, I wasn’t teasing you,” Giselle told him.

“What?”

“About crying.”

“Listen,” he said irritably, “did you ever see a looney or a spacer without leaky eyes? It’s the glare, that’s all.”

“Is that it? Huh—want to know something? I can’t cry. That’s funny. You’re a man and you can cry, but I can’t.”

Relke watched her grumpily while she warmed her behind at the oven. She’s not more than fifteen, he decided suddenly. It made him a little queasy. Come on, Joe, hurry.

“You know,” she went on absently, “when I was a little girl, I got mad at… at somebody, and I decided I was never going to cry anymore. I never did, either. And you know what?—now I can’t. Sometimes I try and I try, but I just can’t.” She spread her hands to the oven, tilted them back and forth, and watched the way the tendons worked as she stiffened her fingers. She seemed to be talking to her hands. “Once I used an onion. To cry, I mean. I cut an onion and rubbed some of it on a handkerchief and laid the handkerchief over my eyes. I cried that time, all right. That time I couldn’t stop crying, and nobody could make me stop. They were petting me and scolding me and shaking me and trying to give me smelling salts, but I just couldn’t quit. I blubbered for two days. Finally Mother Bernarde had to call the doctor to give me a sedative. Some of the sisters were taking cold towels and—”

“Sisters?” Relke grunted.

Giselle clapped a hand to her mouth and shook her head five or six times, very rapidly. She looked around at him. He shrugged.

“So you were in a convent.”

She shook her head again.

“So what if you were?” He sat down with his back to her and pretended to ignore her. She was dangerously close to that state of mind which precedes the telling of a life history. He didn’t want to hear it; he already knew it. So she was in a nunnery; Relke was not surprised. Some people had to polarize themselves. If they broke free from one pole, they had to seek its opposite. People with no middle ground. Black, or if not black, then white, never gray. Law, or criminality. God, or Satan. The cloister, or a whorehouse. Eternally a choice of all or nothing-at-all, and they couldn’t see that they made things that way for themselves. They set fire to every bridge they ever crossed—so that even a cow creek became a Rubicon, and every crossing was on a tightrope.

You understand that too well, don’t you, Relke? he asked himself bitterly. There was Fran and the baby, and there wasn’t enough money, and so you had to go and burn a bridge—a 240,000-mile bridge, with Fran on the other side. And so, after six years on Luna, there would be enough money; but there wouldn’t be Fran and the baby. And so, he had signed another extended contract, and the moon was going to be home for a long long time. Yeh, you know about burned bridges, all right, Relke.

He glanced at Giselle. She was glaring at him.

“If you’re waiting for me to say something,” she snapped, “you can stop waiting. I don’t have to tell you anything.”

“I didn’t ask you anything.”

“I was just a novice. I didn’t take permanent vows.”

“All right.”

“They wouldn’t let me. They said I was—unstable. They didn’t think I had a calling.”

“Well, you’ve got one now. Stop crawling all over me like I said anything. I didn’t ask you any questions.”

“You gave me that pious look.”

“Oh, garbage!” He rolled out of the chair and loped off to the room. The stationman’s quarters boasted its own music system and television (permanently tuned to the single channel that broadcast a fairly narrow beam aimed at the lunar stations). He tried the television first, but solar interference was heavy.

“Maybe it’ll tell us when it’s going to be Monday,” she said, coming to watch him from the doorway.

He gave her a sharp look, then softened it. The stove had warmed the kitchen, and she had stepped out of the baggy coveralls. She was still wearing the yellow dress, and she had taken a moment to comb her hair. She leaned against the side of the doorway, looking very young but excessively female. She had that lost pixie look and a tropical climate tan too.

“Why are you looking at me that way?” she asked. “Is this all we’re going to do? I mean, just wait around until somebody comes? Can’t we dance or something?” She did a couple of skippity steps away from the door jamb and rolled her hips experimentally. One hip was made of India rubber. “Say! Dancing ought to be fun in this crazy gravity.” She smirked at him and posed alluringly.

Relke swallowed, reddened, and turned to open the selector cabinet. She’s only a kid, Relke. He paused, then dialed three selections suitable for dancing. She’s only a kid, damn it! He paused again, then dialed a violin concerto. A kid—back home they’d call her “jail bait.” He dialed ten minutes’ worth of torrid Spanish guitar. You’ll hate yourself for it, Relke. He shuddered involuntarily, dialed one called The Satyricon of Lily Brown, an orgy in New African Jazz (for adults only).

He glanced up guiltily. She was already whirling around the room with an imaginary partner, dancing to the first selection.

Relke dialed a tape of Palestrina and some plainchant, but left it for last. Maybe it would neutralize the rest.

She snuggled close and they tried to keep time to the music—not an easy task, with the slow motion imposed by low gravity mismatched to the livelier rhythms of dancing on Earth. Two attempts were enough. Giselle flopped down on the bunk.

“What’s that playing now, Bill?”

“Sibelius. Concerto for Something and Violin. I dunno.”

“Bill?”

“Yeah.”

“Did I make you mad or something?”

“No, but I don’t think—” He turned to look at her and stopped talking. She was lying on her back with her hands behind her head and her legs cocked up, balancing her calf on her other knee and watching her foot wiggle. She was lithe and brown and… ripe.

“Damn,” he muttered.

“Bill?”

“Uh?”

She wrinkled her nose at him and smiled. “Don’t you even know what you wanted to come over here for?”

Relke got up slowly and walked to the light switch. He snapped it.

“Oh, dahling!” said a new voice in the darkness. “What if my husband comes home!”

After Sibelius came the Spanish guitar. The African jazz was wasted.

Relke sat erect with a start. Giselle still slept, but noises came from the other room. There were voices, and a door slammed closed. Shuffling footsteps, a muffled curse. “Who’s there?” he yelled. “Joe?”

The noises stopped, but he heard the hiss of someone whispering. He nudged the girl awake with one elbow. The record changer clicked, and the soft chant of an Agnus Dei came from the music system.

“Oh, God! It’s Monday!” Giselle muttered sleepily.

“A dame,” grunted a voice in the next room.

“Who’s there?” Relke called again.

“We brought you some company.” The voice sounded familiar. A light went on in the other room. “Set him down over here, Harv.”

Relke heard rattling sounds and a chair scraped back. They dumped something into the chair. Then the bulky silhouette of a man filled the doorway. “Who’s in here, anyhow?” He switched on the lights. The man was Larkin. Giselle pulled a blanket around herself and blinked sleepily.

“Is it Monday?” she asked.

A slow grin spread across Larkin’s face. “Hey Harv!” he called over his shoulder. “Look what we pulled out of the grab bag! Come look at lover boy…. Now, Harv—is that sweet? Is that romantic?”

Kunz looked over Larkin’s shoulder. “Yuh. Real homey, ain’t it. Hiyah, Rat. Lookit that cheese he’s got with him. Some cheese. Round like a provolone, huh? Hiyah, cheesecake, know you’re in bed with a rat?”

Giselle glanced questioningly at Relke. Relke was surveying the tactical situation. It looked unpromising. Larkin laughed.

“Look at him, Harv—wondering where he left his shiv. What’s the matter, Relke? We make you nervous?” He stepped inside, Kunz followed.

Relke stood up in bed and backed against the wall. “Get out of the way,” he grunted at Giselle.

“Look at him!” Larkin gloated. “Getting ready to kick. You planning to kick somebody, sonny?”

“Stay back!” he snapped. “Get out of here, Giselle!”

“A l’abri? Oui—” She slid off the bed and darted for the door. Kunz grabbed at her, but she slipped past. She stopped in the doorway and backed up a step. She stared into the next room. She put her hand to her mouth. “Oh! Oh!” she yelped. Larkin and Kunz glanced back at her. Relke lunged off the bed. He smashed against Larkin, sent him sprawling into Kunz. He dodged Giselle and sprinted for the kitchen and the cutlery rack. He made it a few steps past the door before he saw what Giselle had seen. Something was sitting at the table, facing the door. Relke stopped in his tracks and began backing away. The something at the table was a blistered caricature of a man, an icy frost-figure in a deflated pressure suit. Its mouth was open, and the stomach had been forced up through… He closed his eyes. Relke had seen men blown out, but it hadn’t gotten any pleasanter to look at since the last time.

“Get him, Harv!”

They pinned his arms from behind. “Heading for a butcher knife, Relke?” He heard a dull crack and felt his head explode. The room went pink and hazy.

“That’s for grabbing glass on us the other day, Sonny.”

“Don’t mess him up too much, Lark. The dame’s here.”

“I won’t mess him up. I’ll be real clean about it.”

The crack came again, and the pink haze quivered with black flashes.

“That’s for ratting on the Party, Relke.”

Dimly he heard Giselle screaming at them to stop it.

“Take that little bitch in the other room and play house with her, Harv. I’ll work on Sonny awhile, and then we’ll trade around. Don’t wear her out.”

“Let go,” she yelled. “Take your hands off—listen, I’ll go in there with you if you’ll quit beating him. Now stop—”

Another crack. The pink haze flew apart, and blackness engulfed him. Time moved ahead in jerks for awhile. First he was sitting at the table across from the corpse. Larkin was there too, dealing himself a hand of solitaire. Loud popular music blared from the music system, but he could hear Kunz laughing in the next room. Once Giselle’s voice cried out in protest. Relke moved and groaned. Larkin looked his way.

“Hey, Harv—he’s awake. It’s your turn.”

“I’m busy,” Kunz yelled.

“Well, hurry up. Brodanovitch is beginning to thaw.”

Relke blinked at the dead man. “Who? Him? Brodan—” His lips were swollen, and it was painful to talk.

“Yeah, that’s Suds. Pretty, isn’t he? You’re going to look like that one of these days, kid.”

“You—killed—Suds?”

Larkin threw back his head and laughed. “Hey, Harv, hear that? He thinks we killed Suds.”

“What happened to him, then?”

Larkin shrugged. “He walked into an airlock with a bottle of champagne. The pressure went down quick, the booze blew up in his face, and there sits Suds. A victim of imprudence, like you. Sad looking schlemazel, isn’t he?”

“Wha’d you bring him here for?”

“You know the rules, Sonny. A man gets blown out, they got to look him over inch by inch, make sure it wasn’t murder.”

Giselle cried out again in protest. Relke started to his feet, staggering dizzily. Larkin grabbed him and pushed him down.

“Hey, Harv! He’s getting frisky. Come take over. The gang’ll be rolling in pretty quick.”

Kunz came out of the bunkroom. Larkin sprinted for the door as Giselle tried to make a run for it. He caught her and dragged her back. He pushed her into the bunkroom, went in after her, and closed the door. Relke lunged at Kunz, but a judo cut knocked numbness into the side of his neck and sent him crashing against the wall.

“Relke, get wise,” Hary growled. “This’ll happen every now and then if you don’t join up.”

The lineman started to his feet. Kunz kicked him disinterestedly. Relke groaned and grabbed his side.

“We got no hard feelings, Relke….” He chopped his boot down against the back of Relke’s neck. “You can join the Party any time.”

Time moved ahead in jerks again.

Once he woke up. Brodanovitch was beginning to melt, and the smell of brandy filled the room. There were voices and chair scrapings and after a while somebody carried Brodanovitch out. Relke lay with his head against the wall and kept his eyes closed. He assumed that if the apartment contained a friend, he would not still be lying here on the floor; so he remained motionless and waited to gather strength.

“So that’s about the size of it,” Larkin was telling someone. “Those dames are apt to be dynamite if they let them into Crater City. We’ve got enough steam whipped up to pull off the strike, but what if that canful of cat meat walks in on Copernicus about sundown? Who’s going to have their mind on politics?”

“Hell, Lark,” grunted a strange voice. “Parkeson’ll never let them get in town.”

“No? Don’t be too damn sure. Parkeson’s no idiot. He knows trouble’s coming. Hell, he could invite them to Crater City, pretend he’s innocent as a lamb, just didn’t know what they are, but take credit for them being there.”

“Well, what can we do about it?”

“Cripple that ship.”

“Wha-a-at?”

“Cripple the ship. Look, there’s nothing else we can do on our own. We’ve got no orders from the Party. Right before we break camp, at sundown, we cripple the ship. Something they can’t fix without help from the base.”

“Leave them stuck out here?”

“Only for a day or two. Till the Party takes over the base. Then we send a few wagons out here after dark and pick up the wenches. Who gets credit for dames showing up? The Party. Besides, it’s the only thing we dare do without orders. We can’t be sure what’d happen if Parkeson walked in with a bunch of Algerian whores about the time the show’s supposed to start. And says, ‘Here, boys, look what Daddy brought.’”

“Parkeson hasn’t got the guts.”

“The hell he hasn’t. He’d say that out of one side of his mouth. Out of the other side, he’d be dictating a vigorous protest to the WP for allowing such things to get clearance for blasting off, making it sound like they’re at fault. That’s just a guess. We’ve got to keep those women out of Crater City until, we’re sure, though. And there’s only one way: cripple the ship.”

There were five or six voices in the discussion, and Relke recognized enough of them to understand dimly that a cell meeting was in progress. His mind refused to function clearly, and at times the voices seemed to be speaking in senseless jargon, although the words were plain enough. His head throbbed and he had bitten a piece out of the end of his tongue. He felt as if he were lying stretched out on a bed of jagged rocks, although there was only the smooth floor under his battered person.

Giselle cried out from the next room and beat angrily on the door.

Quite mindlessly, and as if his body were being directed by some whimsical puppet master, Relke’s corpse suddenly clambered to its feet and addressed itself to the startled conspirators.

“Goddam it, gentlemen, can’t you let the lady out to use the trapper?”

They hit him over the head with a jack handle.

He woke up again. This time he was in the bunkroom. A faint choking sound made him look up. Giselle sat on the foot of the bed, legs tightly crossed, face screwed up. She was trying to cry.

“Use an onion,” he told her thickly, and sat up. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s Monday now.”

“Where are they?”

“They left. We’re locked in.”

He fell back with a groan. A stitch in his side felt like a broken rib. He turned his face to the wall. “What’s so great about Monday?” he muttered.

“Today the others are taking their vows.”

When he woke up again, Novotny was watching him from the foot of the bed. The girl was gone. He sat up and fell back with a groan.

“Fran,” he said.

“It wasn’t Fran, it was a hustler,” said Joe. “I had Beasley take her back. Who busted you?”

“Larkin and Kunz.”

“It’s a good thing.”

“What?”

“They saved me the trouble. You ran off with the jeep.”

“Sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry. Just watch yourself, that’s all.”

“I wanted to see what it was like, Joe.”

“What? Playing house with a wench?”

He nodded.

“What was it like?”

“I don’t know.”

“You woke up calling her Fran.”

“I did?”

“Yah. Before you start feeling that way, you better ask Beasley what they did together on the rug while you were asleep, Romeo.”

“What?”

“She really knows some tricks. Mme. d’Annecy really educates her girls. You been kissing and cooing with her, Relke?”

“I’m sick, Joe. Don’t—”

“By the way, you better not go back. The Madame’s pretty sore at you.”

“Why?”

“For keeping the wench gone so long. There was going to be a show. You know, a circus. Giselle was supposed to be in it. You might say she had the lead role.”

“Who?”

“Giselle. Still feel like calling her Fran?—Hey! if you’re going to vomit, get out of bed.”

Relke staggered into the latrine. He was gone a long time.

“Better hurry up,” Novotny called. “Our shift goes on in half an hour.”

“I can’t go on, Joe.”

“The hell you can’t. Unless you want to be sent up N.L.D. You know what they do to N.L.D. cases.”

“You wouldn’t report me N.L.D.”

“The hell I wouldn’t, but I don’t have to.”

“What do you mean?”

“Parkeson’s coming, with a team of inspectors. They’re probably already here, and plenty sore.”

“About the ship? The women?”

“I don’t know. If the Commission hear about those bats, there’ll be hell to pay. But who’ll pay it is something else.”

Relke buried his face in his hands and tried to think. “Joe, listen. I only half remember, but… there was a cell meeting here.”

“When?”

“After Larkin and Kunz worked me over. Some guys came in, and…”

“Well?”

“It’s foggy. Something about Parkeson taking the women back to Crater City.”

“Hell, that’s a screwy idea. Who thinks that?”

Relke shook his head and tried to think. He came out of the latrine mopping his face on a towel. “I’m trying to remember.”

Joe got up. “All right. Better get your suit. Let’s go pull cable.”

The lineman breathed deeply a few times and winced at the effect. He went to get his suit out of the hangar, started the routine safety check, and stopped halfway through. “Joe, my suit’s been cut.”

Novotny came to look. He pinched the thick corded plastic until the incision opened like a mouth. “Knife,” he grunted.

“Those sons of—”

“Yah.” He fingered the cut. “They meant for you to find it, though. It’s too conspicuous. It’s a threat.”

“Well, I’m fed up with their threats. I’m going to—”

“You’re not going to do anything, Relke. I’m going to do it. Larkin and Kunz have messed around with my men one time too often.”

“What have you got in mind, Joe?”

“Henderson and I will handle it. We’ll go over and have a little conference with them, that’s all.”

“Why Henderson? Look, Joe, if you’re going to stomp them, it’s my grudge, not Lije’s.”

“That’s just it. If I take you, it’s a grudge. If Lije and I do it, it’s just politics. I’ve told you guys before—leave the politics to me. Come on, we’ll get you a suit from the emergency locker.”

They went out into the transformer vault. Two men wearing blue armbands were bending over Brodanovitch’s corpse. One of them was fluently cursing unknown parties who had brought the body to a warm place and allowed it to thaw.

“Investigating team,” Novotny muttered. “Means Parkeson is already here.” He hiked off toward the emergency lockers.

“Hey, are you the guy that left this stiff near a stove?” one of the investigators called out to Relke.

“No, but I’ll be glad to rat on the guys that did, if it’ll get them in trouble,” the lineman told him.

“Never mind. You can’t hang them for being stupid.”

“What are you going to do with him?” Relke asked, nodding at the corpse.

“Promote him to supervisory engineer and give him a raise.”

“Christ but they hire smart boys for the snooper team, don’t they? What’s your I.Q., friend? I bet they had to breed you to get smart.”

The checker grinned. “You looking for an argument, Slim?”

Relke shook his head. “No, I just asked a question.”

“We’re going to take him back to Copernicus and bury him, friend. It takes a lot of imagination to figure that out, doesn’t it?”

“If he was a class three laborer, you wouldn’t take him back to Copernicus. You wouldn’t even bury him. You’d just chuck him in a fissure and dynamite the lip.”

The man smiled. Patient cynicism was in his tone. “But he’s not a class three laborer, Slim. He’s Mister S.K. Brodanovitch. Does that make everything nice and clear?”

“Sure. Is Parkeson around?”

The checker glanced up and snickered. “You’re a chum of his, I guess? Hear that, Clyde? We’re talking to a wheel.”

Relke reddened. “Shove it, chum. I just wondered if he’s here.”

“Sure, he’s out here. He went over to see that flying bordello you guys have been hiding out here.”

“What’s he going to do about it?”

“Couldn’t say, friend.”

Novotny came back with an extra suit.

“Joe, I just remembered something.”

“Tell me about it on the way back.”

They suited up and went out to the runabout. Relke told what he could remember about the cell meeting.

“It sounds crazy in a way,” Novotny said thoughtfully. “Or maybe it doesn’t. It could mess up the Party’s strike plans if Parkeson brought those women back before sundown. The men want women back on the moon project. If they can get women bootlegged in, they won’t be quite so ready to start a riot on the No Work Without a Wife theme.”

“But Parkeson’d get fired in a flash if—”

“If Parliament got wind of it, sure. Unless he raised the squawk later himself. UCOJE doesn’t mention prostitution. Parkeson could point out that some national codes on Earth tolerate it. Nations with delegates in the Parliament, and with work teams on the moon. Take the African team at Tycho. And the Japanese team. Parkeson himself is an Aussie. Whose law is he supposed to enforce?”

“You mean maybe they can’t keep ships like that from visiting us?”

“Don’t kid yourself. It won’t last long. But maybe long enough. If it goes on long enough, and builds up, the general public will find out. You think that wouldn’t cause some screaming back home?”

“Yeah. That’ll be the end.”

“I’m wondering. If there turns out to be a profit in it for whoever’s backing d’Annecy, well—anything that brings a profit is pretty hard to put a stop to. There’s only one sure way to stop it. Kill the demand.”

“For women? Are you crazy, Joe?”

“They could bring in decent women. Women to marry. That’ll stop it.”

“But the kids. They can’t have kids.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s the problem, and they’ve got to start solving it sometime. Hell, up to now, they haven’t been trying to solve it. When the problem came up, and the kids were dying, everybody got hysterical and jerked the women back to Earth. That wasn’t a solution, it was an evasion. The problem is growth-control—in low gravity. It ought to have a medical answer. If this d’Annecy dame gets a chance to keep peddling her wares under the counter, well—she’ll force them to start looking for a solution.”

“I don’t know, Joe. Everybody said homosexuality would force them to start looking for it—after Doc Reiber made his survey. The statistics looked pretty black, but they didn’t do anything about it except send us a shipful of ministers. The fairies just tried to make the ministers.”

“Yeah, but this is different.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Half the voters are women.”

“So? They didn’t do anything about homosex—”

“Relke, wise up. Listen, did you ever see a couple of Lesbians necking in a bar?”

Relke snickered. “Sure, once or twice.”

“How did you feel about it?”

“Well, this once was kind of funny. You see, this one babe had on—”

“Never mind. You thought it was funny. Do you think it’s funny the way MacMillian and Wickers bill and coo?”

“That gets pretty damn nauseating, Joe.”

“Uh-huh, but the Lesbians just gave you a giggle. Why?”

“Well, I don’t know, Joe, it’s—”

“I’ll tell you why. You like dames. You can understand other guys liking dames. You like dames so much that you can even understand two dames liking each other. You can see what they see in each other. But it’s incongruous, so it’s funny. But you can’t see what two fairies see in each other, so that just gives you a bellyache. Isn’t that it?”

“Maybe, but what’s that got to do with the voters?”

“Ever think that maybe a woman would feel the same way in reverse? A dame could see what MacMillian and Wickers see in each other. The dame might morally disapprove, but at the same time she could sympathize. What’s more, she’d be plenty sure that she could handle that kind of competition if she ever needed to. She’s a woman, and wotthehell, Wickers is only a substitute woman. It wouldn’t worry her too much. Worry her morally, but not as a personal threat. Relke, Mme. d’Annecy’s racket is a personal threat to the home girl and the womenfolk.”

“I see what you mean.”

“Half the voters are women.”

Relke chuckled. “Migod, Joe, if Ellen heard about that ship…”

“Ellen?”

“My older sister. Old maid. Grim.”

“You’ve got the idea. If Parkeson thinks of all this…” His voice trailed off. “When is Larkin talking about crippling that ship?”

“About sundown, why?”

“Somebody better warn the d’Annecy dame.”

The cosmic gunfire had diminished. The Perseid shrapnel still pelted the dusty face of the plain, but the gram-impact-per-acre-second had dropped by a significant fraction, and with it fell the statistician’s estimate of dead men per square mile. There was an ion storm during the first half of B-shift, and the energized spans of high voltage cable danced with fluttering demon light as the trace-pressure of the lunar “atmosphere” increased enough to start a glow discharge between conductors. High current surges sucked at the line, causing the breakers to hiccup. The breakers tried the line three times, then left the circuit dead and waited for the storm to pass. The storm meant nothing to the construction crews except an increase in headset noise.

Parkeson’s voice came drawling on the general call frequency, wading waist-deep through the interference caused by the storm. Relke leaned back against his safety strap atop the trusswork of the last tower and tried to listen. Parkeson was reading the Articles of Discipline, and listening was compulsory. All teams on the job had stopped work to hear him. Relke gazed across the plain toward the slender nacelles of the bird from Algiers in the distance. He had gotten used to the ache in his side where Kunz had kicked him, but it was good to rest for a time and watch the rocket and remember brown legs and a yellow dress. Properties of Earth. Properties belonging to the communion of humanity, from which fellowship a Looney was somehow cut off by 238,000 miles of physical separation.

“We’ve got a job to finish here,” Parkeson was telling the men.

Why? What was in space that was worth the wanting? What followed from its conquest? What came of finishing the job?

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing. Nothing anybody ever dreamed of or hoped for.

Parkeson scolded on. “I know the question that’s foremost in your minds,” his voice continued, “but you’d better forget it. Let me tell you what happens if this line isn’t finished by sundown. (But by God, it will be finished!) Listen, you wanted women. All right, now you’ve all been over to visit the uh—‘affectionate institution’—and you got what you wanted; and now the work is behind schedule. Who gives a damn about the project, eh? I know what you’re thinking. ‘That’s Parkeson’s worry.’ OK, so let’s talk about what you’re going to breathe for the next couple of periods. Let’s talk about how many men will wind up in the psycho-respiratory ward, about the overload on the algae tanks. That’s not your responsibility either, is it? You don’t have to breathe and eat. Hell, let Nature take care of air and water, eh? Sure. Now look around. Take a good look. All that’s between you and that hungry vacuum out there is ten pounds of man-made air and a little reinforced plastic. All that keeps you eating and drinking and breathing is that precarious life-cycle of ours at Copernicus. That plant-animal feedback loop is so delicately balanced that the biology team gets the cold shakes every time somebody sneezes or passes gas. It has to be constantly nursed. It has to be planned and kept on schedule. On Earth, Nature’s a plenum. You can chop down her forests, kill of her deer and buffalo, and fill her air with smog and hot isotopes; the worst you can do is cause a few new deserts and dust bowls, and make things a little unpleasant for a while.

“Up here, we’ve got a little, bit of Nature cooped up in a bottle, and we’re in the bottle too. We’re cultured like mold on agar. The biology team has to chart the ecology for months in advance. It has to know the construction and survey teams are going to deliver exactly what they promise to deliver, and do it on schedule. If you don’t deliver, the ecology gets sick. If the ecology gets sick, you get sick.

“Do you want another epidemic of the chokers like we had three years back? That’s what’ll happen if there’s a work slowdown while everybody goes off on a sex binge at that ship. If the line isn’t finished before sundown, the ecology gets bled for another two weeks to keep that mine colony going, and the colony can’t return wastes to our cycle. Think it over, but think fast. There’s not much time. ‘We all breathe the same air’—on Earth, that’s just a political slogan. Here, we all breathe it or we all choke in it. How do you want it, men?”

Relke shifted restlessly on the tower. He glanced down at Novotny and the others who lounged around the foot of the steel skeleton listening to Parkeson. Lije caught his eye. He waved at Relke to haul up the hoist-bucket. Relke shook his head and gave him a thumbs-down. Henderson gestured insistently for him to haul it up. Relke reeled the bucket in. It was empty, but chalked on the sides and bottom was a note from Lije: “They toll me what L and K did to you and your girl. I and Joe will take care of it, right after this sermon. You can spit on my fist first if you want. Lije.”

Relke gave him a half-hearted screw-twist signal and let the bucket go. Revenge was no good, and vicarious revenge was worse than no good; it was hollow. He thought of asking Joe to forget it, but he knew Joe wouldn’t listen. The pusher felt his own integrity was involved, and a matter of jurisdictional ethics: nobody can push my men around but me. It was gang ethics, but it seemed inevitable somehow. Where there was fear, men huddled in small groups and counted their friends on their fingers, and all else was Foe. In the absence of the family, there had to be the gang, and fear made it quarrelsome, jealous, and proud.

Relke leaned back against his strap and glanced up toward Earth. The planet was between quarter and half phase, for the sun was lower in the west. He watched it and tried to feel something more than a vague envy. Sometimes the heartsick nostalgia reached the proportions of idolatrous adoration of Gaea’s orb overhead, only to subside into a grudging resentment of the gulf between worlds. Earth—it was a place where you could stop being afraid, a place where fear of suffocation was not, where fear of blowout was not, where nobody went berserk with the chokers or dreamed of poisoned air or worried about short-horn cancer or burn blindness or meteoric dust or low-gravity muscular atrophy. A place where there was wind to blow your sweat away.

Watching her crescent, he felt again that vague anger of separation, that resentment against those who stayed at home, who had no cause for constant fear, who could live without the tense expectancy of sudden death haunting every moment. One of them was Fran, and another was the one who had taken her from him. He looked away quickly and tried to listen to the coordinator.

“This is no threat,” Parkeson was saying. “If the line isn’t finished on time, then the consequences will just happen, that’s all. Nobody’s going to punish you, but there are a few thousand men back at the Crater who have to breathe air with you. If they have to breathe stink next period—because you guys were out having one helluva party with Madame d’Annecy’s girls—you can figure how popular you’ll be. That’s all I’ve got to say. There’s still time to get the work back on schedule. Let’s use it.”

Parkeson signed off. The new engineer who was replacing Brodanovitch gave them a brief pep-talk, implying that Parkeson was a skunk and would be forced to eat his own words before sundown. It was the old hard-guy-soft-guy routine: first a bawling-out and then a buttering-up. The new boss offered half of his salary to the first team to forge ahead of its own work schedule. It was not stated nor even implied that Parkeson was paying him back.

The work was resumed. After half an hour, the safety beeper sounded on all frequencies, and men switched back to general call. Parkeson and his party were already heading back toward Copernicus.

“Blasting operation at the next tower site will occur in ten minutes,” came the announcement. “Demol team requests safety clearance over all of zones two and three, from four forty to five hundred hours. There will be scatter-glass in both zones. Zone two is to be evacuated immediately, and all personnel in zone three take line-of-sight cover from the red marker. I repeat: there will be scatter-glass…”

“That’s us,” said Novotny when it was over. “Everybody come on. Brax, Relke, climb down.”

Braxton swore softly in a honeysuckle drawl. It never sounded like cursing, which it wasn’t, but like a man marveling at the variety of vicissitudes invented by an ingenious universe for the bedevilment of men. “I sweah, when the angels ahn’t shootin’ at us from up in Perseus, it’s the demol boys. Demol says froggie, and eve’body jumps. It gives ’em that suhtain feelin’ of impohtance. Y’all know what I think? I got a thee-orry. I think weah all really dead, and they don’ tell us it’s hell weah in, because not tellin’ us is paht of the tohture.”

“Get off the damn frequency, Brax, and stay off!” Novotny snapped when the Alabaman released his mic button. “I’ve told you and Henderson before—either learn to talk fast, or don’t talk on the job. If somebody had a slow leak, he’d be boiling blood before he could scream—with you using the frequency for five minutes to say ‘yeah.’”

“Mistuh Novotny! My mothuh always taught me to speak slowly and de-stinct-ly. If you think that yo’ Yankee upbringin’…”

Joe rapped on his helmet until he shut up, then beck-oned to Henderson. “Lije, we got twenty minutes.”

“Yeah, Joe, want to go see a couple of guys now?” He flashed white teeth and stared back toward the barrack train.

“Think we can handle it in twenty minutes?”

“I don’ know. It seem like a short time to do a real good job of it, but maybe if we don’t waste any on preliminary fisticuffin’…”

“Hell, they didn’t waste any ceremony on Relke.”

“Less go, then!” He grinned at Relke and held out his fist. “Spit on it?”

Relke shook his head. Henderson laughed. “Wanted to see if you’d go ptooey in your helmet.”

“Come on, Lije. The rest of you guys find cover.”

Relke watched the two of them lope off toward the rolling barracks. “Hey, Joe,” he called after a few seconds.

The lopers stopped to look back. “Relke?”

“Yeah. Don’t lose.”

“What?”

“They’ll say I sicced you. Don’t lose.”

“Don’t worry.” They loped again. The longer Relke watched them, the less he liked the idea. If they didn’t do a pretty thorough job on Kunz and Larkin, things would be worse for Relke than if they did nothing at all. Then there was the movement to think about; he didn’t know to what extent they looked out for their own.

Relke walked out of the danger zone and hiked across the hill where he could get a clear view of the rocket. He stopped for a while on the slope and watched four distant figures moving around on the ground beneath the towering ship. For a moment, he thought they were women, but then he saw that one of them was coiling mooring cable, and he knew they were ship’s crew. What sort of men had the d’Annecy women been able to hire for such a job? he wondered.

He saw that they were getting ready to lift ship. Lift ship!

Relke was suddenly running toward them without knowing why. Whenever he topped a rise of ground and could see them, he tried calling them, but they were not using the project’s suit frequency. Finally he found their voices on the seldom used private charter band, but they were speaking French.

One of the men looped a coil of cable over his shoulder and started up the ladder toward the lock. Relke stopped atop an outcropping. He was still two or three miles from the ship. The “isobar” valve system for the left knee of his suit had jammed, and it refused to take up the increased pressure caused by flexure. It was like trying to bend a fully inflated rubber tire, and he hobbled about for a moment with one leg stiff as a crutch.

“Listen!” he called on the p.c. frequency. “You guys at the ship. Can you hear me?” He was panting, and he felt a little panicky. The man on the ladder stopped climbing and looked around.

There was a staccato exchange in French.

“No, no! Over here. On the rock.” He waved at them and jumped a few times. “Look toward the camp. On the rock.”

They conversed heatedly among themselves for a time. “Don’t any of you speak English?” he begged.

They were silent for a moment. “Whoevair ees?” one of them ventured. “You conversation with wrong radio, M’sieur. Switch a button.”

“No, no. I’m trying to call you…”

A carrier drowned him out.

“We close for business,” the man said. “We go now.” He started climbing again.

“Listen!” Relke yelled. “Ten thousand dollars. Everything.”

“You crazy man.”

“Look, it won’t get you in any trouble. I’ve got plenty in the bank. I’ll pay—”

The carrier cut him off again.

“You crazy. Get off the air. We do not go to Earth now.”

“Wait! Listen! Tell Giselle… No, let me talk to her. Get her to use the radio. It’s important.”

“I tell you, we close for business now.” The man climbed in the airlock. The others climbed up behind. They were, jeering at him. This time it sounded like Arabic. He watched until they were all inside.

White fury lanced the ground and spread in a white sheet beneath the ship and roiled up in a tumult of dust and expanding gasses. It climbed on a white fan, gathering velocity. Relke could still make it out as a ship when its course began arcing away from the vertical. It was beginning a trajectory in the direction of Copernicus. When it was out of sight, he began trudging back toward the work site. He was nearly an hour overdue.

“Where you been?” Novotny asked him quietly after watching him hobble the last quarter of a mile in stony silence. He was squinting at the lineman with that faintly puzzled look that Relke recognized as a most ominous omen. The squint was lopsided because of a cut under one eye, and it looked like a chip was missing from a tooth.

Relke showed his stiff leg and bounced the heel against the ground a couple of times. “I walked too far, and the c.p. valves got jammed. Sorry, Joe.”

“You don’t have to be sorry. Let’s see.”

The pusher satisfied himself that the suit was malfunctioning. He waved the lineman toward the barrack train. “Go to supply and get it fixed. Get back on the double. You’ve slowed us down.”

Relke paused. “You sore, Joe?”

“We’re on duty. I don’t get sore on duty. I save it up. Now—haul ass!”

Relke hobbled off. “What about… what you went for, Joe?” he called back. “What happened?”

“I told you to keep your nose out of politics!” the pusher snapped. “Never mind what happened.”

Joe, Relke decided, was plenty sore. About something. Maybe about a beating that backfired. Maybe about Relke taking an hour awol. Either way, he was in trouble. He thought it over and decided that paying a bootleg ship ten thousand to take him back to Earth with them hadn’t been such a hysterical whim after all.

But then he met Larkin in the supply wagon. Larkin was stretched out flat on his back, and a medic kept saying, “Who did it to you? Who did it to you?” and Larkin kept telling him to go to hell out of a mouth that looked like a piece of singed stew meat. Kunz was curled up on a blanket and looked even worse. He spat in his sleep and a bit of tooth rattled across the deck.

“Meanest bunch of bastards I ever saw,” the clerk told Relke while he checked in the suit. “They don’t even give you a chance. Here were these two guys sleeping in their bunks and not bothering anybody, and what do you think?”

“I quit thinking. What?”

“Somebody starts working them over. Wham. Don’t even wake them up first. Just wham. You ever see anything like it? Mean, John, just mean. You can’t even get a shift’s sleep anymore. You better go to bed with a knife in your boot, John.”

“It’s Bill.”

“Oh. What do you suppose makes a guy that mean anyway?”

“I don’t know. Everybody’s jumpy, I guess.”

The clerk looked at him wisely. “There you have put your finger on it, John. Looney nerves. The jitters. Everybody’s suit-happy.” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “You know how I tell when the camp’s getting jittery?”

“Listen, check me out a suit. I’ve got to get back to the line.”

“Now wait, this’ll surprise you. I can tell better than the psych checkers when everybody’s going on a slow panic. It’s the sleeping bag liners.”

“What?”

“The bed wetters, John. You’d be surprised how many grown men turn bed wetters about the middle of a hitch. At first, nobody. Then somebody gets killed on the line. The bag liners start coming in for cleaning. By the end of the hitch, the wash tank smells like a public lavatory, John. Not just the men, either. Some of the engineers. You know what I’m doing?”

“Look, Mack, the suit…”

“Not Mack. Frank. Look, I’ll show you the chart.” He got out a sheet of paper with a crudely drawn graph on it. “See how it goes? The peak? I’ve done ten of them.”

“Why?”

The clerk looked at him blankly. “For the idea box, John. Didn’t you know about the prizes? Doctor Esterhall ought to be glad to get information like this.”

“Christ, they’ll give you a medal, Charley. Now give me my damn suit before I get it myself. I’m due on the line.”

“OK, OK. You got the jitters yourself, haven’t you?” He went to get the suit. “I just happened to think,” he called back. “If you’ve been turning in liners yourself, don’t worry about me. I don’t keep names, and I don’t remember faces.”

“You blab plenty, though,” Relke grumbled to himself.

The clerk heard him. “No call to get sore, John.”

“I’m not sore, I’m just in a hurry. If you want to beg for a stomping, it’s nothing to me.”

The clerk came back bristling. “Who’s going to stomp?”

“The bed wetters, I guess.” He started getting into the suit.

“Why? It’s for science, isn’t it?”

“Nobody likes to be watched.”

“There you put your finger on it, John. It’s the watching part that’s worst. If they’d only quit watching us, or come out where we could see them! You know what I think? I think there’s some of them among us. In disguise.” The clerk smirked mysteriously at what-he-knew-but-wouldn’t-tell.

Relke paused with a zipper halfway up. “Who do you mean—watching? Checkers?”

The clerk snorted and resumed what he had been doing when Relke entered: he was carefully taping his share of stock in Mme. d’Annecy’s venture up on the wall among a display of pin-ups. “You know who I mean,” he muttered.

“No, I don’t.”

“The ones that dug that mine, that’s who.”

“Aliens? Oh, bullspit.”

“Yeah? You’ll see. They’re keeping an eye on us, all right. There’s a guy on the African team that even talked to some of them.”

“Nuts. He’s not the first guy that ever talked to spooks. Or demons. Or saucer pilots. You don’t have to be a Looney to be a lunatic.”

That made the clerk sore, and he stomped off to his sanctum to brood. Relke finished getting into the suit and stepped into the airlock. Some guys had to personify their fear. If there was danger, somebody must be responsible. They had to have an Enemy. Maybe it helped, believing in gremlins from beyond Pluto. It gave you something to hate when your luck was bad.

He met Joe just outside the lock. The pusher was waiting to get in.

“Hey, Pappy, I own up. I was goofing off awhile ago. If you want to be sore—” Relke stopped. Something was wrong. Joe was breathing hard, and he looked sick.

“Christ, I’m not sore! Not now!”

“What’s wrong, Joe?”

The pusher paused in the hatchway. “Run on back to the line. Keep an eye on Braxton. I’m getting a jeep. Back in a minute.” He went on inside and closed the hatch.

Relke trotted toward the last tower. After a while he could hear Braxton talking in spasms on the frequency. It sounded like sobbing. He decided it was sobbing.

“Theah just isn’t any God,” Bama was moaning. “Theah just couldn’t be a God and be so mean. He was the bes’ frien’ a man evah had, and he nevah did nothin’ to de-serve it. Oh, God, oh, God, why did it have to be him? Theah jus’ can’t be any God in Heaven, to treat a man that way, when he been so…” Braxton’s voice broke down into incoherent sobbing.

There was a man lying on the ground beside the tower. Relke could see Benet bending over him. Benet was clutching a fistful of the man’s suit. He crossed himself slowly and stood up. A safety team runabout skidded to a halt beside the tower, and three men piled out. Benet spread his hands at them in a wide shrug and turned his back.

“What happened?” Relke asked as he loped up to Beasley.

“Kama was welding. Lije walked over to ask him for a wrench or something. Bama turned around to get it, and Lije sat down on the strut with the hot weld.”

“Blow out?”

“He wasn’t that lucky. Call it a fast slowout.”

Novotny drove up, saw the safety jeep, and started bellowing furiously at them.

“Take it easy, chum. We got here as quick as we could.”

“Theah jus’ can’t be any God in Heaven…”

They got Henderson in the safety runabout. Novotny manufactured a hasty excuse to send Braxton off with them, for grief had obviously finished his usefulness for awhile. Everybody stood around in sickly silence and stared after the jeep.

“Genet, you know how to pray,” Novotny muttered. “Say something, altar boy.”

“Aw, Joe, that was fifteen years ago. I haven’t lived right.”

“Hell, who has? Go ahead.”

Benet muttered for a moment and turned his back. “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti…” He paused.

“Can’t you pray in English?” Joe asked.

“We always said it in Latin. I only served at a few masses.”

“Go ahead.”

Benet prayed solemnly while they stood around with bowed heads and shuffled their boots in the dust. Nobody understood the words, not even Benet, but somehow it seemed important to listen.

“Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine. Et lux perpetua luceat…”

Relke looked up slowly and let his eyes wander slowly across the horizon. There were still some meteorites coming in, making bright little winks of fire where they bit into the plain. Deadly stingers out of nowhere, heading nowhere, impartially orbiting, random as rain, random as death. The debris of creation. Relke decided Braxton was wrong. There was a God, all right, maybe personal, maybe not, but there was a God, and He wasn’t mean. His universe was a deadly contraption, but maybe there wasn’t any way to build a universe that wasn’t a deadly contraption—like a square circle.

He made the contrapation, and He put Man in it, and Man was a fairly deadly contraption himself. But the funny part of it was, there wasn’t a damn thing the universe could do to a man that a man wasn’t built to endure. He could even endure it when it killed him. And gradually he could get the better of it. It was the consistency of matched qualities—random mercilessness and human endurance—and it wasn’t mean, it was a fair match.

“Poor Lije. God help him.”

“All right,” Novotny called. “Let’s pull cable, men.”

“Yeah, you know what?” said Beasley. “Those dames went to Crater City. The quicker we get the line finished, the quicker we get back. Damn Parkeson anyhow!”

“Hell, why do you think he let them go there, Beeze?” Tremini jeered. “So we’d work our butts off to finish quick, that’s why. Parkeson’s no idiot. If he’d sent them packing for somewhere else, maybe we’d finish, maybe we wouldn’t.”

“Cut the jawing. Somebody run down and get the twist out of that span before she kinks. Relke, start taking up slack.”

Atop the steel truss that supported’ the pendulous insulators, the lineman began jacking up the slack line. He glanced toward the landing site where the ship had been, and it was hard to believe it had ever been there at all. A sudden improbable dream that had come and gone and left nothing behind. Nothing? Well, there was a share of stock…

“Hey, we’re all capitalists!” Relke called.

Benet hooted. “Take your dividends out in trade.”

“Listen, someday they’ll let dames come here again and get married. That’s one piece of community property you better burn first.”

“That d’Annecy dame thought of everything.”

“Listen, that d’Annecy dame is going to force an issue. She’ll clean up, and a lot of guys will throw away small fortunes, but before it’s over, they’ll let women in space again. Now quit jawing, and let’s get to work.”

Relke glanced at the transformer station where he had taken the girl. He tried to remember what she looked like, but he got Fran’s face instead. He tried to transmute the image into Giselle’s, but it stayed Fran. Maybe he hadn’t really seen Giselle at all. Maybe he had looked at her and seen Fran all along, but it had been a poor substitution. It had accomplished one thing, though. He felt sorry for Fran now. He no longer hated her. She had stuck it out a long time before there had been another guy. And it was harder for a wife on Earth than it was for a husband on Luna. She had to starve in the midst of plenty. He had only to deny himself what he couldn’t get anyhow, or even see. She was the little girl with her nose against the bakery window. He was only fasting in the desert. It was easy; it put one beyond temptation. To fast in a banquet hall, one had to be holy. Fran wasn’t holy. Relke doubted he’d want a wife who was holy. It could get damnably dull.

A quick glance at Earth told him it was still in the skyless vault. Maybe she’ll come, if they ever let them come, he thought wistfully. Maybe the guy’ll be a poor substitute, and she’ll figure out who she’s really married to, legal instruments notwithstanding. Maybe… O God, let her come!… women had no business on Luna, but if they didn’t then neither did men, nor Man, who had to be a twosome in order to be recognizably human.

“Damn it, Relke, work that jack!” Joe yelled. “We got to build that line!”

Relke started cranking again, rocking his body to the rhythm of the jack, to the rhythm of echoes of thought. Got to build the line. Damn it, build the line. Got to build the line. Build the damn line. The line was part of a living thing that had to grow. The line was yet another creeping of life across a barrier, a lungfish flopping from pool to pool, an ape trying to walk erect across still another treeless space. Got to build the line. Even when it kills you, got to build the line, the bloody endless line. The lineman labored on in silence. The men were rather quiet that shift.

₁₉₅₇