Lifeline

Chapter 21

CLAVIUS BASE—Day 26

Damned dirty socks again.

Clancy tried to ignore the smell, but the suit refused to cooperate. Lunar rocks, their edges razor sharp in the direct sunlight, stared him in the face as he stepped around them. His foot slipped. Cursing, he kicked up a volley of pebbles and caught himself before falling in slow motion.

From up on the wall, he could see Longomontanus Crater unfold before him—sixty miles of unbroken smoothness. A five-mile-long track ran through the dust from the point where the wall-kelp had hit the lunar surface. The Filipino scientists couldn’t have aimed the package any better: the container had struck at one and a half kilometers per second, nearly tangential to the ground. Maybe it was even still intact.

“The Lunatics think we’re a bunch of rednecks, Cliffy,” Shen’s voice came over the suit radio. “But look who gets to go out on a two-day wild-goose chase for a package of space seaweed?”

“Gives you a chance to stretch your legs. Nice legs, too.” Clancy grinned inside his helmet. She gave him a raspberry over the suit radio. “Is that beeper still going strong?”

“Intermittent now—the battery must be almost dead.”

“Doesn’t matter, Cliff,” Homann’s voice interrupted. “We can see the track now. Piece of cake. It’s like a giant arrow pointing straight to the pot of gold.”

“I thought it was rainbows that pointed to the pot of gold,” Shen said.

“Can’t get any rainbows here. No atmosphere.”

“Well, let’s just find it and get back to base,” Clancy interrupted them. “Wooster’s probably screwing up my score in the docking simulator.”

At Clavius Base the Orbitech 2 engineers kept to themselves. Once in a while Clancy had to step in and bash heads together, but in general the engineers were well-behaved. The other Lunatics resented the unwelcome guests, though, begrudging them the precious supplies they consumed.

But while the Lunatics sulked, Clancy’s engineers had taken over the mundane grit work that the Clavius Base scientists had to do—hydroponic gardening, ice mining, equipment repair. It was “busywork” for the engineers, Clancy knew—and so did they—but it kept them from being bored silly.

Left to his own intuition, Clancy would have suggested some sports activity, maybe a regular jaunt outside—it did no real harm, and the oxygen tanks were readily replenished from processing lunar rock. But Dr. Tomkins had suggested low levels of physical activity to decrease food consumption. He expressed optimism at the hydroponics teams working to increase productivity in the underground garden tunnels.

“Aww, Tomkins can’t even make up his own bed, not to mention his mind,” Shen had complained. “He’s so wishy-washy, he’ll have things in complete disarray before long.”

Clancy held up his hand, cutting short any echo of her complaints. “Tomkins might not be the most outstanding administrator around, but he’s been in charge of Clavius Base for years. If he wasn’t capable, NASA and the U.N. would have canned him years ago. Let’s see how he does with this kelp stuff.”

Spirits had lifted noticeably around Clavius Base when the container had hit the Moon. Most of the Lunatic scientists had been dubious about the slingshot scheme—especially after they found out the idea came from the arrogant and unpredictable Luis Sandovaal.

The Filipino scientist’s thick white hair stood out in the holotank. His blue eyes blazed; his face filled the unit as he shouted.

“What do you take us for—idiots? Of course we plotted the trajectory. Ten days and the package will intersect the Moon, but you will have to locate it yourself. We put a homing beacon on it. The wall-kelp is our gift to you. And once you see its growth characteristics, you will think it is manna from heaven.”

Tomkins had done his best to appease the temperamental scientist. “You have our thanks, Dr. Sandovaal. We will be in contact if we have any questions, and to describe the progress of your wall-kelp.”

Clancy felt warm in his suit, but all the gauges read normal. He wanted to find the package and start the journey back. After two days moving out in the rovers, he was getting a little tired of the tedium. The smell of dirty socks seemed to grow stronger. It had never felt like this up at Orbitech 2. There they at least had modular living quarters, so they could take off the suits after a long day’s work. He was tired of sucking on the suit nutrients, of using the piddlepack. He desperately wanted a shower.

Below him, the team of six-packs spread out and moved along the popcorn-powdery floor of the crater. Their big wheels rolled along, grinding the surface to dust in silence.

The second lunar rover lay fifty yards away on the crater floor. The rest of the crew was hidden by jutting rocks. He activated his chin mike and hoped the others were within line-of-sight transmission.

“Any luck?”

“The beeper’s pretty much useless now, Cliff. Just a ping or two. It’s more confusion than help.” Shen’s voice sounded loud in his helmet.

“Find anything, Homann?” He could see the silver of the other man’s suit as he bounded ahead.

“You’d hear the hollering if I did.”

“Get to a higher spot so you can see better—but be careful.” The skipping track of the package’s landing had been obvious from a distance, but on the jumbled crater floor it was indistinguishable. Clancy worked his shoulders back and forth to reach an itch on his back. Comfortable again, he looked up at the crater walls towering over him. They jutted into the star-filled sky, hiding their fissures and jagged edges.

“Looks like it skidded into the crater wall and bounced back,” Homann said. “Five hundred pounds of packaged seaweed. Blooey! So much for ‘Fragile—handle with care.’ Ever see any of those classic Roadrunner cartoons? I wonder if it’s Acme wall-kelp.”

“Okay, okay, just direct us to the terminus of the skid path. Come on, Pete, I’m getting tired of being out here.” Clancy tried to keep the impatience out of his voice. There’s got to be an easier way to find this stuff, he thought. He’d calculated enough scattering cones at MIT to be able to guess where the package would land.

“I’ll give you a nice long back rub when we get back, boss,” Shen said.

“Ooooh!” Homann broke in. “You could give me one!”

“Quit clowning, you guys.”

Homann directed them across the crater floor. Even from the inconvenient vantage point, now Clancy could see the skid tracks from the impact. “X marks the spot!” Homann radioed.

“Shen, listen for beeps.”

After a few more minutes of searching, Clancy brushed fine lunar dust off the pitted surface of the package. Buried under three centimeters of dust, the desk-sized container was bashed on one end from its collision with the rock, but the outer wall seemed to be unbreached. The kelp was intact.

He radioed, “Merry Christmas, everybody!”

“Easy, easy!” Philip Tomkins hovered over the construction workers like a mother hen. Duncan McLaris stood on his tiptoes away from the crowd, watching. The rest of Clavius Base observed through personal holoscreens. The ConComm link to the Aguinaldo showed the Filipino Council of Twenty, with Dr. Sandovaal in the foreground.

Clancy pried at the container until the seal suddenly burst open. “Ooof.” He went sprawling backwards.

Shen caught him and propped him back up, patting his shoulder. “I told you you’d be throwing yourself at me after a year, boss.”

Clancy ignored her and motioned to Dr. Tomkins. “All yours, sir.”

Tomkins straightened and peered into the hololink with the Aguinaldo. “I sincerely thank our Filipino friends for this gift of food, this opportunity. If it fulfills only a fraction of your expectations, Dr. Sandovaal, it will indeed save our lives here at Clavius Base.”

With Sandovaal nodding sagely in the background, Tomkins cracked open the main chamber of the container. “It appears to be intact!” Tomkins turned to the holotank. He grinned, and his big body seemed to be filled with a greater excitement than Clancy had ever seen him display.

Sandovaal’s voice came across the three hundred thousand kilometers from the Aguinaldo. “When your lunar tunnels are filled with wall-kelp, just remember me.” He moved out of sight of the holotransmitters, the bare hint of a smile on his face.

Clavius Base got its first look at the wall-kelp. Clancy sniffed the air, frowning, and looked into the wet, green receptacle of wall-kelp.

Perhaps this substance was going to save them, but for now, it smelled even worse than the dirty socks in his space suit.