The Precipice

ASTRO CORPORATION OFFICES

If he finds the account I set up for him to pay the rent on my sister’s dewar I’m toast,” Pancho said as she paced across Dan’s office.

Sitting behind his desk, Dan said, “I’ll get George to scratch the program. Astro can pay the storage fees for your sister.”

Pancho shook her head. “That’ll just call attention to what I did.”

“Not if we erase the subroutine completely. He’ll never know.”

“No!” Pancho insisted. “Don’t go anywhere near it. It’ll tip him off for sure.” Dan could see how agitated she was. “You just want to leave it there? He might stumble across it any minute.”

“He knows I did it,” Pancho said, crossing the room again in her long-legged strides. “I know he knows. He’s just playin’ cat-and-mouse with me.”

“I don’t think so. He’s not the type. Humphries is more a sledge-hammer-on-thehead kind of guy.”

She stopped and turned toward Dan, her face suddenly white, aghast. “Jesus H.

Christ… he might turn off Sis’s life support! He might pull the plug on her!”

Dan knew she was right. “Or threaten to.”

“That’d give him enough leverage to get me to do whatever he wants.”

“What does he want?”

“He wants Mandy. He wants her scrubbed from the mission so he can talk her into marrying him.”

Dan leaned back in his desk chair and stared at the ceiling. He’d had the office swept for bugs only an hour earlier, yet he had the uneasy feeling that Humphries knew everything that he said or did. Pancho’s not the only Astro employee he’s recruited, Dan reminded himself. My whole double-damned staff must be honeycombed with his snoops. Who can I trust?

He snapped forward in the chair and said into the phone console, “Phone, find George Ambrose. I want him here, now.”

In less than a minute Big George came through the doorway from the outer office.

“George, I want this whole suite swept for bugs,” Dan commanded.

“Again? We just did it an hour ago.”

“I want you to do it this time. Yourself. Nobody else.”

Scratching at his shaggy beard, George said, “Gotcha, boss.” It took a maddening half hour. Pancho forced herself to sit on the sofa while George went through the office with a tiny black box in one massive paw. “Clean in here,” he said at last.

“Okay,” said Dan. “Close the door and sit down.”

“You said you wanted the outer offices done, too,” George objected.

“In a minute. Sit.”

Obediently, George lowered his bulk into one of the cushioned chairs in front of Dan’s desk.

“I’ve been thinking. Tonight, the three of us are going to move a dewar out of the catacombs,” Dan said.

“Sis? Where—”

“I’ll figure that out between now and then,” Dan said. “Maybe somewhere else on the Moon. Maybe we’ll move her to one of the space stations.”

“You’ve gotta have the right equipment to maintain it,” George pointed out.

Dan waved a hand in the air. “You need a cryostat to keep the nitrogen liquified.

Not much else.”

“Life support monitors,” Pancho pointed out.

“Self-contained on the dewar flask,” said Dan.

“Not the equipment,” Pancho corrected. “I mean you need some people to take a look every few days, make sure everything’s running okay.” With a shake of his head, Dan said, “That’s a frill that you pay extra for. You don’t need it. The equipment has safety alarms built in. The only time you need human intervention is when the flask starts to exceed the limits you’ve set the equipment to keep.”

“Well, yeah… I guess,” Pancho agreed reluctantly.

“Okay, George,” Dan said. “Go sweep the rest of the place. We can all meet here for dinner at…” he called up his appointment screen with the jab of a finger,”… nineteen-thirty.”

“Dinner?” Pancho asked.

“Can’t do dirty work on an empty stomach,” Dan said, grinning mischievously. “But where are we taking her?” Pancho asked as she disconnected the liquid nitrogen feed line. Despite its heavy insulation, the hose was stiff with a rime of frost. Cold white vapor hissed briefly from its open end, until she twisted the seal shut.

“Shh!” Dan hissed, pointing to the baleful red eye of the security camera hanging some fifty meters down the corridor.

This late at night they were quite alone in the catacombs, but Dan worried about that security camera. There was one at each end of the long row of dewars, and although the area was dimly lit, the cameras fed into Selene’s security office where they were monitored twenty-four hours a day. Pancho figured that, like security guards anywhere, the men and women responsible for monitoring the cameras seldom paid them close attention, except when a warning light flashed red or a synthesized voice warned of trouble that some sensor had detected. That’s why they had hacked into the sensor controls on Sis’s dewar and cut them out of the monitoring loop.

Dan and George were sweating with the effort of jacking up the massive dewar onto a pair of trolleys. Even in the low gravity of the Moon, the big stainless-steel cylinder was heavy.

“Where’re we goin’?” Pancho repeated.

“You’ll see,” Dan grunted.

Pancho plugged the nitrogen hose into the portable cryostat they had taken from one of the Astro labs, several levels below the catacombs. “Okay, all set,” she whispered.

“How’re you doing, George?” Dan asked.

The shaggy Australian came around the front end of the dewar. “Ready whenever you are, boss.”

Dan glanced once at the distant camera’s red eye, then said, “Let’s get rolling.” The caster wheels on the trolleys squeaked as the three of them pushed the dewar down the long, shadowy corridor.

“Don’t the security cameras have a recording loop?” Pancho asked. “Once they see Sis’s dewar is missing, they’ll play it back and see us.”

“That camera’s going to show a nice, quiet night,” Dan said, leaning hard against the big dewar as they trundled along. “Cost me a few bucks, but I think I found an honest security guard. She’ll erase our images and run a loop from earlier in the evening to cover the erasure. Everything will look peaceful and calm.”

“That’s an honest guard?” Pancho asked.

“An honest guard,” Dan said, panting with the strain of pushing, “is one who stays bought.”

“And I’ll put an empty dewar in your sister’s place,” George added, “soon’s we get this one settled in.” Pancho noticed he was breathing easily, hardly exerting himself.

“But where’re we takin’ her?” Pancho asked again. “And why’re we whisperin’ if you got the guard bought?”

“We’re whispering because there might be other people in the catacombs,” Dan replied, sounding a bit irked. “No sense taking any chances we don’t need to take.”

“Oh.” That made sense. But it still didn’t tell her where in the hell they were going. They passed the end of the catacombs and kept on going along the long, dimly-lit corridor until they stopped at last at what looked like an airlock hatch. Dan stood up straight and stretched his arms overhead until Pancho heard his vertebrae crack.

“I’m getting too old for this kind of thing,” he muttered as he went to the hatch and pecked on its electronic lock. The hatch popped slightly open; Pancho caught a whiff of stale, dusty air that sighed from it.

George pulled the hatch all the way open.

“Okay, down the tunnel we go,” said Dan, unclipping a flashlight from the tool loop on the leg of his coveralls.

The tunnel had been started, he explained to Pancho, back in the early days of Moonbase, when Earthbound managers had decided to ram a tunnel through the ringwall mountains to connect the floor of Alphonsus with the broad expanse of Mare Nubium.

“I helped to dig it,” Dan said, with pride in his voice. Then he added, “What there is of it, at least.”

The lunar rock had turned out to be much tougher than expected; the cost of digging the tunnel, even with plasma torches, had risen too far. So the tunnel was never finished. Instead, a cable-car system had been built over the mountains. It was more expensive to operate than a tunnel would have been but far cheaper to construct.

“I’ve ridden the cable car up to the top of Mt. Yeager,” Pancho said. “The view’s terrific.”

“Yep,” Dan agreed. “They forgot about the tunnel. But it’s still here, even though nobody uses it. And so are the access shafts.”

The access shafts had been drilled upward to the outside, on the side of the mountain. The first of the access shafts opened into an emergency shelter where there were pressure suits and spare oxygen bottles, in case the cable-car system overhead broke down.

“And here we are,” Dan said.

In the scant light from the flashlights that Dan and George played around the tunnel walls, Pancho saw a set of metal rungs leading up to another hatch. “There’s a tempo just above us,” he said as George started climbing the ladder.

“We’ll jack into its electrical power supply to run the dewar’s cryostat.”

“Won’t that show up on the grid monitors?” Pancho asked. Shaking his head, Dan replied, “Nope. The tempos have their own solar panels and batteries. Completely independent. The panels are even up on poles to keep ’em out of the dust.”

Pancho heard the hatch groan open. Looking up, she saw George squeeze his bulk through its narrow diameter.

“How’re we gonna get Sis’s dewar through that hatch?” she demanded.

“There’s a bigger hatch for equipment,” Dan said.

As if to prove the point, a far wider hatch squealed open over their heads. Dim auxiliary lighting from the tempo filtered down to them. Even with the little winch from the tempo, it was a struggle to wrestle the bulky dewar and its equipment up through the hatch. Pancho worried that Sis would be jostled and crumpled in her liquid nitrogen bath. But at last they had Sis hooked up in the temporary shelter. The dewar rested on the floor and all the gauges were in the green.

“You’ll have to come back here once a month or so to check up on everything.

Maybe once every six or seven months you’ll have to top off the nitrogen supply.”

A thought struck her. “What about when I’m on the mission?”

“I’ll do it,” George said without hesitation. “Be glad to.”

“How the hell can I thank you guys?”

Dan chuckled softly. “I’m just making certain that my best pilot isn’t blackmailed by Humphries into working against me. And George…” The big Aussie looked suddenly embarrassed.

“I used to live in one of the tempos,” he said, his tenor voice softer than usual. “Back when I was a fugitive, part of the underground. Back before Dan took me under ’is wing.”

Dan said, “This is a sort of homecoming for George.”

“Yeah,” George said. “Reminds me of the bad old days. Almost brings a fookin’ tear to my eye.”

Dan laughed and the Aussie laughed with him. Pancho just stood there, feeling enormously grateful to them both.