The end was routine. ¢le’s knowledge sufficed; the technicians were able to convert the Canopian mattermitter for transfer, invoking fairly minor but critical modifications of detail. The settings were arranged for the center of Sphere Sol. ¢le was held under guard with the punishment-box, scheduled for later transfer.
Flint stepped into the transfer chamber.
4. Lake of Dreams
*notice initial mission destroy 200 intensity threat entity failed*
—detail?—
*own agent 200 intensity dispatched contact made owing to suspicions of natives of canopus unable to eliminate sol transferee necessary to provide transfer information to sphere canopus in order to*
—WHAT?!—
*to protect identity of agent origin and allay suspicion per directive judgment call on part of operative we intercepted agent at time of retransfer from canopus*
—judgment call? more likely operative stunned by allure of equivalent aura and lost imperative for mission what sex agent?—
*female*
—precisely and target entity male route her through spot reorientation to ensure next time duty before pleasure and reassign for next available intercept unfortunate we have to work through these high-kirlian types never can be quite certain of their loyalties—
*POWER*
—CIVILIZATION—
Flint hopped rapidly over the surface of Luna, Planet Earth’s huge moon, putting the mining station at Posidonius Crater behind him. The hopper’s single plunger smacked into the bleak surface of the crater floor, compressing like a pogo stick, then thrusting him upward in a broad arc. He was only a fraction of his normal weight because of the reduced gravity, but the old-fashioned heavy-duty mining suit was twice his mass. The net result was a jumping weight of about two-thirds his nude-body normal. He needed the powered hopper to make real progress.
He bore west, searching out the gap in the crater wall. The station was inside a subcrater within Posidonius, capped over and pressurized. Nature had excavated the pit; now men used it as convenient access to the high concentrations of aluminum, titanium, magnesium, silicon, and iron there. It had cost a lot, a century or three ago, to emplace the first Lunar mines; they had paid their way many times over. Posidonius Mine was about worked out, as were most of the digs of this quadrant, and in fact the moon itself, but as long as the diminishing ores were worth more than the cost of operation, the mines continued to function. Today the planet Mercury of Sol and the larger moons of the outer Solar System—Ganymede, Titan, and Triton—were more important resources. Luna was largely forgotten.
Security was slack, which was why Flint had been able to pose as an itinerant miner and steal a suit and hopper to make a much better chase of it. By the time Imperial Earth traced him this far, he would be impossible to trace further. The Lunar surface was so pocked with the marks of other hoppers—and each mark was permanent the instant made, since there was no weather, no air to erase it—that his trail was not discernible. Once he got beyond the crater, beyond direct visual range, he would be lost. Bless that jagged rim!
He made it. The crater itself was fifty to seventy-five miles in diameter, depending on which way it was measured, and the mine was off-center, so he had about twenty miles to go. The hopper enabled him to do it in just about an hour without getting winded. Time enough; his next on-shift would not be for another two hours.
The crater rim, so fragile-looking from telescopic distance, was actually a phenomenal mountain ring several miles thick, though not tall. It had been formed millions or even billions of years ago by the impact of a large meteor, the material of the crater center scooped out and dumped in that circle. Not volcanic; there was very little volcanic activity on the moon. Here at the western pass the wall was broken, and he navigated the rubble without difficulty. It was against Sphere law to deface the visible landscape of Luna, but anonymous miners had blasted out an ascending channel at the narrowest part to facilitate passage from the central depression. It was too small to show up on most photographs taken from Earth, so no investigation had been made. Anyway, that had been in the heyday of the mine, when metals worth millions of Sphere dollars had been extracted every few hours. Miners were tough, ornery men and women; even the Imperium tended to let them alone, as long as they produced. The profession of mining, freed from the cave-ins and black-lung threats of ancient times, had become the stuff of adolescent fancy. Miners were heroes, prized and well paid and bold, and planet lubbers sought them avidly.
Now he emerged onto the broad Mare Serenitatis, the Sea of Serenity, an expanse of almost-level rock some four hundred miles across. The early Solarians, staring at their great moon from the vantage of misty Earth, had pictured these lava plains (here in the mare there had been volcanism!) as oceans and seas and bays, and named them accordingly. The illusion had been banished when Luna was physically explored, and perhaps even before then, but the intriguing names had remained. “Hope I don’t get my feet wet,” Flint muttered. His suit radio was turned off, of course; he would be a fool to let them trace him through his broadcast emissions.
His feet did not get wet, though the hopper made little splashes in the dust that disappeared almost instantly. With no air to hold the substance up, it collapsed without billowing. On the apex of each glide he could see over the Serpentine Wrinkle Ridge, an arm of which approached quite close to the rim of Posidonius. Had he been able to bound high enough, he might have been able to see all the way across the western edge of the Sea of Serenity to where its vast crater wall parted to give access to the even vaster Mare Imbrium, the Sea of Rains. His line of sight would give him a glimpse of one of that sea’s craters, probably Archimedes. Flint had studied, and therefore had an exact visual memory of, the map of the adjacent geography of Luna—but this would be a narrow line-of-sight view between the encroaching mountain ranges of the Caucasus to the north and the Apennines to the south. Mountains on Earth were named after these—or maybe it was the other way around. There were three craters in that vicinity, so he couldn’t be quite certain which one he would see from five hundred miles away. It really didn’t matter, since the tight curvature of the moon put the whole area out of sight and he was not going there anyway.
He veered north, changing direction by shifting his weight to make the hopper lean. He skirted Posidonius, now shielded from observation by its rim. Ahead of him was Lacus Somniorum, the Lake of Dreams. Primitive that he was, he loved that imagery. Flint had dreams—of escape, of freedom, of eventual return to Outworld and his green darling Honeybloom. Pnotl of Sphere Knyfh, that alien transferee from the inner galaxy, had dazzled him into undertaking the mission, but in Sphere Canopus reality had caught up with fancy. He had encountered no high-Kirlian natives there, and had suffered torture and the constant threat of death. The one high-Kirlian entity he had met had turned out to be another transferee. He was unfit for this type of work; the edge was off. He hadn’t even been able to complete his mission; the girl transferee had had to bail him out. Let her initiate the next mission! The Imps would not search for him long; they would know his suit-air could last no more than a day, so could assume he had perished. There was nothing like dying to avoid being pestered.
But he was not the suicidal type. He had a destination in mind, barely three hundred miles to the north. Burg Crater—where an abandoned mine shaft still had leftover stores of oxygen, water, and food. It was one of a number of craters within reach. By the time they checked them all—if they ever did—he would be gone again. They had little chance to catch up with him.