And he would have, it was plain in his voice. I got to my feet, hesitant, and walked trembling to the window, squinting against the glare.
“Look out there,” he ordered. “Look!”
I looked.
IV
Terror. Horror. Dizziness and nausea.
Far and away and far. nothing and nothing. Only the glare, and the high blue, and the far far horizon, and the broken gray slag stretching out, way down below.
“Do you see?” he demanded. “Look down there! We’re so high up it’s hard to see, but look for it. Do you see it? Do you see the green? Do you know what that means? There are green things growing again Outside! Not much vet. It’s only just started back, but it’s begun. The radiation is down. Plants are growing again.”
The power of suggestion. And, of course, the heightened sensitivity caused by the double threat of a man beside me carrying a gun and that yawning aching expanse of nothing beyond the window. I nearly fancied that I did see faint specks of green.
“Do you see it?” he asked me.
“Wait,” I said. I leaned closer to the window, though every nerve in me wanted to leap the other way. “Yes!” I said. “Yes, I see it! Green!”
He sighed, a long painful sigh of thanksgiving. “Then now you know,” he said. “I’ve been telling the truth. It is safe Outside.”
And my lie worked. Tor the first time, his guard was completely down.
I moved like a whirlwind. I leaped, and twisted his arm in a hard hammerlock, which caused him to cry out and drop the gun. That was wrestling. Then I turned and twisted and dipped, causing him to fly over my head and crash to the floor. That was judo. Then I jabbed one rigid forefinger against a certain spot on the side of his neck, causing the blood in his veins to forever stop its motion. That was karate.
Well, by the time the Army men had finished questioning me, it was three o’clock in the afternoon, and I was five hours late. The Army men corroborated my belief that the man had been a spy, who had apparently lost his mind when cornered in the elevator. Outside was still dangerous, of course, they assured me of that. And he’d been lying about having been here two months. He’d been in the Project less than two days. Not only that, the Army men told me they’d found the radiation-proof car he’d driven, and in which he had hoped to drive back to his own Project once he’d discovered all our defenses.
Despite the fact that I had the most legitimate excuse for tardiness under the roof, Linda refused to forgive me for not making our ten o’clock meeting. When I asked her to marry me she refused, at length and descriptively.
But I was surprised and relieved to discover how rapidly I got over my heartbreak. This was aided by the fact that once the news of my exploit spread, there were any number of girls more than anxious to get to know me better, including the well-cleavaged young lady from the Transit Staff. After all, I was a hero.
They even gave me a medal.
Meteor Strike!
Harvey Ricks had always bit off more than he cared to chew. Somehow, he had always managed to chew, and swallow. Now, standing for the first time in the vacuum of Space, he wondered if this was the bite that would choke him.
The cargo cargo was crated for delivery at Los Angeles, where the workers didn’t consider it anything special. In the company where they worked, this particular cargo was of the type called a Standing Repeater. That is, a new order was shipped out every six months, regular as clockwork. First the order department mailed off a suggested list of specifications to the General Transits, Ltd. main office in Tangiers. Next, the list came back, usually with a few substitutions inked in, and was sent down to LA, to the warehouse, for the specific items to be crated for shipment.
There were seven aluminum crates in the cargo, each a three-foot cube. Aluminum was still the lightest feasible crating material, and this cargo was destined for the Quartermaster Base orbiting the Moon.
The seven crates left the warehouse by helicopter and were flown north to the airport midway between LA and San Francisco. There they spent thirty-two hours in another warehouse before being flown to the Tangiers Poe. (Even in nomenclature, Man made it apparent that his thoughts these days were ever outward, away from Earth. The spaceport on Earth was called Tangiers Poe, which stood for Port Of Embarkation. The spaceport on the Moon was called Moon Pod, for Port Of Debarkation. It was as though Man didn’t want to admit that he still had to make the round trip.)
The cargo arrived at the Tangiers Poe a day ahead of schedule, and spent one more night in a warehouse. Across the field, the four lighters from Station One were being unloaded. Their cargo was almost exclusively manufactured items from the factories on the Moon. Manufacturers had discovered, to their astonishment, that the lighter gravity and the accessible vacuum and the ready availability of free raw materials on the Moon more than offset the additional cost of labor and buildings and transportation. In the last fifteen years, the Moon had become studded with heavily-automated factories, producing everything from delicate electronic equipment to razor blades. Though human exploitation of the Moon had begun as a military venture, back in the late nineteen-sixties, by 1994 it had been taken over almost completely by commercial interests.
A few of the cartons being unloaded across the field were samples or data from the scientific teams on the Moon. These teams, all affiliated with one university or another, were for the most part supported by the manufacturers themselves. As at all times in the past, commercial business success had been shortly followed by commercial philanthropy. A part of the profits of what one newspaper columnist had dubbed the Moonufacturers was siphoned off to give scientists an opportunity and a freedom for research and investigation unavailable through any “short-range Government grant.
There were as yet no tourist facilities either for travel to the Moon nor for a stay on the Moon.
A rumor was current that a number of hotel and restaurant corporations were banding together to found a Moon resort, but so far nothing had come of it.
The seven aluminum crates spent the night in the Poe warehouse, and in the morning were turned over to Glenn Blair, whose charge they would be for the next thirty-three days, until they reached the Quartermaster Base.
Glenn Blair was a big man, big-boned and fully-fleshed, with a short-cropped head of light hair. Thirty-four years of age, he had been for the last seven years one of the two Chief Cargomasters for General Transits, Ltd., the franchised operator of the Earth-Moon transportation system.
He came into the warehouse now with Cy Braddock, the Poe Cargo Chief, and the two of them compared the stacked crates half-filling the warehouse with the manifest flimsies attached to Braddock’s, checking off each item as they found it. When they came to the seven crates from Los Angeles, Blair said, “Cargo for QB. Let’s see, what’s the specification?” He read the line on the manifest, and grinned. “I forgot it was time for another shipment. Six months already.” He patted the nearest of the seven crates. “The boys at QB will be happy to see you fellas,” he said.
Braddock looked over his shoulder and read the specification. “What’s so important about that stuff? I thought that was low priority.”
“Check your reegs, Cy. These fellas are priority number one. If they don’t get to QB, there’ll be hell to pay. Within a month, QB would be more dangerous than a cannibal village.”