“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 I’m not for fouling up the whole Lunar project just to get the Schneider-Volkov Act repealed, when you can’t get it repealed that way anyhow.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.”