“Kind of a secret.”
“Oh.”
“I did the impossible for them, y’see, but I did it too late to be of any use and they don’t want anybody to know about it so they gave me the prize as hush money and told me to keep my trap shut.”
Confused, Pancho asked, “About what?”
For the first time that evening, Walton broke into a smile. “My cloak of invisibility,” he answered.
Little by little Pancho wormed the story out of him. Walton had been working with Professor Zimmerman, the nanotech genius, when the old U. N. had sent Peacekeeper troops to seize Moonbase.
“Stavenger was in a sweat to develop nonlethal weapons so we could defend ourselves against the Peacekeepers when they got here without killing any of them,” Walton said, growing steadier and gloomier with each step along the corridor. “Zimmerman promised Stavenger he’d come up with a way to make our guys invisible, but the bastards killed him when they attacked. Suicide bomber got down to his lab and blew the old man to smithereens.”
“Himself, too?” Pancho asked.
“I did say ‘suicide, ‘ didn’t I? Anyway, the so-called war ended pretty quick and we got our independence. That’s when we changed the name from Moonbase to Selene.”
“I know.”
“For a while there I didn’t have anything to do. I’d been Zimmerman’s assistant and now the old man was gone.”
Walton had doggedly kept working on Zimmerman’s idea of finding a method for making a person invisible. And eventually he succeeded.
“But who needs to be invisible?” Walton asked. Before Pancho could answer he went on, “Only somebody who’s up to no damn good, that’s who. Spies. Assassins. Crooks. Thieves.”
Selene’s governing council decided to mothball Walton’s invention. Bury it so that no one would even know it existed.
“So they gave me the big fat prize to keep me quiet. It’s a pension, really. I can live in comfort—as long as I stay in Selene and keep my mouth shut.”
“Sounds cool to me,” Pancho said, trying to cheer him up.
But Walton shook his head. “You don’t understand, Pancho. I’m a freaking genius and nobody knows it. I’ve made a terrific invention and it’s useless. I’m not even supposed to mention it to anybody.”
Pancho said, “Aren’t you taking a chance, talking to me about it?”
He gave her a sidelong glance. “Aw, hell, Pancho, I hadda tell somebody tonight or bust. And I can trust you, can’t I? You’re not gonna steal it and go out and assassinate anybody, are you?”
“ ‘Course not,” Pancho answered immediately. But she was thinking that it might be a hoot to be invisible now and then.
“Wanna see it?” Walton asked.
“The invisibility dingus?”
“Yeah.”
“If it’s invisible, how can I see it?”
Walton broke into a cackle of laughter. Clapping Pancho on the back, he said, “That’s what I like about you, Pancho ol’ pal. You’re okay, with a capital oke.”
Walton turned down the next cross-corridor and led Pancho up to the level just below the Grand Plaza, where most of Selene’s life-support machinery chugged away, purifying the air, recycling the water, rectifying the electrical current coming in from the solar farms. Pumps clattered. The air hummed and crackled. The ceilings of these chambers were rough, unfinished rock. Pancho knew that on their other side was either the manicured lawn of the Grand Plaza or the raw regolith of the
Moon’s surface itself. And along a corridor not far from where they walked lay the catacombs.
“Isn’t the dingus under lock and key?” Pancho asked as Walton led her past a long row of metal lockers.
“They don’t even know it exists. They think I destroyed it when they gave me their lousy prize. Destroy it, hell! I’ll never destroy it. It’s the only one in the whole wide solar system.”
“Wow.”
He nodded absently. “And it’s not a ‘dingus’, it’s a stealth suit.”
“Stealth suit,” Pancho echoed.
“Like a wetsuit, covers you from head to toe,” he explained in a hushed voice, as if afraid someone would hear him. Pancho strained to listen to him over the background hum and chatter of the machinery.
Pancho followed Walton down the long row of metal lockers. The corridor smelled dusty, unused. The overhead lights were spaced so far apart that there were shadowy pools of darkness every few meters. Walton stopped in front of a locker identified by a serial number. Pancho saw that it had an electronic security lock.