For weeks, Lars Fuchs had been living in the machinery and storage spaces in Selene’s “basement.”
On the Moon, where the deeper below the surface you are, the safer you are from the radiation and temperature swings and the thin but constant infall of micrometeors that pepper the surface, Selene’s “basement” was its topmost level.
Just below the Grand Plaza and its extensions, Selene’s highest underground level was entirely devoted to the pumps and power converters and other life-support equipment that provided the city’s air, water, light and heat. Living quarters were on the lower levels, the lower the more prestigious—and expensive.
The “basement” also held the warehouses that stocked spare parts, clothing, preserved foods, and the tanks of water that Selene’s residents drank and washed in. In short, the “basement” had all the supplies that a renegade, a fugitive, a homeless exile would need to survive.
During the years he had lived at Ceres, Fuchs had listened for hours to Big George Ambrose talking about the “bad old days” when he had lived as a fugitive in Selene’s shadowy underground economy, surviving on his wits and the petty pilfering that provided food and shelter for him and his fellow nonpersons. Even Dan Randolph had once spent a few months hiding from the authorities in Selene.
So Fuchs had politely checked out of the Hotel Luna, afraid that sooner or later he would be identified and forced to return to Earth, and toted his meager travel bag up toward the kilometer-long tunnel that led to Armstrong Spaceport. Instead of going to the spaceport, though, he found one of the access hatches marked MAINTENANCE AND SUPPLY SECTION: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, quickly decoded its simple security lock, and disappeared into the shadowy “basement,” where machinery throbbed incessantly and the air was heavy with the odors of lubricating oil and ozone from the electrical machinery.
Color-coded pipes and electrical conduits ran overhead. Maintenance robots trundled back and forth along the walkways between the pulsating machinery and the warehouse stacks. Simpleminded machines programmed to alert human controllers of malfunctioning equipment or water leaks, the robots were fairly easy to avoid. Fuchs could see the red lights set into their tops flashing through the dimly lit passageways while they were still far enough distant to get out of range of their optical sensors.
There was a scattering of other people hiding there, too, a ragged handful of men and women who preferred to scratch out an underground living rather than submit to Selene’s laws. Some of them were wild-eyed from drugs, or raving alcoholics; others were simply unable or unwilling to live by other people’s rules. Fuchs met a few of them, barely avoided a fight when one of them pulled a knife and ordered him to swear loyalty. Fuchs bent his knee and agreed, then quickly moved as far away from the megalomaniac as he could and never saw him again.
Fuchs settled down in the “basement,” content to sleep in a bedroll and eat canned foods pilfered from the warehouse stocks. He spent his waking hours peering at his palmcomp, studying the schematics of Selene’s air ducts and water pipes, searching for a way to penetrate the lunar city’s lowest level, where Humphries lived in his magnificent mansion.
As the weeks passed, Nodon, Sanja, and Amarjagal arrived at Selene one by one, each of them bearing identification as Astro Corporation employees, lowly technicians. Their one-room corporate apartments were sufficient for them, luxurious compared to Fuchs’s hideout in the storeroom shelves in the “basement.”
Fuchs visited his crew members, furtively making his way through Selene’s corridors to spend long hours with them, planning how he might kill Martin Humphries.
SHINING MOUNTAIN BASE
Daniel Jomo Tsavo hated the three-second lag in communications between the Earth and Moon. It upset him to ask a question and then wait and wait and wait until the answer came back. Yet there was no way around the lag. And now the safety people have warned us that a solar storm is on its way; normal communications will be disrupted and all work on the surface will have to stop until the storm passes. Ah well, he said to himself, this call to Yamagata is on a tight laser-beam link. The storm should not affect it, unless it’s powerful enough to fry the laser transmitter on the surface.