One message, though, was from Pancho Lane.
Surprised and curious, George ordered her message on-screen. The computer displayed a wavering, eye-straining hash of colored streaks. Pancho’s message was scrambled. George had to pull out his personal palmcomp and hunt for the combination to descramble it.
At last Pancho’s lean, lantern-jawed face filled with screen. “Hi George. Sorry we didn’t get to spend more time together before you had to take off. Lemme ask you a question: Can you contact Lars if you need to? I might hafta talk to him.”
The screen went blank.
George stared at it thoughtfully, wondering: Now why in all the caverns of hell would Pancho need to talk to Lars Fuchs?
HELL CRATER
Pancho always grinned when she thought about Father Maximilian J. Hell, the Jesuit astronomer for whom this thirty-kilometer-wide lunar crater had been named. Wily promoters such as Sam Gunn had capitalized on the name and built a no-holds-barred resort city at Hell Crater, complete with gambling casinos and euphemistically named “honeymoon hotels.”
Astro Corporation had made a fair pocketful of profits from building part of the resort complex. But Pancho wasn’t visiting Hell to check on corporate interests. She had received a message from Amanda to meet her at the medical center there. Mandy’s message had come by a tortuously circuitous route, imbedded in a seemingly innocuous invitation to Selene’s annual Independence Day celebration, sent by none other than Douglas Stavenger.
Ever since the Christmas party Pancho had been trying to see Amanda, to renew the friendship that had come to a screeching halt once Mandy had married Humphries. Amanda replied politely to each of Pancho’s invitations, but somehow always had an excuse to postpone a meeting. Mandy never replied in real time; her messages were always recorded. Pancho studied Amanda’s face each time, searching for some hint of how Mandy was and why she wouldn’t—or, more likely, couldn’t—get away from Humphries long enough to have lunch with an old pal.
So when Stavenger’s video invitation popped up on Pancho’s screen, she was staggered to see his youthful face morph into Amanda’s features. “Please meet me at the Fossel Medical Center, Pancho, next Wednesday at eleven-thirty.”
Then her image winked out and Doug Stavenger’s was smiling at her again. Pancho couldn’t recapture Mandy’s message, either. It was gone completely.
Curiouser and curiouser, Pancho thought as she rode the cable car from Selene. The cable lines were the cheapest and most efficient transportation system on the Moon. Rockets were faster, and there was a regular rocket shuttle between Selene and the growing astronomical observatory complex at Farside. But the cable cars ran up and over the Alphonsus ringwall mountains and out to Copernicus, Hell, and the other budding centers being built on the Moon’s near side. There were even plans afoot to link Selene with the bases being built in the lunar south polar region by cable systems.
A corporate executive of Pancho’s stature could have commandeered a car for herself, or even flown over to Hell in her own rocket hopper. But that wasn’t Pancho’s style. She enjoyed being as inconspicuous as possible, and found it valuable to see what the ordinary residents of Selene—the self-styled Lunatics—were thinking and doing. Besides, she didn’t want to call the attention of Humphries’s ever-present spies to the fact that she was going, literally, to Hell.
So she whizzed along twenty meters above the flat, pockmarked, rock-strewn surface of Mare Nubium, wondering what Amanda was up to. The cable car’s interior was almost exactly like a spacecraft’s passenger cabin, except that Pancho could feel it swaying slightly as she sat in her padded chair. Small windows lined each side of the cabin, and there was a pair of larger curving windows up forward, where tourists or romantics could get a broad view of the barren lunar landscape rushing past. What’d that old astronaut call it? Pancho asked herself. Then she remembered: “Magnificent desolation.”
Those front seats were already taken, so Pancho slouched back in her chair and pulled out her palmcomp. Might’s well get some work done, she told herself. But she couldn’t help staring out at the mountains of the highlands rising beyond the horizon, stark and bare in the harsh unfiltered sunlight.