“Sacre putain de I’archev^gue anglais! Sat man, ‘e weell die wissout air. Get from se way.” The newcomer stooped, grabbed her by the upper arms, lifted her and set her aside.
Dagny swallowed anger. Edmond Beynac, had to be him, should know better than she how to handle this kind of emergency. And, yes, his companion bore a tank with an attachment. From their elevation at the ladder head they’d probably seen what was happening, figured what was likely needed, and immediately gotten it. Christ, that was quick thinking.
The two men hunkered down on either side of Packer and went deftly to work. “Greenbaum, never mind, come on back and help,” Dagny remembered to call.
Presently Beynac straightened. The crew were gathered with their tools. Two men started to shift rock. “Not like sat, imbeciles!” Beynac roared. “God damn! You could roll pieces down onto ‘im. Comme ci.” He plucked a bar from the nearest hand and demonstrated.
Yes, Dagny thought, things did behave differently on Luna, lower gravity meant less frictional force and—She heard a mutter of resentment. “Obey him,” she commanded. “He’s straw boss now.” .
Evidently the men at the pit had received orders to stay and cope with the damage there, but the first ones from camp were arriving. Dagny went to get them organized. When she returned to Packer, he had been freed and lay in Beynac’s arms.
“I take ‘im to my van and geeve first aid,” the geologist told her. “Per’aps sen se medecins-~se physicians, sey can save ‘is leg.” Not waiting for an okay, he bounded off across the crater floor.
They were four who gathered in the main office. It belonged to Miguel Fuentes,, chief of operations at Rudolph. Dagny Ebbesen was there as a co-ordinate supervisor and Edmond Beynac had been invited for his expertise. The fourth was Anson Guthrie. He spoke from Earth via his image in a teleset on the table.
Officially he had no business here. The mine, like Tychopolis and almost everything else on Luna, was the undertaking of an international consortium under UN supervision. But Fireball was the principal con tractor to all the consortiums, and not only for space transport services. Besides, this was an informal preliminary assessment.
“The government inquiry will drone on for months and set the taxpayers back more than the repairs will cost,” he predicted. “What we can hope for today is to reach the same conclusions it will, and lay our plans accordingly.”
“What plans must we make?” Fuentes asked. “A meteorite that large was a freak to start with, and then it purely chanced to slam down close to where people were. We can’t let an accident like that stop us, can we? Or are the politicians really so stupid?”
He made the three-finger Wait signal in the direction of the hologram, and all held their peace while radio waves passed through space and back again. Dagny grew aware of how small the room was, how crowded with apparatus, relieved merely by a couple of garish pictures stuck on the walls—Florida scenes, she guessed, their lushness pathetic in this place. The air recycler had developed a collywobble of some kind, which gave the flow whirring from the ventilator a faint metallic reek. She longed to be outside.
“Politicians aren’t necessarily any stupider than the rest of us, including corporate chairmen of the board,” Guthrie said. “I’ve studied the immediate reports. That rock wasn’t so big nor so near that it should’ve done the harm it did. Obviously it found a design flaw; but we thought we’d engineered for the worst-case scenario, didn’t we? What got overlooked? If we can figure that out pronto, and how to correct it, we’ll know what to tell the commission. Then it can fart around as much longer as it wants; we’ll meanwhile be doing what’s needed.” He rubbed his chin. “You’re the folks on the spot. Got any ideas?”
Dagny looked across the table at Beynac. She noticed that she enjoyed doing so. He was about thirty, she guessed, very little taller than her but powerfully built, with long head, square face, straight nose, prominent cheekbones, stiff brown hair, green eyes.
Not what you’d call handsome, no. But how he radiated masculinity.