"What is it, though?" Maya asked, and Rolanda shrugged.
"Working on it," she told her. "In the meantime, it doesn't seem to be infectious. Looks like you need direct contact with The New Guy to get it."
"Martin," Gelano said, and when Rolanda looked at him quizzically, he explained about the name, and about how that was the only bit of information they were able to obtain.
"We thought we'd better get out of there," he concluded, as if it had been his idea, when in reality he'd been thinking more along the lines of strangling the man with his bare hands.
"So it's safe to go inside now?" Willis wanted to know, "because we've got some work to do."
"I'd say so," Rolanda nodded. "Besides, we already have Galen. There's been no contagion as far as I can tell, and I've been looking for it."
"Good," declared Maya, and proceeded to unlock the inner door. As it opened, they found that several other residents had gathered, and were waiting for the news.
"Meeting time, I guess," Gelano sighed as he walked in.
Chapter Seven
"Hold on, everyone," Maya said as she waded into the crowd. "We can't tell you much, just the name he gave us and a general description. We've got some work to do."
"First, we need some scouts," Willis broke in. "We need to check around for his ship, see if we can find it. Any tracks, any leads. Who wants to go?"
"Wait," Maya tried to hold back any surge, but already more than four had raised their hands and volunteered for that mission among a general clamoring of voices.
"Just don't go into Moon Base Twelve," Gelano was shouting above the din, and Willis joined in.
"Absolutely. No one is to go in or even near the place."
"No contact!" even Rolanda was yelling, but the first four were already out the door, and everyone else from the fifth on down stood back and watched them exit.
"I'm going to hit the screens," Willis said to Maya. "You get on to O'Nail."
"I'm going to take a shower," Gelano announced as if anyone cared. Fydia had already sneaked off to her cube to do some research of her own.
The crowd dispersed as Maya stood there, shaking her head. If the thing wasn't infectious, it sure was disturbing, she thought. She hadn't seen such excitement since the earliest days of the mission, and that was a much better kind of it back then. She was sure that this wasn't a good thing. The entire mission depended on the group maintaining its balance, its even keel, smooth sailing, all of that kind of thing. Up until now the team's chemistry had been nearly perfect. She was hoping it would all get back to normal very soon. There had to be a reasonable explanation for all of this. Rayburn Willis was right. General Pudsy O'Nail was the best place to start.
She padded over to her console along the hardware-room wall, and brought up a connection back to Mission Control. She had the General's direct contact and she used it. It was not supposed to matter what time of day or night it was, the General was to be continually available, and he was, but that didn't mean he was thrilled to be called at four forty three in the morning. He was groggy when he answered and Maya could see he was still in his pajamas and bleary-eyed. He looked like he'd been drinking, too, and heavily.
"How's it going, Captain?" he asked, using his customary form of address for Maya Nguyen. O'Nail, like most of the people back home, could never get used to the absence of rank and formality among the crew on the moon. As a lifelong military space vet, he'd always assumed that any such mission would have to follow the rules of war. The commission had seen things differently. There was to be no need for rigid discipline, since there was to be no particular object or goal. The settlers were simply to be there, and to get along with each other as best they could. For this reason, a flat organizational structure seemed the most fitting. It sounded suspiciously like Communism to the General, and when he was informed that in fact, it literally was, and that the very same outdated and repudiated model was indeed the one which had been selected for this mission, his mind simply flew straight into denial and he refused to accept or acknowledge the fact. As far as he was concerned, Nguyen was the Captain, the rank she had in fact held in the Air Force, and Rayburn Willis was Lieutenant, since the old man had been precisely that way back when in his youth, long before he'd launched his long and distinguished academic and research career. The few other former military men and women among the group likewise retained their ranks in the General's mind, and as for the rest, well, they didn't count and he tried to pretend they weren't even there.
"Questions, Sir," Nguyen respectfully replied. "We have a situation."
"I sure hope so," the General barked. "Calling me in the middle of the goddamn night, there better damn well be a goddamn situation!"
"We have a visitor," Maya said.
"A what?"
"Visitor," she repeated. "A man. An unannounced arrival. A guest. We don't actually know what he is, or who he is, or what he's doing here. That's basically the question, sir."
"How in the hell could you have a goddamn visitor?" the General grumbled. "Are you on the goddamn moon or not? Or maybe you're all in some fancy hotel and this whole thing is all just a hoax like that idiot Scraham Markham says on his show all the time."
"No sir," Maya smiled. "No hoax. It's all legit. Says his name is Martin. Won't say if that's his first or last. Just Martin. Sending you a photo scan now."
She pressed a button on the console and waited while the General turned his attention to a parallel screen and studied the image she'd transmitted. While he examined it he continued to grumble, probably some more "goddamns,” Maya thought to herself. She enjoyed the General, always, his gruffness and bluntness was a welcome counterpart to the placid correctness she herself exuded at all times.
"Looks like a goddamn moron," was the General's eventual pronouncement.
"Can't really say," Maya informed him. "Seems like we can't near him for more than a couple of minutes. We're getting some kind of allergic reaction. The doctor says it's nerve damage. Maybe it's us," she conjectured, considering that all this time on the moon might have altered them all in some way, and that The New Guy might be the normal one after all. It was worth mentioning to the doctor, she thought.
"I'll look into it," the General told her, now more alert. The photo seemed to have snapped him into consciousness. "If you can't be near him, then don't. Where is he, anyway? Isolated, I hope?"
"In Moon Base Twelve," Maya nodded. "He just appeared there. We don't know how he got here."
"Maybe he walked," the General snorted. "Well, good," he added. "Lock it down. Get some supplies in there if he needs 'em, then lock it down. And that's an order!"
"Yes, sir," Maya replied. "We look forward to hearing from you."
"Right," the General said sharply, shutting off the connection. Maya smiled. The General might believe he was issuing orders which had to be followed, but the truth was the settlers could do whatever they pleased. They were under the command of no one. Still, she thought his was a good idea, and decided to bring it up at the meeting. First, she wanted to see what Rayburn Willis had come up with.
Chapter Eight
As a professor and leader of men, Rayburn Willis had a way with students, especially young male students, whom he impressed as being the sort of man they should all like to become someday. This pattern had carried him through his years in the service, academia, the commercial world and straight on through to the Moon Base Project. He was already on his third such young man at the Base, a physicist and programmer named Barley MacDunhill. Barley was the most youthful of the whole crew. At a mere twenty two years old, it was a close call for the commission, but they'd decided his attributes outweighed any possible age-related concerns.
His main qualification was software wizardry. Even as a tween he'd pioneered mind-numbingly obvious (in retrospect) algorithms for interpersonal search, using published lifestyle patterns to detect and predict behavioral patterns with results so startling they had previously been seen only on every crime sce
ne detective TV show. The proofs he offered were so complete it made a person's daily life hardly seem worth living at all, as predictable and trivial as he could easily demonstrate it all to be. Your opinion of your neighbor's new haircut was intimately related to the next brand of shampoo you would purchase. Your remark at a certain moment after dinner was tied directly to the next beverage you'd select. There was no effect for which Barley could not reasonably presume the cause. It was a relief to many of his colleagues to see him blasted off into space. They all immediately felt slightly less superfluous.
MacDunhill had no evil intentions. He didn't even use his programs. He was a shy, pimply young man who still smelled of his mother's bath salts, who still wore the same red wool sweaters his grandmother gave him every Christmas. He was perpetually in a bit of a sweat, even though his stress levels on Rolanda's tran-fi measured lower than a sleeping possum. He lived in a virtual world of infinite ifs and else-ifs, and would usually look right past the person talking to him as if they had pointed at something interesting off to one side. When he spoke it was with polite hesitation, as if he expected to be always interrupting someone far more interesting than himself. He saw Willis as a sort of God, a man who had been everywhere and done everything and washed his hands and started all over again from scratch. He jumped at the chance to do any favor Willis asked of him.
This favor especially - to track down the real story of one New Guy named Martin. From the image scans Willis had taken, Barley MacDunhill immediately began several parallel global queries, not just a mere visual search. He pounded out scripts heretofore unimagined and unimaginable, based on combinations of left eyebrow and bottom right molar, on pupil dilation in combination with cheekbone inflation, on individual hair strand swirls, on the universally unique identifiable markers of bi-facial arrangements of freckles and pores. There would be no chance this Martin could escape the ultimate resolution, and within minutes, the target was in his sights. Targets, actually. Martin has a hybrid, according to Barley MacDunhill's results. He was part-Albert Gwynn of International Falls, Minnesota, part-Palash Kapoor of Anaheim, California, part-Derek Lee of Hoboken, New Jersey and part-Chura Kliwvasha of Spangle, Washington. Barley handed the printout to Rayburn Willis, who glanced at it skeptically.
"There can be no doubt," Barley told him. "Martin is these men, precisely."
"How can one man be four men?" Willis growled. He had a lot of respect for Barley's programming skills, but he recognized nonsense when he saw it, a skill MacDunhill apparently lacked.
"The program doesn't lie," Barley shrugged. It was clear to him, in any case. A properly formulated question produces a single and proper answer every time. He had submitted the evidence, and received an absolute verdict. Martin was these men, these men only and no others. Willis wasn't satisfied.
"Try it again," he insisted, handing the paper back to Barley, who widened his eyes in the most condescending manner possible, and returned his attention to the computer. He would plug in a few more variables, but was certain the response would be the same. Willis shook his head and walked away. He not only recognized nonsense, but also knew a dead end when he came to one. There would be no outlet there.
Chapter Nine
The news from the survey team was equally unenlightening. The group had been led by Redmon Chanoo, who'd listed on his resume such skills as wild animal tracker along with his other, more civilization-worthy accomplishments. He liked to assert that he could sniff out a dinosaur fossil ten feet underground given the proper humidity and windflow conditions. Here on the moon those particular talents had found no useful outlet until now. Bearing in mind the team's warnings to stay away from the suspect and Moon Base Twelve, he and his three companions had circled around the structure in ever widening orbits. They cataloged, and systematically eliminated from consideration all the known footprints of the settlement and tire tracks of the various vehicles. Chanoo hadn't realized it before, but in the long months of their residence, the pioneers had managed to make a bit of a mess of the surface of the moon, especially in the local environment. You might have thought a herd of buffalo had been stampeding around there for years given all the dust and disturbance they'd managed to kick up.
Even with all that, it was clear that no new vehicle had entered anywhere within twenty-five klicks, and no new human footprints either. From all the signs they could glean, The New Guy had materialized in place right inside the Moon Base he presently occupied. Unfortunately, no one had thought to rig up the Moon Shack with video surveillance cameras, so it wasn't possible to track down the exact time or method of his arrival that way. Comparing notes with everyone associated with the structure - mainly the Builders group of which Redmon was one - Martin would have had to arrive sometime between oh twenty hundred hours GMT the previous evening and oh seven hundred GMT that morning, when Galen first encountered him. That left, if Redmon's calculations were correct, a window of approximately eleven hours during which The New Guy may have arrived.
Redmon presented his finding quite meticulously at the general meeting held, as Redmon would have said, at approximately thirteen ten that afternoon. By this time, everyone in the colony had been alerted and filled in on the situation, and twenty five of the twenty six residents (Pete was still sleeping) had gathered on the common-use carpet in Moon Base One. Redmon concluded his speech and resumed his squatting position on the floor. The next to speak was Rayburn Willis, who rather sheepishly presented Barley MacDunhill's report, appending that he himself did not necessarily accord with this findings but merely that it was his duty to provide the information, however pointless it might seem. His presentation was greeted with the absolute silence it deserved.
Maya was next. She had heard back from General O'Nail by that time, and what he'd given her was precisely nothing. Mission Control was completely in the dark about The New Guy and had nothing to offer, not even suggestions other than 'why not send somebody over to ask the man more questions'. Rolanda was quickly on her feet objecting, reporting the results of her own research, which concluded that The New Guy seemed to be the carrier of some sort of detrimental and possibly dangerous virus. No one should go near the man or Moon Base Twelve until she could come up with some sort of antidote or at least a kind of protective equipment. For this to happen they needed more time to study the effects of the strain. Rolanda thought it would be useful if the people who'd come into contact could speak directly of the effects they'd experienced, as this would serve not only to caution the others but also help illuminate any issues she might have overlooked so far.
Galen was the first to offer his impressions. He had already begun to recover from the shaking and the overall nervousness. With the sedative he'd been given, the worst of the feelings had diminished within a couple of hours. By now, nearly six hours later, he felt he was returning to normal. Gelano, likewise, related the slackening of his symptoms, though he admitted he was still in the grip of some residual rage. Fydia Sooth claimed to be all better, and insisted she hadn't really felt much, just a little tension was all. Willis described his impatience and involuntary finger-twitching. Rolanda thought that data point worth noting.
It was decided then. The settlers would do nothing at all until further notice. Rolanda and the other scientists - biochemists, botanists and molecular engineers - would get down to the matter of more study and research. In the meantime, outdoor activities were to be restricted and limited, in case The New Guy was to suddenly emerge from his den, and watchfulness enhancement would be the watchword of the day. Consent to this approach was, naturally, unanimous. Mission Control would be informed that the mission was presently under control.
Chapter Ten
Fydia Sooth didn't know whether to laugh or merely chuckle. The whole science department was absorbed in a technical analysis of how someone could literally "get on your nerves"! This would revolutionize the field of interpersonal relationships. "Imagine," she said to herself, "if you could wave a gadget at every new person you met and
immediately know how aggravating they were going to be!" It hadn't been that bad, had it? Now that the effects of her encounter with The New Guy had pretty much worn off, she was tempted to sneak out of the Base and head on back to Number Twelve by herself. She could wrangle the truth out of him one way or another, she was sure. But she was well aware that the process they all followed here on the moon was paramount. They were in it for the long haul, and everyone, at every moment of decision, had to keep the long view in mind. There was no room for adventurism here, and she was certainly no Trotskyite. Now was not the time for any infantile disorders.
Fydia had always excelled at discipline. This was often the reason her own interpersonal relationships never worked out. She liked ground rules and she insisted on agreements being honored. Trust was essential, and she had never found anyone who could live up to her standards in this area. Yet she was not, as you might expect, a serious person. On the contrary, she was quite light-hearted and liked nothing better than to sing out loud and dance. Here on the moon she took these activities outside, so as not to disturb her barrack-mates, and conducted her SETI broadcasts using the very best noise-canceling headset equipment.
The search for extraterrestrials was her other great hobby and passion, and she had official sanction to perform that function here. Rather than broadcast random or regular patterns, or mathematical equations, or fractal sequences, or other such sophisticated notions as dominated the academic approach, Fydia believed in the transcendent attraction power of music. Besides, she would often say, any alien that doesn't dance isn't really worth contacting anyway. She focused her beams on the basis of galactic background radiation, following a color theory of her own invention. Certain types of music were more likely to be receptive in appropriately filtered settings. This was merely an extension of consumer theory back home, where pink walls and light jazz went together in high-end bistros, and throbbing electronica seemed to pair well with flashing neon in blackness.