The Precipice

MISSION CONTROL CENTER

The timing had to be just right.

Nervous despite being invisible, Pancho edged cautiously into the Armstrong spaceport’s mission control center. It was nearly two a. m. The center was quiet, only two controllers on duty and both of them were relaxed, one leaning back in his chair while the other poured coffee at the little hotplate off by the door to the lav. Pancho hadn’t told anyone about this caper. She thought it best to borrow the stealth suit and get the job done without bringing anyone else into the picture, not even Dan Randolph. The fewer people who knew about the stealth suit, the better. No landings or takeoffs were scheduled at this hour; the skeleton crew was in the control center strictly because prudent regulations required that the center always be manned, in case an emergency cropped up.

How could there be an emergency? Pancho asked herself as she slowly tiptoed to the console farthest from those being used by the pair of controllers. Spacecraft don’t just zoom in on the spur of the moment; even a max-thrust flight from one of the space stations orbiting Earth takes six hours to reach the Moon. Plenty time to rouse the whole crew of controllers if they were needed. The only possible emergency would be if one of the teams at a remote outpost on the lunar surface ran into a jam. Maybe if an astronomer at the Farside Observatory suddenly developed a case of appendicitis and their radio was out so they sent the poor boob on a ballistic lob to Selene without being able to alert anybody first. That was just about the only emergency Pancho could think of.

Or if an invisible woman sneaked in and jiggered the flight schedule for tomorrow’s launches. No, Pancho thought, not tomorrow’s. It’s already past two in the morning. Today’s schedule.

She sat at one of the unattended consoles, as far from the human controllers as possible, and waited for the woman at the coffee urn to return to her post. The overweight guy sitting at his console looked half asleep, feet up on the consoles, eyes closed, a pair of earphones clamped over his head. They weren’t the regulation earphones, either. The guy was listening to music; Pancho could see the rhythmic bobbing of his head.

Hope it’s a lullaby, she said to herself.

The woman controller took a sip of her coffee and made a sour face. Then she looked straight at Pancho. Inside the stealth suit, Pancho froze. The moment passed. The woman’s gaze shifted and she started back toward her console, her steaming coffee mug in one hand. Pancho began to breathe again. The woman came back to her console, next to the guy, gave him a disapproving frown, then sat down and clapped a regulation earphone and pin-mike set to her head.

Good, thought Pancho. The big chamber was too quiet to suit her. Normally the rows of consoles would be filled with controllers talking to the traffic coming in and out of Selene. There would be plenty of background chatter to hide her pecking at a keyboard. But then there wouldn’t be any empty consoles to use; they’d all be occupied during normal working hours.

Pancho tentatively tapped on the keyboard before her, once to silence the voice system, then again to call up the status board. The woman at her console did not hear the faint clicks. Or if she did, she paid no notice. The guy was definitely asleep, Pancho thought, his head lolling on his shoulders now, his bulging belly rising and falling in deep, slow breathing.

Only one craft on the schedule, Pancho saw from the status display. Due to land in five hours. Plenty of time for her to do what she had to and get out before more controllers began filing in for the morning shift.

Slowly, cautiously, with one eye on the bored woman sitting on the other side of the room, Pancho tapped out a set of instructions for the morning’s schedule. Then she got up, quietly left the control center, and returned the stealth suit to Ike Walton’s locker up in the storage area near the catacombs. She wondered if she’d ever need it again. Maybe I ought to keep it, she thought. But then Ike would discover it was gone, sooner or later, and that would raise a stink. Better to let it stay here and just hope Ike doesn’t change the combination on the lock. Sudden panic hit Pancho. Elly was not in the locker, where she had left her. Pancho had thought that the krait would snooze away in the chilly air of the storage area; she had fed Elly a mouse only a day earlier, and that usually left the snake in a pleasantly drowsy state of digestion. But moving her to Walton’s locker must have disturbed Elly’s torpor. The snake had slithered through one of the air slits in the bottom of the locker door.

For several frantic minutes Pancho searched for the krait. She found her at last, curled on the floor in front of a heating vent. But when she tried to pick Elly up, the krait reared and hissed at her.

Pancho got down on both knees and frowned at the snake. “Don’t you go hissy on me,” she said sternly. “I know I disturbed your nap, but that’s no reason to get sore.”

The snake’s tongue flicked in and out, in and out.

“That’s right, take a good sniff. It’s me, and if you’ll just calm yourself down, I’ll wrap you around my nice warm ankle and we can get back home. Okay?” Elly relaxed and sank back into a tight little coil of glittering blue. Pancho slowly extended her hand and when Elly didn’t react, she stroked the krait’s head gently with one finger.

“Come on, girl,” she crooned, “we’re gonna take you home where you can sleep nice and comfy.”

But not for long, Pancho added silently.