The Rock Rats

CHAPTER 16

Selene’s Hotel Luna had gone through several changes of management since it was originally built by the Yamagata Corporation.

In those early days, just after the lunar community had won its short, sharp war against the old United Nations and affirmed its independence, tourism looked like a good way to bring money into the newly-proclaimed Selene. Masterson Aerospace’s lunar-built Clipperships were bringing the price of transportation from Earth down to the point where the moderately well-heeled tourist—the type who took “adventure vacations” to Antarctica, the Amazonian rain forest, or other uncomfortable exotic locales—could afford the grandest adventure vacation of them all: a trip to the Moon.

Sadly, the opening of the hotel coincided almost exactly with the first ominous portents of the greenhouse cliff. After nearly half a century of scientific debate and political wrangling, the accumulated greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere and oceans started an abrupt transition in the global climate. Disastrous floods inundated most coastal cities in swift succession. Earthquakes devastated Japan and the American midwest. Glaciers and ice packs began melting down, raising sea levels worldwide. The delicate web of electrical power transmission grids collapsed over much of the world, throwing hundreds of millions into the cold and darkness of pre-industrial society. More than a billion people lost their homes, their way of living, everything that they had worked for. Hundreds of millions died.

Tourism trickled down to nothing except the extremely wealthy, who lived on their financial mountaintops in ease and comfort despite the woes of their brethren.

Hotel Luna became virtually a ghost facility, but it was never shut down. Grimly, hopefully, foolishly, one owner after another tried to make at least a modest success of it.

To a discerning visitor, the lavish, sprawling lobby of the hotel would appear slightly seedy: the carpeting was noticeably threadbare in spots, the oriental tables and easy chairs were scuffed here and there, the ornate artificial floral displays drooped enough to show that they needed to be replaced.

But to Lars Fuchs’s staring eyes, Hotel Luna’s lobby seemed incredibly posh and polished. He and Amanda were riding down the powered stairway from the hotel entrance up in the Grand Plaza. Glistening sheets of real, actual water slid down tilted slabs of granite quarried from the lunar highlands. The water was recycled, of course, but to have a display of water! What elegance!

“Look,” Fuchs exclaimed, pointing to the pools into which the waterfalls splashed. “Fish! Live fish!”

Beside him, Amanda smiled and nodded. She had been brought to the hotel on dates several times, years ago. She remembered the Earthview Restaurant, with its hologram windows. Martin Humphries had taken her there. The fish in those pools were on the restaurant’s menu. Amanda noticed that there were far fewer of them now than there had been back then.

As they reached the lobby level and stepped off the escalator, Fuchs recognized the music wafting softly from the ceiling speakers: a Haydn quartet. Charming. Yet he felt distinctly out of place in his plain dark gray coveralls, like a scruffy student sneaking into a grand palace. But with Amanda on his arm, it didn’t matter. She wore a sleeveless white pantsuit; even zippered up to the throat it could not hide her exquisitely-curved body.

Fuchs didn’t pay any attention to the fact that the spacious lobby was practically empty. It was quiet, soothing, an elegant change from the constant buzz of air fans and faint clatter of distant pumps that was part of the everyday background of Ceres.

As they reached the registration desk, Fuchs remembered all over again that Martin Humphries was footing their hotel bill. Humphries had insisted on it. Fuchs wanted to argue about it as they rode a Humphries fusion ship from Ceres to Selene, but Amanda talked him out of it.

“Let him pay for the hotel, Lars,” she had advised, with a knowing smile. “I’m sure he’ll take it out of the price he pays you for Helvetia.”

Grudgingly, Fuchs let her talk him into accepting Humphries’s generosity. Now, at the hotel desk, it rankled him all over again.

When it had originally opened as the Yamagata Hotel, there had been uniformed bellmen and women to tote luggage and bring room service orders. Those days were long gone. The registration clerk seemed alone behind his counter of polished black basalt, but he tapped a keyboard and a self-propelled trolley hummed out of its hidden niche and rolled up to Fuchs and Amanda. They put their two travel bags onto it and the trolley obediently followed them into the elevator that led down to the level of their suite.

Fuchs’s eyes went even wider once they entered the suite.

“Luxury,” he said, a reluctant smile brightening his normally dour face. “This is real luxury.”

Even Amanda seemed impressed. “I’ve never been in one of the hotel’s rooms before.”

Suddenly Fuchs’s smile dissolved into a suspicious scowl. “He might have the rooms bugged, you know.”

“Who? Martin?”

Fuchs nodded gravely, as if afraid to speak.

“Why would he bug the rooms?”

“To learn what we plan to say to him, what our position will be in the negotiation, what our bottom figure will be.” There was more, but he hesitated to tell her. Pancho had hinted that Humphries videotaped his own sexual encounters in the bedroom of his palatial home. Would the man have cameras hidden in this bedroom?

Abruptly, he strode to the phone console sitting on an end table and called for the registration desk.

“Sir?” asked the clerk’s image on the wallscreen. A moment earlier it had been a Vickrey painting of nuns and butterflies.

“This suite is unacceptable,” Fuchs said, while Amanda stared at him. “Is there another one available?”

The clerk grinned lazily. “Why, yessir, we have several suites unoccupied at the moment. You may have your pick.”

Fuchs nodded. Humphries can’t have them all bugged, he thought.

“I’m glad you decided to meet me in person,” Martin Humphries said, smiling from behind his wide desk. “I think we can settle our business much more comfortably this way.”

He leaned back, tilting the desk chair so far that Fuchs thought the man was going to plant his feet on the desktop. Humphries seemed completely at ease in his own office in the mansion he had built for himself deep below the lunar surface. Fuchs sat tensely in the plush armchair in front of the desk, feeling uneasy, wary, stiffly uncomfortable in the gray business suit that Amanda had bought for him at an outrageous price in the hotel’s posh store. He had left Amanda in the hotel; he did not want her in the same room as Humphries. She had acquiesced to his demand, and told her husband that she would go shopping in the Grand Plaza while he had his meeting.

Humphries waited for Fuchs to say something. When he just sat there in silence, Humphries said, “I trust you had a good night’s sleep.”

Suddenly Fuchs thought of hidden cameras again. He cleared his throat and said, “Yes, thank you.”

“The hotel is comfortable? Everything all right?”

“The hotel is fine.”

The third person in the room was Diane Verwoerd, sitting in the other chair in front of the desk. She had angled it so that she faced Fuchs more than Humphries. Like her boss, she wore a business suit. But while Humphries’s dark burgundy suit was threaded with intricate filigrees of silver thread, Verwoerd’s pale ivory outfit was of more ordinary material. Its slit skirt, however, revealed a good deal of her long slim legs.

Silence stretched again. Fuchs looked at the holowindow behind Humphries’s desk. It showed the lush garden outside the house, bright flowers and graceful trees. Beautiful, he thought, but artificial. Contrived. An ostentatious display of wealth and the power to flaunt one man’s will. How many starving, homeless people on Earth could Humphries help if he wanted to, instead of creating this make-believe Eden for himself here on the Moon?

At last Verwoerd said crisply, all business, “We’re here to negotiate the final terms of your sale of Helvetia Limited to Humphries Space Systems.”

“No, we are not,” said Fuchs.

Humphries sat up straighter in his chair. “We’re not?”

“Not yet,” Fuchs said to him. “First we must deal with several murders.”

Humphries glanced at Verwoerd; for just that instant he seemed furious. But he regained his composure almost immediately.

“And just what do you mean by that?” she asked calmly.

Fuchs said, “At least three prospectors’ ships have disappeared over the past few weeks. Humphries Space Systems somehow acquired the claims to the asteroids that those prospectors were near to.”

“Mr. Fuchs,” said Verwoerd, with a deprecating little smile, “you’re turning a coincidence into a conspiracy. Humphries Space Systems has dozens of ships scouting through the Belt.”

“Yes, and it’s damned expensive, too,” Humphries added.

“Then there is the out-and-out murder of Niles Ripley on Ceres by a Humphries employee,” Fuchs went on doggedly.

Humphries snapped, “From what I hear, you took care of that yourself. Vigilante justice, wasn’t it?”

“I stood trial. It was declared justifiable self-defense.”

“Trial,” Humphries sniffed. “By your fellow rock rats.”

“Your employee murdered Niles Ripley!”

“Not by my orders,” Humphries replied, with some heat. “Just because some hothead on my payroll gets himself into a brawl, that’s not my doing.”

“But it was to your benefit,” Fuchs snapped.

Coolly, Verwoerd asked, “How do you come to that conclusion, Mr. Fuchs?”

“Ripley was the key man in our habitat construction program. With him gone, the work is stopped.”

“So?”

“So once you acquire Helvetia, the only organization capable of finishing the project will be HSS.”

“And how does that benefit me?” Humphries demanded. “Finishing your silly-assed habitat doesn’t put one penny into my pocket.”

“Not directly, perhaps,” said Fuchs. “But making Ceres safer and more livable will bring more people out to the Belt. With your company in control of their supplies, their food, the air they breathe, even, how can you fail to profit?”

“You’re accusing me—”

Verwoerd interrupted the budding argument. “Gentlemen, we’re here to negotiate the sale of Helvetia, not to discuss the future of the Asteroid Belt.”

Humphries glared at her again, but took in a breath and said grudgingly, “Right.”

Before Fuchs could say anything, Verwoerd added, “What’s done is done, and there’s no way of changing the past. If an HSS employee committed murder, you made him pay the full price for it.”

Fuchs searched for something to say.

“Now we should get down to business,” said Verwoerd, “and settle on a price for Helvetia.”

Humphries immediately jumped in with, “My original offer was based on your total assets, which have gone down almost to nothing since the fire in your warehouse.”

“Which was deliberately set,” Fuchs said.

“Deliberately set?”

“It was no accident. It was arson.”

“You have proof of that?”

“We have no forensics experts on Ceres. No criminal investigators.”

“So you have no proof.”

“Mr. Fuchs,” Verwoerd said, “we are prepared to offer you three million international dollars for the remaining assets of Helvetia Limited, which—frankly—amounts to the good will you’ve generated among the miners and prospectors, and not much more.”

Fuchs stared at her for a long, silent moment. So sure of herself, he thought. So cool and unruffled and, yes, even beautiful, in a cold, distant way. She’s like a sculpture made of ice.

“Well?” Humphries asked. “Frankly, three million is pretty much of a gift. Your company’s not worth half that much, in real terms.”

“Three hundred million,” Fuchs murmured.

“What? What did you say?”

“You could make your offer three hundred million. Or three billion. It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to sell to you.”

“That’s stupid!” Humphries blurted.

“I won’t sell to you at any price. Never! I’m going back to Ceres and starting all over again.”

“You’re crazy!”

“Am I? Perhaps so. But I would rather be crazy than give in to you.”

“You’re just going to get yourself killed,” Humphries said.

“Is that a threat?”

Again Humphries looked at Verwoerd, then turned back to Fuchs. He smiled thinly. “I don’t make threats, Fuchs. I make promises.”

Fuchs got to his feet. “Then let me make a promise in return. If you want to fight, I can fight. If you want a war, I’ll give you a war. And you won’t like the way I fight, I promise you that. I’ve studied military history; it was required in school. I know how to fight.”

Humphries leaned back in his desk chair and laughed.

“Go ahead and laugh,” Fuchs said, pointing a stubby finger at him. “But consider: you have a great deal more to lose than I do.”

“You’re a dead man, Fuchs,” Humphries snapped.

Fuchs nodded agreement. “One of us is.”

With that, he turned and strode out of Humphries’s office.

For several moments, Humphries and Verwoerd sat there staring at the doorway Fuchs had gone through.

“At least he didn’t slam the door,” Humphries said with a smirk.

“You’ve made him angry enough to fight,” Verwoerd said, with a troubled frown. “You’ve backed him into a corner and now he feels he has nothing to lose by fighting.”

Humphries guffawed. “Him? That little weasel? It’s laughable. He knows how to fight! He’s studied military history!”

“Maybe he has,” she said.

“So what?” Humphries replied testily. “He’s from Switzerland, for god’s sake! Hardly a martial nation. What’s he going to do, smother me in Swiss cheese? Or maybe yodel me to death.”

“I wouldn’t take it so lightly,” said Verwoerd, still looking at the empty doorway.