Griffin's Egg

It was Beth Hamilton.

"That's not Hiro," Krishna said.  "It's Gunther. That's Hiro.  That he's carrying.  We were out in the highlands and--"  His voice cracked and collapsed in confusion.

"Is that you, Krishna?" someone asked.  "There's a touch of luck.  Send  him up front, we're going to need him when we get in."  Somebody else slapped an arm over Krishna's shoulders and led him away.

Over the radio, a clear voice spoke to the overseer.  "Dmitri, is that you?  It's Signe.  You remember me, don't you, Dmitri?  Signe Ohmstede.  I'm your friend."

"Sure I remember you, Signe.  I remember you.  How could I ever forget my friend?  Sure I do."

"Oh, good.  I'm so happy.  Listen carefully, Dmitri.  Everything's fine."

Indignantly, Gunther chi

A burly man in a Westinghouse suit grabbed Gunther's bad arm and shook him.  "Shut the fuck up!" he growled.  "This is serious, damn you.  We don't have the time to baby you."

Hamilton shoved between them.  "For God's sake, Posner, he's just  seen--"  She stopped.  "Let me take care of him.  I'll get him calmed down.  Just give us half an hour, okay?"

The others traded glances, nodded, and turned away.

To Gunther's surprise, Ekatarina spoke over his trance chip.  "I'm sorry, Gunther," she murmured.  Then she was gone.

He was still holding Hiro's corpse.  He found himself staring down at his friend's ruined face.  The flesh was bruised and as puffy-looking as an overboiled hot dog.  He couldn't look away.

"Come on."  Beth gave him a little shove to get him going.  "Put the body in the back of that pick-up and give us a drive out to the cliff."

*

At Hamilton's insistence, Gunther drove.  He found it helped, having something to do.  Hands afloat on the steering wheel, he stared ahead looking for the Mausoleum road cut-off.  His eyes felt scratchy, and inhumanly dry.

"There was a preemptive strike against us," Hamilton said.  "Sabotage.  We're just now starting to put the pieces together.  Nobody knew you were out on the surface or we would've sent somebody out to meet you.  It's all been something of a shambles here."

He drove on in silence, cushioned and protected by all those miles of hard vacuum wrapped about him.  He could feel the presence of Hiro's corpse in the back of the truck, a constant psychic itch between his shoulder blades.  But so long as he didn't speak, he was safe; he could hold himself aloof from the universe that held the pain.  It couldn't touch him.  He waited, but Beth didn't add anything to what she'd already said.

Finally he said, "Sabotage?"

"A software meltdown at the radio station.  Explosions at all the railguns.  Three guys from Microspacecraft Applications bought it when the Boitsovij Kot railgun blew.  I suppose it was inevitable.  All the military industry up here, it's not surprising somebody would want to knock us out of the equation.  But that's not all.  Something's happened to the people in Bootstrap. Something really horrible.  I was out at the Observatory when it happened.  The newsjay called back to see if there was any backup software to get the station going again, and she got nothing but gibberish.  Crazy stuff.  I mean, really crazy.  We had to disco

"We're here."

As he pulled up to the foot of the Mausoleum cliff, it occurred to Gunther that they hadn't thought to bring a drilling rig.  Then he counted ten black niches in the rockface, and realized that somebody had been thinking ahead.

"The only people who weren't hit were those who were working at the Center or the Observatory, or out on the surface.  Maybe a hundred of us all told."

They walked around to the back of the pick-up.  Gunther waited, but Hamilton didn't offer to carry the body.  For some reason that made him feel angry and resentful.  He unlatched the gate, hopped up on the treads, and hoisted the suited corpse.  "Let's get this over with."

Before today, only six people had ever died on the Moon.  They walked past the caves in which their bodies awaited eternity.  Gunther knew their names by heart:  Heisse, Yasuda, Spehalski, Dubinin, Mikami, Castillo.  And now Hiro.  It seemed incomprehensible that the day should ever come when there would be too many dead to know them all by name.

Daisies and tiger lilies had been scattered before the vaults in such profusion that he couldn't help crushing some underfoot.

They entered the first empty niche, and he laid Hiro down upon a stone table cut into the rock.  In the halo of his helmet lamp the body looked piteously twisted and uncomfortable.  Gunther found that he was crying, large hot tears that crawled down his face and got into his mouth when he inhaled.  He cut off the radio until he had managed to blink the tears away.  "Shit."  He wiped a hand across his helmet.  "I suppose we ought to  say something."

Hamilton took his hand and squeezed.

"I've never seen him as happy as he was today.  He was going to get married.  He was jumping around, laughing and talking about raising a family.  And now he's dead, and I don't even know what his religion was."  A thought occurred to him, and he turned helplessly toward Hamilton.  "What are we going to tell Anya?"

"She's got problems of her own.  Come on, say a prayer and let's go.  You'll run out of oxygen."

"Yeah, okay."  He bowed his head.  "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want... ."

Back at Bootstrap, the surface party had seized the airlocks and led the overseer away from the controls.  The man from Westinghouse, Posner, looked down on them from the observation window.  "Don't crack your suits," he warned.  "Keep them sealed tight at all times.  Whatever hit the bastards here is still around.  Might be in the water, might be in the air.  One whiff and you're out of here!  You got that?"

"Yeah, yeah," Gunther grumbled.  "Keep your shirt on."

Posner's hand froze on the controls.  "Let's get serious here.  I'm not letting you in until you acknowledge the gravity of the situation.  This isn't a picnic outing.  If you're not prepared to help, we don't need you.  Is that understood?"

"We understand completely, and we'll cooperate to the fullest," Hamilton said quickly.  "Won't we, Weil?"

He nodded miserably.

Only the one lock had been breached, and there were five more sets of pressurized doors between it and the bulk of Bootstrap's air.  The city's designers had been cautious.

Overseen by Posner, they passed through the corridors, locks and changing rooms and up the cargo escalators.  Finally they emerged into the city interior.

They stood blinking on the lip of Hell.

At first, it was impossible to pinpoint any source for the pervasive sense of wrongness nattering at the edge of consciousness.  The parks were dotted with people, the fill lights at the juncture of crater walls and canopy were bright, and the waterfalls still fell gracefully from terrace to terrace.  Button quail bobbed comically in the grass.

Then small details intruded.  A man staggered about the fourth level, head jerking, arms waving stiffly.  A plump woman waddled by, pulling an empty cart made from a wheeled microfactory stand, quacking like a duck.  Someone sat in the kneehigh forest by Noguchi park, tearing out the trees one by one.

But it was the still figures that were on examination more profoundly disturbing.  Here a man lay half in and half out of a tu