Cascade Point

Finally, message complete, I set the alarm for seven o'clock and settled down for a good night's sleep. Tomorrow was going to be a busy day.

—

"Good morning," I said briskly to the clerk at the rental counter. "I'd like to check out a suit and buggy for the day."

"For a long trip, sir?"

"Probably. I want to go exploring a little around the Aristarchus Rille area. Pick up some rocks, get a few pictures, that sort of thing."

He consulted his list, confirmed I'd been checked out on the equipment yesterday by one of the staff. "I can let you have one of the Selenes, Mr. Holst; number eight. Is that satisfactory?"

"Fine." The solar-augmented batteries of a Selene, I had been told, gave the buggy an almost unlimited range. Even with the decoy run I would have to make, the round trip to Krieger should be easily less than three hundred kilometers.

The suit and Selene were delivered in ten minutes, one of the hotel staff then taking another thirty to help me double-check everything, but within an hour I was tooling northwest along the sun-lit lunar landscape at the rip-roaring speed of forty kilometers an hour. The terrain was pretty hilly for a while, until I had crossed Prinz Rille I, but then it generally settled down, and I was able to devote less of my already busy mind to the chore of driving. It took me a bit over an hour to reach Aristarchus Rille V. Finding a close-set pair of hills, I parked the Selene between them and set to work with the buggy's toolkit. What I was doing now was not only illegal but was the act of a suicidal idiot as well, and I could feel sweat gathering on my forehead. Carefully removing the self-contained radio beacon from its hiding place under the seat, I took it outside and left it beside a recognizable rock formation. The beacon was, naturally, designed so that it couldn't be turned off and was continually monitored from Prinz. To those observers, I would simply have left my vehicle parked while I went exploring on foot, and my side trip north to Krieger would go completely u

It was only another fifty kilometers to Krieger D, but I took the time to give the entire Krieger crater system a wide berth. Swinging east, I circled Krieger D at a distance of about ten kilometers and made my cautious approach from the northeast. I reached the rim without incident and, after parking the Selene in a convenient depression, I began setting up my apparatus.

Among its equipment the Selene carried a very fine tripod-mounted monocular adapted for spacesuit use. Setting this up, I sca

So far, so good. Now came the hard part. I obviously couldn't use a radio to contact him, even if he had a transceiver, which I doubted. No sentries were in sight, but there had to be some security measures in force around the building, so going up and knocking on Larry's window was out, too.

However...

A few years ago the number of scientific parties poking around remote areas of the moon had grown so great that some method of good communication had become essential. A series of satellites had been the answer, satellites that would accept modulated laser beams from the surface and relay such messages to a central switching station. Austere though the Hilton's rooms had been, the management knew better than to scrimp on any safety equipment, and my Selene was equipped with a beautiful laser transmitter. It would make a bright red spot on Larry's wall, a spot I could flick on and off in Morse code. Larry should be able to come up with something to make his own dots and dashes with, and with the monocular I would be able to see whatever he used.

I was just about to go get the laser when a motion in the room caught my eye. Another soldier had entered and was talking with Larry. The conversation was brief, though. Larry stood up and disappeared from my view; he returned a moment later buckling a gunbelt around his waist. Then, together, they left the room.

I thought about that for all of three seconds. Then I got up, stowed the monocular, and took off just as fast as the Selene would take me. Granted all I don't know about military procedure, I do know prisoners are not issued weapons. Larry was very clearly no longer a prisoner, and the obvious conclusion followed immediately: He had thrown in with Colonel Stark.

—

The trip back to Prinz was uneventful, which was a good thing as I wasn't paying much attention to my driving. Over and over again I shuffled the facts, lined them up, and added them together, and each time I came up with the same answer. Somehow Stark had gotten to Larry, either through bribes or threats—the latter, perhaps, directed at Louise. That would explain Larry's protectiveness toward her last night, as well as the fear I had sensed. If Stark got caught now, Larry would be run through the percolator along with the colonel, and he knew it. No wonder he had tried to throw me out of his dream.

For me, it all boiled down to the fact that my sole information source had dried up. I had counted heavily on a direct contact with Larry, on the solid data that he would have provided; without it I was effectively stalemated.

I lost an extra hour getting home by nearly forgetting to go back for the radio beacon I'd left at Aristarchus Rille V. I finally made it in around seven-thirty, itching all over from eleven hours in a spacesuit. First on my priority list was a bath, after which I had a late di

There had to be a way to figure out what was going on at Krieger D. I couldn't go back to Louise and tell her she'd used half of her savings to send me to the moon for nothing. Larry might not yet be in so deeply that he couldn't be saved, especially if Stark was using threats to keep him in line. The right facts in the right hands might do it, but I needed facts first.

The really aggravating thing was that, down deep, I knew everything I needed had been in that first confused contact with Larry. I still remembered most of the images and words from that dream, but a good ninety percent of them had to be extraneous, and there was no way for me to separate the facts from the garbage.

Unless...

Unless I could correlate Larry's dream images with someone else's, someone who also knew what was going on. I leaped over to my nightstand—very literally; I'd forgotten about lunar gravity—and picked up the pamphlet I'd studied earlier, turning to the first page of the military-history section. Sure enough, right below the picture of General Conrad Blaine was a photo of Colonel Avram Stark. I took the time to memorize both faces, even though I just needed Stark's at the moment. Blaine, as Pentagon honcho in charge of the moon, would be the man to contact once I had some facts.

With one last look at Stark's photo, I snapped off the light and slid into bed.

—

The overall tone of Stark's dream was a curious mixture of anxiety, frantic activity, and icy calmness. I stayed near the edge of the scenery for several minutes, watching for anything that looked familiar, but either Stark didn't use any of the same symbols as Larry or else he just wasn't dreaming about the mine tonight.