“Even as a teacher,” Wilma added.
“Why?” I asked. “Did he ever threaten you?”
“ ‘Threaten?’ Oh lordy, no. Oops, sorry, Reverend. No, threats just don’t happen here, Mr. Morgan. But Manny had this way of replying to you when you’d upset him, these ironic retorts, that you really couldn’t say he’d sassed you, but you knew he was being disrespectful.”
“I know what you mean, Wilma,” Mary said. “Manny was real big on irony and sarcasm. He could really wield his tongue like a sword.”
This was all very interesting and revealing, but I wasn’t sure it was getting me any closer to finding that bomb. “Was there any particular place in Currier and Ives that Manny might really have felt animosity toward? Anyplace you can think of that he might really want to make sure he destroyed?”
They all looked at me blankly. Finally, it was Mrs. McMaster who spoke up. “Mr. Morgan, I think the problem we’re all having is that we just can’t believe that Manny would want to destroy anything in Currier and Ives at all. Up until he was exiled, I don’t think anyone thought he’d ever be any trouble. Oh sure, we knew he wanted to leave and see the Solar System, but we never got the impression, or at least, I never did, that he wanted to burn his bridges and not come back.”
“I agree,” Tim said. “He loved it here. He liked to hike along the shore, particularly in the fall. We used to do that a lot as we were growing up. When we were older, he and I and some other friends would camp out by the sea and listen to the surf roll in and watch the stars.
“Something just went wrong inside him, Mr. Morgan. Maybe it was the way his parents died—”
“Now, Tim,” McMaster said.
“But it might matter, Reverend,” Tim protested. “Manny was never the same after that. That’s something I know.”
“OK, so what happened?” I asked. “I think I should be told.”
Jo picked up the story.
“We don’t like to talk about it. Basically, it was a murder-suicide. Manny’s mom Gloria was dying of brain cancer. There was nothing anyone could do about it. Not just here, either, Jake. Anywhere. And Manny’s father had had a stroke a couple years before. He did OK, but everyone knew he wasn’t the same. Anyway, after the disease had progressed far enough so Gloria couldn’t get out of bed anymore, one day Manny went to school and when he got home the neighbors told him they’d heard two gunshots and his folks were both dead.
“It was really no one’s business how a husband and wife decided to draw their lives to a close, but neither of them brought it up to Manny. Some of us think his father was supposed to at least leave a note, but probably forgot.”
“Yeah. Manny was never the same after that,” Tim added. “He didn’t want to live in his house anymore. That’s why he moved in with the Blacks.”
The meeting went on for another hour, but no more useful information came out. The most pertinent thing said in that last hour was by the minister: “Mr. Morgan, regardless of what happens, no one will blame the Patrol.”
That was nice, but hardly helpful.
Tim agreed to take me around Currier and Ives and show me some of the places he and Manny and many of the other boys used to hang out. I doubted it would help, but I wanted time to think, and Jo had some official work to take care of that afternoon, too. (“Gotta play Santa at the old folks’ home,” she said.)
Tim had a one-horse sledge. We set out for a nearby hill. We chatted along the way. He wanted to know about space and life on the Moon, so I filled him in with one part of my brain while the rest tried to figure out what the hell Manfred Rolff had in mind when he’d left the bomb here. If he’d left the bomb here. That was another question. No one had seen him, anywhere. We had no idea where in the thousands of square kilometers of Currier and Ives he might have left the thing, or if he’d just made it all up for the hell of it.
“Now we have to climb, Mr. Morgan,” Tim said, reigning the horse to a stop.
Thank God they kept Luna City at one standard g. The climb was steep and we went up for at least fifty meters. If I’d only been used to Moon gravity and had just done a quick tone-up before coming to Earth, I wouldn’t have made it up a tenth of the way.
It was well worth the climb.
The top of the hill was a large plateau, surprisingly open, with large, flat sheets of rocks broken and scattered about, surrounded by trees and bushes growing up high along the sides, bursting through the snow. You could see the ocean from there, and the town, and at night I’m sure you could see to the end of the Universe.
“Lots of us boys used to come up here just to kill an afternoon. We’d build a fire, play ‘war’ there in the trees, kill game to eat. Talk about girls. You didn’t have a place like this on the Moon when you were growing up, I’ll bet,” Tim said.
“I grew up in Arizona. There were lots of places like this.” But I didn’t get to go to any of them.
How could anyone want to destroy such beauty? Even a small part of it? Even if he was mad at the whole world?
I wanted to find that Easter egg in the worst way.
We went to a few other places after that, but those had really been summer haunts, and weren’t much worth seeing with snow cover. On the ride back to town I thought about what the outside reaction would be when the bomb went off tomorrow morning. By and large, the Solar Union would just ignore it. There would be some who would think “those intolerant bastards probably deserved it anyway.” With shame I realized that I might have been one of them had I been spending Christmas morning by myself when the news broke.
Jo was finished playing Santa Claus by the time Tim brought me back, and we went back to her place.
“Why so glum?” Jo asked. “C’mon—it’s Christmas Eve. You knew this mission was impossible anyway. Look around you.” We were not quite out of town yet. “Do any of these people look like they’re going to let this spoil their holiday?”
“But Jo, there is a nuclear bomb set to go off tomorrow morning—”
“Or so was claimed by a psychotic, since deceased, commando.”
“We still have to take this seriously.”
“We have been taking this seriously, Jake. You’re here. I’ve been taking you around, introducing you to the people most likely to be able to tell you something worthwhile about Manfred Rolff, late of the Republic of Currier and Ives, now just late. Assuming he did come here, though no one has seen him, and set a bomb, even at twelve kilotons, what’s the worst that can happen?”
“Governor—it’s a nuclear bomb,” I said.
“I know. I used to design those things, remember? Radius of total destruction is a few kilometers, at maximum yield. The radius of serious hurt from the prompt radiation is lots less, so we don’t have to worry about that. We might get a little fallout, but the wind blows out to sea around here. If he planted the bomb in one of our towns, then Christmas morning we stand to lose a few hundred people, though probably less than are lost in the typical aircraft disaster. Didn’t Luna City lose ninety or so people when that air main broke a couple years ago?”
“OK, OK, I give up,” I finally said. But I hadn’t. I couldn’t really argue with Jo’s logic, and in the last twenty-four hours, I couldn’t say that I’d gotten any closer to finding the bomb, or even verifying that Manny had really left one here. But even if Jo and the rest of the good citizens of Currier and Ives were willing to wait and see, something wouldn’t stop grinding around in my guts.
“I’m going to a Christmas party tonight. You’re more than welcome to come,” Jo said. “Or, if you wish, you can pack up and leave, though Sarah might be disappointed. Go back to the Moon. You really have done more than anyone could have reasonably asked you to do. It’s not your fault you can’t do the impossible.”