He snagged a passing suit and asked, "What's going on?"
"Haven't you heard? The war is over. They've made peace. And there's a ship coming in!"
The Lake Geneva had maintained television silence through most of the long flight to the Moon for fear of long-range beam weapons. With peace, however, they opened direct transmission to Bootstrap.
Ezumi's people had the flicks sew together an enormous cotton square and hack away some hanging vines so they could hang it high on the shadowed side of the crater. Then, with the fill lights off, the video image was projected. Swiss spacejacks tumbled before the camera, grinning, all denim and red cowboy hats. They were talking about their escape from the hunter-seeker missiles, brash young voices running one over the other.
The top officers were assembled beneath the cotton square. Gunther recognized their suits. Ekatarina's voice boomed from newly erected loudspeakers. "When are you coming in? We have to make sure the spaceport field is clear. How many hours?"
Holding up five fingers, a blond woman said, "Forty-five!"
"No, forty-three!"
"Nothing like that!"
"Almost forty-five!"
Again Ekatarina's voice cut into the tumult. "What's it like in the orbitals? We heard they were destroyed."
"Yes, destroyed!"
"Very bad, very bad, it'll take years to--"
"But most of the people are--"
"We were given six orbits warning; most went down in lifting bodies, there was a big evacuation."
"Many died, though. It was very bad."
Just below the officers, a suit had been directing several flicks as they assembled a camera platform. Now it waved broadly, and the flicks stepped away. In the Lake Geneva somebody shouted, and several heads turned to stare at an offscreen television monitor. The suit turned the camera, giving them a slow, panoramic scan.
One of the spacejacks said, "What's it like there? I see that some of you are wearing space suits, and the rest are not. Why is that?"
Ekatarina took a deep breath. "There have been some changes here."
There was one hell of a party at the Center when the Swiss arrived. Sleep schedules were juggled, and save for a skeleton crew overseeing the flicks, everyone turned out to welcome the dozen newcomers to the Moon. They danced to skiffle, and drank vacuum-distilled vodka. Everyone had stories to tell, rumors to swap, opinions on the likelihood that the peace would hold.
Gunther wandered away midway through the party. The Swiss depressed him. They all seemed so young and fresh and eager. He felt battered and cynical in their presence. He wanted to grab them by the shoulders and shake them awake.
Depressed, he wandered through the locked-down laboratories. Where the Viral Computer Project had been, he saw Ekatarina and the captain of the Lake Geneva conferring over a stack of crated bioflops. They bent low over Ekatarina's peecee, listening to the CMP.
"Have you considered nationalizing your industries?" the captain asked. "That would give us the plant needed to build the New City. Then, with a few hardwired utilities, Bootstrap could be managed without anyone having to set foot inside it."
Gunther was too distant to hear the CMP's reaction, but he saw both women laugh. "Well," said Ekatarina. "At the very least we will have to renegotiate terms with the parent corporations. With only one ship functional, people can't be easily replaced. Physical presence has become a valuable commodity. We'd be fools not to take advantage of it."
He passed on, deeper into shadow, wandering aimlessly. Eventually, there was a light ahead, and he heard voices. One was Krishna's, but spoken faster and more forcefully than he was used to hearing it. Curious, he stopped just outside the door.
Krishna was in the center of the lab. Before him, Beth Hamilton stood nodding humbly. "Yes, sir," she said. "I'll do that. Yes." Dumbfounded, Gunther realized that Krishna was giving her orders.
Krishna glanced up. "Weil! You're just the man I was about to come looking for."
"I am?"
"Come in here, don't dawdle." Krishna smiled and beckoned, and Gunther had no choice but to obey. He looked like a young god now. The force of his spirit danced in his eyes like fire. It was strange that Gunther had never noticed before how tall he was. "Tell me where Sally Chang is."
"I don't--I mean, I can't, I--" He stopped and swallowed. "I think Chang must be dead." Then, "Krishna? What's happened to you?"
"He's finished his research," Beth said.
"I rewrote my personality from top to bottom," Krishna said. "I'm not half-crippled with shyness anymore--have you noticed?" He put a hand on Gunther's shoulder, and it was reassuring, warm, comforting. "Gunther, I won't tell you what it took to scrape together enough messenger engines from traces of old experiments to try this out on myself. But it works. We've got a treatment that among other things will serve as a universal cure for everyone in Bootstrap. But to do that, we need the messenger engines, and they're not here. Now tell me why you think Sally Chang is dead."
"Well, uh, I've been searching for her for four days. And the CMP has been looking too. You've been holed up here all that time, so maybe you don't know the flicks as well as the rest of us do. But they're not very big on planning. The likelihood one of them could actively evade detection that long is practically zilch. The only thing I can think is that somehow she made it to the surface before the effects hit her, got into a truck and told it to drive as far as her oxygen would take her."
Krishna shook his head and said, "No. It is simply not consistent with Sally Chang's character. With all the best will in the world, I cannot picture her killing herself." He slid open a drawer: row upon row of gleaming canisters. "This may help. Do you remember when I said there were two canisters of mimetic engines missing, not just the schizomimetic?"
"Vaguely."
"I've been too busy to worry about it, but wasn't that odd? Why would Chang have taken a canister and not used it?"
"What was in the second canister?" Hamilton asked.
"Paranoia," Krishna said. "Or rather a good enough chemical analog. Now, paranoia is a rare disability, but a fascinating one. It's characterized by an elaborate but internally consistent delusional system. The paranoid patient functions well intellectually, and is less fragmented than a schizophrenic. Her emotional and social responses are closer to normal. She's capable of concerted effort. In a time of turmoil, it's quite possible that a paranoid individual could elude our detection."
"Okay, let's get this straight," Hamilton said. "War breaks out on Earth. Chang gets her orders, keys in the sofware bombs, and goes to Bootstrap with a canister full of madness and a little syringe of paranoia--no, it doesn't work. It all falls apart."
"How so?"
"Paranoia wouldn't inoculate her against schizophrenia. How does she protect herself from her own aerosols?"
Gunther stood transfixed. "Lavender!"
They caught up with Sally Chang on the topmost terrace of Bootstrap. The top level was undeveloped. Someday--so the corporate brochures promised --fallow deer would graze at the edge of limpid pools, and otters frolic in the streams. But the soil hadn't been built up yet, the worms brought in or the bacteria seeded. There were only sand, machines, and a few unhappy opportunistic weeds.