“There,” Greg said triumphantly. Then he jammed the wrench into the hatch’s wheel, to prevent it from being turned. “Now if they want to get in here they’ll have to blast.”
He whirled around, eyes blazing. Melissa felt her heart thundering beneath her ribs. We’re going to do it! she said to herself. We’re going to tear it all down! We’re going to put an end to all of it, at last!
There was a computer at the end of the workbench. Greg strode to it, bending over the keyboard.
“One system at a time,” he muttered. “First the lights.”
The computer screen lit up. Greg worked the keyboard, fingers moving in staccato rhythm. Melissa thought the sparse overhead lights flickered, but the lighting was so dim in this cavern that she couldn’t be sure.
“Damn! The backup nuke conies on-line automatically and there’s no way to shut it down unless the solar farms come back on.”
He pecked at the keyboard again, harder. “Shit,” he muttered. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“You can’t do it?” Melissa asked, looking at the incomprehensible alphanumerics scrolling up the display screen.
“I can do it,” Greg growled. “I just can’t do it through the damnable computer. Too many redundancies and backups.”
“Then what—”
“The main airlock!” Greg crowed. “I can open the main airlock long enough to blow all the air out of the garage! Emergency decontamination procedure. Look!”
Melissa saw another jumble of symbols on the computer screen, but overhead loudspeakers immediately blared out a warning that echoed through the big cavern.
“That’s just a start!” Greg shouted.
He ran back to the workbench, picked up another wrench, and waved it in the air. “I’m going to wipe them all out!I can do it! Watch me!”
Melissa followed him down the narrow walkway between man-tall metal shapes that throbbed and chugged ceaselessly.
“I don’t need the compiler system,” Greg railed, banging his wrench angrily on the metal domes of the pumps as he passed them, making the cavern ring. “I don’t need the fucking computer! I’ll do it the hard way!”
“Do what?” Melissa asked.
Instead of answering her, he turned and pointed back to the workbench. “Get every tool you can carry. Bring them to me. Now!”
She scurried to obey, staggering slightly in the unaccustomed gravity, righting her balance by leaning against the cold metal pumps.
She went to the toolbox they had already opened and lifted out an assortment of wrenches, pliers and screwdrivers. By the time she got back to Greg he had already twisted off two of the four bolts holding down the domed top of one of the pumps.
“It all gets down to plumbing,” Greg mumbled as he worked furiously. “All the high technology of this base depends on pipes that carry either air or water.”
“You’re going to break the pumps?”
Greg looked up at her, a grease stain already smeared across his forehead. I’m going to cut off their air supply. Let them choke to death on their own fumes.”
“Us too?” she asked.
He laughed. “Of course, us too. We’ll die together, Melissa. You’ll like that, won’t you?”
“I was in love with you,” she said.
“No greater love has any man,” Greg babbled as he yanked at the bolts of the pump, “than he lays down his life for his ex-lover.”
She dropped to her knees next to him. “Kill them all,” she whispered urgently. “But be sure to kill us, too.”
“We’ll die,” Greg said triumphantly. “We’ll all die!”
CONTROL CENTER
Doug flew down the tunnel, his feet barely touching the ground, leaping the distance between one closed airtight hatch and the next in a few long, loping lunar strides.
Jinny Anson was already in the control center when Doug got there. So was his mother and Lev Brudnoy.
“They’re in the EVC, affl right,” Anson was saying, pointing at the big electronic wall map of the base. “Sonofabitch blew out the garage and now the oxygen partial pressure in tunnel four is below safe level.”
“How could he do that?” Joanna asked, wide-eyed.
Still scowling at the wall map, Anson replied, “He just opened the main airlock. All the air in the garage got sucked out into the vacuum.”
“But how—”
“There’s an emergency procedure in the computer controls,” Anson answered impatiently, “so we can clear the garage of toxins or radioactives or any other crap in a hurry.”
“Was anyone in the garage?”
“Of course! We’re counting heads now, making sure everybody got out okay.”
“What about tunnel four?” Doug asked. “That’s the tunnel that leads into the EVC, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, right. He must’ve shut down the pumps, I guess. Or maybe turned off the air-circulating fans. It doesn’t take much.”
“What is he trying to do?” Brudnoy asked.
“Commit suicide,” Joanna replied without an instant’s hesitation.
“And take all of us with hint?” Anson almost snarled the words.
Joanna nodded silently.
Doug asked, “Has anybody been able to make contact with him?”
Anson shook her head. “He doesn’t answer, not even the paging system. And he must’ve knocked out the surveillance cameras somehow, we can’t get a picture from inside theEVC.”
“Damn!”
Doug saw that the consoles were fully manned; tight-lipped technicians sat at the monitor screens, headsets clamped to their ears, fingers running over their keyboards as they checked every system in Moonbase.
In the control center’s air of quiet frenzy, Anson had naturally, automatically taken charge.
“He’s trying to knock out the whole base,” she said, thinking aloud. “Already blown out the garage and tunnel four’s down below safe minimums. It’s only a matter of time before he gets the rest of us.”
“What can we do to stop him?” Joanna asked, sounding a bit frantic.
“First things first,” said Anson. Turning, she marched to one of the consoles and spoke to the technician seated there. “Activate all the emergency air filtration systems. And get a squad of safety people to manually check them.”
Doug saw the question in his mother’s eyes. “Backup systems,” he explained, “to filter the carbon dioxide out of the air. Even if Greg shuts down the main recycling equipment, the backups will keep our air breathable.”
“For how long?” Joanna asked.
Brudnoy looked at her with sad eyes. “A few hours,” he said softly. “At most, a few hours.”
“Shouldn’t we get everyone into spacesuits, then?” Joanna suggested.
“There aren’t enough suits for everyone,” Brudnoy countered.
Doug added, “And it would take an hour of pre-breathing before you could get into a suit without giving yourself the bends.”
“Besides,” the Russian said, “if the EVC goes down, the suits will only prolong your misery for a few hours more.”
“Very encouraging,” Zimmerman said loudly as he stepped through the control center’s entrance. “I don’t suppose you have suits my size anyway.”
They all turned to see the fat old professor walking toward them as carefully as a man negotiating a minefield. Zimmerman’s gray three-piece suit looked rumpled, but there was no sign of fear in his fleshy face. He looked more annoyed than afraid.
“I told you to stay in your quarters,” Doug said. “How did—”
“You expect me to sit in that coffin of a cell, all alone? Never! If I am to die, it will be in company.”
“But the hatches.”
“Bah! Obviously I learned how to open them.”
“You shut them behind you, I hope.”
Anson said, “They close automatically, don’t worry about it.”
“So what is the problem?” Zimmerman asked.
Doug swiftly explained. The old man’s face went gray.