"A paper copy? The first thing Harry told me was that we're not supposed to make paper copies unless it's specially authorized. Paper's very scarce up here."
"No kidding? I've planted four trees with my own hands, you know." Kinsman hesitated a moment, but when Diane did not reply he said, "There's reusable plastic in the bin next to the computer."
Diane muttered, "Oh, right," and leaned across her desk to pull a thin sheet of plastic from the computer tray. Puzzling momentarily, she flexed it, then slid it into the printer beside her display screen. Turning to her keyboard she touched a series of pressure pads, very carefully, one finger at a time. Her nails were all trimmed short, but not for the guitar anymore.
"I've got to be careful," she said. "Working the keyboard is funny in this gravity." She gave Kinsman a sidelong glance. "And I was never very good at typing anyway."
Abruptly the printer erupted into furious action, buzzing out line after line across the thin plastic sheet with inhuman 291 speed. Then it stopped dead, Diane pulled the plastic out of the printer and handed it to Kinsman.
"You've got to sign for it," she said.
Kinsman nodded, scribbled his signature on the display screen with the electronic stylus she handed him, then got to his feet.
"Diane . . ." He found himself almost at a loss for words. "I can't tell you how great it is to have you here." She said nothing, merely looked up at him with those dark, deep eyes.
"I'll pick you up at twenty hundred," he said.
"You don't know where my quarters are."
"I'll find you," he said. "You've come a quarter-million miles, I'll make it across the last few hundred meters."
He felt buoyant as he made his way through the din of the comm center and out into the shadowy silence of the tomblike corridor. Then, in the dim light of the overhead fluorescents, he read his decoded message:
TO: COL. C.A.KINSMAN/CDR, MNBS I DEC 99 PRIORITY: ONE-ONE-ZERO REF: RMM 99-2074 SECURITY CLASSIFICATION: TOP SECRET INCREASED ORBITAL OPERATIONS REQUIRE LOGISTICS AND MANPOWER SUPPORT FROM MOONBASE. URGENTLY REQUIRE YOUR LATEST ASSESSMENT ON MOONBASE CAPABILITY TO IMMEDIATELY SUPPLY LOGISTIC SUPPORT FOR TEN (10) MANNED ORBITAL SEARCH AND DESTROY MISSIONS PER DAY, PLUS MANPOWER SUPPORT FOR MISSIONS AND/OR BACKUP PERSONNEL FOR STATIONS ALPHA, BETA, GAMMA.
PRIORITY RATING FOR THIS REQUIREMENT IS ONE-ONE- ZERO. CONSIDER POSSIBILITY OF YELLOW ALERT STATUS IMMINENT: RED ALERT POSSIBLE. REQUIRE DETAILED RESPONSE IN TWENTY-FOUR (24) HOURS.
B/G R.M.MURDOCK COMMANDING OFFICER USAF LUNAR OPERATIONS
Kinsman stood alone in the empty corridor, staring at the flimsy plastic sheet in his hand. Suddenly he was trembling, his entire body shaking while in his mind he saw it all again: the weightless, soundless, slow-motion fight; the cosmonaut's space-suited figure revolving slowly, slowly against the back- drop of solemn staring stars; the face inside the helmet frozen in the sudden terrified realization of death.
They're going to do it, Kinsman's mind screamed at him. They're going to make me kill again.
Wednesday 1 December 1999:
ALL SPACE OPERATIONS worked by Universal Time. Not only those in the lunar community, but all space activities in orbit near the Earth, as well.
Colonel Frank Colt flicked a glance at the fuel gauge readout on the instrument panel in the cockpit of his small, sleek, one-man spaceplane.
"Alpha to Mark One," said a voice in his helmet earphones, gritty with static. "Repeat: We read your fuel reserves approaching redline."
Colt was strapped into the padded contour seat, sealed inside his pressurized suit. The spaceplane looked almost like a fighter aircraft, except that its wings were much too small and its tail surfaces nearly nonexistent. It was long and needle-slim, glittering silvery against the blackness of space.
Colt was a lieutenant colonel, the highest-ranking black man among the Aerospace Force's astronaut corps. He had spent the past several hours in orbit, chasing down "unidenti- fied" satellites. Precisely two hundred and ninety-six kilome- ters to his left stretched the achingly beautiful blue and white Earth, dazzling clouds lacing the South Atlantic, the coast of Africa a thin gray haze on the horizon, approaching fast.
But Colt paid no attention to that. Inside his sealed suit 293 he itched and sweated, and after being weightless for more than an hour his legs were beginning to go to sleep again.
They tingled annoy ingly.
