Feeling desperate, I raced to the communications center, down the corridor from the airlock area. It was a small chamber, studded with display screens and staffed by two men and two women. They didn’t want to let me talk to Mai, or Sam, or anybody else out there on the golf course.
“Mr. Gunn’s orders,” they said.
“To hell with Sam’s orders,” I roared at them. “This is a safety issue. Lives are at stake!”
They told me to call the safety office and even offered me a spare console to sit at. I scanned the available comm channels and put my call through. To Mai.
Before the technicians realized what I’d done, Mai’s face came up on the central screen of my console. She smiled at me.
“You left without saying good-bye,” she chided gently.
“Get back inside!” I fairly screamed. “If Sam wants to kill himself that’s his business, but I won’t let him kill you!”
Mai’s face went stern. “Chou, do you think I’m an idiot? This suit is perfectly safe.”
“That may be what Sam says, but—”
“That’s what Dr. Cardenas says,” Mai interrupted. “I’ve spoken with her for hours about the suit. It’s been tested at Selene for months. It’s fine.”
“How can it be?” I was nearly hysterical with fear. “It’s nothing but a thin layer of transparent fabric.”
“Ask Dr. Cardenas,” said Mai. “I’ve got a golf game to play.”
She cut the connection. My screen went blank.
Still sitting at the console, with all four of the comm techs staring at me, I put in a call to Dr. Kristine Cardenas, at the nanotechnology laboratory in Selene.
All her lines were busy. News reporters were besieging her about the nanosuit.
I sank back in the console’s little wheeled chair, terrified that Mai would die of asphyxiation or radiation poisoning or decompression out there in that flimsy suit. Insanely, I felt a grim satisfaction that if Mai died, Sam probably would too.
Numbly I pushed the chair back and began to get up on wobbly legs.
One of the technicians, a youngish woman, said to me, “You can watch the tournament from here, if you like.”
I sank back onto the chair.
One of the male techs added, “If you can sit quietly and keep your mouth shut.”
That’s what I did. Almost.
It was a weird golf game.
Sam was nothing more than a duffer, yet he was holding his own against some of the best players on Earth.
Encased in an exoskeleton suit, Rufus, the muscular South African, literally scorched his drives out of sight. In the light lunar gravity, the Day-Glo orange balls rose in dreamy slow motion, arced lazily across the starry sky, and sailed gently toward the ground, disappearing over the short horizon.
He was overdriving, slamming the ball beyond the green, into the deep treacherous sand. Then he’d flail away, blasting explosions of sand that slowly settled back to the ground while his ball zoomed into another area of deep sand. When he finally got his ball on the green his putting was miserable.
The more bogeys he got, the harder he powered his drives and the more erratic his putts. In the display screen of the console I was watching I could see his face getting redder and redder, even through the tinted visor of his helmet. And his exoskeleton suit seemed to be getting stiffer, more difficult to move in. Probably sand from his desperate flailings was grinding the suit’s joints.
Sam just took it easy. His drives were erratic, a slice here, a hook there. It took him two or three shots to get on the green, but once there, his putts were fantastic. He sank putts of twenty, even thirty meters. It was as if the ball was being pulled to the cup by some invisible force.
Mai was doing well, also. Her drives were accurate, even though nowhere near long enough to reach the greens. But she always landed cleanly on the fairway and chipped beautifully. She putted almost as well as Sam and kept pace with the leaders.
Both Mai and Sam seemed able to swing much more freely in their nanosuits. Where the other golfers were stiff with their drives and chips, Mai and Sam looked loose and agile. If they’d been bigger, and able to drive the ball farther, they would have led the pack easily.
But my course was really tough on all of them. By the time they reached the last tee, only three of the golfers had broken par. Sam had birdied the last three holes, all par fives, but he was still one above par. The skinny little Indian, Ramjanmyan, was leading at three below.
And Mai was right behind him, at two below.
The eighteenth was the toughest hole on the course, a par six, where the cup was nearly a full kilometer from the tee and hidden behind a slight rise of solid gray rock slanting across the green-painted ground.
Mai stood at the tee, looking toward the lighted pole poking up above the crest of the rocky ridge, her driver in her gloved hands. She took a couple of practice swings, loose and easy, then hit the drive of her life. The ball went straight down the fairway, bounced a couple of dozen meters short of the green, hopped over the ridge, and rolled to a stop a bare ten centimeters from the cup.
“Wow!” yelled the comm techs, rising to their feet. I could even hear the roar of the crowd all the way over in Dante’s lobby.
Sam was next. His drive was long enough to reach the green, all right, but he sliced it badly and the ball thunked down in the deep sand off the edge of the green, almost at the red-painted hazard line.
Groans of disappointment.
“That’s it for the boss,” said one of the techs.
Somehow I found myself thinking, Don’t be so sure about that.
Ramjanmyan’s drive almost cleared the ridge. But only almost. It hit the edge of the rock and bounced high, then fell in that dreamlike lunar slow motion and rolled back almost to the tee. Even in his exoskeleton suit, the Indian seemed to slump like a defeated man.
