“You’re invited, too.”
Before I can refuse, Harry pipes up. “We’ll be there!”
Janine’s smile turns genuine. “Good. I’ll see you there, okay?” And she scampers off.
I scowl at Harry. “Why’d you say yes? I don’t feel like partying. ’Specially for Zeke.”
“Chill out, Taylor,” Harry tells me. “All work and no play, you know.”
So we go off to the Pelican Bar—after I take a quick shower and pull on a fresh set of coveralls. The Pelican’s owned by some fugitive from Florida; he’s got the place decorated with statues of pelicans, photographs of pelicans, painting of pelicans. Behind the bar there’s a big screen display of Miami, the way it looked before the greenhouse floods covered it over. Lots of pelicans flying over the water, diving for fish.
The place is jammed. Bodies three, four deep around the long bar. Every booth filled. Noise like a solid wall. I take two steps inside the door and decide to turn around and leave.
But Harry grabs my wrist and tows me through the boisterous crowd, like a tractor dragging some piece of wreckage.
He takes me right up to Zeke Browkowski, of all people, who’s standing at the bar surrounded by admirers. Including Janine.
“Hey, here’s the turtle guy!” Zeke yells out, grinning at me. My hands clench into fists but I don’t say anything.
To my total shock, Zeke sticks out his hand to shake. “Taylor, you beat me. You broke the rules, but you beat me, man. Congratulations.”
Surprised, I take his hand and mutter, “Lotta good it’s done me.”
Still grinning, Zeke half turns to the guy standing next to him. He’s an Asian man: older, grayer, wearing a regular suit instead of coveralls, like the rest of us.
“Taylor, this is Hideki Matsumata. He designed Dash-nine.”
Matsumata bows to me. On reflex, I bow back.
“You have made an important contribution, Mr. Reed.”
“Me?”
Smiling at me, Matsumata says, “I was certain that my Dash-nine couldn’t be beaten. You proved otherwise.”
I can’t figure out why he was smiling about it. I hear myself say, “Like Zeke says, I broke the rules.”
“You bent the rules, Mr. Reed. Bent them. Sometimes rules need to bent, stretched.”
I didn’t know what to say.
Glancing down at Harry, in the powerchair beside me, Matsumata says, “Today you showed that walking vehicles can negotiate mountainous territory that wheeled or tracked vehicles cannot.”
“That’s what walkers are all about,” says Harry. “That’s what I was trying to tell you all along.”
“You have proved your point, Professor Walker,” Matsumata says. But he’s looking at me as he says it.
Harry laughs and says, “Soon’s we get that bad bearing replaced, Tay, you’re going to take Stomper up to the top of Mount Yeager. And then maybe you’ll do a complete circumnavigation of the ringwall.”
“But I don’t have a job.”
“Sure you do! With Walker’s Walkers. I haven’t fired you.”
“The company’s not busted?”
Harry’s big grin is my answer. But Matsumata says, “Selene’s governing council has wanted for some time to build a cable-car tramway over the ringwall and out onto Mare Nubium. Walking vehicles such as your Stomper will make that project possible.”
“We can break out of the Alphonsus ringwall and start to spread out,” Harry says. “Get down to the south polar region, where the ice deposits are.”
My head’s spinning. They’re saying that I can stay here on the Moon, and even do important work, valuable work.
Zeke claps me on the shoulder. “You done good, turtle guy.”
“By breaking the rules and getting disqualified,” I mutter, kind of stunned by it all.
Janine comes up and slips her hand in mine. “What was it you were singing during the race? Something about dying with a hammer in your hand?”
“John Henry,” I mumble.
“Wrong paradigm,” says Harry, with a laugh.
“Whattaya mean?”
“The right paradigm for this situation is an old engineer’s line: Behold the lowly turtle, he only makes progress when he sticks his neck out.”
