The Precipice (20 page)

Despite his size, George moved gracefully, light on his feet and perfectly at home in the low lunar gravity.

“I'm not here,” Dan growled.

“Right. But if you were, I'd hafta tell you that Pancho Lane's missin'.”

“Missing?”

“Not in her quarters,” George said as he approached. “Not in any of the Astro offices. Not in the spaceport or the Grand Plaza.
Not anyplace I've looked. Blyleven's worried about her.”

Frank Blyleven was chief of Astro's security department. Dan glanced at Cardenas, then said to George, “She could be in someone
else's quarters, you know.”

George looked surprised at the idea. “Pancho? She doesn't have a guy and she doesn't sleep around.”

“I wouldn't worry—”

“She didn't show up at the office t'day. She's never missed an hour of work, let alone a whole day.”

That worried Dan. “Didn't show up at all?”

“I asked everybody. No Pancho, all day. I been lookin' for her all night. Nowhere in sight.”

“Did you ask her roommate?”

“Mandy Cunningham? She was out havin' dinner with Humphries.”

“She should be back by now.”

George made a leering smirk. “Maybe. Maybe not”

Turning to Cardenas, Dan said, “I'd better look into this. George is right, Pancho's had her nose to the grindstone ever since
she came up here.”

“So maybe she's taking a little r and r,” Cardenas said, unruffled.

“Maybe,” Dan admitted. But he didn't think so.

P
ancho had spent the entire day being invisible. The night before, she had gone to the Pelican Bar for a little relaxation
after another long, grueling day of study and simulation runs in the Astro office complex.

The incongruously-named Pelican Bar had been started by a homesick Horidian who had come to Selene back in the days when the
underground community was still known as Moonbase. Hired to be the base's quartermaster, he had developed a case of hypertension
that kept him from returning to Earth until a regime of exercise and medication brought his blood pressure under control.

He took the pills, largely ignored the exercise, and started the bar in his own quarters as a clandestine drinking club for
his cronies. Over the years he had grown into a paunchy little barrel of a man, his bald head gleaming under the ceiling fluorescents,
a perpetual gap-toothed smile on his fleshy, tattooed face. He often told his patrons that he had found his
true calling as a bartender: “A dispenser of cheer and honest advice,” as he put it.

The bar was several levels down from the Grand Plaza, the size of two ordinary living suites, carved out of the lunar rock.
And quiet. No music, unless someone wanted to sit at the synthesizer that lay dusty and rarely touched in the farthest, most
shadowy corner of the room. The only background noise in the place was the buzz of many conversations.

Pelicans were everywhere. A holographic video behind the bar showed them skimming bare centimeters above the placid waters
of the Gulf of Mexico against a background of condo towers and beachfront hotels that had long since gone underwater. Photos
of pelicans adorned every wall. Statues of pelicans stood at each end of the bar and pelican mobiles hung from the smoothed-rock
ceiling. A meter-tall stuffed toy pelican stood by the bartender's computer, dressed in garish, outlandish Florida tourist's
garb and peering at the drinkers through square little granny sunglasses.

Pancho liked the Pelican Bar. She much preferred it to the tidy little bistro up in the Grand Plaza where the tourists and
executives did their drinking. The Pelican was a sort of home away from home; she came often enough to be considered one of
the steady customers, and she usually bought as many rounds as any of the drinkers clustered around the bar.

She exchanged greetings with the other regulars while the owner, working behind the bar as usual, broke away from an intense
conversation with a despondent-looking littte redhead to waddle down the bar and pour Pancho her favorite, a margarita with
real lime from Selene's hydroponic fruit orchard.

Although a set of booths lined the back wall, there were no stools at the bar itself. You did your drinking standing up, and
when you could no longer stand your buddies took you home. House rules.

Pancho had wedged herself into the crowd in between a
total stranger and a retired engineer she knew only as a fellow Pelican patron whose parents had hung the unlikely name of
Isaac Walton around his neck. The word was he had originally come to the Moon to get away from jokes about fishing.

Walton's face always seemed slightly askew; one side of it did not quite match the other. Even his graying hair seemed thicker
on one side than the other. Normally a happy drinker, he looked morose as he leaned both elbows on the bar and stared into
his tall, frosted drink.

“Hi, Ike,” Pancho said brightly. “Why the long face?”

“Anniversary,” Walton mumbled.

“So where's your wife?”

He gave Pancho a bleary look. “Not my wedding anniversary.”

“Then what?”

Walton stood up a little straighter. He was about Pancho's height, stringy and loose-jointed. “The eighth anniversary of my
being awarded the Selene Achievement Prize.”

“Achievement Prize?” she asked. “What's that?”

The bartender broke into their conversation. “Hey, Ike, don't you think you've had enough for one night?”

Walton nodded solemnly. “Yup. You're right.”

“So why don't you go home to your wife,” the bartender suggested. Pancho heard something more than friendliness in his tone,
an undercurrent of—jeeps, she thought, he almost sounds like a cop.

“You're right, pal. Absolutely right. I'm going home. Whatta I owe you?”

The bartender waved a meaty hand in the air. “Forget it. Anniversary present.”

“Thank you very much.” Turning to Pancho, he said, “You wanna walk me home?”

She glanced at the bartender, who still looked unusually grim, then shrugged and said, “Sure, Ike. I'll walk you home.”

He wasn't as unsteady on his feet as Pancho had thought he'd be. Once outside the bar Walton seemed more depressed than drunk.
Yet he nodded or said hello to everyone they passed.

“What's the Achievement Prize?” Pancho asked as they walked down the corridor.

“Kind of a secret.”

“Oh.”

“I did the impossible for them, y'see, but I did it too late to be of any use and they don't want anybody to know about it
so they gave me the prize as hush money and told me to keep my trap shut.”

Confused, Pancho asked, “About what?”

For the first time that evening, Walton broke into a smile. “My cloak of invisibility,” he answered.

Little by little Pancho wormed the story out of him. Walton had been working with Professor Zimmerman, the nan-otech genius,
when the old U.N. had sent Peacekeeper troops to seize Moonbase.

“Stavenger was in a sweat to develop nonlethal weapons so we could defend ourselves against the Peacekeepers when they got
here without killing any of them,” Walton said, growing steadier and gloomier with each step along the corridor. “Zimmerman
promised Stavenger he'd come up with a way to make our guys invisible, but the bastards killed him when they attacked. Suicide
bomber got down to his lab and blew the old man to smithereens.”

“Himself, too?” Pancho asked.

“I did say ‘suicide,' didn't I? Anyway, the so-called war ended pretty quick and we got our independence. That's when we changed
the name from Moonbase to Selene.”

“I know.”

“For a while there I didn't have anything to do. I'd been Zimmerman's assistant and now the old man was gone.”.

Walton had doggedly kept working on Zimmerman's idea
of finding a method for making a person invisible. And eventually he succeeded.

“But who needs to be invisible?” Walton asked. Before Pancho could answer he went on, “Only somebody who's up to no damn good,
that's who. Spies. Assassins. Crooks. Thieves.”

Selene's governing council decided to mothball Walton's invention. Bury it so that no one would even know it existed.

“So they gave me the big fat prize to keep me quiet. It's a pension, really. I can live in comfort—as long as I stay in Selene
and keep my mouth shut.”

“Sounds cool to me,” Pancho said, trying to cheer him up.

But Walton shook his head. “You don't understand, Pancho. I'm a freaking genius and nobody knows it. I've made a terrific
invention and it's useless. I'm not even supposed to mention it to anybody.”

Pancho said, “Aren't you taking a chance, talking to me about it?”

He gave her a sidelong glance. “Aw, hell, Pancho, I hadda tell somebody tonight or bust. And I can trust you, can't I? You're
not gonna steal it and go out and assassinate anybody, are you?”

“'Course not,” Pancho answered immediately. But she was thinking that it might be a hoot to be invisible now and then.

“Wanna see it?” Walton asked.

“The invisibility dingus?”

“Yeah.”

“If it's invisible, how can I see it?”

Walton broke into a cackle of laughter. Clapping Pancho on the back, he said, “That's what I like about you, Pancho ol' pal.
You're okay, with a capital oke.”

Walton turned down the next cross-corridor and led Pancho up to the level just below the Grand Plaza, where most of Selene's
life-support machinery chugged away, purifying
the air, recycling the water, rectifying the electrical current coming in from the solar farms. Pumps clattered. The air hummed
and crackled. The ceilings of these chambers were rough, unfinished rock. Pancho knew that on their other side was either
the manicured lawn of the Grand Plaza or the raw regolith of the Moon's surface itself. And along a corridor not far from
where they walked lay the catacombs.

“Isn't the dingus under lock and key?” Pancho asked as Walton led her past a long row of metal lockers.

“They don't even know it exists. They think I destroyed it when they gave me their lousy prize. Destroy it, hell! I'll never
destroy it. It's the only one in the whole wide solar system.”

“Wow.”

He nodded absently. “And it's not a ‘dingus,' it's a stealth suit”

“Stealth suit,” Pancho echoed.

“Like a wetsuit, covers you from head to toe,” he explained in a hushed voice, as if afraid someone would hear him. Pancho
strained to listen to him over the background hum and chatter of the machinery.

Pancho followed Walton down the long row of metal lockers. The corridor smelled dusty, unused. The overhead lights were spaced
so far apart that there were shadowy pools of darkness every few meters. Walton stopped in front of a locker identified by
a serial number. Pancho saw that it had an electronic security lock.

Feeling uneasy, Pancho asked, “Don't they have any guards patrolling up here?”

“Nah. What for? There's cameras at the other end of the corridor, but this old tunnel's like an attic. People store junk up
here, personal stuff they don't have room for down in their quarters.”

Walton tapped out the security code on the electronic lock and pulled the metal door open. It squealed slightly, as if complaining.

“There it is,” he said in a hushed voice.

Hanging inside the locker was a limp bodysuit, deep black.

“Ain't she a beauty?” Walton said as he carefully, lovingly, took the suit from the locker and held it up by its hanger for
Pancho to admire.

“Looks almost like a wetsuit,” Pancho said, wondering how it could make someone invisible. It guttered darkly in the feeble
light from the overhead fluorescents, as if spangled with sequins made of onyx.

“The suit's covered with nanocameras and projectors, only a couple of molecules thick. Drove me nuts getting ‘em to work right,
lemme tell you. I
earned
that prize money.”

“Uh-huh,” Pancho said, fingering one of the gloved sleeves. The fabric felt soft, pliable, yet somehow almost gritty, like
grains of sand.

“The cameras pick up the scenery around you,” Walton was explaining. “The projectors display it. Somebody standing in front
of you sees what's behind you. Somebody on your left sees what's on your right. Just like they're looking through you. To
all intents and purposes you're invisible.”

“It really works?” she asked.

“Computer built into the belt controls it,” Walton said. “Batteries are probably flat, but I can charge ‘em up easy enough.”
He pointed to a set of electrical outlets on the smoothed-rock wall of the corridor, opposite the lockers.

“But it really works?” she repeated.

He smiled like a proud father. “Want to try it on?”

Grinning back at him, Pancho said, “Sure!”

While Pancho wriggled into the snug-fitting suit Walton plugged the two palm-sized batteries into the nearby electrical outlet.
By the time she had pulled on the gloves and fitted the hood over her head, he was snapping the fully-charged batteries into
their slots on the suit's waist.

“Okay,” Walton said, looking her over carefully. “Now pull the face mask down and seal it to the hood.”

Narrow goggles covered Pancho's eyes. “I must look like a terrorist, Ike,” she muttered, the fabric of the mask's lining tickling
her lips.

“In a minute you won't look like anything at all,” he said. “Unlatch the safety cover on your belt and press the pressure
switch.”

Pancho popped the tiny plastic cover and touched the switch beneath it. “Okay, now what?” she asked.

“Give it fifteen seconds.”

Pancho waited. “So?”

With a lopsided grin, Walton said, “Hold your hand up in front of your face.”