The Diamond Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

tall even for the low gravity of Ganymede, almost emaciated, with sunken cheeks and burning eyes. On the point of his chin a dozen or so very long, very black hairs managed to suggest a goatee. Unlike his facial hair the hair of his head was thick and glossy, long and black, hanging to his shoul-ders. He had inch-long nails on the thumb and fingers of his right hand, but the nails of his left were cut short. He was wearing blue canvas work pants and a shirt patterned like mattress-ticking.
    “No problem,” said Blake coolly, giving the outstretched hand, the dangerous one, a single short jerk. A curious fel-low, thought Blake: his accent was as phony as they come, straight out of an ancient Charlie Chan movie-chip; the fin-gernails were not a Mandarin affectation but apparently for playing twelvestring guitar, and the work clothes suggested that the guy wanted to present himself as a man of the working class.
“So glad you not in big hurry,” said Lim.
     
“You have something to show me?”
    “Yes.” Lim’s voice was suddenly low and conspiratorial, his expression almost a leer. “You come with me now?” Ostentatiously, he held the gate of the railing open and waved Blake through it. Blake followed him to the back of the office and into a low dark passageway. He caught glimpses of small, dim rooms on either side, crowded with men and women bent over machine tools.
    A slow ride in a big freight elevator brought them out into a huge service bay, its floor and walls carved from ancient ice. The excavation of the bay wasn’t finished; there was a hole in a sunken corner of the floor as big as a storm drain, to carry off the melt as ice was carved away.
    In the middle of the bay, inadequately lit by overhead sodium units, a spidery flatbed trailer supported a big load, securely tied down and wrapped in blue canvas. “There it is,” Lim said to Blake, not bothering to move from where he was standing by the elevator.
    Two middle-aged women bundled thickly into insulated overalls looked up from the engine of a surface crawler; most of the machine was in pieces, scattered over the ice. “One of the rectifiers in that thing is still intermittent, Luke,” said one of the women in Cantonese. “Supply is supposed to send a rebuild over this afternoon.”
“How long can this one run?” Lim asked her.
     
“An hour or two. Then it overheats.”
     
“Tell Supply to forget it,” Lim said.
     
“If your customer wants to take delivery . . .”
     
“Ignore the foreigner, go back to work,” Lim said, his breath steaming in the orange light.
    Blake went to the flatbed and released the tie-down catches. He yanked at the canvas, patiently circling the rig until he had all the cloth piled on the floor. The machinery thus revealed was a cylinder compounded of metal alloy rings, girdled by a universal mount and carried on cleated treads; its business end consisted of two offset wheels of wide, flat titanium teeth, each cutting edge glistening with a thin film of diamond.
An ice mole—but despite its impressive size, it was a mere miniature of the one Blake had seen pictured on the office wall.
    Blake jumped lightly onto the flatbed. He pulled a tiny black torch from his hip pocket and switched on its brilliant white light; from his shirt pocket he took magnifying gog-gles and slipped them on. For several minutes he crawled over the machine, opening every access port, inspecting cir-cuits and control boards. He checked bearing alignments and looked for excessive wear. He pulled panels off and studied the windings and connections of the big motors.
Finally he jumped down and walked back to Lim. “Noth-ing visibly broken. But it’s as old as I am, seen a lot of use. Maybe thirty years.”
“For the price you want to pay, surplus is what you get.”
     
“Where’s the power supply?”
     
“You pay extra for that.”
     
“When somebody tells me ‘like new,’ Mr. Lim, I don’t think they mean thirty years old.