Signal Shattered

The Earth was dead.

It balanced on the horizon, waning three-quarters full, an angry molten ball. Plumes of volcanic hydrogen sulfide streaked across the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer.

Jack missed the oceans and blue sky.

But the moon was home now, with its craters and black rock. His home and the home of the four other people he had saved.

This lunar landscape had looked better down on the Earth. Up close, it was harsh sunlight and deep shadows ... and too silent. The only colors were the false infrared scarlets and pinks reflected on the faceplate of Jack's helmet. The only sound the whir of his vacuum suit's oxygen recycler.

Velcroed to the thigh pad of Jack's vacuum suit was a black-chrome ball the size of a grapefruit. He ripped it off and examined the reflected stars upon its surface. He should have dropped the thing — hammered it into a million pieces. It was the cause of all this trouble.

No. That wasn't right. He was just as much to blame for the eleven billion murders.

It had started a month ago when he deciphered a signal in cosmic noise. Contained within the static were instructions to build a faster-than-light transceiver. Jack contacted an alien who claimed to be from the Canopus star system. The alien called himself Wheeler.

Wheeler had wanted to trade technologies ... and Jack had been happy to oblige.

Jack first obtained an enzyme that streamlined DNA. It made humans smarter and healthier. With his friends Isabel Mirabeau and Zero al Qaseem, Jack used the enzyme to build an international biomedical corporation. They all got very rich.

Wheeler then gave Jack a black-chromed sphere, a teleportationdevice known as the gateway. Jack ran his gloved hand over the mirrored ball, brushing off the lunar dust.

There were surprises, though, to Wheeler's new technologies.

The enzyme strengthened a person's dominant personality trait. For Isabel, her keen sense of business was heightened to Machiavellian extremes. Zero's abstract, artistic viewpoint was stretched to eccentric extremes.

And Jack's mind?

He gazed at his reflection in the gateway's surface — a smear of eyes and nose and mouth. He wasn't sure what the enzyme was doing to him. His thinking, however, was as jumbled as an unfinished jigsaw puzzle.

There were unforeseen side effects to the gateway as well.

It absorbed the spinning motion of planets to power its teleportations. American and Chinese military forces used their gateways in a world war that lasted a single day. The rotation of the Earth slowed, and tectonic shifts nearly destroyed what was left of the world.

The last surprise, however, was the biggest: Wheeler. His dirty business practices were notorious throughout the galaxy. He needed a fresh voice to broker his deals.

Blackmailed by Wheeler, Jack contacted another civilization and located their home world. Wheeler plundered their technologies, then committed genocide to cover his tracks.

When Wheeler demanded Jack find a second alien species, Jack refused . . . so Wheeler silenced the Earth to protect his operation. He destroyed the planet, the lunar observatory, and the Martian colonies. Eleven erased because of Jack's moral stand.

Isabel and Zero teleported to locations unknown.

Jack fled to his secret installation under the lunar North Pole. Now, twenty-four hours later, oxygen, water, and food were running low.

All in all, it was a lousy deal.

Jack blinked, and stared past his mirror image in the sys gateway. He connected his thoughts to its operating system. Virtual red and blue arrows extruded tangentially off its surface.

He pointed the red vector at himself. The blue arrow he stretched to the horizon.

From the lunar North Pole, Jack took a single step — eighteen hundred kilometers — and teleported to the Michelson Observatory on the far side of the moon.

He stood in four centimeters of silver dust; curls and wisps swirled around his boots. Before him the slope of Mach crater rose thirty meters. For an instant, Jack felt like he was still on top of the moon ... and here. In both locations for an instant.

Jack's breath caught in his throat. It wasn't the sudden shift in position that threw him-but the bodies: seven people in vacuum suits were sprawled in the dirt.

They must be from the observatory, outside when Wheeler arrived yesterday. There was no IR differential from them. Dead cold.

Jack had not seen the consequences of his actions face-to-face. Every time he looked up at the Earth, though, he imagined a blasted landscape of corpses that must look like this ... only multiplied a billion times over.

The nearest figure lay facedown. Jack knelt, turned it over, and saw a woman's features inside the semireflective helmet. Her eyes were wide open, watching Jack. He pulled back and caught his own reflection in her faceplate. Depending on how he focused, he saw her features, or his, or a dozen images of both their mirrored faces.

Jack should have said a prayer. But what good or his, that do? If there was a God, He would have never let this happen. He would have never let Jack get away unpunished.

Jack couldn't stand the dead woman's unblinking stare, so he sprinkled dust over her faceplate. He'd come back later and bury her.

He stood and noticed tracks around the body besides his: clear bootprints in the talc-fine powder. They had a diamond pattern different from his sawtooth imprint or the dead engineers' contoured treads.

Some impressions in this lunar dirt were over a century old. Armstrong, Aldrin, all the heroes and scientists that followed, no one ever tidied up after those guys. Now the moon was a mess of tracks and treads.

These prints, however, were crisp. All others had been blurred by recent shock waves. So whoever had made them had done so after Wheeler had come and gone.

Another survivor?

It wasn't necessarily good news. Jack loosened his Hautger SK semiautomatic in its holster. He followed the tracks up the crater's ridge. Seventy paces — then they abruptly vanished...