Have Space Suit—Will Travel

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “Get in it,” Fats ordered. “Quit fiddlin’.”

  “All right,” I answered almost cheerfully. Then I hesitated. “Say—I haven’t any air.”

  “Take another look,” said Fats. I looked. Charged oxy-helium bottles were on the backpack. “Although,” he continued, “if we didn’t have orders from him, I wouldn’t give you a whiff of Limburger. You made us for two bottles—and a rock hammer—and a line that cost four ninety-five, earthside. Sometime,” he stated without rancor, “I’m gonna take it out of your hide.”

  “Shaddap,” said Skinny. “Get going.”

  I spread Oscar open, wriggled in, clipped on the blood-color reader, and zipped the gaskets. Then I stood up, clamped my helmet, and felt better just to be inside. “Tight?”

  (“Tight!” Oscar agreed.)

  “We’re a long way from home.”

  (“But we got air! Chin up, pal.”)

  Which reminded me to check the chin valve. Every—thing was working. My knife was gone and so were the hammer and line, but those were incidentals. We were tight.

  I followed Skinny out with Fats behind me. We passed Wormface in the corridor—or a wormface—but while I shuddered, I had Oscar around me and felt that he couldn’t get at me. Another creature joined us in the air lock and I had to look twice to realize that it was a worm-face in a space suit. The material was smooth and did not bulge the way ours did. It looked like a dead tree trunk with bare branches and heavy roots, but the supreme improvement was its “helmet”—a glassy smooth dome. One-way glass, I suppose; I couldn’t see in. Cased that way, a wormface was grotesquely ridiculous rather than terrifying. But I stood no closer than I had to.

  Pressure was dropping and I was busy wasting air to keep from swelling up. It reminded me of what I wanted most to know: what had happened to Peewee and the Mother Thing. So I keyed my radio and announced: “Radio check. Alfa, Bravo, Coca—”

  “Shaddap that nonsense. We want you, we’ll tell you.”

  The outer door opened and I had my first view of Pluto.

  I don’t know what I expected. Pluto is so far out that they can’t get decent photographs even at Luna Observatory. I had read articles in the Scientific American and seen pictures in LIFE, bonestelled to look like photographs, and remembered that it was approaching its summer—if “summer” is the word for warm enough to melt air. I recalled that because they had announced that Pluto was showing an atmosphere as it got closer to the Sun.

  But I had never been much interested in Pluto—too few facts and too much speculation, too far away and not desirable real estate. By comparison the Moon was a choice residential suburb. Professor Tombaugh (the one the station was named for) was working on a giant electronic telescope to photograph it, under a Guggenheim grant, but he had a special interest; he discovered Pluto years before I was born.

  The first thing I noticed as the door was opening was click…click…click—and a fourth click, in my helmet, as Oscar’s heating units all cut in.

  The Sun was in front of me—I didn’t realize what it was at first; it looked no bigger than Venus or Jupiter does from Earth (although much brighter). With no disc you could be sure of, it looked like an electric arc.

  Fats jabbed me in the ribs. “Snap out of your hop.”

  A drawbridge joined the door to an elevated roadway that led into the side of a mountain about two hundred yards away. The road was supported on spidery legs two or three feet high up to ten or twelve, depending on the lay of the land. The ground was covered with snow, glaringly white even under that pinpoint Sun. Where the stilts were longest, about halfway, the viaduct crossed a brook.

  What sort of “water” was that? Methane? What was the “snow”? Solid ammonia? I didn’t have tables to tell me what was solid, what was liquid, and what was gas at whatever hellish cold Pluto enjoyed in the “summer.” All I knew was that it got so cold in its winter that it didn’t have any gas or liquid—just vacuum, like the Moon.

  I was glad to hurry. A wind blew from our left and was not only freezing that side of me in spite of Oscar’s best efforts, it made the footing hazardous—I decided it would be far safer to do that forced march on the Moon again than to fall into that “snow.” Would a man struggle before he shattered himself and his suit, or would he die as he hit?

  Adding to hazard of wind and no guard rail was traffic, space-suited wormfaces. They moved at twice our speed and shared the road the way a dog does a bone. Even Skinny resorted to fancy footwork and I had three narrow squeaks.

  The way continued into a tunnel; ten feet inside a panel snapped out of the way as we got near it. Twenty feet beyond was another; it did the same and closed behind us. There were about two dozen panels, each behaving like fast-acting gate valves and the pressure was a little higher after each. I couldn’t see what operated them although it was light in the tunnel from glowing ceilings. Finally we passed through a heavy-duty air lock, but the pressure was already taken care of and its doors stood open. It led into a large room.

  Wormface was inside. The Wormface, I think, because he spoke in English: “Come!” I heard it through my helmet. But I couldn’t be sure it was he as there were others around and I would have less trouble telling wart hogs apart.

  Wormface hurried away. He was not wearing a space suit and I was relieved when he turned because I could no longer see his squirming mouth; but it was only a slight improvement as it brought into sight his rear-view eye.

  We were hard put to keep up. He led us down a corridor, to the right through another open double set of doors, and finally stopped suddenly just short of a hole in the floor about like a sewer manhole. “Undress it!” he commanded.

  Fats and Skinny had their helmets open, so I knew it was safe, in one way. But in every other way I wanted to stay inside Oscar—as long as Wormface was around.

  Fats unclamped my helmet. “Out of that skin, bub. Snap it up!” Skinny loosened my belt and they quickly had the suit off even though I hindered.

  Wormface waited. As soon as I was out of Oscar he pointed at the hole. “Down!”

  I gulped. That hole looked as deep as a well and less inviting.

  “Down,” he repeated. “Now.”

  “Do it, bub,” Fats advised. “Jump or be pushed. Get down that hole before he gets annoyed.”

  I tried to run.

  Wormface was around me and chivvying me back before I was well started. I slammed on the brakes and backed up—glanced behind just in time to turn a fall into a clumsy jump.

  It was a long way to the bottom. Landing did not hurt the way it would have on Earth, but I turned an ankle. That didn’t matter; I wasn’t going anywhere; the hole in the ceiling was the only exit.

  My cell was about twenty feet square. It was, I suppose, carved out of solid rock, although there was no way to tell as the walls and floor and ceiling were the same elephant hide used in the ship. A lighting panel covered half the ceiling and I could have read if I’d had anything to read. The only other detail was a jet of water that splashed out of a hole in the wall, landed in a depression the size of a washtub, and departed for parts unknown.

  The place was warm, which was well as there was nothing resembling bed or bedclothes. I had already concluded that I might be here quite a while and was wondering about eating and sleeping.

  I decided I was tired of this nonsense. I had been minding my own business, out back of my own house. Everything else was Wormface’s fault! I sat down on the floor and thought about slow ways to kill him.

  I finally gave up that foolishness and wondered about Peewee and the Mother Thing. Were they here? Or were they dead somewhere between the mountains and Tombaugh Station? Thinking it over glumly, I decided that poor little Peewee was best off if she had never wakened from that second coma. I wasn’t sure about the Mother Thing because I didn’t know enough about her—but in Peewee’s case I was sure.

  Well, there was a certain appropriateness to the fix I was in; a knight-errant usually lands in a dungeon at
some point. But by rights, the maiden fair ought to be imprisoned in a tower in the same castle. Sorry, Peewee; as a knight-errant, I’m a good soda jerk. Or jerk. “His strength is as the strength of ten because his heart is pure.”

  It wasn’t funny.

  I got tired of punishing myself and looked to see what time it was—not that it mattered. But a prisoner is traditionally expected to scratch marks on the wall, tallying the days he’s been in, so I thought I might as well start. My watch was on my wrist but not running and I couldn’t start it. Maybe eight gees was too much for it, even though it was supposed to be shockproof, waterproof, magnetism-proof, and immune to un-American influences.

  After a while I lay down and went to sleep. I was awakened by a clatter.

  It was a ration can hitting the floor and the fall hadn’t helped it, but the key was on it and I got it open—corned beef hash and very good, too. I used the empty can to drink from—the water might be poisoned, but did I have a choice?—and then washed the can so that it wouldn’t smell.

  The water was warm. I took a bath.

  I doubt if many American citizens during the past twenty years have ever needed a bath as much as I did. Then I washed my clothes. My shirt, shorts, and socks were wash-and-wear synthetics; my slacks were denim and took longer to dry, but I didn’t mind; I just wished that I had one of the two hundred bars of Skyway Soap that were home on the floor of my closet. If I had known I was coming to Pluto, I would have brought one.

  Washing clothes caused me to take inventory. I had a handkerchief, sixty-seven cents in change, a dollar bill so sweat-soaked and worn that it was hard to make out Washington’s picture, a mechanical pencil stamped “Jay’s Drive-in—the thickest malts in town!”—a canard; I make the thickest—and a grocery list I should have taken care of for Mother but hadn’t because of that silly air conditioner in Charton’s Drugstore. It wasn’t as bedraggled as the dollar bill because it had been in my shirt pocket.

  I lined up my assets and looked at them. They did not look like a collection that could be reworked into a miracle weapon with which I would blast my way out, steal a ship, teach myself to pilot it, and return triumphantly to warn the President and save the country. I rearranged them and they still didn’t.

  I was correct. They weren’t.

  I woke up from a terrible nightmare, remembered where I was, and wished I were back in the nightmare. I lay there feeling sorry for myself and presently tears started welling out of my eyes while my chin trembled. I had never been badgered “not to be a crybaby”; Dad says there is nothing wrong with tears; it’s just that they are socially not acceptable—he says that in some cultures weeping is a social grace. But in Horace Mann Grammar School being a crybaby was no asset; I gave it up years ago. Besides, it’s exhausting and gets you nowhere. I shut off the rain and took stock.

  My action list ran like this:

  1. Escape from this cell.

  2. Find Oscar, suit up.

  3. Go outdoors, steal a ship, head home—if I could figure out how to gun it.

  4. Figure out a weapon or stratagem to fight off the wormfaces or keep them busy while I sneaked out and grabbed a ship. Nothing to it. Any superman capable of teleportation and other assorted psionic tricks could do it. Just be sure the plan is foolproof and that your insurance is paid up.

  5. Crash priority: make sure, before bidding farewell to the romantic shores of exotic Pluto and its friendly colorful natives, that neither Peewee nor the Mother Thing is here—if they are, take them along—because, contrary to some opinions, it is better to be a dead hero than a live louse. Dying is messy and inconvenient but even a louse dies someday no matter what he will do to stay alive and he is forever having to explain his choice. The gummed-up spell that I had had at the hero business had shown that it was undesirable work but the alternative was still less attractive.

  The fact that Peewee knew how to gun those ships, or that the Mother Thing could coach me, did not figure. I can’t prove that, but I know.

  Footnote: after I learned to run one of their ships, could I do so at eight gravities? That may simply call for arch supports for a wormface but I knew what eight gees did to me. Automatic pilot? If so, would it have directions on it, in English? (Don’t be silly, Clifford!)

  Subordinate footnote: how long would it take to get home at one gravity? The rest of the century? Or just long enough to starve to death?

  6. Occupational therapy for the lulls when I went stale on the problems. This was important in order to avoid coming apart at the seams. O. Henry wrote stories in prison, St. Paul turned out his strongest epistles incarcerated in Rome, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in jail—next time I would bring a typewriter and paper. This time I could work out magic squares and invent chess problems. Anything was better than feeling sorry for myself. Lions put up with zoos and wasn’t I smarter than a lion? Some, anyhow?

  And so to work—One: how to get out of this hole?

  I came up with a straight-forward answer: there wasn’t any way. The cell was twenty feet on a side with a ceiling twelve feet high; the walls were as smooth as a baby’s cheek and as impervious as a bill collector. The other features were the hole in the ceiling, which ran about six feet still higher, the stream of water and its catch basin, and a glowing area in the ceiling. For tools I had the stuff previously listed (a few ounces of nothing much, nothing sharp, nor explosive, nor corrosive), my clothes, and an empty tin can.

  I tested how high I could jump. Even a substitute guard needs springs in his legs—I touched the ceiling. That meant a gravity around one-half gee—I hadn’t been able to guess, as I had spent an endless time under one-sixth gravity followed by a few eons at eight gees; my reflexes had been mistreated.

  But, although I could touch the ceiling, I could neither walk on it nor levitate. I could get that high, but there was nothing a mouse could cling to.

  Well, I could rip my clothes and braid a rope. Was there anything near the hole on which to catch it? All I could recall was smooth floor. But suppose it did catch? What next? Paddle around in my skin until Wormface spotted me and herded me back down, this time with no clothes? I decided to postpone the rope trick until I worked out that next step which would confound Wormface and his tribe.

  I sighed and looked around. All that was left was that jet of water and the floor basin that caught it.

  There is a story about two frogs trapped in a crock of cream. One sees how hopeless it is, gives up and drowns. The other is too stupid to know he’s licked; he keeps on paddling. In a few hours he has churned so much butter that it forms an island, on which he floats, cool and comfortable, until the milkmaid comes and chucks him out.

  That water spilled in and ran out. Suppose it didn’t run out?

  I explored the bottom of the catch basin. The drain was large by our standards, but I thought I could plug it. Could I stay afloat while the room filled up, filled the hole above, and pushed me out the spout? Well, I could find out, I had a can.

  The can looked like a pint and a “pint’s a pound the world ’round” and a cubic foot of water weighs (on Earth) a little over sixty pounds. But I had to be sure. My feet are eleven inches long; they’ve been that size since I was ten—I took a lot of ribbing until I grew up to them. I marked eleven inches on the floor with two pennies. It turns out that a dollar bill is two and a half inches wide and quarter is a smidgeon under an inch. Shortly I knew the dimensions of room and can pretty accurately.

  I held the can under the stream, letting it fill and dumping it fast, while I ticked off cans of water on my left hand and counted seconds. Eventually I calculated how long it would take to fill the room. I didn’t like the answer, so I did it over.

  It would take fourteen hours to fill the room and the hole above, plus an hour to allow for crude methods. Could I stay afloat that long?

  You’re darn tootin’ I could!—if I had to. And I had to. There isn’t any limit to how long a man can float if he doesn’t panic.

  I balled my slac
ks and stuffed them in the drain. I almost lost them, so I wrapped them around the can and used the bundle as a cork. It stayed put and I used the rest of my clothes to caulk it. Then I waited, feeling cocky. Maybe the flood would create the diversion I needed for the rest of the caper. Slowly the basin filled.

  The water got about an inch below floor level and stopped.

  A pressure switch, I suppose. I should have known that creatures who could build eight-gee, constant-boost ships would design plumbing to “fail-safe.” I wish we could.

  I recovered my clothes, all but one sock, and spread them to dry. I hoped the sock would foul a pump or something but I doubted it; they were good engineers.

  I never really believed that story about the frogs.

  Another can was tossed down—roast beef and soggy potatoes. It was filling but I began to long for peaches. The can was stenciled “Available for subsidized resale on Luna” which made it possible that Skinny and Fatty had come by this food honestly. I wondered how they liked sharing their supplies? No doubt they did so only because Wormface had twisted their arms. Which made me wonder why Wormface wanted me alive? I was in favor of it but couldn’t see why he was. I decided to call each can a “day” and let the empties be my calendar.

  Which reminded me that I had not worked out how long it would take to get home on a one-gee boost, if it turned out that I could not arrange automatic piloting at eight gees. I was stymied on getting out of the cell, I hadn’t even nibbled at what I would do if I did get out (correction: when I got out), but I could work ballistics.

  I didn’t need books. I’ve met people, even in this day and age, who can’t tell a star from a planet and who think of astronomical distances simply as “big.” They remind me of those primitives who have just four numbers: one, two, three, and “many.” But any tenderfoot Scout knows the basic facts and a fellow bitten by the space bug (such as myself) usually knows a number of figures.