by Homer Hickam
“Dust Palace register,” he said, and the puter called up the denizens of that place. As each flipped by, he became depressed.
Never had there been a group of more rough, gruff, and potentially murderous men, all now supposedly reformed but still quite capable of general mayhem. With this lot, how was he supposed to find the honest and simple man the Colonel required? “They don’t exist here in Moontown,” the sheriff moaned to himself. “Innocent men don’t come here—they’re all on the run for a reason.”
The sheriff asked the puter to keep looking, but all it found were felons, gunrunners, and university presidents, sly and wily, and not an innocent among any of them.
“No, no, and no again,” the sheriff kept saying as each name and bio flitted by. After a while, the sheriff gave up and leaned back in his squeaky chair, the squawk causing the deputy outside to scrunch up his face in sonic pain and the prisoner in the closet to rattle his chains. There was, the sheriff confessed to himself, no such man in Moontown as the Colonel had requested him to find. That meant the sheriff, as the Moontown miners on the scrapes oft said of themselves, was in some deep scrag.
:::
THREE
When the Apollo astronauts, the first Earthly visitors to the moon, brought back a ton or so of rock samples, it didn’t take long before it was discovered moon dust was saturated with a product of the solar wind, the isotope known as Helium-3. A hundred years later, fusion reactors, using the same principles that powered the sun, were perfected, and Helium-3 proved to be the perfect fuel. The technology had come just in time for a wounded, war-weary, and overpopulated Earth, desperate for clean, pure energy and willing to pay handsomely for it.
Since an atmosphere and a magnetic field kept the solar wind away from Earth, the moon was the best and nearest place to get Helium-3. Entrepreneurs and risk-takers began to climb onto rockets to fly across cislunar space to the gray sphere, there to explore for not only the magical isotope but scarce industrial metals such as titanium and platinum. This was all done in a place where there was no law, the moon wilder than even the old American Wild West. There was not only no central government, there was no government at all, just independent mining companies prospecting in the most extreme environment any people had ever known. Many of the early pioneers died on the way to the moon, many more after they got there, sometimes in pitched battles over claims, but the tough men and women who survived gradually prospered.
While most of the early Helium-3 towns were built close to the original Apollo landing sites, Moontown was located in the far northern reaches of the Alpine Valley of the moon. The valley was a major feature of the gray planetoid, an eighteen-mile-wide trench nearly three hundred miles long. Some lunar geologists thought it was a lava-flooded rift from an ancient volcano. Others said an asteroid must have struck at a shallow angle and smashed out a channel. The people of Moontown didn’t much care how their valley had been formed. All they cared about was the Helium-3 in its dust. On both sides of the valley were corrugated cliffs with slumped steps that held the richest saturations yet known of the wondrous isotope.
Mining on the scrapes of Moontown was a sequential, orderly process: blast down the dust from the cliff faces of the valley, push the dust with a big machine called a scraper to pile it into mounds called tents, load the tents onto shuttles, run the shuttles to conveyor belts called scraglines, and offload. From there, the belt carried the dust to the shakers and solar collectors where the isotope—the miners called it heel-3—was shaken off and secondarily boiled off, the dust left behind called scrag. After that, it was a matter of venting the Helium-3 into an initial holding chamber, then compressing it into lunasteel canisters. Trucks were used to transport the canisters across the moon in convoys to Armstrong City where it was taken up the lunar elevator and moved to the industrial Cyclers for transfer to Earth.
Though it might be orderly and well understood, heel-3 mining was still a dangerous enterprise. Suit failure meant the horrific results of exposure to a vacuum—boiling blood, skin turned purple from bursting capillaries, eyes reduced to mushy blots, lungs starved and collapsed. When the sun rose, it stayed up for two weeks and the temperatures in which the miners worked was greater than the boiling temperature of water. In the two-week darkness that followed—miners called it the long shadow—a cold far below the Earth’s polar regions froze the scrapes. Failure of the suits to maintain a moderate temperature caused many of the early miners to either freeze to death or die from heatstroke before they could crawl to safety.
Moon dust, formed by ancient volcanoes and the sledgehammer pounding of meteors and comets over billions of years, was a complex structure of interlocking glass shards and fragments that could rip lung tissue and grind down the toughest steel. Rocks and pebbles also got hung up in the gears, levers, and axles of the scrapers, loaders, shuttles, and belts, turning them into immobile hulks. Dust was the prize but it was also the problem.
When Crater and Petro reached the beltway, even Crater couldn’t hold back a groan at what they found. The previous shift had left them a lot of work. Before the first shuttle arrived, he and Petro had to shovel hard and fast to put loose dust back on the belt and dig out small pebbles in the rollers. Belt stoppage was common when the pickers didn’t do their job of keeping the rollers clean. “That third shift is worthless,” Petro crabbed as he popped out a big rock with a lunasteel pry bar.
Although Crater agreed, he didn’t say anything. What good did griping do, after all? If it made you happy, Petro should have been the happiest person on the moon.
Before long, the first shuttle loaded with dust arrived, and within an hour a lot of things on the shift turned scrag. A scraper blew a wheel bearing, a fuel cell on a shuttle kept shorting out, and the conveyor belt motor broke down, forcing Crater and Petro to use fastbugs with trailers to haul the dust up to the sundancers while the belt was being repaired. Then the blue banger was called away to help open up a new scrape to the south. “Call me if you need me,” Mrs. Hook said to each of the leaders of her various teams and then drove away. Crater watched her go and felt a bit uneasy. He didn’t like it when the blue banger was off the scrape. What if something happened on the scragline and they needed her to make a decision? It might be a decision he would have to make, and he didn’t trust himself to make the right one.
Lunch was a welcome fifteen minutes of being allowed to sit down and suck out a protein-rich soup through a straw stuck in a helmet port. After the soup, which he barely tasted, Crater leaned back against a big rock and admired the steep dun-colored cliffs soaring above the brown, gray, and white rock fragments and dust that flowed like a river down the valley.
Petro rested his back against a boulder. As he did, the Earth began to peek out from the horizon. “Mother Earth,” he said in a wistful voice, and added, “puffy white clouds, blue seas, and green forests. Glorious.”
Crater watched the bulbous blue and white orb making its appearance, so colorful compared to his drab little planet. By strict definition, of course, the moon wasn’t a planet, but the people who lived there tended to call it that, good as anybody else’s. And although Crater marveled at the world, he did not envy the people on it. He had heard too many stories of war, death, destruction, cruelty, and starvation. Still, despite his opinion, he felt a nearly genetic longing to someday walk along its sandy beaches next to its great blue seas and lie upon its cool, green pastures, or walk amongst the trees of its great forests. He had heard there were living creatures there that were different from humans, yet caught up in the same web of life and time, creatures such as whales and cats and dogs and giraffes and insects and who knew what else? He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to actually touch such a creature. He wondered if it would feel anything like touching the gillie, which didn’t like to be touched. It had scurried away when he’d pressed his fingers on it once or twice. It hadn’t felt that bad. Just sort of soft and dry.
It was an hour after lunch when the gillie crawled
out of its holster. It said, Roller alert.
“What do you mean?” Crater asked.
Look and see, it said.
Crater looked and saw nothing, just the explosive devils about to blow up a detpak. When they blew it, down came a cascade of dust. Although there was no sound—sound waves can’t travel in a vacuum—Crater thought the explosion was normal.
Roller alert, the gillie said again.
Petro drove up beside Crater. “What are you looking at?”
“The gillie thinks there’s a roller up there.”
Petro turned to look. As more rocks and dust fell away, both he and Crater could see that the devils had indeed blown loose a roller. It was slowly emerging from the steep cliff, gravity teasing it out, grain by grain. Suddenly, the roller fell free of the dust and rolled down the face of the cliff. Beneath it was a scraper, manned by an operator who called himself Thumper Tom. Crater and Petro began to bleat out warnings, but Thumper Tom was oblivious to their transmissions, probably because he was playing music in his helmet, an illegal but pervasive activity on the scrapes. When the roller hit a step, it bounded into the vacuum, then fell, clipped Tom’s scraper, turned it over, then kept rolling on a downward slope, gathering velocity and momentum.
“Scrag!” Petro yelped. “It’s coming right at us!”
Confirmed, the gillie said, its skin turning as red as a rocket’s glare.
Crater and Petro gauged the path of the massive boulder and swerved out of its way, then watched as the roller kept rolling until it reached a rise in the terrain that stopped it. Petro peered at it, then said, “Crater, I hope you take this as a sign because that’s what it is. We’ve got to get off these scrapes before we get killed.”
Crater wasn’t listening to Petro but instead to the calls going out to the blue banger from the various team leads, telling her about the unfortunate roller. There was no reply. Mrs. Hook had apparently moved into a radio shadow the helmet communicators couldn’t penetrate. “Gillie, call the blue banger,” Crater said and the gillie, being vastly more powerful, quickly made the connection whereupon Crater explained to her what had happened.
“The scraper was knocked over. We can’t see Thumper Tom. He could be beneath it,” was his conclusion.
“How about the rest of the crew?”
“They’re okay.”
“Tell everybody to stay put. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
The gillie said, Thumper Tom is under the scraper. Thumper Tom heart rate 160. Blood pressure 180 over 100.
Crater was relieved to hear the scraper driver was alive but then the gillie added, Leak, right boot caused by biolastic cellular dust damage. Suit failure will occur in approximately twelve minutes.
It was not Crater’s responsibility to do anything more than what he had done, inform the team leaders of the blue banger’s instructions and also about Thumper Tom’s perilous situation. The replies generally fell into the category of passive acceptance that Thumper Tom was as good as dead. “No way I’m going to crawl under that scraper,” the other scraper driver said.
“Poor old Tom,” Petro said. “He owed me money too.”
“We have to save him!” Crater blurted, surprised by his own audacity.
Petro thought perhaps he had misheard his tubemate.
“What are you talking about? We don’t have to do anything but wait for the blue banger.”
“But, Petro, don’t you understand? By the time she gets here with help, Tom’s going to be dead as a hammer!”
“So? We’re just scragline pickers. It’s not our job to rescue anybody.”
“But . . . but . . . I know how to rescue him,” Crater said. And even as he said it, he saw in his mind a force diagram, the vectors pointing in the necessary directions, and the machines and devices needed to make the diagram come true. There was, however, a major problem that Crater couldn’t get his mind around. “Oh no,” he groaned. “I know how to save Tom but we can’t do it.”
Intrigued, Petro asked, “Why not?”
“Well, we’d have to drive the shuttles and operate their winches and we don’t have permits.”
This struck Petro as a profoundly Crater thing to say, which made him laugh. “Permits? You’re worried about permits? We go out there and lift that scraper up, it’ll probably fall on top of us. That’s what you should be worrying about!”
The gillie, which apparently couldn’t decide what color to be so was just staying a uniform gray, piped up. Approximately eleven minutes until suit failure due to dust intrusion. Alert. Another roller.
Crater processed the information provided by the gillie. Eleven minutes before the biolastic material in Thumper Tom’s right boot failed. Although biolastic cells were capable of repairing small breaches, moon dust in the tear could disrupt the pattern, causing the rest of the sheath to unravel. As for the other roller the gillie had just reported, Crater studied the slope above the overturned scraper until he saw it. A cascade of dust and small rocks was falling around it as it slowly emerged, and it was at least four times bigger than the first one.
Petro also saw the new danger. “Crater, maybe it’s best to just let old Thumper Tom go.”
Crater wasn’t good at making decisions—he was terrible, in fact—but he knew if Thumper Tom was to have a chance, he needed to make one now. He got off his fastbug and ran to one of the shuttles. After hesitating, Petro ran to the other one, yelling, “What’s your plan?”
Crater explained the required force vectors as he and Petro cranked the shuttles up and drove them onto the slope behind the overturned scraper. Once in position, they put their winches in neutral, got off and pulled the cables to the scraper, hooked the cables onto its lifting pintles, then ran back to their respective shuttles and wound in the cables, tilting the scraper up and off Thumper Tom. Only his helmet could be seen protruding from a big pile of dust.
Petro allowed a sigh. “I guess I’ll dig him out.” He climbed off the shuttle with a shovel in his hand. “Just keep your eye on that roller. Sing out if it moves an inch. Do you hear me, Crater? An inch!”
“I hear you, brother,” Crater said, his mind swirling with worries, which for some reason made him add, “Don’t worry.”
“Yeah, right,” Petro retorted as he loped to the scraper.
Crater looked across the valley and saw two green suits at the perimeter of the scrape. Someone had called the paramedics but they didn’t seem to be in any hurry to help. Likely they had spotted that big new roller too. In the distance, he saw a spray of dust. It was probably the blue banger’s fastbug but she still had a way to go before arrival. It was then the gillie announced: Roller out.
“Roller out, Petro!” Crater yelled, transmitted instantly by the gillie.
Down the massive roller came. It slammed into the scraper, the impact snapping the cables. Crater ducked as one of them came flying back at him like a giant whip. When he looked up, he saw that Petro had managed to pull Thumper Tom into the clear without being killed. The roller, however, careened on.
Roller will impact western maintenance shed in approximately twenty-one seconds, the gillie said. Breach probable.
The roller was trundling mercilessly across the scrape as if aimed at the western maintenance shed, a big mooncrete hangar that sat partially above the surface on the west side of Moontown. A breach in the shed meant the unsuited mechanics inside would die horrible deaths, their bodies swollen, their insides turned to pink mush.
Crater’s instinct took over. He wound the remnant of the cable onto the shuttle winch while simultaneously pushing the accelerator pedal to the floor. He set a course at an angle to intercept the roller, catching vacuum as his shuttle leapt across a narrow, collapsed lava tube. Empty shuttles were fast.
Crater had an angle on the roller so he caught up to it, did a hard steer in front, and jumped off just as it slammed into the shuttle. When Crater looked up from the dust, he saw the roller ricocheting off in a harmless direction. He also saw the shuttle
was smashed. The maintenance shed was untouched.
Suit integrity confirmed, the gillie said, making an automatic report of Crater’s biolastic material.
“What about Thumper Tom and Petro?”
Petro nominal. Thumper Tom fifteen seconds to suit failure.
Crater cringed. “Petro, where are you?” he called, fearful of the answer.
“At the entry hatch,” Petro replied, his tone so calm it sounded as if he were about to yawn. “Paramedics are with me.
Thumper Tom’s going to be okay.”
“You saved him!” Crater cried, then let his breath out for what seemed like the first time in hours.
We saved him,” Petro answered. “And you saved the “orangutans and the entire maintenance shed. We’re heroes, Crater!”
“No, we’re not,” Crater answered miserably. “We’re in trouble. We drove the shuttles without permits.”
Petro laughed and said, “If you could sell simple, brother, you’d be a rich man.”
Crater didn’t know how to respond to that, so he didn’t.
In any case, it was about then that the blue banger arrived.
“What happened?” she demanded as the other miners climbed up the slope to where Crater was standing. They gawked at the shuttle, which lay smashed in the dust, and the gigantic roller that had finally stopped a mile away. When no team leader seemed to be able to find his or her voice, Montana Bill told the blue banger how the devils had accidentally blown loose not one but two rollers, how one of them had rolled over Thumper Tom’s scraper, how Crater and Petro had taken the shuttles and pulled the scraper off Tom, how Petro had dragged the scraper driver clear, and then how Crater had knocked aside the big roller by sacrificing the shuttle, concluding with, “That dang roller would have surely killed every worker in the maintenance shed, Mrs. Hook, and that’s a fact.”