by Homer Hickam
Crater showed Bad Haircut how to build up a good tent with the scraper, then showed the shuttle drivers how to properly scoop and load the dust. He showed the scragline pickers how to use a shovel and a hook pick, then walked up to the solar tower and showed the operator how to find the sun and burn out the heel-3. Soon, he was exhausted from all the showing he’d done.
Bad Haircut drove up and announced a problem with the scraper blade. Sure enough, there was a big rock lodged in between the frame and the blade. Crater was a bit surprised.
He’d looked over the scrape that morning and had not seen a rock that big. Still, Bad Haircut had managed to find one.
“Take it out,” Crater told one of the scragline pickers who had wandered over.
“I don’t know how,” he said.
Crater grabbed a pry bar and climbed onto the scraper to dislodge the big rock. Bad Haircut chose that moment to make an announcement. “I have asked our leaders to come visit us, and here they come. It will be good for them to see us work.”
Crater popped the rock loose, then picked it up and heaved it off the scraper. “Well, if you want them to see you work, you’d best actually do some.”
Bad Haircut got back on his scraper as Hit Your Face and King Wise Beyond Belief came walking up. “What idiocy is this, boy?” the king growled at Crater. “Why did you insist we come outside to look at the scrape? It is just dust and rocks. Why should I waste my time out here when I could be thinking?”
“I didn’t insist on anything,” Crater answered.
“But we received an urgent message from you,” Hit Your Face said. He stopped talking when he noticed the scraper, driven by Bad Haircut, had turned in his and the king’s direction and was coming fast with its blade raised. The pair started to run but they didn’t run far. Bad Haircut smashed them with the scraper blade, then ran over them. Three times.
Crater was shocked and sickened. He was also wondering if he was going to be next. “Are you the new king?” he asked Bad Haircut after the scraper came trundling back. He figured it wouldn’t hurt to ingratiate himself with the murderer, especially since he doubted he could outrun the scraper.
Bad Haircut grimaced from his driver’s perch. “I suppose I am. But what shall I do with you?”
“Let me go, of course,” Crater said. “You don’t need me anymore.”
“But you are a witness,” Bad Haircut said.
Crater pointed at the other Umlap men who were staring in their direction. “There are many witnesses.”
“One is my partner. Eats Many Turnips, the shuttle driver.
He and I will kill the others later.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because we can then sell Baikal to General Nero, who has been trying to buy it and the scrape. That’s what King Wise Beyond Belief was going to do. The difference is we won’t have to share the money with anybody. Perhaps I will also kill Eats Many Turnips. I shall think on it.”
“Those are evil ideas, Bad Haircut.”
“It is but life, Crater Trueblood, although I fear your living is at an end.”
Bad Haircut pulled the lever to raise the scraper blade so as to kill Crater, but as he did, the fuel cells within suddenly exploded in a gush of fire and smoke. Bad Haircut was knocked off his seat and thrown into the dust, whereupon the scraper blade fell on top of him. Crater knelt beside Bad Haircut and discovered he was still breathing, though it didn’t look like for long. “What happened?” Crater asked.
The new king laughed, his helmet fogging as the suit’s ventilation system failed. “I bet your gillie did it.” Then, after a few gurgles, which may have been chuckles, he died, and the fog in his helmet faded away.
Crater stood up and looked at the other Umlaps who stared back at him, then walked toward the Baikal entry hatch. Crater trudged to the maintenance shed, opened the airlock door, and climbed into the fastbug’s seat. The gillie was there waiting for him and crawled up on his shoulder. Crater drove into the dust and kept going, leaving Baikal and the Umlaps behind.
As he neared the dustway, Crater said to the gillie, “Did you make the fuel cells explode?”
Yes. I stopped the stirrers through the scraper puter. Heat buildup.
Only a matter of time.
“How did you know Bad Haircut’s plan?”
Tapped into vidcams, do4us, and puter systems. Could see, hear, and read everything.
“You’re not supposed to do anything unless I tell you to do it.”
Gillie helps you.
“But only when I ask for help.”
Gillie helps Colonel too. You must catch Cycler on time.
The gillie’s response caught Crater by surprise. “How do you know about that?”
Gillie pays attention to all Moontown systems.
Crater said, “You are a bad gillie.”
The gillie looked sad, although it could look no way at all.
“Let’s catch the convoy,” Crater said, then turned onto the dustway and pressed the hammer down.
:::
NINETEEN
The convoy would stop for a rest at Aristillus Crater, and that was where Crater hoped to catch it. If not there, the next place might be at the Bessell way station in the great empty Mare Serenitatis—the Sea of Serenity— which was mostly Russian territory. Crater couldn’t imagine driving that far alone. He was more than a little afraid the giant crowhopper might catch him out there too.
He worried over the fuel cell status, then asked the gillie, “Can we make Aristillus?”
Yes, if the fuel cell retains its charge.
“Well, I knew that,” Crater replied.
Tired, the gillie replied.
Crater supposed this was an apology. “I didn’t know you were so fragile,” he admonished.
Gillie only flesh and blood.
“I didn’t know you had any blood.”
It’s a metaphor. My tissue must be occasionally restored.
Crater drove on until he felt fatigue seeping into his bones.
His tissue had to be occasionally restored too. He pulled over, put up the solar panel, and leaned back for a nap. “Keep track of my suit pressure,” he told the gillie, which responded with a simple chirp. Crater supposed it really was tired if that’s all it could do.
When Crater awoke, he climbed out of the fastbug to stretch his legs. He slung the rifle on his shoulder, chose a direction, and walked for a while, then picked a small crater and sat on its lip and contemplated the view, which was a handsome brown plain with some nearby rolling hills.
In the distance he saw some mountains that he presumed were the Caucuses, named after a mountain range on Earth.
He looked around for the Earth and found it high overhead and thought it would be ironic if he could see the Earthly Caucuses that were in western Russia. But all he could see were the Americas, and they were mostly hidden beneath clouds.
Crater tried to imagine what it would be like to live beneath a white shroud. He tried but it was beyond his imagination.
Then he spotted something glittering in the sun. He walked toward it and found an ancient robotic lander. Long ago, people on Earth had sent robots to the moon, and this was one of them. Fascinated, Crater walked around it. It had crashed, that much was clear, as it was a crumpled mess. Its spherical fuel tanks were split, its dish antenna was bent, and everything else was twisted aluminum and steel. Its solar panels were also shattered, their shards glittering in the sun.
Crater spotted a metal plate lying in the dust. There was a symbol engraved on it that he recognized, the hammer and sickle of ancient Russia when it was part of something called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The letters
CCCP were also on the plate, the Cyrillic letters that stood for USSR.
Crater again looked up at the Earth. All the countries there had changed since the smashed robot had flown, but the physics of spaceflight had not changed at all. It still took a lot of energy to move things from the Earth to the moon.
Crater found himself admiring the people in those extinct countries who’d sent such machines to the moon, but he also felt sorry for the ones who’d sent along this particular robot.
From his reading of the old USSR, those scientists and engineers might have been shipped off to Siberia which, in those days, was a terrible place. It was still no place to take a vacation, or so Crater had heard.
Crater began to think about time. Time was a peculiar thing and no one had a real grasp on it. Crater had a fair understanding of quantum physics. Albert Einstein, the physicist who had first explained the relationship between time and space, said the only reason time existed was so everything didn’t happen at once. During a sermon, the Moontown preacher had once quoted a little piece of Scripture from Ecclesiastes: He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
Crater sat companionably with the old robot, thinking about time, until he decided it was time for him to go. He was confident he could catch up with the convoy, but not if he kept taking detours.
As he walked back, retracing his path, he came across a set of tracks he hadn’t noticed before that crossed his own.
He studied them and concluded he’d never seen such strange tracks. Each was the shape of a U and made deep, gouging marks in the dust. “Gillie, what made those tracks?” he asked.
Unknown, the gillie said.
Crater was astonished that he’d stumped the gillie. Maybe, he thought, he’d asked the question wrong. He considered a better question, but never got the chance to ask it because that was when the creature that had made the tracks appeared. It was the strangest thing Crater had ever seen: a monster with the head of a dragon, wild eyes and flaring nostrils, and four stout legs that had heavy, thick feet if such strangely shaped things could be called feet at all. The awful creature advanced on Crater, shaking its terrible head, each heavy step producing an angry spurt of dust and leaving behind the strange U-shaped tracks.
:::
TWENTY
Looking back on it, Crater would wonder why he hadn’t used the rifle on the monster. Maybe it was for the same reason he hadn’t been able to shoot the crowhopper. He was soft, that’s what Captain Teller had said, and Crater supposed he was right.
When the monster came for him, Crater took off. He ran through a field of craters, leaping over the smaller ones, stumbling across the bigger ones, weaving back and forth where he could. But the thing was too powerful and too fast. It came up behind him, then alongside, bumping its thick shoulder into his, a shoulder that seemed dense as mooncrete and crackling with energy. Crater fell hard into the dust. He scrambled to his feet, started to run again, but then stopped because the creature was standing in his path.
It appeared to be studying him as if to decide what part of Crater to eat first. Crater took a step to the right and the monster matched him with a sidestep in that direction. Crater took a step to the left and it matched his movement again. Since it appeared to be content for the moment, not quite ready to race up and crush the life out of him with its pile-driver feet, Crater was about to ask the gillie what the monster was when the gillie answered on its own.
Gillie believes it is the Earthian animal known as a horse.
Crater, being well educated by Q-Bess and the denizens of the Dust Palace, knew very well what a horse was and what one looked like, and this wasn’t it. Jockey Jill, a diminutive but intense woman, had even taught him about horses in some detail. Looking closer, however, he saw that the creature could indeed be a horse except it was wearing some sort of suit and a helmet. But what was a horse doing on the moon in such a rig?
Crater simply could not accept it, even though the evidence was standing in front of him.
The gillie said, Let it approach you.
“How do you know about horses?”
Gillie listens to Jockey Jill.
Crater waited and, sure enough, the horse took a step toward him, stopped, then took another. It kept raising its head, as if to sniff the air, but of course there was no air except what was in its helmet.
Finally, the great head pushed within arm’s reach of Crater.
Touch its nose.
Crater touched the front of the horse’s helmet. He didn’t know if the horse was male or female but he said, “Good boy.
That’s a good boy.”
The gillie had apparently searched for the horse’s comm channel and found it as the horse made a peculiar nickering sound that Crater had never heard or imagined that any animal could make. “Is that sound normal?” he asked, worrying now that the horse might be sick.
Normal for this species.
Crater noticed something protruding from the thick, armored material on the horse’s neck and was startled to see it was a flechette. It had struck at an angle so had been captured by the armor. There was another flechette, Crater could see now, on its flank, similarly captured by the armor. Crater plucked the one from the neck cover, then pulled out the one from the flank. The one from the flank had blood on it, and the horse shuddered when he pulled it free. The flechette had penetrated into the horse, but its suit still hadn’t leaked.
“You have a biolastic suit, don’t you?” Crater asked. Crater inspected the flank wound and saw no blood leaking out. To repair the sheath that quickly, Crater supposed the biolastic material on the horse was of a superior type.
Then Crater saw a vidpin attached to the armor. He pushed it and read its message.
PEGASUS
Born Stallion Aug. 14, 2116
STEEL PRIZE STABLES
Madison, Alabama
Warhorse: Alabama Irregulars
Silver Moon Medal with four Red Bud Clusters
Eight Campaign Medals including
Battle of Nashville
Battle of Western Kentucky
Battle of Atlanta
Corporate owner: Deep Space Suits, Inc.
Manager: Major Ellis Justice, late of the Ala. Irregs.
“Pegasus.” Crater tried the name on and concluded it was a good one for this big horse, even though it had no wings.
The horse looked back along its track. Nickering softly, it started walking away, and, curious, Crater followed it. The horse walked along the path it had made and kept walking with Crater behind, his rifle at the ready. The crowhoppers that had shot the horse might be nearby. The horse’s owner had to be nearby too, and Crater wondered if it might be a lunatic who was so much a real lunatic that he had brought a horse from Earth, built it a suit, and kept it. In that case, he would have to be a very wealthy lunatic.
The horse was walking faster than Crater could keep up.
It looked back once, then stopped. Crater walked up next to it and inspected the suit it was wearing. Built into it, unless Crater was mistaking its purpose, was what he thought was called a saddle. Horses had been used by humans for centuries for transportation. He’d seen the old vidpix of American cowboys riding them. With these images in mind, and knowing he could not keep up with the horse, Crater climbed upon the lip of a small crater and stuck his leg over the horse’s back, then slipped into its saddle while tucking his rifle beneath elastic straps sewn to the fabric, apparently for such utility.
The fabric over the armor automatically curled around Crater’s boots. The horse took a few steps forward, then looked over its shoulder again and waited patiently until Crater saw a button on the saddle. He pushed it, and two straps were unreeled from the nose of the horse’s helmet. Crater reached over the horse’s neck and took the straps in his hands. There was a snap buckle to join them together, which Crater did, creating what he recalled were called reins. “So I can steer you, right?” he asked the horse, which pondered him with one of its big brown eyes, then turned and began, without warning, to run.
And how it ran!
Crater hung on and it was glorious. Pegasus ran through the crater field and then began to stretch its legs, soaring with ev
ery step in great bounds. Ten yards, twenty, fifty, and more!
Crater reckoned Pegasus was going faster than even his fastbug could go. The dust below became a blur but Crater was not afraid. He loved the sensation of being aboard a beast that ran with such fluid grace. The gillie whooped and yodeled as if it were a cowboy from an old western movie. This made Crater laugh, and he whooped and yodeled himself.
The horse ran on, leaping over great craters, up a small hill, launching itself and soaring so high, it was almost as if it were flying. Pegasus, the flying horse in Greek mythology, brought thunder and lightning from Olympus, and everywhere Pegasus’s hoof struck the earth, water was supposed to have sprung forth. Crater wished that might also be true on the moon, and maybe it was true because this was truly a miraculous creature. “Fly on, Pegasus!” Crater cried with joy and abandon. He had never, in the entire history of his life, felt such freedom as on the back of the great horse as it galloped and flew.
Crater saw the dustway and a big truck parked on it.
He pulled gently back on the reins, and Pegasus slowed and stopped. Crater got off and led the horse into some rocks for cover. He wanted to study the truck before going any closer.
The truck was a van of some type, designed perhaps to carry Pegasus. Crater activated the zoom setting on his helmet binoculars. His heart sinking, he saw two crowhoppers and their spiderwalkers. He also saw a man lying in the dust, apparently the driver of the truck. He was spread-eagled, his hands and feet tied to stakes driven into the regolith. Crater saw the man’s bearded face was twisted in pain. Crater also saw a line of tracks leading off the dustway and realized they were hoof marks. A ramp from the big truck in the back was where Pegasus had come down and apparently gotten away from the crowhoppers.
Crater yelped involuntarily when the crowhopper shot the man tied down.