Helium3 - 1 Crater

by Homer Hickam

  Crater headed for the clinic, finding Justice in a ward staffed by nurses and doctors in starched whites who were efficiently moving about carrying instruments, bedpans, and medicines. Justice was in a bed with starched white sheets, his head resting on a starched white pillow. Everything inside the clinic tube was so white it hurt Crater’s eyes, but he appreciated the obvious attempt to make everything look as antiseptic as he supposed it actually was. Certainly, the air had an antiseptic perfume.

  Justice had tubes running in and out of him and was asleep when Crater sat down alongside him. Justice opened his eyes and said, “The lookouts on the south perimeter are ready, Major.”

  He blinked a few times, then turned his head and smiled in recognition. “Crater. Good to see you, though I just saw you several hours ago. Since then, I’ve been pinched and prodded and shot full of medicinal bacteria the doctors tell me will soon absorb my pneumonia. Getting some other microbes— perhaps through that yellow tube, I’m not certain—that will soon have me feeling like a sixteen-year-old again. For that I can scarcely wait, as there are several pretty nurses I’d like to chase around the clinic.”

  “It’s good to see you’re being cared for so well, sir,” Crater said. “I’ll go see Pegasus to make certain he is as well.”

  “You may do that, but I’ve stayed at Aristillus many a day and the boys in the maintenance shed love that old horse as much as I do. He’ll be fine. I’m more concerned about the motorbarn.”

  “Captain Teller is seeing to its care, sir,” Crater said.

  “So all is well, all is well.”

  “Not quite,” Crater said and explained that they were all stuck for a while.

  Crater was anxious to see to the gillie. Justice sensed Crater’s anxiety and waved him along. “Well, get on and let me sleep. If things open up, don’t leave without me and the

  Peg, promise? We’d like to get on down to Armstrong City and stay there until this crowhopper business gets settled.”

  “How will that be done?” Crater asked.

  “I guarantee you Colonel Medaris will see to it,” Justice said. “If this is war, he’ll be in his element. He’ll pull the other heel-3 towns together, get them organized. They won’t like it, but they’ll have no choice if these assassins have a larger purpose more than raiding way stations and convoys. Maybe that package you’re going after has something to do with it.

  The Colonel was always a good one for anticipating what the enemy might do.”

  After talking to the head nurse and making sure she understood that Justice was to be given every medical aid possible, and then having his head handed to him by the nurse who let him know, in no uncertain terms, that every patient she and her nurses looked after got the same, superb care, he left the clinic and walked through the tubes until he reached the shopping tubes. He wandered around until he found a shop that sold puters and readers, called Clara’s Puters & Stuff.

  The woman at the counter noticed the gillie as soon as Crater walked inside. “My goodness, haven’t seen one of those for a very long while! It’s illegal, you know.”

  “It knows that but it’s sick,” Crater said. “Can you help it?”

  Then he told her about its encounter with biolastic cellular structure.

  “Oh, that Deep Space biolastic bacteria can be a nasty bunch,” she clucked. She delicately withdrew the gillie from its holster and laid it down on a cloth on a workbench, then probed it with her finger. Crater watched it squirm and it made him anxious. “Maybe you shouldn’t do that,” he said.

  The woman smiled. “I worked with gillies on Earth.

  Don’t worry. I just wanted to see how much energy it has left.

  Precious little, I fear. It’s very sick but here’s what I can do. I can put it in the detox bath I use for polluted bio-diodes. It will either work or kill it.”

  Crater felt he had no choice. “Go ahead,” he said.

  She wrapped the gillie in the cloth, then gave Crater a receipt for it. “I’m Clara, by the way. Come back in an hour.

  We’ll know if the bath is going to work by then or not.”

  Crater went looking for Petro, finding him in a side tube that housed a cafeteria unlike any he’d ever seen. The sign over the entrance announced Olde USA Coffee House. It had big shiny metal cylinders that dispensed something hot into plaston cups. There was a pictogram of some drinks that Crater gradually deduced were types of coffee. Until that very moment in the entire history of his life, Crater had never imagined there was more than one type of coffee or, for that matter, why there needed to be more than one. It didn’t make sense. Coffee was to help wake you up and get you going on a scrape and that was about all, as far as he knew. But here were people lined up to get coffee in all kinds of flavors and retreating to small round tables where they sat, sipping the hot drink, and generally doing nothing except staring at their readers. It was all very odd. Petro, sitting with Irish over a deck of cards, waved Crater over.

  “Captain Teller briefed us about your adventures,” Petro said. “Very well done, but you look kind of glum. What’s up?”

  Crater told him about the gillie being sick. “How did you get it back?” Petro asked.

  Crater gave Petro a condensed version of everything that had happened since he’d gone off with the Umlaps. Petro looked at Crater with astonishment, then whistled. “Well, Crater, I’d say you’ve done a few crazy things. I admire that.”

  “What kind of cafeteria is this?” Crater asked, wanting to get the topic off himself.

  “It’s not a cafeteria at all. It’s a coffee shop like they used to have in the old USA. See the sign and all those kinds of coffee? Pick one out. You can use your convoy number to pay for anything but electronic doodads, clothes, shoes, that kind of thing. Food’s covered. Lodging, too, if you can’t sleep in your truck.”

  “We’re gonna be stuck here forever,” Irish said. “And when the long shadow arrives with us still sleeping in our trucks, if a heater fails, we wake up a big, pink slab of ice.”

  “You see?” Petro said. “This whole convoy could fall apart any minute.”

  Crater waited out an hour with gloomy Petro and Irish, feeling more than a little gloomy himself, then looked at the time and said, “Got to go check on the gillie.” He ran to the shop, and Clara waved him inside. “The bath did some good, I think,” she said and unwrapped the gillie. It immediately got up and crawled into its holster. It still looked limp. “Let me keep it overnight,” Clara said. “I’ll give it a fresh bath every few hours. No extra charge. I’ve gotten attached to the little thing.”

  Crater thanked Clara, used the convoy number to pay her, and walked back to the main corridor. He tossed up a prayer to the Big Miner on behalf of the gillie, even though it was just a biological machine.

  Crater next decided to seek out Maria. He wanted to talk to her, to see if this surprising turn-around on how she felt about him was real or a dream. Along the way, he encountered a group of women and children who were wearing red and black robes that draped their bodies from their necks to their ankles. After a second look, Crater realized they were Umlaps. The facial features of the women and children were softer than the men’s harsh angularities and they seemed a bit taller than their men, but Umlaps they were for certain. The children appeared to all be girls, none more than eight years old by Crater’s estimate, huddled within the knot of women and looking out with wide, frightened eyes.

  The Umlap women had big hands, short legs, no ears, and long arms, physical characteristics expected of Umlaps, but Crater was struck by how normal the children looked, if normal was the right word to use. Their limbs were the proper ratios, and their ears, the ones he could see, seemed to be just like any other attached to a human child.

  The Umlaps were peering into various shops, then consulting with each other before wandering on to the next shop, buying nothing. Finally, the women sat down on some mooncrete benches in the center of the tube, the children sitting in their laps or hanging
on to their shoulders, and just stared at people as they went past. Crater wondered what they were doing at Aristillus, then supposed that was as far as they had gotten after running away from Baikal.

  Petro came strolling along and stopped beside Crater.

  “What pathetic creatures,” he said. “I meant to tell you they were here, seeing as how you did away with their king. As a potential king myself, I think perhaps you went a bit too far.”

  “I didn’t do away with their king. Bad Haircut did that.

  Why are they here?”

  “The truck they drove from Baikal broke down about a mile away. They abandoned it and walked here.”

  “They look scared.”

  “They should be,” a woman shopkeeper said, stepping outside her store. “From what I’ve heard, they’ve had a lifetime of being beaten and generally abused by their men. Now they’re getting another fresh dose of abuse. Mayor Trakk has slapped a fine on them for every day they’re here. He expects their men to pay for their return.”

  Petro said to the shopkeeper, “My brother killed the Umlap king, so I imagine they won’t be paying anything.”

  “I did no such thing,” Crater said. “I tried to help the king.”

  “And where is he now?”

  “Dead.”

  “I rest my case.”

  The shopkeeper clucked her tongue, shook her head at the strange outlanders who’d washed up in her hometown, and went back inside her shop.

  Crater watched the Umlap women and children and wished there was something he could do to ease their burden. After a while, he realized some of the women were begging from passersby, all of whom were hurrying past without even glancing their way. “They’re hungry,” Crater said, alarmed.

  Petro shrugged. “Just ignore them, Crater. They’re not your problem.”

  The way Crater saw it, they were as much his problem as anyone else’s. He walked down the corridor until he reached a shop with a sign that said Meal In A Box. He checked with its manager, then went back to where the Umlaps were sitting.

  He didn’t quite know what to say, but one of the women gave him a hard look. “Look, girls,” she said in Umlap, “this one likes to stare at our misery.”

  “We should grab him for ransom,” another of the women said. “Perhaps someone would feed us if we let him go.”

  “My name is Crater,” Crater said in Umlap to the first woman who had spoken.

  She was taller than the rest, her robe slightly cleaner, and she wore a cap on her head that was black with red piping like Wise Beyond Belief’s cap. “How do you know Umlap?” she demanded.

  “There are Umlap miners in Moontown, my home. They taught me and I am a quick study. Also, I was recently in Baikal.”

  “Were you?” Her eyes narrowed. “We escaped from those evil men there who chained us to our beds at night and whipped us when it suited them, which was most of the time.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that,” Crater said. He hesitated, then said, “King Wise Beyond Belief and his assistant, Hit Your Face, are dead. So is Bad Haircut.”

  This news caused nearly all the women to frown, which meant, of course, they were happy. But then, perhaps upon reflection, they began to smile, and tears leaked slowly down their faces, for even the backward Umlap expressions couldn’t change that physical reaction. The children, sensing something terrible had happened, started to wail.

  “Why did you tell them that?” the woman with the black and red cap scolded. “Those men, as awful as they were, were Umlaps.”

  “It was the truth,” Crater said.

  “Do you think it so virtuous to tell someone the truth even though it will ruin what little happiness they have?”

  Crater thought that over, then said, “But you would have found out eventually.”

  “But not so soon. Therefore, you are responsible for their present unhappiness.” She eyed him until her anger seemed to subside. “My name is Queen No Nonsense Talker. My husband, Thinking Great Thoughts, was the king before Wise Beyond Belief killed him and took over. Thinking Great Thoughts was not a good king either. He allowed many evil things to happen.”

  Crater pointed at the shop. “If you and the others are hungry, go there and get what you need. I gave them my convoy number.”

  The queen pondered Crater. “And what do you get out of this sudden charity?”

  “Nothing. Do you want the food?”

  “Yes, of course. We’ve been eating out of garbage cans.”

  “Then please be my guest.”

  The Umlap queen grimaced and stood up, saying, “Ladies, this kind stranger, for reasons I’m not certain, is offering us and our daughters food. If we go over to that shop and get what we want, he says he’s willing to pay for it.”

  Actually, it was the Colonel paying through his convoy number, but Crater couldn’t imagine he would mind, considering his generous spirit. The women and children headed for the shop. Crater followed them, reminded the proprietor of the convoy number, and watched while the Umlaps were handed meals in little paper boxes whereupon they retreated to the benches to eat.

  Petro, who’d been watching, came over. “The Colonel is going to love paying for this,” he said, chuckling.

  “Leave me alone,” Crater said.

  Petro shrugged. “I’ve got a card game in the casino anyway.” He walked away.

  Crater sat with the women and their daughters and enjoyed watching them eat. All the while, he considered their situation, and being a sequential thinker, he gradually resolved in his mind what they should do. When they were finished eating, the women tidied up the area, threw all the boxes in the trash receptacles, and the queen came over and sat in front of him, her hands on her knees, and regarded him carefully and deeply.

  “Are you looking for a bride?” she asked. “I’m thirty-eight but still healthy. I have had my one girl child so would not burden you with raising another since she is already grown.”

  “What do you mean you’ve had your one girl child?”

  “Umlap women can have but one child, always daughters.

  After that, we become sterile.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I don’t know. Something in the way we were engineered.

  But look there. See that young woman?”

  Crater looked and saw a young Umlap woman looking back at him with hopeful eyes.

  “That is my daughter. She is a normal human being, and it may be she can have more than one daughter. She might be more suitable to you for a wife than me.”

  “I don’t need a wife,” Crater said, then processed the other thing the Umlap queen had said. “What do you mean your daughter’s a normal human being?”

  The queen glanced lovingly at her daughter, then said,

  “The men who made us did so by modifying our DNA while we were still in egg form. It changed us to be as we are but did not change our progeny. Perhaps you are familiar with the dinochicken that these doctors invented before us, the dinosaur made from a chicken egg? Two of the dinochickens mated, an egg was laid, but out did not come a dinochicken but a normal chicken. We are the same except, of course, we aren’t dinochickens. We are humans.”

  “Yet you can only have one daughter.”

  “Yes,” the queen mused. “That part we do not understand.

  I don’t think the men who made us understood it either. There is so much more to us than DNA, or protein, or nerve endings, or anything else. There is something that is beyond matter.”

  “You mean your spirit,” Crater said. “Or maybe your soul.”

  “Yes,” she said and, though her expression didn’t change, Crater could tell she was crying inside. Perhaps all the Umlaps were crying inside, including their poor men who were selfdestructive, because they could not find their souls within the bodies and minds constructed for them by other men. All Crater could conclude was he was glad the laboratory that had made the Umlaps had been burned down.

  “You seem lost in thought,” th
e queen said.

  Crater focused on the situation at hand. “I’ve been thinking over your problem. Why don’t you travel to Moontown?

  The Colonel has always been happy to hire Umlaps.”

  “It is where we actually meant to go,” the queen admitted, “but we weren’t sure of the way and ended up here.”

  “You should have turned left at the dustway, not right,”

  Crater said.

  “The men never allowed us to study a map,” the queen answered, brushing her hair out of her eyes. She, like the other Umlap women, had thick, black, lustrous hair.

  Crater looked around at the truck drivers listlessly wandering the shopping corridor or picking around the shops.

  “Heel-3 trucks have an extra seat. You could ride on them to Moontown or whatever heel-3 town suits you.”

  “And what payment would these drivers take?”

  She had him there. The drivers were, after all, independent contractors. “They would want to get paid,” he conceded.

  That was when Captain Teller showed up. He pulled Crater away from the women. “Please tell me you didn’t feed them with our convoy number.”

  “I fed them with our convoy number,” Crater said.

  Teller’s face, already pinched, pinched some more. “You are insubordinate, Crater, the worst scout I’ve ever had. If it wasn’t for your mechanical ability, I would have fired you long ago.

  The Colonel will have both our hides for this expenditure.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Crater said, though he knew he didn’t sound very convincing.

  “Come to think of it,” Teller said, “the solution is simple. It will come out of your pay.”

  Pay was something Crater had never asked about, was uncertain would occur, and had no clue to the amount. “That’s fine, Captain,” he said.

  “Why did you do it?” Teller demanded. “I am a bit of a student of human folly and think I could get a college degree just by studying you.”

  “I felt sorry for these poor women. Besides, I told them the Colonel would hire them.”