by Homer Hickam
The convoy plunged on into the darkness, Plinius Village miles behind, trillions of stars crowding the sky, the dustway a pale white track through the gray dust of the Ocean of Tranquility. Crater, far ahead on the scout, trundled down the dustway with Arago Crater passing to his right. On its rim blinked the lights of a communications tower.
When the flechettes hit, Crater at first thought it was rocks being thrown up by the wheels of his fastbug. But then a shot burst through the dust shield, just missing him. He wheeled off the dustway, skirted a small crater, then came around again while unholstering his rifle.
He used his helmet starlight scope to look in the direction he thought the flechettes had come and caught sight of a crowhopper dodging through a boulder field. Crater pressed down on the accelerator and chased after him. The crowhopper ran down a small rille and then reappeared on a spiderwalker.
Crater gave chase, but as he did, he saw the flare of two jumpcars landing north of his position. He feared they were attacking the convoy.
Still, he kept chasing the spiderwalker, hoping for a clear shot. When he saw the contraption run down a crack, he took a calculated risk that it would reappear at the other end. He jumped over another crater and cut off the spiderwalker as it came out of the crack, ramming it. The crowhopper was knocked off and Crater, though he tried to avoid it, ran over the creature.
A terrible accident, the gillie said.
“Gillie!” Crater cried with joy at the sudden communication from the little thing. “Status report!”
Sick.
“You sound good, anyway,” Crater said, as he walked over and kicked the leg of the crowhopper. There was no response.
Sick, the gillie said again.
“Stay in your holster. We’ve got a bumpy ride ahead of us.”
Crater drove back to the convoy, swerving through boulder and crater fields. When he reached a small rise, he saw the convoy had circled up. The muzzles of the crowhoppers’ railguns were winking in the darkness, and Crater knew their flechettes had to be beating up the trucks. Winks of light showed that some of the drivers were fighting back with old-fashioned powder guns and a bright flash where Maria was probably shooting back at the attackers with her railgun rifle.
“Gillie!” Crater said, hoping it would wake up. “Can you tell me how many and where the crowhoppers are?”
The gillie crawled to his shoulder. Gillie hears six crowhoppers.
Crater switched on the helmet infrared scanner, saw that it was overwhelmed by the flashes of the rifles, and switched to thermal imaging. He saw the signature of the two jumpcars, their engines still warm. Crater headed there.
He worked his way to a jumpcar, sitting upright on its fins.
He climbed up its ladder, crawled inside, and sat down at its controls. He threw the necessary switches, heard the auxiliary power units rev up, then set it on autopilot to blast off in sixty seconds. He emerged and went to the next jumpcar. A crowhopper spotted him as he climbed aboard and came after him on the ladder, trying to grab his legs. Kicking the thing off, Crater climbed to the cockpit, fired up the engines, and twisted the throttle stick. The jumpcar roared aloft, the crowhopper clinging to the ladder. Somehow it managed to climb inside. Crater saw it and threw the bullet-shaped ship into a steep climb, then looped over into a twist, the crowhopper bouncing off the interior until it was thrown out of the hatch and then disappeared.
Switching to his helmet’s infrared, Crater rolled the jumpcar on its back so he could get a view of the fighting and saw the flashes from the crowhopper railguns had stopped.
Another scan showed five of them running toward the other jumpcar. They clambered inside just as the timer Crater had set reached zero. The jumpcar blasted off, streaked straight up, then flipped over and plummeted down to crash and burn.
Not trusting his piloting skills enough to land, Crater flipped the jumpcar over and put it on autopilot. The landing still proved to be a hard one since a fin clipped a boulder. The jumpcar teetered, then fell over. Crater jumped through the hatch and ran, the jumpcar exploding behind him.
He walked back to the line of trucks and came up beside
Captain Teller. “I’m back, sir,” Crater said, then briefly described what he’d done.
Teller’s expression said as much as his words. “You’re a brave, courageous lad. I take back everything I ever said about you.”
“You set the example, sir,” Crater said and meant it.
“I thought perhaps they had ambushed you,” Teller said.
“One did. I got him.”
Maria came over and hugged Crater’s neck. “That was amazing. You’re amazing.”
Petro came running up and pumped Crater’s hand. “Well done, brother!”
“Be careful,” Captain Teller said. “There could still be one out there. Oh gosh.”
Crater didn’t understand why Captain Teller had said “Oh, gosh,” but then he understood. A spreading stain of crimson covered Teller’s chest as he began to fall. Maria turned and fired her rifle into the darkness as Crater caught Captain Teller and gently lowered him to the dust.
:::
Part Three
THE CYCLER
:::
TWENTY-NINE
Crater walked out of the dustlock into the most amazing place he’d ever seen, the main corridor of the bustling marketplace of the moon’s largest town. Maria was still dealing with the Armstrong City clerks and inspectors who’d emerged from the airlock to register the convoy, tax the heel-3 canisters aboard, and assist in their further transport. She also had to attend to the handling of Captain Teller’s body, including seeing his family. Crater wanted to see Teller’s family too, but there was an urgent message for him to go to the Medaris Mining company offices and meet a representative sent from the Colonel. In the dustlock, the Armstrong City dusties insisted that he remove his Deep Space BCP suit with the explanation that the biotechnology had not been approved by the city health department. Crater didn’t mind removing it—the sheath was pretty dusty, after all—and the hot water showers afterward felt very good.
He headed for the company office, but before he got there, the sheriff of Moontown appeared out of the crowd, took him by the arm, and turned him around. “We have to be careful, Crater! There may be assassins.”
Crater was surprised to see the sheriff. “How did you get here?”
“Jumpcar,” he said. “The Colonel had a visitor and I hitched a ride.”
That sounded awfully convenient to Crater, but the sheriff seemed sincere. So he let himself be led to a ticket counter that had a sign that said See the Site of Humankind’s First Landing on the Moon. There were photos of the American astronauts Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin for sale along with other souvenirs, including models of the Apollo capsule and the Eagle lander. The sheriff handed over an adequate number of johncredits and the clerk handed back two paper tickets. “Let’s hurry. We don’t want to miss the tram,” the sheriff said.
The sheriff pointed at a dustlock that said Tours to Tranquility Base Landing Site. They went through it, emerging into a pressurized tram filled with tourists. “Welcome,” the tour guide said. “I hope you enjoy your excursion to Tranquility Base.”
The sheriff pointed at two empty seats and he and Crater sat down. The tram pulled out, following a well-used track, while the tour guide announced that only one mile away was the landing site of Apollo 11, the place where humans first walked on an “astronomical body.” Calling the moon an “astronomical body” was something of an insult to Crater, but he didn’t say anything, just looked out the window at the boring view that was mostly devoid of craters or anything else other than a mildly sloping plain of pebbly dust. Before long, the bus arrived at the famous landing site, which was lit up by big spotlights. The tourists immediately started to take pictures.
Crater gazed with some wonder at the truncated base of the landing craft called Eagle. Beside it was the American flag on a staff stuck into the dust. The flag was a
recreation, of course, since the original flag had been knocked down when the upper half of the Eagle had taken off.
The tour guide had already exhausted his spiel on how close Armstrong had come to aborting the mission because of an overworked guidance computer, and how the brave American had landed anyway, completing the promise of the long-dead and little known President Kennedy who had ordered the landing to occur before the Russians could get to it.
The guide was Russian, so he proceeded to tell the tourists that, of course, the Russians had launched the world’s first Earth satellite called Sputnik, and also launched the first person into space, whose name was Yuri Gagarin. He also went on to say that during the civil war, poor Gagarin’s body had gone missing from the Kremlin during an attack by Siberian revolutionaries, but that was neither here nor there.
The tour guide next turned to what had happened to the Apollo 11 site in the years following the landing. He mentioned the outrage in the provinces comprising the old United States of America that had occurred when a Chinese robot on tracks had barged into the site and destroyed many of the footprints while also knocking over some of the experiments left behind. A mission by the Independent States of America, which claimed the Apollo sites since it included among its member states Texas, Florida, and Alabama—where much of the Apollo hardware had been designed and built— studied the site to see if it could be reconstructed. One of its interesting findings was that it wasn’t the Chinese who had destroyed Armstrong’s famous “first step for man, giant leap for mankind” boot print but Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who had inadvertently stepped on it as he climbed off the ladder of the landing craft.
While the tourists clicked their photos, the sheriff said, “I have your ticket for the elevator and the Cycler.”
“I hope whatever is in that package is worth Captain Teller’s life,” Crater said.
The sheriff took a moment, then said, “I guess nothing’s worth that.”
“The crowhoppers were after me. That’s why they attacked our convoy.”
The sheriff looked incredulous. “You shouldn’t take these things so personally. The Colonel has many enemies. There might be any number of reasons why his convoy was attacked.”
“Then why did you mention assassins?”
The sheriff shrugged. “I’m a cautious man.”
“I think maybe you’re also capable of lying when it suits you. What I don’t understand is why the Colonel didn’t send me here by jumpcar in the first place.”
“His is broken and I hitched a ride,” the sheriff reminded him. “Anyway, if you go around questioning why the Colonel does what he does, it won’t be too long before you’re thoroughly confused. I can tell you this much. He’s got Plans A, B, and C. You were Plan B.”
“If I’m Plan B, what were Plan A and Plan C?”
“Plan A was a couple of fellows who’ve already got themselves killed. I guess they were sort of 1A and 2A.”
“I know about them,” Crater said. “How about Plan C?”
“Ah, well, that would actually be Plan 1C and 2C. Plan 1C is me and 2C is another employee in the Armstrong City office. You see, Crater, the Colonel isn’t one to put all his eggs in a single basket, not that you’d know what a real egg looks like. Anyway, you will be happy to learn that the Colonel has decided you are to be the chosen one to ride the Cycler. He is pleased with the reports he’s received about you from poor Captain Teller.”
“Captain Teller said something good about me to the Colonel?”
“He extolled your capabilities every time he called Moon-town. He said you had true grit.”
Crater reflected that it was only at the very end that Teller had praised him to his face. Crater didn’t know whether to be happy or sad. He chose sad.
The sheriff noticed. “You see? Now you’re upset. That’s why it’s not good to know too much when it comes to the schemes of the Medaris family.”
Crater lapsed into a kind of melancholy until he was galvanized by the tour guide. “If you’ll look out the right side,” the man said, “you’ll see the remains of a lander that lost power and crashed about sixteen years ago. It was one of the main reasons the elevator was built.”
“Sheriff,” Crater said, “I think that was the lander my parents were on.” Then he felt the gillie wriggle out of its holster.
It was looking better, although Crater didn’t know why he thought that since it always looked the same, other than an occasional color change.
It is the lander where your father died, it said.
“How do you know?” Crater demanded.
Gillie there.
This shouldn’t have been a surprise, although it was. After all, the gillie was owned by his parents. Crater had never thought about it before. He supposed there was a lot he hadn’t thought about.
The gillie said, Hospital.
“What about the hospital?”
Go. You. Me.
“Oh no you don’t, Crater,” the sheriff said. “The hospital is on the other side of the city. You don’t have time to go over there and, besides that, some assassin might put an elk sticker in your back.”
When the bus returned to the dustlock, Crater got up and joined the tourists clambering back to Armstrong City. Maria was waiting for him and the sheriff came up behind. “Ready to go to the elevator?” she asked.
“I’m going to the hospital,” Crater said.
“Why? You look fine.”
“Something that crazy gillie said,” the sheriff said. He handed Maria the tickets. “Don’t be late.”
Maria looked at Crater, who was determinedly studying a map of the city posted on the wall. She grabbed him by the arm and pushed him into a taxi. “Hospital,” she said, and off they went.
See Nurse Soichi, the gillie said on the way.
When they arrived, Maria paid the taxi driver, and she and Crater descended into the labyrinth of tubes that made up the hospital which, as it turned out, was officially called the Colonel John High Eagle Medaris Hospital and Medical Research Facility. “Grandfather funded this place,” Maria explained.
At the desk, Crater asked for Nurse Soichi. “Third tube, Obstetrics,” the receptionist said and pointed toward a pink stripe that they should follow.
The doctors and nurses in Obstetrics wore crisp, starched whites, and the place looked modern and well organized. At the nurses’ station, Crater asked for Nurse Soichi and was told to wait. “We have an elevator ascension to make,” Maria said.
“Believe me,” the nurse said, “Nurse Soichi will be along shortly. She is the most efficient and punctual person on the ward.”
Sure enough, in a few minutes, a small woman in white arrived with a reader in her hand and a stethoscope draped around her neck. “These two young people asked for you,” the nurse at the station said. Nurse Soichi, identified by the name tag on her uniform, glanced at Crater and Maria, and asked, “How can I help you?”
“I was born here sixteen, almost seventeen years ago,”
Crater said.
She smiled. “My dear, many babies are born here and I have attended most of them.”
“Yes, ma’am, but my parents were in a lander crash. My father was killed. My mother was brought here for me to be born. I was adopted by another couple after she died.”
Hello Nurse Soichi, the gillie said.
The little nurse’s mouth fell open. She placed the reader on the nurses’ station, then took Crater into her arms and held him. “What a beautiful young man you’ve turned into!” she exclaimed. She felt his arms. “Strong too. Your mother would be so proud. What happened to you? Where did you go?”
“Moontown. I became a heel-3 miner. My name is Crater.
Crater Trueblood.”
“Who’s this?” she asked of Maria.
“A friend,” Maria answered.
Nurse Soichi led them into a small room that had some plaston chairs and they sat. After primly smoothing out her skirt, the nurse said, “Your mother was so brave. The
doctors wanted to abort you. It was her only chance to live, they said, but she said you were more important. So you were born. She held you in her arms until she slipped away.”
Nurse Soichi leaned over and touched Crater’s knee. “Your mother said I was to tell you when you grew up how much she and your father loved you, that you were the most important thing to them, and that was why they’d come to the moon.
They wanted you to live in a place where there were no wars and where people had a chance to live free.”
Gillie was there, said the gillie.
Nurse Soichi smiled tenderly at the gillie. “Yes, Gillie, I will tell them. Before she died, your mother told the gillie to always stay with you and to protect you.”
Crater was grateful for the news about his mother and about the gillie. It made the little thing’s attachment to him more understandable.
“Nurse Soichi, who were Crater’s parents?” Maria asked.
“Ah,” she said, “who were they, indeed? Well, your mother didn’t say much, Crater, but there was enough paperwork for me to figure things out. Paul and Juliet Trueblood were inventors, rather famous ones. They invented many things, their most famous being an electro-biological filtering system that converted seawater into fresh, which revolutionized life in some desert countries on Earth.”
“Why wasn’t Crater sent back to Earth to stay with relatives?” Maria asked.
“At that time, dear, there was no elevator and there were no Cyclers. Getting here was a risky thing and very expensive.
Orphans were routinely taken into local families, usually without paperwork. The couple who took Crater seemed very nice. Did you stay with them, Crater?”
“Yes, ma’am, but they got killed on the scrapes. I was taken in by Q-Bess who manages the Dust Palace, such being what we call the bachelor’s tube. I’ve had a good life.”
“I am heartily glad to hear it,” Nurse Soichi said, rising from her chair. She gave Crater a hug. “I have to continue my rounds,” she said, then patted the gillie, which actually seemed to like her touch. It turned a restful blue before lapsing back to gray. “Good old thing. You were brave too.” And off she went, a nurse on her rounds.