The Best of Hal Clement

by Hal Clement

  “Our place is about eight miles away.” Talles seemed amused. Smiling, he added, “We walk, and carry our baggage.”

  His sister-in-law looked at him, stupefied. Rick, too, was startled. The bags weren’t heavy, especially on the Moon, but—

  “There’s no public transportation here. We could probably work out some arrangement for getting the luggage delivered, but it would inconvenience a lot of people.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.” Mrs. Suspee frowned. “I suppose this is a sort of frontier town, in a way.”

  Talles laughed. “Maybe it is, but that’s not why we walk. You’re on the Moon now. You weigh about a sixth of what you did on Earth. You need exercise, plenty of it, or your muscle tone goes down, your circulation falters, your bones start getting soft. A good rule of thumb is ten miles of fast walking every day for each hundred pounds of body mass. If your work doesn’t give you time for that, you get a doctor to prescribe some specific exercises and you do ’em faithfully. All right—traveling!”

  He picked up his sister-in-law’s luggage—a forty-pound-mass bag in each hand—and started off down the same tunnel that had swallowed the Footprints members. Rick took his own, much lighter load, and he and his stepmother followed his uncle.

  The tunnel ran about eight feet wide and ten feet high for some thirty yards. An airtight door about three yards in opened manually rather than by photocell or pushbutton. Talles carefully closed it behind them. A similar barrier graced the farther end of the passage. Once through this, they found themselves in a much broader though not much higher passageway. Well lighted, crowded with people, it was lined on both sides with large windows filled with sales displays. Except for the ceiling it gave the impression of a street in a shopping district.

  “Not so frontier after all,” remarked Evelyn Suspee.

  “We don’t think so,” replied Talles. “But remember the freight charges back to Earth before you stock up on souvenirs.”

  Mrs. Suspee was finding the hike less dull than she had expected. And less tiring than it would have been on her home planet. The trip was long, of course. In spite of the low gravity, one could not walk much faster than on Earth. When Rick tried, his feet spent too much time off the ground and left him with poor control or none; and after a near-collision with another pedestrian, who glared first at him and then at his uncle, the boy was more careful. Talles advised him that there were pedestrian speed limits, quite strictly enforced, in the tunnels; if he wanted to try the leaping “run” cultivated by Moon-dwellers, there were caves devoted to athletics.

  Part of the walk was through residential tunnels, not quite as wide as those in the business districts but interrupted more often by parklike caves where grass, flowers and even bushes grew under the artificial light. Rick noticed that each of the doors along these tunnels was marked by a small lamp; some white, the rest blue except for a very few that were red. He asked his uncle about them.

  “We work around the clock here, Rick. The periods of sunlight don’t match human biological rhythms, and few of us see the sun much anyway. It’s more efficient for facilities to be in use all the time rather than shut down sixteen hours a day while people play and sleep, so we live in shifts. White light over a door means the family is up for the day, though of course they may be out at work or school or what have you. Blue means they’re asleep. Red means the unit isn’t occupied. No matter when you walk the tunnels you’ll find about as many people in them as now. All but the smallest businesses are always open, and the mines, schools, and other productive facilities are always operating.”

  “I’d think if you overslept, you’d have a hard time finding out whether you were late for today’s work or early for tomorrow’s,” remarked Rick. “Looking out the window would tell you nothing. I suppose you use twenty-four-hour clocks, though.”

  “You’ve touched a sore subject,” his uncle replied. “As a matter of fact, we don’t. We still have the A.M. and P.M. distinction. I know it’s silly, but every time the change is proposed in the settlement council it’s defeated. People just don’t like the idea of going to work at half-past seventeen. Of course, the same thing holds true on Earth. And because they want to start work earlier in summer so they can have more recreation time before dark, they make laws changing the clock settings. I admit it doesn’t really matter whether you start your time measurement from local mean apparent midnight or any other moment—but changing the zero point back and forth with the seasons I insist is pretty silly. We’re just as human here, so I don’t suppose we’ll ever graduate to the twenty-four-hour clock.”

  Rick’s aunt was at home when they arrived. She was a taller and quieter woman than Evelyn Suspee. At least she seemed quieter to Rick, but that may have been because his stepmother did not give anyone else much chance to talk. She monopolized the conversation all through the standard guest-arrival routine of settling the visitors in their rooms and feeding them dinner.

  Rick would much rather have listened to his aunt and uncle talk. After all, that was what he was here for, wasn’t it? To learn more about the Moon and the people who dwelled on it?

  He bit thoughtfully into his cutlet of fishmeal artificially flavored and imported from Earth like practically everything else eaten here. Three generations of colonization had seen the steady growth of youth organizations on the Moon devoted to hiking, exploration, technical innovation, and the like. Although autonomous, they were loosely joined into a confederation that set standards and established goals.

  The trend had inspired a resurgence of similar youth clubs on Earth. There the emphasis was on ecology, space science, and—where still available—outdoor living. The FEA—Federated Earth Adolescents—had agreed to send a representative to exchange ideas and knowledges with a typical Lunar group. Largely because he had an uncle on the Moon interested in the youth movement, Rick Suspee had been chosen as the emissary. His stepmother had elected to accompany him, at her own expense. She wanted to see her sister, Edna, after a separation of many years, and to meet her sister’s husband, Jim Talles.

  Rick earnestly hoped he would be up to the responsibilities wished on him by the FEA. He glanced across the table at his husky, curly-haired uncle by marriage. Rick felt sure that the man would help him. Talles was the kind of person who inspires confidence. He had no children of his own, and it was perhaps in compensation for that lack that he devoted himself to the affairs of young people.

  * * *

  About an hour after dessert and coffee, the Footprints members began to arrive. Marie D’Nombu was first by perhaps five minutes, and within another half-hour ten of the group were crowded into the small Talles living cave. Since Aichi Yen was among them, Rick was still a little uneasy about speaking up. Marie quickly took care of that situation. Somehow she managed to take the conversation away from Mrs. Suspee without actually interrupting, then smoothly induced the Earth boy to talk.

  Jim Talles was wearing another of his amused smiles. He knew Marie and her brains. He listened with approval as the girl pulled Rick into the chatter by making remarks about Earth that simply had to be corrected—remarks not really silly but indicating reasonable misunderstandings. The question of going out in the rain, which she had left unsettled back at the lock, was straightened out, and incidentally gave Rick a much better idea of just what “outdoors” meant to these Moon folks. They called it “outside.” He himself described scuba wet-suits as opposed to spacesuits, and even Aichi made a slip in physics there when he remarked that it must be harder to swim in Earth’s heavier gravity. Jim Talles wondered whether this had been done on purpose to make Rick feel better about his mistake at the rocket ladder. If so, Marie must have inspired it; Aichi would never have thought up such a thing by himself.

  Marie herself helped Aichi Yen out of his confusion by getting him to describe his present outdoor work, and this interested even Mrs. Suspee for a while. A physics student, Aichi had worked out what he hoped was an original computer technique for untangling mean
ingful radio signals from noise. He was going to give it a test in about a week, when there was to be an eclipse. He would be picking up signals from Earth and the Sun simultaneously, a mixture of complex natural and even more complex artificial waves, and would then spend several happy weeks with his records in the school computer lab. He had set up his receiving equipment in a small crater quite some distance from town so as to avoid still a third set of interference patterns.

  “We’ll get you out to Aichi’s site when the action starts, Rick,” Talles put in. “I suppose you’re in a hurry to get outside, but if you can wait a few days there’ll be more to see and something really to do. I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen an eclipse of the Sun, and by waiting you can charge two batteries on one line. Besides, there are things I think you’ll want to see inside, like the mine where I work, and it will be handier for me if we take care of that first.”

  “And maybe he can come to the school with some of us,” said Marie. “There are a lot of people there who don’t know as much about Earth as they think they do. Rick can straighten them out. All right, Rick?”

  “Sure. I don’t mind the wait. How long a ride is it out to Aichi’s setup?”

  Talles smiled. “It’s in Picard G, isn’t it, Aichi?”

  “Picard GA, to be exact.”

  “Yes. That’s about thirty miles, as I remember, but you don’t ride. The Footprints really meant it when they picked their name, even if it was two generations ago. You can walk that far, can’t you?”

  “Oh, sure. It’s just that I didn’t think I’d be allowed to hike outside. I don’t have any experience with spacesuits, and I figured there’d be all sorts of regulations about who could go out in them.”

  “There are,” admitted his uncle. “You’ll be competent, though, before you go out. That’s my responsibility,” he added hastily as he saw the worried look on the faces of two or three of his young guests. “I probably won’t be free to go, and you kids will be expected to keep an eye on Rick just as you would on any newcomer short on experience. But I won’t let him go unless I’m convinced he has the basic lessons thoroughly learned. So relax.” Aichi Yen and the others did relax, visibly. They had known for some days that the guest from Earth would accompany them outside, but they had been quite uneasy over who would be held responsible if he managed to kill himself. Jim Talles had been letting them stew in that pan out of curiosity, to see whether they would try to duck the load. He was, after all, one of their teachers even if he didn’t belong to the school department—he was the official adult adviser of the formally incorporated youth union known as the First Footprints.

  “Great!” Rick enthused. “A badge for spacesuit competence will really mean something back on Earth. Which one is it?” For the first time he began examining in detail the pictorial and geometrical decorations of the others.

  “There isn’t any for suits,” Aichi said quietly. “I don’t think there’s anyone on the Moon who isn’t competent about them—at any rate, no one over five or six years old.”

  Marie took the edge off the remark. “I guess it’s sort of like umbrellas or raincoats on Earth,” she said. “Or maybe you can think of something that’s an even better example—maybe swimming. I suppose everyone can do that even if they don’t all have scuba ratings.”

  “That’s not quite right.” Rick followed the change of subject gratefully. “A lot of people can’t swim, and there are six different water competence levels before you get to scuba, and a lot of others in watercraft management—” He held forth uninhibitedly until Marie exercised her tact once more.

  All in all, it was a good evening. These Moon people seemed a pretty good bunch, Rick decided before he got to sleep.

  The next few days confirmed that opinion. Rick spent two of them at the Wilsonburg school, where class routine was altered to make him the center of attention. He spent a day with his uncle in the mine that was the main reason for Wilsonburg’s existence. He passed a solid twelve hours with Jim Talles becoming familiar with spacesuits, until he could don one without hesitation or error, check it our properly, conduct emergency operations at reflex speed, and explain how electrical accumulators and Daly oxygen cartridges worked.

  Talles had planned a further program to keep Rick occupied up to the time of the hike to Aichi’s site. But like so many plans, this one ran into trouble. An accident occurred in the mine.

  Not a catastrophe. No one was killed. No one was even seriously endangered—except Rick. And he was nowhere near the place.

  His danger arose from the fact that his uncle went on full-time emergency duty, and the schedule in the Talles household collapsed. His aunt had to work as usual but Rick had never gotten her hours straight. His mother continued her irregular round of visits and shopping trips. His young friends had their own rather tight schedules to keep. So Rick was left pretty much on his own.

  As a result, he got his sleeping hours out of step with the planned starting time for the hike. And his mother, in one of her rare moments of firmness, insisted that if he didn’t get a good night’s rest before going, he wouldn’t go. She was unhappy about the trip anyway. The idea of her only child walking miles out on the Moon’s surface with only a few layers of fabric between him and vacuum frightened her even more than the bounce ride.

  Rick was perfectly willing to sleep, but could not. He was like a six-year-old on Christmas Eve, embarrassed as he would have been to admit it. He went to bed, but had given up all hope of actually sleeping when he did doze off. When he woke up, of course, and looked at his watch, his first thought was to dig a hole in the ground and bury himself.

  He was to meet the group at North-Down Lock at eight. The watch said five minutes to eight. And the place was an hour’s walk away.

  II

  In the hall outside his room Rick paused. There was no time to eat, he decided. The snack of a few hours before would have to last him. The group must be at the lock by now—maybe if he ran he would get there before they left. It might take a while to get the whole crowd into spacesuits. Running would have to be done carefully, he knew. It was dangerous in the tunnels under Moon gravity—especially so for someone with his background—and there were stringent laws about when and under what circumstances one could run within the settlement.

  His stepmother never understood why he didn’t call the lock. For years afterward she would irritate him by returning to the subject and trying to make him explain. His uncle, of course, understood so well that he never even bothered to ask during the investigation later on. In fact, Rick never even thought of the phone. Moving quietly and hoping that his aunt slept as soundly as his stepmother, he headed for the front door. For just an instant he was tempted to rouse his stepmother and ask why she had let him sleep so late; but that would have wasted time. He slipped into the corridor his Moon friends called a street and hopped, leaped, and skipped toward North-Down, awkwardly threading his way among the people.

  He was not stopped for speeding, though several times he was the target of irritated frowns.

  He would probably have made the trip in less than half an hour had he not mistaken a turn and wasted more than ten minutes getting back to the proper route. It was eight forty-five when he reached the recessed doorway that was one of the entrances to the North-Down Lock area.

  Sensors responded to his arrival, triggering a flashing light—green, since there was safe pressure on the other side of the door. Rick, as he had been taught, flicked the “acknowledge reading” switch located high on the door frame. Then he activated the door switch itself. Despite the need for power economy, doors on the Moon that opened into areas even moderately likely to tap vacuum were motor-driven. The chamber Rick entered was not normally exhausted; it was a sort of combined garage and locker room. However, it did have a large direct exit to the surface for getting out unusually large pieces of equipment. When so used it became an airlock chamber.

  On every Moon-dweller’s mind there was always the possibility of leakage
or outright valve failure in any outer room. Rick was aware of that threat, just as the school kids he had met a few days before had been aware of rain and cold on Earth. It was the Big Difference everyone was told about. But awareness was not the same thing as the reflective self-protection of a native.

  With the door secured behind him—by a strictly manual latch, activation of which shut off a warning bell—he made his way to the main personnel exits. His fervent hope was that the group might still be there.

  The place was empty. Even the lock chamber, visible through the transparent wall, was unoccupied. The outer door was closed, and the red light on its frame backing the green one at the inner seal signaled that the chamber was carrying normal pressure. This implied that the lock had last been used by an inbound person or group, a possibility that did not occur to Rick. To him it was clear only that his friends had left without him. He did not blame them. He knew that much to be done on the trip was too tightly scheduled to allow delay. But he was bitterly disappointed.

  Just which mistake he made next is still being argued. The fact that he, or more accurately his stepmother, had fallen out of step with the Wilsonburg clocks was minor. In truth, Rick was actually eleven-and-a-quarter hours early for his meeting rather than forty-five minutes late. And for the worst mistake, still to come, it is hard to blame anyone but Rick alone. Pierre Montaux is blamed by many, including himself, for letting Rick get away with it, but …

  * * *

  Pierre happened to be on duty at the locker room when Rick arrived. Hearing footfalls, the boy glanced back over his shoulder and saw the middle-aged attendant. They had never met before. Rick had had his suit check at another lock, and Pierre had not been on duty the only time the boy had been to North-Down to learn the layout.

  “What are you doing here, lad?”

  “Sir, I seem to have missed a group going out to Picard G. Could you tell me how long ago they left?”