Analog SFF, April 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Finally, it's true that Destry improvised a rail-gun and did fire on several of the search parties looking for him, causing several injuries but no deaths. But the unfinished Armstrong Dome Airless Fury uses as one famous backdrop had nothing to do with the incident, as that landmark was years away from being needed, let alone proposed, designed, or even partially built.

  Airless Fury ends with a furious Malcolm Bell, who has tracked Ken Destry across the Moon's surface, catching up with him on foot, after a chase that has lasted several days. In real life, Bell had no intention of ever running across Destry. Like everybody else on the Moon, he had heard of Destry's rampage and followed all the recommended security procedures for keeping out of Destry's way. He'd even signed on to the general consensus, common once a full week had elapsed without a Destry incident, that the poor man had probably run out of air or food or otherwise succumbed to his condition. But once things began returning to normal, and his own duties began to require a daily commute from his home warren to a new one being excavated thirty kilometers away, he became one of several lunar workers carrying their own railguns just in case the general consensus turned out to be wrong.

  Airless Fury got most of the story wrong. It invented some stuff. It omitted other stuff. It left out the single most important fact about the incident, one known only to people who lived on the Moon at the time.

  All that said, even Airless Fury was right about one thing.

  There certainly was a gunfight.

  * * * *

  I still didn't know whether Bell's claims of a suit-shredding security system were at all accurate, but I saw no point in testing them. I turned when he told me and stepped where he told me and at one point backtracked several steps because he claimed to have miscalculated and led me over an array he called the Valley of Death, where a single misstep would have reduced my suit to what he called “a loose mesh more appropriate as a bathing suit than as something you'd find useful in vacuum.” By then I was more than half sure that the system belonged to the same species of bullshit as most versions of the gunfight story. A few years later, when he disappeared, leaving in his place the phenomenon that has made his homestead a quarantined site ever since, the authorities searched the land around his sealed habitat and found out that it was all true, a revelation that made my skin prickle from the imagined sensation of blood bubbling in cold vacuum.

  But that day I followed his directions and made it inside his airlock in a state resembling the same confidence I'd felt since first plotting this madness of mine. It was a standard box of a chamber, only one square meter at its base, but so squat as far as height was concerned that even I, with my slight dimensions, had to stoop in order to enter. I tried to imagine Bell using it to go in and out and remembered reading that most of the pioneers had been small people, chosen as much for their ability to fit into tight spaces as they were for the length and breadth of their professional resumes. Any illusions I might have had about meeting a legend who would tower over me like some kind of Greek god, his mighty forehead scraping the clouds ... were stupid on their very face, but remained intact anyway. I knew the stories were bullshit. But this was Malcolm Bell, dammit. Bullshit or not, meeting him was like meeting William Tell, Robin Hood ... or Wyatt Earp.

  The door behind me slid shut, the quaint seal around the rim inflating to produce a seal in a technology that might have been considered old-fashioned when I was born. A few seconds later, I started hearing ambient sound: the hissing of external air, the metallic sound of my boots shifting against the dust-catching grill below. But even as the indicator light over the inner doorway flashed green, I continued to wait.

  His voice crackled over the speakers. “It's safe. You can take your helmet off, if you want.”

  I made no move. “Are you going to open the inner door?”

  “I haven't decided yet. But you might as well make yourself comfortable. I promise: I'm not the type to expose an obnoxious busybody to vacuum.”

  Yes. But you are the type to surround your home with deathtraps, or at least to say that you have. And yet, what choice did I have? Even in a room stocked with all the air I could breathe in a lifetime, I could still asphyxiate behind the seal of a suit that refused to allow any of it in. So I unlocked my helmet, taking a groundhog's pleasure in the sibilant hiss of my suit's pressure equalizing with the somewhat greater concentration of the airlock booth.

  Traveling from one pressurized environment to another, you can learn a lot about what somebody's like from your first taste of their air. In the last few weeks, during my interviews with people who had known Bell back in the day, I'd visited some private habitats inhabited by people who had long since lost the ability to smell themselves and whose stench was thick enough to bring tears to my eyes. Bell's had the slightest tinge of old-man scent, sweet in a way that suggested daily ingestion of cough drops, but was downright pleasant by comparison. I could even make out some kind of exotic, flowery tinge, which reminded me of the tropical exhibit at Shepardville's Botanical Gardens: perfume, scented cleaning fluid, or perhaps an indication that the winner of the Moon's most famous gunfight now spent his years cultivating flowers under a sun lamp. Why not? He had to be doing something in here, all these years.

  Either way, I found myself enjoying it. “Thank you.”

  “You're not welcome,” he said. “This is an unconscionable imposition on my time and privacy. Tell the truth, I'm showing you far more hospitality than you deserve.”

  I shifted weight from one foot to the other, to cover the embarrassment that made the hackles rise on the back of my neck. “I know. And I'm sorry. Whether it makes a difference or not ... I do appreciate it.” I waited several long seconds for a response, received none, and ventured, “Maybe I should tell you why I'm here?”

  “You don't have to, Miss Jessie James. There are only a few things this can be about. Either you want to write a book about me, or you need to tell me what I've always meant to you, or you want a famous person's willing participation in an anecdote that you'll later be able to share with your family and friends. Whatever the particulars, it amounts to nothing more than wanting to approach a monument, chip off a piece for yourself, and walk away carrying it in your pants pocket. This would not be a problem if I wasn't a man, and there weren't so many of you, wanting your own pieces, that if I let all of you have what you want there wouldn't be any of me still left for myself. You want the gunfight story? Go download Cold Roses. It's pretentious and overwrought, but got at least half of the facts right, all without asking me a single damned thing.”

  Another man might have delivered all of that as a plaintive, hysterical rant. From his mouth it sounded like resignation, born from years of sad experience. I wondered how many pushy curiosity-seekers he'd needed to admit as far as his airlock. “I've seen Cold Roses, sir. It didn't tell me what I needed to know.”

  “Then download the Commission's report. It's the result of a hearing that lasted six weeks, and includes enough detail to choke Oswald Spengler. Unless you're one of those touchy-feelie types who want to know what it was like, in which case I have no answer more eloquent than, I didn't have time to stop and think about it.”

  His anger didn't delay me one heartbeat, but I did need several seconds to fight my way clear of that reference to Spengler, whose Decline of the West I had not then read and would not touch until several years into my own self-imposed exile. “No, sir. I don't need to know about the gunfight. I already know everything I want to know about the gunfight.”

  There was another pause, shorter this time. “And that is?”

  “You armed yourself in response to a possible threat from a colleague deranged through no fault of his own. He fired on your barge. You fled the vehicle and returned fire. The confrontation lasted several minutes, but sooner or later one of you had to hit his target. The lucky survivor happened to be you. You almost lost your commission, in part because of some zealous prosecutors who accused you of being as dangerous as the man you w
ere fighting, but were cleared of all charges. The tale's grown in the telling and you've been living down your reputation as a hero ever since. But everything else, sir, is just drawing dotted lines between the places where you stood and the places where your rounds hit their respective targets. It's been dissected and analyzed from every possible angle, hundreds of times, by people far smarter or far more obsessive than I am, and I wouldn't be here, taking up your time, if all I wanted to do is travel that same ground all over again. For what it's worth, I'm not even a historian. Whether you believe it or not, sir, I have a reason to be here.”

  When he spoke again, his voice betrayed a respect I hadn't heard there before. “How old are you, young lady?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “I thought I detected the arrogance of youth. You do know that I haven't allowed anybody past the airlock since some six years before you were born?”

  “Yes, sir. And if you don't mind me saying so, it sounds damned pointlessly lonely.”

  The words surprised me as much as they must have surprised him. Nothing like them had appeared anywhere on my long list of strategies for getting him to drop the habit of a lifetime and speak to me. Even now, I found them mortifying. I would have pulled the very sentiment from the air, and tucked it away in my pocket, had there been any way of catching up with it and dragging it back. I found myself cringing, half-expecting him to open the outer door and flush me back into vacuum, where all impudent snots belonged.

  He surprised me by guffawing.

  Malcolm Bell laughed that hard maybe four times in all the time we knew each other. It was a number exactly equal to the number of times he laughed at all. Other people had varying intensity settings, ranging from polite chuckles to uncontrollable giggles. Bell was more than capable of being amused by things other people said, but never laughed out loud unless he could devote his entire being to it, and when he did, it always took him some time to stop.

  I must say that I've spent a lot of years missing that sound. There's a certain amount of personal pride that comes with being able to make it happen.

  On that day I thought it would never end. But even it trailed off eventually. And he said, “Every thirty years or so, the human race surprises me by producing someone worth making exceptions for. You have your audience, Jessie James.”

  The inner door slid open...

  * * * *

  In just about every version of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Wyatt Earp is a tower of strength, more titan than man, so certain of his own rectitude that it might as well have been this certainty that prevented him from being pierced by any of the bullets fired on that dusty street on Tombstone.

  It might even be true.

  Certainly, it's remarkable enough that a man who lived the way he did never did feel the sting of a bullet himself. So many of the legends of his day did. Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and Wild Bill Hickok all died that way—some backshot, others facing their enemies, but all as prone to the effects of violence as any other man. Earp's own body remained inviolate.

  The inescapable impression is that when he stood before the Clantons, exchanging a flurry of bullets at point-blank range, he was tall and unafraid, as aware of his own invulnerability as future generations would be, when they saw his story told and retold in one medium after another.

  Again, maybe it's so. Maybe he was just crazy enough to think that the laws of chance didn't apply to him.

  And maybe he was terrified, and wishing he were anywhere else.

  Malcolm Bell sits in the driver's seat of a Class B Lunar Barge, traveling maybe forty kilometers an hour as he makes his way to a solar array under construction on a ridge a three-hour drive from base. He is under cover, the better to keep his suit temperature within a comfortable mean, despite what will have to be a full day's trek under the pitiless unfiltered Sun, but as is typical for that time and state of technology, not under air. He is tired. He hasn't told anybody, but he's been having trouble sleeping these past few nights, and would have begged off this pain in the ass solo detail, were the local work culture at all tolerant of such frivolities as sick days. Life here, the life they're still trying to build, is still too precarious for that. The motto is, If you can walk, you can work, and Bell remains too mobile to spend the day in his bunk when he's part of the machine that makes life on this world possible.

  He knows this, but he is also a human being under stress that would break many other untrained men, so his mind is following fourteen separate trains of thought at once. Part of him is thinking about the drive he has already made a dozen times, but part is thinking of a fellow engineer who he considers a real ass, part is trying to remember the name of a popular singer who has been on the tip of his tongue all day, part is looking forward to getting some downtime when he can see his good friends Minnie and Earl, and part is thinking about that poor crazy son of a bitch, Destry.

  Shit, Destry.

  Bell knows he's being stupid. There's no point in worrying about Destry. Worrying about Destry is like worrying about lightning. It strikes or it doesn't, and if it wants you it will have you. All the worry accomplishes is ruining your day while you wait to find out if the dice rolls, one way or the other. Besides, Destry's got to be dead by now. There's no way he's still out here, running around so far from any supply drops, just looking for another wandering surface rat to ambush. He must be spam in a can, baking inside his suit, perhaps even bursting from his tin shell as the gases build up from within. It's a disgusting image, but the only possible one, because Destry's not some unstoppable monster, just a man with the immense misfortune to pull the wrong lottery ticket in the God-has-a-sense-of-humor sweepstakes.

  Bell knows all this, in the same way he knows his service codes and his emergency procedures and the words to the current hit song with the easily-mocked lyrics that have burrowed into his skull and now refuse to leave, but he is also a human being, with a human being's capacity to dwell on bogeymen, and he has been dwelling on the image of his own head bursting into a fog of swiftly-dispersing vapor as his helmet is bisected by another of Destry's jury-rigged weapons. It's not suffering that frightens him. It's the unknowability of the moment. It's being alive one instant, and dead the next, without so much as a by-your-leave for realization. Why, this very thought, the one he's thinking now, could be the very last thought he'll ever have, and he'll never know it. Or maybe this one is the last. Or this one.

  He is lucky that he happens to be not only looking in the right direction but also working himself into a fine state of paranoia when the projectile shatters the air gauge on the control panel before him. This is a vacuum, after all. There is no audible distant gunshot, no musical crunch as the transparency covering the display surface turns to shrapnel. There is just a hole where no hole existed before, and were he not thinking of Destry he could very easily hand himself over to the slaughter by wasting the next few seconds wondering what kind of mechanical blowout could have caused such a catastrophic malfunction. Instead he realizes at once that Destry must be firing at him, from one of the jagged hills that overlook this now well-traveled road. He is therefore already hurling himself to the left—that direction chosen only because it is the nearest way out of there—when a second projectile passes through the spot where he'd been standing and imbeds itself in the control panel, its only lasting effect to provide further grist for the future storytelling mill.

  Objects on the Moon fall slowly, by terrestrial standards, even if they don't want to, and Bell's desperate dodge develops a certain slapstick flavor as he sinks toward the rocky ground—a good two meters below him, thanks to the barge's oversize treads—not at all rushed by the knowledge that there's somebody shooting at him. He is even able to begin his frantic call for help before he hits and commences to roll. “Bell to Control! Request immediate assistance!"

  Cliff McRae is the comm-op riding the console that day. He's from some nowhere in the Texas Panhandle and speaks with an exaggerated version of the cowboy twang that has flavo
red a disproportionate percentage of NASA's public speakers for over a century now. “We copy, Bell. What's the nature of your problem?"

  Bell is still tumbling beside the barge he has abandoned. He owes his life to the conservation of momentum, as his trajectory parallels the vehicle's forward motion, and thus keeps in its shadow where he is shielded, for the moment, from his attacker's line of fire. This will change in a second, if he cannot regain his feet and keep up. He gasps, “I'm being fired upon from the ridge!"

  McRae's pause lasts a full five seconds. “I'm tracking your location, Mr. Bell. I see you south of Route 7, marker seventeen. Is that affirmative?"

  "That's the route. I don't know the marker. I've abandoned the barge, which is still in motion, and am using it for cover."

  "Have you positive ID on the shooter?"

  "Hell, no, I don't have positive ID! But just how many crazed snipers do we have on this hunk of rock?"

  There's grim amusement in McRae's reply. “Copied. Stay covered, Malcolm. We're working on getting you on some reinforcements."

  Meanwhile, Bell has managed to regain his feet and now hustles alongside the barge, which is continuing to roll at a speed he can match as long as he keeps to a slow jog. It's not easy going. Moonsuits are not made for running, nor is lunar gravity. A normal run for a human being involves a certain number of moments between steps, when both feet are off the ground at the same time, moments when the runner uses gravity to his advantage, and that the Moon insists on using as opportunities for slow-motion ballet. It's possible to compensate and build up a speed significantly in excess of what the same legs would achieve on Earth, but you pretty much have to be raised on the Moon to pick up the knack.