“Calvin,” I said slowly, “I hate to even entertain such a thought about our three saviors over there, but do you think it’s possible that rather than being rescued, we’ve just been robbed?”
“At this point I’m pretty certain that we’re being robbed,” he said. “Now the question is, will we be rescued into the bargain?”
“They were good enough to supply us with air and water. That must count for something,” I offered.
“The water!” Bemis exclaimed. “Yes. Let’s see if there’s enough to rouse the Beast. I’ll pour it down his gullet.” And he did so, then he caressed a number of knobs and switches in order to direct the precious fluid through the machine’s vitals.
Then I noticed that the dust boat was moving again. It soon left the digger and began to draw away.
“Calvin,” I said quietly, “I was joking before, or at least half joking, but I think we have just been robbed, and left to fend for ourselves.”
Bemis looked up from his gauges to witness the departure. We turned to look out the starboard viewport as the thieves moved past us, their bow wave sparkling, then turned to the forward port and watched as they sped away in front of us.
“We would have been better off with a canoe full of red Indians,” I said. “They would have scalped us, sure, but not so completely.”
Then as we watched, the dust boat loaded with our precious supplies, to say nothing of our precious salvation, began to turn, negotiating a broad glowing arc through the dust. After half a minute it was visible out the port side viewport, and was curving back in our direction.
“What are they doing?” Calvin said.
“Perhaps they’ve had a change of heart,” I offered.
“I’ll ask them,” he said, reaching for the radio’s controls. “Assuming they’ll answer. I wouldn’t if I were the thief.”
“Wait,” I said, “now it looks like they’re traveling in circles.” The dust boat had come about in a wide turn off our port bow, and was now steaming straight toward us. “They can’t mean to ram us, can they?”
“What would be the point in that?” Bemis said. “It would simply wreck their boat. The Beast has a far tougher hide than they do.”
But, although it was coming ever closer to the digger, the dust boat was still steering hard to port, and by the time it was back to within a half dozen yards of us, it had turned a full three hundred and sixty degrees, until at last it came to rest with its stern directly ahead of us, just a few yards beyond the digger’s great claw. Then one of the acrobats leapt from the heavily laden parade float onto the claw itself and made fast a line to it.
“This is beginning to look like a rescue again,” I said.
The man bounded back to the parade float, and to my immense satisfaction knocked a piece of booty into the dust as he landed. Those men were good, no doubt of that, good like a saint is good, but fortunately they were not perfect. (For my part, I am a skeptic when it comes to perfection. It is a fine thing to pursue, but, like great wealth or an unusually beautiful woman, may Heaven help you should you ever manage to catch it. Oh, it’s fine for a time, perhaps even a long time, perhaps even a month, but then where do you go from there?) Plus the lost item had the look of vacuum jerky about it, so I was doubly pleased.
The radio crackled for a moment, then a new voice said, “Cap’n’ll have the price a that jerky outta yer share, now won’t he,” and the voice laughed.
“He kin eat it then. I’d not have such vittles if I was adrift a month,” claimed another voice. “I tell ya, shipmate, a man which—”
“Stow it, Chalk,” said the voice of the pilot. “I need you men quiet now.” Then, directing his transmission to us, he said, “So have you got the digger fired up then?”
“Fired up?” Bemis said, still staring out the forward port. He pulled his eyes away to inspect a cluster of gauges, whose needles, I noticed, were inching their way up their dials. “Uh, yes, nearly,” he said, “but I doubt we’ll move very much.”
“That was a nice bit of piloting,” I said to the radio.
“Thank’y,” came the reply. “She’s a worthy craft, the dust boat, but she turns slow, and won’t back up for boogers, so it takes a bit a doin’ to get her into position. Now, when I give the word, I want you to put that monster into gear and give it all the steam you’ve got. Can you do that?”
“Sure thing,” Calvin said, and he glanced at the gauges again. Their needles were nearly vertical by then, and, although I knew little of gauges—I’m more of a wheel-and-rudder man when given my ‘druthers—that seemed a good sign.
Over on the dust boat, one of the men reached out with the same six-foot toothpick he’d used to sound the sled, and batted aside a restraining hook holding the two sides of the dust boat’s aluminum skin together at the stern. Apparently this was our cue. “A’right now,” came the voice of our deliverer, “put ’er in gear and lay on the boogerin’ steam.”
We did as instructed. There was no response from the Beast for a moment, and the line holding us to the dust boat drew taut as the craft ahead of us started to move, then the steam took hold and we began to inch forward as well.
“We’re moving, Cal!” I crowed. “By Heaven, we’re moving.”
It wasn’t much of a speed, as yet, about the pace of a snail in top condition, but we were moving, and that qualified as a miracle in my religion, if only a miracle on the proportions of a snail. And soon we were picking up speed, to the breakneck pace of a man out for a stroll. He would have to be an old man, mind you, probably an octogenarian, and walking with a cane, but he could beat a snail, at least in the long haul, and that was enough. The reason we could travel even at that pace was because when the dust boat started moving forward, the two sides of its skin, now released, separated themselves and left a space that was relatively free of dust in which the digger could creep along. It was ingenious, although not without some precedent. Apparently certain waterfowl, geese for example, employ a similar principle when they fly in their characteristic V-shaped phalanx. The bird before blocks the wind, or a part of it, from the bird behind, and the dust boat was doing much the same thing for us.
We rode along in silence for a while then, thoroughly enjoying the fact that we were moving at all. By now we were roaring along at nearly the pace of a dog. Yes, you guessed it, an old dog, and one with three legs, but three good legs.
After a minute, I said, “Is it my imagination, or is the level of the dust dropping?”
Bemis looked out the starboard port, or maybe it was the other one. He stared at the dust for a while and eventually said, “I think you’re right. Are we going out the way we came in, or another way?”
“I think we are into new territory,” I said, “but I can’t be certain. I don’t suppose we have a compass?”
“No,” he said.
“I imagine it’s in the dust boat then,” I said, and gestured vaguely out the front viewport.
Bemis gave me a withering look, and making little effort to hide his condescension, said, “The Moon has no magnetic field to speak of, Sam. Even if we had a compass it wouldn’t do us a lick of good.”
“Oh yes,” I said quickly. “I know that.” And I did, now that Bemis had told me.
“In any case, now that I think of it, the Beast never turned from his original course, so we must be heading for the other side of the crater,” he concluded. And indeed we were. As the dust receded, the rim wall of Farley’s Crater began to grow ahead of us, until it blotted out a significant portion of sky.
The damnable dust was at last behind us, and we followed the dust boat up an incline, which in turn put us onto a narrow road, this presumably leading either through, into, or over the rim wall. I was about to say that we had little choice in the matter, since we were still attached to our benefactors by a stout line, but of course the Beast could have parted that trifle with little more than a shrug. There seemed no point in such a reckless, not to say rude, course of action however, for they had al
l of our supplies on the parade float. We wouldn’t have made it a mile before we would have to be rescued all over again. So we came over the rim wall together, and eventually arrived at what even a lime-hued neophyte such as myself could recognize as the entrance to a mine.
The first and most obvious signs of the mine were the mountains of tailings laid out all around it like the seven hills of Rome. I’ve just said they were mountains, and I admit this is an exaggeration, but a worthy one I think, since they were mighty tall for piles of tailings (which, by the way, are the dross cast aside after the valuable bits have been removed), and mighty steep by terrestrial standards, and thus inspired just a pinch of awe. Perhaps you have noticed on Earth how a pile of dirt or sand will slide down into a mound whose sides cannot get any steeper than a certain angle, no matter how you try to pile it higher. On the Moon, where the gravitational force is far less oppressive, more of a gentle tug at the coat tails than the usual kick in the pants, the piles of mine tailings we saw around us were far more precipitous than those back home. Given the right state of mind, such as might come from being spared a slow asphyxiation, they appeared almost comical, looking more like a collection of dunce caps than proper hills.
Beyond these, there was a small bay or inlet cut into the outer rim wall (for, if I have not made it clear, we were firmly on the outside of Farley’s Crater by then), and just beyond that was the open maw of a mine.
Chapter Two
The dust boat, with the digger close behind, crawled around the mountains of tailings and onto a flattened area just outside the rough hole in the rim wall that was the entrance to the mine. This place was home to a collection of mining equipment and conveyances, including a partially disassembled traction engine, ore carts in various stages of repair, and even a fairly formidable digging leviathan. This object, though undoubtedly a fine machine, was not in a weight class equal to that of the Beast and was no threat to his hegemony, but it certainly could have fought on the undercard without disgrace.
The dust boat came to a stop on a spot crisscrossed with tire tracks that lay just beyond the entrance to the mine, and Bemis brought the digger to a halt directly behind it. The two machines extinguished their power plants then, and in the process released quantities of excess steam, which froze and fell to the ground in record time. Once the Beast was in repose, we reached for our helmets, eager to escape the confines of the digger’s microscopic pilot house, despite having no idea of what might be ahead for us.
“You don’t suppose they’ll have water enough for a bath?” Bemis wondered aloud.
“A bath?” I said, fitting one of the cylinders of air we’d been given onto a bracket on the back of his pressure suit. “Well now, ain’t you the nob.” Then, recalling how long it had been since his last encounter with soap and water, and the exertions we had undertaken in the meantime, I modified my opinion. “I expect they’ll have enough to spare once they’ve caught the scent of you.”
“And I don’t suppose you have an odor,” he said.
“Not that I’ve noticed,” I said, perhaps a bit disingenuously, but not entirely so. At that point I had been keeping company with my own odor for so long that it had finally tired of making my life, or at least my nose, miserable, and thrown in the sponge. Thereafter, like a picture hanging for years in the same location, or a debt owed to a man long in the grave, its presence went unnoticed. I don’t know why this happens, but I consider it solid proof of the existence of a loving and merciful God. Bemis and I successfully negotiated the Dutch oven, then stood outside in the dim earthlight and watched with mixed emotions as the low gravity acrobats unshipped our former prospecting gear and performed a ruthless triage of it. Air cylinders, water, foodstuffs (including the loathsome vacuum treated varieties), and perennials such as the pick and shovel were placed back aboard the sled they had started on, and everything else, objects we had paid dearly if discursively to possess, was pitched unceremoniously onto the tailings. I was nearly moved to lend a hand in this operation, just to bid farewell to goods I had cherished in simpler times, but then they got to tossing around the explosives and I decided I was moved near enough as it was and left them to their work. In fact they were quite solicitous of the explosives and provided them with a choice berth aboard the sled. Then the third man from the dust boat, its pilot, beckoned to us with a wave of his gloved hand, so we turned away from the disposition of our possessions, and followed him into the black mouth of the mine.
There were no electric lights decorating the tunnel that stretched away into the rock, and naturally there were no torches or other forms of oxygen-fueled lighting either. I reached for the switch on my helmet that activated its headlamp, but by then the battery that powered it was so depleted that its light would have failed to illuminate the inside of a walnut. Bemis tried his, and the result was much the same. Fortunately, our guide had a battery for his lamp that had been recently fed, and it lit the way just fine for him, so all we had to do was follow along and not let him and his beacon get too far ahead.
By the light left in our benefactor’s wake, we could see that the steep, descending tunnel was occasionally shored up with posts and plates of steel or aluminum wedged or pounded into the rock. Those occasions were few, however, and substantially far apart, like Thanksgiving, Groundhog Day, and the Fourth of July, and were just as eagerly anticipated. To me it seemed a meager collection, considering the countless tons of rock poised to come down on us. But the Moon is forgiving in this department, if in little else, due to the lax gravitation once again, and it turned out that the rare occasions these miners had chosen to celebrate with shoring were enough to keep the roof over our heads where it belonged.
After perhaps a hundred yards of burrowing down into the crater’s rim, the tunnel leveled off and expanded into a cavern, and there a succession of ore carts rested, partially filled with rock. Two men in pressure suits, their helmet lamps robustly ablaze, shoveled ice ore, or mine tailings, or perhaps peppermint candy—I couldn’t have told one from the other at that point in my career, and I’m fond of peppermint candy—from a long pile on one side of the cavern into the carts. I could see immediately why they had coveted our shovel.
We wormed past the men doing the shoveling and came to a stop before a big sheet of aluminum that after a moment I perceived to be an airlock. We passed into it and out the other side all together, as it was considerably more spacious than the Beast’s Dutch oven, and on its far side we were able to escape our pressure suits for the first time in a decade, or so it seemed. We had not withdrawn ourselves from their company in the digger’s cabin, even though they had overstayed their welcome, because trying to put them on in there had made the difficulty plenty clear. Once emptied of their contents, our suits, minus their helmets, were taken up by two of the four men in the chamber beyond the airlock, thrown into that same airlock, and straightaway subjected to the rigors of the vacuum.
Bemis and I must have appeared puzzled—I wrongly assumed that our pressure suits were to be deeded to the mine owners along with our other goods, and hoped vaguely that they would survive the triage—because one of the men said, “A few minutes in the vacuum kills the fleas, as well as a good portion of the bacteria.” His tone was only moderately condescending, which as a professional greenhorn I appreciated, but I had no idea what a bacterium was at the time, or in truth even today, as I can only judge by the claims of the scientists who lobby for their existence, and scientists are in the business of inventing impossibilities. Still, if these bacteria kept company with fleas, I reckoned they were getting what they deserved.
The man, who was tall and thin with a face and manner located somewhere between those of a parson and an undertaker, said, “Welcome aboard the Deirdre, gentlemen, although I suppose your gentility remains to be seen. I am first mate Lang. You may call me Mister Lang, First Mate, or sir, whichever you prefer.” He was dressed in the standard issue uniform of the Moon, flannel shirt and bib overalls, but it was the cleanest and best p
reserved such uniform I had ever seen, outside of those still supine upon a shelf in a dry goods store.
“I’m Sam Clemens,” I said. “Of the Missouri Clemenses,” I added, trusting that my family’s reputation had not reached the Montes Caucasus ahead of me, “and this is my partner Calvin Bemis. And you can call us Sam and Calvin, I suppose.” I offered my hand at this point, but it was left alone on the field and eventually was obliged to retire.
“You look in better shape than some we’ve seen,” said Lang. “Garrett and Watkins were three-quarters in the grave by the time we got them aboard—but we’ll send you down to Mister Kent for a good going-over to satisfy the formalities, and chase down any remaining fleas.” I tried to look indignant over this, but was betrayed by the untimely need for a scratch. “He’ll see to it that you get cleaned up.” And here he wrinkled his nose just a bit. I too detected an odor, which I assumed was due to Bemis, but in fact the scent I was imbibing was a permanent resident of the Deirdre mine. In another week I would fail to notice it at all.
I said, “So are you the foreman here?”
“Like I told you—Clemens is it—I’m first mate of the Deirdre.” I had known first mates aplenty in the piloting trade, but the profession felt out of place inside the Moon. Still, most of them were kin enough to a foreman to fill the bill, so I let it rest. I had also determined by some process of elimination that it was the mine itself that they called the Deirdre, and so I was content. “Don’t fret, Clemens,” the first mate continued, “Mister Kent will see that you’re fed and watered when he’s done with you.” My ears pricked up like a coyote’s upon discovering a prairie dog. I’d thought I was content, but had failed to consult with my stomach in the matter, and any news of food was now profoundly interesting to me. I could not recall the last time I had eaten, let alone eaten well, and was reluctant to do so, for I feared that if I did and remembered the full pleasure of it, I might descend into a bottomless melancholy, since chances were excellent that I would never experience its like again.
The Deirdre Page 2