“My leg is getting cold,” I said. “Very cold.” It also hurt like the devil, but I figured that was old news.
“Course it is. That’s the next thing happens, ya see. But don’cha worry now, Samuel. Peterson got along jus’ fine, he did, though it’s true a peg’s something of a nuisance in a pressure suit.”
“Peg?” I sobbed.
“Yup, ‘twere a fine one, too. Mister Lovelace he made it from a length a pipe. Were right proud of it, he was. Now, Calvin, you lifts Samuel’s leg over whilst I pulls him up.” I was being hoisted over one of the steeper points of D3. When the tunnel was more navigable again, Chalk asked casually, “And how’s the gam then?” The pain had vacated my leg below the knee and had lodged in my thigh. It was excruciating even at that remove. I now felt nothing below the tourniquet.
“It’s fine,” I said, whistling a chorus of Yankee Doodle as I passed the graveyard. “The thigh hurts, but I don’t feel a thing below the knee.”
Chalk said nothing for a long moment, but he clucked several times, which was worse. Then he said, “Yer vacuum ‘ll do that, it will. Nothin’ for it. But don’t ya worry none. Men rarely dies from such a thing. Leastways most of ‘em.” I was spared the remainder of Chalk’s opinions, because when he bent to tighten the rope around my leg, I passed out.
I awoke in the airlock when Calvin took my helmet off, but I said nothing and kept my eyes closed, and continued to do so for the remainder of the trip to Mister Kent’s lair. I decided to play possum for two reasons: to take advantage of what I considered a well deserved opportunity for sloth—being carried through a tunnel like a hodful of ore made for a strangely pleasant, if bumpy, ride—and to gather information. In my experience, people are reluctant to tell you to your face that you are going to die, at least if you're scheduled to do it any time soon, and if I was slated to expire, say, before supper, I wanted to know it. I reckoned I might have a good deal of explaining to do to get inside the Pearly Gates, and I needed some time to polish up my material.
This worked about as well as could be expected. No one said I was about to die, but then no one said I wasn’t either. No one said anything of significance during the whole trip. That is, no one said anything about me.
I kept my eyes shut even when we reached the sickbay. It smelled like mutton stew that day, although I couldn’t imagine where they’d find any mutton, except perhaps salted away in a hogshead. I was placed on a bed hastily assembled from foodstuffs, and almost immediately heard Mister Kent invoke the Deity, and not in a kindly way. I thought, perhaps they will let me have a plate of that mutton stew before I die.
Then he said, “Damn you, Chalk. This is some of your work, i’n’t it?”
“Aye, Mister Kent.”
“Well, he’ll be lucky if he doesn’t lose the leg, thanks to you.”
Chalk said, “It’s the only way I know’s ta —”
Kent cut him off. “It i’n’t a shark bite, you fool.” He sighed. “There’s likely to be significant vacuum trauma.”
“Twas only tryin’ ta help, Mister Kent.”
“Yes, yes, I know. Now run along. And you too, Bemis. You’re no use here.” Then Kent said, “And you, Clemens. Quit pretending you’re unconscious.” I opened my eyes. “That’s better. Now hold still while I untie this line.” I looked down the length of my haggis to assay the extent of the damage and saw his scarred hands reaching for the knot. “This is likely to hurt a bit, but it’ll pass soon enough.”
The rope line came loose from the suit’s knee joint and soon I felt a tingling sensation in the lower part of my leg. “It’s fine,” I said. “Not so bad, just a sort of—yaaaw!” I cried out as a sudden horrible aching pain engulfed my leg below the knee.
“Rest easy, son. It’ll pass,” Kent said again.
“When?” I said through gritted teeth.
“Hard to say.”
Kent slowly removed the lower portion of my pressure suit. He tsked and shook his head, his great red beard waggling, as he inspected my leg, which was now turned a dreadful purplish blue, like a carcass of meat left in the snow. “In a few hours, I expect.”
“A few hours?” Apparently I wasn’t going to die after all, but now I regretted the fact. “Are you going to saw off my leg?” The pain being what it was, I decided I was in favor of the procedure, but only if death was no longer an option.
The beard waggled again. “D’rather not. It’s a messy business, and some say it can hurt a bit.” He inspected my foot then. “This toe is going to have to come off, however.” Then a moment later, “No. It’s done the work for us and come off by itself.” I felt a lightning bolt of pain, sauce for the main course the rest of the leg was serving, and then Kent held up an inch-long gobbet of my very own flesh, now lost to me forever under my very eyes. There was no fakery this time, and I fainted, again.
Chapter Five
Mister Kent was kind enough to offer me the vacuum-frozen toe for a souvenir, but I declined the gift, mostly because I had no place to keep it, except attached to my foot. Failing that, I was indifferent to the disposition of the remains, asking only that it not be fed to the Deirdre’s cat, or anyone else, for a snack. I expect that to this day it resides in a jar of mineral spirits somewhere inside the Moon.
The pain in my leg was fairly horrible for most of a week. There was no cure for this, apparently, though whiskey, then going for three dollars and twenty-five cents an ounce in Captain Merriwether’s ledger, offered it some competition, and I ran up my bill, and the length of my term of servitude, accordingly. I bet on the whiskey, repeatedly, with the dogged, forlorn desperation of a racetrack punter already deep in the hole, but the pain was too much for it and took home the purse every time. Only sleep, in whose depths all sensation vanishes, provided genuine relief. Still, the whiskey hangovers I awoke with were useful; they stood in and provided some misery while the real pain woke up and got its britches on.
The first few days of my convalescence, I was confined to the sickbay, and whenever I was not sprawled in a hammock luxuriating in my agony, I spent the time repairing my pressure suit. Fixing the hole in the knee joint, although exacting, was far easier than removing the concoction of grease and dust from the suit’s exterior, which was nearly impossible. But as it happened, like any number of things, whiskey was the cure for it. I suppose you think I mean the drinking of it, and it’s true that this was a slight help in combating the tedium that came with the project, but it also had a most salubrious effect upon the stubborn muck itself. It seemed that the slush did not appreciate its society, and fled from it like the whiskey was carrying a warrant for its arrest, and the dust came along as an accomplice. Once I discovered this miracle, my term of servitude increased again.
It took two full days, minus the time spent sleeping, suffering, imbibing whiskey, and sleeping again, before the cleaning and repairing was complete. (I knew how much time was passing thanks to Mister Lovelace’s clock with the truncated pendulum, whose electrically relayed chimes, sounding in imitation of a ship’s bells, echoed through the parts of the Deirdre that possessed air. This was Earthbound time of course, and bore as much resemblance to the actual passage of days and nights on the Moon as a Fiji witch-doctor does to Queen Victoria, but it told me when supper was due and that was enough.) Once my gear was back in shape, there was very little for me to do, and in spite of my lifelong dedication to the vice of sloth, I grew bored.
To ameliorate this, I offered to help Mister Kent with the cooking, once he had agreed to let me stand upright for brief spells. This was a more than serviceable diversion, and I enjoyed it while it lasted. But it was too choice a berth to hold for long, I suppose. On only the third day of my apprenticeship, while rummaging about the galley in Mister Kent’s absence, I came across a trunk full of wonderful condiments and exotic spices. These marvelous additives proved irresistible, and before I knew it, improvisation had got the better of me and I produced a stew that even Puss, the mine’s cat, who was widely known an
d admired for her catholic tastes, would not touch. I was proud of my work in this new vocation, and thought less of Puss for her opinion. For my part, I thought it fine, though admittedly pungent. It went down largely without incident if you didn’t slow it down by trying to chew it, and tasted almost like proper stew if you thought to hold your nose. I was shocked, and disappointed of its further use, when Mister Kent informed me, rather hotly as I remember, that the trunk contained as many articles of physic, such as skin liniment, poultices, and draughts for the relief of constipation as it did condiments, and in his opinion I had employed more than the necessary amount of each in seasoning my concoction.
Bemis came to visit me fairly often, which helped with the boredom. Since I was laid up with an injured limb, it appeared that my partner in hod toting was at loose ends. This seemed a strange lacuna in an enterprise that wanted men, any men, badly enough to lurk in the rim of Farley’s Crater, like a spider in her web, ready to rouse them out of the dust. But according to Calvin, all of the ore, and even the lion’s share of the tailings, had been removed from the Deirdre for the moment, and thus the hods stood idle. He said word around the belowdecks was that a major new shaft was to be sunk, or blasted out with explosives rather, in an attempt to reveal a new, voluminous, and superior cache of ice. So Bemis, at leisure for pretty much the first time since I’d known him, had taken up with Mister Lovelace, and spent hours in his chambers beneath the belowdecks, where the heat and humidity were truly astonishing, communing with the resonance engine and the other wondrous devices it supported. Not long after the incident with the stew, I was encouraged to visit him there, the only proviso being that I should keep off the injured leg as much as possible.
The pain in the limb gradually subsided, more or less in concert with the consumption of whiskey, I’ll confess. However, no sooner had it become bearable than a new phenomenon came calling, one which I thought an unnecessary extravagance. The toe, or at least the sensations available through it, which I had thought lost to oblivion with the departure of the organ itself, was suddenly returned to me, with a vengeance. I could see the sorry appendage floating disconsolately, if not insolently, in a jar in Mister Kent’s sickbay, yet it nevertheless insisted on itching, burning, tingling, and aching as if it were still attached to my foot, and not living there in contentment either. It behaved as if it resented the vacuum freezing and wanted revenge, and it got it too. I’d heard of this phenomenon, sometimes called the phantom limb, from men who had lost an arm or a leg in battle, but I had always taken their descriptions of these ghostly, inexplicable sensations to be instances of poetic license. That is, I thought they were lying. I know now that they were not, and if anything were understating the case. As it is, I can only hope I don’t misplace any more body parts, especially major ones, for if I did, I think their constant complaining would drive me to distraction.
I had not visited Mister Lovelace’s domain prior to my convalescence, and at first did not know how even to get there until I hobbled over to the belowdecks and asked around. Most of the men, including Perkins, Chalk, Winters, Garrett, and Watkins were there, lounging in their hammocks in the steamy gloom, playing poker, or tending to the insatiable needs of their pressure suits. I had not been back into the belowdecks since my haggis had sprung a leak, and the men would not hear a word from me until I had rolled up my overalls and presented the injured limb for inspection. And they were right to do so, for, although according to Mister Kent the limb was sound, it, or what was left of it, made for a spectacular show, and if I had been prescient enough to charge admission to see it, I expect I could have paid for my extra whiskey outright. Thanks to the vacuum, the limb was decorated from the knee to the four remaining toes in a gaudy, livid, multihued bruise that would have put a week-old cadaver to shame. I turned this marvel to and fro, displaying every patch of purple, green, yellow, blue, and black to its full effect, and all but the severest of the former whalers lavished the most satisfying compliments upon it.
To my dismay, Chalk was niggardly in his praise for the limb, saying merely, “I seen worse,” by which he meant more spectacularly horrific, I suppose.
“Not on a man that kept the leg, I’ll wager,” countered Watkins. I thanked him, in my thoughts anyway, for his support of the abused limb.
Such a concise evaluation, of anything, was not in Chalk’s nature as I had observed it, and it occurred to me that his reluctance to lavish the gam with the praise it deserved might stem from some lingering sense of responsibility for its present condition, but in the end I believe he was simply envious of its undeniable splendor. Alas, even the best of us may fall silent when placed nose-to-nose with the sublime.
Eventually, once the show had let out and my pants leg was restored, I mentioned that I was looking for Bemis and expected to find him with Mister Lovelace in his lair. Then I asked Perkins, who was beside me, how I might get there.
“Go on down the rabbit hole,” he said with a grin. “Just follow the steam and you can’t miss it.” And he pointed to a short passage that was dripping with condensation.
“Down the rabbit hole?” I scoffed, looking around the belowdecks. “I could have sworn I was there already.”
Nevertheless, I went into the opening indicated, and it was a good thing I was hobbling along like a lamed mule or I would have arrived in Mister Lovelace’s realm with a broken neck, because the way through to the place was nothing but a yawning shaft sunk straight down into the rock. There was no ladder of any description leading into it, only a cluster of pipes coming up out of the hole, along with several fat bundles of insulated wires, which presumably took electrical energy to the various parts of the Deirdre to feed the electric lights and the battery charging devices in the belowdecks.
I leant forward, bracing myself on my whole left leg, and peered into the shaft. It was a modest four feet or so in diameter, but could have been a thousand feet deep for all I could see of the bottom of it. The only signs that it had an end anywhere this side of eternity were the cloud of steam rising from it, and a dense, rumbling cacophony of mechanical sounds.
Still leaning forward, I called down into the hole over the distant racket, shouting, “Calvin? Calvin Bemis, are you in there?”
There was no reply, so I repeated the call. I waited a moment longer, then at last a voice rose out of the depths, saying something that was largely unintelligible. Whether it was the voice of Bemis or Lovelace I could not tell, but somewhere in the jumble of words penetrating the general din I heard the command to “come ahead,” or anyway I fancied I did. I stared down into that abyss and pondered how I was to go about that, when the voice returned with the mysterious injunction to “use the pole.” It was then that I noticed that there was indeed a thick aluminum pole starting in the roof and disappearing down into the blackness. I had thought this merely another pipe sending air to some distant cavern, such as Captain Merriwether’s cabin, and, although wrong, this was a worthy assumption, because of course it was a pipe, only one set to a different purpose. It crossed my mind that, had I been a bit more thorough in arranging my recent calamity, I would have found a section of just such a pipe strapped to the stump of my leg.
I considered protesting this overly precipitous mode of transportation, but knew from the nature of the conversation so far that no one below would be likely to understand me if I did, so I drew in a deep breath, grabbed the pole with both hands, stepped into the void, and slid down into the hole. The trip did not last long, fortunately, as the shaft was only about thirty feet deep. That would have been plenty long enough to break a man’s leg on Earth, even with the pole for assistance, but it was only a modest plunge as such things are reckoned on the Moon. Still, I had the presence of mind to take the landing on my good leg alone, otherwise I expect I would be howling in pain to this day.
Once I was again on solid ground, I began to look around, and saw all about me a bewildering collection of machinery, seemingly all of it in fervent, not to say frenetic, motion. Gleam
ing rods thrust pistons in and out of their cylinders, gears racketed around their shafts, pulleys pulled, fly wheels flew, and gouts of steam belched from more orifices than I cared to count. A low, steady rumbling filled the cavern, accompanied by a clattering and banging like a whole kitchen-full of pots and pans being thrown repeatedly down the basement stairs. All around me, and even above me, the machinery sat—the parts that weren’t in wild motion anyway—looming like great prehistoric beasts wreathed in clouds of steam. This steam was penetrated in ghostly fashion by no less than three electric bulbs hanging on wires above the machines. Three electric lights in a single space set a new record, and Mister Kent with his brace of two was suddenly knocked down a step in my pantheon.
“Sam!” called Bemis from somewhere in the chaos of flailing pistons and whirring gears, “I’m so glad you’re here.” He poked his grease and sweat-smeared face out from behind a clutch of cogs (or perhaps sprockets, assuming there’s a difference), and I waved and smiled my respects. “How’s the leg today?” he added.
“Fair to middling,” I said with a shrug.
“How’s that?” he hollered over the noise.
“Splendid,” I tried. In fact, the absent toe was itching like the devil, but that was far too much information for this sort of conversation.
“Good,” Bemis said, then, “Say, could you hand me up a spanner?”
I glanced about me in an effort to locate the article, but could see nothing that fit my idea of such a device. Before I could admit defeat, Mister Lovelace appeared beside me with the requested tool. I took it from him as if I’d been waiting on it all afternoon, then reached up and shoved it into Calvin’s outstretched hand. He thanked me, then was gone again behind the housing of a collection of gears.
“Your friend Bemis is a good mechanic,” said Lovelace over the pounding of the machines. “He’s still rather light on theory and wants a good deal of experience yet, but I expect that in time he’ll make a first-rate resonance engineer.”
The Deirdre Page 6