The Deirdre

  “Then what do we do?” I asked.

  “When you’re ready, switch on your lamps and come charging up-tunnel like your arses are on fire, talkin’ on the radio like there’s a dozen of you. We’ll let them know we’re still here, and once they see that they’re trapped between us, they’ll have no choice but to give themselves up.”

  “Or else go down with guns blazing,” I said.

  “Have you got a better idea, Clemens?” Perkins said.

  I wasted no one’s time claiming that I did.

  Calvin and I and the shovel went out to the main line, turned on our headlamps, and worked our way down-tunnel to D3-4 (which was faintly but definitively marked as such), then started into it.

  “We forgot to ask how far along it is,” I said, by which I meant the connecting passage.

  “We’ll find it,” was Calvin’s terse reply. He would find it, anyway, because he was in the lead.

  The spur was more snug than most, and soon we were walking bent almost double with the air cylinders on our backs scraping against the ceiling. We traversed one dogleg, then another, then after rounding a third, we came up against a pile of rubble.

  “We’re stuck now,” I said.

  But Bemis thought otherwise. “I think this is it, only the sides of the hole have fallen in. Hand me the shovel. “

  I did so, and he used it to push the debris forward, then he stood up straight and I knew his head must be in the tunnel above us.

  “Do you see them?” I said.

  “No,” he replied. “I’m switching off my lamp. You’d better do the same.”

  “Very well. Do we by any chance know which way is which?”

  This, for once, stopped Calvin cold. After a while he gave in and said, “No. We’ll have to guess.”

  He climbed into the tunnel above, which was a merciful few inches taller, and soon after I did the same.

  “Can you see anything?” I said.

  “Of course not,” he said, a bit peevishly. Then, “Wait a minute while our night vision returns.” All the night vision in the world will do you no good if there is no light at all, but I decided that Calvin didn’t need to be reminded of that right then.

  “There,” he said suddenly. “We go this way.”

  “Which way is that?”

  He said nothing, just pulled me in the direction he’d decided to go.

  “Should we start the hullabaloo?” I asked, as we worked our way along the passage.

  “Let’s try to see if we’re going the right way first,” he replied, although I’d thought that question decided.

  Then about a minute later Bemis went into a sharp dogleg. I knew this because I didn’t, and ran up against the tunnel wall instead. “Calvin,” I said, “if you could alert me to impending doglegs I would be—”

  He let out a cry of alarm.

  “Well, it’s too late now,” I said.

  “Hell and damnation,” he growled. These were mighty oaths for the likes of Calvin Bemis.

  “Are they there?” I said. “Should we start the charge?”

  “No, it’s—just watch your step coming around.”

  I was about to ask how I was supposed to see my steps without any light when suddenly I saw them, my boots that is. He had turned on his headlamp and, as advertised, an effluvial fan of light spilled into the bend. I continued to keep my eyes firmly on my boots, as I’d been advised to do, and thus I nearly failed to fall onto the ground when my boot landed on an air cylinder.

  “What the—”

  “Shh.”

  Bemis was shushing me again. Had he found another ghost, I wondered.

  No, what he had found, literally stumbled upon in fact, was a cache of supplies. In the light from his headlamp I counted eight air cylinders, plus a fat bag full of spare batteries, some delicious vacuum-frozen comestibles, a ten-gallon carboy of water, and what appeared to be a vacuum tent rolled up into a cylinder.

  “Looks like our friends are planning to stay awhile,” I whispered. “They’ve got—”

  “Radios off,” ordered Calvin.

  He had turned his headlamp off as well, plunging us once again into complete blackness.

  Our helmets somehow found each other in the dark, and Calvin’s hollow booming voice said, “Sam, tell me if I’m wrong, but this changes everything.”

  “How’s that?” I said.

  “If we take their supplies and put them where they can’t find them, we can starve them out,” he explained.

  “Or suffocate them out,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  I liked this plan, because it held out the promise, or at least the possibility, of less sudden violent death than charging the enemy head-on—or even from the rear, as we were planning to do.

  I said, “That’s a splendid idea, Cal, but what about Perkins and Garrett? They’re waiting for us to drive the devils into their trap.”

  “True,” he said. “Perhaps if we go far enough along the tunnel in their direction, we can—wait,” Calvin interrupted himself, “is that a lamp? Someone’s coming this way! Back around the bend, Sam. Quickly.”

  He pulled my arm and we retreated around the dogleg.

  He again held his helmet against mine and said, “They must be here to replenish supplies. They have no way of knowing we’re here, and with lamps off and our radios switched back on, we’ll be able to hear what they’re saying without detection. If we can keep quiet, that is.” I knew full well that the “we” he was referring to was me.

  “Certainly,” I agreed.

  So I crouched in the tunnel, watching the play of light and shadow across the wall of the bend as if I were a denizen of Plato’s celebrated cave, breathing as shallowly and quietly as possible, and listening for—listening for all I was worth. What I heard, like much of what I learned in the Moon, was interesting, generally unpleasant, and potentially rewarding if a great deal of effort was applied in putting it to use.

  There were two men on the other side of the dogleg, which was convenient for conversation, as a man on his own was not likely to tell us much—unless he happened to be John Jones, who was quite capable of holding up both ends of a conversation by himself. But there were two men, and what was better, they were arguing, although it was not clear at first what they were arguing about.

  “We’ll never hear the end of it from Black Johnny if we don’t secure this spur,” said one of the men. “T’ say nothing of the whole line.”

  “Black Johnny can go straight to the devil,” said the second. “And they ain’t going nowhere in any case.” I didn’t understand who ‘they’ were, as yet, but I had no doubts whatsoever about who ‘Black Johnny’ was. Of course, if the men of the Hammer ‘n’ Tongs had been as handy with a moniker as they were at breaking and entering, their resident lunatic would surely have been called Black Jack, but I was in no position to correct them.

  “I’ll hold yer coat for ya while ya tells ol’ Johnny where he oughta go, shall I?” said the first man. The second man made a rude but otherwise unintelligible noise over this, while the first continued speaking. “Black Johnny’ll not be a factor. And I tell ya, those Deirdres’ll be right there where we left ‘em, hidin’ out just around that bend. Now where’d ya put them bullets?” Apparently we weren’t the only ones low on ammunition.

  “They’re in with the batteries,” said the other. “If I was them I’d send a man around the ‘leg firin’ that pistol for all I was worth. If he was smart enough to keep his lamp out, we’d never know he was there ‘til we was full a holes.”

  “So why d’ ya think they ain’t done it already, old cock? Cuz they ain’t got the bullets is why.” The man had guessed at our, or really Perkins’s, dilemma, and he had guessed correctly. “You sure they’re in here?” It took a moment for me to figure out he was talking about the bullets, not Garrett and Perkins. “Damn if there ain’t—ah, here they are. Now hand over that pistol. Two c’n play at guns a-blazin’, only if they had more bullets I ‘spect we�
��d a heard plenty outta them by now.”

  Somehow we had to warn Perkins that these men were freshly loaded for Deirdres and ready to go on the attack, and in my agitation I had almost said as much to Bemis and “blown the gaff,” as they say backstage at the carnival.

  “Good thing Black Johnny gave over a pistol,” said one, the one who had not consigned Black Johnny to the devil, I believe. And this was good news, of a sort. It appeared that they had only the one pistol after all.

  “He ain’t gonna need it where he’s goin’,” said the other, the one who had consigned Black Johnny to the devil. I must say that carrying a loaded pistol with you on your way into Hell is a notion pregnant with theological possibilities, but it is just as surely a question best left for another day. “Not with the dynamite he’s carrying,” said the same voice. Taking a box full of dynamite with you into Hades would up the ante considerably, and is worthy of further discussion. However, I soon began to suspect that Perdition was not Black Johnny’s immediate destination, although it was hard to imagine that the proprietor of that notorious establishment didn’t have his lodgings already set aside.

  “Crazy as a shit-house rat, you ask me,” said the other man.

  “True enough,” the first chuckled. “He’ll put a quick end to these thieving Deirdres though, blowin’ their resonance engine to kingdom come.”

  “Not the engine!” shouted Bemis.

  Against all odds and expectations, it was Calvin who had blown the gaff.

  “Who’s that?” said the first man.

  “Twern’t me, Bob,” insisted the second.

  “Deirdres!” they shouted together.

  Bemis, who knew full well that he was responsible, wasted no time in pushing me back down the tunnel. I wasted no time at all in complying. I went through the first dogleg at a run, or as close to it as I could manage in a pressure suit, with Calvin bumping me along from behind. I saw the walls around me light up suddenly then disappear again, and I knew they were firing the pistol at us. I plunged with even greater speed into the second, or perhaps it was the third, dogleg with Bemis still close behind me, then saw the reflection of another flash on the wall of the bend.

  “Calvin, are you—”

  “I’m all right,” he interrupted. ”Although I think a bullet hit one of my air cylinders. Just keep moving.” I kept moving, running in total darkness, except for the occasional flash from the pistol.

  This went along fine until I stepped into the hole, otherwise known as the improvised entrance into D3-4. I fell awkwardly into said hole, and Calvin, coming along right behind me, tripped over whatever parts of my haggis hadn’t gone in yet, and fell on top of me.

  “In, in!” he shouted, and I hurried to get the remainder of my haggis into the minuscule passage. Once I had moved a short distance up the minus four tunnel, Bemis leapt in, then stopped to pile up as much debris as possible into the space between himself and the hole, no doubt hoping this would discommode our pursuers.

  After that we half-ran and half-crawled through the low tunnel, acting like a pair of gophers pursued by a cottonmouth. When we reached D3 itself, where we could nearly stand, we redoubled our pace, and in a remarkably short time we shot through the entrance to the D line, where several men stood doing nothing useful that I could see, except for one, who dealt me a ringing blow to the helmet with a shovel. The quick-witted imbecile wielding the shovel turned out to be Chalk.

  “Chalk!” I hollered. “It’s me. Clemens. Are you trying to kill me all over again?”

  “My apologies, Samuel,” he said. “Thought you was one a them.”

  “Well, that’s something, I suppose,” I said. “They’re right behind us,” I added more usefully. “And they’re firing at us with a pistol, so be prepared. Where’s the captain?”

  “Was here, but he’s gone off again,” Chalk said.

  “I’m going to warn Mister Lovelace,” Calvin said, and departed immediately.

  I looked around to take the measure of our forces. “Is Perkins still in the D3?” I asked. “And Garrett?”

  “Far as we know,” said Watkins, but he was wrong.

  A moment later, a haggis came plunging through the sally port at a run, yelling, “It’s me. Garrett. Perkins is right behind me.” I could have tried this, and perhaps avoided a blow to the head, but I was busy and it hadn’t occurred to me at the time.

  Foolishly, I turned and looked down the tunnel, hoping to see Perkins trotting into the glare of our cluster of helmet lamps. Instead I saw a flash, then another, soon followed by the sound of a voice I knew well.

  “Booger! Booger me. Booger booger booger!” Perkins dove across the threshold of the sally port just as another flash shone behind him—and a bullet, its energy fortunately largely spent, ricocheted off Watkins’s helmet. Perkins stood up, then threw the six-gun in his glove to the ground. “Out of boogerin’ bullets.”

  “Unfortunately, they have plenty,” I said.

  “Oh, Clemens,” he said. “Good to see you’re all right. Where’s Bemis?”

  “He went to warn Mister Lovelace. You see, we found out that—”

  “Captain!” Perkins cried, derailing my revelations. Merriwether stepped into the penumbra of lamplight in the antechamber. “Captain, do you have the other pistol? Or more ammunition at least?”

  Captain Merriwether handed him the second six-gun without hesitation. Perkins immediately faced the sally port and peered into it, hoping, I’m sure, to spy something to shoot at.

  Then Merriwether drew open a small sack and took out a stick of dynamite. “Can one of you men prepare this?” he said quietly. “My hands are trembling too much to secure the cap, I fear.”

  Much to my surprise, I reached over and took the sack and the dynamite from his gloves, saying, “I can do it, Captain. Mister Perkins has taught me how,” and I opened the sack and began to assemble the charge.

  “Thank you,” he mumbled distractedly, then said, “Who is that?”

  “Clemens, sir,” I said.

  He said, “Pleased to see you’re learning, Clemens.” Despite the pleasantries, I felt rather distinctly that I was attending a funeral, or at best a wake.

  “What’s that for, Cap’n?” said Chalk.

  “To seal the D line,” he said. Several of the men exclaimed in surprise.

  “Never you fret now, Cap’n,” said Chalk. “We’ll stop ‘em, sure’s yer born. Ain’t that right, Samuel?” I said nothing, being much preoccupied with preparing the D’s destruction. “Why, we’ll run ‘em clear back ta Lucky Strike. You jus’ give the word.” This was big talk from a man who had spent the afternoon watching the sally port from the outside, but still I said nothing.

  Captain Merriwether said, “Thank’y, Chalk, but that won’t be necessary. This,” he pointed at the dynamite I was preparing, “will keep them bottled up in the Ds while we pack our kit.”

  “Pack our kit?” said Winters, at least I think it was Winters. “Are ya sayin’, sir, that we’re to abandon ship? We can lick the bastards, Cap’n, honest we can.” This from the other man who had spent the day outside the sally port.

  “I have no doubt we could—you’re a fine crew,” said the captain. “But if they want the Deirdre so badly, then they can have it.” This brought on a shower of protests from, as far as I could tell, everyone except me—my attention was largely confined to the dynamite—and Perkins, who was lurking somewhere beyond the mouth of the tunnel, still looking for something to shoot. No one wanted to come right out and call the captain a coward, not to his faceplate, but the accusation was as palpable as if the word had been carved into the wall.

  “They want it all right, the nasty boogers.” This was Perkins of course, still inside the D line, but clearly within radioing distance. “Do we have any more bullets?”

  “Garrett. Watkins. One of you go help Mister Perkins to hold them off. And take some ammunition.” A pair of helmets turned to face each other, and then one of them took up the pistol Perkins ha
d discarded and the lone box of six-gun shells, and ran into the tunnel after him. Merriwether then turned to me. “Clemens, are you ready with that stick?”

  “Yes, Captain,” I said solemnly. “But I have no experience with laying a charge.”

  “That’s fine,” he said. “I’ll place it.” He took the stick of dynamite, with its blasting cap and attendant wiring attached, and I took up the spool, preparing to unreel the wire behind him. He took a step toward the entrance and the rain of objections began again.

  The captain barked, “Stow it,” then, once the protests had been duly stowed, he sighed and said, “Can’t you men see, the Deirdre is played out.” This precipitated yet another downpour of protests. “I didn’t want to believe it either,” he continued, once the squall had passed. “That’s why I brought all this on us by reopening the D2—but it isn’t any use, men. There’s no ice left to be had in this hole. The Hammer ‘n’ Tongs boys can have it. They’ll find nothing but rock.”

  There was still a light drizzle of objections, then Perkins’s voice came over the radio. “Captain’s right, boys, sorry to say. Right as rain.” Not a drop of protest followed. “You know I’d tell you, I didn’t think it were so, but the cap’n’s steerin’ you true. For better or worse, we’re done here. Now let’s have that dynamite in here before I get killed.”

  Captain Merriwether and the dynamite went through the sally port. A minute later, he, Perkins, and Garrett came back out, and the dynamite did not.

  “Is everyone accounted for?” asked the captain.

  “I believe so,” Perkins said, “except—Clemens, where’s Bemis?”

  “Oh Lord,” I said.

  “Is he still in the D3?”

  “No,” I said quickly. “He went to help Mister Lovelace.” By now, Merriwether had uncoiled a substantial length of wire and ordered everyone around the nearest dogleg. Taking my usual place face down on the ground, I continued, “While we were lurking in the D3 minus four—no, make that the minus two—we heard two of the devils say Black Johnny—that’s their name for Jones—that Black Johnny had gone to blow up the Deirdre’s resonance engine.”