Then he looked over his shoulder, more or less in my direction, and shouted, “You can let him loose now, Sam.” He looked above him into the dark vertical hole, and appeared satisfied by what he saw. At least Lovelace hadn’t fallen back and landed on him, so something was going right. Still, I was far from certain that letting loose of Black Johnny was a good idea. The steam inside the engine room was very thick by then, but apparently Bemis could see me being beaten against the side of the resonance engine like a carpet at spring cleaning, and concluded that I might be in need of some help. And suddenly he was holding Black Johnny’s pistol. I assume he pulled the trigger and got no satisfaction, although I felt a sliver of it over being right.
He shouted, “Duck, Sam!” and threw the pistol at Black Johnny’s head. As I had obediently ducked, and closed my eyes for good measure, I didn’t see where or how the pistol landed, but I heard Jones yelp with pain, then bellow with rage, and knew Calvin had hit the mark.
Jones released his grip on the pipe and fell to the catwalk. I let go of him in mid-flight and landed awkwardly on one foot in front of him, teetering on my toes like a prima ballerina, then leapt at the opening to the shaft, into which Bemis had just disappeared. I grabbed the center pole as I shot past—even experienced men invariably overshoot any leap made on the Moon—and thus spun myself around it, only to see Black Johnny, now on his feet, prepare to leap after me. I glanced up into the dark hole above me, saw that Bemis had successfully vacated the premises, bent my legs, and shot upward, raising my hands to guard against hitting my head on the ceiling at the top of the shaft, since of course I had pushed off with too much force. Then, just as I saw light at the upper end of the tunnel, an arm reached down and grabbed me by the hair, my luxuriant red hair, and pulled. This was help I did not need, or so I thought for the better part of a second, then another hand grabbed my ankle from below, on the leg that had recently been abused of course. So Black Johnny had me by one end and, presumably, Calvin Bemis had me by the other. I continued moving upward, however, and soon Bemis had pulled me out of the shaft entirely, and Jones, still clutching my ankle, came half out of it as well, smearing the edge of the shaft with wet black slush as he came. There was a crowd of men gathered about the top of the shaft, most still in their pressure suits, helmets held by one glove. Black Johnny let go of my ankle and staggered to his feet, or to his boots, as the case may be.
Someone more observant than I said, “He’s still got the dynamite.”
“That’s right, ya barstard,” Jones said, “so you’d best keep well back.” He paused and appeared to consider a moment, then said, “Still, yer engine’s gotta go, an’ I got plenty a wire, don’t I.” He held the electrical condenser that would detonate the blasting cap in one hand and the sticks of dynamite in the other, and after a second he tossed the dynamite into the hole. As the deadly package fell, the wires uncoiled, and Jones, along with all the rest of us, saw that they had got themselves looped around one of his boots. Perkins raised his helmet in a bid to hit Jones over the head when he bent to pull the wires loose, but just as Perkins swung, Jones slipped on the slush at his feet. He pitched forward, dropping the slush-coated condenser, Perkins’s helmet sailed over his head, and he fell down into the shaft after his dynamite, cursing as he went. The condenser fell to the deck and Bemis made a grab for it, but then it jerked, flew up, and struck the pole in the center of the shaft. I saw a spark, and an instant later there came a deafening clap of thunder, and a combination of smoke, flame, foul air, and perhaps parts of Black Johnny Jones erupted out of the hole.
All the men, including me, were flung entirely out of the vestibule by the blast, and found ourselves scattered around the belowdecks like autumn leaves, singed by the flame, coughing and choking on the noxious fumes, and our ears ringing from the force of the explosion. I looked around me and saw—nothing. The electric bulb thereabouts had been extinguished in the blast, along with the rest of the electrical systems, our source of heat, and most cruelly, our source of air.
Chapter Eleven
“Get your pressure gear on!” shouted Perkins.
Fortunately, most of the men still wore their pressure suits. They quickly donned helmets and started their air, and soon thereafter several headlamps came alight, casting beams that swung about in the smoke like lighthouse beacons trying to pierce a thick fog. I scrambled over to where I’d left my haggis and began to climb into it. Bemis was doing the same beside me, while Mister Lovelace ran to collect his little-used gear from the airlock chamber where it was stowed. While suiting up, I automatically reached for my helmet, then remembered I’d inadvertently left it with Mister Kent. The air was exceedingly foul in the belowdecks, even at that early stage of the Deirdre’s demise, and I tried to hold my breath for as long as I could stand while I worked to get inside my suit. Then I leapt up and ran into the tunnel leading to the galley, coughing up smoke and dust as I went. The air grew gradually better as I approached Mister Kent’s chambers, and I was able to enter the galley breathing in a more or less normal fashion, but I knew that luxury would not be available for much longer.
“Clemens,” cried Mister Kent, “thank goodness you’re here.” Now that was a greeting I could grow accustomed to, I thought. “Mister Lang is going to need some assistance getting into his pressure suit, and you might help me as well, if you will. I must admit that I spend as little time inside of a pressure suit as is possible, considering my circumstances. I find them—uncomfortably confining.” He had unearthed a haggis, presumably his own, from somewhere, and had activated its headlamp, otherwise I could have seen nothing. Using its light, I retrieved my own helmet, placed it over my head, sealed it, and started the flow of air. Its metallic tang tasted sweet after sampling the smoky residue of the exploded resonance engine. I wondered, in passing, how long my present supply of air would last, and where exactly the next life-preserving cylinder would come from.
Kent was twisting the strands of his great beard into locks, then using bits of twine to tie these together into festoons. He continued speaking as he performed these strange ablutions, and despite being sealed into my dear haggis, I found I could still hear him in muted tones, since there was still air, if only of a poor sort, beyond my faceplate.
He said, “I assume from the darkness and the increasingly unhealthful atmosphere that you have failed to save the resonance engine.” I wanted to assure him that, although what he’d said was true, the failure had not been entirely mine. But, since the statement was likely rhetorical, and further, since I suspected that any reply originating from within my haggis would be unintelligible, I only nodded my helmet in his direction and went to assist Mister Lang.
He lay on the filth-strewn floor of the now un-illuminated chicken coop—not a place anyone would choose to lie down if he could help it—and fought to get his wounded limb into the leg of his suit, grunting and grimacing with the pain of the effort.
“Clemens.” His voice came faintly through my sealed helmet. “Thank heavens.” I wondered briefly if I should frequent more disasters. “Help get me into this, will you? Kent is worse than useless.”
I crouched down and untangled the suit’s legs, and repositioned the boots, which were already attached, so that the haggis would behave itself upon Lang’s arrival. I saw that someone—presumably Lang himself, upon resuming consciousness—had patched the bullet hole in the thigh. Tend to your pressure gear first, and bind up your own wounds when you find the time; that is a motto to stay alive by in these parts. I slowly pulled Lang’s suit up his legs and over his hips, then assisted him into the upper section as well, as he was still more or less lying down. He checked the seals, secured his helmet, and almost immediately began speaking again.
I switched on my radio. “—Jones had his revenge? Is Mister Lovelace—”
I interrupted, in order to move things along. “Black Johnny destroyed the entire engine room, I expect. He carried three sticks of dynamite.”
“Good Lord.” Lang made
as if to rise, so I helped him to his feet. “Black Johnny?” he said.
“That’s what the men of the Hammer ‘n’ Tongs called Jones.”
“I see. How many were killed? Is Mister Lovelace still—”
“As far as I know, only Jones was killed,” I said. “But the Deirdre itself is finished, I’m afraid.”
“You should have let me put a bullet into him,” he growled.
“It was not up to me,” I said. “How to employ the pistols, that is.”
“I see that,” he said. “Only they’re your pistols, you know. We were unarmed before you and Bemis arrived.” So the captain’s precious pistols were really our precious pistols, once upon a time. No wonder everyone in authority kept asking me if I could hit anything with them.
I left the coop then, wondering for an instant what would become of the chickens. I wished the scrofulous rooster, who had performed his tedious arias non-stop during my convalescence, a swift trip to the devil, but I feared for the hens, expecting that, short of an heroic rescue, they would end their excursion to the Moon as vacuum jerky, feathers and all.
I returned to the galley to find Mister Kent stripped to his red under-drawers. With his ample girth, voluminous beard, and those red drawers, he looked like Kris Kringle, albeit a bewildered Kris Kringle gone wildly off course in his yuletide rounds. I helped him get into his pressure suit, as requested, taking particular care that the festoons of beard were not snagged on the neck ring when the helmet locked into place.
Meanwhile, Mister Lang said, “We have to gather up everything of value, especially water, air cylinders, foodstuffs, spare parts, and tools, and get it to the belowdecks, or better yet, take it directly to the airlock. It’s a shame we don’t have the hods to haul it, but they were all in the D line. Wrap as much of it as you can in blankets, or anything you can find.” True to his word, he began piling pots, cooking utensils, a sack of beans, and an assortment of unruly root vegetables onto his former bedclothes. He added, “Hammocks will serve best for transporting the larger items.” Lang was what the gamblers loafing in the texas would have called a “cool customer”—obviously in considerable pain, but out of his sickbed and directing the evacuation pretty much without pausing for breath.
Mister Kent, on the other hand, was nearly hysterical.
Panic, if not promptly checked, is as good as a death sentence when inside a pressure suit, and I immediately went about settling him down—not by directing him to calm himself, since that is rarely effective, but by diverting his attention to something else, preferably something that wasn’t about to try to kill him.
“What shall we do about the livestock, Mister Kent?” I said.
“Livestock? What livestock?” Make the panicked man think, if you possibly can. “W-we have no livestock, Clemens.” He paused. “We had a goat once upon a time, but it liked to chew at the men’s air hoses, so we were obliged to eat it.”
“The chickens,” I said. “Is there a way to save them, do you think? If nothing else, they are meat on the hoof. So to speak.”
“True,” said Kent, almost chuckling, which was an excellent sign. “But I’ll be damned if I know how to do it. They’re surprisingly robust—I believe they actually like it here—but I doubt they could survive for any length of time in the vacuum.” Kent’s voice faltered then. “Will there be a pressure tent available for the return trip to civilization, Percy? That would suit the hens admirably, and honestly, myself as well. I fear I’ll go mad if I have to remain in this—thing—for even a fraction of the trip. And you—your wound will need attention as well.”
Lang said, “I’ll see what I can do, Mister Kent. Now you’d best collect up your medicines and the like.”
“Very well,” Kent said. “May I remove the helmet for a spell?”
“You may not,” said Lang definitively, then added, “What we need is a spare pressure suit.”
“What for?” I asked.
“For the livestock, Clemens.”
“Oh. Yes,” I agreed, soon grasping his intentions.
“The problem would be getting them inside it,” Lang said.
“Chalk might be able to help with that,” said Kent, who was busy loading a trunk, and seemed to have himself under control for the moment. “The birds seem to like him more than most.”
“Due to a similar cast of mind, no doubt,” said I.
“No doubt,” agreed Kent.
Lang said, “He’s a better miner than you are, Clemens, and perhaps the best I’ve ever seen at moving about on the surface.”
I said, “He’s a genius at Lunar terpsichore. I’ll grant him that.”
“What’s a topsy-turvy then, Samuel?” came Chalk’s distinctive voice, and a second later a small grease-streaked haggis hove into view at the mouth of the forward tunnel. He was also a prodigy at sneaking up on a fellow, I decided.
“Oh, Chalk,” Lang said. “Start hauling all this kit to the airlock. I’ll stay put for now and continue loading supplies into hammocks and the like. Mister Kent assures me I’ll pay dearly for it if I run around on this leg.”
“Aye, Mister Lang,” answered Chalk.
“Clemens, you go with him,” Lang said, then added, “Chalk, is there a spare pressure suit in stores?”
“Well now,” said Chalk, “I believe the cap’n keeps a extra set a gear. He’s in the belowdecks now, directing the men how ta go about abandoning ship, an’ I’ll ask after it if ya likes. Who should I say is to be wearin’ it?”
“We thought it might suit the chickens,” I said.
“Dear me,” said Chalk. “Not sure how that’ll suit the cap’n.”
“Never mind that. Just bring it here,” said Lang. “Now start moving this kit.”
Chalk and I each took up as much in the way of supplies as we could manage, the limiting factor being not the weight, which was negligible as usual, but the size of one’s bindle compared to the tunnel’s stingy diameter.
We negotiated the passage in question and dropped our loads in the antechamber before the airlock, which was already piled high with hastily wrapped goods from the belowdecks. All the scene needed for Christmas was a fresh-cut fir tree and Mister Kent prancing around it in his under-drawers. Chalk then went in search of the captain’s spare haggis, while I started up the passage leading to the belowdecks. I didn’t get far before I ran into Calvin Bemis coming the other way, dragging a hammock piled high with air cylinders—and piled rather too high, I decided, since a party of them would jump ship whenever the hammock hit a rough patch. I suppose by now I don’t need to tell you how many of those there were.
I would have had to demolish the entire unruly edifice of cylinders, and somehow dispose of Bemis as well, in order to get by, so I bowed to the inevitable and backed out of the passage, meanwhile collecting any cylinders and other gear that had gone overboard and fetched up within my reach.
“I can only hope these are all full,” I said of the air cylinders. It was the rigorously enforced custom of the Deirdres to refill any and all cylinders depleted during their forays into the tunnels immediately upon returning to the belowdecks. Bemis and I had failed to do this when in pursuit of Black Johnny, however, and I suspected others had made the same mistake.
“Most are, but there’re a few that are low. Be sure to check the gauge before you try one on,” he said. I checked a gauge and found that I was carrying one of the miscreants in my arms. “Sam,” Calvin said, then he paused portentously.
“Yes, Calvin?” I prompted.
“Sam, Captain Merriwether is planning on taking all the Deirdres back to Lucky Strike. And once there, he intends to pay each man what he’s owed and return to New England.”
“That’s more or less what I had expected,” I said, then looked around to find that I’d backed myself all the way to the airlock chamber. I selected a vacant spot beside a pyramid of water containers and began to unship the air cylinders that had not deserted the hammock during the trip. While doing this I noticed that m
y headlamp was going dim, and soon found that I could worry over spent batteries just as easily as I could over depleted air cylinders.
“So what do you think about that?” Calvin pressed.
As for that conversation, I was thoroughly in the dark. I placed the final cylinder on top of its fellows, stood up straight, and said, “What are you driving at, Calvin?”
“Well, I don’t know about you, Sam, but that’s not where I want to go.”
“So where is it you—” Light dawned like I’d just installed a fresh battery. “Ahh,” I said, “Now that you mention it, neither do I. I could never forgive myself if I had to go back to picking.”
“I still intend to go prospecting,” he said affirmatively. “And now that we know something about how it’s done, our prospects should improve.”
“Calvin,” I marveled, “was that a pun?”
“What? Sam, do you want to go prospecting or not?”
“Absolutely, Calvin. Positively, unequivocally, and without a doubt. Despite the fact that, thanks to the Deirdre, I now know better.” Then I had a thought, and right away it began to worry at me, pushing the empty air cylinders and depleted batteries temporarily to the back of the line. I said, “Will Merriwether want the Beast, do you think?”
“He’d better not,” Bemis said.
And Chalk reappeared, carrying a fine-looking pressure suit slung across his shoulders.
I said, “It’s a matter of how well fixed we are for supplies, I should think.” I waved an arm at the loot surrounding us.
“If they have a working resonance engine and water enough, they should be fine,” Bemis said. “Then again, we’ll need plenty of water for the Beast.”
I said, “Chalk, do you know if the digger Garrett and Watkins arrived in is operational?”
“I reckon so,” he said. “But I’s hardly the one ta be askin’ that of. I come ta tell ya, cap’n wants all hands to muster here at the airlock in half a glass, ready to leave.”
The Deirdre Page 14