The Deirdre

  “Cuz Black Johnny done it!” said the gunman in triumph. “Di’n’t kill ‘em all outright, but still he done it. Wrecked their engine, don’cha see. That’s why there’s no lights, and they’s all wearin’ their gear.” Then, “What’ve ya done with him then, ya thievin’ barstards? Where’s our Johnny?”

  “He’s dead,” said the captain. “Blew himself to atoms, and the Deirdre with him, damn his eyes.”

  “Told ya he done it. An’ they kilt him for it, ya see.”

  “Get out now or I promise you I’ll shoot,” insisted Perkins, running his bluff again.

  “Not afore I shoot you,” came the response.

  Sensing weakness in our opponent, I decided to try turning Perkins’s bluff on its head.

  “Go on and get out now,“ I said with a casual insouciance, as if the invading men were a pack of bothersome pups gamboling through my kitchen. “You can’t fool us. There’s no bullets in that gun.”

  The silence that ensued was just long enough to constitute a tell, but not quite long enough to make the diagnosis certain. “Hell there ain’t,” the man said at last, and I knew then that his gun was as empty as the two of ours.

  “Shoot me then,” barked Perkins, getting into the spirit of the thing. Clearly, he was as convinced of the pistol’s impotence as I.

  “No, you shoot me first,” the man insisted. This deathless exchange was too much for me, and before I could check myself I laughed out loud, ruining the fun.

  “Get out!” shouted Perkins, and like Bemis had done with Black Jonny, he threw the empty gun at the man’s head. It struck him dead on the money—he was only about a dozen feet away—and rebounded into the Christmas presents. Simultaneously, a crooked star of cracks spread across the man’s faceplate.

  He took no time to consider, but straight away descended into panic. The pistol fell from his glove, and he said, his voice quavering, “You done it now. Air’s no good in here, is it? Deadly, most like. You gone an’ kilt me, ya barstards.” Black Johnny had infected the lot of them with his distinctive style of profanity, I decided.

  “Go back to the Hammer ‘n’ Tongs then, and good riddance,” said Mister Lang.

  “Oh Lord, I kin smell the rotten air,” the man whined.

  “Quit yer bellyachin’, Bob,” said another of the men. “You ain’t dying. Put some patching compound on it.” He gestured at the heaps of gear. “There’s bound to be plenty in all this junk.” Bob did as he was told, and the other man, whom I took to be their leader, turned back to us and said, “We ain’t goin’ nowhere. Hammer ‘n’ Tongs ain’t producin’ like she used to, so we mean to have the Deirdre. Black Johnny explained it to us plenty a times. Said it’s ours by right, clear an’ legal, once you gone and jumped our claim.”

  “A madman, a jonah, and a sea lawyer to boot,” said Captain Merriwether.

  “We didn’t intend to jump your claim,” Lang said.

  Their leader just snorted at that.

  “Not that it’s any of your business,” said the captain, “but as it happens the Deirdre is played out.”

  “Played out, huh,” said the invader. His tone was skeptical, like the man who, although he may be unable to prove it, is still pretty certain that the child isn’t his. “A course you’re gonna say it’s played out, aren’t ya? Nossir. That dog won’t hunt. You’d best try again.” I could almost see the wry, contemptuous smile on his face.

  “Why else would we be abandoning her then?” insisted Merriwether, gesturing at the Christmas heap.

  “Black Johnny blew up yer engine is why. Can’t work the Deirdre without yer engine.” I could just make out his grin behind his faceplate. “But we can.”

  “Think what you like then,” Merriwether growled. “You can all of you go straight to the devil. Now stand aside.”

  There was a moment of quiet, then the leader said, “We’ll have your supplies and your spare gear in any case.”

  “The hell you will,” said Lang, raising himself off the vacuum jerky. “There’s more of us than there are of you.”

  “It would be a mercy to shoot us if you intend to take the supplies,” mumbled Mister Lovelace. “Without air and water we’re as good as dead.”

  “Start puttin’ it in the ‘lock, boys,” their leader said, then turned to add, “You’d best not try to stop us. There’s plenty more men outside the ‘lock, you know.”

  “How’re they fixed for bullets?” said Perkins, reaching for a stout length of pipe, and I sensed Mister Lang eyeing the bundle containing Mister Kent’s knives.

  “Oh dear,” murmured Kent.

  It looked to me, and no doubt to everyone else present, as if a major donnybrook was about to ensue. It was the predictable end to such a standoff, I suppose, and is certainly the perennial favorite course of action amongst young men in conflict everywhere else I have ever been. The assembled Deirdres did indeed outnumber the men in the airlock, and likely still would after adding in any others that might be waiting their turn outside it. And yet, it seemed equally as obvious to me that no one there had much of an appetite for the project, not even the intrepid Mister Perkins, and I knew perfectly well why. In the end, success at such an enterprise could only be gauged by comparing the magnitude of each side’s destruction. If your side punched more holes in, or otherwise seriously damaged, more of the other side’s haggises than the other side did of yours, then you were the winner, even if the victors were as full of holes as a colander and dying from asphyxiation. I was feeling very fond of my haggis about then, and I didn’t welcome any sort of shenanigans, however noble and steeped in glory they might be, that threatened to derail its crucial mission of keeping me alive. I expect everyone else, with the possible exception of the late Black Johnny Jones, saw things in more or less the same way. Nevertheless, it seemed little short of a certainty that we would all soon come to blows. But as it happened, I had a different idea, and I reckoned there was nothing to be lost in trying it, except my reputation for veracity.

  “Captain,” I said, with a mighty, if wholly feigned, resignation, “it’s no use. That Black Johnny licked us, licked us good, even if he did go to his maker in doin’ it.” This caused confused, disgruntled grumbling amongst the Deirdres, but I ignored it and steamed ahead. “Just tell them the truth and we can get away from here.”

  “Shut your gob, Clemens,” growled Perkins, and I wondered if he had divined my intentions, or if he simply wanted me to stop talking on general principles.

  “Let him speak,” said the lead invader.

  So I said, “I don’t suppose you stopped to examine the rock we’d blasted out right before you came barging into the D line?” I knew full well they hadn’t. And they did too.

  “What about it?” said the leader.

  “Clemens!” hollered Perkins, and an instant later he lunged at me, his gloved hands clutching at my throat, which looked impressive, even if we both knew that the organ he sought was entirely beyond his reach. I decided to add playacting to Perkins’s already long list of useful abilities. Captain Merriwether and Bemis added to the show by stepping forward to pummel me, uselessly, about the haggis. All they needed to do to silence me was yank the air hose out of my regulator, or any of a dozen other things that would have put a quick and ugly end to my ravings, but it’s the drama that makes the performance, don’t you know, and a clutch of fellows punching and kicking a man from every side makes for far better drama, and in this case far less actual injury, than any of them. Besides, if my scheme was performing up to expectations, the men of the Hammer ‘n’ Tongs would be so pleased that the attack on me was ineffective that they wouldn’t stop to consider why that was.

  “There’s no ice in that rock, it’s true,” I began, trying to sound as put upon as I looked. Calvin was directly in front of me, and as his gloved fists bounced harmlessly off my partially inflated chest, I caught a glimpse of the grin beyond his faceplate. None of the Deirdres likely had any idea what I was up to, not even Bemis, but to their gre
at credit, they had faith in my well-known ability to confabulate, and were likewise enjoying their part in the play.

  “But what there is,” I said then, “is heavy metals.”

  “Clemens, you’re a dead man,” Perkins spat.

  “Iron by the ton, I expect,” I continued. “And gold.”

  “Gold?” two of the invaders said together, with equal parts avarice and awe.

  “Nuggets as big as your thumb,“ I said, throwing caution, but hopefully not all credibility, to the wind.

  “Why do you betray us?” moaned the captain, plunging further into the act. “Have we not been good to you? Treated you fairly?”

  I remembered Black Johnny’s antics then, and prepared to hurl myself into the role like I was Wilkes Booth himself hamming it up in his latest moving picture.

  Then a skeptical-sounding Chalk said, “Well now, I been in that line plenty, an’ I don’t recall any—” Unlike Perkins and the others, he must have slept through the first act.

  “Arr, the tyrant Merriwether and his evil henchman Lang,” I shouted, stomping smartly on Chalk’s inconvenient recollections. “The two a you made the Deirdre a prison, a foul dungeon, a rotten stinking hellhole, where a slow and painful death is the only sure escape.” I took a moment to struggle fruitlessly against the Deirdres. “I dares you ta say it ain’t so, ya evil barstards.” And indeed the captain, Mister Lang, and the others dared not say anything of the kind, not just then, and they continued to beat on me like a drum, presumably to keep the drama up to par. “And these men,” I hollered, “these fine upstanding, generous gentlemen—far better than the likes of you, ya barstards—why, they have a working engine.”

  I threw off my attackers then, with surprising ease, and turned to face my new friends from the Hammer ‘n’ Tongs. “So I’ll join up with you men,” I declared smugly. This brought only silence, and a few more half-hearted blows from the amateur thespians. “I’ll show you right where it is, too, I will. And I only expects what’s rightfully comin’ to me in return. An equal share is all I ask, maybe a nugget or two more for my trouble. Nothing extravagant.”

  The lead invader laughed, as I’d hoped he would. “Go ta hell, mister. What do we want with you? Went an’ told us everything we needs ta know, now didn’t ya.” And he laughed again. “Come on, boys. Let’s go dig us some gold.” And with that the four men turned, opened the outer hatch, and, the foul wind of the Deirdre’s ruined air at their backs, ran off to find their fortunes in gold.

  There was no gold in the D line of course, but then there were no additional miners waiting outside the airlock either, so by my calculations we were even.

  The eleven of us stood motionless, seemingly afraid that the slightest perturbations would somehow undo our bizarre deliverance. At last someone tried to break the silence with what I believe was to be my name, but he was immediately silenced by Mister Lang. “Don’t make a sound,” he whispered. “Not ‘til we’re sure they’ve gone.”

  Perkins, obeying Lang’s admonition, mimed something to the effect of “I’ll trail them for a while, at a safe distance” and went through the now wide-open airlock. A light breeze of highly questionable atmosphere still blew through it, ruffling the hammocks.

  When Perkins was gone, Merriwether gestured for us to disable our radios, then drew Bemis, Garrett, and myself to him, so that we could touch our helmets together and talk. Unbidden, Chalk put his helmet against mine.

  “Clemens,” our former captain said, once helmets had been assembled, “I’m pleased to see that we finally found a use for that rogue tongue of yours. But it won’t last. They’ll be back here before long, and hopping mad no doubt.”

  “Particularly at me,” I said.

  “No doubt,” agreed the captain. “I expect we could take them, given our superior numbers—always assuming they don’t have another box of shells stowed somewhere—but I see no point in such a fight. Men would end up injured or dead, and valuable gear destroyed, even if we were victorious. So we shall apportion the supplies as best we can, load up the sleds, and take our leave of the Deirdre as soon as possible.”

  “There’s quite a lot of useful, and salable, machinery yet to be salvaged,” came a voice, which I soon recognized as that of Mister Lovelace. He must have risen and found a place for his helmet in the scrum. “The engine is certainly destroyed, to my infinite regret, but the valves, fittings, gauges, pipes, tubing, and the like in the belowdecks alone—”

  “Quite right, Mister Lovelace,” said the captain. “I’m pleased to see that you have recovered yourself sufficiently to return to your duties. Take Winters, and perhaps Chalk—are you still taking orders from me, Gottschalk?”

  “Aye, Cap’n. A course, Cap’n. I only—”

  “Fine. Then you and Winters help Mister Lovelace to salvage as much as he can before we’re forced to depart. Put whatever you collect in the remaining two ore cars. And mind what Mister Lovelace tells you. There’s no point in hauling out a parcel of trash. Now, off with you.”

  “Aye,” said Chalk and Winters together, and they and Mister Lovelace left the scrum.

  “Now, Garrett—are you there?”

  “Yessir,” Garrett said.

  “Good. You and Watkins go and get your machine ready to travel. You’ll need some water.” He gestured at a pile of containers. “Inform myself or Mister Lovelace immediately if you encounter any difficulties. Without your digger’s resonance engine performing properly, we are as good as pooped. Mister Bemis, I trust you can do the same for your machine. Clemens can assist you, or else start hauling out supplies. You men will need water and other goods, but it’s not possible to say how much you’re likely to need without knowing where it is you’re going. Do you have a destination, Mister Bemis?” It was clear from his tone that Merriwether thought we were making a mistake to go off on our own.

  “Not at the moment,” Calvin admitted.

  “Mister Clemens?”

  I said, “I think we should consult Mister Perkins before we decide.”

  “That would be wise, I expect,” Merriwether agreed. “In the meantime, Mister Lang and I will try to determine as exactly as possible how much water, grub, and other kit we will need to get nine men safely to Lucky Strike. What remains of the supplies is yours. If it is not sufficient—” I sensed a shrug. “—then what course you steer after that is up to you.”

  “Here’s Perkins now,” said Bemis.

  Perkins instantly grasped the situation and joined the scrum.

  “They appear to have bought Clemens’s story, at least for the moment,” he said. “They were quite a distance into the D line by the time I started back.”

  “Very good,” Merriwether said. “I believe we can reactivate the radios then.” We all did so, and Merriwether continued directing the evacuation.

  It was decided that, while Calvin worked to revive the Beast, and Mister Lang and the captain divvied up the supplies, Perkins and I should assemble the tents the two parties would require for their respective journeys, secure each to the appropriate conveyance, such as a sled or a parade float, inflate same, and outfit them with the supplies and other gear that each would need. This was a formidable task, but it appealed to me, or my pride anyway. As the reader may recall, my first bout with a vacuum tent—so very long ago it seemed by then—had been decided overwhelmingly in favor of the tent. The way I saw it, I had the right to a rematch, and with Mister Perkins in my corner, I felt certain that this time I should emerge victorious, or at least manage a draw.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I hadn’t thought to ask what conditions were like out on the surface just then, or to put it another way, what time of day it happened to be. It seemed like years since I’d last seen the stars, and fully an age since I’d been in the presence of His Majesty the Sun. I did not much regret my hiatus from the latter, however, for on the Moon he is not at all the benign presence he appears to be when one lives on Earth. There, he is a gentle, benevolent, and, dare I say it, e
nlightened monarch (except perhaps in the more forlorn deserts). But out in the Mare Imbrium or the Montes Caucuses, where one is exposed to his full fire and fury, he is a tyrant, and not an amusing tyrant like King Kamehameha or Louis XIV either, but a genuine, old-fashioned crucifixion-and-scorched-earth character in the mold of Caligula, Ivan the Terrible, or Attila the Hun, eager to burn out your eyes with his light, strip the skin from your flesh with his searing heat, and slowly but steadily poison your insides with penetrating torrents of invisible radiation.

  But like any man of the modern age, I thought such despots a phenomenon of the distant past, or if extant, then confined to backward and dreary lands such as the Belgian Congo or Canada. Therefore, I loped innocently up the main tunnel leading to the surface, and only stopped to consider what had become of my sun shield when I caught a glimpse of eye-searing white beyond the tunnel’s mouth. When I reached the opening, close behind Perkins, who held the other end of my burden, and Bemis, who carried two twenty-gallon containers of water ice weighing a total of about fifty pounds, I saw that the Sun was low on the horizon, which caused the seven hills of tailings to cast long coal-black shadows across the otherwise scorched regolith, all seven of them pointing in our direction. Incidentally, there was no advantage in it being sunset or sunrise, except that one could escape the tyrant’s wrath by ducking into the shadows—otherwise the Sun’s rays are just as lethal at sunset as they are at high noon.

  “Is it sunrise or sunset?” I asked no one in particular, since as far as I was concerned there was no way to tell the difference.

  But Perkins answered me immediately with, “It’s sunrise, I regret to say.”

  “How can you tell?” I insisted, turning away from the vista of the seven hills before I lost my eyesight to it.

  “It’s a matter of the direction,” he said, clarifying nothing.

  “The direction of what?”

  “Why, the Sun of course, ya silly booger. If it’s in front of us here, then it must be rising.”