by John F. Carr
Miller lowered his eyes. “It was an accident.” He leaned up on one elbow to look at Owens, and Connolly wondered for the hundredth time if Miller had a gun in that bag with him. “Whether you believe it or not doesn’t change the fact.”
“Right, then. Frank that’s enough, yes?” Connolly said from his own bag in the wall hammock. “Get some sleep; the shuttle’s due in eight hours. I’ll come and wake you then.”
Owens stood up and pulled several blankets from a locker.
“What are you doing?” Connolly asked.
“I’m sick of the company I’ve been keeping.” The Navigator headed aft. “I’m going back to the ground car bay to sleep.”
“Frank, don’t be an idiot, there’s no heat back there!”
“Yeah, but there’s a lock on the door.” Owens stopped in front of Connolly, pointedly ignoring Miller almost at his feet. “Look, there’s fresh batteries in the sleeping bags; you come out to get me in six hours. Check me out sooner if you get bored.” He turned at the hatch, looking down at Miller. “On second thought, considering your company; don’t get bored.”
*
*
*
To Potter’s surprise, the crew member who seemed most affected by Ike’s death was not his brother Mike, but Farrow. The Fast Eddie’s master had taken to wandering about the ship with an apparent intensity of grief that was a little frightening in a man who couldn’t reasonably be kept away from air locks and orbital attitude controls.
Farrow would often look out the viewports, staring down at the moon, and speaking softly under his breath. Rarely, Mike would come up behind the master and place a hand on his shoulder in a gesture of compassion. Seeing as it was from the man whose brother had died to his employer, and that the former appeared less affected than the latter, Potter found these occasional tableaux faintly distasteful, though he couldn’t be exactly sure why.
As long as it keeps Farrow out of the way til we can get our surviving crew back aboard, Potter told himself, how Mike deals with his brother’s death is his own affair.
“Captain Potter, we’re ready.” Liu had finished the preliminary systems check on the second shuttle that morning, ship time, and had spent the rest of the day loading the gear they’d need to get Shuttle One flying again.
“Fine. Well, I guess it’s pretty clear who’s got to go.”
Liu nodded. “I’ll need Mike for the repair work; Owens and Connolly can keep busy, but this is drydock work, and command crew won’t be much use.”
Potter looked over his shoulder to be sure Farrow wasn’t about. “Bill, this is going to be tricky; you need a pilot to get down there in one piece.”
Liu nodded. “There’s nothing for it. But we’ve got to take Farrow down with us; we can’t leave him alone up here on the Fast Eddie. Hell, in his state he could walk out an airlock.”
Potter ground a knuckle against his temple. “Yeah. Well, let’s hope he doesn’t wander off while we’re down there. You recheck your repair estimates?”
Liu nodded again. “Everybody working like coolies, worst case: three days. Most likely only two. We’re up and off and back aboard Fast Eddie, headed home. The survey’s scrubbed, of course; no bonus potential for a screw-up like this.”
“Yeah, break my heart, why don’t you.” Potter looked over Liu’s shoulder and out the port. “I’ve learned as much about this place as I care to already, Bill.”
And I suspect, Potter finished to himself, that our Mister Miller has, too.
Shuttle Two drifted downward, and Potter found himself suddenly wishing there was an overhead hatch, so he could take one last look at the Fast Eddie above them. Involuntarily, he shuddered.
What a gruesome thought; unlucky, too. He began the minute adjustments that, magnified by their thirty-mile descent, would bring them into the general area of the first shuttle’s landing zone. Liu was strapped in next to him, his eyes closed.
Can’t say as I blame you, old friend. This is the sort of joyride that would have the Engineering and Machinists’ Union howling for my blood if they knew about it.
Behind them, Farrow had strapped himself in with a firm confidence that belied his earlier distress. Nevertheless, Mike continued a solicitous, if detached, attention toward his boss. Good, Potter thought. Somebody else can hold his hand for a while.
“Coming up on final, gentlemen,” Potter tried to loosen his tightened throat with speech; it didn’t work.
Air resistance increased around the shuttle, and the noise level from outside increased with it. In seconds the shuttle was a rock-filled washing machine of rattling pressure plates and popping seams. A giant of the air was slapping a pillow against the nose and belly, but the pillow weighed tons.
Potter saw Liu in his peripheral vision. The Chief Engineer had forced his eyes open to check his status panel. “How long, Emmett?” The vibrations made Liu’s voice sound like a jackhammer was digging into his chest.
“Three minutes more.”
“Have to be on the ground sooner; she’s losing it.”
“I meant three minutes to the landing zone. Another five to circle and land.”
Liu rolled his eyes heavenward, and Potter hoped he wasn’t looking for a good spot for harp playing.
When the shaking stopped, it was sudden enough to make Potter shout for a structural integrity check.
“Fine, it’s fine,” Liu said through clenched teeth, as he checked his board. “She’ll hold for that five minutes, but don’t go longer than ten.” Liu mumbled to himself in satisfaction, “Heyah, all gods bear witness, I can fix a rainy day!”
Potter passed over the western mountain range that sheltered the valley, their snowcapped peaks seeming barely below him despite his altitude. Shuttle Two’s flat glide was taking it from one hundred thousand feet to a fifth of that in the course of their three-thousand mile flight path, and the view became spectacular.
The sun had broken through the thin cloud cover, lighting the valley from behind him, while Cat’s Eye illuminated it from above. And in that moment, as he looked across what would one day become known as the Shangri-La, he suddenly felt a great peace.
It’s pure, he thought. It’s harsh in that purity, but it’s a beautiful kind of harsh. People will come here, and will live, and die, as Owens said they would. They’ll settle it and cultivate it, fly over it and bury their dead in it, but they’ll never change it, not really. In the end, like any pure place, it will change them. It will make them what it wants them to be, and they’ll love it for that. The rest of this moon is cruel and ugly, but this valley is cruel and beautiful. Men will go to the other lands, and some will stay there, too. But those lands will never know the kind of devotion people will come to feel for this sheltered valley, this safe haven in a hard world.
The moment passed; the landing zone was beneath them, a cleared circle of dead gray winter grass in an unrelenting sea of shifting white, the crooked shadow of the crippled shuttle nearby. Potter was getting the feel of Liu’s bastard child as he flew her, and realized the landing would be tricky.
Tricky it was, but perfect nonetheless.
One figure stood on the snow beyond the cleared circle; it ran toward the shuttle in a kind of loping shuffle; long step, double-drag the other leg, long step. Potter cracked the hatch and pushed it open, freeing the debarkation ladder as he did so.
“Oh, my sweet Christ!” The blast of frigid air hit him in the face like a flame-thrower; he actually recoiled a step, frantically gathering his parka close as he fought to keep his balance. On the ground below, the figure that had come to meet them was struggling up the ladder. It stumbled into the shuttle and fell against the wall, sliding down to the floor plates.
Potter knelt in the howling wind, pulling back the hood of their one-man reception party. It was Connolly, and he looked half-dead.
“Mike, Bill, help me get him on the couch.” Potter knew that after extended months with no more gravity than the Fast Eddie’s centrifuge, it would
take all three of them to lift the First Officer, and maybe Farrow besides. “And somebody close that pneumonia hole before we all wind up like Connolly.”
Potter’s examination told them what they all knew already “Exposure, of course. Frostbite on all his toes and all but two fingers. I’m no doctor, but I can see those’ll have to come off.” Potter lightly touched the blackened digits. “Hell, he’s going to lose this whole foot.” He stood and shook his head, helplessly. “I don’t think we can save him,” he said quietly, as if to himself.
“If he warms up enough to get circulation in his limbs, he’s likely to get blood poisoning,” Liu warned.
Potter nodded. ‘’Keep the temperature down in here,” he said. A boyhood survivor of Atlantic winters in lobster boats on Earth’s Narragansett Bay, Potter had seen plenty of frostbite. “If he does start getting circulation into those fingers and feet, the pain alone will kill him.”
Potter crouched beside his frozen shipmate, trying to get something out of him. “Connolly,” he called quietly. “Brian, it’s Emmett where’s Owens? Connolly, where’s Miller?”
Connolly started babbling so suddenly Potter almost jumped “Frank went to sleep in the ground car bay, I told him not to, I said there wasn’t heat, not there, he went anyway, I woke up and went to check on him, but he’d locked the door. He said he wanted to be there because the door had a lock, and I had to go outside and go around to the ground car bay door, and it had swung open somehow. Frank didn’t answer and I crawled in and he was solid, oh God he was solid as a statue…he was like marble, like blue marble, God forgive me I let him die in there…I should have stopped him, should have ordered him, I—”
Connolly’s voice shattered into a keening wail, sobs wracked his chest, their sound filling the shuttle as the dying man brought his ruined hands up to cover his face. In a moment, Connolly lapsed into unconsciousness.
Potter rose and went to the locker, removing a pair of comically thick insulated mittens with a single index-finger sewn in. He pulled a rifle out as well, a flat-sided accelerator model with rocket shell projectiles for vacuum or zero-G environments.
“Bill,” Potter said, “take another rifle. Mike, Mister Farrow, stay with Connolly and do what you can for him.”
Potter and Liu left the second shuttle and crossed the landing zone toward the first. Byers’ Star had slipped behind the Cat’s Eye gas giant, and this side of the Cat’s Eye moon was turning away from its parent world. Night was coming to their hemisphere, truenight, and the temperature was dropping to welcome it.
“Emmett, this guy is BuReloc.” Liu was trying to reason with Potter, but still matching his stride,
“I don’t give a rip.”
They closed with the shuttle, its port list exposing the belly to them. Beyond the body of the craft could see a man’s legs moving about, and some kind of pole pacing them.
Too angry at the man’s cheek to give any thought of ambush, Potter walked around the nose of the shuttle, and everything seemed to happen at once.
Miller was there, with something in his hands and a pile of broken, frozen dirt on the ground nearby. There were two graves, each marked with crosses. It was all Potter saw before Miller turned toward them, the long black cylinder pivoting before him.
Potter heard Liu say: “He has a gun.” The Chief Engineer didn’t shout, but simply raised his own accelerator rifle to his shoulder and fired in one smooth, practiced motion. Miller spun about and went down, and it was only then that Potter realized he had struck Liu’s weapon down with his hand.
Liu snapped the weapon away and back-stepped. “Are you trying to get us killed?” Liu was almost snarling, but he recovered his composure instantly. “I—I’m sorry, Emmett; but he was—”
But Potter was going to the felled BuCorrect agent. The 9mm rocket shell had hit him in the groin; Potter didn’t need a great deal of imagination to think that Liu had been aiming for Miller’s head until his blow had dropped the weapon’s aim point. A little lower and to the left, Potter mused, and live or die, my friend, the Miller line would have ended with you.
Miller’s teeth were squared in a rictus of agony, but Potter wasn’t feeling especially charitable toward the man just now, and anyway he was curious about something. He turned Miller over, eliciting a gasp of pain from the victim. He lifted the cylinders Miller had been holding when he turned toward them. There was a foot-square metal plate at one end, and Potter held, it up for Liu’s inspection.
It was a shovel.
*
*
*
Back aboard Shuttle Two, Miller sipped cautiously at the tea. His beard stubble was blue-black and, together with the dark circles under his eyes and the sallowness of his skin, made him look as bad in shock as Connolly looked in the last stages of hypothermia. The warmth of the semi-operational craft was bringing some color to his features and a lot of pain to his own near-frozen extremities.
“He wouldn’t come inside,” the intelligence officer said. “He seemed to think that I’d gone out and deliberately opened the bay door to the wind, to kill Owens.”
“And did you?”
Miller sighed and lowered his head. “Christ, Potter, look at where my sleeping bag is; I’d have to crawl right over Connolly to get to the damn door. It must have come open in the night; probably hydraulic failure. Owens wouldn’t feel it through his own sleeping bag until the batteries gave out; his own body heat would have bled away after that.”
Potter said nothing for a time, looking out the shuttle’s forward window. “You buried Owens and Ike?”
Miller nodded. “Connolly wouldn’t have anything to do with it. He wasn’t going to let me do it, but they couldn’t stay in here with us, and leaving them out might have drawn one of those big predators down from the hills. It wasn’t a sentimental gesture.”
Potter turned at that. “Maybe not. But plain markers, or none at all, might make me believe that. Crosses don’t.”
“That was kind of you,” Farrow said quietly from the back. Miller shrugged, wincing at the pain any movement caused him.
Potter sighed. “Right.” He, turned to Farrow. “Tom, would you look after Brian and Mister Miller? We’re going to see about getting Shuttle One flight ready.”
Farrow moved to comply as Potter, Liu and Mike left the Shuttle once more.
“I’m telling you, Emmett,” Liu began when they’d left Shuttle Two. “This CoDo spy is going to be the death of us all.”
Potter said nothing except: “Wait and see.”
Placing lifting jacks beneath the hull and leveling it off, they found that Shuttle One looked far worse off than it really was. The collapse of the landing leg into the sinkhole had severed half a dozen cables, but caused very little actual damage. Liu shook his head at the irony.
“If they’d had jacks and an arc welder, they’d have been back a week ago.”
Shuttle One was operational and flight-ready in twenty hours, which suited Potter just fine, as the truenight of this hemisphere of the moon was now less than twelve hours away. During his watch, he made a cup of tea and sat beside the sleeping Miller, watching him.
“I think you’re awake,” Potter said quietly.
Miller opened his eyes. “What is it?
Potter pursed his lips and studied the blank wall opposite. “Oh, many things. Like why was Ike up there in the hills with you at all?”
“He invited himself. I assumed he was told to keep eye on me. Anyway, I didn’t object to him coming, traveling alone in these circumstances is idiotic.”
“Yup. It’s illegal, too.”
“Right.” Miller sneered.
Potter sipped his tea. “What did this predator look like?”
“Big. Shaggy mane. A lion with an attitude.
“Maybe like a bear?”
“Maybe. Probably. I don’t know, I’ve never seen a bear.”
Potter nodded. “And you drove it off with the rifle.”
“That’s right, so?”
>
Potter didn’t answer right away, but only went back to his tea. “Do you hunt a lot, Mister Miller?”
“Not animals.”
“I didn’t think so. I used to hunt a lot when I was young. Sometimes, on Survey trips like this one, I’ll stalk a local animal that looks game. In my years on Survey duty, I’ve seen a lot of strange animals that do a lot of strange things. But there’s one thing I’ve never seen, Miller. Can you guess what it is?”
“Why spoil your fun?”
Potter smiled. “I’ve never seen an animal on an alien world that was afraid of man. They aren’t capable of it, you see. How could they be? They’ve never seen a man before. Our scent is different, but not threatening, assuming they even smell us at all. They don’t see us as a threat, they can’t possibly. Like the American bear. Do you have any idea how many settlers it killed and how many grizzlies the settlers had to kill, before the bears learned that man was dangerous? That man’s rifles were dangerous? And grizzlies at least come from the same genetic soup as we do.”
Potter shook his head. “Nope. You have to kill such animals, Miller. They don’t scare. And it isn’t because they’re too stupid to be afraid of Man; they just don’t know how dangerous human beings can be.”
There was a long silence, during which Potter finished his tea before concluding: “But I do.”
Miller watched him silently.
“That was a clumsy lie, Miller. That contrived gesture of crosses for the graves was another.” Potter stood up and tossed his cup away. “And they’ll cost you. I’d have been happy to blow your head off for killing Ike, or just getting him killed. But this is better. I don’t even care how or why you did it, now. I’m just looking forward to turning you over to the CoDo Bureau of Investigation for murder. Who knows? You might get lucky; maybe they’ll sentence you to Involuntary Colonization and you’ll get sent right back here.” He went to the door and turned, silhouetted for a moment in the hatch. “Won’t that be nice?”
“Potter,” Miller said, “you know that won’t happen. You can kill me and leave me here, and the Bureau of Intelligence will have your ass on general principle. You can take me back and turn me in, and BuInt will squeeze the CBI, and I’ll walk, and maybe BuInt will have your ass anyway, just to make an example of tramp spacers who get delusions of moral grandeur.”