Bouncing Off the Moon

by David Gerrold

  Before I could kick free, Mickey blocked me. "Charles, wait—"

  "Why? If something happened to him, we're on our own. Waiting up here is only going to use up oxygen. You have to stay with Douglas and Stinky. I can do this—"

  "Mickey, he's right. Let him go. We have to get down from here."

  Mickey sighed and stepped out of the way. I don't think he liked any of us right at that moment.

  I didn't care. I kicked free.

  GETTING DOWN

  I sailed off the rocks and out into open space—above the crater wall, above the rubble-strewn slope, above the gaping chasms, toward the distant gray Lunar plain. Parts of it were so dark the shadows were tangible.

  There wasn't as much sense of motion as I expected—and there wasn't as much falling feeling either. Even so, my heart lurched in my chest. Here I was again, hanging in open space—

  I tried looking up. That didn't help. The cord was zipping by too fast. I looked down. That was even worse. I could see how fast the ground was coming up. The line was too steep. I twisted the handles as hard as I could.

  The wheel slowed, the vibration in my hands and arms changed. But it didn't feel slow enough. "Oh, chyorr!" I should have started sooner.

  "Charles—?"

  "I'm trying to slow down." The ground was coming up awfully fast. And I was feeling really stupid. I twisted the handles harder—but they were already at their limit; they clicked into a locked position. The wheel was stopped—but I was still going! The wheel skidded and bounced along the cord. Was this what happened to Alexei? Betrayed by the Lunar laws of physics? There wasn't enough weight on the wheel, there wasn't enough friction between the wheel and the line, they were both too polished—and the line was too damn steep! I was just going to keep sliding all the way down—until I slammed into a big unfriendly boulder.

  It was a long way down. More than a klick, maybe two. How fast would I be going when I hit bottom? Fast enough to hurt? Fast enough to puncture the bubble suit? Twenty kph? Thirty? More? If only I had a couple of Palmer tubes—

  That gave me an idea. I took my hands out of the connecting gloves and hurriedly connected the emergency rebreather tube to the valve of the bubble suit. It snapped immediately into place. This was going to be tricky. I pointed the valve and opened it in a series of short bursts.

  I couldn't hear the outrush of air, but I could feel it. I came skidding to a stop on the line. My downward rush was halted. The line wasn't as steep here, the brakes held. I took my finger off the valve. I couldn't believe it—it worked! I'd traded a few minutes of air—maybe more—for a safe landing. A fair trade. I shoved my hands back into the gloves and looked down. I was hanging thirty meters above a yawning abyss. It was too dark to see how deep the bottom was.

  "Chigger?" That was Douglas. "What was that screaming about?"

  "What screaming?"

  "You were screaming."

  "No, I wasn't—was I really?"

  "Yes, you were. What happened?"

  "I was going too fast. The brakes didn't work. Well, they worked, but they didn't. Alexei screwed up, I think. Even if the wheel doesn't turn, you'll still go skidding down the line. But it's okay. I stopped myself. I used some of the air from my rebreather."

  "How much?" That was Mickey.

  "Not too much. Just a few squirts."

  "Charles, I don't want to alarm you. But it's hard to tell how big a squirt is in vacuum. Don't panic. We've all got spare bottles. We're not going to run out of air. But that's not a real good idea."

  "It was the only one I had, Mickey. Anyway, you and Douglas are going to have to do the same thing."

  "No, we're not. I'm going to figure something else out. Where are you now?"

  "Hanging maybe a hundred klicks over nothing in particular."

  "How much farther do you have to go?"

  I peered ahead. "The ground levels out soon. So does the line. It looks like maybe two or three hundred meters. It's hard to tell."

  "You'll have to go very slow."

  "I know that!"

  "All right. Just keep talking."

  My arms were starting to get tired. I reached up, grabbed the handles firmly, took a breath, and carefully began untwisting—not very much, just enough to unlock the brake and let the wheel start rolling. Only a little bit. I began moving forward. Very slowly. So far so good.

  The thought occurred to me that I might have reacted out of panic. The line had a lot of sag in it. Of course the highest part would be the steepest. Lower down, the line would level off enough that the brakes would be more effective.

  The more I thought about it, something felt wrong about this. Al-exei had planned everything else so carefully; why did he screw this up? Lunar explorers used all kinds of tricks for getting up and down steep slopes. This couldn't have been the first time he'd done this. So why didn't he know better? Had he been careless? Or stupid? Or what?

  The ground came gliding up to meet me. Everything was back to slow motion. It was like one of those flying dreams where you drift along like a cloud. I tightened my grip and came to a halt, suspended only a couple of meters above the Lunar dust. The line went on farther, but the ground dropped away again. Maybe this would be a good place to get off … ?

  Two meters. I did the math in my head. One-sixth of two meters. It would be like jumping off a chair. I could do that. "All right," I said. "I've found a stopping place. It's not too far to the ground. I'm going to drop down here. Wait a minute." I looked up at the wheel and the handles and visualized what would happen when I released my grip. The wheel would pop off the line, dropping me down. I just had to be ready. "Here goes—"

  My hand came free and I fell. The bubble bounced down onto the ground. I didn't fall over.

  "I'm down."

  "Good job, Chigger. All right, now move out from under the line. You don't want to get accidentally bumped. We're coming down now. Mickey and I are coming down together."

  "Huh?"

  "You'll see. Just keep out of the way."

  I stared up the line and waited. Several very long moments later, three luminous bubbles appeared very high up. One very large one, and two smaller ones with silver figures inside. They were moving very slow—painfully slow.

  "I can see you," I reported.

  "We can see you too," Mickey called back. "We'll be down in a bit."

  It took longer than a bit, but I could see them clearly, so I wasn't worried. When they finally did arrive, they hung lower on the line than I had. In fact, they were holding their knees up so they wouldn't scrape the ground. They brought themselves to a stop, hanging all together like the last three grapes on the stem. Douglas lowered his long gangly legs to the ground and unclipped himself and Mickey.

  He showed me how they'd used some of the leash to the inflatable to tie their two wheels (together to make a kind of pulley rig. With both wheels locked, the cord had to twist around first one wheel, then the other. It couldn't skid—at least not very well.

  "We should have thought of this before," said Douglas. "All three of us could have come down at the same time. With your wheel rigged in, we would have had even better control. We did skid a bit at first, but not as hard as you did."

  We were on a low hill. Mickey was already settling the inflatable on the level crest of it, opening up the first zipper of the entrance tube so Douglas could go in and take care of Stinky. As soon as Douglas was on his way in, Mickey came over to me and checked my air bottles.

  "How bad?" I asked.

  "Not as bad as it could have been. You used up half an hour of breathing. Maybe more. You'll just have to swap in one of your O-bottles earlier, that's all. Later on, we might have to equalize your air supply with mine or Douglas's. What you did was very smart, Chigger—and also very stupid. I hope you realize that. We don't have air to waste. Alexei didn't leave us much margin."

  "I didn't have time to think, Mickey."

  "I know you didn't. And I'm not bawling you out. We've just got to be mor
e careful from here on. Okay?"

  "More careful than what?" I asked.

  Mickey looked exasperated. "I mean, we're going to have to think harder. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

  "Do you understand what I'm saying? Is there anything I could have done different?"

  He got it. Or maybe he didn't. "All right. Fine. Let's just drop it."

  He turned back to the inflatable. "Doug, do you need my help?"

  Douglas was already inside. There was a smaller silver beetle next to him—Stinky. I couldn't see what he was doing, but from his posture, it looked as if he was squatting over a toilet bag. "No, I think we've got everything under control."

  Mickey turned to me. "Chigger, you stay here. I'm going to follow the line down to its end and look for Alexei."

  "I'll go with," I said.

  "I'd rather you didn't. It might not be very pretty—"

  "I've seen dead bodies before," I lied. Well, in the movies anyway. "Besides, you might need help bringing back the extra oxygen bottles and all the other stuff that Alexei was carrying."

  "All right," said Mickey. "But if you throw up inside your bubble, you'll have to live with it."

  "I'll be fine," I said. I hoped I was right. I followed him, hop-skipping over the hill.

  END OF THE LINE

  We followed the cord for several hundred meters. The ground was uneven, and generally sloping downward, though here and there it rolled upward too. There were boulders everywhere, of all sizes—some as big as cars or houses, others even bigger; so we couldn't really see too far in any direction. But we weren't worried about losing our way. Not as long as we kept the line in sight. Mostly it was ten or twenty meters over our heads.

  Mickey turned his transmitter all the way up and called for Alexei to respond, please. We waited and waited, but there was no answer.

  Several times we paused to circle around some of the bigger boulders, just in case Alexei had come down behind one of them, or even on top of one. But if he had, we didn't see him. Mickey kept checking his homing device, but Alexei's beacon didn't register. Maybe he was out of range. That was possible. Or maybe it was no longer transmitting. That was possible too.

  Then we came to a place that was very slow going. The boulders were too big and uneven and we had to watch our bounces carefully. When we got past that, we took a short rest, each of us taking a small drink of water. Mickey looked over at me. "Y'know—Chigger, you're a pretty good kid."

  I didn't know how to respond to that, so I just grunted something that might have been thanks.

  "At first, I thought you were a whiny pain in the ass—but you can take care of yourself. Better than I expected. I respect you for that."

  And then he added, "I hope that maybe you're starting to respect me too."

  "Yeah, I guess so," I said.

  "Charles, you resent me. I see it on your face every time you look at Douglas and me together. And I don't blame you. Douglas and Bobby are all you've got left, and I must seem like an intruder to you."

  I didn't know what to say to that either. After a bit, I mumbled half an agreement. "Well, yeah."

  "So, let's agree to work together anyway, okay? Because we both care about Douglas. And Bobby."

  "Urn. Okay."

  We slapped gloves, kind of like a handshake, only clumsy, and then we checked in with Douglas. He told us to be glad that odors cannot travel through the vacuum of space.

  We pushed on.

  After another fifteen minutes of bouncing and skipping through house-sized boulders, we came around a tall rocky prominence and stopped. We had finally reached the end of the line. Literally. The place where the grapple-dart had anchored itself.

  Mickey bounced up to the top of a boulder, then bounced over to the next. He tilted himself forward to inspect the dart. "It looks fine," he said. "I'm going to see if I can loosen it and bring it with us. We might need it again."

  "But Alexei had the pistol."

  "Well, we'll just have to find him."

  I was already circling the outcrop, looking for Alexei's body. I wanted to find it—and I didn't. I was morbidly curious—and I was terrified. If Alexei was dead, then where were we … ?

  "All right, I've got the grapple-dart," said Mickey. "I'm coming back down." Two quick bounces and he was beside me again. Above us the line was falling slack. "Did you see anything?" Meaning, did you find Alexei?

  "Uh-uh. It's like he popped off the line and flew away into space."

  "Knowing Alexei, I could almost believe that." Mickey bounced up and grabbed the sagging cord above us. He pulled the free end over the rocks and began winding it up. "Even without the pistol, this might be useful. Waste not, want not, remember?" He handed me the line to hold, then circled the promontory, looking for anything I might have missed. He spiraled outward among the boulders, then came back to me. "Nope. He must have jumped off earlier. We could search for days and never find him." After a moment, he added, "And we don't have enough air for that."

  We started back toward Douglas and Mickey resumed winding the cord. "You know," he started, thinking aloud. "There was a lot of horizontal slack at this end of the line. He might have had time to slow down, even stop." And then he added, pointedly, "You might have too."

  "Yeah, but I didn't know that."

  "No, you didn't."

  We picked our way back slowly. We took turns gathering up the cord and winding it in loose coils. It looked unnaturally thin to me—but everything on Luna seemed spindly. If they made it only one-half as strong as it would need to be on Earth, it would still be three times stronger than necessary for Luna.

  We spread out and searched from side to side, looking for any sign of Alexei. Even a track on the ground would have been welcome. We searched as carefully as we could—but we were in shadow, there were a lot of boulders, and it would have been easy to miss him in the dark.

  Mickey stopped to study his PITA. He whispered something to it, studied the display. "All right," he said, with terrifying finality. "I'm going to call it. You know what that means?"

  "You think he's dead."

  "It means we can't waste any more oxygen looking for him. If he's dead, we can't help him. And if he's alive, we still can't help him—" He stopped and faced me. "Do you know the first law of Luna?"

  "Uh—no," I admitted.

  "It's very cold, it's very selfish. Take care of your own well-being first. Otherwise, you have nothing for anyone else."

  "That doesn't sound selfish to me. It sounds like good advice."

  "It is. But a lot of dirtsiders don't like it. The equations are too cold for them. You know what that means?"

  "Everybody does. Not enough air."

  "That's right." He took a breath. "All right. Let's go back and talk to Douglas. It's time to make a decision."

  Douglas and Bobby were sitting together inside the inflatable. Bobby was munching an MRE and sipping at a canteen. I checked the time. We'd have to take another bathroom break in an hour. If we waited until he went now, we might manage two hours, two and a half. Maybe.

  Mickey and I stopped outside the inflatable. We checked each other's air supply. We were both fine. Mickey told Douglas what we had found—and what we hadn't found. He traced lines in the thin dust. "Here's where we started. Here's where we are now. Here's the closest two train lines. We could have gone to this one, to the east. It's only half the distance, in fact it's still closer, but there are some steep crater walls in the way. And we'd be in sunlight a lot of the time, dodging from shadow to shadow. Experienced Loonies wouldn't have had a problem with it, but it's too risky for beginners. So Alexei had us going the long way, but safer—heading for this other line here. This way, we stay mostly in shadow, and the biggest problem is that one little crater rim—yeah, that was a little one—and a little bit of sunlight, and making sure that we have enough air. He thought we could do it. So did I. I still do."

  I couldn't tell what Douglas was thinking. Behind the blurry wall of the inflatabl
e, he was an unreadable silver ghost.

  "If we call for help," said Mickey, "we'll probably end up in the custody of bounty marshals. Alexei was my only real connection on Luna. I might be able to make some phone calls, but I can't think of anyone who'd get involved for us. For you. Unless—"

  "Unless what?"

  "Unless you know who paid your dad to carry the monkey. They'd certainly have an interest in reclaiming their property."

  "No, they won't," said Douglas. "It's a decoy. Having us caught by bounty marshals serves them perfectly. It's a public distraction."

  For an instant, the monkey tightened its grip on my head, reminding me it was there. For an instant, I wondered again if it was really a decoy. But something told me I didn't want to voice that thought aloud. "So what's our alternative?" I asked. "Without Alexei, can we still get to the train?"

  "I think so. My maps are good. Not as good as Alexei's, but he showed me the way, and I think I can get us to Prospector's Station."

  "And then what?"

  "Then we keep going. We take cargo trains. We zigzag. We avoid interception points. We get to the catapult somehow. Or we sit here and call for help. But we have to decide in the next few minutes, because if we don't start moving soon, the window closes. We won't have enough air."

  "How much air?"

  "My guess is six hours if we're active, eight if we're resting. We can call for help anytime, Douglas. But if we're going to move, we have to move now."

  "What about the closer train?"

  Mickey pointed east—toward the harsh glare of the rising sun.

  Douglas turned and looked. He didn't like what he saw. I could see that much in his posture. "And the farther one?"

  Mickey pointed south, toward the darkness.

  Douglas stared into the gloom. "You really think we can do it?"

  "Alexei thought so. And he knew the risks better than any of us."

  "All right," Douglas said. "Let's do it."

  "You want me to take Bobby?"

  "No, I promised him he'd stay with me. Let me get packed—"