The Sunspacers Trilogy

by George Zebrowski

  “I already know the shaft,” I said. “Is there something I can dig with?”

  Jake turned on his flashlight, stood up, and moved toward the screen unit, where he bent over and squatted under the console. After a minute of scraping and squeezing noises, he unbolted a meter length of shiny steel. “This should do,” he said as he brought it to me.

  I took my light and turned it on. It seemed to be working, so I attached its magnetic surface to one end of the rod and gave the assembly to Jake.

  “Shine the light at the opening,” I said.

  I climbed up on his shoulders and pulled myself inside. Then I turned and reached down for the steel.

  “I’ll come up and stay at the mouth,” Jake said as he handed it up. “Yell if you need help.”

  “Right.” I crawled inside, pointing the beam ahead.

  Breathing became harder again. I slowed, inhaling evenly. No point in passing out.

  Rest, I told myself as I came to the turn, but I didn’t stop; every delay would leave me weaker. I was stirring up dust. My eyes filled with tears, and I began coughing.

  Closing my eyes tightly, I felt my way forward until I touched the grating with my rod. I put it down and took out a handkerchief. Wheezing, I struggled to tie the cloth around my face.

  I began to spit, bringing up gobs of dusty mucus, drooling over myself. I thought I was going to throw up, but the heaving stopped as the fabric over my nose and mouth began its filtering action. I was still getting stuffy air, but it was cleaner.

  I lay down and rested, breathing slowly until I felt better; then I forced myself up on all fours again.

  Removing the light from the rod, I placed the beam to shine on the grating. Slowly, I struck the rocky debris, pushing the rod through the grating to loosen the material on the other side.

  There might just as well be a hundred light-years of stone ahead of me, I thought, and even if I broke through, there might not be any air on the other side.

  I jabbed at the rock a hundred times, goaded on by visions of it falling away. People would die if I failed. Rosalie would die.

  The light flickered. I reached over and turned it off, angry at its old design; everything on Mercury was obsolete. I knew the small space well enough by now to work in the dark. Might as well save the light, whatever there was left of it.

  I picked at the wall of rubble, insisting to myself that I would find myself on the other side if I didn’t weaken. My future self was waiting only a few minutes up ahead, alive and out of danger. I needed him, even if he no longer needed me.

  As I worked and sweated in the dark, I wished that he would reach across from his side of time and pull me through the rock to safety…

  My heart was beating wildly as I chopped at the grating, ready to explode in my chest; and the blackness flowed in around me, imprisoning me as it solidified.

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  17

  The Squeeze

  All the air had disappeared into the future.

  I lay still in an endless present, unable to breathe, eyes open, listening to the dark, wondering if they were all dead back in the hall.

  Something shifted, gritty and stonelike; a trembling passed through me. I strained to hear beyond the pounding of blood in my ears, fearful that the coming quake would crush me.

  Then a soft breeze wandered in from the future, slipping into the pocket of the past where I was trapped. I pulled the coolness into my lungs and waited for the fresh air to dry my face. I inhaled deeply, and with a jolt my body resumed its forward motion in time.

  I sat up suddenly and groped for my light.

  “Joe!” Jake’s echo stabbed into my ears.

  “I’m okay!” I found the light and turned it on.

  “Air’s flowing,” Jake called.

  I turned the light on the grating and saw a small opening at the top right-hand corner, where the tremor had probably loosened the rockfall.

  I seized the rod and began to widen the break. When the breach was larger, I put down the rod and positioned myself to use my feet.

  I kicked.

  The grate gave a bit on the second try, more on the third.

  I gulped a deep breath and whacked it a good one. The grate sailed away into the darkness. I listened to its clattering, unable to believe my luck.

  I heard coughing. “Who’s there?” I demanded.

  “Need help?” Bob answered.

  “Come ahead—I’ve cleared it!”

  “Joe?” Rosalie asked from what seemed a great distance.

  I cast the light into the tunnel and saw her. Linda and Bob were behind her. “We felt the airflow,” Bob said.

  “What kind of room is behind us?” I asked.

  “The floor of the jail is no lower than in the hall,” he answered.

  “Go on through,” Linda said impatiently.

  I turned the light and crawled through the grate opening. Perching on the rubble, I searched the room with my beam. It was a cell block.

  “It’s the jail, all right,” I said, realizing that the barred doors might be locked from the outside. I was squatting on a huge pile of rock that had fallen against the wall, high enough to cover the vent. The ceiling of the chamber was cracked, threatening more falls. Bob crawled out next to me.

  “There’s no one here,” I said, illuminating the rubble all the way to the bars.

  “Might mean they got out. The doors may be open.”

  I started down, but my foot caught on something. My light revealed a human arm, and for a moment I wondered if by some miracle it had grown out of the rubble. The palm was open, as if to shake hands. I checked the pulse, but the limb was stiff and cold.

  “Dead?” Bob asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Hey!” Jake called from the far end of the shaft. “The lights have gone on in the hall!”

  Bob poked his head back into the opening. “Try the screen intercom again!”

  “Doing it now!”

  We waited.

  “No luck! There go the lights again!”

  I scrambled lower and turned to give Bob some light. He reached me, and we picked our way to the bars. “Whose hand would that be?” I asked.

  “Probably one of the recent ex-cons.”

  “You lock them up?”

  “Oh, no. He might have been in for being drunk, or something. Many of them use the jail to sleep in. We don’t have room, and they don’t mind.”

  “You mean they keep to themselves.”

  “Some do, some don’t. If they marry, they live differently, but that doesn’t happen too often.”

  Bob grasped the bars with both hands and pushed. I helped, and we managed to slide the door open. He took out his flashlight and played the beam back over the rubble.

  “I hope most of them got out,” he said. “Come on down!”

  Linda and Rosalie crawled out of the vent and made their way down the pile. Neither of them stopped or said anything when they saw the hand.

  “Listen,” Bob said.

  “What?”

  “Air—coming in from the other shafts.”

  I heard a steady whisper.

  Linda and Ro reached us, and Bob led the way out into the station. We saw no more bodies. The place was deserted, even though the damage seemed light. I wondered how many bodies might be hidden by the rubble in the cell blocks.

  “This is the complaint room,” Bob said.

  Empty chairs faced the judicial bench. The screen was flashing a ghostly light across the wall behind the bench, reminding me of fish swimming in an aquarium.

  Bob sat down behind the bench and punched up a call on the terminal. “Can’t get anything,” he said finally.

  “What now?” Linda asked, sounding strangely composed.

  Bob looked up at us, his face pale in the flicker. “Well—we can’t risk opening the outer door to the tunnel from here either. We’re right next to the hall, but we’re getting air in here and it’s moving through to the others.
We’re all safe for the moment. I don’t want to do anything to make things worse. We can last a long time with air.”

  We all sat down in the first row of chairs.

  “They’ll get to us eventually,” Bob said from the bench. “The Heat Mole digger always comes through damaged tunnels and reseals them.”

  “But when?” Linda asked.

  “Could be a few days, but there’s a kitchen in here. We can move some of the kids out of the hall—”

  “What if it’s so bad they can’t do anything for us?” Linda insisted. “Shouldn’t we face that possibility?”

  “Unlikely,” Bob replied, shaking his head. Again, he seemed unwilling to admit that it could happen. “If it drags on, the asteroid people will arrive and lend a hand. We can last a long time with food and air…”

  “Bob,” I said gently, “could they be all dead? How would we know?” I glanced at Linda. Her dark shape was watching me.

  “The Control Center can withstand anything. They’ll get us out.”

  Linda sighed. “People have been dying here.”

  “I said the Control Center, not the whole place.” His voice trembled.

  “Hello!”

  “That’s Jake,” I said, standing up.

  I rushed back into the cell block. Jake was crouching inside the vent, shining his light down. His beam caught me in the eyes as I reached the bars.

  “Will someone tell me what’s going on?” he said.

  “Start bringing people through. Bob says there’s a kitchen.”

  “Can we fit everyone?” he asked.

  “We’ll call a halt if it gets crowded.”

  He stared at me for a moment. I blinked, and he was gone.

  The first group was coming through when the cell block ceiling caved in again. I heard the sound and started toward the block.

  “Don’t!” Bob shouted from the console, where he had been working to contact the Control Center.

  “They may need help!”

  “Should have stayed,” Linda muttered.

  I listened for tremors, clicked on my light and approached the doorway. Dust was drifting out, a stately motion of particles wandering in my beam.

  Coughing, Jake and a few kids staggered out. I flicked my beam across them, looking for signs of injury. Linda and Ro rushed up to them, and we settled them into chairs.

  I went through the door and down the short corridor, and saw that all six cells were filled in with rockfall. I couldn’t even see where the ceiling had been. I turned and staggered back.

  “How many were with you?” I asked Jake.

  “Seven or eight more—but some were still in the pipe, so they’ll make it back into the hall.”

  “We’re cut off,” I said. “The hall is not getting air again.”

  I looked around in the ghostly light. Ten of us had gotten out—ten out of a couple of hundred.

  “Who’s here?” I asked.

  Bob called out their names: “Helen Wodka, Ted Quist, Jenny Miller, Frank Givenchy, Hank Golden.”

  “Sergeant Black was right behind me…” Helen said.

  “Did he come out of the vent?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  I turned off my flashlight, and we sat in silence for a few moments. The flickering screen cast Bob’s shadow on the wall behind the bench. He was hunched over, working intently to reach through the intercom lines, and it seemed that he was playing a strange game of some sort.

  “Who else came out of the vent?” I asked.

  “I was next to last,” Helen replied.

  “So he’s the only one we lost.” Not counting those who were already under the rockfall, I thought, and assuming no one was crushed in the pipe.

  “Maybe we should try to dig through to the vent,” I said.

  “With what?” Jake asked. “It would take a week.”

  “I don’t hear the air coming in,” Helen said suddenly.

  We listened to the silence, hoping that it was just a trick of hearing.

  “The inlet’s here above the bench,” Bob said.

  I turned my torch on it. He climbed up and held his hands against the grate. “Nothing—it’s blocked.”

  He jumped down and slumped into his place behind the screen, and I realized that the air system was being cut at more than one point.

  “The sensors at Control have to be showing which air lines are gone,” Bob insisted. “They must know the fix we’re in by now.”

  If the feedback warning system was still intact; if there was anyone to read the sensors. I had no doubt that someone would get us out. Eventually. Dead or alive. It just didn’t seem likely that we’d remedy our local lack of airtwice . How much luck can you have in one day? Breathing was beginning to seem a luxury.

  I had a wild thought.

  “Bob—can’t we get up to the surface and cross over to the Center? There are only ten of us.”

  He stared at me from across the room, his face distorted by the cold flickering. The strain of the last hours was beginning to show. He no longer seemed sure of anything. Maybe his parents were dead, he was telling himself; after all, they were flesh and blood, as easily crushed as the people in the cell blocks. They weren’t immune—anyone could be dead. It seemed clear to me that Bob knew by now that this situation was different from the ones he had survived in the past. The quake had probably affected a larger area, and there were other things to consider.

  “There are hatches to the surface,” he said finally, “and we could probably find a few suits, but—”

  “You and I’ll go for help. They may not know—”

  “—but the Sun is up,” he said, shaking his head in despair. “Even with a suit, that’s no protection at all.”

  “Then why have suits at all!” I shouted angrily.

  “It’s pretty safe at night.”

  His face darkened and faded away as the screen died, leaving us in total darkness. “Save the flashlights,” Jake said.

  “Isn’t anything good enough?” I asked.

  “Sure—the shielded vehicles,” Bob replied, “but if there’s a solar flare, forget it. Nothing will do. Instant crisp human.”

  Jake snorted.

  “Are there any vehicles nearby?” I asked. Questioning him was like pulling teeth. He seemed dazed.

  “Don’t know.”

  “Well, let’s go find out!”

  “You’d still have to cross some surface to get one.”

  “What if one were close by?”

  “We could make a dash for it, but the radiation dose might still be bad.…”

  “Tell them the truth,” Jake said.

  We waited. “I’ll be very honest—it’s never been this long. Too much seems to have gone wrong this time. Pockets like this may be all that’s left.”

  “So you don’t think we’re going to make it,” Linda said.

  “I’ve lived here all my life. You get a feeling…”

  I stood up in the darkness. “Feelings, my ass! Where’s the hatch, the suits?”

  “Could use a suntan myself,” Jake said. “Always wondered what it would be like to look that big Sun in the face.” I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

  “Maybe we should just wait,” Helen Wodka said.

  “If there are hatches, they were meant to be used,” I insisted. “Where are the suits?”

  “I think we can reach one of the utility rooms,” Bob said cautiously. “There’s a door to your right.”

  I turned on my flashlight and found it.

  “I’ll go with you,” Bob said.

  I walked over and tried the crank. It turned easily.

  “Crank it shut after us,” Bob instructed.

  “What if you don’t come back?” Linda asked.

  “Then you’ll just have to wait for help,” Bob replied as I cranked open the door.

  Ro came up to me. “Joe—are you sure you want to try this?”

  “There’s no choice,” I whispered. “The air in here or in the hall w
on’t last forever.” Bob took my flashlight and shone it into a long, dark corridor. I put my arms around Ro and held her close. “Do you want me to wait here and watch you suffocate?”

  We kissed. “I just wanted to know that you feel sure about going,” she said.

  I turned away quickly and followed Bob. We heard the door cranking shut behind us.

  “Here it is,” he said as we came to another door.

  I turned the crank. The door opened, and we stepped inside. Half a dozen suits hung on the racks.

  “These are useless against the Sun,” he said wearily, “and it’s more than two kilometers to the Center. We can’t dash that.” He had lived here all his life. What could I possibly know?

  “Wait a minute,” he said suddenly.

  “I’m thinking the same thing—we’ll have to go up and see.”

  “I don’t know. There may be no way to check except by opening the airlock.” He still didn’t sound too hopeful.

  “If we could get to the Center,” I said, “we could come back in a shielded track bus, dock with the airlock, and take everyone out. We could do that, couldn’t we?”

  “It would be funny if we died out there and help arrived anyway.”

  “We could be just as dead thinking like that,” I said. “How long can they last back in the hall?”

  “Let’s suit up,” he said.

  We held the light for each other, and checked each suit as we put it on. Our helmet lights went on when we closed our face plates.

  “These are ancient,” Bob said over the suitcom. “Not much use for them.” He pointed upward. “Let’s go.”

  My helmet beam shot up into a rock chimney. A ladder rose for at least thirty meters and disappeared into the dark.

  We climbed, listening to each other’s breathing. The suits seemed to be working well, despite their age.

  “Stop,” Bob said after a long while. “Here’s the inner lock crank.” I heard him struggling above me. “Okay, it’s open.” His feet disappeared into the opening. Lights came on.

  I climbed up after him. “The lights work in here,” I said.

  “Independent source. Solar.”

  “What now?”

  “You stay here.” He started to crank the door to the outer chamber. Suddenly the door slid open. “Must have triggered an automatic.”