This is basically my version the Doom Novel Hell on Earth, with the mormon stuff and government turning traitor thing, and I have fit Hell into it.
As we hit the roof of Deimos, I looked up. The pressure dome was cracked. Of course. That made sense, the way things had been going. Next thing you knew, thousand-year-old Martians would come along and wink us out of existence.
Fly Taggart stared at the crack, and his eyes bugged out like a frog. I wish he knew a bit more physics; if I have one complaint about Fly, it's that he doesn't hold with higher education. The crack was small, and I could see it wasn't going to leak all the air out of the dome in the next few minutes. Days, more like; days, or even weeks. It's a big facility.
Then I looked past the crack and saw what that huge Marine corporal was really staring at: we weren't orbiting Mars anymore!
The entire moon of Deimos had just taken a whirlwind tour of the solar system. I swallowed hard; we were staring at Earth.
"I ... guess we know their invasion plans now," I said, feeling the blood rush to my face.
Fly plucked at his uniform-Lieutenant Weems's uniform, except he'd pulled off the butter bars-like it had suddenly started itching, "Well at least we stopped them," he said.
"Look again, Fly." The globe was flecked with bright pinpoints of light, flares of explosives millions of times more powerful, more hellish, than any we had ducked or lobbed back here on Deimos. I
pointed to the obvious nuclear exchange blanketing our home, dumping like a few billion tons of radia- tion, fallout, and sheer explosive muscle on-on everyone we had ever known. "Looks like they've already invaded."
Fly suddenly latched onto my arm with a vise grip of raging emotion. I tried to pry his steel hands loose, while he hollered in my ear. "It's not over, Arlene!" PFC Arlene Sanders, United States Marine Corps: that's me. "We've already proven who's tougher. We won't let it end like this!"
Right. Me and Fly and nothing but weapons, ammo, and a hand with some fingers on it. We were, going to jump from LEO down to the surface of the Earth. Or maybe we'd drive the planetoid down and land it at Point Mugu. I guess you couldn't consider Deimos strictly a moon anymore, since it appeared to be mobile.
We were stuck a mere four hundred klicks from where we wanted to be: but that was four hundred kilometers straight up. What's more, we were flying around the Earth at something better than ten kilom- eters per second-not only would we have to jump down, we'd better do one hell of a big foot-drag to kill that orbital velocity.
And after that we'd solve Format's Last Theorem, simplify the tax code, and cure world hunger. That last one was easy enough to fix. The problem wasn't that there wasn't enough food; it was just in the wrong places and didn't last long enough. I once heard an old duffer say all we really needed was food irradiation, Seal-a-Meals, and a bunch of rocket mail tubes to plant the food in the center of the famine du jour.
Rocket mail tubes . . . "Fly," I shrieked, jumping up and down. "I know how to do it!"
"Do what, damn it?" Could we do it? I did some fast, rule-of-thumb calculations: our mass versus that of a typical "care package" from Mars, the sort they sent up to the grunts like me serving on Deimos; the Earth's gravita- tional pull compared to that of Mars-it's harder to fly up and down off the Earth's surface than the Martian surface. Maybe ... no, it would work! Well, maybe.
"I know how to get us across to Earth, Fly. Did you know there's a maintenance shed for unmanned snip- ping rockets on this dump of a moon?"
"No," he said suspiciously. Of course he didn't. He was never stationed here, like I'd been. It was a garage where the motor-pool sergeant kept all the mail tubes, the shipping rockets. I had no idea why they were called "mail tubes"; we send our mail electronically, as the universe intended. "A one-way ticket to Earth," I summed up, trying to penetrate that thick skull of his. "If we can find any kind of ship, we go home and kick some zombie ass. Again."
"All over again," he breathed, catching my drift at last. "Well, hell, we're professionals at this now!" We continued looking at the familiar blue-green sphere of Earth, as the unfamiliar white spots ap- peared and disappeared all over the globe. An old piece of advice floated up from deep in my memory: DON'T LOOK DOWN! We gazed upon white clouds
so beautiful that they reminded me of what we'd been fighting to save.
Were we too late? Part of me hoped so, a part that just wanted to sit down and rest.
We'd fought those damned, ugly monsters until we were too tired to fight-and now it was looking like we had to do it all over again.
All at once I noticed a sprinkling of the flares all over California, my home state. "Oh, God, Fly," I said, my stomach contracting.
"Yeah. Terrible." Jesus, couldn't my best bud think of anything stronger to say when Armageddon came to your hometown?
I shook my head. "You don't understand. That's not what I meant. I mean I don't feel anything." I trembled as I spoke.
Fly put his arm around me; well, that was more like it. "It's all right," he mumbled. "It's not what you think. There's nothing wrong with you. After what you've been through, you're just numb. Your brain is tired."
I let my head rest on his shoulder. "So my mind is coming loose. What about body and soul?"
Right then and there I decided we needed a new word to describe the state after you've reached ex- haustion but had to keep going on automatic pilot. Wherever that state was, Fly and I had been there a long, long time.
I put my arm around Arlene's shoulders,
hoping she would understand it meant nothing but friendship. Oh don't be silly, Fly; of course she understands!
Where to begin? I was born at an early age, in a log cabin I helped my father build. I grew up, joined the UnitedStatesMarineCorpsSir!-went to fight "Scythe of Glory" Communist leftovers in Ke- firistan, punched out the C.O., was banged up in the brig and sent to Mars with the rest of my jarhead buddies.
We up-shipped to Phobos, one of the moons of Mars-well, now the only moon of Mars-and dis- covered a boatload of aliens had invaded through the used-to-be-dormant "Gates," long-range teleporters from . . . from where? From another planet, God knows where. Arlene and I battled our way into the depths of the Phobos facility of the Union Aerospace Corporation . . . who started the whole invasion, turns out, by monkeying with the Gates in the first place.
It all rolled downhill from there. We ended up on Deimos somehow-and I'm still not sure how that happened!-and duked our way up one side and down the other, killing more types of monsters than you can shake a twelve-gauge at, finally ending up in a hyperspace tunnel . . . you'll have to ask Arlene Sand- ers (Exhibit A, the gal to my left) to explain what that is. But when we finally killed everything worth killing, we lucked into stopping the invasion cold. See previ- ous report-from-the-front for full details.
In the end, we faced down the spidermind-the handy nickname chosen for the spider-shaped "mas- termind" of the invasion, chosen by Bill Ritch, requisat in pace, a computer genius who helped us at the cost of his own life.
Right before defeating the spidermind, I'd thought there was nothing left in me. I was certain that I couldn't have continued without Arlene, a physical reminder of what we were fighting for, like old-time war propaganda. While she breathed, I had to breathe, and fight. Blame it on the genes. We'd had the strength to go on against hundreds of monsters. We weren't about to let a little thing like the laws of physics stop us now.
Arlene couldn't stop looking at California, so I gently led her away from the sight. "You know, Arlene, I feel really stupid that I didn't think of the shed; especially after using the rocket fuel to fry the friggin' spider."
She blinked her eyes and rubbed them. I could tell she was trying not to cry. "That's why you need me, Flynn Peter Taggart."
So we went spaceship shopping. Of course, there was the little matter of adding to our personal armaments. We hadn't seen any mon- sters for a while. Maybe we neutralized all of them- but I wasn't about to count on it.
"Once, I was asked why I don't like to go out on the street without being armed," I told Arlene.
"Must have been an idiot," came the terse reply. She'd regained her self-control, but she was still acting defensive. We were good friends, but that made it easier for her to be embarrassed in front of me. "No, I wouldn't call her that," I continued. "But she'd lived a protected life; never came up against the mother of all storms."
"What's that?" Arlene wanted to know. "Late-twentieth-century street slang for when the bad mother on your block decides it's time to teach you a lesson. At such times, it is advisable to carry an equalizer."
"Like this?" Arlene asked, bending down to re- trieve an AB-10 machine pistol, her personal fave. Every little bit helps.
"If my friend had one of those in her purse-" I began, but Arlene interrupted.
"Too long to get it out. I like to carry on my person."
"Yeah, yeah. I was about to say if she had carried, she might be alive today."
Arlene stopped rummaging through the contents of a UAC crate and looked up. "Oh, Fly, I'm sorry." "Sometimes you get the lesson only one time, and it's pass-fail." I playfully poked the air in her direc- tion. "Welcome back," I said.
"What do you mean?" she asked, squinting at me the way she always did when I made her defensive. "You can feel again, dear."
"Oh," she said, her body becoming more relaxed. "You're right. One person means something. Well, sometimes . . . if there aren't too many one persons." "One's real. There's the body on the floor. A million is just a statistic, no matter how much screaming the professional mourner does."
She punched the air back at me. And she smiled. We didn't talk for a little while. We continued gather- ing goodies en route to the shed. It didn't take long to locate; the good news was that it was large and apparently well-stocked. It would take days to go through all the crates and boxes; but if the labels on the outside were accurate, we'd discovered a much larger inventory of parts than I would have imagined necessary for Deimos Base.
The bad news was a complete absence of ships in any state of assembly. There was nothing to fly! "Well jeez, I thought it was a great idea," said Arlene. "Too bad it flopped."
Somehow it seemed immoral to give up hope while standing inside Santa's workshop. I began examining some of the boxes while Arlene kicked one across the room; but that didn't bother me, she was never meant for the modern age she was born into. She'd have been more homey as a freebooter in the days of blood and iron, when one physically competent woman did enough in her lifetime to breed legends of lost, Amazonian races of warrior queens. She had guts; she had cold steel will. She didn't have patience, but what the hell!
I didn't think I would face death as well as she. I'd go down in a very nonstoic way, kicking death in the groin if I could only line up my shot.
I looked inside those boxes-big ones, little ones, all kinds of in-between ones-and an idea grew in my head, a few words slipping out.
"I wonder if it still might be possible to seize the objective," I muttered.
Arlene heard, too. "Huh? What do you mean, seize the objective?"
I was only half listening. The little voice in the back of my head drowned her out with some really crazy stuff: "It seems ridiculous, A.S., but it could work." 3
The stoic qualities of Arlene Sanders were better suited to facing death than being irritated by her old buddy. "Fly, what the hell are you talking about?" She stomped to where I was going through a box of thin metal cylinders, perfect for the project growing inside my head.
"Yes," I said, "it really could work." Using the special tone of voice normally reserved for dealing with mentally deficient children and drunken sailors, she said: "Tell me what in God's name you're on about, Fly!"
I lifted my head from the box. "When I was a kid, I wanted a car real bad. I mean real bad. Real real, bad bad."
"Here we go down memory lane," she said with a shrug.
"See, I couldn't afford the car," I said, "but I wanted one."
"Real real, bad bad?" "I mean, I'd have taken anything with wheels and a transmission. If I couldn't have a six, I'd settle for four. Three, anything! But no matter how much I lowered expectations, I still couldn't afford a vehicle." "Is this going somewhere, Fly, or do I need to hitchhike back home to Mother?"
"That's exactly right," I said. "I'm talking about transportation. I couldn't afford a car-but I could afford a spare part now and then, and you know how this ended up?"
She put her hands on her hips, head tilted to the side, and said: "Let me guess! You collected spare parts, and collected and collected, and finally you were able to build your own F-20! Or was it an aircraft carrier? Amphibious landing craft?"
I ignored her. "I built myself a car. Had a few problems; no brakes exactly, but it ran; and what a powerful sound that baby made when she turned over."
Arlene finally saw where I was headed. Memory lane dead-ended right here on Deimos. "Fly, you're BS-ing me."
"No, I really built an auto . . ." "You are insane if you think you can build a freakin' spaceship out of spare parts!"
I literally jumped up and down. "You thought of it too," I said. "Great idea, isn't it? We can build a rocket and get off this rock."
She was very tolerant. "Fly, an automobile is one thing. You're talking about a spaceship."
I looked her straight in the eye. "After all we've been through, you going to tell me we can't do this?" She looked me straight back. "Read my lips," she said. "We can not do this."
"We have nothing to lose, A.S. It can't be any harder than taking down the spidermind, can it?" "You have a point there," she said grudgingly. "So how do you propose we start?"
She was always annoyed when I used reality to win an argument. I knew it was possible. But not without a manual.
"We need some tech," I said. "Tech?"
"Plans . . . then we can give it to our design depart- ment."
"Don't tell me ... I'm the design department." I smiled. "You're the design department."
"And what are you, Fly Taggart?" "Everything else."
We went looking for a manual. Ten minutes later we found one in the most logical place, which was the last place we looked, naturally: next to the coffee maker. I tried to get Arlene to make us a pot of coffee, but she stared at me as if I'd grown a third head.
So I made it myself; I'd forgotten that Arlene didn't indulge, but that was all right with me. I figured since I was the production line, I needed all the caffeine I could survive.
Next we inventoried everything we had to work with. Our best choice was to make a small mail rocket intended for one person, but capable of seating two, if they were really chummy. I wrote a list of parts needed and found almost everything within three hours . . . except for a thingamabob. I knew what it was really called, but I couldn't think of it. We spent another hour searching, and though we didn't come across it, we located more tools that would be of immeasurable value; a screwdriver, a drill bit, a magnifying glass, and a paper punch.
"Enough for now," said Arlene. "I'm sure the thingamabob will show up before we finish. We'd better get started ... I have no idea how fast the air is leaking from the dome; we might have a month, we might have a couple of days!"
I wasn't going to argue with an optimistic Arlene. Hell, I hardly ever argued with the pessimistic one. "We haven't looked under all the tarps," I said, "and there are other rooms to check too. But there is one more shopping expedition required before we start work. We need enough food and water to hold us through the job; and all the spare liquid oxygen tanks and hydrogen tanks we can find."
Arlene nodded. We were in a race with a bunch of air molecules, and they had a head start. In addition to oxygen for fuel, we actually needed to breathe now and again over the next few days. Weeks, whatever. It would be cruel fate indeed if I screwed the last bolt and hammered the final wing nut, only to keel over from oxygen deprivation.
My brain was working overtime now: "The pres- sure is dropping so slowly, we're not going to notice when it gets dangerous. Can you rig up something to warn us when to start taking a hit of pure oxygen?" "And regulate how much we should take. Yeah, it's a space station ... I don't think I'll have much trou- ble finding an air-pressure sensor and rebreather kit." She pulled a gouge pad out of her shirt pocket and started taking notes. She thought of something I'd missed: "I'll look for warm clothes too, Fly. The temperature will drop as we lose pressure."
"Won't the sun warm us? We're no farther away than Earth itself."
"We're underground. All this dirt makes a great insulator, unfortunately."
First day, we were good scouts, gathering supplies for our merit badge in survival. I regretted that we couldn't move what we needed to a lower level and seal off one compartment. That would stretch survival by another month. But hauling the tons of material we'd need to build a rocket was impossible.
Arlene scrounged a generous supply of food, most of it produced under the dome with considerable help from the Genetics Department. After watching the monsters produced assembly-line out of the vat, I hesitated even to eat our own-human experiments in recombinant-DNA veggies and lab-grown "Meet." But Arlene wasn't queasy. She preferred the Deimos- grown peas and carrots to the real delicacy, frozen asparagus from Earth.
"I despise asparagus," she insisted. "All right; so I hate okra." The slimy stuff was one of my childhood loathings.
On the second day, we ran head-on into our first lesson in Spaceship Construction 101: namely, trans- lating the manual from "techie-talk" into English. Here, what should we make of this?
The ZDS protocol provides reliable, flow- controlled, two-way transmission of unenriched fuel-cell packet deliverables from nozzle to sock- et. It is a plasma stream (PLASM-STREAM) or
packet stream (SOCK-SEQFUELPACKET) pro- tocol. ZDS uses the Union Aerospace Corpora- tion double-sequencing directed stream format. This format provides for nozzle, spray, and
extern-spray (socket) specification. NOTE: see the definition for ZDS-redirect in Section 38.12.
ACTIVE OR PASSIVE Sockets utilizing the ZDS protocol are either "active" or "passive." Nozzle processes must be directed into passive (external spray) sockets. They detect for connection requests from deliver- able processes residing on the same or other nodes of the fuel-cell packet path. Socket proc- esses broadcast requests for active (directed spray) nozzles. They sidestep nominal delivery in favor of reverse-directed (acknowledging) packet streams.
ALL CONNECTIONS BETWEEN NOZZLES AND SOCKETS MUST BE SET TO DEFAULT
ACTIVE OR PASSIVE PROTOCOL DEPEND- ING ON THE ANTICIPATED FUEL-CELL
PATH DELIVERY PROCESS. WARNING! Failure to follow UAC active/passive nozzle-socket connection protocols may result in unanticipated fuel-cell path combustion with un- desirable results.
I could translate the final warning pretty well: if we didn't figure out what the hell they meant by "active/passive nozzle-socket connection protocols," Arlene and I would become a rather spectacular fireworks display.
Arlene was better at figuring it out than I was; she had actually taken engineering night courses during her shore tours. I volunteered the use of my hands and a strong back if she'd turn the technical gobbledy- gook into the kind of instructions a Marine can follow: "Put this part here! Tighten that bolt, Ma- rine!"
"Yeah, just like you to have the woman do all the hard work," she said.
"Just remind me to clean the carburetor before I work on the piston valves."
"It's not a car, you moron!" "Huh. I guess in space no one can hear you make metaphors." Amazingly, she didn't shoot me.
Unfortunately, the rockets used by the Deimos facility-hence all the spare parts-were short-hop, lightweight supply rockets, never intended to carry a single human being, let alone two of us ... and never intended to fight a gravity well like Earth's. There were a couple large-bore rocket casings left over from God knows when, back before we had the MDM-44 plasma motors developed by Union Aero- space, and this was the key: I figured I could hot-rod a 44 into & bigger cousin, cram it inside one of the old casings, and have enough juice to fling us off Deimos, burn into the atmosphere, and brake to a (messy) landing Somewhere on Earth.
My main goal was to keep from blowing us up. After frying our spider baby in JP-9 jet fuel, I had a new respect for the stuff. It beat the hell out of salad oil.
Arlene squatted on an uncomfortable stool translat- ing technical paragraphs into something I could un- derstand. My optimist projection was to finish the task in ten days!
Reality dragged ass. Starting our third week, we ran into the first serious problem. Trying to jerry-rig parts we couldn't find into configurations we couldn't figure out was a bitch, and I insisted we needed to test-fire the motor when I finally got a working model. We didn't have much time, but the motor was life and death, a must test. We'd spent two days painfully assembling it, and I do mean "we." Arlene enjoyed an excuse to get off her stool; besides, it was a two-man job.
We finally ended up with a sleek beauty two meters long and a meter in diameter, almost small enough to fit inside the old-model rocket skin. Just a few odd pieces here and there where I thought I could super- charge the system-or where I couldn't find the correct part and had to Substitute butter for eggs. A pair of start cables snaked into the machine from ten feet away, where a switch box was connected to twenty-seven fifty-volt ni-cad batteries.
I'd spent half a day welding steel bars together into a framework, sort of, kind of approximating the interior scaffolding in the mail tube. We bolted the motor inside, mooring it securely to the deck plates. Last, I attached a highly sensitive pressure sensor to the forward edge to measure the thrust. I'd trust Arlene to make the calculations and tell me whether we would make it into orbit or not.
"Want to say a prayer?" she asked before I switched it on.
"Yeah; I wasn't always in trouble with the nuns. Maybe I can collect on a few good deeds." Arlene stationed herself behind a bulkhead; I reached over and flipped the switch, then dived behind cover. Superheated gases rushed out the back with a tremendous roar . . . and I could tell immediately it was too much force; I'd tweaked my rocket engine too good.
But I couldn't switch it off! It was just a model, designed to burn until the fuel was gone; no cut-off valve.
The scaffolding strained, groaning like a dying steam demon-whoops, remind me later-and I
knew what was about to happen. "Get your head down!" I screamed. No use-she couldn't hear any- thing over the roar of the engine and the scream of steel twisting and ripping free.
The mooring tore loose with a horrible, grinding noise that for an instant even drowned out the 44. My beautiful, working rocket engine broke free, ate the pressure sensor with one gulp, and smashed through a dozen boxes of precious parts before making a smok- ing hole against the nearby bulkhead, leaving a per- fectly straight series of holes, like a cartoon. 4
Destroying a bulkhead on a doomed base, or even some spare parts, was no cause for alarm. Destroying the motor was something else again. Arlene screamed something obscene, but I couldn't hear her over the ringing in my ears. We got off lucky. It could have struck the JP-9 and ended everything. After we extinguished the fire and salvaged what we could of the motor, Arlene looked at me humorlessly. "Flynn Taggart, what deviltry did you do to those poor nuns?"
"Can you rephrase that, after what we've been through?" We were both a little punchy, getting by on shifts of four hours sleep. But no spiderminds were trying to kill us, no imps throwing a wrench in the machinery, no hell-princes setting fires worse than the one we'd just put out. It felt like we were on vacation. All right, to fill in a bit: an imp is what we dubbed the brown, spiny, leathery alien that throws flaming balls of mucus. Hell-princes looked like the typical "devil" from my troubled youth in Catholic school- red body, goat legs, horns, and they too threw some- thing noxious that killed you real dead; we pretty much decided it had to be an example of genetic engineering, since it was too close to a human concep- tion of evil.
We had also killed demons, which I privately called pinkies, that were huge, pink, hairy critters with no brains but an awful lot of teeth; flying, metallic skulls with little rocket motors; invisible ghosts; and an unbelievable horde of zombies-spiritually, they were the worst, for oftener than not, they were our own buddies and comrades at arms, "reworked" into the living dead.
But the granddaddy monster of them all was the steam-demon, so called because it was a five-meter- tall mechanical monstrosity with a back rack full of rockets and a launcher where its hand should have been. When it moved, it sounded like a steam loco- motive and shook the ground.
None of that was important compared to one fact: Arlene had completely changed her mind about build- ing the rocket. "I'm sorry I ever doubted you," she said. "I guess it is possible."
But now I was the contrarian. "We did all the calculations right, A.S. We checked and triple- checked everything . . . How could the engine be so much more powerful than we thought?"
She smiled. "Because they obviously deliberately understated the capabilities in the technical literature-probably for security reasons."
"So all our calculations are worthless crap. How are you going to fly this thing?"
She didn't seem overly concerned. "Fly, the vehicle hasn't been built that I can't pilot."
"Um . . . well, this rocket hasn't been built, has it?" "You know what I mean! If you build it, I will fly. I swear."
"Hm." I didn't know what to say. I had no idea whether she was or wasn't a hot-shot rocket pilot. We don't get much call for that in the Light Drop Infan- try. But now that she believed in the rocket, nothing was going to stop us.
There were other motor parts, and we patched together something I figured was eighty percent ready. There was no time for better. The air was growing thinner and the temperature was dropping ... the crack in the dome was finally taking its toll. The pressure dropped so gradually, we didn't even notice. After a while I found myself panting for air after climbing a ladder, and Arlene had to rest after every heavy part she handed me.
Then a couple of days later, I realized my mind was ' wandering in the middle of a task. I focused, then wandered again.
Arlene was able to maintain her concentration; maybe being smaller, she didn't need as high a partial pressure of oxygen. But both of us were getting mighty cold.
When I saw Arlene shivering while working, I made her throw on a couple of sweaters and did the same. We wore gloves, except that I kept removing mine because it interfered with the work. Then my hands would turn to ice, and I'd put them back on to warm up before taking another stab at attaching the fine filaments that ran microvolts to the plasma globules. Suddenly, the air-pressure sensor started screaming its fool head off. Arlene and I exchanged a worried glance, but we didn't need to be told twice. It was time to start hitting the raw stuff, O2 neat. We took hits off the same oxygen bottle, trying to limit ourselves to a few breaths every hour or so, or when we started to get dizzy or goofy.
But we just didn't have that much bottled oxygen. Uncle Sugar packed a lot of air into a single bottle; but even so, even at the slow pace we used it, we'd run out of breathing oxygen in just a few more days. We had more bottles, but we needed them for fuel mixing. And of course we'd need to breathe more frequently as the pressure dropped-paradoxically, it was drop- ping slower now, since there was less pressure in the dome to push the air out.
We stretched the bottles as long as we could, but they ran out while there was still plenty of work left. I'd done mountain climbing in my native Colorado before joining the Corps; as the air grew thinner, I tried to help Arlene deal with it. "Breathe shallowly," I said. "Rest, and don't talk except for the job." The physical exertion wasn't any less, though. We'd have to stop frequently, gasping and panting. We tired easily and needed more sleep, but stayed on the four- hour rotations, creating a cycle of exhaustion we couldn't break. But sleeping longer would just make the job take longer, and the pressure would drop lower in the meantime.
Low pressure is insidious. There are obvious ef- fects: exhaustion, trouble breathing, and cold. But there are other symptoms people don't often think about: your ears ring; it's hard to hear sounds (thinner air makes everything sound muffled and "tinny"); and worst of all, your mind can start to go. Our brains are built for a certain barometric pressure, and if it's too high or too low, we start getting strange.
Or in Arlene's case, hallucinogenic. "Pumpkin!" she suddenly screamed, waking me
after two hours of my allotted four. She grabbed a pump-action riot gun and pounded a shot over my head, so close it made my skull vibrate.
"Pumpkin" was our name for the horrible, floating alien heads-mechanical, I think-that vomited ball lightning capable of frying you at fifty paces. I threw myself off the table we used as a bed, figuring the vacation was over: the aliens had found us at last! But when I dropped to my knees, Sig-Cow rifle at the ready, all I saw was the dark hole in the wall left by my overly enthusiastic motor test of a week ago. Arlene ran down the passageway ahead of me, firing wildly; firing at nothing. But those bastard alien "demons" could be fast! I had no reason to doubt my buddy as I joined her, ready to do what we'd done countless times during our assault on Phobos, Deimos, and the tunnel.
Then she ran straight into the bulkhead like it wasn't there, and I suddenly realized something was seriously wrong with her.
She knocked herself out. I couldn't look after her then; I had to make sure about the pumpkin.
Knuckling the residue of sleep from bloodshot eyes, I ran like a mother down the corridor, eyes left, right . . . not wasting a shot but ready for the enemy. For an instant I thought I saw a flying globe and almost squeezed off a shot. But it was a trick of peripheral vision, just a flash of my own shadow.
A cul-de-sac at the end of the corridor finally convinced me that there was no freaking pumpkin. I stood for a moment, desperately trying to get nonexistent air into my burning lungs. Then I re- turned to Arlene, who groaned and panted as she started coming to.
"Pal, honey, I hate to do this . . . but I've got to relieve you of your weapon."
She stared uncomprehendingly. "There was no pumpkin," I explained. "You're suffering from low-pressure psychosis."
"Oh Jesus," she said quietly. She understood. Sadly, she handed over the scattergun and her AB-10 machine pistol.
I felt like the bottom of my boots after walking through the green sludge. You don't relieve a Marine of his weapon, not ever. By doing so, I'd just effec- tively demoted her to civilian. And the worst part was, even she realized now that she'd been halluci- nating.
She was crying when we walked slowly back to the vehicle assembly room, a.k.a. the hangar. I'd never seen Arlene cry before-except when she had to kill the reworked, reanimated body of her former lover, Dodd.
"Hey," I said a few hours later, "can't we electro- lyze water and get oxygen?"
Arlene was silent for a moment, her lips moving. "Yes," she said, "but we'd only get a few breaths per liter, and we need the water too, Fly."
"Oh." Not for the first time, I wished I knew more engineering. I vowed to take classes when we made it back home ... if there even was a "back home" anymore.
I started having unpleasant dreams, so I didn't mind giving up more of my sleep allotment. It was always the same dream, actually. I loved roller coast- ers as a kid. They were the closest I could get to flying in those days. I lived only five miles away from a freestanding wood-frame monster. I thought I would love nothing better, until they built a tubular steel, eight-loop supercoaster.
I'd never been afraid on the old roller coaster. With all the courage of an experienced ten-year-old, I'd sit in the car as it slowly reached the top, the horizon slanting off to my left, and pretend it was the rim of a planet and I was an astronaut. As it went over the top, plunging down a cliff of wood and metal, I made it a point of honor not to hold on to the crash bar. I was too grown-up for that!
I was always interested in how things were put together and how they worked. So I asked about the new roller coaster. A man who worked at the amuse- ment park told me stuff he wasn't supposed to say, stuff he knew nothing about-about how the forces generated could snap a human neck like rotten cord- wood, how the auxiliary chain that gave the car acceleration had a lot of extra strain on it for an eight- loop ride.
As I started up the first hill of the new ride, I thought about what I'd learned. I didn't know it was all bogus crap made up to impress a ten-year-old. The first loop, I worried about centrifugal force snapping my neck; the second loop, I sweated over velocity tearing me out of my seat; the third loop, I fixated on the damned chain coming loose; and the fourth loop was reserved for a ten-year-old having ulcers over the gears stripping. And then I threw up- not a good thing to do when you're upside down. I wonder if that bastard ever knew what damage his misinformation caused?
As I grew up, I learned how real knowledge could banish fear. You play the odds. You focus on the job at hand. You don't want to mess up. The childhood trauma was behind me ... until it came back now on Deimos as I tried to grab a little sleep. Instead of rest, I was back on that eight-loop metal monster, and now it turned into the arms and legs of a steam-demon. When the creature screamed at me and raised its missile arm, I would always wake up; so I didn't even have the pleasure of fighting or dying.
I didn't worry about my stupid dreams, though. It sure beat fighting the real thing. Besides, I was getting off easy compared to Arlene.
I knew things were bad when I tried to wake her up and she stared with unblinking eyes, not seeing a damned thing. I realized she was still asleep. I'd read somewhere that it's risky to wake a person from a trance state, and I didn't require medical training to know Arlene was Somnambulist City.
There wasn't time to go hunting for a medical library. A quick check of medical supplies produced a Law Book, wedged between the surgical bandages and antibiotics. I had to laugh. A text on medical malprac- tice had made it all the way to a Martian moon, and now, by way of a hyperspace tunnel, had almost returned to Earth.
I wasn't laughing as I returned to Arlene. She walked in her sleep, striking at the air in front of her. "Get away," she said to phantoms only she could see. "I won't leave you. I'll stay, I'll stay!"
5 If I shouldn't wake her, there seemed no
reason I shouldn't try to communicate. "Arlene, can you hear me?"
"Quiet," she said, "I don't want Fly to hear you. He's depending on me."
"Why don't you want him to know about me?" I asked.
"Because you're evil," she said with conviction. "You're all evil, you bastards."
She walked slowly down the corridor. So long as she wasn't in danger of hurting herself, I saw no reason to shock her out of it. "Why are we bad?"
"You scare me. You make my brother do bad things!"
Up to that point I did not know that Arlene even had a brother.
It was weird-I thought we'd known everything about each other's family life. She talked about her parents and growing up in Los Angeles all the time. I was uncomfortable pursuing the matter, but I rationa- lized away my moral qualms and decided to play out the hand. "Who are we?" I asked again.
She swayed drunkenly, delivering a monologue like those weird, old plays from previous centuries. "Bad things in the air, in the night, making my brother crazy. He'd never do bad things except for you. I thought I'd never see you again . . . Why'd you follow me into space, to Mars, to Deimos? When I grew up, I thought you weren't real, but now I know better. You followed me, but I won't let you get inside me; not inside!"
When Arlene had kidded me about going down memory lane, I took it in good humor. But if we were going to have to relive all the bad stuff from our childhood as the air leaked away, I was good and ready to say good-bye to Deimos now, rocket or no rocket, instead of later.
In the meantime, what was I going to do about Arlene? I couldn't let her wander the corridors, argu- ing with ghosts from her childhood. With time short and no way to send to Earth for a correspondence course in psychology, I went with common sense. "Arlene, we'll make a deal with you," I said. "We'll stop bothering you and let you get back to Fly." "In exchange for what?" she wanted to know, quite reasonably.
"Because we've moved back to Earth, and you can't touch us there."
"Fly and I are building a ship to take us to Earth," "Ha, we don't believe you two will get anywhere near us. You'll be stuck on Deimos forever!" "That's a lie!" she snapped, and stopped walking. "We'll fight you again." She stared right at me. "We're not afraid of your little genetic stupidmen." "Big words!" I said.
She came right at me, fists raised, and started hitting me. As I fended off her blows-not too difficult, considering the difference in reach-I yelled, "Hang on, Arlene, I'm coming to help you. This is Fly, Fly!"
As I say, I never took any courses in psychology, but I acted in school plays. And to steal a phrase, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to go with the flow. I gave myself a magna cum laude graduation as her eyes came into focus and she recognized me.
"Fly? What happened?" "We've been fighting monsters again."
She looked around the empty corridor and then back to me. I didn't have to spell it out. "How much longer can we take this?"
"Not a second longer than we have to." Arlene started seeing weird colors after that- auras, shadows, and things she wouldn't tell at first. Sometimes she would put the tech documents down, sitting quietly with her eyes shut until the colors went away.
It scared me plenty, but it terrified her. She was losing her mind-and she knew it. So when I told her the engine was eighty percent finished, Arlene urged, "Fly, forget the other twenty percent. It's done! Let's blow this popcorn stand."
I had to be honest. "A.S., there are still a few systems I don't think are in really good shape." "We can't wait. We've taken chances with worse odds than that the whole time we've been on this rock. Fly, I ... I stopped being able to see color vision this morning. All I can see is gray-except when I hallucinate a rainbow-colored aura. And my peripheral vision is shot." She paused, licking her lips. "And Fly, there's something else."
She came close and spoke softly, seriously. "I want to confess something to you, Fly. What would your nuns think of that? For the first time I'm really afraid. I'm afraid I might kill you, thinking you're one of the monsters. I couldn't stand that."
The little voice in the back of my head had whis- pered that possibility when she first imagined the pumpkin. It was a chance I was willing to take. Even so, I was glad she, not I, stated the danger loud and clear.
I sped up preparations, insisting that Arlene sleep whenever possible. The air and pressure problems were getting to me as well, but I handled them better than Arlene.
Of course, the problem with oxygen starvation is that you are not the best judge of your own reason. But the best chance for both of us was to finish the rocket.
And we were close, tantalizingly close. I suddenly got the creepy crawlies. I recognized the symptom: I was picking up the same psychosis as Arlene. "All right," I acquiesced, "we go in the next few hours. We have a chance, I guess; eighty percent is eighty points better than zero."
We got busy. We drank water. We ate a last good meal of biscuits, cheese, fruit, nuts. The Eskimos say that food is sleep, by which I guess they mean if your body can't get one kind of recharge, you might as well take the other.
Arlene abandoned me to work out the telemetry program that would (God willing) launch us, kill Deimos's orbital velocity, dropping us into the atmos- phere, then take us down, at which point she'd hand over control to me to find a suitable spot to touch down. Fortunately, it was basically cut-and-paste; I doubt she could have written it from scratch . . . not in the condition she was in. The hand of God must have graced her, though she'd never admit it, for her to keep it together long enough to patch it together. As we prepared to leave, I kept running the basic worries through my mind. The mail tubes were de- signed for Mars, which has only a fraction the atmos- phere of Earth and a much lower gravity; the specific impulse developed by the rockets might not be enough to overcome Earth's gravity as we spilled velocity and tried to land. On the other hand, the thick atmosphere might cause so much friction that our little ship would burn up.
The launcher was a superconducting rail gun. Re- minded me of the eight-loop wonder at the amuse- ment park back in the Midwest. This time I hoped I wouldn't throw up. At least this piece of equipment didn't have an auxiliary chain ... so what was there to worry about?
I grunted the launcher around to point opposite Deimos's orbital path. The rocket controls were sim- ple to operate, thank God; throttle, stick, various navigational gear that I didn't really understand, and environmental controls, all ranged around my face in a tremendously uncomfortable position.
Then suddenly, a few hours before our scheduled departure, Arlene totally freaked out.
At first I thought she was joking. She strolled up to me and said, "Don't try to fool me; I know what you really are."
"Yeah, a prize SOB," I said distractedly. A moment later I was on my butt with Arlene's boot on my chest and a shiv-a sharpened piece of metal-against my throat. Looking into her eyes, I saw the blank look of a zombie . . . and for a moment, Jesus, I thought they'd somehow gotten her, reworked her!
But it was just the low pressure, or maybe slow oxygen deprivation. I talked to her for five minutes from my supine position, saying anything, God knows what, anything to snap her back to some semblance of herself. After a while she dropped the shiv and started crying, saying she had murdered God or some such silly nonsense.
I wasn't going to abandon her, no matter what; but there was nothing in my personal rule book that said I had to make it any more difficult. We had Medikits in the shed. I gave her a shot. She struggled, coughed, and turned to me. "Why can't we eat our brothers?" she asked; then the drug took effect.
She'd be okay; in the mail-tube rocket, we've have more pressure, and more important, more partial- pressure of O2. She'd be all right ... I hoped. I put her aboard the rocket, threw in a bag of supplies, and squeezed in next to her. It was like being in a sleeping bag together-or a coffin. I positioned myself so I could reach all the controls, took a deep breath and got serious.
Just before lighting the cigar, I remembered the stark terror of riding in the E7 seat of an S-8 sub- hunter "Snark" jet and coming in for my virgin landing on an aircraft carrier. Trusting entirely to the guy on the other end made me more nervous than the idea of landing on a postage stamp. Well, this time, for better or worse, I was the guy with the stick; considering that I'd never flown anything but a troop shimmy over some mountains, I almost wished I were back in the S-8.
I threw the switches, pushed forward on the throttle (oddly similar to a passenger airliner), and the rocket slid along the tube, launching at ten g's. Arlene was already out, of course, and missed the pleasure of blacking out with me.
Suddenly, I discovered myself in a strange room, a faint hissing catching my attention. Black and white, no color ... I knew I should know where I was, what all these things, this equipment around me, was. I should know my name too, I guessed.
Then the sound cut back in; fly, someone said. A command? Fly, fly-"Fly." It was me, my lips, saying the word fly ... the name! Fly, me; my name. Then I saw color and recognized the jerry-rigged blinking lights and liquid-crystal displays of the mail tube. I'd installed them myself; the mail doesn't need to see where it's going, but we did.
Through the slit of a viewscreen, I saw deepest blue with faint, cotton-candy wisps, strings flashing past. I glanced at the altimeter-much too high for clouds. Ionized gases?
Then something socked me in the face, like a 10mm shell, and agony exploded across my face. At first it was bilateral; then it focused right behind my eye- balls, like God's own worst migraine. For a few seconds I thought my head literally was going to detonate. Then it faded as the blood finally repressurized my cranial arteries and rebooted my brain. I looked at the chronometer: the entire black- out had lasted only forty-five seconds.
It could have been forty-five years. A low groan announced Arlene's return to con- sciousness. "Fly," she moaned, "good luck."
I was too busy to say anything. But it was good having her back again. The calculations she'd already worked out for our glide path were okay, and I used the retros to get us on her highway.
As we came in, the ride got bumpier and rougher. The interior of the little craft started heating up. Being so close together made us sweat all the faster. When it got over fifty degrees centigrade, beads of perspiration poured into my eyes, interfering with vision.
But the temp continued to rise. The mail tubes are supposed to be insulated-but the skin on this one was built for Mars.
In Earth atmosphere, we were being baked. The temp boiled up past seventy degrees, and I was gasping for air, every breath searing my lungs. My skin turned red and I could barely hold the controls. Another minute and we would be dead.
6 Fly!" Arlene screamed. "Blow the oxygen!
We'll lose it, but it'll heat up and blow out the exhaust, cooling the interior!"
"Not again!" I said. "Huh?"
"We'll be low on air again!" "Do it, Fly, or we'll fry."
We took turns making the other face unpleasant facts. It was something like being married.
I did as she commanded. The cooling effect made a real difference. My brain was still on fire, but at least I could think again.
"So what systems still aren't working?" she asked next, still gasping from each searing breath. This seemed like an opportune moment to be
completely honest. "Now that you mention it," I mentioned, "the only one I'm worried about is the landing system."
"What?" "The thingamabob would have come in useful for landing. What do they call it? Oh yes, the aerial- braking system."
She sighed. If there had been more room in our little cocoon, she might have shrugged as well. "By- gones," she said. "Sorry for the trouble I caused." "Arlene, don't be ridiculous! I was having crazy dreams and was about to go off the deep end myself. You just went first because you're . . . smaller." It occurred to me that we were having more of a discussion than was wise under the circumstances. "So how in hell do we land this puppy?" No sooner were these words out of her mouth than Arlene started yawning.
I figured we should try and set it down anywhere on dry land. Live or die, I wasn't in the mood for a swim. If we survived, we could get our bearings anywhere on Earth-pick a destination and then haul butt. We didn't have any time to waste. Thanks to our stunt with the oxygen, the O2 to CO2 ratio was dropping. I was in even less mood for us to become goofy from oxygen deprivation after watching Arlene go nuts before-thanks, Mr. Disney, but I'm not going back on that ride.
I had to explain this to Arlene, but she was asleep again so I explained it to the Martian instead. He was a little green guy, about three feet high, and I was glad to see him. "About time one of you showed up," I said. "We always expected to see guys like you up here instead of all this medieval stuff."
"Perfectly understandable," he said in the voice of W. C. Fields. "These demons are a pain. But they're welcome to Deimos."
"Why is that?" I asked. "Confidentially, it's an ugly moon, don't you think? Not at all a work of beauty like Phobos, a drinking man's moon. Speaking of which, you wouldn't have some whiskey on you?"
"Sorry, only water." He was very offended. "You mean that liquid fish fornicate in? We Martians don't care for the stuff. You can drown in it, you know. Now ours is a nice, dry planet, rusty brown like that car of yours after you abandoned it to the elements. Mars is nice and cold, good practice for the grave. Are you sure you don't have any booze?"
I figured he was bringing up drowning just to scare me. If Arlene and I didn't burn up in the atmosphere, there was always a good chance of winding up in the drink and drowning like the Shuttle pioneers had in the 1980s.
Besides, he'd raised a certain issue and I wanted an answer. "Why does Phobos look better to you than Deimos?" I asked.
"My dear fellow, Phobos is the inner moon of Mars. Deimos was always on the outs even before those hobgoblins hijacked it. The outs is a bad place to be, and you are out of time and going to die and betray Arlene and betray the Earth, you puny little man with your delusions."
While he was talking, he was growing in size, and sharp teeth protruded beyond his sneering lips; the eyes flamed red, as the rockets flamed red, as the sky was underneath and overhead all at the same time. And I was screaming.
"You're one of them! You're a demon-imp-specter- thing. You tricked me."
"Fly," said a comforting voice from behind the Martian. "Fly, you're hallucinating."
"I knew that," I told her as the Martian faded from view. "I knew it all along."
A quick check of the cabin gave a head count of (1) myself, (2) Arlene, (3) no Martians. I checked again to make sure. Yep, just two humans. No monsters. No Martians. Not much air. Definitely not enough air. "We've got to land this quickly," I said.
"Um ... if it's all the same to you, Fly, I can wait until we can land it safely."
The atmosphere got thick enough that I pulled the cord to extend our mini-wings. Instantly, we started buffeting like mad, shaking so hard I thought my innards would become outards. We rolled, pitched, yawed-triple-threat!-and it was all I could do to hang on to the ragged edge of Arlene's computer- projected glide path.
The screen displayed a series of concentric squares that gave the illusion of flying through an infinite succession of square wire hoops. So long as I kept inside them, I should go where she projected, some- where in North America, she said; even she wasn't sure where.
But I kept cutting through the path, coloring out- side the lines. I couldn't hold it! I'd yank on the stick and physically wrench us back through the wire frames and out the other side (they turned from red to black when I was briefly on the meatball). The best I could do was stay within spitting distance of my proper course . . . and naturally, we were running too hot, much too fast. We were going to overshoot our mark-possibly straight into the Pacific Ocean. I barely hung on, abandoning retros to guide our two-man "cruise missile" by fins, air-braking to spill as much excess velocity as possible. The ship started shaking. An old silver tooth filling started to ache. Arlene leaned back against the seat, muscles in her jaw tightening, eyes getting wider and wider. I think she was starting to appreciate the gravity of our situation.
North America unwound beneath the window like a quilt airing out on a sunny day. We were over the Mississippi, sinking lower, falling west, descending fast. Then we entered a cloudbank. Finally the ship landed, not gracefully I might add. Arlene and I looked around, we landed in a freaking field, the sun was setting and bunnies were bouncing around. "Huh, guess the earth wasn't under attack after all, but that big ugly Deimos is still in orbit" I said.
"Oh they're so cute!" Arlene gasped while looking at the rabbits.
"Arlene can you smell something?"
"Actually, I can…."
We could both smell something, and hear something, shouting, w both turned around and saw it, a city was burning, flames all over, explosions, how we both ignored this, I have no fucking idea. But Arlene seemed more focus on a stick, implanted into the dirt, with a bunny's head on it. "Oh god" Arlene sighed. I for one was more focused on the city, now that I had stoped hallucinating I was ready for action, no one can stop us.