Страница:
found it still where I'd left it. Sunday night--still daylight
in Delambre--I packed the rover and decided to look once more
before leaving. I was feeling discouraged.
At first I thought it hadn't been touched, then I realized
the pictures had been changed. I knelt and spun the drum, and
through the slits I saw the flickering image of myself in my
pressure suit, with Winston in his, capering around my legs.
#
I had a week to think it over. Was she saying she wanted
to see the dog? Any dog, or just Winston? Or was she saying
anything at all except I see you?
What I had to remember was there was no real hurry to this
project, my feelings of impatience notwithstanding. If Winston
had to be involved, it would require bringing Liz deeper into
my confidence, something I was reluctant to do. So the next
weekend I went out armed with four dogs, one from each of the
cultures in Texas. There was a brightly painted Mexican one,
carved from wood, another simpler wooden pioneer dog, a
Comanche camp scene, with dogs, painted on rawhide--the best I
could do--and my prize, a brass automaton of a dog that would
shuffle up to a fire hydrant and lift its leg.
I set them out on my next visit. As I was crawling into
the tent afterwards my phone rang.
"Hello? I said, suspiciously.
"I still say it can't fly."
"Liz? How'd you get this number?"
"You ask me that? Don't start me lying this early in the
morning. I got my methods."
I thought about telling her what the CC thought of her
methods, and I thought about chewing her out for invading my
privacy--since my retirement I'd restricted my telephone to
incoming calls from a very short list--but thinking about those
things was as far as I got, because as I was talking I'd stood
up and turned around, and all four of my new gifts were lined
up just outside the tent, looking in at me. I turned quickly,
scanning the landscape in every direction, but it was useless.
In that mirror skin of hers she might be lying flat no more
than thirty meters away and I wouldn't have a prayer.
So what I said was "Never mind that, I was just thinking
of you, and that lovely dog of yours."
"Then this is your lucky day. I'm calling from the car,
and I'm no more than twenty minutes from Delambre, and Winston
is having a wet dream that may concern your left leg, so throw
some of that chili on the stove."
#
"I think you gained two kay since last week," she said
when she came into the tent. "When it comes time to whelp that
thing, you're gonna have to do it in shifts." I appreciated
those remarks so much that I added three peppers to her bowl
and miked it hard. Pregnancy is maybe the most mixed blessing
I'd ever experienced. On the one hand, there's a feeling I
couldn't begin to describe, something that must approach
holiness. There's a life growing in your body. When all is said
and done, reproducing the species is the only demonstrable
reason for existence. Doing so satisfies a lot of the brain's
most primitive wiring. On the other hand, you feel like such a
sow.
I told her as little as I could get away with, mostly that
I'd seen someone out here and that I wanted to get in contact
with her. She saw my box of toys: the zoetrope, and the dogs.
"If it's that girl you had the pictures of, and you saw
her out here, I'd like to meet her, too."
I had to admit it was. How else was I going to convince
her to leave Winston in my care for the rest of the weekend?
We tossed around a few ideas, none of them very good. As
she was getting ready to leave she thought of something, pulled
a deck of cards from her pocket, and handed them to me.
"I brought these along when I found out where you'd been
coming all these weekends." She'd previously told me the story
of her detective work, nosing around Texas, finding out from
Huck that I always left Friday evening when the paper went to
bed--lately even earlier. Rover rental records available to the
public, or to people who knew how to get into them, told her
where I'd been renting. A bribe to the right mechanic got her
access to the odometer of my vehicle, and simple division told
her how long a trip I'd been taking each time, but by then
she'd been pretty sure it was to Delambre.
"I knew you'd seen something out here during the
Bicentennial," she went on. "I didn't know what, but you came
back from that last walk looking wilder than an acre of snakes,
and you wouldn't tell anybody what it was. Then you show up at
my place with those pictures of a girl running through nothing
and you won't let me wire 'em or digitize 'em. I expect you got
secrets to keep, but I could figure out you were looking for
somebody. So if you want to find somebody, what you do is you
start playing solitaire, and pretty soon they'll come up and
tell you--"
"--to play the black ten on the red Jack," I finished for
her.
"You heard it. Well, at least it'll give you something to
do." She left, casting a worried eye over her pet, who didn't
seem at all disturbed to see her go, and with a final
admonition that Winston got his walkies three times a day or he
was apt to get mean enough to make a train take a dirt road.
#
I'd already brought a deck of cards. I usually have one
with me, as manipulating them is something to do with my hands
at idle moments, better than needlepoint and potentially much
more profitable. If you don't practice the moves you find your
hands freeze up on you at a critical moment.
But I never play solitaire, and the reason is a little
embarrassing. I cheat. Which is all very well for blackjack or
five-card stud, but what's the point in solitaire?
Point or not, I eventually found myself laying out a hand.
Pretty soon I got into it. Not the game itself, than which
there are few purer wasters of time, but the cards. You have to
be able to visualize the order, make them your friends so
they'll tell you things. Do it long enough and you'll always
know what the next card will be, and you'll know what the cards
are that you can't see, as sure as if they were marked on the
back.
I did it for a long time, until Winston got up and began
to scratch at the wall of the tent. Better get him into his
suit before he got frantic, I thought, and looked up into the
face of the girl. She was standing there, outside the tent,
grinning down at Winston, and she had a telescope tucked under
her arm. She looked at me and shook a finger: naughty, naughty.
"Wait!" I shouted. "I want to talk to you."
She smiled again, shrugged her shoulders, and became a
perfect mirror. All I could see of her was the distorted
reflection of the tent and the ground she stood on. The
distortions twisted and flowed and began to dwindle. Pressing
my face against the tent wall I could follow her progress for a
little while since she was the only moving object out there.
She wasn't in any hurry and I thought she looked back over her
shoulder, but there was no way to be sure.
I got into my suit quickly, thought it over, and suited
Winston, too. I let him out, knowing his ears and sense of
smell were totally useless out here but hoping some other doggy
sense would give me a lead. He shuffled off, trying to press
his nose to the ground as he usually did, succeeding only in
getting moondust on the bottom of his helmet. I followed him
with my flashlight.
Soon he stopped and tried to press his face to the surface
with more than his usual doggedness. I knelt and looked at what
he was trying to pick up. It was a bit of spongy material that
crumbled in my glove when I lifted it. I laughed aloud; Winston
looked up, and I patted the top of his helmet.
"I might have know you wouldn't miss food, even if you
can't smell it," I told him. And we set off together, following
the trail of breadcrumbs.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
Feeling not unlike the hood ornament on a luxury
rover--and showing a lot more chrome-plated belly than either
Mr. Rolls or Mr. Royce would have approved of--I stepped boldly
forth into the sunlight, almost as naked as the day I was born.
Boldly, if you don't dwell on the thirty minutes I spent
getting up my nerve to do it in the first place. Naked, if you
don't count the mysterious force field that kept me wrapped in
a warming blanket of air at least five millimeters thick.
Even the warming part was illusory. It certainly felt as
if the air was keeping me warm, and without that psychological
reassurance I doubt if I'd have made it. Actually, the air was
cooling me, which is always the problem in a space suit,
whether bought off the shelf at Hamilton's or hocus-pocused
into existence by the Genius of the Robert A. Heinlein. See,
the human body generates heat, and a spacesuit has to be a good
insulator, that's its main purpose; the heat will build up and
choke you without an outlet. See?
Oh, brother. If you had a chuckle at my explanations of
nanoengineering and cybernetics, wait till you hear Hildy's
Field Suits Made Simple.
"You're doing fine, Hildy," Gretel (not her real name)
coaxed. "I know it takes some getting used to."
"How would you know that?" I countered. "You grew up in a
field suit."
"Yeah, but I've taken tenderfeet out before."
Tenderfeet, indeed. I bent over to see those pedal
extremities, thinking I'd have to get reacquainted with them
post-partum. I wiggled my toes and light wiggled off the
reflections. Like wearing thick mylar socks, only all I could
feel was what appeared to be the rough surface of Luna. There
was some feedback principle at work there, I'd been told; the
field kept me floating five millimeters high no matter how hard
I pressed down. And a good thing, too. Those rock were hot.
"How's the breathing?" Gretel asked, in a funny voice I'd
get used to eventually. Part of the field suit package was a
modification of my implanted telephone so that sub-vocalization
could be heard over the channel the Heinleiners used
suit-to-suit.
"I still want to gasp," I said.
"Say again?"
I repeated it, saying each word carefully.
"That's just psychotic."
I think she meant psychosomatic, or maybe psychological.
Or possibly psychotic was the perfect word. How would you
describe someone who trusted her delicate hide to a spatial
effect that, as near as I could understand it, had no existence
in the real world?
The desire to breathe was real enough, even though a
suppressor of some kind was at work in my brain cutting off
that part of the autonomic nervous system. My body was getting
all the oxygen it needed, but when your lungs have been
inhaling and exhaling for over a hundred years, some part of
you gets a little alarmed when asked to shut it off for an hour
or so. I'd been holding my breath for almost ten minutes so
far. I felt about ready to go back inside and gulp.
"You want to go back inside?"
I wondered if I'd been muttering to myself. Gotta watch
that. I shook my head, remembered how hard that was to see, and
mouthed "No."
"Then take my hand," she said. I did, and our two suit
fields melted together and I felt her bare hand in mine. I
could see that, if these things ever got on the market, there
was going to be a big fad in lovemaking under the stars.
#
Don't go shopping for a field suit just yet, though.
They'll surely be available in a few years, what with
current conditions. A lot of people are angry at the
Heinleiners for not just bestowing the patents gratis to the
general public. I've heard mutterings. A lot of good it will do
the mutterers; they simply don't understand Heinleiners. There
goddam sure ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and they're
out to prove it.
As I write this, the Heinleiners are still pretty pissed
off, and who could blame them? All charges have naturally been
dropped, the statutes of limitations have expired, as it were.
Nobody's out hunting them. Yet I swore a solemn oath not to
reveal the names of any of them until given permission, and
that permission has not been granted, and who's to say they're
wrong? Say what you will about me as a reporter, but I never
revealed a source, and I never will. Hence, the girl I will
call "Gretel." Hence all the aliases I will bestow on the
people I met after I followed Gretel's trail into the perfect
mirror.
And I promised not to lie to you, but from here on in I
will not always tell you the whole truth. Events have of
necessity been edited, to protect people with no reason to
trust authority but who trusted me and then found . . . but I'm
getting ahead of myself.
#
The trail of breadcrumbs led into the rubble that washed
at the base of the Heinlein. At first it seemed as if they
vanished into a blank wall, but I found that if I ducked a
little there was a way through.
Luckily, I had Winston on a leash, because he was
straining to head right into the pile, and god knows if I'd
ever have found him again. I shined my flashlight under the
overhang--which seemed to be the back end of a vintage
rover--and saw it would be possible to squirm my way in.
Without the crumbs I never would have tried it, as I could
already see four ways to go. But I did go in, wondering all the
time just how stable this whole pile was, if I dared brush up
against anything.
Not too far in it became clear I was on a pathway. At
first it was just bare rock. Soon there was a flooring laid
down, made of discarded plastic wall panels. I tested each step
cautiously, but it seemed firm. I found each panel had been
spot welded to some of the more massive pieces of debris that
made up the jackstraw jumble. I further saw, looking around the
edge of the roadway, that the ground was no longer down there.
My flashlight picked up an endless array of junk. If there'd
been any air I might have tried dropping a coin or something; I
had a feeling I'd hear it clatter for a long time.
For a while I kept testing each new panel cautiously, but
each was as firmly in place as the last. I decided I was being
silly. People obviously used this path with some frequency, and
despite its impromptu nature it seemed sturdy enough. Flashing
my light around above me I could soon see the tunnel itself had
been made by some kind of boring machine. It was cylindrical,
and a lot of rubbish had been blasted or cut away; I found
sliced edges of metal beams on each side of the tunnel, as if
the center sections had been cut out. I hadn't seen it as a
cylinder at first because its walls were so relentlessly
baroque, not covered with anything as they would be in King
City.
Before long I came to a string of lights hung rather
haphazardly along the left-hand side of the tunnel. And not
long after that I saw somebody approaching me from a good
distance. I shined the light at the person, and she shined her
light at me, and I saw she was also pregnant and also had a
bulldog on a leash, which seemed too much for coincidence.
Winston didn't put it together. Instead, he plowed forward
in his usual way, either to greet a new friend or to rend an
enemy into bloody gobbets, who could tell? I could hear the
clang over my suit radio when he hit. He sat down hard, having
had no visible effect upon the perfect mirror.
Neither did I, though I scrupulously did all the futile
things people do in stories about humans encountering alien
objects: chunking rocks, swinging a makeshift club, kicking it.
I left no scratches on it. ("Mister President, it is my
scientific opinion the saucer is made of an alloy never seen on
Earth!") I'd have tried fire, electricity, lasers, and atomic
weapons, but I didn't have any handy. Maybe lasers wouldn't
have been the best idea.
So I waited, wondering if she'd been watching me, hoping
she'd had a good laugh at my expense, feeling sure she hadn't
led me this far just to strand me, and in a moment the surface
of the mirror bulged and became a human face. The face smiled,
and then the rest of the body appeared. At first I thought she
was moving forward, but it turned out the mirror was moving
back and the field was forming around her body as she simply
stood there.
It moved back about three meters, and she beckoned to me.
I went to her, and she made some gestures which I didn't
understand. Finally I got the idea that I was to hold on to a
bar fastened to the wall. I did, and the girl crouched and held
on to Winston, who seemed happy to see her.
There was a loud bang and something slammed into me. Bits
of trash and dust swirled, maybe a little mist, too. The
perfect mirror was no longer where it had been and the corridor
had changed. I looked around and saw the walls were now coated
with the same mirror, and the flat surface had re-formed behind
me, where it had been originally. A rather dramatic airlock.
For a few more seconds Gretel was still wrapped in
distortion, then her suit field vanished and she became the
nude ten-year-old who had run through my dreams for such a long
time. She was saying something. I shook my head and glanced at
the readouts for exterior temperature and pressure-- pure
habit, I could see and hear the air was okay-- then I took off
my helmet.
"First thing," Gretel said, "you've got to promise not to
tell my father."
"Not to tell him what?"
"That you saw me on the surface without my suit. He
doesn't like it when I do that."
"I wouldn't, either. Why do you do it?"
"You gotta promise, or you can just go home."
I did. I would have promised one hell of a lot of things
to get farther down that tunnel I could see stretching ahead of
me. I even would have kept most of them. Personally, I don't
view a promise made to a ten-year-old to be binding, if it
involves a matter of safety, but I'd keep that one if I could.
I had a thousand questions, but wasn't sure how to ask
them. I'm a good interviewer, but getting answers out of a
child takes a different technique. It would be no problem--the
problem with Gretel was getting her to shut up--but I didn't
know it at the time. Right then she was squatting, getting
Winston out of his helmet, so I watched and waited. Liz had
promised me Winston never bit people unless ordered to do so,
and I sure hoped that was true.
Once again Winston came through for me. He greeted her
like a long-lost friend, bowling her over in his attempts to
lick her face, reducing her to giggles. I helped her get him
out of the rest of his suit.
"You could get out of yours, too, if you want to," Gretel
said.
"It's safe?"
"You might have asked that before I took off the dog's
helmet."
She had a point. I started peeling out of it.
"You've led me a merry chase," I said.
"It took me a while to convince my father we ought to let
you in at all. But I'm never in a hurry about such things,
anyway. Do you good to wait."
"What changed his mind?"
"Me," she said, simply. "I always do. But it wasn't easy,
you being a reporter and all."
A year ago that would have surprised me. Working for a
newspad you don't get your face as well-known as straight
television reporters do. But recent events had changed that. No
more undercover work for me.
"Your father doesn't like reporters?"
"He doesn't like publicity. When you talk to him, you'll
have to promise not to use any of it in a story."
"I don't know if I can promise that."
"Sure, you can. Anyway, that's between you and him."
We were walking down the round, mirrored corridor by then.
When we came to another mirrored wall like the one I'd first
encountered, she didn't slow down but headed right for it. When
she was a meter away it vanished to reveal another long section
of walkway. I looked behind us and there it was. Simple and
effective. The bored-out tubes were lined with the field, and
these safety barriers were spaced out along the way. This new
technology would revolutionize Lunar building techniques,
whatever it was.
I was bursting with questions about it, but my feeling for
her was that it wasn't the right time to ask them. I was there
as the result of a child's whim, and it would be a good idea to
see where I stood with her, get on her good side as much as
possible.
"So . . ." I said. "Did you like the toys?"
"Oh, please," she said. Not a promising beginning. "I'm a
little grown up for that."
"How old are you?" There was always the chance I'd read
her wrong from the beginning; she could be older than me.
"I'm eleven, but I'm precocious. Everyone says so."
"Especially Daddy?"
She grinned at me. "Never Daddy. He says I'm a walking
argument for retroactive birth control. Okay, sure I liked the
toys, only I'd prefer to think of them as charming antiques.
Mostly, I liked the dog. What's his name?"
"Winston. So that's why you talked your father into
letting me in?"
"No. I could get a dog easily enough."
"Then I don't get it. I worked so hard to interest you."
"You did? That's neat. Hell, Hildy, I'd have asked you in
if you'd just sat out there on your butt."
"Why?"
She stopped and turned to me, and the look on her face
told me what was coming. I'd seen that look before.
"Because you work for the Nipple. It's my favorite pad.
Tell me, what was Silvio really like?"
#
Most of my conversations with Gretel got around to Silvio
sooner or later, usually after long and adoring detours through
the celebrity underbrush of the current pre-pubescent idols of
television and music. I'd interviewed Silvio a total of three
times, been at social occasions where he was present maybe
twenty times, exchanged perhaps a dozen sentences with him at
those functions. It didn't matter. It was all gold to Gretel,
who was easily twice as star-struck as most girls her age. She
hung on my every word.
Naturally, I made up a lot. If I could do it in print, why
not to her? And it was good practice for telling her all the
intimate details of the teeny stars, few of whom I'd even heard
of, much less met.
Is that awful? I suppose it is, lying to a little girl,
but I'd done worse in my life, and how badly did it hurt her?
The whole gossip industry, flagshipped by the Nipple and the
Shit, is of questionable moral worth to begin with, but it's a
very old industry, and as such, must fill a basic human need.
I've apologized for it enough here. The biggest difference in
my stories to her was that, when I was writing it, it was
usually nasty gossip. My stories to her were usually nice ones.
I viewed it as paying my keep. If Scheherazade could do it, why
not Hildy Johnson?
#
I was grateful that she held my hand on that first stroll
on the surface. Breathing is perhaps the most underrated
pleasure in life. You notice it when something smells good,
curse it when something stinks, but the rest of the time you
don't even think of it. It's as natural as . . . well, see? To
really appreciate it, try holding your mouth and nose closed
for three minutes, or however long it takes to reach the edge
of blackout. That first breath that brings you back from the
edge of death will be the sweetest thing you ever tasted, I
guarantee it.
Now try it for thirty minutes.
The oxygen in my new lung was supposed to be good for that
long, with a five to seven minute margin. "Think of it as
thirty," Aladdin had said, when he installed it. "That'll keep
you safe."
"I'll think of it as fifteen," I retorted. "Maybe five."
I'd been sitting in his clinic at the time, the left side of my
chest laid open, the ugly gray mass of what had recently been
my left lung lying in a pan on a table like so much
butcher-shop special of the day.
"Don't talk," he warned. "Not when I'm doing
respiratory-system work." He wiped a drop of blood from the
corner of my mouth.
"Maybe one," I said. He picked up the new lung, a thing of
shiny metal with some trailing tubes, shaped very much like a
lung, and started shoving it into the chest cavity. It made wet
sucking sounds going in. I hate surgery.
I'd have thought it was something brand-new but for my
recent researches into vacuum technology. One part of it was
revolutionary, but the rest had been cobbled together from
things developed and set aside a long time ago.
The Heinleiners weren't the first to work on the problem
of adapting the human body to the Lunar surface. They were just
the first ones to find a more or less practical answer. Most of
the lung Aladdin put inside me was just an air bottle, filled
with compressed oxygen. The rest was an interface device that
allowed the oxygen to be released directly into my bloodstream
while at the same time cleansing the carbon dioxide. A few
other implants allowed some of the gas to be released through
new openings in my skin, carrying off heat. None of it was new;
most of it had been experimented with as early as the year 50.
But the year 50 wasn't railroad time. The system wasn't
practical. You still had to wear a garment to protect you from
the heat and the cold, and it had to protect you from
both--extremes never seen on Earth--while at the same time
keeping the vacuum from your skin, bleeding off waste heat, and
a host of other requirements. Such garments were available; I'd
bought two of them within the last year. They were naturally
much improved from the mummy bags the first space explorers
wore, but they worked on the same principles. And they worked
better than the implanted lungs. If you're going to have to
wear a suit, after all, what's the point of a thirtyminute
supply of air in place of a lung? If you plan much of a stay on
the surface you're going to have to back-pack most of your air,
just like Neil Armstrong did.
And the Heinleiners did, too, for longer stays. But they'd
solved the problem of what to do with the suit: just turn it
off when not in use.
I supposed they'd also solved the psychological problem of
the suits, which was the panic reflex when one has not breathed
normally for some time, but I suspected the answer was the same
one a child learns in her first swimming lesson. Do it enough,
and you'll stop being afraid.
I'd done it for fifteen minutes now, and I was still
frightened. My heart was racing and my palm was sweating. Or
was that Gretel's?
"You'll sweat quite a bit," she said, when I asked. "It's
normal. That layer of air will stay pretty hot, but not too hot
to handle. Also, the sweat helps to bleed off the heat, just
like it does inside."
I'd been told the suit's distance from one's body
fluctuated by about a millimeter in a regular rhythm. That
varied the volume considerably, sucking waste air from inside
you and expelling it into vacuum in a bellows action. Water
vapor went along with it, but a lot just dripped down your
skin.
"I think I'd like to go back in now," I mouthed, and must
have done it well enough, because I heard her say "Okay," quite
clearly. That was the same circuitry the CC used to talk to me
in private, back when I was still speaking to him. Aside from
the respirator/air supply/field generator, and a few air ducts,
not much had needed to be done to prepare me for field suit
use. Some of that's because I was already wired to a
fare-thee-well, as the CC had pointed out on my direct
interface jaunts. Some adjustments had been made to my eardrums
to keep them from hurting in fluctuating pressures, and a new
heads-up display had been added so that when I closed my eyes
or just blinked, I saw figures concerning body temperature and
remaining air supply and so forth. There were warning alarms
I'd been told would sound in various situations, and I didn't
intend ever to hear any of them. Mostly, with a field suit, you
just wore it. And all but a tiny portion of that, you wore
inside.
The air lock I'd used to get into the secret warrens was
only for inanimate objects, or people wearing inanimate
objects, like the old-style suit I'd been wearing. If you had a
field suit in, you simply stepped into the wall of mirror and
your own suit melted into it, like a drop of mercury falling
into a quicksilver pool. That was the only way to get through a
null-field barrier other than turning it off. They were
completely reflective on both sides. Nothing got through, not
air, not bullets, not light nor heat nor radio waves nor
neutrinos. Nothing.
Well, gravity got through, whatever gravity is. Don't seek
the answer to that one in these pages. But magnetism didn't,
and Merlin was working on the gravity part. Follow-up on that
still to come.
Just before Gretel and I stepped through I saw part of the
mirror wall distorted in the shape of a face. That was the only
way to see through the wall, just stick your face in, and even
that was tough to get used to. Gretel and her brother-what
else?--Hansel did it as naturally as I'd turn my head to glance
out a window. Me, I had to swallow hard a few times because
every reflex I had was telling me I was going to smash my nose
against that reflection of myself.
But I had no trouble this time because I wanted very badly
to be on the other side of that mirror. I was running by the
time I hit it. And of course there was no sensation of hitting
anything--my suit simply vanished as it went through the larger
field--with the result that, because some part of me had been
braced for impact, had been flinching, wincing, bracing myself,
it was like reaching for that non-existent top step, and I did
a comical cakewalk as if the floor was coated with banana peels
and came that close to a pratfall any silent film comedian
would have envied.
Before you snicker, you go and try it.
Gretel claimed to be able to distinguish people's faces
when covered by a null suit. I supposed that if you grew up in
one it would be possible; they were still all chrome-plated
masks to me, and probably would be for a long time. But I'd
figured it was Hansel who poked his face through, since that's
where we'd left him, watching Winston, and it was indeed him
who greeted me after my maiden voyage in the new suit. Hansel
was a lad of fifteen, a tall, awkward, rather shy boy with a
shock of blonde hair like his sister's and a certain look in
his eye I'm sure he got from his father. I thought of it as the
mad scientist's gleam. As if he'd like to take you apart to see
how you worked, only he was too polite to ask if he could. He'd
put you back together, I hasten to add, or at least he'd intend
to, though the skills might not always be up to the intent. He
got that from his father, too. Where the shyness came from I
had no idea. It was not inherited paternally.
"I just got a phone call from the ranch," Hansel said.
"Libby says the palomino mare is about to foal."
"I got it, too," Gretel said. "Let's go."
They were off while I was still catching my breath. It had
been a long time since I'd tried to keep up with children, but
I didn't dare let these get out of my sight. I wasn't sure if I
could find my way back to the Heinlein alone. Sounds unlikely,
doesn't it? If there's one thing Lunarians are good at, it's
negotiating a threedimensional maze, or at least we'd like to
think so. But the mazes of King City tend to be of two types:
radiating out from a central plaza, with circular ring roads,
or a north/south up/down grid. The paths of the Delambre Dump
were more like a plate of spaghetti. Two days in Delambre would
have any urban planner ready for a padded cell. It just growed.
The paths I was now hurrying down had been made by nothing
more mysterious than obsolescent tunneling machines--one of the
other things Lunarians are good at. They usually bored their
way through rock, but the sort of techno-midden stratigraphy
found in Delambre presented them no problems; they'd laser
their way through anything. The Heinleiners had a dozen of
them, all found on site, repaired, and seemingly just sort of
set loose to find their own way. Not really, but anyone who had
tried to find a rhyme or reason in the pathways had to figure
an earthworm would have done a tidier job.
Once the wormholes were there, human crews came in and
installed the flooring out of whatever plastic panels were at
hand. Since those panels had been a construction staple for
over a century, they weren't hard to find. The last step was to
provide an ALU every hundred meters or so. An ALU was an Air
Lock Unit, and consisted of this: a null-field generator with
logics to run their odd locking systems at each end, a big can
of air serviced weekly by autobots, and a wire running to a
solar panel on top of the heap of garbage to power the whole
thing. When somebody got around to it glow- and heat-wires were
strung along the top of the tunnel so they wouldn't be too cold
or dark, but these were viewed as luxuries, and not all parts
of the tunnels had them.
A more jack-leg, slip-shod system of keeping the
Breathsucker at bay had never been seen on this tired old orb,
and nobody with half a brain would trust her one and only body
to it for a split second. And with good reason: breakdowns were
frequent, repairs were slow. Heinleiners simply didn't care,
and why should they? If part of the tunnel went down, your suit
would switch on and you'd have plenty of time to get to the
next segment. They just didn't worry much about vacuum.
It made for weird travel, and another reason to keep up
with the children. Both of them were carrying flashlights,
which were almost mandatory in the tunnels, and which I'd
forgotten again. We came to a dark, cold section and it was all
I could do to keep their darting lights in sight. Sure, I could
call them back if I got lost, but I was determined not to. It
wouldn't have been fun, you see, and above all kids just want
to have fun. You don't want to get a reputation as somebody
they have to keep waiting for.
It was cold, too, right up to the point of chattering
teeth, and then my suit switched on automatically and before I
got out of the dark I was warm again. Winston looked back at me
and barked. He was still in his old-style suit, Hansel carrying
his helmet. They'd wanted me to let them give him a null-suit,
but I didn't know how to explain it to Liz.
#
The first time the children took me to the farm, I had
been expecting to see a hydroponic or dirt-based plantation of
the sort most Lunarians know must be out there somewhere, but
would have to consult a directory to find, and had never
actually seen. I'd been to one in the course of a story long
ago--I've been most places in my century--and since you
probably haven't I'll say they tend to be quite dull. Not worth
you time. Whether the crop is corn or potatoes or chickens,
what you see are low rooms with endless rows of cages or stalls
or furrows or troughs. Machines bring food or nutrients, haul
away waste, harvest the final product. Most animals are raised
underground, most plants on the surface, under plastic roofs.
All of it is kept distant from civilization and hardly ever
talked about, since so many of us can't bear to think the
things we eat ever grew in dirt, or at one time cackled,
oinked, and defecated.
I was expecting a food factory, albeit one built to
typical Heinleiner specs, as Aladdin once described them to me:
"Jerry-rigged, about threequarter-assed, and hellishly unsafe."
Later I did see a farm just like that, but not the one
belonging to Hansel and Gretel and their best friend, Libby.
Once again I'd forgotten I was dealing with children.
The farm was behind a big pressure door aboard the old
Heinlein that said CREW'S MESS #1. Inside a lot of tables had
been shoved together and welded solid to make waist-high
platforms. These had been heaped with soil and planted with
mutant grasses and bonsai trees. The scene had been laced with
little dirt roads and an HO Gauge railroad layout, dotted with
dollhouses and dollbarns and little doll towns of
often-incompatible scales. The whole thing was about one
hundred by fifty meters, and it was here the children raised
their horselets and other things. Lots of other things.
Being children, and Heinleiners, it was not as neat as it
might have been. They'd forgotten to provide good drainage, so
large parts suffered from erosion. A grandiose plan to make
mountains against the back wall had the look of a project never
finished and long-neglected, with bare orange plastic matting
showing the bones of where the mountains would have been if
they hadn't run out of both enthusiasm and plaster of Paris.
But if you squinted and used your imagination, it looked
pretty good. And your nose didn't need to be fooled at all.
Walk in the door and you'd immediately know you were in a place
where horses and cattle roamed free.
Libby called to us from one of the little barns, so we
climbed up a stile and onto the platform itself. I walked
gingerly, afraid to step on a tree or, worse, a horse. When I
got there the three of them were kneeling beside the red-sided
barn. They had the roof lid raised and were peering down to
where the mare was lying on her side on a bed of straw.
"Look! It's coming out!" Gretel squeaked. I did look, then
looked away, and sat down beside the barn, knocking over a
section of white rail fence as I did so. Hell, the fence was
just for show, anyway; the cows and horses jumped over it like
grasshoppers. I lowered my head a little and decided I was
going to be all right. Probably.
"Something wrong, Hildy?" Libby asked. I felt his hand on
my shoulder and made an effort to look up at him and smile. He
was a red-headed boy of almost eighteen, even lankier than
Hansel, and he had a crush on me. I patted his hand and said I
was fine and he went back to his pets.
I'm not notably queasy, but I'd been having these spells
associated with pregnancy. I still had a month to go, far too
late to change my mind. It was an experience I wasn't likely to
forget. Trust me, when you get up at three A.M. with an
insatiable hunger for chocolate-coated oysters, you don't
forget it. The sight of it coming back up in the morning is
unlikely to slip your mind, either.
I'd been a little concerned about the pre-natal care I was
getting. There was a problem, in that I could hardly go to a
clinic in King City, as the medics were bound to notice my
unorthodox left lung. The Heinleiners had a few doctors among
them and the one I'd been seeing, "Hazel Stone," told me I had
nothing to worry about. Part of me believed her, and part of
me--a new part I was just beginning to understand: the paranoid
mother-- did not. It didn't seem to surprise her and she took
the time to do what she could to put my mind at ease.
"It's true the stuff I have out here isn't as up-to-date
as my equipment in King City," she had said. "But we're not
talking trephining and leeches, either. The fact is that you're
doing well enough I could deliver him by hand if I had to, with
just some clean water and rubber gloves. I'll see you once a
week and I guarantee I'll spot any possible complications
instantly." She then offered to "just take him out now and pop
him in a bottle, if you want to. I'll keep him right in my
office, and I'll hook up as many machines as it takes to make
you feel better."
I'd realized she was just humoring me, but I gave it some
thought. Then I told her, no, I was determined to stick it out
to the end, since I'd come this far, and I said I realized I
was being silly.
"It's part of the territory," she had said. "You get mood
swings, and irrational impulses, cravings. If it gets bad
enough, I can do something about those, too." Maybe it was just
a reaction to all the tampering the CC had recently been doing
to me, but I refused her mood levelers. I didn't like the
swings, and I'm not a masochist, but if you're going to do
this, Hildy, I told myself, you should find out what it's like.
Otherwise, you might as well just read about it.
But the real source of my nervousness was just as silly as
a plate of pickles and ice cream. Since I was still living in
Texas and commuting to Delambre, I had also been seeing Ned
Pepper once a week, too. Ostensibly it was to keep him and
others from getting suspicious, but I'm pretty sure it was also
because I found him oddly reassuring. The thing is, while no
one held any brief for his medical knowledge or skills, most
people felt he was a damn good intuitive diagnostician. Had he
been born in a simpler era he might have made quite a name for
himself. And . . .
"Hildy," he told me, tapping his stethoscope against his
lip, "I don't want to alarm you, but something about this
pregnancy makes me nervous as a jacked-off polecat." He took
another pull on his bottle and staggered to his feet as I
settled my skirt back around my legs. That's the only reason
I'd been able to go to him and not the King City sawbones; a
West Texas gynecological exam barely disarranged your clothing.
The Doctor would poke his cold metal heartbeat disc under my
shirt and listen to my heart and the fetal one, thump my back
and my belly, take my body temperature with a glass
thermometer, then ask me to swing my feet up into these here
stirrups, my dear. I knew he had a shiny brass speculum he was
dying to try out but I drew the line at that. Just let him look
and play doctor and we'd both go home happy. So what was this
nervous shit? He didn't have any right to be nervous. He sure
didn't have the right to tell me about it. He seemed to realize
that as soon as the slug of redeye hit his belly.
"I assume you're getting real medical care?" he asked,
sheepishly. When I told him I was, he nodded, and snapped his
suspenders. "Well, then. Don't fret yourself none. He'll
probably come out a ridin' a wild bronc and dealin' five-card
stud. Just like his mama."
Naturally, I did worry. Pregnancy is insanity, take it
from me.
#
When I was sure my nausea had passed I stood up and saw
I'd been sitting on the hen coop. It had a steel framework but
my weight had loosened a lot of the fake wooden shingles glued
to the sides. A rooster about the size of a mouse was
protesting this outrage by pecking at my toes. Inside, several
dozen hens were . . . well, egging him on. Sorry.
The colt wouldn't be standing on his own for a little
while yet, but the show was basically over. Hansel and Gretel
and Libby moved off to other pursuits. I stayed a little
longer, empathizing with the mare, who looked up at me as if to
say You'll get your turn soon enough, Miss Smarty. I reached in
and stroked the new-born with my fingertip, and the mother
tried to bite my hand. I didn't blame her. I got up, dusted my
knees, and headed over to the farm house.
I knew the house lid was hinged; I'd seen the kids lift it
up. But I was still ambivalent enough about these pets that I
didn't want to do that. Instead I bent over and pushed the
little doorbell. In a moment one of the male kewpies came out
and looked up expectantly, hoping for a treat.
If the horselets and mini-kine and dwarfowl were cherry
bombs in a scale of illegal explosiveness, then the kewpies
were ten sticks of dynamite. Kewpies were little people, no
more than twenty centimeters tall.
The children had named them well. These are not adult
human beings, done to scale. In an effort to make them smarter,
Libby had given them bigger brains, and thus bigger heads.
Perfectly sane reasoning, for a child. It might even be right,
for all I knew about it. But though he assured me the current
generation was much more clever than the two preceding ones,
they were no more intelligent than any of several species of
monkey.
They were not human, let's get that out of the way right
now. But they contained human genes, and that is strictly
forbidden on Luna under laws over two centuries old. I didn't
have any of these creepy little baby dolls to ride my little
horselet when I was a nipper. I don't think anybody did. No,
these were the result of Libby's enquiring young mind, and no
in Delambre--I packed the rover and decided to look once more
before leaving. I was feeling discouraged.
At first I thought it hadn't been touched, then I realized
the pictures had been changed. I knelt and spun the drum, and
through the slits I saw the flickering image of myself in my
pressure suit, with Winston in his, capering around my legs.
#
I had a week to think it over. Was she saying she wanted
to see the dog? Any dog, or just Winston? Or was she saying
anything at all except I see you?
What I had to remember was there was no real hurry to this
project, my feelings of impatience notwithstanding. If Winston
had to be involved, it would require bringing Liz deeper into
my confidence, something I was reluctant to do. So the next
weekend I went out armed with four dogs, one from each of the
cultures in Texas. There was a brightly painted Mexican one,
carved from wood, another simpler wooden pioneer dog, a
Comanche camp scene, with dogs, painted on rawhide--the best I
could do--and my prize, a brass automaton of a dog that would
shuffle up to a fire hydrant and lift its leg.
I set them out on my next visit. As I was crawling into
the tent afterwards my phone rang.
"Hello? I said, suspiciously.
"I still say it can't fly."
"Liz? How'd you get this number?"
"You ask me that? Don't start me lying this early in the
morning. I got my methods."
I thought about telling her what the CC thought of her
methods, and I thought about chewing her out for invading my
privacy--since my retirement I'd restricted my telephone to
incoming calls from a very short list--but thinking about those
things was as far as I got, because as I was talking I'd stood
up and turned around, and all four of my new gifts were lined
up just outside the tent, looking in at me. I turned quickly,
scanning the landscape in every direction, but it was useless.
In that mirror skin of hers she might be lying flat no more
than thirty meters away and I wouldn't have a prayer.
So what I said was "Never mind that, I was just thinking
of you, and that lovely dog of yours."
"Then this is your lucky day. I'm calling from the car,
and I'm no more than twenty minutes from Delambre, and Winston
is having a wet dream that may concern your left leg, so throw
some of that chili on the stove."
#
"I think you gained two kay since last week," she said
when she came into the tent. "When it comes time to whelp that
thing, you're gonna have to do it in shifts." I appreciated
those remarks so much that I added three peppers to her bowl
and miked it hard. Pregnancy is maybe the most mixed blessing
I'd ever experienced. On the one hand, there's a feeling I
couldn't begin to describe, something that must approach
holiness. There's a life growing in your body. When all is said
and done, reproducing the species is the only demonstrable
reason for existence. Doing so satisfies a lot of the brain's
most primitive wiring. On the other hand, you feel like such a
sow.
I told her as little as I could get away with, mostly that
I'd seen someone out here and that I wanted to get in contact
with her. She saw my box of toys: the zoetrope, and the dogs.
"If it's that girl you had the pictures of, and you saw
her out here, I'd like to meet her, too."
I had to admit it was. How else was I going to convince
her to leave Winston in my care for the rest of the weekend?
We tossed around a few ideas, none of them very good. As
she was getting ready to leave she thought of something, pulled
a deck of cards from her pocket, and handed them to me.
"I brought these along when I found out where you'd been
coming all these weekends." She'd previously told me the story
of her detective work, nosing around Texas, finding out from
Huck that I always left Friday evening when the paper went to
bed--lately even earlier. Rover rental records available to the
public, or to people who knew how to get into them, told her
where I'd been renting. A bribe to the right mechanic got her
access to the odometer of my vehicle, and simple division told
her how long a trip I'd been taking each time, but by then
she'd been pretty sure it was to Delambre.
"I knew you'd seen something out here during the
Bicentennial," she went on. "I didn't know what, but you came
back from that last walk looking wilder than an acre of snakes,
and you wouldn't tell anybody what it was. Then you show up at
my place with those pictures of a girl running through nothing
and you won't let me wire 'em or digitize 'em. I expect you got
secrets to keep, but I could figure out you were looking for
somebody. So if you want to find somebody, what you do is you
start playing solitaire, and pretty soon they'll come up and
tell you--"
"--to play the black ten on the red Jack," I finished for
her.
"You heard it. Well, at least it'll give you something to
do." She left, casting a worried eye over her pet, who didn't
seem at all disturbed to see her go, and with a final
admonition that Winston got his walkies three times a day or he
was apt to get mean enough to make a train take a dirt road.
#
I'd already brought a deck of cards. I usually have one
with me, as manipulating them is something to do with my hands
at idle moments, better than needlepoint and potentially much
more profitable. If you don't practice the moves you find your
hands freeze up on you at a critical moment.
But I never play solitaire, and the reason is a little
embarrassing. I cheat. Which is all very well for blackjack or
five-card stud, but what's the point in solitaire?
Point or not, I eventually found myself laying out a hand.
Pretty soon I got into it. Not the game itself, than which
there are few purer wasters of time, but the cards. You have to
be able to visualize the order, make them your friends so
they'll tell you things. Do it long enough and you'll always
know what the next card will be, and you'll know what the cards
are that you can't see, as sure as if they were marked on the
back.
I did it for a long time, until Winston got up and began
to scratch at the wall of the tent. Better get him into his
suit before he got frantic, I thought, and looked up into the
face of the girl. She was standing there, outside the tent,
grinning down at Winston, and she had a telescope tucked under
her arm. She looked at me and shook a finger: naughty, naughty.
"Wait!" I shouted. "I want to talk to you."
She smiled again, shrugged her shoulders, and became a
perfect mirror. All I could see of her was the distorted
reflection of the tent and the ground she stood on. The
distortions twisted and flowed and began to dwindle. Pressing
my face against the tent wall I could follow her progress for a
little while since she was the only moving object out there.
She wasn't in any hurry and I thought she looked back over her
shoulder, but there was no way to be sure.
I got into my suit quickly, thought it over, and suited
Winston, too. I let him out, knowing his ears and sense of
smell were totally useless out here but hoping some other doggy
sense would give me a lead. He shuffled off, trying to press
his nose to the ground as he usually did, succeeding only in
getting moondust on the bottom of his helmet. I followed him
with my flashlight.
Soon he stopped and tried to press his face to the surface
with more than his usual doggedness. I knelt and looked at what
he was trying to pick up. It was a bit of spongy material that
crumbled in my glove when I lifted it. I laughed aloud; Winston
looked up, and I patted the top of his helmet.
"I might have know you wouldn't miss food, even if you
can't smell it," I told him. And we set off together, following
the trail of breadcrumbs.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
Feeling not unlike the hood ornament on a luxury
rover--and showing a lot more chrome-plated belly than either
Mr. Rolls or Mr. Royce would have approved of--I stepped boldly
forth into the sunlight, almost as naked as the day I was born.
Boldly, if you don't dwell on the thirty minutes I spent
getting up my nerve to do it in the first place. Naked, if you
don't count the mysterious force field that kept me wrapped in
a warming blanket of air at least five millimeters thick.
Even the warming part was illusory. It certainly felt as
if the air was keeping me warm, and without that psychological
reassurance I doubt if I'd have made it. Actually, the air was
cooling me, which is always the problem in a space suit,
whether bought off the shelf at Hamilton's or hocus-pocused
into existence by the Genius of the Robert A. Heinlein. See,
the human body generates heat, and a spacesuit has to be a good
insulator, that's its main purpose; the heat will build up and
choke you without an outlet. See?
Oh, brother. If you had a chuckle at my explanations of
nanoengineering and cybernetics, wait till you hear Hildy's
Field Suits Made Simple.
"You're doing fine, Hildy," Gretel (not her real name)
coaxed. "I know it takes some getting used to."
"How would you know that?" I countered. "You grew up in a
field suit."
"Yeah, but I've taken tenderfeet out before."
Tenderfeet, indeed. I bent over to see those pedal
extremities, thinking I'd have to get reacquainted with them
post-partum. I wiggled my toes and light wiggled off the
reflections. Like wearing thick mylar socks, only all I could
feel was what appeared to be the rough surface of Luna. There
was some feedback principle at work there, I'd been told; the
field kept me floating five millimeters high no matter how hard
I pressed down. And a good thing, too. Those rock were hot.
"How's the breathing?" Gretel asked, in a funny voice I'd
get used to eventually. Part of the field suit package was a
modification of my implanted telephone so that sub-vocalization
could be heard over the channel the Heinleiners used
suit-to-suit.
"I still want to gasp," I said.
"Say again?"
I repeated it, saying each word carefully.
"That's just psychotic."
I think she meant psychosomatic, or maybe psychological.
Or possibly psychotic was the perfect word. How would you
describe someone who trusted her delicate hide to a spatial
effect that, as near as I could understand it, had no existence
in the real world?
The desire to breathe was real enough, even though a
suppressor of some kind was at work in my brain cutting off
that part of the autonomic nervous system. My body was getting
all the oxygen it needed, but when your lungs have been
inhaling and exhaling for over a hundred years, some part of
you gets a little alarmed when asked to shut it off for an hour
or so. I'd been holding my breath for almost ten minutes so
far. I felt about ready to go back inside and gulp.
"You want to go back inside?"
I wondered if I'd been muttering to myself. Gotta watch
that. I shook my head, remembered how hard that was to see, and
mouthed "No."
"Then take my hand," she said. I did, and our two suit
fields melted together and I felt her bare hand in mine. I
could see that, if these things ever got on the market, there
was going to be a big fad in lovemaking under the stars.
#
Don't go shopping for a field suit just yet, though.
They'll surely be available in a few years, what with
current conditions. A lot of people are angry at the
Heinleiners for not just bestowing the patents gratis to the
general public. I've heard mutterings. A lot of good it will do
the mutterers; they simply don't understand Heinleiners. There
goddam sure ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and they're
out to prove it.
As I write this, the Heinleiners are still pretty pissed
off, and who could blame them? All charges have naturally been
dropped, the statutes of limitations have expired, as it were.
Nobody's out hunting them. Yet I swore a solemn oath not to
reveal the names of any of them until given permission, and
that permission has not been granted, and who's to say they're
wrong? Say what you will about me as a reporter, but I never
revealed a source, and I never will. Hence, the girl I will
call "Gretel." Hence all the aliases I will bestow on the
people I met after I followed Gretel's trail into the perfect
mirror.
And I promised not to lie to you, but from here on in I
will not always tell you the whole truth. Events have of
necessity been edited, to protect people with no reason to
trust authority but who trusted me and then found . . . but I'm
getting ahead of myself.
#
The trail of breadcrumbs led into the rubble that washed
at the base of the Heinlein. At first it seemed as if they
vanished into a blank wall, but I found that if I ducked a
little there was a way through.
Luckily, I had Winston on a leash, because he was
straining to head right into the pile, and god knows if I'd
ever have found him again. I shined my flashlight under the
overhang--which seemed to be the back end of a vintage
rover--and saw it would be possible to squirm my way in.
Without the crumbs I never would have tried it, as I could
already see four ways to go. But I did go in, wondering all the
time just how stable this whole pile was, if I dared brush up
against anything.
Not too far in it became clear I was on a pathway. At
first it was just bare rock. Soon there was a flooring laid
down, made of discarded plastic wall panels. I tested each step
cautiously, but it seemed firm. I found each panel had been
spot welded to some of the more massive pieces of debris that
made up the jackstraw jumble. I further saw, looking around the
edge of the roadway, that the ground was no longer down there.
My flashlight picked up an endless array of junk. If there'd
been any air I might have tried dropping a coin or something; I
had a feeling I'd hear it clatter for a long time.
For a while I kept testing each new panel cautiously, but
each was as firmly in place as the last. I decided I was being
silly. People obviously used this path with some frequency, and
despite its impromptu nature it seemed sturdy enough. Flashing
my light around above me I could soon see the tunnel itself had
been made by some kind of boring machine. It was cylindrical,
and a lot of rubbish had been blasted or cut away; I found
sliced edges of metal beams on each side of the tunnel, as if
the center sections had been cut out. I hadn't seen it as a
cylinder at first because its walls were so relentlessly
baroque, not covered with anything as they would be in King
City.
Before long I came to a string of lights hung rather
haphazardly along the left-hand side of the tunnel. And not
long after that I saw somebody approaching me from a good
distance. I shined the light at the person, and she shined her
light at me, and I saw she was also pregnant and also had a
bulldog on a leash, which seemed too much for coincidence.
Winston didn't put it together. Instead, he plowed forward
in his usual way, either to greet a new friend or to rend an
enemy into bloody gobbets, who could tell? I could hear the
clang over my suit radio when he hit. He sat down hard, having
had no visible effect upon the perfect mirror.
Neither did I, though I scrupulously did all the futile
things people do in stories about humans encountering alien
objects: chunking rocks, swinging a makeshift club, kicking it.
I left no scratches on it. ("Mister President, it is my
scientific opinion the saucer is made of an alloy never seen on
Earth!") I'd have tried fire, electricity, lasers, and atomic
weapons, but I didn't have any handy. Maybe lasers wouldn't
have been the best idea.
So I waited, wondering if she'd been watching me, hoping
she'd had a good laugh at my expense, feeling sure she hadn't
led me this far just to strand me, and in a moment the surface
of the mirror bulged and became a human face. The face smiled,
and then the rest of the body appeared. At first I thought she
was moving forward, but it turned out the mirror was moving
back and the field was forming around her body as she simply
stood there.
It moved back about three meters, and she beckoned to me.
I went to her, and she made some gestures which I didn't
understand. Finally I got the idea that I was to hold on to a
bar fastened to the wall. I did, and the girl crouched and held
on to Winston, who seemed happy to see her.
There was a loud bang and something slammed into me. Bits
of trash and dust swirled, maybe a little mist, too. The
perfect mirror was no longer where it had been and the corridor
had changed. I looked around and saw the walls were now coated
with the same mirror, and the flat surface had re-formed behind
me, where it had been originally. A rather dramatic airlock.
For a few more seconds Gretel was still wrapped in
distortion, then her suit field vanished and she became the
nude ten-year-old who had run through my dreams for such a long
time. She was saying something. I shook my head and glanced at
the readouts for exterior temperature and pressure-- pure
habit, I could see and hear the air was okay-- then I took off
my helmet.
"First thing," Gretel said, "you've got to promise not to
tell my father."
"Not to tell him what?"
"That you saw me on the surface without my suit. He
doesn't like it when I do that."
"I wouldn't, either. Why do you do it?"
"You gotta promise, or you can just go home."
I did. I would have promised one hell of a lot of things
to get farther down that tunnel I could see stretching ahead of
me. I even would have kept most of them. Personally, I don't
view a promise made to a ten-year-old to be binding, if it
involves a matter of safety, but I'd keep that one if I could.
I had a thousand questions, but wasn't sure how to ask
them. I'm a good interviewer, but getting answers out of a
child takes a different technique. It would be no problem--the
problem with Gretel was getting her to shut up--but I didn't
know it at the time. Right then she was squatting, getting
Winston out of his helmet, so I watched and waited. Liz had
promised me Winston never bit people unless ordered to do so,
and I sure hoped that was true.
Once again Winston came through for me. He greeted her
like a long-lost friend, bowling her over in his attempts to
lick her face, reducing her to giggles. I helped her get him
out of the rest of his suit.
"You could get out of yours, too, if you want to," Gretel
said.
"It's safe?"
"You might have asked that before I took off the dog's
helmet."
She had a point. I started peeling out of it.
"You've led me a merry chase," I said.
"It took me a while to convince my father we ought to let
you in at all. But I'm never in a hurry about such things,
anyway. Do you good to wait."
"What changed his mind?"
"Me," she said, simply. "I always do. But it wasn't easy,
you being a reporter and all."
A year ago that would have surprised me. Working for a
newspad you don't get your face as well-known as straight
television reporters do. But recent events had changed that. No
more undercover work for me.
"Your father doesn't like reporters?"
"He doesn't like publicity. When you talk to him, you'll
have to promise not to use any of it in a story."
"I don't know if I can promise that."
"Sure, you can. Anyway, that's between you and him."
We were walking down the round, mirrored corridor by then.
When we came to another mirrored wall like the one I'd first
encountered, she didn't slow down but headed right for it. When
she was a meter away it vanished to reveal another long section
of walkway. I looked behind us and there it was. Simple and
effective. The bored-out tubes were lined with the field, and
these safety barriers were spaced out along the way. This new
technology would revolutionize Lunar building techniques,
whatever it was.
I was bursting with questions about it, but my feeling for
her was that it wasn't the right time to ask them. I was there
as the result of a child's whim, and it would be a good idea to
see where I stood with her, get on her good side as much as
possible.
"So . . ." I said. "Did you like the toys?"
"Oh, please," she said. Not a promising beginning. "I'm a
little grown up for that."
"How old are you?" There was always the chance I'd read
her wrong from the beginning; she could be older than me.
"I'm eleven, but I'm precocious. Everyone says so."
"Especially Daddy?"
She grinned at me. "Never Daddy. He says I'm a walking
argument for retroactive birth control. Okay, sure I liked the
toys, only I'd prefer to think of them as charming antiques.
Mostly, I liked the dog. What's his name?"
"Winston. So that's why you talked your father into
letting me in?"
"No. I could get a dog easily enough."
"Then I don't get it. I worked so hard to interest you."
"You did? That's neat. Hell, Hildy, I'd have asked you in
if you'd just sat out there on your butt."
"Why?"
She stopped and turned to me, and the look on her face
told me what was coming. I'd seen that look before.
"Because you work for the Nipple. It's my favorite pad.
Tell me, what was Silvio really like?"
#
Most of my conversations with Gretel got around to Silvio
sooner or later, usually after long and adoring detours through
the celebrity underbrush of the current pre-pubescent idols of
television and music. I'd interviewed Silvio a total of three
times, been at social occasions where he was present maybe
twenty times, exchanged perhaps a dozen sentences with him at
those functions. It didn't matter. It was all gold to Gretel,
who was easily twice as star-struck as most girls her age. She
hung on my every word.
Naturally, I made up a lot. If I could do it in print, why
not to her? And it was good practice for telling her all the
intimate details of the teeny stars, few of whom I'd even heard
of, much less met.
Is that awful? I suppose it is, lying to a little girl,
but I'd done worse in my life, and how badly did it hurt her?
The whole gossip industry, flagshipped by the Nipple and the
Shit, is of questionable moral worth to begin with, but it's a
very old industry, and as such, must fill a basic human need.
I've apologized for it enough here. The biggest difference in
my stories to her was that, when I was writing it, it was
usually nasty gossip. My stories to her were usually nice ones.
I viewed it as paying my keep. If Scheherazade could do it, why
not Hildy Johnson?
#
I was grateful that she held my hand on that first stroll
on the surface. Breathing is perhaps the most underrated
pleasure in life. You notice it when something smells good,
curse it when something stinks, but the rest of the time you
don't even think of it. It's as natural as . . . well, see? To
really appreciate it, try holding your mouth and nose closed
for three minutes, or however long it takes to reach the edge
of blackout. That first breath that brings you back from the
edge of death will be the sweetest thing you ever tasted, I
guarantee it.
Now try it for thirty minutes.
The oxygen in my new lung was supposed to be good for that
long, with a five to seven minute margin. "Think of it as
thirty," Aladdin had said, when he installed it. "That'll keep
you safe."
"I'll think of it as fifteen," I retorted. "Maybe five."
I'd been sitting in his clinic at the time, the left side of my
chest laid open, the ugly gray mass of what had recently been
my left lung lying in a pan on a table like so much
butcher-shop special of the day.
"Don't talk," he warned. "Not when I'm doing
respiratory-system work." He wiped a drop of blood from the
corner of my mouth.
"Maybe one," I said. He picked up the new lung, a thing of
shiny metal with some trailing tubes, shaped very much like a
lung, and started shoving it into the chest cavity. It made wet
sucking sounds going in. I hate surgery.
I'd have thought it was something brand-new but for my
recent researches into vacuum technology. One part of it was
revolutionary, but the rest had been cobbled together from
things developed and set aside a long time ago.
The Heinleiners weren't the first to work on the problem
of adapting the human body to the Lunar surface. They were just
the first ones to find a more or less practical answer. Most of
the lung Aladdin put inside me was just an air bottle, filled
with compressed oxygen. The rest was an interface device that
allowed the oxygen to be released directly into my bloodstream
while at the same time cleansing the carbon dioxide. A few
other implants allowed some of the gas to be released through
new openings in my skin, carrying off heat. None of it was new;
most of it had been experimented with as early as the year 50.
But the year 50 wasn't railroad time. The system wasn't
practical. You still had to wear a garment to protect you from
the heat and the cold, and it had to protect you from
both--extremes never seen on Earth--while at the same time
keeping the vacuum from your skin, bleeding off waste heat, and
a host of other requirements. Such garments were available; I'd
bought two of them within the last year. They were naturally
much improved from the mummy bags the first space explorers
wore, but they worked on the same principles. And they worked
better than the implanted lungs. If you're going to have to
wear a suit, after all, what's the point of a thirtyminute
supply of air in place of a lung? If you plan much of a stay on
the surface you're going to have to back-pack most of your air,
just like Neil Armstrong did.
And the Heinleiners did, too, for longer stays. But they'd
solved the problem of what to do with the suit: just turn it
off when not in use.
I supposed they'd also solved the psychological problem of
the suits, which was the panic reflex when one has not breathed
normally for some time, but I suspected the answer was the same
one a child learns in her first swimming lesson. Do it enough,
and you'll stop being afraid.
I'd done it for fifteen minutes now, and I was still
frightened. My heart was racing and my palm was sweating. Or
was that Gretel's?
"You'll sweat quite a bit," she said, when I asked. "It's
normal. That layer of air will stay pretty hot, but not too hot
to handle. Also, the sweat helps to bleed off the heat, just
like it does inside."
I'd been told the suit's distance from one's body
fluctuated by about a millimeter in a regular rhythm. That
varied the volume considerably, sucking waste air from inside
you and expelling it into vacuum in a bellows action. Water
vapor went along with it, but a lot just dripped down your
skin.
"I think I'd like to go back in now," I mouthed, and must
have done it well enough, because I heard her say "Okay," quite
clearly. That was the same circuitry the CC used to talk to me
in private, back when I was still speaking to him. Aside from
the respirator/air supply/field generator, and a few air ducts,
not much had needed to be done to prepare me for field suit
use. Some of that's because I was already wired to a
fare-thee-well, as the CC had pointed out on my direct
interface jaunts. Some adjustments had been made to my eardrums
to keep them from hurting in fluctuating pressures, and a new
heads-up display had been added so that when I closed my eyes
or just blinked, I saw figures concerning body temperature and
remaining air supply and so forth. There were warning alarms
I'd been told would sound in various situations, and I didn't
intend ever to hear any of them. Mostly, with a field suit, you
just wore it. And all but a tiny portion of that, you wore
inside.
The air lock I'd used to get into the secret warrens was
only for inanimate objects, or people wearing inanimate
objects, like the old-style suit I'd been wearing. If you had a
field suit in, you simply stepped into the wall of mirror and
your own suit melted into it, like a drop of mercury falling
into a quicksilver pool. That was the only way to get through a
null-field barrier other than turning it off. They were
completely reflective on both sides. Nothing got through, not
air, not bullets, not light nor heat nor radio waves nor
neutrinos. Nothing.
Well, gravity got through, whatever gravity is. Don't seek
the answer to that one in these pages. But magnetism didn't,
and Merlin was working on the gravity part. Follow-up on that
still to come.
Just before Gretel and I stepped through I saw part of the
mirror wall distorted in the shape of a face. That was the only
way to see through the wall, just stick your face in, and even
that was tough to get used to. Gretel and her brother-what
else?--Hansel did it as naturally as I'd turn my head to glance
out a window. Me, I had to swallow hard a few times because
every reflex I had was telling me I was going to smash my nose
against that reflection of myself.
But I had no trouble this time because I wanted very badly
to be on the other side of that mirror. I was running by the
time I hit it. And of course there was no sensation of hitting
anything--my suit simply vanished as it went through the larger
field--with the result that, because some part of me had been
braced for impact, had been flinching, wincing, bracing myself,
it was like reaching for that non-existent top step, and I did
a comical cakewalk as if the floor was coated with banana peels
and came that close to a pratfall any silent film comedian
would have envied.
Before you snicker, you go and try it.
Gretel claimed to be able to distinguish people's faces
when covered by a null suit. I supposed that if you grew up in
one it would be possible; they were still all chrome-plated
masks to me, and probably would be for a long time. But I'd
figured it was Hansel who poked his face through, since that's
where we'd left him, watching Winston, and it was indeed him
who greeted me after my maiden voyage in the new suit. Hansel
was a lad of fifteen, a tall, awkward, rather shy boy with a
shock of blonde hair like his sister's and a certain look in
his eye I'm sure he got from his father. I thought of it as the
mad scientist's gleam. As if he'd like to take you apart to see
how you worked, only he was too polite to ask if he could. He'd
put you back together, I hasten to add, or at least he'd intend
to, though the skills might not always be up to the intent. He
got that from his father, too. Where the shyness came from I
had no idea. It was not inherited paternally.
"I just got a phone call from the ranch," Hansel said.
"Libby says the palomino mare is about to foal."
"I got it, too," Gretel said. "Let's go."
They were off while I was still catching my breath. It had
been a long time since I'd tried to keep up with children, but
I didn't dare let these get out of my sight. I wasn't sure if I
could find my way back to the Heinlein alone. Sounds unlikely,
doesn't it? If there's one thing Lunarians are good at, it's
negotiating a threedimensional maze, or at least we'd like to
think so. But the mazes of King City tend to be of two types:
radiating out from a central plaza, with circular ring roads,
or a north/south up/down grid. The paths of the Delambre Dump
were more like a plate of spaghetti. Two days in Delambre would
have any urban planner ready for a padded cell. It just growed.
The paths I was now hurrying down had been made by nothing
more mysterious than obsolescent tunneling machines--one of the
other things Lunarians are good at. They usually bored their
way through rock, but the sort of techno-midden stratigraphy
found in Delambre presented them no problems; they'd laser
their way through anything. The Heinleiners had a dozen of
them, all found on site, repaired, and seemingly just sort of
set loose to find their own way. Not really, but anyone who had
tried to find a rhyme or reason in the pathways had to figure
an earthworm would have done a tidier job.
Once the wormholes were there, human crews came in and
installed the flooring out of whatever plastic panels were at
hand. Since those panels had been a construction staple for
over a century, they weren't hard to find. The last step was to
provide an ALU every hundred meters or so. An ALU was an Air
Lock Unit, and consisted of this: a null-field generator with
logics to run their odd locking systems at each end, a big can
of air serviced weekly by autobots, and a wire running to a
solar panel on top of the heap of garbage to power the whole
thing. When somebody got around to it glow- and heat-wires were
strung along the top of the tunnel so they wouldn't be too cold
or dark, but these were viewed as luxuries, and not all parts
of the tunnels had them.
A more jack-leg, slip-shod system of keeping the
Breathsucker at bay had never been seen on this tired old orb,
and nobody with half a brain would trust her one and only body
to it for a split second. And with good reason: breakdowns were
frequent, repairs were slow. Heinleiners simply didn't care,
and why should they? If part of the tunnel went down, your suit
would switch on and you'd have plenty of time to get to the
next segment. They just didn't worry much about vacuum.
It made for weird travel, and another reason to keep up
with the children. Both of them were carrying flashlights,
which were almost mandatory in the tunnels, and which I'd
forgotten again. We came to a dark, cold section and it was all
I could do to keep their darting lights in sight. Sure, I could
call them back if I got lost, but I was determined not to. It
wouldn't have been fun, you see, and above all kids just want
to have fun. You don't want to get a reputation as somebody
they have to keep waiting for.
It was cold, too, right up to the point of chattering
teeth, and then my suit switched on automatically and before I
got out of the dark I was warm again. Winston looked back at me
and barked. He was still in his old-style suit, Hansel carrying
his helmet. They'd wanted me to let them give him a null-suit,
but I didn't know how to explain it to Liz.
#
The first time the children took me to the farm, I had
been expecting to see a hydroponic or dirt-based plantation of
the sort most Lunarians know must be out there somewhere, but
would have to consult a directory to find, and had never
actually seen. I'd been to one in the course of a story long
ago--I've been most places in my century--and since you
probably haven't I'll say they tend to be quite dull. Not worth
you time. Whether the crop is corn or potatoes or chickens,
what you see are low rooms with endless rows of cages or stalls
or furrows or troughs. Machines bring food or nutrients, haul
away waste, harvest the final product. Most animals are raised
underground, most plants on the surface, under plastic roofs.
All of it is kept distant from civilization and hardly ever
talked about, since so many of us can't bear to think the
things we eat ever grew in dirt, or at one time cackled,
oinked, and defecated.
I was expecting a food factory, albeit one built to
typical Heinleiner specs, as Aladdin once described them to me:
"Jerry-rigged, about threequarter-assed, and hellishly unsafe."
Later I did see a farm just like that, but not the one
belonging to Hansel and Gretel and their best friend, Libby.
Once again I'd forgotten I was dealing with children.
The farm was behind a big pressure door aboard the old
Heinlein that said CREW'S MESS #1. Inside a lot of tables had
been shoved together and welded solid to make waist-high
platforms. These had been heaped with soil and planted with
mutant grasses and bonsai trees. The scene had been laced with
little dirt roads and an HO Gauge railroad layout, dotted with
dollhouses and dollbarns and little doll towns of
often-incompatible scales. The whole thing was about one
hundred by fifty meters, and it was here the children raised
their horselets and other things. Lots of other things.
Being children, and Heinleiners, it was not as neat as it
might have been. They'd forgotten to provide good drainage, so
large parts suffered from erosion. A grandiose plan to make
mountains against the back wall had the look of a project never
finished and long-neglected, with bare orange plastic matting
showing the bones of where the mountains would have been if
they hadn't run out of both enthusiasm and plaster of Paris.
But if you squinted and used your imagination, it looked
pretty good. And your nose didn't need to be fooled at all.
Walk in the door and you'd immediately know you were in a place
where horses and cattle roamed free.
Libby called to us from one of the little barns, so we
climbed up a stile and onto the platform itself. I walked
gingerly, afraid to step on a tree or, worse, a horse. When I
got there the three of them were kneeling beside the red-sided
barn. They had the roof lid raised and were peering down to
where the mare was lying on her side on a bed of straw.
"Look! It's coming out!" Gretel squeaked. I did look, then
looked away, and sat down beside the barn, knocking over a
section of white rail fence as I did so. Hell, the fence was
just for show, anyway; the cows and horses jumped over it like
grasshoppers. I lowered my head a little and decided I was
going to be all right. Probably.
"Something wrong, Hildy?" Libby asked. I felt his hand on
my shoulder and made an effort to look up at him and smile. He
was a red-headed boy of almost eighteen, even lankier than
Hansel, and he had a crush on me. I patted his hand and said I
was fine and he went back to his pets.
I'm not notably queasy, but I'd been having these spells
associated with pregnancy. I still had a month to go, far too
late to change my mind. It was an experience I wasn't likely to
forget. Trust me, when you get up at three A.M. with an
insatiable hunger for chocolate-coated oysters, you don't
forget it. The sight of it coming back up in the morning is
unlikely to slip your mind, either.
I'd been a little concerned about the pre-natal care I was
getting. There was a problem, in that I could hardly go to a
clinic in King City, as the medics were bound to notice my
unorthodox left lung. The Heinleiners had a few doctors among
them and the one I'd been seeing, "Hazel Stone," told me I had
nothing to worry about. Part of me believed her, and part of
me--a new part I was just beginning to understand: the paranoid
mother-- did not. It didn't seem to surprise her and she took
the time to do what she could to put my mind at ease.
"It's true the stuff I have out here isn't as up-to-date
as my equipment in King City," she had said. "But we're not
talking trephining and leeches, either. The fact is that you're
doing well enough I could deliver him by hand if I had to, with
just some clean water and rubber gloves. I'll see you once a
week and I guarantee I'll spot any possible complications
instantly." She then offered to "just take him out now and pop
him in a bottle, if you want to. I'll keep him right in my
office, and I'll hook up as many machines as it takes to make
you feel better."
I'd realized she was just humoring me, but I gave it some
thought. Then I told her, no, I was determined to stick it out
to the end, since I'd come this far, and I said I realized I
was being silly.
"It's part of the territory," she had said. "You get mood
swings, and irrational impulses, cravings. If it gets bad
enough, I can do something about those, too." Maybe it was just
a reaction to all the tampering the CC had recently been doing
to me, but I refused her mood levelers. I didn't like the
swings, and I'm not a masochist, but if you're going to do
this, Hildy, I told myself, you should find out what it's like.
Otherwise, you might as well just read about it.
But the real source of my nervousness was just as silly as
a plate of pickles and ice cream. Since I was still living in
Texas and commuting to Delambre, I had also been seeing Ned
Pepper once a week, too. Ostensibly it was to keep him and
others from getting suspicious, but I'm pretty sure it was also
because I found him oddly reassuring. The thing is, while no
one held any brief for his medical knowledge or skills, most
people felt he was a damn good intuitive diagnostician. Had he
been born in a simpler era he might have made quite a name for
himself. And . . .
"Hildy," he told me, tapping his stethoscope against his
lip, "I don't want to alarm you, but something about this
pregnancy makes me nervous as a jacked-off polecat." He took
another pull on his bottle and staggered to his feet as I
settled my skirt back around my legs. That's the only reason
I'd been able to go to him and not the King City sawbones; a
West Texas gynecological exam barely disarranged your clothing.
The Doctor would poke his cold metal heartbeat disc under my
shirt and listen to my heart and the fetal one, thump my back
and my belly, take my body temperature with a glass
thermometer, then ask me to swing my feet up into these here
stirrups, my dear. I knew he had a shiny brass speculum he was
dying to try out but I drew the line at that. Just let him look
and play doctor and we'd both go home happy. So what was this
nervous shit? He didn't have any right to be nervous. He sure
didn't have the right to tell me about it. He seemed to realize
that as soon as the slug of redeye hit his belly.
"I assume you're getting real medical care?" he asked,
sheepishly. When I told him I was, he nodded, and snapped his
suspenders. "Well, then. Don't fret yourself none. He'll
probably come out a ridin' a wild bronc and dealin' five-card
stud. Just like his mama."
Naturally, I did worry. Pregnancy is insanity, take it
from me.
#
When I was sure my nausea had passed I stood up and saw
I'd been sitting on the hen coop. It had a steel framework but
my weight had loosened a lot of the fake wooden shingles glued
to the sides. A rooster about the size of a mouse was
protesting this outrage by pecking at my toes. Inside, several
dozen hens were . . . well, egging him on. Sorry.
The colt wouldn't be standing on his own for a little
while yet, but the show was basically over. Hansel and Gretel
and Libby moved off to other pursuits. I stayed a little
longer, empathizing with the mare, who looked up at me as if to
say You'll get your turn soon enough, Miss Smarty. I reached in
and stroked the new-born with my fingertip, and the mother
tried to bite my hand. I didn't blame her. I got up, dusted my
knees, and headed over to the farm house.
I knew the house lid was hinged; I'd seen the kids lift it
up. But I was still ambivalent enough about these pets that I
didn't want to do that. Instead I bent over and pushed the
little doorbell. In a moment one of the male kewpies came out
and looked up expectantly, hoping for a treat.
If the horselets and mini-kine and dwarfowl were cherry
bombs in a scale of illegal explosiveness, then the kewpies
were ten sticks of dynamite. Kewpies were little people, no
more than twenty centimeters tall.
The children had named them well. These are not adult
human beings, done to scale. In an effort to make them smarter,
Libby had given them bigger brains, and thus bigger heads.
Perfectly sane reasoning, for a child. It might even be right,
for all I knew about it. But though he assured me the current
generation was much more clever than the two preceding ones,
they were no more intelligent than any of several species of
monkey.
They were not human, let's get that out of the way right
now. But they contained human genes, and that is strictly
forbidden on Luna under laws over two centuries old. I didn't
have any of these creepy little baby dolls to ride my little
horselet when I was a nipper. I don't think anybody did. No,
these were the result of Libby's enquiring young mind, and no