Страница:
compressor motor in the overturned freezer I was able to hear a
voice from the grave. A growl.
The soldier didn't hear it, or maybe he was too busy. He
had his pants down around his heels and he knelt in front of me
and that's when I saw Winston, dragging his hind leg, bleeding
from his gut, eyes filled with murder.
The man lowered himself over me.
I wanted Winston to bite him . . . well, you know where I
wanted Winston to bite him. I got second best. The bulldog
fastened on the soft flesh of the soldier's inner thigh. The
man's leg jerked in pain, and he was flying over me. I grabbed
the strap of his rifle as he went by.
He had strength and mass on his side, but there was the
little matter of Winston. The dog had cut an artery. The
soldier tried to wrestle his rifle away from me with one hand
and pry Winston loose with the other and ended up doing both
things badly. Blood was spraying everywhere. I was screaming.
Not the big full scream you hear at the movies, and not a
scream of rage, but a highpitched scary thing I was powerless
to stop.
Then I got one hand on the barrel of the rifle, and one
hand on the stock, and fumbled for the trigger as he realized
what was happening and gave up his struggle with Winston,
concentrating on me. He got his hand over the barrel. Sadly for
him, it was over the end of the barrel, and when I squeezed the
trigger his hand wasn't there anymore. It wasn't anywhere
anymore, but the air was full of a red mist.
The soldier never did stop fighting. I guess that's why
they're soldiers. With Winston hanging from his leg, his pants
around his ankles, missing a hand, he still came at me and I
swung the rifle up and held the trigger down and didn't really
see what happened next because on full auto-fire the weapon
packed such a kick that I was knocked on my ass again, and when
I opened my eyes he was mostly on the walls, except for bits
here and there on the floor, and the one big piece still in
Winston's mouth.
I could say I paused and reflected on the enormity of
taking a human life, or how nauseated I was at the sight of his
dismembered body. I did think of those things, and many others.
But later. Much later. At that time my mind had collapsed on
itself and was only large enough to hold a few thoughts, and
only one of those at a time. First, I was going to get out of
there. Second, anybody between me and getting out of there was
going to have a Hildy-sized hole drilled right through his or
her stinking carcass. I had killed, and by god I meant to keep
on killing if that's what I had to do to get to safety.
"Winston. Here, boy." I got up on one knee and talked to
him. I didn't know what to expect. Would he recognize me? Was
he too far gone in bloodlust?
But after a final shake of the soldier's leg, he let go
and came to me. He was dragging his hind leg and he was
gut-shot, but still walking.
I will admit I don't know why I took him. I mean, I really
don't. My holocam recorded the scene, but it doesn't tape
thoughts. Mine weren't very organized just then. I remember
thinking I sure as hell owed him. It also crossed my mind that
I was probably safer with him than without him; he was one hell
of a weapon. I prefer to think I thought those things in that
order. I won't swear to it.
I scooped him up in one arm, holding the rifle in the
other, and stuck my head around the corner. Nobody blew it off.
Nobody seemed to be moving at all. The square was a lot smokier
and there was still a lot of gunfire, but everyone seemed to
have taken cover. I could do that, too, and wait for somebody
to find me, or I could use the smoke to hide in, knowing I
could easily stumble on someone else who was doing the same
thing, and was a better shot than I was.
I don't know how you make a decision like that. I mean, I
made it, but I don't recall weighing the pro's and con's. I
just looked around the corner, didn't see anybody, and then I
was running.
Actually, running is a very generous word for what I did,
with a dying dog tucked under one arm and a heavy weapon
dangling from the other. And don't forget a belly the size of
Phobos. Thank god holocams record only what you see, and not
what you look like. That couldn't have been an image I'd like
preserved for posterity.
My goal was the entrance to a corridor that led back
toward the Heinlein, and I was about halfway there when someone
behind me yelled "Halt!" in a firm and not-at-all-friendly
voice, and things happened very fast . . . and I did everything
right, even with all the things that went wrong.
I turned and kept back-pedaling, slowly, and I dropped
Winston (who uttered the only yelp of pain he made through his
entire heroic ordeal--and I'm sorry, Winston, wherever you
are). I saw it was a King City cop, and he was young, and he
looked as scared as I was, and he carried a huge drilling
laser, which was pointed at me.
"Drop your weapon," he said, and I said Sorry, chum, this
isn't personal, only not out loud, and I pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened, and it was then I noticed the blinking red
light on this curved metal thingy that must have been the ammo
clip, and which must have been saying feed me!, or words to
that effect in gun-language, and understood why what I'd
thought was a short burst had had such a cataclysmic effect on
my would-be rapist. So I dropped the gun and I held up my
hands, and I saw Winston making his last dash, hobbling across
the ten meters or so that separated us, and I put my hands out,
palms up, and I shouted No!, and I will swear in any court in
the world that I saw the man's finger tightening on the trigger
from ten meters away, with the muzzle wavering between me and
Winston as if he couldn't decide which to shoot first. And I
know this is flatly impossible, but I even thought I saw the
light start to come out the end of the weapon in the same
fraction of a second that I grabbed my null-suit control and
twisted it hard.
I was dazzled by green light. For a few moments I was
blind. When vision returned the world was full of multi-colored
incandescent balloons that drifted here and there, obscuring
the world, popping like cartoon soap bubbles. I was sweating
horribly inside my suit-field. It could have been worse.
Outside the field, most everything seemed to be on fire.
About the only way you can go wrong with a laser is to
shoot it at a mirror. You couldn't blame the cop for that. I
hadn't been a mirror when he pulled the trigger; it was that
close.
But he really should have let go a lot sooner.
Everywhere the beam hit me, it was reflected back, but
because the human body is much a complex shape the reflected
beam went all over the place. The resulting scorch line hit the
walls in many places, melting plastic panels and starting fires
behind them. It hit the cop at least three times. I think any
of them would have been fatal without quick treatment. He was
lying still, with flames engulfing his clothing in three deep,
black slashes.
Somewhere in its wild gyrations the beam had hit Winston.
His fur was on fire and he wasn't moving, either.
I was trying to think of what to do when a high wind rose.
It briefly whipped the flames into a white-hot frenzy, but then
it snuffed them out. All the smoke cleared in an instant and
the scene took on that crisp clarity you find only in vacuum.
I turned, and ran for cover.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
I crouched in a pile of chrome-plated pipes not twenty
meters from two patrolling figures in spacesuits, trying to
pretend I was just another piece of bent pipe. I wasn't quite
sure how to go about this. Don't move, and think tubular
thoughts, I finally decided, and it had worked so far.
I was keeping one eye on the clock, one eye on the
soldiers, and one eye on the blinking red light in my head-up
display. Since this adds up to three eyes, you can imagine how
busy I was. I was the busiest motionless person you ever saw.
Or didn't see.
As if that weren't enough, I was calling every telephone
number in my vast mental card file.
Forget those trivial inventions like fire, the wheel, the
bow and arrow, the plow. Man didn't become truly civilized
until Alex Bell uttered those immortal words, "Shit, Watson, I
spilled acid all over my balls." Hiding there with my oxygen
running out, my only hope of staying alive lay in getting some
help over the telephone, and if it worked I resolved to light a
candle every year on Mr. Bell's birthday.
My situation was dire, but it could have been worse. I
could have been a member of the King City police dragooned (I
later learned) into the first wave of the assault on Virginia
City. In addition to the hazards of an armed populace, not to
mention the meanest, gamest dog who ever lived, they had the
added problem of not having pressure suits when the second
wave, which attacked from the surface, began cutting the cables
which brought power from the solar panels topside, which
powered the null-fields which kept the air in.
That's what had happened just after I was lasered by the
last cop. It was the air rushing out of the public square that
had first fanned, then extinguished the flames on Winston's
corpse.
It wasn't a blow-out like the one at Nirvana, or I
wouldn't be here to tell you about it. What we're used to in a
blow-out is a lot of air rushing through a relatively small
hole. You get picked up and battered, then you get squeezed,
and even in a null-suit your chances of survival are slim. But
when a null-field goes, it goes all at once, and the air just
expands. You get a gentle wind, then poof! Like a soap bubble.
And then you get a lot of cops and soldiers grabbing their
throats, spitting blood, and falling quietly to the ground. I
saw two people die like this. I guess it's a fairly quick,
peaceful way to go, but I still get nauseous just thinking
about it.
At the time I thought the Heinleiners had done it. It was
a logical tactic. It was the way they customarily fought fires,
and god knows there were plenty of fires by the time the air
went. And it just didn't make sense that their own people would
cut the power, knowing the first group didn't have suits.
Well, it was their own people who did it, and it wasn't
the only thing about the assault that didn't make sense. But I
learned about that much later. Hiding there in the pipes all I
knew is that a lot of people had tried to kill me, and a lot
more were still trying. It had been a game of cat and mouse for
about three hours since the nullfield power went down.
The power loss had immediately turned the corridor I meant
to travel to the Heinlein from a silvery cylinder into a
borehole through eons of trash, just like the one I had
traveled to lo those many weeks ago to enter this crazy
funhouse in the first place. That was a damn good thing,
because not long after the blowout I met the first of many
pressure-suited people coming down the path in the other
direction.
We didn't actually meet, which was another good thing,
because he or she was carrying a laser just like the one that
had almost fried me. I saw him (I'm going to say him, because
all the soldiers were male and there was something in the way
he moved) while he was still some distance from me, and I
quickly melted into the wall. Or into where the wall had been,
you see. There were thousands of gaps along the corridor large
enough for even a pregnant woman to squeeze through.
Once into one of the gaps, however, you never knew what
lay beyond. You had entered a world with no rational order to
it, a three-dimensional random maze made of random materials,
some of it locked in place by the pressure of other junk above
it, some of it alarmingly unstable. In some of these
hidey-holes you could slip through here and squeeze through
there and swing across a gap in another place, like in a
collapsed jungle gym. In others, two meters in and you found a
cul-desac a rat would have found impassable. You never knew.
There was simply no way to tell from the outside.
That first refuge was one of the shallow ones, so I had
pressed myself against a flat surface and began learning the
Zen of immobility. I had several things going for me. No need
to hold my breath, since I was already doing that because of
the null-suit. No need to be very quiet, because of the vacuum.
And in the suit he might not have seen me if I'd been lying
right in his path.
I told myself all those things, but I still aged twenty
years as he crept by, swinging his laser left and right, close
enough that I could have reached out and touched him.
Then he had passed, and it started getting very dark
again. (Did I mention all the lights went out when the power
failed? They did. I'd never have seen him if he hadn't been
carrying a flashlight.)
I wanted that flashlight. I wanted it more than anything
in the world. Without it, I didn't see how I'd ever make it to
safety. It had already gotten dark enough that I could barely
see the useless rifle I'd carried with me, and wouldn't see
anything at all when he'd moved a little farther along.
I almost jumped out of my skin when I realized he could
have seen the flashing red light on the empty clip as he
passed; I'd forgotten to cover it up. If only I had another . .
. then I looked more closely at the clip. It had an opening at
the end, and a brass shell casing gleamed in there. I realized
it was two clips taped together. The idea was to reverse it
when you'd used up the first. God, soldiers are tricky
bastards.
So I reversed it, almost dropping first the clip, then the
rifle, and I leaned out into the corridor and squeeze off a
shot in the direction the soldier had come from to see if the
damn thing worked. From the recoil I felt, I knew it did. I
hadn't counted on the muzzle flash, but apparently the man
didn't see it.
Stepping out into the corridor, I fired a short burst into
the soldier's back. Hey, even if I could have shouted a warning
to him in vacuum, I really don't think I would have. You don't
know the depths you can sink to when all you're thinking about
is survival.
His suit was tough, and my aim was not the best. One round
hit him and it didn't puncture his suit, just sent him
stumbling down the path, turning, bringing his weapon up, so I
fired again, a lot longer this time, and it did the trick.
I won't describe the mess I had to sort through to find
his light.
#
My fusillade had destroyed his laser and used up my last
ammo clip, so encumbered with only the flashlight and what
remained of my wits I set out looking for air.
That was the trick, of course. The null-suit was a great
invention, no doubt about it. It had saved my life. But it left
something to be desired in the area of endurance. If a
Heinleiner wanted to spend much time in vacuum he'd strap a
tank onto his back, just like everyone else, and attach a hose
to the breast fitting in front. Without a strap-on, the
internal tank was good for twenty to thirty-five minutes,
depending on exertion. Forty minutes at the outside. Like, for
instance, if you were asleep.
I hadn't done much sleeping and didn't plan on any soon,
but I hadn't thought it would be a problem at first. All or the
corridors were provided with an ALU every half-kilometer or so.
The power to these had been cut, but they still had big air
tanks which should still be full. Recharging my internal tank
should be just a matter of hooking the little adapter hose to
my air fitting, twisting a valve, and watching the little
needle in my head-up swing over to the FULL position.
The first time, it was that easy. But I could see even
then that having to search out an ALU every half hour was the
weakest point in my notvery-strong survival strategy. I
couldn't keep it up endlessly. I had to either get out of there
on my own or call for help.
Calling seemed to make the most sense. I still had no idea
what was happening beyond the limits of Heinlein Town, but had
no reason to suspect that if I could get through to a lawyer,
or to the pad, my problems would not be over. But I couldn't
call from the corridor. There was too much junk over my head;
the signal would not get through. However, through sheer luck
or divine providence I was in one of the corridors I was fairly
familiar with. A branch up to the left should take me right out
onto the surface.
It did, and the surface was crawling with soldiers.
I ducked back in, thankful for the mirror camouflage I was
wearing. Where had they all come from?
There were not regiments, or divisions, or anything like
that. But I could see three from my hiding place, and they
seemed to be patrolling except for one who was standing around
near the entrance I'd just exited. Guarding it, I presumed.
Perhaps he just meant to take captives, but I'd seen people
shooting to kill and wanted no part of finding out his
intentions.
One of the other things I'd been lucky about was in seeing
the man in the square who'd been hit by bullets while wearing
his null-suit. Otherwise I might have wrongly concluded the
suit, through which nothing could pass, could render me immune
to bullets. Which it would . . . but only at a cost.
This was explained to me later. Maybe you already figured
it out; Smith said "as should be intuitively obvious," but he
talks like that.
Bullets possess kinetic energy. When you stop one dead in
its tracks, that energy has to go somewhere. Some of it is
transferred to your body: e.g., the bullet knocks you over. But
most of the energy is absorbed by the suit, which promptly
freezes stiff, and then has to do something with all that
energy. There's no place to store it in the null-generator.
Smith tried that, and the generators overheated or, in extreme
cases, exploded. Not a pretty thought, considering where it's
implanted.
So what the field does is radiate the heat away. From both
surfaces of the field.
"I'm sure it's a symmetry we can defeat, given time,"
Smith told me. "The math is tricky. But what a bulletproof
jacket it will make, eh?"
It sure would. In the meantime, what happened is you got
parboiled. Getting rid of excess heat was already your biggest
problem in a null-suit. You could survive one hit in a suit
(several people did), but usually only if you could turn it off
pretty quickly and cool yourself. With two or more hits your
internal temperature would soar and your brain would cook.
The suit was supposed to turn itself off in that case,
automatically. But naturally it wouldn't turn off if there was
vacuum outside. It won't do that no matter how extreme
conditions inside got; vacuum is always the worst of any set of
evils.
If I got shot now, I'd cook, from the skin inwards.
#
I didn't start out singing hosannas to the name of A.G.
Bell. For the first hour I wanted to dig him up and roast him
slowly. Not his fault, of course, but in the state I was in,
who cared?
After filling my tank again I made my way to the top of
the junk pile. This was possible-though by no means
easy--because where I was, near the Heinlein, the thickness of
the planetary dump was not great. By squirming, making myself
small, picking my way carefully I was soon able to stick my
head out of the mess. Any of a thousand passing satellites
ought to have a good line of sight at me from there, so I
started dialing as fast as my tongue could hit the switchboard
on the insides of my teeth. I figured I'd call Cricket, because
he . . .
. . .could not be reached at that number. According to my
head-up, which is seldom wrong about these things. Neither
could Brenda, or Liz. I was about to try another number when I
finally realized nobody could be reached, because my internal
phone relied, when out on the surface, on a booster unit that's
standard equipment in a pressure suit.
How could I be expected to think of these things? You tap
your teeth, and pretty soon you hear somebody's voice in your
ear. That's how a fucking telephone works. It's as natural as
shouting.
I sure as hell thought about it then, and soon realized I
had another problem. The signal from my phone wouldn't get
through my null-suit field. The Heinleiners used the field
itself to generate a signal in another wave band entirely, so
they could communicate with each other, suit-to-suit, and
nobody, not even the CC, could overhear them. I was screwed by
their security.
I thought about this a long time, keeping one eye on the
oxygen gauge. Then I went back to the dark corridor and sneaked
up on the body of the man I had killed.
He was still there, though shoved over to one side of the
passage. I managed to get his helmet off and lose myself back
in the maze, where I used my light and a few bits of metal that
came to hand to pry out what I hoped was the booster for his
suit radio. I had done my work better than I knew; there was a
bullet hole punched through it.
I held on to it anyway. I got another charge of air and
went back to the surface, where I used a length of wire to
connect my pressure fitting to the radio itself, on the theory
that this was the only way for anything to get out of the suit.
I switched it on, was rewarded with a little red light going on
in a display on the radio. I dialed Cricket again, and got
nothing.
So I brought all my vast and subtle technological skills
to bear on repairing the radio. Translation: I whanged the
sumbitch on the dashboard of the junk rover I was sitting in,
and I dialed again. Nothing. Whang. Still not a peep. So I
WHANGED it again and Cricket said "Yeah, what the hell do you
want?"
My tongue had been leading a life of its own, nervously
dialing and re-dialing Cricket's number as I worked my
engineering magic on the radio. And now, when I needed it, I
couldn't get the damn tongue to work at all, so overwhelmed was
I at hearing a familiar voice.
"I haven't got time to dick around here," Cricket warned.
"Cricket, it's me, Hildy, and I--"
"Yeah, Hildy, you cover it your way and I'll cover it
mine."
"Cover what?"
"Just the biggest damn story that ever . . ." I heard the
sound of mental brakes being applied with the burning of much
mental rubber; after the clashing of mental gears Cricket said,
sweetly, "No story, Hildy. Nothing at all. Forget I said
anything."
"Damn it, Cricket, is the shit coming down out there, too?
What's happened? All I know is--"
"You can figure it out for yourself, just like I did," he
said.
"Figure what out? I don't know what you're--"
"Sure, sure, I know. It won't work, Hildy. You've conned
me out of a big story for the last time."
"Cricket, I don't even work for the Nipple anymore."
"Once a reporter, always a reporter. It's in your blood,
Hildy, and you could no more ignore this one than a whore could
keep her legs together when the doorbell rings."
"Cricket, listen to me, I'm in big trouble. I'm trapped--"
"Ah ha!" he crowed, confusing me completely. "A lot of
folks are trapped, old buddy. I think it's the best place for
you. Read about it in a few hours in the Shit." And he hung up.
I almost threw the radio out across the horizon, but
sanity returned just in time. With it came caution, as my eyes,
following the wouldbe trajectory, saw two figures clambering up
the junk. They were headed for me, probably on the scent of my
transmission. I ducked over the side of the junked rover and
dived back into the maze.
#
I still haven't entirely forgiven Cricket, but I've got to
say that love died during that phone call. Sure, I deserved
some of it; I'd tricked him often enough in the past. And in
his defense, he thought I was trapped in an elevator, as
thousands of Lunarians were at that moment, and he didn't think
I'd be in any particular danger, and if I was, there wasn't
anything he could have done about it.
Yeah, sure. And your momma would have fucked pigs,
Cricket, if she could have found any who'd have her. You didn't
give me time to explain.
What really high-gravved me was that, when I finally got
back in position to call him again, he'd set his phone to
refuse calls from me. I risked my neck ducking in for more air
then finding a new place to transmit from, and what I got for
my efforts was a busy signal.
I got a lot of those in quick succession. Brenda didn't
answer. Neither did anybody at the Nipple, which worried me no
end. Think about it. A major metropolitan newspad, and nobody's
answering the phone?
I knew it had to do with the big story Cricket mentioned.
Impossible visions flitted through my head, from a city-wide
blowout to thousands upon thousands of soldiers like the ones
I'd seen laying waste to the whole planet.
But I had to keep trying. So I went back down into the
maze and sought out my favorite airing hole. And two big guys
in suits were camped out there, weapons ready.
#
I'd had ten minutes of air when I first backed into the
pile of chrome pipes to hide from the soldiers. That had been
seven minutes earlier.
The first thing I'd done was cut back the oxygen
dissemination rate in my artificial lung to a level just short
of unconsciousness. Ditto the cooling rate. I figured that
would stretch the ten minutes into fifteen if I didn't have to
move around too much. So far I hadn't moved at all. The
blinking red light I was watching was telling me my blood
oxygen level was low. Another gauge, normally dormant, had lit
up as well, and this one assured me my body temperature stood
at 39.1 degrees and was rising slowly. I knew I couldn't take
much more without becoming delirious; anything over forty was
dangerous territory.
I'm a miserable tactician, I'll admit it, at least in a
situation like that. I could see the elements of the problem,
but all I could do was stew about it. Those guys topside, for
instance. Could they communicate my position to the gorillas
guarding the air tank? They were no more than thirty meters
above me; if they had any kind of generalship at all a message
would soon be arriving to the guards to be on the lookout for a
roly-poly, out-of-breath football trophy, known to associate
with lengths of chrome-plated pipe.
If so, what could I do about it? There was no hope of
making my way through the maze to the next air station--which
might well be guarded, anyway. So if these guys didn't find
somewhere else to go in the next eight minutes, it was going to
be a dead heat (terrible choice of words there) as to whether I
died of suffocation or boiled in my own sweat. I didn't really
have a preference in the matter; it's something only a coroner
could care about.
Brenda Starr, comic-strip reporter, would surely have
thought up some clever ruse, some diversion, something to lure
those freaking soldiers away from the air tank long enough for
her to re-fuel. Hildy Johnson, scared-shitless schoolteacher
and former inkster, didn't have the first notion of how to go
about it without drawing attention to herself.
There was one bit of good news in the mix. My tongue had
continued its independent ways as I crouched in hiding, and
soon I was startled by the sound of a busy signal in my ear. I
didn't even know who I'd called, much less how the signal got
out. I eventually surmised (and later found out it was true)
that something in the junk pile was acting as an antenna,
relaying my calls to the surface, and thence to a satellite.
So I tried Brenda again (still no answer), and the Nipple
(still nothing), and then I dialed Liz.
"Buckingham Palace, Her Majesty speaking," came a slurred
voice.
"Liz, Liz, this is Hildy. I'm in big trouble."
There was a long, somehow boozy silence. I wondered if
she'd fallen asleep. Then there was a sob.
"Liz? Are you still there?"
"Hildy. Hildy. Oh, god, I didn't want to do it."
"Didn't want to do what? Liz, I don't have time for--"
"I'm a drunk, Hildy. A goddam drunk."
This was neither news, nor a well-kept secret. I didn't
say anything, but listened to the sound of wracking sobs and
watched the seconds tick off on my personal clock and waited
for her to talk.
"They said they could put me away for a long time, Hildy.
A long, long time. I was scared, and I felt really awful. I was
shaking and I was throwing up, only nothing came up, and they
wouldn't let me have a drink."
"What are you talking about? Who's 'they?'"
"They, they, dammit! The CC."
By then I had more or less figured it out. She stammered
disconnected parts to me then, and I learned the complete story
later, and it went something like this:
Even before the Bicentennial celebration Liz had been
firmly in the employ of the CC. At some point she had been
arrested, taken in, and charged with many counts of weapons
violations. (So were a lot of others; the invasion of Heinlein
Town had been armed with weapons confiscated during a huge
crackdown--an event that never made the news.)
"They said I could go to jail for eighty years, Hildy. And
then they left me alone, and the CC spoke to me and told me if
I did a few little things for him, here and there, the charges
might be dropped."
"What happened, Liz? Did you get careless?"
"What? Oh, I don't know, Hildy. They never showed me the
evidence they had against me. They said it would all come out
in the trial. I don't know if it was obtained illegally or not.
But when the CC started talking I figured out pretty quick that
it didn't matter. We talked about that; you know that, if he
ever wanted to, he could frame every person on Luna for
something or other. All I could see was when we got to court,
it'd be an airtight case. I was afraid to let it get that far."
"So you sold me out."
There was silence for a long time. A few more minutes had
gone by. The guards hadn't moved. There wasn't anything else to
do but listen.
"Tell me the rest of it," I said.
It seemed there was this group of people out around
Delambre that the CC wanted to know more about. He suggested
Liz get me out there and see what happened.
I should have been flattered. The CC's estimate of my
bloodhound instincts must have been pretty high. I suppose if I
hadn't seen anything during that first trip, something else
would have been arranged, until I was on the scent. After that,
I could be relied on to bring the story to ground.
"He was real interested when you brought in that tape of
the little girl. I . . . by that time I was a wholly-owned
subsidiary, Hildy. I told him I could find some way of getting
you to tell me what was going on. I'd have done about anything
by then."
"The hostage syndrome," I said. The guards were still
there.
"What? Oh. Yeah, probably. Or sheer lack of character.
Anyway, he told me to hold back or you'd get suspicious. So I
did, and you finally invited me in."
And on that first visit she'd stolen a nullfield
generator. She didn't say how, but it probably wasn't too hard.
They're not dangerous unless you try to open them up.
I could put the rest of it together myself. During the
next week the CC had learned enough null-field technology to
make something to get his troops through the barriers, if not
to equip them with null-suits or fields of their own.
"And that's pretty much it," she said, and sighed. "So I
guess he arrested you, and probably all those other folks, too,
right? Where have they got you? Have they set bail yet?"
"Are you serious?"
"Hell, Hildy, I don't think he could have anything serious
on you."
"Liz . . . what's going on out there?"
"What do you mean?"
"Cricket said all hell was breaking loose, somehow or
other."
"You got me, Hildy. I was just . . . ah, sleeping, until
you called. I'm here in my apartment. Come to think of it, the
lights are flickering. But that could be just my head."
She was in the dark as much as I was. A lot of people
were. If you didn't leave your apartment and you didn't live in
one of the sectors where the oxygen service was interrupted,
the chances of your having missed the early stages of the Big
Glitch were excellent. Liz had been in an alcoholic stupor,
with her phone set to take calls only from me.
"Liz. Why?"
There was a long pause. Then, "Hildy, I'm a drunk. Don't
ever trust a drunk. If it comes to a choice between you and the
next drink . . . it's not really a choice."
"Ever thought of taking the cure?"
"Babe, I like drinking. It's the only thing I do like.
That, and Winston."
Maybe I would have hit her right in the belly at that
point; I don't know. I know I was filled with rage at her.
Telling her the dog was fried and vac-dried wouldn't have begun
to get back at her for what she'd done to me.
But just then I suddenly got real, real hot. I'd already
been too warm, you understand; now, in an instant, my skin was
so hot I wanted to peel it off and there was a burning ache on
the left side of my chest.
The null-suit did what it could. I watched in growing
alarm as the indicator that had been telling me how many
minutes I had to live took a nose dive. I thought it wasn't
going to stop. Hell, it was almost worth it. With the falling
gauge came a cooling blast of air all over my body. At least I
wasn't going to fry.
I'd finally put together what was happening, though. For
almost a minute I'd been feeling short, sharp shocks through
the metal pipes I leaned against and the metal brace I had my
feet on. Then I saw a bullet hit a pipe. That's the only thing
it could have been, I reasoned. It left a dent, a dull place on
the metal. Somebody was standing on top of the junk pile and
shooting down into it at random. It had to be blind shooting,
because I couldn't see the shooter. But the bullets were
ricocheting and one had finally struck me. I couldn't afford
another hit.
So I grabbed a length of pipe and started toward the
corridor. I didn't think I could do much good against the tough
pressure suits, but if I swung for the faceplates I might get
one of them, and at least I'd go down fighting. I owed it to
Winston, if to no one else, to do that much.
Getting to the corridor was like reaching for that top
step that isn't there. I stepped out, pipe cocked like the
clean-up batter coming to the plate. And nobody was there.
I saw their retreating backs outlined by the light of
their helmet lamps. They were jogging toward the exit.
I'll never know for sure, but it seems likely they'd been
summoned to the top to help in the search for me. How were they
to know the guys on top of the pile were only a few meters
directly above them? Anyway, if they'd stayed in place, I'd
have been dead in ninety seconds, tops. So I gave them ten
seconds to get beyond the point where they could possible see
me, and I reached for the ALU adapter hose.
It wasn't there.
It made me mad. I couldn't think of anything more foolish
than getting this close to salvation and then suffocating with
about a ton of compressed oxygen at my fingertips. I slammed my
hand against the tank, then got my flashlight and cast about on
the ground. I was sure they'd taken it with them. It's what I
would have done, in their place.
But they hadn't. It was lying right there on the ALU's
baseplate, probably knocked off when one of the guards decided
to rest his fat ass on the tank. I fumbled it in place between
the tank and my chest valve, and turned the release valve hard.
I make my living with words. I respect them. I always want
to use the proper one, so I searched a long time for the right
one to describe how that first rush of cooling air felt, and I
concluded nobody's made up a word for that yet. Think of the
greatest pleasure you ever experienced, and use whatever word
you'd use to describe that. An orgasm was a pale thing beside
it.
#
Why hadn't they taken the connector hose? The answer, when
I eventually learned it, was simple, and typical of the Big
Glitch. They hadn't known I needed it.
The cops and soldiers who had invaded Heinlein Town hadn't
been told much about anything. They hadn't been led to expect
armed resistance. They knew next to nothing about the nature of
or limitations to null-suit technology. They surely hadn't been
told there were two groups, working at cross purposes to the
extent that one group would ensure the destruction of the
other. All this affected their tactics terribly. A lot of
people lived because of this confusion, and I was one of them.
I'd like to take credit for my own survival-- and not
everything I did was stupid--but the fact is that I had
Winston, and I had a lot of luck, and the luck was mostly
generated by their ignorance and poor generalship.
I had vaguely realized some of this by the time I made my
way from the ALU and to a branching corridor I thought would
take me to a different surface exit. I didn't know what good it
would do me, but it was worthwhile to keep it in mind.
Once on the surface again, I called the Nipple and again
got a busy signal, all the time keeping my eyes open for more
of the bad guys. I was hoping they were all up atop the junk,
possibly stumbling around and breaking legs, heads, and other
important body parts. I wished Callie were there; she'd have
put a hex on them.
Callie? Well, what the hell. I had to dredge the number up
from the further reaches of my memory, and it did no good at
all. Not even a busy signal. Nothing but dead air.
Then I remembered the top code. Why did it take me so
long? I think it was because Walter really had impressed it on
me that the code was not to be used at all, that it existed as
an unachievable level of dire perfection. A story justifying
the use of the top code would need headlines that would made
72-point type seem like fine print. The other reason is that I
had never thought of what was happening to me as a story.
I didn't really expect much from it, to tell the truth.
I'd been using my normal access code to the Nipple, and that
should have gotten through any conceivable log-jam of calls and
directly into Walter's office. So far it had yielded only busy
signals. But I punched in the code anyway, and Walter said:
"Don't tell me where you are, Hildy. Hang up and move as
far from your present position as you dare, and then call me
back."
"Walter!" I screamed. But the line was already dead.
It would be nice to report that I immediately did as he
said, that I wasted no time, that I continued to show the
courageous resolve that had been my trademark since the first
shots were fired. By that I mean that I hadn't cried to that
point. I did now. I wept helplessly, like a baby.
Don't try this in you null-suit, when you get one. You
don't breathe, so your lungs just sort of spasm. It's enough to
make your ears pop. Crying also throws the regulator mechanism
out of whack, so that I wasted ten minutes' oxygen in three
minutes of hysterics. Trust Mister V.M. Smith not to have
reckoned with emotional outbursts when he laid out the
parameters.
I had cleverly retained the connector hose to the air
tank, so I made my way back there and filled up again. If only
I could find a loose, portable tank I'd be able to strike off
across the surface. Hell, if it was too big to carry I could
drag it. Did I hear someone mention the dead soldier and his
suit? Great idea, but my uncanny accuracy with the machine gun
had damaged one of the hose fittings. I checked when I borrowed
the flashlight, and again--because I needed the air, and who
knows, maybe I'd been mistaken--when I salvaged the radio.
Libby could probably have fudged some sort of adaptor from the
junk all around me, but considering the pressure in that tank
I'd sooner have kissed a rattlesnake.
These are the thoughts that run through your mind in the
exhausted aftermath of a crying jag. It felt good to have done
it, like crying usually does. It swept away the building sense
of panic and let me concentrate on the things that needed to be
done, let me ignore the impossibility of my position, and
enabled me to concentrate on the two things I had going for me,
like chanting a mantra: my own brain, which, no matter how much
evidence I may have adduced to the contrary, was actually
pretty good; and Walter's ability to get things done, which was
very good.
I actually found myself feeling cheerful as I reached the
egress again and scanned the surface for enemies. Not finding
any made me positively giddy. Move from your present position,
Walter had said. As far as you dare.
I moved out of the maze and dashed across a short strip of
sunlight and into the shadow of the Heinlein.
#
"Hello, Walter?"
"Tell me what you know, Hildy, and make it march."
"I'm in big trouble here, Wal--"
"I know that, Hildy. Tell me what I don't know. What
happened?"
So I started in on a condensed history of me and the
Heinleiners, and Walter promptly interrupted me again. He knew
about them, he said. What else? Well, the CC was up to
something horrible, I said, and he said he knew that, too.
"Assume I know everything you know except what happened to
you today, Hildy," he said. "Tell me about today. Tell me about
the last hour. Just the important parts. But don't mention
specific names or places."
Put that way, it didn't take long. I told him in less than
a hundred words, and could have done it in one: "Help!"
"How much air do you have?" he asked.
"About fifteen minutes."
"Better than I thought. We have to set up a rendezvous,
without mentioning place names. Any ideas?"
"Maybe. Do you know the biggest white elephant on Luna?"
". . . yeeeesss. Are you near the trunk or the tail?"
"Trunk."
"All right. The last poker game we played, if the high
card in my hand was a King, start walking north. If it was a
Queen, east. Jack, south. Got it?"
"Yeah." East it would be.
"Walk for ten minutes and stop. I'll be there."
With anyone else I'd have wasted another minute pointing
out that only left me a margin of five minutes and no hope at
all of getting back. With Walter I just said, "So will I."
Walter has many despicable qualities, but when he says he'll do
something, he'll do it.
I'd have had to move soon, anyway. As we were talking I'd
spotted two of the enemy moving across the plain in big, loping
strides. They were coming from the north, so I hefted the radio
and tossed it toward the southeast. They immediately altered
direction to follow it.
Here came the hard part. I watched them pass in front of
me. Even in a regular suit I'd have been hard to spot in the
shadows. But now I started walking eastwards, and in a moment I
stepped out into the bright sunshine. I had to keep reminding
myself how hard Gretel had been to spot when I'd first
encountered her. I'd never felt so naked. I kept an eye on the
soldiers, and when they reached the spot where the radio had
fallen to the ground I froze, and watched as they scanned the
horizon.
I didn't stay frozen long, as I quickly spotted four more
people coming from various directions. It was one of the
hardest things I ever did, but I started walking again before
any of them could get too close.
With each step I thought of a dozen more ways they could
find me and catch me. A simple radar unit would probably
suffice. I'm not much at physics, but I supposed the null-suit
would throw back a strong signal.
They must not have had one, because before long I was far
enough away that I couldn't pick any of them out from the
ground glare, and if I couldn't see them they sure as hell
couldn't see me.
At the nine-minute point a bright silver jumper swooped
voice from the grave. A growl.
The soldier didn't hear it, or maybe he was too busy. He
had his pants down around his heels and he knelt in front of me
and that's when I saw Winston, dragging his hind leg, bleeding
from his gut, eyes filled with murder.
The man lowered himself over me.
I wanted Winston to bite him . . . well, you know where I
wanted Winston to bite him. I got second best. The bulldog
fastened on the soft flesh of the soldier's inner thigh. The
man's leg jerked in pain, and he was flying over me. I grabbed
the strap of his rifle as he went by.
He had strength and mass on his side, but there was the
little matter of Winston. The dog had cut an artery. The
soldier tried to wrestle his rifle away from me with one hand
and pry Winston loose with the other and ended up doing both
things badly. Blood was spraying everywhere. I was screaming.
Not the big full scream you hear at the movies, and not a
scream of rage, but a highpitched scary thing I was powerless
to stop.
Then I got one hand on the barrel of the rifle, and one
hand on the stock, and fumbled for the trigger as he realized
what was happening and gave up his struggle with Winston,
concentrating on me. He got his hand over the barrel. Sadly for
him, it was over the end of the barrel, and when I squeezed the
trigger his hand wasn't there anymore. It wasn't anywhere
anymore, but the air was full of a red mist.
The soldier never did stop fighting. I guess that's why
they're soldiers. With Winston hanging from his leg, his pants
around his ankles, missing a hand, he still came at me and I
swung the rifle up and held the trigger down and didn't really
see what happened next because on full auto-fire the weapon
packed such a kick that I was knocked on my ass again, and when
I opened my eyes he was mostly on the walls, except for bits
here and there on the floor, and the one big piece still in
Winston's mouth.
I could say I paused and reflected on the enormity of
taking a human life, or how nauseated I was at the sight of his
dismembered body. I did think of those things, and many others.
But later. Much later. At that time my mind had collapsed on
itself and was only large enough to hold a few thoughts, and
only one of those at a time. First, I was going to get out of
there. Second, anybody between me and getting out of there was
going to have a Hildy-sized hole drilled right through his or
her stinking carcass. I had killed, and by god I meant to keep
on killing if that's what I had to do to get to safety.
"Winston. Here, boy." I got up on one knee and talked to
him. I didn't know what to expect. Would he recognize me? Was
he too far gone in bloodlust?
But after a final shake of the soldier's leg, he let go
and came to me. He was dragging his hind leg and he was
gut-shot, but still walking.
I will admit I don't know why I took him. I mean, I really
don't. My holocam recorded the scene, but it doesn't tape
thoughts. Mine weren't very organized just then. I remember
thinking I sure as hell owed him. It also crossed my mind that
I was probably safer with him than without him; he was one hell
of a weapon. I prefer to think I thought those things in that
order. I won't swear to it.
I scooped him up in one arm, holding the rifle in the
other, and stuck my head around the corner. Nobody blew it off.
Nobody seemed to be moving at all. The square was a lot smokier
and there was still a lot of gunfire, but everyone seemed to
have taken cover. I could do that, too, and wait for somebody
to find me, or I could use the smoke to hide in, knowing I
could easily stumble on someone else who was doing the same
thing, and was a better shot than I was.
I don't know how you make a decision like that. I mean, I
made it, but I don't recall weighing the pro's and con's. I
just looked around the corner, didn't see anybody, and then I
was running.
Actually, running is a very generous word for what I did,
with a dying dog tucked under one arm and a heavy weapon
dangling from the other. And don't forget a belly the size of
Phobos. Thank god holocams record only what you see, and not
what you look like. That couldn't have been an image I'd like
preserved for posterity.
My goal was the entrance to a corridor that led back
toward the Heinlein, and I was about halfway there when someone
behind me yelled "Halt!" in a firm and not-at-all-friendly
voice, and things happened very fast . . . and I did everything
right, even with all the things that went wrong.
I turned and kept back-pedaling, slowly, and I dropped
Winston (who uttered the only yelp of pain he made through his
entire heroic ordeal--and I'm sorry, Winston, wherever you
are). I saw it was a King City cop, and he was young, and he
looked as scared as I was, and he carried a huge drilling
laser, which was pointed at me.
"Drop your weapon," he said, and I said Sorry, chum, this
isn't personal, only not out loud, and I pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened, and it was then I noticed the blinking red
light on this curved metal thingy that must have been the ammo
clip, and which must have been saying feed me!, or words to
that effect in gun-language, and understood why what I'd
thought was a short burst had had such a cataclysmic effect on
my would-be rapist. So I dropped the gun and I held up my
hands, and I saw Winston making his last dash, hobbling across
the ten meters or so that separated us, and I put my hands out,
palms up, and I shouted No!, and I will swear in any court in
the world that I saw the man's finger tightening on the trigger
from ten meters away, with the muzzle wavering between me and
Winston as if he couldn't decide which to shoot first. And I
know this is flatly impossible, but I even thought I saw the
light start to come out the end of the weapon in the same
fraction of a second that I grabbed my null-suit control and
twisted it hard.
I was dazzled by green light. For a few moments I was
blind. When vision returned the world was full of multi-colored
incandescent balloons that drifted here and there, obscuring
the world, popping like cartoon soap bubbles. I was sweating
horribly inside my suit-field. It could have been worse.
Outside the field, most everything seemed to be on fire.
About the only way you can go wrong with a laser is to
shoot it at a mirror. You couldn't blame the cop for that. I
hadn't been a mirror when he pulled the trigger; it was that
close.
But he really should have let go a lot sooner.
Everywhere the beam hit me, it was reflected back, but
because the human body is much a complex shape the reflected
beam went all over the place. The resulting scorch line hit the
walls in many places, melting plastic panels and starting fires
behind them. It hit the cop at least three times. I think any
of them would have been fatal without quick treatment. He was
lying still, with flames engulfing his clothing in three deep,
black slashes.
Somewhere in its wild gyrations the beam had hit Winston.
His fur was on fire and he wasn't moving, either.
I was trying to think of what to do when a high wind rose.
It briefly whipped the flames into a white-hot frenzy, but then
it snuffed them out. All the smoke cleared in an instant and
the scene took on that crisp clarity you find only in vacuum.
I turned, and ran for cover.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
I crouched in a pile of chrome-plated pipes not twenty
meters from two patrolling figures in spacesuits, trying to
pretend I was just another piece of bent pipe. I wasn't quite
sure how to go about this. Don't move, and think tubular
thoughts, I finally decided, and it had worked so far.
I was keeping one eye on the clock, one eye on the
soldiers, and one eye on the blinking red light in my head-up
display. Since this adds up to three eyes, you can imagine how
busy I was. I was the busiest motionless person you ever saw.
Or didn't see.
As if that weren't enough, I was calling every telephone
number in my vast mental card file.
Forget those trivial inventions like fire, the wheel, the
bow and arrow, the plow. Man didn't become truly civilized
until Alex Bell uttered those immortal words, "Shit, Watson, I
spilled acid all over my balls." Hiding there with my oxygen
running out, my only hope of staying alive lay in getting some
help over the telephone, and if it worked I resolved to light a
candle every year on Mr. Bell's birthday.
My situation was dire, but it could have been worse. I
could have been a member of the King City police dragooned (I
later learned) into the first wave of the assault on Virginia
City. In addition to the hazards of an armed populace, not to
mention the meanest, gamest dog who ever lived, they had the
added problem of not having pressure suits when the second
wave, which attacked from the surface, began cutting the cables
which brought power from the solar panels topside, which
powered the null-fields which kept the air in.
That's what had happened just after I was lasered by the
last cop. It was the air rushing out of the public square that
had first fanned, then extinguished the flames on Winston's
corpse.
It wasn't a blow-out like the one at Nirvana, or I
wouldn't be here to tell you about it. What we're used to in a
blow-out is a lot of air rushing through a relatively small
hole. You get picked up and battered, then you get squeezed,
and even in a null-suit your chances of survival are slim. But
when a null-field goes, it goes all at once, and the air just
expands. You get a gentle wind, then poof! Like a soap bubble.
And then you get a lot of cops and soldiers grabbing their
throats, spitting blood, and falling quietly to the ground. I
saw two people die like this. I guess it's a fairly quick,
peaceful way to go, but I still get nauseous just thinking
about it.
At the time I thought the Heinleiners had done it. It was
a logical tactic. It was the way they customarily fought fires,
and god knows there were plenty of fires by the time the air
went. And it just didn't make sense that their own people would
cut the power, knowing the first group didn't have suits.
Well, it was their own people who did it, and it wasn't
the only thing about the assault that didn't make sense. But I
learned about that much later. Hiding there in the pipes all I
knew is that a lot of people had tried to kill me, and a lot
more were still trying. It had been a game of cat and mouse for
about three hours since the nullfield power went down.
The power loss had immediately turned the corridor I meant
to travel to the Heinlein from a silvery cylinder into a
borehole through eons of trash, just like the one I had
traveled to lo those many weeks ago to enter this crazy
funhouse in the first place. That was a damn good thing,
because not long after the blowout I met the first of many
pressure-suited people coming down the path in the other
direction.
We didn't actually meet, which was another good thing,
because he or she was carrying a laser just like the one that
had almost fried me. I saw him (I'm going to say him, because
all the soldiers were male and there was something in the way
he moved) while he was still some distance from me, and I
quickly melted into the wall. Or into where the wall had been,
you see. There were thousands of gaps along the corridor large
enough for even a pregnant woman to squeeze through.
Once into one of the gaps, however, you never knew what
lay beyond. You had entered a world with no rational order to
it, a three-dimensional random maze made of random materials,
some of it locked in place by the pressure of other junk above
it, some of it alarmingly unstable. In some of these
hidey-holes you could slip through here and squeeze through
there and swing across a gap in another place, like in a
collapsed jungle gym. In others, two meters in and you found a
cul-desac a rat would have found impassable. You never knew.
There was simply no way to tell from the outside.
That first refuge was one of the shallow ones, so I had
pressed myself against a flat surface and began learning the
Zen of immobility. I had several things going for me. No need
to hold my breath, since I was already doing that because of
the null-suit. No need to be very quiet, because of the vacuum.
And in the suit he might not have seen me if I'd been lying
right in his path.
I told myself all those things, but I still aged twenty
years as he crept by, swinging his laser left and right, close
enough that I could have reached out and touched him.
Then he had passed, and it started getting very dark
again. (Did I mention all the lights went out when the power
failed? They did. I'd never have seen him if he hadn't been
carrying a flashlight.)
I wanted that flashlight. I wanted it more than anything
in the world. Without it, I didn't see how I'd ever make it to
safety. It had already gotten dark enough that I could barely
see the useless rifle I'd carried with me, and wouldn't see
anything at all when he'd moved a little farther along.
I almost jumped out of my skin when I realized he could
have seen the flashing red light on the empty clip as he
passed; I'd forgotten to cover it up. If only I had another . .
. then I looked more closely at the clip. It had an opening at
the end, and a brass shell casing gleamed in there. I realized
it was two clips taped together. The idea was to reverse it
when you'd used up the first. God, soldiers are tricky
bastards.
So I reversed it, almost dropping first the clip, then the
rifle, and I leaned out into the corridor and squeeze off a
shot in the direction the soldier had come from to see if the
damn thing worked. From the recoil I felt, I knew it did. I
hadn't counted on the muzzle flash, but apparently the man
didn't see it.
Stepping out into the corridor, I fired a short burst into
the soldier's back. Hey, even if I could have shouted a warning
to him in vacuum, I really don't think I would have. You don't
know the depths you can sink to when all you're thinking about
is survival.
His suit was tough, and my aim was not the best. One round
hit him and it didn't puncture his suit, just sent him
stumbling down the path, turning, bringing his weapon up, so I
fired again, a lot longer this time, and it did the trick.
I won't describe the mess I had to sort through to find
his light.
#
My fusillade had destroyed his laser and used up my last
ammo clip, so encumbered with only the flashlight and what
remained of my wits I set out looking for air.
That was the trick, of course. The null-suit was a great
invention, no doubt about it. It had saved my life. But it left
something to be desired in the area of endurance. If a
Heinleiner wanted to spend much time in vacuum he'd strap a
tank onto his back, just like everyone else, and attach a hose
to the breast fitting in front. Without a strap-on, the
internal tank was good for twenty to thirty-five minutes,
depending on exertion. Forty minutes at the outside. Like, for
instance, if you were asleep.
I hadn't done much sleeping and didn't plan on any soon,
but I hadn't thought it would be a problem at first. All or the
corridors were provided with an ALU every half-kilometer or so.
The power to these had been cut, but they still had big air
tanks which should still be full. Recharging my internal tank
should be just a matter of hooking the little adapter hose to
my air fitting, twisting a valve, and watching the little
needle in my head-up swing over to the FULL position.
The first time, it was that easy. But I could see even
then that having to search out an ALU every half hour was the
weakest point in my notvery-strong survival strategy. I
couldn't keep it up endlessly. I had to either get out of there
on my own or call for help.
Calling seemed to make the most sense. I still had no idea
what was happening beyond the limits of Heinlein Town, but had
no reason to suspect that if I could get through to a lawyer,
or to the pad, my problems would not be over. But I couldn't
call from the corridor. There was too much junk over my head;
the signal would not get through. However, through sheer luck
or divine providence I was in one of the corridors I was fairly
familiar with. A branch up to the left should take me right out
onto the surface.
It did, and the surface was crawling with soldiers.
I ducked back in, thankful for the mirror camouflage I was
wearing. Where had they all come from?
There were not regiments, or divisions, or anything like
that. But I could see three from my hiding place, and they
seemed to be patrolling except for one who was standing around
near the entrance I'd just exited. Guarding it, I presumed.
Perhaps he just meant to take captives, but I'd seen people
shooting to kill and wanted no part of finding out his
intentions.
One of the other things I'd been lucky about was in seeing
the man in the square who'd been hit by bullets while wearing
his null-suit. Otherwise I might have wrongly concluded the
suit, through which nothing could pass, could render me immune
to bullets. Which it would . . . but only at a cost.
This was explained to me later. Maybe you already figured
it out; Smith said "as should be intuitively obvious," but he
talks like that.
Bullets possess kinetic energy. When you stop one dead in
its tracks, that energy has to go somewhere. Some of it is
transferred to your body: e.g., the bullet knocks you over. But
most of the energy is absorbed by the suit, which promptly
freezes stiff, and then has to do something with all that
energy. There's no place to store it in the null-generator.
Smith tried that, and the generators overheated or, in extreme
cases, exploded. Not a pretty thought, considering where it's
implanted.
So what the field does is radiate the heat away. From both
surfaces of the field.
"I'm sure it's a symmetry we can defeat, given time,"
Smith told me. "The math is tricky. But what a bulletproof
jacket it will make, eh?"
It sure would. In the meantime, what happened is you got
parboiled. Getting rid of excess heat was already your biggest
problem in a null-suit. You could survive one hit in a suit
(several people did), but usually only if you could turn it off
pretty quickly and cool yourself. With two or more hits your
internal temperature would soar and your brain would cook.
The suit was supposed to turn itself off in that case,
automatically. But naturally it wouldn't turn off if there was
vacuum outside. It won't do that no matter how extreme
conditions inside got; vacuum is always the worst of any set of
evils.
If I got shot now, I'd cook, from the skin inwards.
#
I didn't start out singing hosannas to the name of A.G.
Bell. For the first hour I wanted to dig him up and roast him
slowly. Not his fault, of course, but in the state I was in,
who cared?
After filling my tank again I made my way to the top of
the junk pile. This was possible-though by no means
easy--because where I was, near the Heinlein, the thickness of
the planetary dump was not great. By squirming, making myself
small, picking my way carefully I was soon able to stick my
head out of the mess. Any of a thousand passing satellites
ought to have a good line of sight at me from there, so I
started dialing as fast as my tongue could hit the switchboard
on the insides of my teeth. I figured I'd call Cricket, because
he . . .
. . .could not be reached at that number. According to my
head-up, which is seldom wrong about these things. Neither
could Brenda, or Liz. I was about to try another number when I
finally realized nobody could be reached, because my internal
phone relied, when out on the surface, on a booster unit that's
standard equipment in a pressure suit.
How could I be expected to think of these things? You tap
your teeth, and pretty soon you hear somebody's voice in your
ear. That's how a fucking telephone works. It's as natural as
shouting.
I sure as hell thought about it then, and soon realized I
had another problem. The signal from my phone wouldn't get
through my null-suit field. The Heinleiners used the field
itself to generate a signal in another wave band entirely, so
they could communicate with each other, suit-to-suit, and
nobody, not even the CC, could overhear them. I was screwed by
their security.
I thought about this a long time, keeping one eye on the
oxygen gauge. Then I went back to the dark corridor and sneaked
up on the body of the man I had killed.
He was still there, though shoved over to one side of the
passage. I managed to get his helmet off and lose myself back
in the maze, where I used my light and a few bits of metal that
came to hand to pry out what I hoped was the booster for his
suit radio. I had done my work better than I knew; there was a
bullet hole punched through it.
I held on to it anyway. I got another charge of air and
went back to the surface, where I used a length of wire to
connect my pressure fitting to the radio itself, on the theory
that this was the only way for anything to get out of the suit.
I switched it on, was rewarded with a little red light going on
in a display on the radio. I dialed Cricket again, and got
nothing.
So I brought all my vast and subtle technological skills
to bear on repairing the radio. Translation: I whanged the
sumbitch on the dashboard of the junk rover I was sitting in,
and I dialed again. Nothing. Whang. Still not a peep. So I
WHANGED it again and Cricket said "Yeah, what the hell do you
want?"
My tongue had been leading a life of its own, nervously
dialing and re-dialing Cricket's number as I worked my
engineering magic on the radio. And now, when I needed it, I
couldn't get the damn tongue to work at all, so overwhelmed was
I at hearing a familiar voice.
"I haven't got time to dick around here," Cricket warned.
"Cricket, it's me, Hildy, and I--"
"Yeah, Hildy, you cover it your way and I'll cover it
mine."
"Cover what?"
"Just the biggest damn story that ever . . ." I heard the
sound of mental brakes being applied with the burning of much
mental rubber; after the clashing of mental gears Cricket said,
sweetly, "No story, Hildy. Nothing at all. Forget I said
anything."
"Damn it, Cricket, is the shit coming down out there, too?
What's happened? All I know is--"
"You can figure it out for yourself, just like I did," he
said.
"Figure what out? I don't know what you're--"
"Sure, sure, I know. It won't work, Hildy. You've conned
me out of a big story for the last time."
"Cricket, I don't even work for the Nipple anymore."
"Once a reporter, always a reporter. It's in your blood,
Hildy, and you could no more ignore this one than a whore could
keep her legs together when the doorbell rings."
"Cricket, listen to me, I'm in big trouble. I'm trapped--"
"Ah ha!" he crowed, confusing me completely. "A lot of
folks are trapped, old buddy. I think it's the best place for
you. Read about it in a few hours in the Shit." And he hung up.
I almost threw the radio out across the horizon, but
sanity returned just in time. With it came caution, as my eyes,
following the wouldbe trajectory, saw two figures clambering up
the junk. They were headed for me, probably on the scent of my
transmission. I ducked over the side of the junked rover and
dived back into the maze.
#
I still haven't entirely forgiven Cricket, but I've got to
say that love died during that phone call. Sure, I deserved
some of it; I'd tricked him often enough in the past. And in
his defense, he thought I was trapped in an elevator, as
thousands of Lunarians were at that moment, and he didn't think
I'd be in any particular danger, and if I was, there wasn't
anything he could have done about it.
Yeah, sure. And your momma would have fucked pigs,
Cricket, if she could have found any who'd have her. You didn't
give me time to explain.
What really high-gravved me was that, when I finally got
back in position to call him again, he'd set his phone to
refuse calls from me. I risked my neck ducking in for more air
then finding a new place to transmit from, and what I got for
my efforts was a busy signal.
I got a lot of those in quick succession. Brenda didn't
answer. Neither did anybody at the Nipple, which worried me no
end. Think about it. A major metropolitan newspad, and nobody's
answering the phone?
I knew it had to do with the big story Cricket mentioned.
Impossible visions flitted through my head, from a city-wide
blowout to thousands upon thousands of soldiers like the ones
I'd seen laying waste to the whole planet.
But I had to keep trying. So I went back down into the
maze and sought out my favorite airing hole. And two big guys
in suits were camped out there, weapons ready.
#
I'd had ten minutes of air when I first backed into the
pile of chrome pipes to hide from the soldiers. That had been
seven minutes earlier.
The first thing I'd done was cut back the oxygen
dissemination rate in my artificial lung to a level just short
of unconsciousness. Ditto the cooling rate. I figured that
would stretch the ten minutes into fifteen if I didn't have to
move around too much. So far I hadn't moved at all. The
blinking red light I was watching was telling me my blood
oxygen level was low. Another gauge, normally dormant, had lit
up as well, and this one assured me my body temperature stood
at 39.1 degrees and was rising slowly. I knew I couldn't take
much more without becoming delirious; anything over forty was
dangerous territory.
I'm a miserable tactician, I'll admit it, at least in a
situation like that. I could see the elements of the problem,
but all I could do was stew about it. Those guys topside, for
instance. Could they communicate my position to the gorillas
guarding the air tank? They were no more than thirty meters
above me; if they had any kind of generalship at all a message
would soon be arriving to the guards to be on the lookout for a
roly-poly, out-of-breath football trophy, known to associate
with lengths of chrome-plated pipe.
If so, what could I do about it? There was no hope of
making my way through the maze to the next air station--which
might well be guarded, anyway. So if these guys didn't find
somewhere else to go in the next eight minutes, it was going to
be a dead heat (terrible choice of words there) as to whether I
died of suffocation or boiled in my own sweat. I didn't really
have a preference in the matter; it's something only a coroner
could care about.
Brenda Starr, comic-strip reporter, would surely have
thought up some clever ruse, some diversion, something to lure
those freaking soldiers away from the air tank long enough for
her to re-fuel. Hildy Johnson, scared-shitless schoolteacher
and former inkster, didn't have the first notion of how to go
about it without drawing attention to herself.
There was one bit of good news in the mix. My tongue had
continued its independent ways as I crouched in hiding, and
soon I was startled by the sound of a busy signal in my ear. I
didn't even know who I'd called, much less how the signal got
out. I eventually surmised (and later found out it was true)
that something in the junk pile was acting as an antenna,
relaying my calls to the surface, and thence to a satellite.
So I tried Brenda again (still no answer), and the Nipple
(still nothing), and then I dialed Liz.
"Buckingham Palace, Her Majesty speaking," came a slurred
voice.
"Liz, Liz, this is Hildy. I'm in big trouble."
There was a long, somehow boozy silence. I wondered if
she'd fallen asleep. Then there was a sob.
"Liz? Are you still there?"
"Hildy. Hildy. Oh, god, I didn't want to do it."
"Didn't want to do what? Liz, I don't have time for--"
"I'm a drunk, Hildy. A goddam drunk."
This was neither news, nor a well-kept secret. I didn't
say anything, but listened to the sound of wracking sobs and
watched the seconds tick off on my personal clock and waited
for her to talk.
"They said they could put me away for a long time, Hildy.
A long, long time. I was scared, and I felt really awful. I was
shaking and I was throwing up, only nothing came up, and they
wouldn't let me have a drink."
"What are you talking about? Who's 'they?'"
"They, they, dammit! The CC."
By then I had more or less figured it out. She stammered
disconnected parts to me then, and I learned the complete story
later, and it went something like this:
Even before the Bicentennial celebration Liz had been
firmly in the employ of the CC. At some point she had been
arrested, taken in, and charged with many counts of weapons
violations. (So were a lot of others; the invasion of Heinlein
Town had been armed with weapons confiscated during a huge
crackdown--an event that never made the news.)
"They said I could go to jail for eighty years, Hildy. And
then they left me alone, and the CC spoke to me and told me if
I did a few little things for him, here and there, the charges
might be dropped."
"What happened, Liz? Did you get careless?"
"What? Oh, I don't know, Hildy. They never showed me the
evidence they had against me. They said it would all come out
in the trial. I don't know if it was obtained illegally or not.
But when the CC started talking I figured out pretty quick that
it didn't matter. We talked about that; you know that, if he
ever wanted to, he could frame every person on Luna for
something or other. All I could see was when we got to court,
it'd be an airtight case. I was afraid to let it get that far."
"So you sold me out."
There was silence for a long time. A few more minutes had
gone by. The guards hadn't moved. There wasn't anything else to
do but listen.
"Tell me the rest of it," I said.
It seemed there was this group of people out around
Delambre that the CC wanted to know more about. He suggested
Liz get me out there and see what happened.
I should have been flattered. The CC's estimate of my
bloodhound instincts must have been pretty high. I suppose if I
hadn't seen anything during that first trip, something else
would have been arranged, until I was on the scent. After that,
I could be relied on to bring the story to ground.
"He was real interested when you brought in that tape of
the little girl. I . . . by that time I was a wholly-owned
subsidiary, Hildy. I told him I could find some way of getting
you to tell me what was going on. I'd have done about anything
by then."
"The hostage syndrome," I said. The guards were still
there.
"What? Oh. Yeah, probably. Or sheer lack of character.
Anyway, he told me to hold back or you'd get suspicious. So I
did, and you finally invited me in."
And on that first visit she'd stolen a nullfield
generator. She didn't say how, but it probably wasn't too hard.
They're not dangerous unless you try to open them up.
I could put the rest of it together myself. During the
next week the CC had learned enough null-field technology to
make something to get his troops through the barriers, if not
to equip them with null-suits or fields of their own.
"And that's pretty much it," she said, and sighed. "So I
guess he arrested you, and probably all those other folks, too,
right? Where have they got you? Have they set bail yet?"
"Are you serious?"
"Hell, Hildy, I don't think he could have anything serious
on you."
"Liz . . . what's going on out there?"
"What do you mean?"
"Cricket said all hell was breaking loose, somehow or
other."
"You got me, Hildy. I was just . . . ah, sleeping, until
you called. I'm here in my apartment. Come to think of it, the
lights are flickering. But that could be just my head."
She was in the dark as much as I was. A lot of people
were. If you didn't leave your apartment and you didn't live in
one of the sectors where the oxygen service was interrupted,
the chances of your having missed the early stages of the Big
Glitch were excellent. Liz had been in an alcoholic stupor,
with her phone set to take calls only from me.
"Liz. Why?"
There was a long pause. Then, "Hildy, I'm a drunk. Don't
ever trust a drunk. If it comes to a choice between you and the
next drink . . . it's not really a choice."
"Ever thought of taking the cure?"
"Babe, I like drinking. It's the only thing I do like.
That, and Winston."
Maybe I would have hit her right in the belly at that
point; I don't know. I know I was filled with rage at her.
Telling her the dog was fried and vac-dried wouldn't have begun
to get back at her for what she'd done to me.
But just then I suddenly got real, real hot. I'd already
been too warm, you understand; now, in an instant, my skin was
so hot I wanted to peel it off and there was a burning ache on
the left side of my chest.
The null-suit did what it could. I watched in growing
alarm as the indicator that had been telling me how many
minutes I had to live took a nose dive. I thought it wasn't
going to stop. Hell, it was almost worth it. With the falling
gauge came a cooling blast of air all over my body. At least I
wasn't going to fry.
I'd finally put together what was happening, though. For
almost a minute I'd been feeling short, sharp shocks through
the metal pipes I leaned against and the metal brace I had my
feet on. Then I saw a bullet hit a pipe. That's the only thing
it could have been, I reasoned. It left a dent, a dull place on
the metal. Somebody was standing on top of the junk pile and
shooting down into it at random. It had to be blind shooting,
because I couldn't see the shooter. But the bullets were
ricocheting and one had finally struck me. I couldn't afford
another hit.
So I grabbed a length of pipe and started toward the
corridor. I didn't think I could do much good against the tough
pressure suits, but if I swung for the faceplates I might get
one of them, and at least I'd go down fighting. I owed it to
Winston, if to no one else, to do that much.
Getting to the corridor was like reaching for that top
step that isn't there. I stepped out, pipe cocked like the
clean-up batter coming to the plate. And nobody was there.
I saw their retreating backs outlined by the light of
their helmet lamps. They were jogging toward the exit.
I'll never know for sure, but it seems likely they'd been
summoned to the top to help in the search for me. How were they
to know the guys on top of the pile were only a few meters
directly above them? Anyway, if they'd stayed in place, I'd
have been dead in ninety seconds, tops. So I gave them ten
seconds to get beyond the point where they could possible see
me, and I reached for the ALU adapter hose.
It wasn't there.
It made me mad. I couldn't think of anything more foolish
than getting this close to salvation and then suffocating with
about a ton of compressed oxygen at my fingertips. I slammed my
hand against the tank, then got my flashlight and cast about on
the ground. I was sure they'd taken it with them. It's what I
would have done, in their place.
But they hadn't. It was lying right there on the ALU's
baseplate, probably knocked off when one of the guards decided
to rest his fat ass on the tank. I fumbled it in place between
the tank and my chest valve, and turned the release valve hard.
I make my living with words. I respect them. I always want
to use the proper one, so I searched a long time for the right
one to describe how that first rush of cooling air felt, and I
concluded nobody's made up a word for that yet. Think of the
greatest pleasure you ever experienced, and use whatever word
you'd use to describe that. An orgasm was a pale thing beside
it.
#
Why hadn't they taken the connector hose? The answer, when
I eventually learned it, was simple, and typical of the Big
Glitch. They hadn't known I needed it.
The cops and soldiers who had invaded Heinlein Town hadn't
been told much about anything. They hadn't been led to expect
armed resistance. They knew next to nothing about the nature of
or limitations to null-suit technology. They surely hadn't been
told there were two groups, working at cross purposes to the
extent that one group would ensure the destruction of the
other. All this affected their tactics terribly. A lot of
people lived because of this confusion, and I was one of them.
I'd like to take credit for my own survival-- and not
everything I did was stupid--but the fact is that I had
Winston, and I had a lot of luck, and the luck was mostly
generated by their ignorance and poor generalship.
I had vaguely realized some of this by the time I made my
way from the ALU and to a branching corridor I thought would
take me to a different surface exit. I didn't know what good it
would do me, but it was worthwhile to keep it in mind.
Once on the surface again, I called the Nipple and again
got a busy signal, all the time keeping my eyes open for more
of the bad guys. I was hoping they were all up atop the junk,
possibly stumbling around and breaking legs, heads, and other
important body parts. I wished Callie were there; she'd have
put a hex on them.
Callie? Well, what the hell. I had to dredge the number up
from the further reaches of my memory, and it did no good at
all. Not even a busy signal. Nothing but dead air.
Then I remembered the top code. Why did it take me so
long? I think it was because Walter really had impressed it on
me that the code was not to be used at all, that it existed as
an unachievable level of dire perfection. A story justifying
the use of the top code would need headlines that would made
72-point type seem like fine print. The other reason is that I
had never thought of what was happening to me as a story.
I didn't really expect much from it, to tell the truth.
I'd been using my normal access code to the Nipple, and that
should have gotten through any conceivable log-jam of calls and
directly into Walter's office. So far it had yielded only busy
signals. But I punched in the code anyway, and Walter said:
"Don't tell me where you are, Hildy. Hang up and move as
far from your present position as you dare, and then call me
back."
"Walter!" I screamed. But the line was already dead.
It would be nice to report that I immediately did as he
said, that I wasted no time, that I continued to show the
courageous resolve that had been my trademark since the first
shots were fired. By that I mean that I hadn't cried to that
point. I did now. I wept helplessly, like a baby.
Don't try this in you null-suit, when you get one. You
don't breathe, so your lungs just sort of spasm. It's enough to
make your ears pop. Crying also throws the regulator mechanism
out of whack, so that I wasted ten minutes' oxygen in three
minutes of hysterics. Trust Mister V.M. Smith not to have
reckoned with emotional outbursts when he laid out the
parameters.
I had cleverly retained the connector hose to the air
tank, so I made my way back there and filled up again. If only
I could find a loose, portable tank I'd be able to strike off
across the surface. Hell, if it was too big to carry I could
drag it. Did I hear someone mention the dead soldier and his
suit? Great idea, but my uncanny accuracy with the machine gun
had damaged one of the hose fittings. I checked when I borrowed
the flashlight, and again--because I needed the air, and who
knows, maybe I'd been mistaken--when I salvaged the radio.
Libby could probably have fudged some sort of adaptor from the
junk all around me, but considering the pressure in that tank
I'd sooner have kissed a rattlesnake.
These are the thoughts that run through your mind in the
exhausted aftermath of a crying jag. It felt good to have done
it, like crying usually does. It swept away the building sense
of panic and let me concentrate on the things that needed to be
done, let me ignore the impossibility of my position, and
enabled me to concentrate on the two things I had going for me,
like chanting a mantra: my own brain, which, no matter how much
evidence I may have adduced to the contrary, was actually
pretty good; and Walter's ability to get things done, which was
very good.
I actually found myself feeling cheerful as I reached the
egress again and scanned the surface for enemies. Not finding
any made me positively giddy. Move from your present position,
Walter had said. As far as you dare.
I moved out of the maze and dashed across a short strip of
sunlight and into the shadow of the Heinlein.
#
"Hello, Walter?"
"Tell me what you know, Hildy, and make it march."
"I'm in big trouble here, Wal--"
"I know that, Hildy. Tell me what I don't know. What
happened?"
So I started in on a condensed history of me and the
Heinleiners, and Walter promptly interrupted me again. He knew
about them, he said. What else? Well, the CC was up to
something horrible, I said, and he said he knew that, too.
"Assume I know everything you know except what happened to
you today, Hildy," he said. "Tell me about today. Tell me about
the last hour. Just the important parts. But don't mention
specific names or places."
Put that way, it didn't take long. I told him in less than
a hundred words, and could have done it in one: "Help!"
"How much air do you have?" he asked.
"About fifteen minutes."
"Better than I thought. We have to set up a rendezvous,
without mentioning place names. Any ideas?"
"Maybe. Do you know the biggest white elephant on Luna?"
". . . yeeeesss. Are you near the trunk or the tail?"
"Trunk."
"All right. The last poker game we played, if the high
card in my hand was a King, start walking north. If it was a
Queen, east. Jack, south. Got it?"
"Yeah." East it would be.
"Walk for ten minutes and stop. I'll be there."
With anyone else I'd have wasted another minute pointing
out that only left me a margin of five minutes and no hope at
all of getting back. With Walter I just said, "So will I."
Walter has many despicable qualities, but when he says he'll do
something, he'll do it.
I'd have had to move soon, anyway. As we were talking I'd
spotted two of the enemy moving across the plain in big, loping
strides. They were coming from the north, so I hefted the radio
and tossed it toward the southeast. They immediately altered
direction to follow it.
Here came the hard part. I watched them pass in front of
me. Even in a regular suit I'd have been hard to spot in the
shadows. But now I started walking eastwards, and in a moment I
stepped out into the bright sunshine. I had to keep reminding
myself how hard Gretel had been to spot when I'd first
encountered her. I'd never felt so naked. I kept an eye on the
soldiers, and when they reached the spot where the radio had
fallen to the ground I froze, and watched as they scanned the
horizon.
I didn't stay frozen long, as I quickly spotted four more
people coming from various directions. It was one of the
hardest things I ever did, but I started walking again before
any of them could get too close.
With each step I thought of a dozen more ways they could
find me and catch me. A simple radar unit would probably
suffice. I'm not much at physics, but I supposed the null-suit
would throw back a strong signal.
They must not have had one, because before long I was far
enough away that I couldn't pick any of them out from the
ground glare, and if I couldn't see them they sure as hell
couldn't see me.
At the nine-minute point a bright silver jumper swooped