Hell on Earth

by Dafydd ab Hugh

  “We’re underground. All this dirt makes a great insulator, unfortunately.”

  First day, we were good scouts, gathering supplies for our merit badge in survival. I regretted that we couldn’t move what we needed to a lower level and seal off one compartment. That would stretch survival by another month. But hauling the tons of material we’d need to build a rocket was impossible.

  Arlene scrounged a generous supply of food, most of it produced under the dome with considerable help from the Genetics Department. After watching the monsters produced assembly-line out of the vat, I hesitated even to eat our own—human experiments in recombinant-DNA veggies and lab-grown “Meet.” But Arlene wasn’t queasy. She preferred the Deimos-grown peas and carrots to the real delicacy, frozen asparagus from Earth.

  “I despise asparagus,” she insisted.

  “All right; so I hate okra.” The slimy stuff was one of my childhood loathings.

  On the second day, we ran head-on into our first lesson in Spaceship Construction 101: namely, translating the manual from “techie-talk” into English. Here, what should we make of this?

  The ZDS protocol provides reliable, flow-controlled, two-way transmission of unenriched fuel-cell packet deliverables from nozzle to socket. It is a plasma stream (PLASM-STREAM) or packet stream (SOCK-SEQFUELPACKET) protocol. ZDS uses the Union Aerospace Corporation double-sequencing directed stream format. This format provides for nozzle, spray, and extern-spray (socket) specification.

  NOTE: see the definition for ZDS-redirect in Section 38.12.

  ACTIVE OR PASSIVE

  Sockets utilizing the ZDS protocol are either “active” or “passive.” Nozzle processes must be directed into passive (external spray) sockets. They detect for connection requests from deliverable processes residing on the same or other nodes of the fuel-cell packet path. Socket processes broadcast requests for active (directed spray) nozzles. They sidestep nominal delivery in favor of reverse-directed (acknowledging) packet streams.

  ALL CONNECTIONS BETWEEN NOZZLES AND SOCKETS MUST BE SET TO DEFAULT ACTIVE OR PASSIVE PROTOCOL DEPENDING ON THE ANTICIPATED FUEL-CELL PATH DELIVERY PROCESS.

  WARNING! Failure to follow UAC active/passive nozzle-socket connection protocols may result in unanticipated fuel-cell path combustion with undesirable results.

  I could translate the final warning pretty well: if we didn’t figure out what the hell they meant by “active/passive nozzle-socket connection protocols,” Arlene and I would become a rather spectacular fireworks display.

  Arlene was better at figuring it out than I was; she had actually taken engineering night courses during her shore tours. I volunteered the use of my hands and a strong back if she’d turn the technical gobbledy-gook into the kind of instructions a Marine can follow: “Put this part here! Tighten that bolt, Marine!”

  “Yeah, just like you to have the woman do all the hard work,” she said.

  “Just remind me to clean the carburetor before I work on the piston valves.”

  “It’s not a car, you moron!”

  “Huh. I guess in space no one can hear you make metaphors.” Amazingly, she didn’t shoot me.

  Unfortunately, the rockets used by the Deimos facility—hence all the spare parts—were short-hop, lightweight supply rockets, never intended to carry a single human being, let alone two of us . . . and never intended to fight a gravity well like Earth’s.

  There were a couple large-bore rocket casings left over from God knows when, back before we had the MDM-44 plasma motors developed by Union Aerospace, and this was the key: I figured I could hot-rod a 44 into a bigger cousin, cram it inside one of the old casings, and have enough juice to fling us off Deimos, burn into the atmosphere, and brake to a (messy) landing Somewhere on Earth.

  My main goal was to keep from blowing us up. After frying our spider baby in JP-9 jet fuel, I had a new respect for the stuff. It beat the hell out of salad oil.

  Arlene squatted on an uncomfortable stool translating technical paragraphs into something I could understand. My optimist projection was to finish the task in ten days!

  Reality dragged ass.

  Starting our third week, we ran into the first serious problem. Trying to jerry-rig parts we couldn’t find into configurations we couldn’t figure out was a bitch, and I insisted we needed to test-fire the motor when I finally got a working model. We didn’t have much time, but the motor was life and death, a must test. We’d spent two days painfully assembling it, and I do mean “we.” Arlene enjoyed an excuse to get off her stool; besides, it was a two-man job.

  We finally ended up with a sleek beauty two meters long and a meter in diameter, almost small enough to fit inside the old-model rocket skin. Just a few odd pieces here and there where I thought I could supercharge the system—or where I couldn’t find the correct part and had to substitute butter for eggs. A pair of start cables snaked into the machine from ten feet away, where a switch box was connected to twenty-seven fifty-volt ni-cad batteries.

  I’d spent half a day welding steel bars together into a framework, sort of, kind of approximating the interior scaffolding in the mail tube. We bolted the motor inside, mooring it securely to the deck plates. Last, I attached a highly sensitive pressure sensor to the forward edge to measure the thrust. I’d trust Arlene to make the calculations and tell me whether we would make it into orbit or not.

  “Want to say a prayer?” she asked before I switched it on.

  “Yeah; I wasn’t always in trouble with the nuns. Maybe I can collect on a few good deeds.” Arlene stationed herself behind a bulkhead; I reached over and flipped the switch, then dived behind cover.

  Superheated gases rushed out the back with a tremendous roar . . . and I could tell immediately it was too much force; I’d tweaked my rocket engine too good.

  But I couldn’t switch it off! It was just a model, designed to burn until the fuel was gone; no cut-off valve.

  The scaffolding strained, groaning like a dying steam demon—whoops, remind me later—and I knew what was about to happen. “Get your head down!” I screamed. No use—she couldn’t hear anything over the roar of the engine and the scream of steel twisting and ripping free.

  The mooring tore loose with a horrible, grinding noise that for an instant even drowned out the 44. My beautiful, working rocket engine broke free, ate the pressure sensor with one gulp, and smashed through a dozen boxes of precious parts before making a smoking hole against the nearby bulkhead, leaving a perfectly straight series of holes, like a cartoon.

  4

  Destroying a bulkhead on a doomed base, or even some spare parts, was no cause for alarm. Destroying the motor was something else again. Arlene screamed something obscene, but I couldn’t hear her over the ringing in my ears. We got off lucky. It could have struck the JP-9 and ended everything.

  After we extinguished the fire and salvaged what we could of the motor, Arlene looked at me humorlessly. “Flynn Taggart, what deviltry did you do to those poor nuns?”

  “Can you rephrase that, after what we’ve been through?” We were both a little punchy, getting by on shifts of four hours sleep. But no spiderminds were trying to kill us, no imps throwing a wrench in the machinery, no hell-princes setting fires worse than the one we’d just put out. It felt like we were on vacation.

  All right, to fill in a bit: an imp is what we dubbed the brown, spiny, leathery alien that throws flaming balls of mucus. Hell-princes looked like the typical “devil” from my troubled youth in Catholic school—red body, goat legs, horns, and they too threw something noxious that killed you real dead; we pretty much decided it had to be an example of genetic engineering, since it was too close to a human conception of evil.

  We had also killed demons, which I privately called pinkies, that were huge, pink, hairy critters with no brains but an awful lot of teeth; flying, metallic skulls with little rocket motors; invisible ghosts; and an unbelievable horde of zombies—spiritually, they were the worst, for oftener than not, they were our own buddies a
nd comrades at arms, “reworked” into the living dead.

  But the granddaddy monster of them all was the steam-demon, so called because it was a five-meter-tall mechanical monstrosity with a back rack full of rockets and a launcher where its hand should have been. When it moved, it sounded like a steam locomotive and shook the ground.

  None of that was important compared to one fact: Arlene had completely changed her mind about building the rocket. “I’m sorry I ever doubted you,” she said. “I guess it is possible.”

  But now I was the contrarian. “We did all the calculations right, A.S. We checked and triple-checked everything . . . How could the engine be so much more powerful than we thought?”

  She smiled. “Because they obviously deliberately understated the capabilities in the technical literature—probably for security reasons.”

  “So all our calculations are worthless crap. How are you going to fly this thing?”

  She didn’t seem overly concerned. “Fly, the vehicle hasn’t been built that I can’t pilot.”

  “Um . . . well, this rocket hasn’t been built, has it?”

  “You know what I mean! If you build it, I will fly. I swear.”

  “Hm.” I didn’t know what to say. I had no idea whether she was or wasn’t a hot-shot rocket pilot. We don’t get much call for that in the Light Drop Infantry. But now that she believed in the rocket, nothing was going to stop us.

  There were other motor parts, and we patched together something I figured was eighty percent ready. There was no time for better. The air was growing thinner and the temperature was dropping . . . the crack in the dome was finally taking its toll.

  The pressure dropped so gradually, we didn’t even notice. After a while I found myself panting for air after climbing a ladder, and Arlene had to rest after every heavy part she handed me.

  Then a couple of days later, I realized my mind was wandering in the middle of a task. I focused, then wandered again.

  Arlene was able to maintain her concentration; maybe being smaller, she didn’t need as high a partial pressure of oxygen. But both of us were getting mighty cold.

  When I saw Arlene shivering while working, I made her throw on a couple of sweaters and did the same. We wore gloves, except that I kept removing mine because it interfered with the work. Then my hands would turn to ice, and I’d put them back on to warm up before taking another stab at attaching the fine filaments that ran microvolts to the plasma globules.

  Suddenly, the air-pressure sensor started screaming its fool head off. Arlene and I exchanged a worried glance, but we didn’t need to be told twice. It was time to start hitting the raw stuff, 02 neat. We took hits off the same oxygen bottle, trying to limit ourselves to a few breaths every hour or so, or when we started to get dizzy or goofy.

  But we just didn’t have that much bottled oxygen. Uncle Sugar packed a lot of air into a single bottle; but even so, even at the slow pace we used it, we’d run out of breathing oxygen in just a few more days. We had more bottles, but we needed them for fuel mixing.

  And of course we’d need to breathe more frequently as the pressure dropped—paradoxically, it was dropping slower now, since there was less pressure in the dome to push the air out.

  We stretched the bottles as long as we could, but they ran out while there was still plenty of work left. I’d done mountain climbing in my native Colorado before joining the Corps; as the air grew thinner, I tried to help Arlene deal with it. “Breathe shallowly,” I said. “Rest, and don’t talk except for the job.”

  The physical exertion wasn’t any less, though. We’d have to stop frequently, gasping and panting. We tired easily and needed more sleep, but stayed on the four-hour rotations, creating a cycle of exhaustion we couldn’t break. But sleeping longer would just make the job take longer, and the pressure would drop lower in the meantime.

  Low pressure is insidious. There are obvious effects: exhaustion, trouble breathing, and cold. But there are other symptoms people don’t often think about: your ears ring; it’s hard to hear sounds (thinner air makes everything sound muffled and “tinny”); and worst of all, your mind can start to go. Our brains are built for a certain barometric pressure, and if it’s too high or too low, we start getting strange.

  Or in Arlene’s case, hallucinogenic.

  “Pumpkin!” she suddenly screamed, waking me after two hours of my allotted four. She grabbed a bump-action riot gun and pounded a shot over my head, so close it made my skull vibrate.

  “Pumpkin” was our name for the horrible, floating alien heads—mechanical, I think—that vomited ball lightning capable of frying you at fifty paces. I threw myself off the table we used as a bed, figuring the vacation was over: the aliens had found us at last!

  But when I dropped to my knees, Sig-Cow rifle at the ready, all I saw was the dark hole in the wall left by my overly enthusiastic motor test of a week ago.

  Arlene ran down the passageway ahead of me, firing wildly; firing at nothing. But those bastard alien “demons” could be fast! I had no reason to doubt my buddy as I joined her, ready to do what we’d done countless times during our assault on Phobos, Deimos, and the tunnel.

  Then she ran straight into the bulkhead like it wasn’t there, and I suddenly realized something was seriously wrong with her.

  She knocked herself out. I couldn’t look after her then; I had to make sure about the pumpkin.

  Knuckling the residue of sleep from bloodshot eyes, I ran like a mother down the corridor, eyes left, right . . . not wasting a shot but ready for the enemy. For an instant I thought I saw a flying globe and almost squeezed off a shot. But it was a trick of peripheral vision, just a flash of my own shadow.

  A cul-de-sac at the end of the corridor finally convinced me that there was no freaking pumpkin.

  I stood for a moment, desperately trying to get nonexistent air into my burning lungs. Then I returned to Arlene, who groaned and panted as she started coming to.

  “Pal, honey, I hate to do this . . . but I’ve got to relieve you of your weapon.”

  She stared uncomprehendingly.

  “There was no pumpkin,” I explained. “You’re suffering from low-pressure psychosis.”

  “Oh Jesus,” she said quietly. She understood. Sadly, she handed over the scattergun and her AB-10 machine pistol.

  I felt like the bottom of my boots after walking through the green sludge. You don’t relieve a Marine of his weapon, not ever. By doing so, I’d just effectively demoted her to civilian. And the worst part was, even she realized now that she’d been hallucinating.

  She was crying when we walked slowly back to the vehicle assembly room, a.k.a. the hangar. I’d never seen Arlene cry before—except when she had to kill the reworked, reanimated body of her former lover, Dodd.

  “Hey,” I said a few hours later, “can’t we electrolyze water and get oxygen?”

  Arlene was silent for a moment, her lips moving. “Yes,” she said, “but we’d only get a few breaths per liter, and we need the water too, Fly.”

  “Oh.” Not for the first time, I wished I knew more engineering. I vowed to take classes when we made it back home . . . if there even was a “back home” anymore.

  I started having unpleasant dreams, so I didn’t mind giving up more of my sleep allotment. It was always the same dream, actually. I loved roller coasters as a kid. They were the closest I could get to flying in those days. I lived only five miles away from a freestanding wood-frame monster. I thought I would love nothing better, until they built a tubular steel, eight-loop supercoaster.

  I’d never been afraid on the old roller coaster. With all the courage of an experienced ten-year-old, I’d sit in the car as it slowly reached the top, the horizon slanting off to my left, and pretend it was the rim of a planet and I was an astronaut. As it went over the top, plunging down a cliff of wood and metal, I made it a point of honor not to hold on to the crash bar. I was too grown-up for that!

  I was always interested in how things were put together
and how they worked. So I asked about the new roller coaster. A man who worked at the amusement park told me stuff he wasn’t supposed to say, stuff he knew nothing about—about how the forces generated could snap a human neck like rotten cord-wood, how the auxiliary chain that gave the car acceleration had a lot of extra strain on it for an eight-loop ride.

  As I started up the first hill of the new ride, I thought about what I’d learned. I didn’t know it was all bogus crap made up to impress a ten-year-old.

  The first loop, I worried about centrifugal force snapping my neck; the second loop, I sweated over velocity tearing me out of my seat; the third loop, I fixated on the damned chain coming loose; and the fourth loop was reserved for a ten-year-old having ulcers over the gears stripping. And then I threw up—not a good thing to do when you’re upside down.

  I wonder if that bastard ever knew what damage his misinformation caused?

  As I grew up, I learned how real knowledge could banish fear. You play the odds. You focus on the job at hand. You don’t want to mess up. The childhood trauma was behind me . . . until it came back now on Deimos as I tried to grab a little sleep. Instead of rest, I was back on that eight-loop metal monster, and now it turned into the arms and legs of a steam-demon. When the creature screamed at me and raised its missile arm, I would always wake up; so I didn’t even have the pleasure of fighting or dying.

  I didn’t worry about my stupid dreams, though. It sure beat fighting the real thing. Besides, I was getting off easy compared to Arlene.

  I knew things were bad when I tried to wake her up and she stared with unblinking eyes, not seeing a damned thing. I realized she was still asleep. I’d read somewhere that it’s risky to wake a person from a trance state, and I didn’t require medical training to know Arlene was Somnambulist City.

  There wasn’t time to go hunting for a medical library. A quick check of medical supplies produced a Law Book, wedged between the surgical bandages and antibiotics. I had to laugh. A text on medical malpractice had made it all the way to a Martian moon, and now, by way of a hyperspace tunnel, had almost returned to Earth.