Orphanage

by Robert Buettner

  The narrow tube had been long and slow on the way in. Now it seemed unending, me pulsing and whooping sounds so close together now they seemed nearly constant

  At last I saw the tube’s end. The hatch remained closed. My heart sank, but I pushed Sluggo forward.

  I got him within ten feet of the inner hatch. Nothing. I wiggled him around like an oversized puppet. Nothing.

  How much longer until this thing blew? Minutes? Seconds?

  If I had accepted that Hollywood job on the spot, Aaron Grodt might not have let the MPs take me. I might be lying by a pool under artificial sunlight right now contemplating Chrissy’s monokini and feeling no pain.

  When this thing blew, would I feel anything, or would I disintegrate before my nerve endings could register pain to my brain?

  I rubbed Sluggo headfirst against the hatch. Nothing.

  In an Aaron Grodt nolo, a trapped hero would shoot off the door lock and escape.

  The flare pistol still bulged in my thigh pocket. I drew it, backed off ten feet. Using Sluggo as a shield, I reached around him, aimed at the hatch, then closed my eyes and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing. I squeezed the trigger again, so hard my hand shook. Nothing. My last hope was a seventy-year-old dud.

  I felt the swell in my closed eyes as tears started. I would die here for no reason.

  I opened my eyes. In the purple light I saw my hand wrapping the pistol butt and the uncocked hammer above my thumb.

  I could squeeze the trigger until the moon turned to cheese, and the pistol wouldn’t fire if I didn’t cock it, first!

  My thumb trembled as it pulled back the hammer.

  If the seventy-year-old flare fired, would it do any good? What if it ricocheted in close quarters and holed my suit?

  I didn’t know prayers, so I just said, “Oh, please.”

  I increased force on the trigger an ounce at a time until I felt the sear release. The hammer seemed to arc forward as though moving through molasses. It struck the cartridge primer.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The hatch remained closed. Then the flare pistol flashed, kicked in my hand, and the flare rocketed ahead and struck the hatch dead center. Nothing budged.

  The flare ricocheted back at me, a red streak, and I dodged. The flare glanced off my helmet then bounced against an oval on the tube wall.

  The hatch flower-petaled open again as the flare skittered in front of me, slow in the tepid gravity, then died. I looked at the oval on the tube wall. The Slug doorknob had been there all the time.

  Black sky, more inviting than any blue summer day, shone beyond the hatch. The flare had not only punched the button that opened the inner door, it had broken either the air lock outer door or the mechanism that controlled it. Both ends of the air lock stood open. The only things holding apart the Projectile’s pressurized atmosphere and vacuum were Sluggo and me.

  Explosive decompression spit us through the air lock like champagne corks. We shot out into sunlit vacuum, forty feet above the moon. Sluggo led, I followed, flailing and screaming like Superman chasing a rocket-boosted zucchini.

  We arced toward the surface. At our projected impact point, two hundred feet from the air lock, Howard bent, back to us, scooping rocks into sample bags.

  Sluggo’s shadow flashed across Howard, and he turned, too late.

  I screamed, “Howard! Watch out!”

  Sluggo slammed Howard like a ton of suet and flattened him. I spun a municipal pool-quality somersault, hit Sluggo feetfirst and trampolined ten yards. I had that cushion, and I weighed no more than a suitcase, but I sprained an ankle during my second landing.

  I lay on my back, waited for explosive decompression from a suit puncture, and saw the Milky Way smeared across the black lunar sky. Whooping vibrated through my shoulder blades. I rolled to my hands and knees. Ten yards away, Howard lay spread-eagled and still, bombed by a giant gherkin. Sluggo lay alongside him.

  I crawled to them. “Howard?”

  No answer. He didn’t stir, and the only thing visible in his gold faceplate was my reflection.

  No Projectile hull interfered between us, now. Maybe the impacts had knocked out one or both of our radios. If sound carried through rock, it should carry through helmets. I leaned forward and laid mine against his. “Howard?”

  “Jason? What happened? What hit me?” His voice echoed like it came from a fishbowl. Which it did.

  I shouted, “The Projectile’s booby-trapped! We’ve got to move! You okay?”

  He sat up, then I dragged him to his feet and pointed him toward the LEM. “Run!”

  He bent toward Sluggo, then reached to touch him. “What—?” I shoved him and gathered Sluggo under one arm. “Run, goddammit!”

  How long had it been since I entered the Projectile? How much longer did we have?

  Beneath my arm as I lunar-bounded, Sluggo flopped like a salami. Pain spiked through my ankle every step. Ahead of me, Howard had mastered the lunar shuffle and bounded fifteen feet at a pace. I was making thirty. Give the moon that. If I have to run for my life, I want to do it where I cover thirty feet per step.

  What was a safe distance from the Projectile? How big would the explosion be? I glanced back over my shoulder. We’d put a hundred yards between us and the Projectile. The whooping had faded, again.

  It changed from a pulse to a solid tone, and my heart skipped.

  I caught Howard in midleap and dragged him behind a mag-train-size boulder as the flash blinded me. I hadn’t dropped my sun visor when I came back out of the Projectile.

  The blast sound and shock seemed to lift the moon, itself, but as soon as I bounced loose from the ground, the sound vanished. I landed on Howard. Exploded pieces swarmed above us and ricocheted off the boulder that sheltered us, though they made no sound in vacuum.

  I lay facedown across Howard while baseball-size chunks and smaller bits that had been blown sky-high rained down on us for what seemed like minutes.

  Finally, stillness returned to the Sea of Fertility.

  I touched helmets with Howard.

  “Wow!” he said.

  We got to our feet and bits of Slug Projectile cascaded off us and plopped into the lunar dust. Sluggo lay at our feet, none the worse for wear. Howard knelt beside him. “Is this—?”

  “The Projectile was crawling with them. They tried to shoot me and cut me to pieces. It was dark and terrifying.”

  “God, I envy you, Jason!”

  I sighed, then stepped around our shielding boulder and looked back. Where the Projectile had been was nothing. Moon boulders had been swept away for a hundred-yard radius around what had to be one big-ass crater, though I couldn’t see it from this angle. Across that swept surface, and beyond, the moon’s gray and white was sprinkled with black Projectile fragments as thick as poppy seeds on a bun.

  A watermelon-size rock near us, but beyond the big boulder, lay split in two by a whizzing fragment. That could have been my head, or Howard’s.

  The blast radius spanned easily two-thirds of a mile. We hadn’t come close to clearing it. We survived only by sheltering behind the boulder. I felt smart until I realized that I had not only failed to bring back information, I had blown the biggest Intelligence coup in world history into rutabagas.

  Howard tapped my shoulder, then leaned his helmet against mine. “We need to get the alien out of vacuum.”

  I lifted my chin. I had brought back something, after all. Mankind’s first prisoner in the Slug War. Even if he was currently frozen as stiff as a cucumber.

  Howard pointed at Sluggo. “Let’s get him back to the LEM.”

  The LEM! Metzger and the LEM had been a half mile from ground zero! I spun toward where they had been, but house-size boulders blocked my view. “Metzger?”

  No telling if I was radioing or if he was transmitting to me. Metzger wouldn’t have known the explosion was coming, not that he could have done much about it.

  My heart raced. I stepped back, got a skipping start, and jump
ed ten feet on top of a flattopped boulder. I nearly overshot it, then caught my balance.

  Scanning the horizon, I couldn’t find the LEM. Maybe my radio worked up here. “Metzger?” I yelled it. Nothing.

  Then I glimpsed the LEM’s gold-foil sparkle, half-obscured by a boulder field. My heart leapt.

  Something seemed different. Maybe from this angle— I looked closer.

  One of the LEM’s four legs lay alongside it. The Module tilted like a cocked hat. A dish antenna dangled where it should have stood straight.

  Even as I jumped from the boulder to the surface and gathered Sluggo, my heart sank. The LEM was primitive, but it was no Conestoga wagon we could lash together with rope. It was going nowhere. Howard had said that this was the only Saturn that had been reconstructed. Canaveral had no lifeboat to send. Howard and I would die slowly here. It almost didn’t matter if Metzger was alive inside the LEM.

  Still, I was already bounding toward the crippled spacecraft, waving Howard to follow. “Metzger?” I yelled at the apogee of each bounce, but got no reply.

  I reached the LEM before Howard and dropped Sluggo in the dust. The damage was worse up close. The main-engine nozzle lay beneath the crew cabin, collapsed like a stomped Dixie cup.

  I picked my way up the bent ladder, touched my faceplate to the LEM window, and hollered, “Metzger?”

  Combined tinting of my helmet visor and the window blackened the LEM’s interior.

  “Jason?” Metzger’s voice. I jumped.

  “You okay?”

  “Bruised. You two?”

  “Tine. The Projectile was booby-trapped.”

  “Gone?”

  “Cinders.”

  “Oh.” I heard disappointment in his tin echo.

  “But we took a prisoner. Sort of. He’s dead.”

  Twenty minutes later the three of us huddled in the LEM, EVA suits hung on the wall, sucking synthetic chocolate milk.

  I told Metzger, “It’s like a jellyfish. Or a slug. Banana-shaped and green.”

  “You’re kidding. I expected, you know, bug eyes, fingers. We’re losing to snails?”

  Howard unwrapped a foil food tube. “We need to get the alien out of vacuum.”

  I scrunched my face. “Bring him in here?”

  Howard shrugged. “I suppose he could rot if we warm him. He lived at zero Fahrenheit.”

  My EVA suit hung on the wall. Howard pointed. “Would he fit in there?”

  “I guess. He’s like five-five, 150 pounds.”

  There was an extra suit, but it hadn’t been unpacked.

  Metzger and Howard suited up, went down the ladder, and wrestled Sluggo into my suit while I unpacked the new one.

  They stuffed him into the suit, his butt end down one leg, his head end just peeping up inside the helmet, behind the visor like… let’s just say the word “dickhead” will never be the same for me. They left him lying on the moon, frozen but protected, and came back inside.

  I addressed the burning question. “There’s no way to repair the LEM.”

  Metzger shook his head. “Dead as your green friend outside.”

  They both avoided my eyes.

  Did they think it was my fault that the Projectile had blown up? That I had marooned them here, to die? Neither of them knew Slugs like I did. Nobody in world history knew Slugs like I did! The little worms were going to blow themselves to pieces, regardless. I had fought my way out of that snake pit dragging a dead Slug! I hadn’t asked to die this way, either.

  I opened my mouth to snap at them, then turned away and looked out the viewport at Sluggo. He lay inside my misshapen EVA suit, dead on a harsh and lifeless world far from home, as I would be, soon. Had he died an orphan, as I would? Were the other Slugs whose ashes lay scattered across the Sea of Fertility his family?

  I looked beyond him, beyond the boulder fields, unchanged for three billion years, to the distant hills, pale against the black sky. Within days I would starve, then freeze, then lie here as still as those hills for another billion years.

  On the horizon, something moved.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I couldn’t speak, so I grabbed Metzger’s hair, pulled his face to the viewport next to mine, and pointed. One speck crawled down a slope toward us, then another and another. The Slugs must have sent out patrols. They were returning. We would be very unpopular.

  I turned from the viewport, squeezed past Howard, and reached into a wall-mounted cargo net. We had one more pistol.

  Howard shook his head.

  I dug in the cargo net for an ammunition magazine. “I’m not just quitting!”

  Metzger tuned from the viewport. “No, Jason. It’s okay.”

  I knew from Metzger’s tone, after a lifetime together, that it was okay.

  Metzger peeled the rubber eye shield from Howard’s binoculars and held them in front of my eyes. I toggled the focus lever and saw a powder blue rectangle. A UN flag on an EVA suit sleeve. I widened the view field. A half dozen lunar dune buggies bounced toward us, filled with EVA-suited humans.

  “What—?”

  Howard said, “We couldn’t tell you. If you had been captured, you could have talked.”

  My head spun. “We aren’t going to die?”

  “Not from being stranded on the moon.” Howard pried the pistol from my fingers and slipped it back in the cargo net.

  I pointed at the bouncing buggies. “What are they?”

  “Gravity-optimized all-terrain vehicles.” Howard turned to Metzger. “What do we need to take with us? Those GOATs will be here in two minutes.”

  I grabbed Howard’s elbow. “How did they get here?”

  Metzger stuffed one foot into his EVA suit. “Just the Slug and any instrument readouts you picked up.”

  Howard nodded, then turned to me. “Four days overland. We were afraid it would take even longer. GOATs weren’t designed to travel long distances. That’s why I gambled our only Saturn to get us here earlier. Good gamble, too. If we hadn’t gotten here early, those guys”— he pointed out the viewport—“would just be picking up Projectile pieces, like you and I did in Pittsburgh.”

  My head spun. “I mean—there are other people on the moon?”

  “Long story. We built a base on the dark side of the moon.”

  My jaw dropped.

  “You’ll see it. That’s where those guys are going to take us.”

  An hour later I sat strapped into the front passenger’s seat of a GOAT, jerking slowly toward the dark side of the moon. The GOAT’s tires were springy, porous screen, its frame metal tubes as delicate as a racing bike. Its roof was a solar-cell panel. It might have weighed as much as a car on Earth, but here a man could lift it by one corner like a bed frame.

  I looked at my driver. By the chevrons on his sleeve he was a master sergeant. I couldn’t ask him much, except during stops when we could touch helmets. This suit also had a bum radio. It made me wonder how we ever reached the moon in ancient times until I remembered that this suit was seventy years old.

  We led the little parade. Howard rode in GOAT two, behind us, with Sluggo strapped across the backseat.

  The trip gave time to think. Foremost, I was glad to be alive. I was mad at Howard and Metzger for letting me think, even for minutes, that we were stranded on the moon. I was even madder that Howard probably had guessed before we ever left Earth that the Slugs would blow themselves up. In fact, he said as much when he told me why he used up mankind’s one and only Saturn V to get here early. Knowing that, he had let me go inside a ticking bomb.

  As a soldier, I knew it was all necessary and sound operational security. But I was still pissed.

  Over the next four days, with nobody to talk to, my mood drooped from pissed to depressed. Somebody had to take the blame for wasting a zillion-dollar rocket ship and blowing up the greatest intelligence find in history, with nothing to show for it but a hyperthyroid amoeba frozen as stiff as a cucumber.

  Howard was in charge of intelligence that would
shape

  I the war. He was safe. Metzger was a hero. In all the years I’d known him, he always skated past blame.

  That left me.

  It promised to be a long four days. At least this time I had hooked up my bladder-relief tube.

  The journey turned uncomfortable and boring after two hours. The terrain soon became monotonous, even after we crossed to the dark side after two days. Plains and hills and boulders gave way to plains and hills and boulders. All blindingly bright but as black-and-white as an art-gallery holo.

  Blindingly bright wasn’t what I expected of the “dark side,” one of history’s great misnomers. The moon doesn’t rotate on its own axis but always keeps one face toward Earth. When that face is sunlit, we see the moon. When the moon swings between Earth and the sun, the side toward Earth is dark and the “dark” side is lit.

  During our trip, the moon swung so the front side we landed on darkened and sunshine “dawned” on the dark side. Sad to say, the moon is the moon. I’d sooner drive across Kansas.

  There was little more to the trip until we crawled up a jagged hill range on the fourth day. A crater rim, as it turned out, then paused at its crest and looked down on Luna Base.

  I shielded my eyes with my hand and stared across row after row of round-roofed white buildings. Vehicles crawled antlike between them. The place sprawled for miles, a town, not a base.

  The bright sunshine faded, and I dropped my hand from my forehead. A cloud must be crossing the sun.

  Cloud? There was no atmosphere here.

  I swiveled my head and looked up. Above us loomed a gray metal skeleton frame that had to be a mile long and a quarter mile wide. I pointed and tugged my driver’s sleeve.

  He leaned across and touched helmets. “Relax. That’s the ship. United Nations Spaceship Hope.”

  Miles above us, the frame drifted slowly past us. Fireflies twinkled and zoomed all around it. “The ship? The one that we were going to build five years from now? The one that’s going to Jupiter?”