by John Varley
She yipped even louder when I tackled her. She started hitting me with her little fists. I yelled that I was trying to help her, dammit, but the battle was too loud for her to hear me. Her fists were the least of my worries, anyway. The tempo of the gunfire was picking up again, and I saw at least two laser beams sizzling overhead.
I managed to keep on my feet as I executed a turn that was probably even worse than a three-legged camel, and headed back toward the gallows.
That’s when a finger of laser light probed into the gallows and the crates underneath exploded in flames.
Some days it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed, does it?
* * *
—
With my struggling burden under one arm and my ridiculous Flash Gordon Photonic Ray-gun hanging from my other, I turned away from the flames and looked around for other shelter.
There wasn’t much. The most promising seemed to be a line of mobile food carts about a hundred feet away from us, in the direction of the ice-cream parlor, which was now in flames, too. The girl was shouting at me now.
“Put me down, you big ape!”
“Shut up, or I will put you down and you can look out for yourself!”
“I’ll kill you, so help me, I’ll kill you! What are you guys doing? Why are you killing us?”
I didn’t have time to think about that then. At least she had stopped struggling.
We were blessed by another lull in the fighting, and I made it to the line of trucks. I could see bullet holes here and there, but it didn’t look like there had been concentrated fire on them. Pick one, Chris. Voodoo donuts? Sergei’s bronto tacos? Atomic Fission Chips?
On the side of one truck it said “The Quackin’ Wok, featuring sizzling duck stir-fry!” It looked substantial, with the service door slammed down tight and the access door at the back standing open. It had the added advantage that it was the closest portable ptomaine palace to us.
I hurried to the door and tossed the girl inside before I had had a chance to look in there myself. It wasn’t until she screamed that I saw that the proprietor was lying on the floor in a pool of blood. A good bit of his head was missing.
It was the scream that got the attention of Hildy Johnson and her Hound from Hell.
The kid launched herself out of the wagon like her ass was on fire and collided with me. She was bloody all over. She was still screaming.
“Hey, put her down!”
The command came from behind me. I turned and faced Johnson. The bulldog was standing beside her, and he looked horrible. He was bleeding badly, and seemed dazed. Johnson was pointing a rifle at me.
The girl chose that moment to finally wriggle free. She darted off, away from us both.
“And drop that weapon,” Johnson added.
“You put your gun down,” I said.
“What the hell is that? A laser?”
“Put your gun down,” I repeated. “You’re under arrest.”
“What are you, a cop?”
“That’s right,” I said. “Put that rifle down, or I’ll shoot.” I had no intention of shooting even though the Uglies had told us that if someone pointed a gun at us, it would be stupid to wait for them to fire the first shot. I could see the logic in that. But I was carrying a drilling laser.
And here once again our stories don’t exactly jibe. This is where my blurry recollections become positively chaotic. But in the next second or two these things happened, though not necessarily in this order:
Winston the bulldog came flying up from the floor, headed right for my leg. It was an image right out of a horror movie.
I took a step back.
I pointed my laser at Winston. Johnson says I pointed it at her.
I heard the click of the trigger as Johnson fired her rifle. How I heard it over the din of battle I can’t explain, but I’m sure I heard it.
The rifle didn’t fire. The ammunition clip was empty.
My finger twitched on the laser’s trigger. Maybe it was a voluntary twitch, maybe it was a reflex twitch. For whatever reason, my finger twitched.
The laser fired.
My world exploded.
* * *
—
Here’s what happened:
Hildy Johnson had recently had a nullsuit installed. No one outside of Irontown had ever seen or heard of this device. You still can’t get one, even if you are a multibillionaire. They are not for sale.
What happens is, instantaneously a null field forms around your body. You become like one of those silver statues on top of baseball or tennis trophies, though without the bat or racket.
This second skin is perfectly reflective, and impermeable. It can be switched on manually, or it can turn itself on when it senses that its user is in a vacuum. Suddenly, it is a perfect space suit, though with a limited supply of oxygen. I don’t know how much, though I know it’s less than a regular space suit’s air supply.
It also turns on automatically if something . . . say, a high-velocity bullet . . . intrudes into the field. In that case, the field freezes temporarily. All that kinetic energy has to go somewhere, and it seems that it bleeds off on both sides of the field. Which means that the person inside the nullsuit can get uncomfortably hot. In fact, if the suit is hit by sustained gunfire, the person inside can pretty much parboil. That happened to a few Heinleiners during the pitched battle.
But that doesn’t concern me here. What is a problem is that one of the things the suit field will stop is high-powered lasers.
The worst thing you can do with a powerful laser is to fire it at a mirror. And if I had shot mine at a flat mirror, I wouldn’t be here to tell you this story. They would still be picking blackened bits of me out of the pavement of Irontown. But the mirror my beam hit was one that perfectly followed the bumps and hollows of Hildy Johnson’s body. The beam reflected all over the place. That meant it was weakened some.
But being weakened some was not enough. Not nearly enough.
* * *
—
Once more, words just don’t seem adequate to describe the confusion of the moments immediately following.
I don’t remember falling down. I remember lying there, looking up at the ceiling. I smelled something burning. It was me.
I tried to lift myself up but only one arm was working at all, and that one wasn’t doing too well. But I got my head up and looked down at myself.
When I say I was on fire I don’t mean that my clothes were just smoldering. There were flames erupting from at least three areas on my body.
There was a long furrow gashed obliquely across both of my legs. I could easily have bled to death from either leg, but the burning beam had cauterized the wounds. There was no blood spurting. There was another black gash across my belly. The clothes around that area were burning, too. The third wound was across my left arm. More flames, and this time a little blood was flowing. I managed to shift myself a bit, and noticed with a strange, calm detachment that most of that arm didn’t move with me. It was entirely severed just below the elbow.
It didn’t even hurt very badly. At first.
The real fun came later. Then there are no words to describe the pain. That was still down the road a bit, but not all that far away.
I managed to roll over on my side, on the left side where the severed arm was still attached by some threads of my clothes. That smothered some of the fire. I slapped at the fire on my belly. I suppose I was actually fanning the flames without meaning to. But I didn’t know what else to do, so I kept trying to beat them out with my one good arm.
There came a point where I simply gave up and waited to die.
* * *
—
But I didn’t die.
Still burning, I looked over to the general area where Johnson had been. She wasn’t there, but her dog was. He had been fini
shed off by my laser bouncing off Johnson. It was probably for the best.
I was finally able, mercifully, to pass out. But it didn’t last for long, and when I came to again the flames were still burning. I think that’s when I began screaming.
Suddenly I was inundated in ice cream.
Actually it was mostly cold water and ice, but there were chunks of dark brown chocolate and red strawberry mixed in with it. Oh, good. Someone had decided that what I needed most was a Neapolitan sundae.
I sputtered. Even in your death throes, I discovered, having a bucket of ice water splashed in your face was a bit of a shock. I looked up and saw that the person who had doused me was the girl I had tried to pull out of the line of fire.
I might as well tell something I learned only later. Her name was Gretel. I will also admit that Gretel is not her real name. I know what her real name is, but just as Hildy Johnson did in her account, I’ll use pseudonyms when referring to Irontown residents.
“Oh, man, you are hurt bad,” she breathed, leaning over and looking at me. She was amazingly calm, considering that the battle was still raging. Her jumpsuit had scorch marks on it where it had been set afire, but her nullsuit seemed to have protected her from major harm.
“Get away,” I choked out. “You’re going to get killed.”
“Shut up,” she said, not unkindly. Then she grabbed the back of my collar and started to drag me. I passed out.
* * *
—
It was pain that brought me around again.
The first thing I noticed was that my arm was gone. The strip of cloth that had kept it attached had torn completely while she was dragging me. Well, I’d just have to buy a new one. It was the least of my worries. The arm stump didn’t hurt much, but the rest . . . it was getting worse by the minute.
I must have groaned.
“Hush!” Gretel hissed. “There’s a group of cops coming this way.”
She had dragged me into a recessed cubbyhole of some kind. We were not perfectly concealed, but it was tons better than where I had been.
I couldn’t see much at all except her face from below. I saw her tense, then relax slightly. There was a loud explosion. I heard a whistling sound. That sound, and all other sounds, quickly diminished. There was a sharp pain in my ears. Air rushed out of my lungs.
I looked up and saw that Gretel had become a silver trophy figure. The mirror face moved, looking down at me.
There had been a blowout. We were in vacuum.
At that moment, I accepted that I was about to die. Oddly enough, I wasn’t too bothered about it all, except for the awful feeling of not being able to catch my breath.
At least it would stop hurting, I figured.
fifteen
But Gretel wasn’t having it.
There are stories of people surviving for unlikely periods of time in a vacuum. Five minutes? So it has been claimed. But no one has ever documented such a thing. The general opinion is that two minutes is about the limit. Some have been revived beyond that, but they were never good for much anymore, intellectually.
They say you lose consciousness in about fifteen seconds. I think I lasted a little longer than that because I remember being dragged for a moment, then lifted into the air.
Even in Lunar gravity, I was quite a burden for a small ten-year-old girl. But Gretel slung me over her shoulder like a sack of cement. Then I was bobbing up and down as she ran with me.
The last thing I remember was seeing an old familiar sign: a blue circle with the number 8 in the middle. “Oxygen Here!”
Then I was gone.
* * *
—
It seemed they had emergency pressure shelters even in Irontown. Knowing libertarian Heinleiners, all of them suspicious of most public facilities, I would expect to get a bill for using one.
When I came to again, I was lying on the floor of a six-by-six-by-six-foot cube.
Several things happen to you if you’re in vacuum:
The water on your tongue begins to boil. Not because it’s hot but from the zero pressure. I’m sorry to say that you shit yourself. You can’t help it. It’s the gas in your intestine swelling up and forcing its way out. You may also piss yourself and vomit, but I didn’t do either of those.
Still, the emergency cubicle didn’t smell all that great.
The pain was starting to really settle in and make itself at home. I screamed, and blood came out of my mouth. Gretel crouched over me. She was sprayed with blood but didn’t really seem to notice it.
“Your lungs must be damaged,” she said. She seemed almost clinically detached, but I suspected there was screaming panic just underneath. But she was consulting her internal display after googling “Extreme vacuum exposure; treatment of.”
She went to one wall where there was a box with a big red cross on it. She opened it and stuff spilled out in a jumble. She crouched down and sorted through it. She came back with a pair of scissors.
“I need to cut your clothes off,” she said.
“Don’t,” I managed to croak.
“I have to, dude. It’s for the burns. We need to get some air to them.
“Please don’t.”
“I’ll do it quickly.”
The human mind is not able to retain a memory of extreme pain. You would go mad if you could actually call up that much pain or, worse, if the memory sneaked up on you. No, I remember understanding at that moment that I had never experienced anything like the pain I endured as she cut my clothing away. But I can’t remember what it actually felt like.
See, in some places the cloth and plastic of my combat uniform had melted into my skin. They were one and the same and didn’t want to part. Gretel pulled tentatively at first.
“If you’re going to do it,” I croaked, “then just do it!”
So she did. With the sound of tearing cloth, she ripped the awful stuff away from me. Once she turned aside and vomited, but other than that, she was a lot calmer than I would have been.
I passed out at least twice more as she worked. Each time it was a blessing. Each time I woke up again, it was a curse.
* * *
—
When I came to again, she was leaning over me, slapping my face.
“Wake up, man!” she said. “What the hell is your name, anyway?” I saw now that she was crying.
“Christ,” I said.
“Christ? Really?”
“Chris. Christopher Bach, city police.”
“I ought to just leave you alone to die, you bastard. Maybe I will.”
“That would suit me fine,” I said.
“After all I’ve gone through? No way. Now I need you to listen. Please, can you still hear me?”
I saw that she had taken off her jumper. What I could see of her was bony and blood-spattered. I wondered why she had stripped.
“There are things I need. I have to go out and get them.”
“Go ahead. Get out of here.”
“I’ll be back, I promise. Maybe I can find some help, if you creeps haven’t killed all my people.” She had to stop and sob for a moment. Then she wiped tears away with the back of her hand.
“This shelter was designed to be a refuge in case of a sudden blowout. But that’s all. They thought that rescue would come along in an hour or so. And maybe it will . . . but maybe it won’t. I haven’t been able to talk to any of my family or friends. I googled a few things when we first got here, but now I’m getting nothing. The system seems to be down. I don’t know why. I’m guessing there’s been a lot of damage to the net.”
She almost surrendered to tears again, and I could see her pull herself together. This kid had more moxie than a battalion of Uglies.
“See, there’s no air lock. I don’t need one. Hell, I don’t even need the shelter. What I’m going to have to do i
s let all the air out of here, open the door, go out, then seal it behind me. I think I can do it in about ten seconds if there’s no one out there shooting at me. You should have enough oh-two pressure again in thirty seconds, tops. I just want you to be ready for it.”
“Your name is Gretel?” Remember, that’s not her real name.
“Yes. Now, are you ready?”
Is anyone ever ready for that? But I nodded.
“I’ll knock three times on the door when I’m back and am about to open the door again. You know not to try to hold your breath?”
“Right. Open my mouth.”
“You’ve got it. I’ll try to be back soon.”
“Gretel? I could sure use a drink of water.”
She looked very upset.
“I’m not sure that’s what you do with a burn patient. I’ll have to look it up, if I can. But first I have to do this. Okay?”
“I’m very thirsty.”
“Just hang on, okay? Be strong, Christopher Bach.”
I nodded. I heard the air hissing out of the chamber, and what little I had in my abused lungs came rushing out, too. Instantly, her nullsuit turned on, and she became a mirror.
And it was a twisted mirror, like before, since it followed the shape of her body only a few millimeters away from her skin. But in her relatively flat chest I could see a twisted reflection of myself.
I’m sure if I had had any air in my lungs I would have screamed. What I saw reflected in her suit didn’t look much like a face.
* * *
—
She was as good as her word, getting out the door and sealing it within ten seconds. Everything dimmed, dimmed some more . . . and then things slowly came back into focus as the chamber filled with life-giving air. When the correct pressure was reached the air spigot stopped hissing. I was left alone with my thoughts.
