by Ben Bova
“Until some hired assassin knocks you off.”
Doug reached out his gloved hand. “Join us, Bam.”
T don’t deserve to join you,” Gordette said, recoiling. “I’m a murderer! A killer!”
“You were a murderer. Now you have the chance to change, to start a new life.”
“Doing what?”
Patiently, Doug said, “Doing whatever you do best. It’s up to you.”
“I killed my own mother!” he screamed, leaping to his feet. “I killed her!”
Doug looked up at him and saw fear, guilt, and the depths of hell in Gordette’s red-rimmed eyes.
Gordette bent over him and yanked Doug to his feet so hard that Doug’s helmet rolled off the bunk and bounced on the concrete floor.
“I killed my mother!” he roared into Doug’s face. “Don’t talk to me about starting a new life.”
He pushed Doug down onto the bunk again and went for his own helmet. Doug watched him put it on, seal the neck ring. Then Gordette started to pull on his gloves.
“Where are you going?” Doug asked.
“Out there. Anyplace. I’ll keep going until I run out of air. That’ll put an end to it.”
Doug got up from the bunk. “Bam, you can’t do that! I can’t let you do it.”
Staring grimly at him through his open helmet, Gordette muttered, “How you gonna stop me, man?”
Doug walked toward him. “Don’t kill yourself, for God’s sake. You can start a whole new life here.”
“Yeah? For how long? In a week or so the Peacekeepers are gonna come marching in here and I’ll be on my way back Earthside, heading for jail ’cause I didn’t nail you.”
“We can keep the Peacekeepers out,” Doug said, feeling almost desperate. “We can stay free.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Don’t kill yourself, Bam!”
Gordette looked at him with eyes suddenly grown calm and cold. “One of us has to die, Doug. I’d rather it be me. Even if I killed you, they’d just set me up for some other piece of shit. Let me end it, man. Let me put an end to the whole fucking mess.”
“No!” Doug snapped, and grabbed for Gordette.
Almost by reflex, Gordette backhanded Doug across the jaw, knocking him off balance, staggering in his spacesuit halfway down the length of the shelter.
Gordette slammed his visor down and turned for the airlock hatch. Doug charged after him. Gordette spun to face him, snapped Doug’s head back with a straight left, then levelled him with a right. Doug’s eyesight blurred as his head hit the concrete flooring, then everything went black.
Edith woke up, stiff and groaning, in the tractor’s seat. She went to rub her eyes but her hands bumped the helmet visor. Pulling herself up to a sitting position, she saw that the tractor was stopped in front of the tempo and Doug was gone.
He must be inside with Gordette, she thought, suddenly alarmed. Quickly she searched around her seat for something that might be useful as a weapon. If there was a tool kit on the tractor, it wasn’t in sight.
Empty-handed, she started to climb down to the ground. As she put one boot on the sandy regolith she saw a spacesuited figure march determinedly past her, past the other parked tractor, and away from the tempo. It wasn’t Doug’s suit, she knew.
Ignoring the distress signals her bladder was sending, Edith went to the open airlock hatch. Doug must be inside, she thought. It took an eternally long moment for her to find the instructions printed on the inner wall of the airlock, alongside the control keypad. Edith had to turn on her helmet light to read them.
It was simple enough. She slid the hatch shut and activated the pump. When the light turned green she opened the inner hatch and stepped into the shelter.
Doug was on the floor, his helmet off, pushing himself up onto his elbows.
“He wants to kill himself,” Doug said to her. She barely heard him through her sealed helmet.
Sliding her visor up, she knelt beside Doug. “What happened? Are you all right?”
“He wants to kill himself,” Doug repeated.
“Let him,” she snapped. “Better him than you.”
Slowly, Doug pushed himself to a sitting position, shook his head a few times, then started to clamber to his feet. “Where’d my helmet get to?” he mumbled.
“You’re not going out there after him!”
He looked at her. “I can’t let him die out there, Edith. He… I just can’t.”
I’ll go with you, then.”
“You stay here,” Doug said firmly, walking back to pick his helmet off the floor. “You’re a lot safer here inside the shelter.”
“And you’re going out to catch him?”
“To find him. To help him—if he’ll let me.”
“Not without me!”
“Yes, without you. You stay here. If I’m not back in an hour, get into the tractor and go back to Moonbase.”
Edith started to argue, but one look into Doug’s determined blue-gray eyes stopped her. It would be pointless, she knew.
So she waited ten minutes, by the watch on her spacesuit wrist, after Doug left the shelter. Then she went to the airlock and started after him in the tractor.
From her perch in the driver’s seat she could see two pairs of bootprints clearly etched into the dark sandy ground. I won’t need an Indian guide to help me follow their trail, Edith told herself.
DAY FORTY-FOUR
Doug followed Gordette’s boot prints, gleaming bright and new in the ancient regolith. The only sounds he heard were his own breathing and the comforting soft buzz of the suit’s air fans. He had stopped at the tractor to refill his air tank. Hunger gnawed at him but there was nothing he could do about that.
How much air does Bam have left in his suit? he wondered. How long can he roam around out here before he runs out?
Gordette’s trail seemed to meander, with no specific aim or purpose. Doug followed it around a house-sized boulder, never even thinking that Gordette could be lurking behind the rock, waiting to ambush him. He wasn’t. His boot prints skirted a worn old crater the size of a baseball diamond, and so deep that its bottom was lost in dense shadow. Meteroid must have come almost straight down to dig that one, Doug thought.
Soon, though, Gordette’s trail started to run beside a sinuous rille that snaked along the dusty ground like an arroyo in desert country. Doug remembered his first walk out on the Moon’s surface, his eighteenth birthday. With Foster Brennart. They had come across a rille that had suddenly spurted a ghostly cloud of gasses from deep within the lunar interior. Methane, ammonia, other volatiles. They had glittered in the sunlight like a billion fireflies.
Brennart thought it was a good omen, my first walk on the surface. Maybe it was, Doug thought. I could use a good omen now.
Suddenly Gordette’s boot prints ended. Disappeared. Doug stopped, puzzled. He backtracked a few steps, then saw that Gordette had climbed down into the shallow gully cut into the ground by the rille. Turning on his helmet lamp, Doug spotted faint boot marks heading along the bottom of the rille, some two meters below the surface on which he stood.
The prints still headed in the same general direction that Gordette had been following. Why’d he jump down into the rille? Doug asked himself. Was he afraid I’d follow him and he’s trying to hide his trail? The prints down inside the rille were faint, but still visible.
Staying on the surface, Doug followed the rille as it wound across the regolith. It could be dangerous down there, Doug told himself. The rilles are old fissures where gas from below ground had seeped out. The ground down there can be brittle as glass, and who knows what’s underneath it?
Edith trundled along in the tractor, trying to keep its speed down to the pace of a walking man. The trail of boot prints was easy to see, and she didn’t want Doug to know she following him. Not yet.
Once she thought she saw the curve of his helmet above the horizon, and she tromped on the tractor’s brakes. If I can’t see him, he can’t see me, she
figured. And he sure can’t hear me coming after him, not out here in all this vacuum.
The nearness of the horizon bothered her. It didn’t look right. She knew, consciously, that the Moon was only a quarter of the Earth’s size and the horizon was therefore much closer than it would be on Earth. But still, at a deep, primitive level, it almost frightened her. As if there really was an edge to this barren, desolate world and she might drop off it.
Yeah, she told herself derisively, you’re right in there with Columbus’s crew. Sail on, babe. Sail on.
Doug didn’t realize he still had the suit-to-suit frequency on until he started hearing strange sounds in his earphones. Gasps? Moans? The sounds came through for a moment, then disappeared, like ghosts vanishing into thin air.
Very thin air, around here, he told himself.
The rille had been getting progressively deeper, sinking more than four meters below the crater floor, Doug guessed.
It was hard to tell, and almost impossible to see if Gordette’s boot prints were still marching along down there, even when he leaned carefully over the worn, rounded smooth edge of the rille to shine his helmet lamp on its bottom.
He came to a spot where a meteoroid had slammed into the ground just next to the rille, collapsing its side into a heap of rubble. Doug spent several minutes searching for bootprints; he found none. As far as he could see there were no prints on the other side of the narrow rille, either.
And the eerie sounds in his earphones had stopped, too.
I’ve overshot him, Doug told himself. He’s back behind me someplace. Down inside the rille. Hiding.
Slowly, bending over the edge of the rille to examine its bottom, Doug started backtracking. He couldn’t see the bottom of the arroyo, it was too deep for his helmet lamp to reach.
He stopped and listened. Nothing. Gordette had gone silent. Is he dead? Maybe what I heard was his last gasping for air.
With great reluctance, and more than a little fear, Doug carefully climbed down inside the rille, lowering himself slowly down as far as he could with his arms fully stretched, then letting himself slide the rest of the way down.
He felt the rough side wall grating against the chest of his suit. Couldn’t do this in a fabric suit, he thought. The cermet won’t tear. But he knew that grinding some dust or larger particles of grit into his suit’s joints could immobilize him as thoroughly as the Tin Woodsman caught in a monsoon rain.
Doug had never felt the panic of claustrophobia, but as he stood shakily inside the narrow rille he saw that the sky above him was nothing more now than a constricted slice of stars cut off on both sides by the steep black walls of the arroyo. Like the view from the bottom of a grave, he thought.
He took a step forward and his boot slid on the glass-smooth rock. He had to grab at both sides of the gully to keep himself from falling. Hardly any dust down here, he realized. This rille must be brand-new, maybe still active.
“New” and “active” were relative terms on the Moon, he knew. A new rille might have opened up only a few thousand years ago. Its activity might be a slight sigh of underground gas every century or so.
A cough. In his earphones Doug heard somebody cough. Couldn’t be anybody but Bam.
Slowly, moving cautiously along the slippery rock floor of the rille, both hands extended to touch its steep confining walls, Doug made his way forward.
Another cough, followed by a quick, desperate gasping.
“Bam!” he called into his helmet mike. “Bam, where are you?”
No response. Standing stock-still, Doug listened hard. Is he holding his breath? No, it’s just so faint I can hardly hear him.
Doug pushed along the slick arroyo and the sound of Gordette’s breathing grew louder. It sounded strained, labored, as if the man were in pain.
“I’m coming, Bam,” Doug called again. “I’ll be with you in a couple of minutes. Hang on.”
“Don’t…” Gordette’s voice was weak. It broke into a gasping cough.
“Save your breath. I’ll be there.”
“Careful… the ground… gives way…”
Doug scanned the ground before him in the light of his helmet lamp. It looked solid enough, glassy and slick, but solid rock. Yet he knew this volcanic vent might be no sturdier than a soap bubble.
More coughing from Gordette. He must be almost out of air, Doug realized. Got to get to him quickly.
The smooth rock floor ended abruptly, like a shattered pane of glass. Black nothingness yawned in front of Doug.
And clinging to the edge of the break like a ship-wrecked sailor desperately clutching a piece of flotsam, was the space-suited figure of Leroy Gordette.
He had one forearm hooked on the crumbling edge of the precipice, and the gloved fingers of his other hand. Doug could see the top of his helmet.
“Hold on,” he said, and immediately felt foolish. What else was Bam trying to do?
“Don’t!” the black man warned. “Fuckin’ rock breaks. It’s as thin as tissue paper. Brittle, too.”
Doug lowered himself to his knees, then got down on his belly and wormed his way toward Gordette.
“Got no purchase for my feet,” Bam said, panting. “Every time… I try to haul my ass up… fuckin’ rock crumbles more.”
“How deep is the hole?” Doug asked. “Can you see the bottom?”
Gordette coughed. “Must go… all the way down… to Chicago. No bottom…”
Inching closer to the man, Doug felt the brittle rock beneath him crack, like thin ice.
He stretched out his arm as far as he could. “Can you grab my hand?”
“I’m runnin’ out of air,” Gordette said, gasping. “Forget it. Get outta here.”
“Grab my hand!” Doug insisted.
“Can’t.”
Doug pushed himself a few centimeters closer. A chunk of the rock floor just in front of his helmet gave way and plummeted down into silent darkness.
“Grab it!”
“Leave me alone…”
With gritted teeth Doug slid closer and wrapped his fingers around Gordette’s wrist just as the edge collapsed into shards and fell away.
Through his suit Doug could feel the vibrations of the servo motors in his glove as they tightened on Gordette’s wrist. The man’s whole weight dangled from Doug’s hand. It felt as if his arm were being wrenched out of its shoulder socket.
“That’s… a helluva grip… you got,” Gordette grunted.
Doug could feel Gordette’s body swaying as it hung in the deep black emptiness. Pain burned through his arm and shoulder. The exoskeleton would keep his fingers clamped on Gordette’s wrist, he knew. Good thing we’re on the Moon, Doug thought. With his spacesuit and all he’d yank my arm right out of my shoulder on Earth.
For moments that stretched like years Doug lay there, flat on his belly, with Gordette hanging in his hand.
“Lemme go…” Gordette panted. “Lemme die…”
“If you go,” Doug said grimly, fiercely, “I go with you. We’re in this together, Bam.”
“You… crazy…”
Doug tried to worm his way back, away from the brittle, crumbling edge of the abyss. Gordette could do nothing to help, even if he wanted to.
Got to haul him out of there, Doug told himself. Got to get him on solid ground before he runs out of air.
But it was almost impossible to edge his way backward with Gordette’s dead weight dangling from his outstretched arm. Grunting, teeth gritted, eyes stinging with sweat, Doug inched back along the glassy rock. It was painfully, agonizingly slow. He felt woozy, head spinning.
“What’re y’all doing down… oh my God!” Edith’s voice.
Doug couldn’t see her, didn’t know how she had gotten there. But she sounded like an angel to him.
“Edith! Where’s the tractor?”
“Right here,” she said, her voice anxious, high. “I rode out on it.”
“Great! Get the tow cable. Quick!”
It seemed to tak
e an eternity and a half for Edith to find the tow cable and then clamber down into the rille behind Doug and tie it to one of the attachment rings on his backpack. She used the cable to climb out again, then went up to the tractor.
“Use the winch,” Doug called to her. “Controls are on the dashboard.”
Edith stared at the dashboard but couldn’t figure out which of the toggles or keypads tan the winch. Instead, she revved up the engines and started backing away, slowly.
“Easy—easy,” Doug’s voice crackled in her earphones. “He’s in a fabric suit.”
Edith thought of all the rodeos she had seen, with cowboys guiding their tough little ponies in steer-roping competitions. Just ease on back, she said silently to the tractor. That’s it, honey, nice and slow and easy.
“Hold it,” Doug commanded. “We’re on safe ground but I think Barn’s passed out.”
Edith clambered down from the tractor and went to the edge of the gulch. Doug was connecting his emergency air hose from his backpack tank to Gordette’s. She shook her head inside her helmet. If it’d been me, I’d of let the sumbitch die down there. He tried to kill Doug!
But she heard Gordette cough and sputter and knew he was going to make it. Doug had saved him.
It took the better part of an hour to get them both out of the rille and their air tanks topped off from the tractor’s supply. Then Edith started back toward Moonbase with Doug sitting between her and Gordette.
For hours Gordette said nothing. The man just sat on Doug’s other side, wrapped in his spacesuit and total silence.
At last Doug said to him, “I’ve been pretty close to death, Bam. It changes your outlook on life.”
“Does it?” Gordette muttered.
“It did for me. I think you’re going to find it will for you, too.”
Gordette said nothing. Edith thought Doug was wasting his breath.
“When we get back to Moonbase,” Doug went on, “you’ll have the chance to start a new life. Start all over, with the past gone forever.”
“Until they throw you out of Moonbase,” Gordette said.
“They’re not going to do that, Bam. With your help, we can beat them.”
