He’d quickly scooped up a fully charged power head and an array of cutting tools before sealing himself into his own ShelterCan, anticipating trouble getting out of the metal shell.
He heard the impacts of the debris increase to a surf-roar directly transmitted through the ground before the same vicious saw-like motion snapped the ShelterCan from its support base. The back-and-forth motions are always the first ones that arrived from a seismic event. Soon, though, the floor of the cave began heaving like a boat in the ocean: long swells that rolled McCrary's ShelterCan back and forth across the floor of the cave while machinery of all kinds crashed to the floor.
Like most of the crew of the Collins, he blacked out during the worst of the combined motions.
***
McCrary had not been Chief Engineer more than two months before he started the process that manufactured hundreds of ShelterCans and placed them in and around the Collins.
“After all,” he had argued to Jeng Wo Lee, the station commander, “we've got to make bulk carriers anyway. This design will just fit into the Fab IV specs.” The Fabricator, Mark IV, was a robotic factory, shipped up to the Collins at significant expense. The factory made almost anything that would fit into its specs. The ShelterCans fit with a handful of centimeters and a couple of gigabytes of programming to spare.
“What are you going to do with all of the extras?” asked Lee. “It's not as if Earth wants them.” They walked around a prototype carrier in the Engineering hangar.
“Oases,” said McCrary. “We know we're swimming in excess iron and aluminum from The Works' oxygen furnace. I say, let's make some use of the things. ShelterCan here will be one part of making the Collins as safe as it can be. Fab IV will be grinding these things out by the boatload. Some Cans will be full-blown bulk-carriers, like I said. For the Oasis model, we just tell Fab to leave out the magnesium tank and firing circuits. The single-board computer gets reprogrammed for suit diagnostics and communications. The LOX tank remains, and some of the leftover silica gets made into thermal tiles.”
“What? Why?” asked Lee. He raised his hand. “Wait, let me think. These will be all over. Outside, of course. Inside, too, right?”
“Scattered all over the inside of the Collins. This place could have a seal failure anytime.”
“But if you're on the surface, you'll be out in the sunlight. Suit trouble...you could boil inside the suit if we don't do something about the ShelterCan.”
“Right. And at night, the thermal time works in reverse, preserving your body heat.”
“Amazing. Will we make our Chaffee quota?”
“Absolutely, Commander. Hell, we might end up shipping some ShelterCans to them for use outside the Chaffee.”
“So, you just keep the Fav IV cranking out ShelterCans, right? And in your spare time, you'll install them all over? Did I get that right?” Lee fingered the insulation on the inside of the main door.
“Yes. I'd like to solicit suggestions from the crew for priority in placement.”
“Granted. Just keep me updated.”
***
McCrary came to with a rush. He rarely wasted time on the meaning of dreams, and this latest one disappeared as soon as he awoke.
He snapped his eyes open, triggering the heads-up display on his spacesuit. All green. The LOX in the suit was full, the power was about half gone. McCrary frowned. If his experience was anything to go on, the guarantee of a week's survival in a ShelterCan might begin to look too optimistic.
He wrestled out his powerhead, selected the appropriate cutting head, and worked on cutting his way out of his ShelterCan.
***
Travis and Bubba swept their lights around the pitch-black safety bunker. It was almost unrecognizable. The ShelterCans laid on the floor of the chamber, dented and torn. The ground shock threw the rudimentary toolboxes in every such chamber around the rock cavity like popcorn, and they either burst and scattered their contents or were so beaten in that the Moondogs despaired of ever opening them.
“Pressure zero,” said Bubba, leaning on his right leg. “This is going to be interesting.”
“Joy. Nothing like the honeytube,” said Travis. The clinging plastic of the prosthesis that took care of urination always felt a little strange, until it became positively annoying. After three days in a spacesuit, even the most macho of men were getting a little frantic to get out of it, if for no other reason than to peel the irritating thing off of their privates.
“Don't generalize from a single point,” said Bubba. “No telling if everyone's like this.”
“Topping off the LOX from my ShelterCan. I figure we drain off ours first, leaving the others for emergencies.”
Bubba laughed, gesturing around him. “This isn't an emergency?”
“You know what I mean. Come on, charge up, then let's get out of here.”
Bubba sobered quickly. “Yeah. Someone might need us.” He waited until Travis looked away, then hobbled over to his ShelterCan to salvage the LOX. His left leg was one solid pillar of pain, and he didn't want to admit it to Travis yet.
***
McCrary was resting on the floor of the cave, siphoning out the LOX from his own ShelterCan. He retrieved a power cable, and plugged it into the Can's charge port. It would not have surprised him at all that his actions were being copied by men he once had working for him. Good habits, once instilled, were followed subconsciously. In this case, the habit extended back to his days in Scouting. “Be Prepared” was not just some nice-sounding motto; it was a principle he followed scrupulously. It had saved his life on several occasions.
He glanced at the gauges. LOX was full, now he was waiting on the batteries. He snorted softly. Battery technology had not progressed in the last fifty years: charging still took five to ten times the time that discharging took, even when you weren't doing anything strenuous.
He tried his radio once more. Nothing. He scanned the bands, looking for a signal, in vain. Sure, he was inside a cave. But the antenna system that led to the colony had little repeaters in all Engineering spaces, including this cave.
He disconnected the power cable, interrupting the charging cycle. He took a different cord and plugged his suit into the intercom system. He again hailed the Collins, listening for any answering signal. Over and over he tried, even tapping out SOS using the intercom switch as a telegraph key.
Nothing.
His mind flashed back to an old movie he had seen once. The actors were long since dead, but their lines lived on. “Why don't they answer?” asked one. “They are unable to respond...they are unwilling to respond,” said the second one.
McCrary pulled out his engineering pad, that ubiquitous device without which every modern engineer feels lost, to jot some ideas down. One look at the smashed face of the device and McCrary sighed. He holstered the device, unwilling to throw it away. After all, they might have a spare display screen left in stores.
He glanced at the fine dust on the floor of the cave. He smiled as he plugged in his recharging cable. Just like Archimedes, he thought, discovering mathematics on the beach. Using a thin piece of metal, he listed the reasons that the colonists were not answering his hails.
They are unwilling to respond. McCrary looked at the words in the dust and shook his head. He could not figure out any possible reason why the colonists, after hearing his voice, would refuse to answer. He moved to smooth out the dust once more, but hesitated. His boyhood love of Sherlock Holmes stayed his hand. This was a possible reason. It needed to remain, even if assigned a very low likelihood of truth.
They are unable to respond.
There is no signal.
My radio has failed.
The Intercom system has no power.
There is a break in the signal cables between this cave and the colony.
There is a signal, but they cannot hear it.
There is no air in the colony.
There is air, but the sound cannot penetrate a ShelterCan, insulation, and a space
suit helmet.
There is a signal, but they cannot respond.
There is no power to the Intercom system.
The signal cables have failed.
They cannot get to a communications console to respond.
They are dead.
McCrary looked at the last line and grimaced. Death was a constant companion for those who ventured off the surface of the Earth. He had seen his share, and while he never grew inured to death, he knew that it sometimes happened and the only appropriate thing to do is to learn why it happened. Only through staring it down were you able to ensure it did not get another victim.
If the Moondogs were dead, there was little he could do about it. Therefore, he had to ignore it and continue under the assumption that they were alive. It followed that if they were alive, they may not be much longer—if the condition of this cave was any indication.
McCrary looked around the cave, taking inventory of the remaining functional items, and turned to leave.
The wall of rock blocking the entrance returned his suit lights in varying shades of gray.
Roundup
UNSOC Lunar Colony Michael Collins, June 17 2082, 1504 EDT
“Here's one,” said Travis, spying the hatch buried beneath debris. “Shows pressure, too!”
Bubba glanced down at the floor, studying the detritus strewn across the corridor. “McCrary knew his stuff.”
Travis's voice sounded in his earpieces. “What do you mean? And where are you? You know you can't tell by radio alone.”
“You're about ten meters up-corridor and to my right. The patterns here on the floor. When this corridor depressurized, it was explosive. All of this stuff came blasting out of the compartments. If we were just sitting around in these suits, we'd be dead.”
“ShelterCans. Smartest thing the guy ever did.”
“That McCrary. I sure hope he made it through,” said Travis.
***
McCrary had carefully climbed to the top of the cave entrance, probing the rockfall. The rocks did not move, but his probe—a long piece of aluminum rod—encountered no resistance when he pushed it through the spaces between the rocks. He sighed and climbed back down.
His swept the beams of his suit lights around the absolutely dark cave. It was quite a bit larger than the safety bunker from which Travis and Bubba had escaped, housing control machinery, now mostly useless, that the Engineers didn’t want to leave around on the surface of the Moon.
Heaters kept the cave warm by bathing the contents in longwave infrared radiation, including several pieces of heavy machinery. On their sides. The shaking had been so violent, even the large nuclear-powered excavators were tipped sideways. McCrary looked at them, then away. Wishing for their might was a waste of time. He had to get into the colony, and quickly. He moved carefully around a floor littered with objects large and small. His eyes kept straying to his ShelterCan, mutilated and useless from the battering of the earthquake.
Or was it? He knew his subconscious was trying to tell him something. But what? He looked at the ShelterCan. It was a long cylinder of spun aluminum, approximately seven feet tall and four feet in diameter. A man could easily fit inside, even with a spacesuit on. Upright, it stood on the wide bell that served the cargo carriers as their main engine.
He snorted. Sometimes, his subconscious played tricks on him. This was the Oasis model, not the cargo model. There was no engine in this one. Still, he couldn't stop thinking about the ShelterCan.
“Let's see,” he said. “Computer, chamber, LOX tank, engine bell. No combustion chamber, no little tank full of magnesium dust. Batteries, thus, some power. Mass is about fifty kilos. So how does this help me?” He kicked a rock at it. It bounced silently off the open hatch of the chamber, arcing out of sight as it left the narrow cone of McCrary's suit lights. The hatch slowly moved, pivoting past the vertical, before slowly swinging shut.
“Sometimes, I’m just slow,” McCrary growled.
***
Travis and Bubba took turns pounding on the hatch to the safety bunker. They stopped to press their helmets to the surface of the hatch while trying to feel any answering vibrations with their gloved hands.
“Nothing,” said Bubba. “Damn. Gauge still shows pressure. Intercom seems to work.”
“It does. I can hear your voice, faintly, when I hold my helmet on the hatch surface.”
“Wish this a'here hatch had a peephole,” grumbled Bubba. “But I'm sure it would weaken the damn thing. Well, do we go in?”
“Yeah,” said Travis. “Tough question. What if they're just sitting around with their helmets off, waiting for rescue?”
Bubba chuckled. “How many Moondogs do you know like that? Sure, we goldbrick when we can. But we ain't be hanging around in our bunker now, are we? McCrary would damn sure ship us home, first thing.” He absently rubbed his left leg. The pain had settled down to a throbbing. He still couldn't feel his toes, but he had an inkling of what the problem was. Frostbite. Somehow, his LOX feed in the ShelterCan had developed a leak and sprayed super-cold oxygen vapor across the foot of his spacesuit.
“What's with that leg? You keep rubbing it.”
Bubba started. “Nothing. At least I'm rubbing one o’ my side legs, not like you.”
“Ha ha,” said Travis. “So, yeah, do we break in or what?”
“I reckon so. Look, if anyone's inside, they're either stuck in their ShelterCans like you was or outside them. If they're outside, we've been whanging the dickens out of this hatch. Seein' as how there's air in there, they shoulda heard it and come to check us out. So, the way I see it, they gotta be inside a ShelterCan or maybe outside one and unconscious. Either way, they're safe, or already in trouble. Besides, I bet we can crash-repressurize the bunker in twenty seconds. I know, I did the drill last year.”
“Well, I guess we go for it. Dump valve or do we pump the air out?”
Bubba nodded, then realized that you cannot see regular gestures in the suit. “Pump. If McCrary were here, he'd insist on saving the air. One day, we just might need this roomful of air.” He turned to the miraculously intact instrument panel beside the hatch and hit some switches. Pressing their helmets to the hatch, both Travis and Bubba dimly heard the alarm klaxons. They faded to silence as the air was removed from the room and stored in storage tanks carefully cemented into the floor of the bunker.
As soon as the gauges read zero, the two Moondogs hauled the hatch open and raced inside. On the floor of the bunker were six very battered ShelterCans, their hatches yawning open.
“Empty!”
***
McCrary crouched behind the overturned forklift. It was the only sizable shelter close enough to his setup. The cylinder nestled atop two aluminum channels, once part of a wall of shelving, now just guide rails for one of McCrary's bucket list item. Aftershocks had played hob with the alignment, but he felt he had everything sufficiently braced this time.
“Always wanted to do this,” he said into his suit recorder. “Never had a situation where I could justify the danger, though.” He smiled. Exploding a gas cylinder—who hadn't thought of the consequences? The LOX tank was balanced atop two angled guide rails and aimed at the top tier of rocks sealing the opening to the cave. McCrary had done some really rough calculations. This crazy scheme just might work. Or he could be letting off a dangerous item in the cave that could very well kill him.
He had drained all of the LOX from the ShelterCan tank into the line of intact storage cylinders still bolted to the wall of the cave. He wrestled a loose oxygen tank to the far end of the cave, laid it on the guide rails, and tack-welded the engine bell from his ShelterCan to the top of the cylinder.
The plan was simple: heat the LOX to boiling with a heater filament, filling the cylinder with hot, highly pressurized gas. The cylinder was rated for two megapascals, about twenty times the air pressure at Earth's sea level. When the tank gauge reached nineteen, McCrary would set off the plastic explosive molded to the tank's valve, snappin
g the neck off the metal cylinder. The outrushing gas would propel the cylinder forward, up the guide rails, and against the top rocks. With good luck, the impact would punch a hole out of the cave. With bad luck, the cylinder would rebound, then race crazily throughout the cave, crushing everything in its path until it ran out of gas.
He peered at the gauge. Eighteen. The heating filament was glowing red under the cylinder. It worried him—the cylinder could rupture at that location, throwing the aluminum tank all over the cave.
Belatedly, he realized that there might just be someone on the other side of the rock pile. It would be a nasty surprise to be digging in the pile and have a gas cylinder take off your head.
“FIRE IN THE HOLE!” he shouted, repeating it three times. Hopefully, the radio made it to the other side of the pile. The longer he waited, the more indecisive he would become.
Eighteen point nine. McCrary whispered something very like a prayer and pressed the detonator.
***
Bubba and Travis continued to make their way up the corridor, examining every spot where a crewman might have sheltered. So far, it seemed as if they were the only inhabitants of the southwest wing of Moonbase Collins. They weren't too surprised. The wings were usually empty, with most of the crew were further in towards the central cavern, while the only thing the southwest wing had going for it was being a convenient shortcut for workers going out to The Works. Still, there were some crew who made their bunks out here—usually those with enough pull to get Commander Jeng to authorize it.
“Getting close, shouldn't we be?” asked Travis. “Doesn't Peter Brinker live around here?”
“He might have been on shift. Still, be thorough. We don't want to miss any of God's chilluns.”
The hatch for the next safety bunker was slightly sprung, as if it had been closed but not securely latched. The two of them looked at each other.
Come In, Collins Page 2
