Walking on the Sea of Clouds

by Gray Rinehart

  He grabbed some Ibuprofen and swallowed them down before he locked his gloves on. He held his helmet and looked for the fifth time at the status panel.

  All green.

  “I’m suited, Grace, except for my fishbowl.” She didn’t answer. She hadn’t said anything for over ten minutes, since she confirmed visually that rocks and debris were falling on top of their vehicle. She hadn’t confirmed it directly to Van, but in a cursing tirade directed at the departing LSOV. He continued, “Standing by—literally standing by—to exit for a visual inspection.”

  The few cameras on the LVN each had limited pan and tilt, but they were primarily directed outward. They were set up so observers inside could keep track of work being done outside and could move the big truck despite its blind spots, not for visual inspections of the truck itself.

  “Roger that, Van,” Grace said. “Want to trade places with me? You don’t have a lot of mobility. No offense.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Van said. “I’ll see you from the outside.”

  Stepping into and out of the airlock was no problem. Negotiating the ladder was trickier, and the slope they were parked on added to the trickiness. Van resolved to shave and tape his knee as soon as he got back inside.

  “All your status lights still show green, Grace?”

  “Affirm. Every system—power, environment, drive, comm, everything.”

  “You looking at overall power, or the individual elements?”

  “I was looking at the combined system, let me switch into the power subsystem.”

  “You should see a drop in output from the front right solar array,” Van said. “Looks like the coverglass got peppered pretty good.” Actually, it looked as if a light gauge shotgun had sprayed the solar panels on that section of the Turtle, but Van didn’t see the need to alarm Grace by describing it. And he was more concerned that falling rocks had damaged something else—maybe something he couldn’t see.

  “Yeah,” Grace said, “there’s a definite drop there, but it’s still functional. Overall power is good.”

  “Glad to hear it.” Van maneuvered himself toward the front of the truck, examining every joint and seam and surface from every angle. He saw no obvious dents or dings, no signs of outgassing, just a shiny new layer of dust on the truck. He resisted the urge to write “wash me” on the side of the vehicle.

  “Hi, Grace,” he said from directly in front of the truck.

  Grace had her suit and helmet on inside, keeping to the safety rules until they were sure the truck was still airtight. Her gloved hand waved at him; her bulbous “head” didn’t move. “Be careful out there, Van. If you fall and break your leg, I’m not coming out after you.”

  “No, Grace, that’s not right. You’re supposed to say, ‘If you fall and break your leg, don’t come running to me.’”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Forget it.” Van moved on. The left side of the truck looked better than the right, except for one camera that got knocked off its mount. Van climbed carefully up and examined it. “Grace, you got any picture on camera … which one is this … camera three?”

  “Switching. No, nothing.”

  “I figured. From the ground I thought maybe the mounting was hit, but looks now like the camera itself got it.” He reached up and pushed at it; it resisted his gloved fingers enough that he didn’t think it would shake loose and damage anything else. “I’m going to leave it in place for now. We can take it down later. Hey, while we’re on the subject of cameras, are all of our cameras strictly visual?”

  “I think so,” Grace said. “Henry and Oskar had the IR camera in the LSOV. They used it when they leak-checked the ROPS system.”

  “I was afraid of that. If we had an IR camera with us, we could get a much better look at leaks—maybe see them when they’re microscopic, instead of looking for gross evidence, steam or frost.”

  “Well, put it in the after-action report. How much longer you plan to be out there?”

  “Twenty, thirty minutes maybe. Longer if I go over everything on the trailer. Why?”

  “Just wondering. I sent a status report up to the satellite just a minute ago, and said we would circle back and check the ROPS and LPPN before we head further south.”

  Van chewed on that idea; it was distasteful, with the flavor of something that you ate because it was good for you even though it tasted horrid. Like mental Brussels sprouts. “That’s going to put us further behind,” he said, “but I reckon we need to.”

  “You don’t sound like you’re convinced.”

  “I just don’t like it, is all.”

  “Then you’re really not going to like this,” Grace said. “By a strict reading of the checklist, we should go all the way back to Mercator for a full check-out.”

  * * *

  Besides the camera, Van found nothing else wrong with the Turtle. Nor did he and Grace find anything wrong with the Halfway House facility. On every satellite pass during the seven-and-a-half hours they spent examining the LPPN and ROPS, they argued back and forth with Shay.

  Van yawned as he read Shay’s latest message. He’d read it twice already, and it didn’t seem as if it was going to change. He adjusted the strap on the new ice pack on his knee. “Shay must be serious,” Van said, “he’s taken to signing his messages ‘S. Nakamura, Mission Commander.’” Van checked the incoming queue again, even though he knew the result would be the same: no message from Barbara. She must be nearly as pissed as Shay.

  Van lay back on the platform. Just a few more minutes of rest.

  “It makes sense,” Grace said as she stepped out of the latrine. A rolled-up white towel hung around her neck as she finger-combed her dark hair. “I’d hate to press on to Faustini and develop a worse problem.”

  Van closed his eyes. “Yeah, but if we go back now, when’s the next chance to pick up a load of ice? It made sense to go down south this time, since we were coming this far—if we go back now, we’re losing a lot of productive time.”

  “I don’t deny that,” Grace said. “But I’d rather be unproductive than stranded. It’s not as if they can fly down to get us, either.” The LSOV had made it back to Mercator, but it was out of commission until they could repair the faulty gimbal mechanism.

  Van didn’t like it, but it wasn’t his job to like it. “Alright,” he said, “I’ll take the first shift. Give me twenty minutes of shut-eye and then I’ll go forward. I’ll tell you what, though—I’m just gonna drag my suit through the neck this time, instead of putting it on. That’ll be easier on my knee.”

  “I won’t tell anybody,” Grace said. “I’ll spool up a message while you rest. Satellite’ll be coming over the horizon soon.”

  It was almost a half-hour later when Van wormed his way through the neck to the cab. He carried the ice pack with him, even though it was barely cool any more, along with his suit. He dumped the suit on the floor, under one of the fold-down jump seats, as he came through the hatch. He closed the hatch behind him and situated himself with the ice on his knee. Within five minutes, he ticked through the start-up procedure and had Snapper rolling back the way they had come: north toward Mare Nubium and Mercator Crater.

  Van adjusted the view of the rearmost camera so he could see when they lost LOS with the Halfway House. The shadows, fingers of black grasping at the reflective lunar plain, were longer than when they had arrived. They would grow longer still until the lunar night—

  Something popped. Not like the usual thermal expansions and contractions, this was sharper: not loud, but distinct. Van looked at all his instruments, but they indicated everything was fine, and was about to call Grace on the intercom when the barest flutter of a breeze blew past his right ear.

  He turned his head up and to the right as if following the moving air. Thin white fingers of frosty vapor jetted out of one of the cab windows.

  He recalled Grace’s worry as he hit the intercom switch. “Grace? We have a worse problem.”r />
  Chapter Twelve

  A Wave of Growing Doubt

  Sunday, 3 December 2034

  The cold, clear, blue Montana sky looked almost close enough to touch. The Sun was still low, but its radiance cut through the chill and scattered most of the shadows. Barbara Richards leaned against a fencepost, gazing up at clouds as white and soft as shredded cotton, and thought of ways to kill her husband.

  She had plenty of time to plan; he wasn’t due back for over six weeks, and that was if the mission didn’t get extended. Unfortunately, the ground was getting too hard already to dig a hole so she could bury the careless jerk—and if she took her dad’s backhoe and started digging trenches, he might get a little suspicious. Finally, she agreed with the old cliché: he was impossible to live with, but she couldn’t really kill him.

  “First thing is, I’m fine,” his message said. Only Van would say he was “fine” in the same breath as mentioning the intramural soccer injury that left him on crutches for two months. Clumsy ox. She ought to bust his other knee so he’d limp evenly.

  Serve him right for taking that setup mission and leaving me down here to milk the Bessies. If he gets hurt so bad that they ground him—

  Barbara cut off that line of speculation as best she could; it would only lead to more consternation. She walked back along the fence, her boots squishing slightly in the cold slush. Winter had come early to the ranch, followed by spring-like days that melted the fresh snow and turned the paths to mud.

  At the door, she pulled the soles of her boots over the scraper and swung her feet through the boot brushes before she went inside and pulled the boots off. The house still smelled of morning coffee and bacon, and her stomach rumbled in anticipation of an early lunch.

  Her dad, hale and hearty at sixty-two, sat at the vintage Formica kitchen table, sleeves rolled up on his green flannel shirt, working over some of the books. The ranch was a sideline more than anything else—he got most of his income from oil wells on the property, tapping the Bakken Formation that spread east into the Dakotas and up into Canada—but he did all the bookkeeping himself, down to the penny. “How’s the beef?” he asked.

  “They’re not beef yet,” Barbara said. “They’re still milk machines for the time being. And they’re fine.”

  He put down his pen and looked closely at her in that fatherly way she both loved and hated. The set of his jaw, the way his dark eyes widened a little and then narrowed by the same degree: loving disapproval. “What’s eating you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “I can tell by the tone of your voice that something’s not right.”

  Barbara went back through what she’d said. How had she sounded? She’d been too preoccupied to pay attention. Maybe she’d been a little too loud and quick, in the way that her mom used to call “snippy,” snapping at him because Van wasn’t there for her to snap at.

  “My husband is an idiot,” she said, deliberately keeping her voice calm and her speech even.

  Her dad picked the pen back up and returned his attention to his paperwork. “Is that all? Heck, I could’ve told you that. In fact, I think I did tell you that.”

  The corners of her mouth turned up at her dad’s light-hearted jab, then she reasserted control. She needed to talk to another woman, just to vent a little. She could saddle PennyFourYourThoughts and ride out to the family plot by the copse and talk to her mom, but today she needed someone who would talk back. And she knew just who to call.

  Half an hour later, after getting shifted from number to number several times, she finally heard Beverly Needham’s excited voice on the phone. “Barmaid, how are you?”

  Barbara grimaced, glad her friend couldn’t see her reaction. Serve drinks at one O-Club function and you’re tagged for life. “I’ve been better, Belladonna. How about you?”

  They had been friends since Vandenberg. Barbara was a junior captain, and had been working in the launch squadron as a planner for a month when she met the Needhams at one of the base’s orientation sessions. Major Gary Needham was the epitome of the “steely-eyed missile man,” newly arrived from a tour in North Dakota as a missile standardization/evaluation officer, and Beverly—“Belladonna” or “Bella” or “BD” because of some unspecified death-metal music connection—was a civilian nurse who had settled into the role of the ideal officer’s wife. They made a great team, and even then Barbara knew the Needhams were destined for a textbook career. Gary was an instructor in the initial operational training program for missileers, on the fast track to a staff job and then an Operations Officer billet and eventually Squadron Command.

  Another fresh face at that orientation session had been Van Richards: a young lieutenant who had washed out of pilot training and would shortly be Gary’s student in the missile program.

  Those were the days.

  BD sounded happy. “We’re doing well, hon. The desert’s cool and crisp this time of year. We got up to Santa Fe over the weekend, and our final training is going well. I’m glad to get out of that mountain, that’s for sure. But if you’ve ‘been better,’ then I need to hear what you called me about. So spill it, girl.”

  BD’s no-nonsense attitude brought a less reluctant smile to Barbara’s lips. “You sure I’m not taking you away from anything? It took me a while to track you down, but I can call back later if you need.”

  “Nothing here that won’t wait, dear. Talk.”

  “I don’t know if you heard, but Van’s hurt.”

  BD didn’t answer right away, and the background noise changed for a moment. Barbara thought she might be holding her hand over the phone.

  “I didn’t know, but I just asked Chuck Springer and he said he’d check. Do you know Chuck and Trish?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “They’re good people. They’re going up with us, so you’ll meet ’em. Now, that man of yours gave us a briefing a couple of weeks ago and he was healthy enough then. How’d he get himself hurt?”

  Barbara explained about the message she’d received, and how little information Van had relayed. As she talked, Barbara discovered a kernel of doubt inside herself that she’d never noticed before.

  Until this morning, excitement had been building inside her, growing the way a tree grows: rings of anticipation and hope layering one over the other, branches of enthusiasm spreading outward as homes for dreams. She’d known about the risk but with her engineering background she had accepted the mitigations. She hadn’t really been concerned for Van’s safety, even when she first got his message: the call had come from him, so obviously he was well enough. Now she was a little ashamed for being more irritated that his injury might keep them out of the colony project than worried for him. She was worried, especially that he might do something to hurt himself worse, but that feeling seemed distant compared to a new fear, one she had never acknowledged before: a creeping fear for her own safety that would rot the timbers of her resolve if she didn’t fix it.

  Before she knew it, a wave of growing doubt—doubt of her abilities, doubt of her fortitude, doubt even of her sanity for signing a Consortium contract—built up inside her and broke on the shore of her friendship. She had started out explaining what had happened to Van, but by the end she had dumped a bucketful of crap on her friend’s head. BD, one of the most careful and caring people Barbara had ever known, didn’t say a word during Barbara’s rant.

  Barbara breathed into the silence.

  “So,” BD said after a moment, “you feel better?”

  “A little. Tell me something that’ll make me feel a lot better.”

  “You are the most brilliant, most beautiful woman I know,” BD said. “Other than me, of course.”

  Barbara laughed, and was some better: more for the laughing than for the words. “Of course,” she said.

  “So, other than your discovery that you really do have doubts like the rest of us, what’s been going on with you?”

  Barbara chuckled. “I’ve realize
d how much basic animal husbandry I’ve forgotten, and why I got out of dairy farming in the first place.” She would never admit it to her father, but it had only taken one day of the farm routine for the old restlessness to kick in: the wanderlust that had led her to Northwestern, to Officer Training School, to Wright-Patterson and Eglin and Vandenberg. When she’d had enough of active duty life, it had been that same spirit that led her to accept Van’s marriage proposal and follow him to Minot and then to Offutt and then out of the service and into the Consortium. Now, for the first time that she could remember, fear tainted that spirit and weighed it down.

  “I’m not as sure as I was,” she confessed to BD. “I’m worried that I won’t be able to hack it, especially if something bad happens.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Van gets hurt worse, or I get hurt. I screw up in training, or freak out when I’m in the Cave. Or I—”

  BD interrupted. “Hang on, hon,” she said. Again, it sounded as if the other end of the call was muffled for a moment, and Barbara held her breath. “Okay, Chuck just gave me an update. He said Van twisted his knee when they were loading equipment, after they’d set up one of the oxygen processors. They didn’t think it was bad enough to send him back to base, so he and Grace were headed down to the polar station.”

  “That’s pretty much what I knew before,” Barbara said.

  She could almost hear BD shaking her head. “Sorry, that’s the best I have at the moment. Where were we?”

  Barbara didn’t want to go back into her litany of fears, so she took the chance to change the subject. “You were about to tell me how your training went. How was the Cave, really?”

  “You know I’m not supposed to give you any details.”

  Barbara leaned forward and gripped the phone tighter, but she tried to keep her irritation at BD’s reluctance out of her voice. “Oh, come on, you can give me a general impression.”

  Silence on the other end meant BD was considering what she would say. Barbara focused on the yellow backs of hundreds of old copies of National Geographic lining the shelves in her parents’ living room. When she was young, before her dad joined the rest of the 21st Century and had high-speed Internet brought out to the house, they had been a fountain of adventures for her. He’d kept up the subscription as long as the magazine had lasted.