Walking on the Sea of Clouds

by Gray Rinehart

  “You worked in some buildings that didn’t have windows, didn’t you?” BD asked. “Just think of it as a really secure building.”

  That didn’t cheer Barbara as much as it should.

  “It’s very dark,” BD continued. “Sometimes it’s boring, and other times there’s almost too much excitement to stand. It was hard, but in the end not as hard as I thought it was going to be.”

  Barbara considered that assessment. “You were an ER nurse, though,” she said, “and that had to help during the ‘exciting’ times.”

  BD chuckled. “You might think, but that was a long time ago.”

  “Maybe, but I barely made it through Self-Aid and Buddy Care.” The confessions and anxieties poured out of her in practically a single breath. “I’m just not sure I can handle big emergencies, you know? Little emergencies, okay, I can do those, but not big ones. Right now I know Van’s hurt and I have no way to get to him … I haven’t even been able to send a message, because I don’t know what to say to him. I think I’m mad at him because it keeps me from panicking over him being hurt.”

  Barbara paused, and BD said, “I’m not sure I can help you with that, hon. Unless you want to come down to New Mexico and I’ll give you a big hug.”

  Barbara smiled at the idea. “Just tell me it’s all going to be alright, BD.”

  “You want me to lie to you?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  A sigh issued from the speaker. “We’ve known each other a long time, Barmaid. I remember how careful you were, meticulous even, and I suspect that hasn’t changed. That made you a good engineer, and it makes me pretty confident that you’re going to make it through everything okay. But let me ask: right now this minute, do you think of yourself as a glass half-full or half-empty person?”

  Barbara weighed herself on the optimism scale and found herself wanting. “Half empty, right now.”

  She imagined Beverly nodding her head, deep in thought. “In that case,” her friend said, “I suspect Van is going to contract gangrene in his leg and have to have it sawed off just above the knee.”

  “What?” Barbara was too stunned to say anything else, but in response to her half-shouted question Beverly Needham was … laughing.

  “That’s not funny,” Barbara said.

  “It’s not?” BD asked, between chuckles. “You really think it might happen?”

  “No,” Barbara said. A thousand different things might happen, but that wasn’t one of them. Or at least not one she was willing to entertain.

  “Then maybe your glass is fuller than you thought, dear.” BD, her caring and concerned friend, started laughing again.

  “It is going to be alright, isn’t it,” Barbara said.

  “No guarantees, girl, but I think there’s a good chance.”

  “That was mean, BD. I knew I should’ve called Maggie Stewart instead of you.” She didn’t mean it—Maggie was nice, but would never be as good a friend as Beverly—but Barbara wanted to get a dig in.

  “Huh. Oh, really? Maggie is a sweet old lady, dear, but she doesn’t have your best interests at heart the way I do. Besides, she’s going in the Cave later today, so you wouldn’t have reached her.”

  “Maybe, but she wouldn’t be mean.…”

  “Oh, stop whining,” BD said, but Barbara could hear the smile in her voice. “Go call your big brute and tell him that if he scares you again you’ll hurt him yourself and go to the Moon without him.”

  “Okay, I’ll do that. Thanks, BD.”

  “Anytime, hon. Now get off the phone—I’m sure you’ve got some cow manure to pick up or something.”

  * * *

  Van kept one eye on the window above him as he eased the Turtle to a halt.

  “What’s the problem, Van?” Grace asked over the intercom.

  “Can’t talk now, Grace,” Van said. “I’ll get back to you in a minute. Monitor status for me, okay? Sing out if anything bad happens.”

  Of all the times not to have my suit on.

  The seriousness of the situation didn’t seep in; it snapped Van awake and cut through his thickening fatigue. He became hyper alert.

  He didn’t see any obvious cracks, but with the Sun a little behind and to the left that particular window was pretty well shadowed. The interior lights played hell with the reflections, and only the fact that the water vapor was flashing to ice before it quickly sublimed into nothingness gave him a clue that he had a problem. Van shifted painfully right, left, forward, backward, looking from all angles through the glass to pinpoint the vapor source. It looked like a tiny leak had formed where the window joined the frame.

  Van reached back to the bulkhead by the hatch and opened the emergency locker. He grabbed the largest stickypatch in the case, a twenty-by-twenty centimeter square, and knelt with his left knee in the driver’s seat so he could better reach the window.

  His ears popped. A thin whistle sounded, as if a fairy were playing the pipes.

  Van considered that he probably had time to read the directions on the stickypatch, but it seemed absurd to bother with something so simple. A cross between plastic wrap, MIL-SPEC “five hundred mile an hour” tape, and an adhesive bandage, they were tough, impermeable membranes designed to stick even on the outside of a suit or other moderate-pressure enclosure. In this case, it would be sticking on the inside; the pressure inside would help seal the opening. The pressure differential wasn’t great enough to worry much about, because a higher percentage of oxygen in the Turtle’s atmosphere allowed the overall pressure to be kept lower than Earth normal and still be breathable. But the pressure on the other side was as close to zero as there was anywhere in the solar system, and Van intended to keep the glass and anything else he could find between him and it. He was as close to that zero pressure as he ever wanted to get.

  “Yellow light, Van,” Grace said through the irritating buzz of an alarm. The alarm went silent a second later; she must’ve acknowledged it on the status panel.

  He didn’t bother to look; he knew what it was.

  He grabbed the hand towel he had brought forward with the ice pack and wiped the glass and the metal rib, in case any vapor had condensed or frozen there as the pressure in the cabin fell. He dropped the towel to float gracefully down and tore open the stickypatch package. He gently slapped the patch in place, half on the glass and the rest overlapping the support bracket. The center of the patch sucked up against the surface as the remaining atmosphere behind pressed in on it. He smoothed down the adhesive edges all around, to avoid any other small leaks.

  Van listened for any more whistles, whines, or pops. Adrenaline enhanced his hearing so the cab was full of electrical hums and the conducted vibrations of pumps and fans, but they were all the normal sounds. As his heartbeat slowed to normal, his perceptions of the sounds attenuated. He slipped down off the seat and barely noticed the pain as his injured knee took up his mass.

  He noticed the pain a moment later when he was suiting up. It was always hard to put on a suit in the small cab, even with the jump seats folded up and the driver’s seat slid forward as far as it would go, but it was especially hard with one leg that didn’t want to bend. Van contorted himself, his knee popping in agonizing complaint, until he was fully suited, checked out, and sealed in.

  Van attached his suit to the cab’s oxygen port, verified the flow was good, and only then consulted his status board.

  “I see your yellow light, Grace. Thanks for shutting off the alarm.”

  “Anytime—I figured that’s what you were working on.”

  “Yeah, looks like we got a pinhole leak, either in the window glass or around the frame. I got a patch on it. Cab pressure should be stable now.”

  “Looks that way,” she said, “but it’ll be a while before we can be sure.”

  “Roger that. Think I’ll just sit tight.”

  “You’re suited, right? You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay—for now. I’m worried about that panel, though. I don’t wan
t to put too much pressure on it.”

  Grace didn’t answer immediately. Van scrolled through status displays while he waited for her to piece together the conclusion that seemed obvious to him. A moment later she said, “I don’t know if I like where you’re going with that.”

  Van smiled. It almost hurt to smile. “Where am I going with that?”

  “You want to depressurize the cab.”

  “Yeppir.”

  “And drive all the way back in suits.”

  “Pretty much. We’ll use the neck like an airlock, pump it down when we’re moving back and forth.”

  “Won’t that be fun,” Grace said. She sounded as enthused about the idea as Van.

  “Not as fun as trying to drive from the back,” he said. It was possible to route the main drive controls to the rear compartment and use the Turtle’s cameras to see, but no one really wanted to try it. “I just think it’s better to do that than to risk making that panel worse.”

  Now Grace laughed. “I guess I was a little premature sending that last message, huh?”

  “Yeah. Why don’t you crank out a new one and get it ready for the next overpass? Meantime, I’m going to get this bucket of bolts moving again. The sooner I get some klicks behind us, the sooner I can come back and relax.”

  “Maybe I’ll whip up something to eat for you,” Grace said.

  Van took his turn to laugh. “That’s okay, Grace. I just want to get a few hours of solid sleep.”

  Van maneuvered himself into position behind the console. His knee complained and he answered with a curse. “Maybe after I tape up my knee better.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Professional Judgment

  Wednesday, 6 December 2034

  Lunar Colonist Group 2, Training Day 3

  The lab was as functional as Stormie and Frank could get it in two busy days. It was a single bay inside mockup habitat four-A, which itself was inside what used to be the Aaronson and Hicks Mine, in the Wasatch Mountains northeast of Salt Lake City. The bay itself was about two meters wide by two and a half long, with a single small table in the center and a reasonable facsimile of a lab bench along one of the short walls. One of the long walls was a set of flat, sliding partitions like a Japanese screen; the other curved like the inside wall of one of those corrugated buildings she remembered from old military movies and Gomer Pyle episodes on TVLand. It was cramped, but she had already gotten used to the lack of space; the layout, on the other hand, wasn’t ideal. She and Frank would probably rearrange the lab several more times before their three-month training session was over.

  Frank was out gathering water samples, and Stormie idly wished she had won the coin toss. Not that she minded running the air balance calculations—her CommPact was more than up to the task, and she was a fair programmer—but she enjoyed the hands-on part of their work almost as much as he did. She was on the fifth iteration, with a new set of assumptions on the leak rate of the habitats and therefore new requirements for inputs from outside the ecosystem—resupplies that would be as rare as empty bellies at a family reunion—when a commotion on the other side of the sliding plastic partition stole her attention.

  She slid open the “door” and caught Herb Crandall’s eye as he jogged down the passageway. “What’s going on?”

  Crandall didn’t break stride. “Fire in the next module,” he said.

  Stormie looked back the way he’d come, toward module three-A. No one else seemed to be coming from that direction, and she realized she hadn’t heard an alarm or an announcement from Central Control. She yelled at Crandall’s back, “Did anyone alert Central?”

  He stepped through the hatch at the far end of the habitat, without acknowledging her question.

  Stormie pocketed her CommPact and moved back the way Crandall had come, toward the junction to habitat three-A. She passed one of the emergency stations: a fire alarm, dual airline respirator hookup, fire extinguisher, and battery-powered emergency lights, all in a slender cabinet tower that was marked at the bottom with phosphorescent signs. The signs themselves, as well as the cabinet handles and controls, had shapes that were distinct to the touch so even if the corridor was full of smoke they could be located and used. The instruction manual had explained that the principle was borrowed from the emergency stations aboard nuclear submarines.

  An odor of burned plastic tinged the air, and Stormie almost grabbed an airline mask from the cabinet. She already planned to grab a pressure suit out of the cabinet in the junction ahead.

  Hacking coughs came from that direction.

  She sprinted the rest of the way and hurdled the high threshold into the junction. The junction was a blocky room with little more than pressure doors and equipment lockers, with status monitoring and control panels next to each hatch. The hatch to the next module was closed, which was good, but Christine Abernathy sounded as if her lungs were trying to vacate her body. She was bending over Leonard Markov, whom she had apparently just dragged out of module three-A.

  Before Stormie could stop herself, she asked the obvious question. “Are you okay?”

  Abernathy nodded, coughing so hard she couldn’t articulate an answer. She pointed at Markov.

  “Let’s get him into the next tunnel,” Stormie said. Even though these were mockups of the prefabricated lunar habitats, and real tunnels on the Moon wouldn’t be dug for almost a year, almost everyone had started calling the narrow habitat modules “tunnels”—in much the same way they used “hatch” and “door” interchangeably. “Is he injured?”

  Christine shook her head.

  “You go ahead, I’ll get him,” Stormie said.

  “We’ll get him,” said a voice behind her. George Fiester stepped through the hatch, followed by Alex Bonaccio. “See if you can get some status from inside,” George said.

  The two men picked Markov up and wrestled him through the hatch into module four-A. Stormie turned her attention to Christine, whose coughing had started to subside.

  “Is there anyone else in there?”

  “Don’t know,” Christine said. “Don’t think so.”

  “How did the fire start?”

  “Not sure … Markov was in his test cell … something electrical.” Her eyes started to glaze over, as if she might pass out or throw up or both. Stormie turned her and pushed her gently toward the open hatch.

  “Go in there and sit down,” she said. “We’ll take it from here. George, Alex, we need to get suited up. I think we need to go into three-A.” She turned to the communications panel and tapped in the code for Central Control. “Central, this is Pastorelli.”

  “Adamson here.” Harmony’s voice was as smooth as if she was singing a lullaby.

  “Did you get word of a fire in Module three-A?”

  “That’s affirmative. Single alarm pull. We got the indicator, then everything went dark from there.”

  “I’m right outside that module, and there’s no alarm sounding here. And we’ve got—”

  “Standby, Stormie,” Harmony said. A moment later the speaker crackled with an all-call public address. “Attention, attention. Fire reported in module three-alpha. Alarms appear inoperative. Responders report in on channel twelve. Repeat, fire reported.…”

  Stormie tuned out the repetition and switched the comm panel to channel twelve. Someone tugged on her arm, and she turned to find George holding out a pressure suit to her.

  The Consortium had produced suits in three sizes that were adjustable within limits; two of each size were stored in lockers in each junction, as well as in lockers on either end of each habitat module. The locker behind George was open, and he held one medium suit for himself and a large for Stormie. The large would be baggy on her, but she was tall enough to need it. Behind George, Alex was halfway through putting his suit on.

  “Central, this is Pastorelli,” Stormie said.

  “Go, Stormie.”

  “We’ve got Christine Abernathy and Leonard Markov, both with apparent smoke inhalation. They’r
e at this end of tunnel four-A. Christy said she thought the fire was electrical, and she didn’t think anyone else was left in the module. I’m here in the junction with George Fiester and Alex Bonaccio, and we’re suiting up to go into three-A.”

  “Roger, Stormie, standby.” Harmony announced a call for first aid response to the tunnel behind Stormie.

  Stormie folded herself into her suit according to the instructions stenciled on the fabric. She ticked off the steps mentally as she completed them, and started the checkout sequence. She plugged her CommPact into the slot on the suit’s interior, glad she’d automatically brought it along. She worked as fast as she could, almost faster than she dared since wearing the suit was not yet second nature to her, but she drove herself forward at the thought of someone still in module three-A. They would be hooked up to the airline and fighting the fire, and hopefully already had it under control—but if so, why weren’t they on the response channel, giving status or calling for backup? Did that mean the module was empty and the fire wasn’t being fought?

  “Control, we’ll be ready to enter in just a couple of minutes,” Stormie said. “What’s the status in there?”

  Harmony was a few seconds responding. “We’ve got intermittent heat signals in the module. We’ve initiated pumpdown of the habitat.”

  Stormie frowned. Had she heard correctly? She glanced at the status readout and confirmed the pressure in three-A was falling, slowly. She clenched her jaw around a harsh rebuke and simply said into the microphone, “Pumpdown? If that fire’s not out, that tunnel needs to be vented.”

  The silence on the other end galled her. They could not truly “vent” the tunnel in this situation, since it was a training mockup, but she was determined to play the scenario as if it were completely real. She expected everyone else to do so, too.