Walking on the Sea of Clouds

by Gray Rinehart

  Crap. If this is the end of day three, what’s going to happen at the end of day eighty-three?

  * * *

  Frank was surprised how quickly he lost all sense of normal time down inside the mountain and under the near-constant artificial light. By his watch, over two hours had passed since he entered tunnel two-A with his tray of water samples and got sucked into the response in the next tunnel. His samples were finally safe in the lab, even though he was not with them.

  He leaned over and pillowed his head on Stormie’s shoulder. They sat crammed practically hip to hip and nose to tail with the primary responders and a few other trainees in the temporary briefing area euphemistically called the “big room,” in front of a flat-screen television, waiting for the AC evaluators to tell them how they did. Stormie wriggled a little, her attention fixed on the datapad in front of her. Frank only looked at her calculations for a second. “Will you assume the holding tank contents are useless?”

  “No telling what volatilized off those components,” she said.

  “Very good. Wake me when the briefing, or debriefing, is over.”

  “Funny.” Stormie nodded at the screen.

  Terrance Winder, the Consortium’s training manager, did not look happy. Frank was not sure he had ever seen the man truly happy, though—Winder’s thin, sunken face behind his wire-rim glasses always looked sour—so he could not be sure. “Okay, folks, let’s start this show so you can all get back to whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing.”

  The debriefing worked its way chronologically from the time the fire started. Frank was surprised that the fire had not been staged for training purposes; it was a legitimate electrical fire caused by carelessness on Markov’s part. Apart from that revelation, the debriefing was a tedious exercise in the difficulty of remote communication: since Winder and the other observers were elsewhere, and some of the participants themselves were tuned in from other parts of the training facility, the proceedings made Frank feel as if he were part of one of those quaint unreality television productions.

  The Consortium had considered turning the training program into a television or Internet broadcast, to generate interest and money from sponsorships. Permissions had been part of the initial paperwork he and Stormie had signed. He supposed the only reason they had not done it yet was that they had not figured out how to make the everyday training regimen interesting enough for an audience to actually tune in. It would be counter-productive to initiate fires and emergencies on a regular basis just for ratings.

  The training director questioned and released various people according to when their parts played out. He was especially interested in the people who fled the scene rather than fighting the fire. Frank chuckled as Winder told one couple, “I’m not sure where you thought you would escape to—‘escaping’ from inside a pressure vessel into a vacuum is a difficult concept for me to grasp.”

  Winder shut off each of the remote connections as he dismissed the trainees using them. When he sent specific people from the room Frank and Stormie were in, they left a little reluctantly. Soon the room was down to just the response team, and Frank relaxed as the creeping claustrophobia of so many bodies in such a small space faded.

  “Okay,” Winder said, “now that the preliminaries are over, let’s figure out what went right and what went wrong with the actual response.”

  Frank sat up and tried to look alert. No one in the room spoke. They looked at each other across and around the small space, and Frank found himself infected by George Fiester’s sly little grin. Stormie returned to her calculations.

  Frank touched Stormie’s shoulder, and briefly rubbed at the tension there. They had not had much time to talk after the emergency was over, but clearly she was concerned about how her reaction would be judged: whether it was a test to see if she would do the right thing and purge the habitat, or obey the orders from Central Control. Several of the other colonists as well as many of the AC brass were former military people, and she had confided that she worried that they might insist on some sort of military discipline—which made sense when people were shooting at you—or the kind of practical safety discipline that made sense even to lifelong civilians. Frank had told her that he thought it unlikely that anyone had scripted the emergency to see whether she would obey or do what she knew was right; she had nodded and thanked him without, he suspected, really hearing his words.

  “Okay,” Winder said from the flat screen on the wall, “I’ll start. Ms. Adamson, did Bio recommend purging module three-alpha, or pumping the module down?”

  Stormie put her datapad in her lap. Jake squirmed in his seat by the far wall. His wife, apparently still on duty in Central Control, answered through the speaker. “Stormie recommended purging the module.”

  “Indeed,” said Winder. “Was that registered as a professional judgment?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “In those words?”

  Jake spoke up before Harmony could answer. “We all heard it, Terry. And we all know what it means. So quit dragging it out and tell us the score.”

  Winder stared out of the screen as if he was preparing to leap through it and seize Jake by the throat. “Okay,” he said, and his voice seemed an octave deeper than it had been, “why not purge the habitat right away?”

  Harmony was on a vocal pickup, so only her voice could betray her emotions. She kept under careful control. “I was in the habitat emergency checklist, and it recommended attempting to pump the module down in order to preserve as much atmosphere as possible.”

  The Winder image nodded. “Are there exceptions to that?”

  “Yes. The presence of toxic materials.”

  “Very well. Ms. Pastorelli, have you analyzed the air in the equalization tank?”

  Stormie did not hesitate. “No, not yet.”

  “So you don’t know if there are any toxins in the tank.”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “And what do you expect to find when you analyze the contents?”

  Frank glanced over at Jake, who was looking expectantly at Stormie. The slackness in his jaw and the wide-open set of his eyes betrayed his hopefulness, almost pleading, that Stormie would salvage this situation for his wife.

  “I’m not sure,” Stormie said. “Some of what burned was insulation and plastic—I don’t know specifically what kind of plastic, or how completely they burned—so we might get some aromatic hydrocarbons, hydrogen cyanide, any number of different things. Not great, but they should only be small amounts, and we can probably rig a filter on the tank’s output to draw off the worst of the contaminants.”

  Frank smiled at Stormie’s carefully crafted answer, but lost his smile at Winder’s next question.

  * * *

  “What level of cleanliness will that leave the tank?” the training director asked.

  Stormie kept her face relaxed as she glanced up into the corner of the room. She resisted the urge to put her fingers on her chin; she wasn’t that good an actress. She’d expected the question, but she pretended to ponder it in order to formulate the right answer.

  Not level E, that’s for sure.

  She couldn’t say that out loud, of course.

  “I don’t know,” she said, because it was the truth. She faced the pseudo-Winder on the screen. “Without knowing exactly what may have gone through the pumps, what might have deposited on the inside, I couldn’t be sure. But I’m not overly concerned about it.” The cleanliness specifications for tanks had been around for decades, and were primarily meant to ensure that a storage tank for, say, monomethyl hydrazine, didn’t have some organics that would react with it and cause a fire. They were talking about a holding tank, a pressure sink for the atmospheric system, and it had to be clean enough to produce breathable gas. Stormie was concerned about what might have ended up in the tank, but “not overly” was a good way to state her level of concern.

  “I see,” Winder said, in that slow delivery that said what he really saw was how Stormie was
talking around the issue. “Alright then. Ms. Adamson, what about Bio’s professional judgment call? Why was that significant, and why didn’t you respond to it?”

  Harmony was slow in answering, and suddenly Stormie’s CommPact was a lead weight on her thigh. Damn. She could’ve pulled up the relevant paragraph from the Lunar Life Engineering contract and e-mailed it to Harmony. It wasn’t as big a deal as Winder was making it out to be.…

  “It was significant,” Harmony said, “because we are allowed to defer decisions to Consortium contractors if they invoke professional judgment. We aren’t required to defer decisions to them, however, and until I had a better idea that we weren’t going to anoxiate someone, I wanted to stay with the checklist.”

  Good answer, girl. Didn’t even need my help.

  “Asphyxiate,” Winder said. “Ms. Pastorelli, why did you believe purging the module was the best plan?”

  Stormie legitimately pondered this question for a second. “Whether it was the best plan, I’m not sure. The intakes for the pumps are near the floor, so a quick pumpdown had a chance of getting breathable air with only a few contaminants. I just knew purging the module would put the fire out quicker. And spreading seven modules’ worth of atmosphere through the volume of eight, temporarily, until we can arrange for replenishment, was justifiable—”

  “Why eight modules?”

  It seemed a stupid question to Stormie. “Because we only have eight modules down here,” she said. “Right now I’m trying to balance the air for forty people in four living modules, two working modules, and two farms. When I get on station I’ll worry about balancing for more people and more habitats.”

  The image of Winder nodded and appeared to write some notes, then he looked up. “Very good,” he said. “We’ll compile our notes and get back with you. Meanwhile, you’re all dismissed. Bio, I will tell you that you only have to balance for thirty-two people now. We had one couple self-eliminate after the fire, and we’ve cut three other couples for failure to act appropriately to the emergency.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Rational Trepidation

  Thursday, 7 December 2034

  Lunar Setup Mission II, Day 37

  The Turtle’s lights barely cut into the shadows outside. With every hour that the LVN moved north toward Mare Nubium and the edge of Mercator Crater, the Earth-Moon system turned and the shadows lengthened until there were more shadows than light. And just as the light was the starkest, brightest, purest light Van had ever seen, the shadows were the blackest.

  But not as black as the shadow he carried with him, the shadow he himself cast over the mission and his own future in the Consortium.

  His knee was smaller now, only about navel-orange-sized, but it still hurt like having razor blades installed under his kneecap. Grace had teased him about his “sexy” shaved leg—shaved from the middle of his thigh down to the middle of his calf—and he had almost gotten used to the constant feel of adhesive on his skin. These last four days of relative rest had been good for it, but the overall mission schedule had fallen apart and he wasn’t going to be able to do his part to set it right.

  And Oskar kept reminding him of that unfortunate fact.

  Barbara, at least, had grown more supportive. She’d been thoroughly ticked off at first, and even threatened to come up and hurt his other knee if he did anything else stupid, but of late her notes had been encouraging. Her smiles were easier to read in her latest messages, but looking back he could pick out a grin even underneath the gruff exterior.

  He wouldn’t mind if she did come up to hurt his other knee, because at least she would be there.

  He was grateful that the driving routine kept him separated from Grace, because he didn’t have to be distracted by her … attributes. The close quarters were sometimes a little too close. Van wanted Barbara on station with him. Not that it would be idyllic—the two of them had their heated moments—but it would afford far fewer temptations to stray. In his experience, misbehaving like that always led to difficulties. Hell, in his experience even the perception of misbehaving like that led to difficulties—usually the kind the Security Police had to clean up after jealous spouses exacted premature revenge.

  The alarm in his helmet beeped three times in quick succession. He’d set it at half-hour intervals to keep him more alert. He checked the systems and verified that everything was still in the green. Except the crack in the cab, of course, but his stickypatch was still holding the truck together.

  Good as duct tape.

  He was driving northwest now, skirting the northern periphery of the low range of hills known as Rupes Mercator. Not that he could see much of the hills, being on the shadow side of them; not for the first time he wished for enough atmosphere that the Moon might have a little twilight, a little color instead of the endless black that created an almost seamless bubble around his little rolling island of light. He’d heard about teams in the Arctic and Antarctic, the storms they endured and the metaphor of being inside a ping-pong ball. Did they make black ping-pong balls? With the exception of earthshine, the lunar surface at night was like being inside one.

  Static in his ears, just a momentary burst, brought him out of the shrouded night and back into the instrument-lit cab. A longer, almost musical pulse told him they were nearly in clear line-of-sight of the repeater. Then as he swung the Turtle around the well-marked curve in the worn track they called a road, an unbroken symphony of static told him they were almost home.

  He squelched the static and keyed his helmet mic.

  “Mercator Base, Mercator Base, do you copy? This is Van and Grace, riding the back of the Turtle, heading home.”

  * * *

  Shay Nakamura had a difficult time looking pissed—he was usually so jovial—but Van thought he was pulling it off admirably.

  “So how far behind are we?” asked Van.

  “You mean you and Grace on your return trip, or all of us on the mission schedule?”

  Van shrugged his upper body out of his suit. He started toweling off and said, “Either. Or both.”

  “Well, you cost me fifty bucks in the pool on when you two would get here. I said you’d overshoot your original ETA by eight hours—”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “—but Oskar said twelve, and he was closest.”

  “Great. If it was anybody else, I’d probably get a cut.”

  “Funny. How’s your knee?”

  “It’s been better, quite recently. But it’s been worse, even more recently.” Van stripped off the rest of his suit and showed off his taping job. He flexed the joint as much as he could, glad the tape limited the range of motion. It didn’t hurt too much. “Fightin’ form, as my old coach used to say. So what’s the next play you want me to run?”

  Shay said, “The next play is chow, and then—”

  Roy Chesterfield called out from behind a stack of transit cases, where he’d been pawing through some of the storage bins. “It may be dinner for us, but the next play for Van needs to be a bath.” He stepped into the alleyway, carrying a small parts bin, and grinned. “I’ll even donate my water ration if he’ll clean some of that stink off of him.” He tossed his ID ring at Van, who fumbled it a little but held on.

  “Me, too,” said Jovelyn Nguyen, who was helping Grace with her suit.

  “Like I was saying,” Shay continued, the irritation on his face now creeping into his voice, “and then we’re going to sit down with the mission plan and see if we can schedule our way out of the mess we’re in. Oskar’s come up with a couple of different possibilities, but they’re not easy. We’ll have to know how much we can count on you, with your leg—”

  “What are you talking about? I’m 110%, as always.” One look from Shay confirmed that he really was in no mood for Van’s bravado, so Van moderated his estimate. “Okay, I’m probably 90% for the first two, maybe three hours, with a gradual decline after that.”

  “Well, that’s going to make a difference,”
Shay said. “We’ll have an all-hands meeting when Henry and Scooter get back inside from plumbing in the latest prefab—call it 2200 hours. Meanwhile, bathe first and then eat. And if you can’t get clean enough on their water chits, you can have mine, too.”

  * * *

  Van only took a double-ration shower, and he didn’t even use Roy’s chit.

  For one thing, his military training carried over to the point that just carrying Roy’s ID ring around with him made him uneasy. Everyone had a dogcatcher chip in their neck that worked with the proximity detectors, and the colony wasn’t established enough to have any restricted areas yet, so the rings didn’t have to be treated like security badges. They were just payment counters for totaling up how much water you used, checking out equipment, that sort of thing. Their portability made it possible to do just what Roy had done—not that Van had to like it.

  The double shower was luxury enough without being wasteful, but Van’s next play wasn’t chow—it was a call to Barbara. A full-up voice call, not prerecorded text or voice messages that were spooled up and sent when it was convenient for the satellites and the networks. He didn’t spring for video, though, since he was paying for this call himself.

  Van had booked time on the big antenna practically as soon as he made contact with the base, and he’d already warned Barbara by text message to be ready for the call anytime between noon Montana time on the 8th and dawn on the 9th. It was early evening when he made contact, but he wasn’t quite prepared for Barbara’s first question.

  “So just how pretty is this Grace girl?”

  Van let a couple of seconds build on top of the one-and-a-half-second time delay before he said, “That’s a fine way to start. What about, ‘Great to hear your voice live, sweetie,’ and ‘I hope everything’s okay.’” He stopped there, not trusting his own tone to sound playful. He counted off three seconds, then five, but Barbara didn’t respond. He said, “Come on, babe, what’s the point of that question? Even if you hadn’t met her, you could find a hundred pictures of her on the AC web site. So who have you been talking to?”