Walking on the Sea of Clouds

by Gray Rinehart

  She put her head on his shoulder. His shirt grew wet with her tears, and she trembled.

  * * *

  Wednesday, 5 September 2035

  “BD, I believe that’s the hardest thing I have ever done in my life.”

  Barbara’s friend sat across one of the small tables from her in the southwest quadrant of the Grand Central dome. They were each drinking coffee, which had become such a luxury that people were either hoarding it in order to establish a black market in it, or actively soliciting Maggie’s assistance in trying to grow coffee plants in the farm tunnels. Barbara doubted that would happen for years and years, because engineering coffee plants the way the fruit and vegetable plants had been engineered—for faster growth and higher yields in low-gravity conditions—would never pass anyone’s sanity check. Not when they could be engineering real, nutritious foods.

  “Honey, I have tried to imagine what you went through,” BD said, “and then I do everything in my power not to imagine what you went through. I think if my name came up in the lottery to have to do that, I’d offer anyone a month’s salary to do it for me.”

  Barbara appreciated BD trying to lighten the mood, but she couldn’t laugh. “That’s what I should’ve done. I didn’t even know the guy, but now almost everywhere I look I see his face. Last night, when I tried to sleep—I was so tired Monday night right after we finished that I fell right asleep and don’t think I dreamed at all—but last night I kept dreaming of different people lying on that tray. Van, you, Rex Stewart—even Stormie, since she’d been right there with me.”

  “What was it like, working with her? I don’t mean what was it like, what you were doing—just, how was she to work with?”

  “She was quiet. I think she was probably thinking a lot of the same things I was. Or trying not to think, like I was.” Barbara sipped again and added, “Professional. Stepped right through the checklist, got everything done and got out of there. Why?”

  “I don’t get to work with her much. Hardly at all, really. Closest I came was when we were partnered in bridge about three weeks ago. I guess I’d characterize her as intense.”

  “Yeah, I’d go along with that.”

  “Does she seem like she’s pretty open to new ideas and new ways of doing things?”

  “I don’t know,” Barbara said. “I guess it would depend on what she was doing. The checklist we were running doesn’t leave a lot of room for improvisation.”

  “No, I know. It’s just that Gary is hot on the idea of wrapping all the independent contractors into the AC. I’m pretty sure he’s had top-level people in the AC contact the Pastorellis’ partner down on Earth. I don’t think they know anything about it, and I don’t know if they realize that the other independents are being brought into the fold, too.”

  “Sorry, BD, I just don’t know,” Barbara said. She sipped more of her coffee, and shivered.

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  “Who, me?” Barbara smiled, but she could feel her own fakery inside it. Would she be okay?

  The whole lunar experience had not turned out the way she had imagined. Oh, there were momentary periods of what she may as well consider to be joy—the exhilaration of bouncing around the surface, jumping up and floating down so smoothly and gracefully; the thrill of looking up to see the shadowed Earth in all its blue and white glory—and in the eight weeks she had been here she had accomplished more in terms of building something new and important than she would ever be able to do on Earth. And her husband—how he thrived here. He seemed to work harder than anyone, and yet always to have more energy for the next thing that needed to be done, and the thing after that. It was as if, in this environment, he had no “off” switch.

  She smiled, a little more genuine this time, but tentative.

  BD smiled back at her. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Do you ever get the feeling,” Barbara said, “that things might be going too well?”

  BD blinked. “Okay, you’ve shifted gears on me. We’re going from the hardest thing you ever did to things going too well, and I got lost somewhere in between.”

  “No,” Barbara said, “I think I might be the one who’s lost. Because, have you ever been afraid that things are going so well that something has to break? Are you ever afraid to let yourself really be happy, because you know the next thing that happens is going to ruin everything? That as soon as things start getting good, the only direction for them to go is to get bad?”

  BD turned away from her and scanned the area inside Grand Central. She had a faraway look in her eye, and sipped her coffee once, twice before she answered. She didn’t look back at Barbara, but looked up toward the thin horizontal windows high in the wall of the dome, the windows through which only lunar darkness was visible right now.

  When Beverly spoke, her voice was soft and hard at the same time—soft-toned, but with a hard edge like the tip of a cold chisel. “I think I know what you mean.

  “I don’t think I ever told you about Carol. It all happened before we met you. We were stationed down at the Cape. Carol was our little girl, she was four, almost five. I had her when we were up at Malmstrom, on our first assignment.

  “She loved the beach. And you can imagine that after four years in Montana, I was ready for the beach, too. Everything was so good, so right. Gary was working on the base. Not too busy, because the launch schedule wasn’t that frantic—I don’t think it was ever frantic at the Cape, even way before we got there—and we had weekends at the beach and trips to Disney and Saint Augustine. So many good times.”

  Barbara wanted to tell her to stop talking, that whatever she was starting to say she didn’t need to say. But she let her go on, as if she were a bystander watching in fascination as an airplane with a broken landing gear was trying to land.

  “We went out on the beach one day to watch a launch. It wasn’t one of Gary’s programs, so we couldn’t get into the official viewing areas, but that was okay because Carol didn’t like loud noises. So if we were a few miles away, where we could feel a little rumble but still see it go up in the sky, that was good enough. After all, they didn’t launch very often, so you had to get out to see it whenever one did.

  “I think it was on Memorial Day—it’s been so long ago, I may be confusing it with something else. I do remember it was in the late afternoon, and it was summertime or close to it, because it was warm and the Sun was out and the sky was beautiful. We went out in the afternoon and I had some snacks and we listened on the radio, and when it went up it was glorious. Carol loved it. She clapped, and squealed, and I don’t know if it was because I was excited or if she really did like it.

  “I never got to find out. I remember thinking at the time how perfect that day was, just wonderful. We got back to where we parked the car, and I was loading our stuff in the back, and … I only took my eyes off her for a second. I heard squealing tires, and all I thought was how Carol didn’t like loud noises.…”

  Beverly’s eyes were closed and her head was tilted a little to the side as if she were still listening to that noise from so many years ago. It was quiet in Grand Central.

  Barbara reached across the table and touched her friend’s arm. “I’m so sorry.”

  BD’s head tipped forward, slowly, for a second, and then she took a deep breath and opened her eyes and looked up again. She drank the last of her coffee in one long smooth pull, and put the mug on the table. She reached up to where Barbara’s hand was on her arm, and she patted it.

  “Yes,” she said, “I know what it’s like to think that things are too perfect.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  An Independent Operation

  Tuesday, 2 October 2035

  Frank closed his eyes and leaned back against the rigid partition. He put his feet on the small shipping container of air sampling pumps, and thought again that once they had some of their debts paid off he and Stormie should start renting two adjacent bays, to use one for storage and the other for work. But t
hat could wait; and, he decided, so could the water sampling he was supposed to do in the western end of Second Avenue. For now, he was too tired to think and so weak it was as if he was under full gravity.

  Just a little nap, and I will get back to work.

  All he got was a little nap. He awoke to a light tapping on the corridor wall, and looked at the monitor to see that not quite twenty minutes had passed.

  Van Richards stuck his head into the cubicle and said, “Good work yesterday.”

  Frank was not so sure. Yes, everything had been done by the book, as Stormie would say; however, their reaction was slow and the response took too long.

  Frank raised his hand in a halfhearted wave. “Thank you,” he said. “And you as well. How is Mr. Springer this morning?”

  “Oh, Chuck’ll be fine. Looks like a bad sprain on his wrist and maybe one broken finger, but Bev was able to get his hand warmed up easily enough. He did an okay job wrapping it up, so it wouldn’t get frostbite.”

  Frank did not argue the point that what he would have gotten would not have been frostbite in the classic sense; rather, that his hand would have swelled somewhat from lack of pressure and, if left long enough, heat would have radiated away from it to the point that ice crystals formed in his cells. He was glad to hear that did not happen; Springer would have some pain for a while, but he would recover.

  Already Frank’s perception of the event was skewed: It was another one of those situations in which time sped up so that everything blurred past, and yet it dragged by. For Frank, it was as much a case of being in a particular place at a particular time as anything else—he supposed it was the right place and time, but someone else might argue the opposite.

  He had been setting up air-monitoring equipment in the first garage. Inboard of the vehicle-sized airlocks the garages were essentially open bays large enough for vehicle and equipment maintenance; unfortunately, the toxic hydrazine fuel that ran the MPV turbines was often present in such concentrations that they could not allow the garage air to circulate into the rest of the colony without scrubbing it first. Were the habitats kept at higher pressure, with nearer to a terrestrial atmospheric mix, it would be less of an issue; since they were not and never would be, Stormie hoped that they could strike a balance by increasing the efficiency of the garages’ water-based permeation filters.

  To figure out the right ratios of air and water flow rates and establish an appropriate maintenance schedule meant they needed a comprehensive baseline of the typical hydrazine concentration. And since the polymer film detectors installed in the garage were meant only to provide warning of high levels of hydrazine, rather than time-weighted-averages of the concentration, that meant lots of sample collection and analysis. So Frank had set up the sampling gear in the garage and was getting ready to leave when the call came in about an accident at the launch rail construction site. Richards, who had been in the garage working on one of the smaller vehicles, pointed at Frank and said, “Let’s go.”

  Frank did not argue about whether going out on a rescue was in- or out-of-scope to the Lunar Life Engineering contract; if he were hurt and called for help, he would not want someone arguing over whether or not they were going to get paid for helping him. He followed Richards to the nearest locker, suited up, and rode with him toward the site.

  The Sun was low in the West, and threw long shadows behind every rock and structure. They got not quite halfway to the launch rail facility when they were met by another multi-purpose vehicle coming toward the colony complex. Sonny Peterson was driving and Springer was in the back, his left arm trussed up so thick it looked as if he was wearing one of those pads that attack-dog trainers wear. He had gotten his arm caught between one of the massive rails and one of the precast supports, and would probably have suffered little real damage had not the rail slid sideways as they winched it back up. The lateral motion, from what Frank gathered, had torn into and shredded the glove of his pressure suit.

  Rather than waste time moving Springer from one vehicle to another, Frank suggested that they simply switch vehicles and drive back. Richards agreed, but insisted that he go back with Peterson and finish Springer’s shift. So Frank brought Springer back in by himself and took him to the infirmary, where Beverly Needham waited to take care of him.

  “I am just glad that he will recover,” Frank said now to Richards. He did not mention that he was already preparing a bill to the Consortium for out-of-scope rescue work. Stormie would be particularly pleased when he told her. He continued, “We did not need another accidental death, especially so soon after the first one.”

  “You’re right about that, brother,” Richards said. “How’s your wife after that?”

  It had been almost exactly a month; Stormie seemed to have recovered, though she tended to avoid the tunnel junctions that held the desiccation chambers. “She is … managing.”

  “Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. Barbara, too. She said Stormie was good to work with, but I think the whole thing still spooks her sometimes.” He paused, and looked away from Frank’s eyes for a moment. “Hey, uh, I have something else I want to ask you.”

  “Very well,” Frank said around a yawn.

  “You had any contact from one of the newbies, guy by the name of Karl Capell?”

  Frank hesitated. Capell was coming up with the next set of colonists, either the second or third week of October depending on the flight schedule. Stormie was already running new air consumption calculations, and he had started estimating water usage as well. Capell had taken the initiative to send Frank and Stormie a message, but he had indicated that it was proprietary.

  Frank spoke slowly, not so much to find the right words as to betray little emotion. “I did receive a message from Mr. Capell, yes.”

  “Did he ask you to sign up for his new union?”

  Frank raised his eyebrows; he had never been very good at hiding his reactions. He did not know how many people received Capell’s “proprietary” message, but it had seemed very passionate and pled for support in combating the Consortium’s “flagrant neglect” of safety measures that had resulted in the miner’s death. Capell seemed to believe that just because accidents had identifiable causes meant that accidents are caused by people whose intentions must be questioned and motives challenged. Stormie had laughed at his message and asked Frank if Capell realized he was writing to people in the health and safety business.

  Frank still measured his words to Richards carefully, as if he were titrating a solution and did not want to push it too far from acid to base. “He did mention a union,” Frank said, “or the possible formation of a union. I sent him a brief note in return, explaining that we are not part of the Consortium.”

  Richards’ brow wrinkled. “I thought I heard that you were coming into the AC with everybody else.”

  “No,” Frank said, more firmly than he intended, and shook his head. He had just had this conversation with James a week ago. The Consortium was trying to take over all the independents, and one of the new investors James had found was urging him to accept their offer. Frank had not bothered to tell Stormie about the idea because he knew she would reject it, and rightly so. They were determined to make a run at an independent operation for as long as they could; and since the AC had agreed to a three-year contract, that was at least how long they were going to go. If the Consortium wanted to replace them after three years, so be it—they would find another adventure to share. If the Consortium wanted to buy out their entire contract at once, that was a different matter; he might entertain the idea, but he would prefer to stay and do the job they had agreed to.

  A mild flush washed over him, replacing his fatigue with irritation that would border on anger if he let it go too far. He probably should not be too surprised that Richards would know about the AC’s offer, since he was close friends with Gary Needham. Frank was formulating an unkind response when Richards spoke again.

  “That’s probably good,” he said, “staying independent. I don
’t know about this Capell character, and I know management usually gets the union they deserve, but I hope y’all can keep your business. There need to be a few people with some objectivity around here, who aren’t on the direct AC payroll, to keep the AC honest.

  “Y’all are good people. I hope you make it.”

  Frank started to revise what he was going to say, but before he could speak Richards tossed a sloppy salute and walked away.

  * * *

  Friday, 2 November 2035

  Jim Fennerling had special-ordered an old-fashioned paper calendar to mark off the days of his recovery, and every time he turned the page he thought about how much better he was than the last time. Yesterday he had flipped it from October to November: five and a half months since his stroke. He still had far to go, especially with little things.

  His fine motor control was better, and he had a new appreciation for video game technology, but he needed help sometimes buttoning buttons and doing other tasks. He had established a routine that was almost normal to him now: a nurse came by in the morning to help him get up and start the day, he ordered takeout for his lunch, his sister came by at dinner—usually with leftovers from her family’s meal the previous day—and another nurse stopped by at night to help him close up shop. He realized how much better he was when he got annoyed at the night nurses for coming before he was ready: when he still had things to do, or at least things he wanted to do.

  He had taken back almost all of the company’s financial dealings from Frank, and even though Frank still worried about his ability to get it all done, he thought Frank appreciated being free to do his real job. Jim, on the other hand, didn’t worry. He had wanted to take back all the financials in September, but Frank wouldn’t give it up; he only relented after Jim started sending him e-mail messages at the rate of about one an hour with everything from interest rate projections, to the costs of shipping various pieces of equipment to the Moon, to a call for papers for an upcoming safety and environmental protection conference—he even told Frank he would be happy to present the paper if Frank would just write it, or have Stormie write it. So over the course of six additional weeks, he gradually took back all of his responsibilities.