Walking on the Sea of Clouds

by Gray Rinehart

  Stewart finished toweling down the vomit-flecked wall of the main room, and started cleaning the stall Van had tried to use.

  Van shook his head at the extent of the mess. He leaned forward until he could pull himself up on the basin, and rung himself up a mug of water. He dipped a clean corner of the towel in it and wiped his forehead, then swished a little water around in his mouth and spat it out. He swallowed a few drops, but was afraid to drink too much.

  “You feeling better?”

  “Not especially. Sorry I’m not much help, but you don’t have to do that. I’ll get to it.”

  Stewart backed out of the stall and dropped a dirty towel into his bucket. “Yes, but if I do it now then you don’t have to ‘get to it.’ Besides, it seems like half the place is down with the same thing.”

  That was news to Van, but he’d spent the last few hours in the machine shop programming the EBM to make a replacement part for Rocky, the LSOV. He’d been on his way back to his and Barbara’s apartment when it hit him.

  “What’ve we got?” he asked, and wiped his forehead again with the wet corner of the towel.

  “I don’t know,” Stewart said, “but it ain’t pretty. I figure it’s some kind of food poisoning—something you guys ate that the rest of us didn’t. You feel up to taking a walk? We can get you in with the others.”

  Van let Stewart lead him down to Second Avenue and into Grand Central; that is, Van leaned on the older man as they went through the habitats and junctions and into the dome. The far side of the chamber was bright with sunlight slanting through the high windows, and the room was more crowded than Van had ever seen it. They’d shoved aside all the little tables and laid out blankets in each quadrant of the dome. Van reckoned himself the fifteenth patient in what looked to be a twenty-bed ward.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Faustini Crater

  Friday, 11 January 2036

  They drove as straight as they could toward Tycho, along one of the bright rays of ejecta that was visible from Earth. The trail before them had been blazed monthly since the first colonists landed, and with no wind or rain to erode it the track stood out clearly. Here and there previous crews had burned warnings—on rocks or on the trail itself, especially where they had fused patches of dust together—that mimicked earthside traffic signs. “Bridge Out” was a favorite, since no bridges had been built to straighten the path; the farther they went, the more often they were forced to creep around or through obstacles or ravines.

  By Friday they were on the southwest side of Tycho and stopped at the Halfway House. The scavenging station was operating normally, the LPPN and ROPS producing power and oxygen within normal limits. While they hooked up the Turtle and replenished its oxygen supply, Stormie looked back toward Tycho. It would’ve been nice if they’d driven close enough to see the Surveyor-7 landing site, just north of the crater, but they couldn’t afford a detour of over 200 kilometers. To the south, the tracks led as far as she could see and continued on, past Maginus to Clavius and beyond. Stormie chuckled at the realization that she was standing between Tycho and Clavius. As prophetic as 2001: A Space Odyssey was, with its Clavius base and that monolith at Tycho, she didn’t remember Kubrick including anyone like her as part of the starring cast.

  Topped off with oxygen, they continued south. On Saturday, the fourth day out from Mercator, Stormie was engrossed in calculating the projected respiratory totals for next month’s new colonists when the truck slowed and stopped. She looked at her watch; it was an hour before her sixth driving shift was supposed to start. Bruce was snoring in his corner of the commons, and Gabe had his nose in a book on his datapad, as usual. Stormie figured Capell was sick, so she started suiting up. As she was sealing up her suit, she realized how long it had been since she’d bathed. So much for Bruce’s detailing job; she was glad everyone’s noses were desensitized by now.

  But the truck hadn’t stopped because Capell needed her to drive; he had stopped because the Turtle told him it had a problem with the drive circuits. And because she was the one suited up at the time, Stormie found herself outside checking out the situation.

  The first things she noticed were the shadows. Her team had traveled far enough south that the Sun cast shadows toward the pole, though it had not reached its zenith. Nor was it close enough to lunar noon for the Moon to have entered the Earth’s magnetotail, but that couldn’t be helped; she would try to limit her time outside, where she was less protected from the solar wind.

  She pulled one of the lamps from its charging socket and started her walkaround. Capell and Bruce had done all the troubleshooting they could from inside. The truck’s diagnostics were inconclusive, but they’d tracked the problem to one circuit feeding the body’s number two wheel: the front wheel on the right side. Stormie crawled under the truck and used the lamp to drive back the shadows. She looked at everything from different angles and reported back what she saw, which amounted to nothing wrong. When he was satisfied, Bruce talked her through unhooking the secondary power cable for that drive circuit. Stormie capped the cable and crawled out from under the Turtle. When she was clear, Capell applied power to number two through the redundant circuits. Stormie watched the wheel grab and try to move forward; it spun through half a rotation before Capell stopped it. He applied reverse power and the wheel complied. Stormie reported her visual confirmation, and the others verified they could feel the motion inside.

  Stormie reconnected the secondary cable, then disengaged and capped the primary so they could test that circuit. Again the wheel grabbed and spun, clockwise and counter- from Stormie’s perspective.

  “No alarm that time,” Bruce said. “Stormie, go ahead and hook that power cable back up. We’ll watch it, but we need to get going again.”

  Stormie’s fingers had stiffened a bit, and it was harder to attach the cable than it had been to detach it, but in a few minutes she was tightening the collar—

  —and the truck started moving with her still under it.

  “Whoa, stop!” she said. She twisted around to keep out of the way of the spinning wheels. “I’m under here!” The truck rolled almost a meter before it stopped. She watched carefully to be sure it wasn’t moving any more.

  Capell cursed over the radio link. “I got a green light and just reacted.”

  “What?” Stormie asked. “How did you get a green light? I thought you disabled that circuit.”

  “That’s my fault,” Capell said. “I reset the breaker at the wrong time. Are you okay?”

  Yeah, no thanks to you. Stormie got her breathing back under control, and checked to make sure she hadn’t torn her suit on something. The pressure in her suit stayed steady, and she closed her eyes for a second to let the pressure inside her escape. Idiot could’ve killed me. Spend all my time keeping him and all of us alive, just to have him run me over with a truck. Stormie reached up to her helmet, and wished she could just rest her head in her hands. “Yeah, I’m okay. I’m locking down the collar and coming out now.”

  Bruce said, “Good, Stormie. I slapped Karl around a little, and I’ll look the other way if you want to punch his lights out.” Which she probably could: she was almost a head taller than Capell. Bruce continued, “Now, when you get out from under the truck, just climb up and strap in. I want us to drive a klick or so and see if we get any more alarms.”

  She weighed the extra radiation exposure against getting back inside where she would encounter Capell. She decided a few extra rads wouldn’t hurt that much. “Roger,” she said.

  The open beds on either side of the ARG were small, and crammed with gear; Stormie made herself somewhat comfortable atop a transit case. She found it almost pleasant riding in the bed of the truck. She at least had her choice of views; inside the Turtle’s shell, all they got were camera views, though the cab had a good view out the front and to either side. She looked back the way they had come and the shadows reached out toward her like the fingers of a great lunar goddess—damn it, she should remember who
that was … Minerva? no—guarding the trail behind them.

  Stormie used the trailer as a reference point to judge the distances and sizes of rocks and ridges, but that only worked within a narrow range. To the side, beyond a hundred meters it was much harder to estimate size accurately. A boulder that looked to be as big as a car, only a short distance away, could really be a kilometer away and turn out to be the size of a house. She wished her helmet had a laser rangefinder, like the new ones made for Barbara Richards’ crater development team.

  They drove slowly and made some maneuvers where the landscape allowed. They sped up and slowed, went up a hill and down, and for a while Stormie actually closed her eyes and let the Turtle’s motion rock her. She breathed deep and tried to decompress. After about twenty minutes, they stopped.

  Stormie unstrapped and climbed down. “How is it, Bruce?”

  “We got the same alarm again,” he said, “but that wheel seems to be turning with all the others. Come on back inside.” She put the lantern back in its charger and cycled through the airlock. Once the pressure equalized, but before she moved into the common area, she did what she could in the tiny space to clean her suit; unfortunately, crawling in the dust under the Turtle’s belly had made decontamination a losing proposition.

  All four of them crammed into the commons. Capell, thumbing through a checklist on his datapad, didn’t acknowledge her entrance. As Stormie pushed herself into one corner of the small volume, Bruce said, “Here’s how I see it. The electric transmissions are all working, else number two wouldn’t want to turn on any circuit. Plus, I checked the power flow on that test drive and they were all drawing within normal limits and feeding power back when we braked.”

  “Then what’s the problem?” Stormie asked. “Is the wheel drawing more current on that one circuit than it should?”

  Bruce shook his head. His blond hair settled back into place before he spoke again. “Not so it’s out of tolerance. It’s a problem with that particular circuit, no doubt, and it bugs me.

  “So here it is. We’re less than a day and a half away from the ice plant. According to the decision matrix in the checklist, we continue on. That makes sense to me. Once we get the ice loading started, I’ll do what I can to troubleshoot, but we ought to be able to go the whole way even if we lose that one drive circuit completely. And that’s a lot better than driving four days back empty-handed.”

  Bruce looked at each of them in turn. Gabe shrugged. Capell gave a thumbs-up. Stormie said, “We should have enough air to breathe, so let’s go.”

  “Good,” Bruce said. “Don’t push too hard and we’ll get there okay.” He looked at his watch, and continued, “We’ll keep to the regular rotation and stay on the original timing. Stormie, you’re up.”

  Of course I am, that’s why I didn’t take off my suit. Stormie sighed, put her helmet back on, and went forward to the cab. She resisted the urge to punch Capell as she slid by.

  * * *

  Sunday, 13 January 2036

  Frank had endured much worse, but his previous experience did not make this any more pleasant.

  Another spasm of nausea hit him as he put away his datapad. At least it was only nausea now; at first, it had brought back the fire—the latent manifestation of the picophage blaze that he had not experienced in many glorious weeks—and he had struggled just to stay conscious.

  He had been even more circumspect than usual in his last message to Stormie. Primarily because he did not want her to worry too much, but also because she would remember his earlier joke about Legionnaires’ disease and chide him about his wishes. “Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it,” she would say. He had not, in fact, wished for this, but making that point would not matter.

  In that way, Stormie and his mother were quite alike, though Stormie would neither acknowledge nor appreciate it. His mother would also tell him he needed to be more careful about words he said, but for a different reason: she had for many years followed the pseudo-magical “name it and claim it” evangelical fringe, and had often made the point that it worked both ways. Her intention was to name and claim things that were going to do her good, in the hope that by some miracle she would experience the good; at the same time, she assiduously avoided even naming things that might bode ill, out of fear that she would experience the ill. That always seemed too much like hocus-pocus for Frank, and he had no concern that his careless speech had somehow wrought this illness.

  His father never agreed with or supported his mother’s insistence on naming and claiming; he firmly believed that the answer to prayer was sometimes no, and that the ways of God were, in the end, unfathomable. His father tolerated her worldview, though, and once when he had rolled his eyes at one of her claims, Frank had asked him why. His father said it was a small thing to allow, and family harmony was much more important than any small things; that had been an important lesson in Frank’s life, and one he tried to apply in his own marriage.

  Frank was drawn from memory and reverie when Barbara Richards knelt next to his head and put an infrared probe in his ear to register his temperature. “Are you doing any better?” she asked.

  Frank swallowed the trace of saliva he had in his mouth, and said, “Not appreciably.”

  “Well, it’s only been about twenty-four hours yet, so I guess it’s got a little longer course to run.”

  “How many of us are sick?”

  “Twenty-eight, including five transients.”

  “So,” he said, trying to think, “twenty-three out of thirty-six permanent party and five out of eight miners.” The proportions seemed about the same, but his brain was fuzzy and would not do the math.

  “Actually it’s twenty-three out of thirty-two,” Barbara said, “since we don’t have any report that Bruce and Stormie and the others have gotten sick. So whatever it is, and Yvette is leaning toward some kind of contamination in the food supply, it hit after they were gone.”

  Frank resolved that he would give Stormie the details in his next message to her, even though Gary may have already briefed Bruce on the situation. If it was a food issue, her team would have to be careful since they were eating food they took from the colony.

  Frank hoped it was not a food issue, for Stormie’s sake; but for the sake of their business, he hoped it was.

  He needed to get up and get some samples taken and analyzed to rule out the water supply as a potential cause. He pulled his legs up under him and tried to kneel, but the nausea and pain came again, hard and fast, and he found himself lying on his side with his knees drawn against his chest. Barbara’s hand rested on his shoulder: it was heavy and hot and it hurt.

  “I don’t know where you think you’re going,” she said. “You just need to stay here and take it easy until we get all this figured out. I’ve got to check on some other people now, but I’ll be back—and when I come back, I want to see you lying here quietly, resting, just like everybody else.”

  Frank nodded, but did not speak. As she walked away, he unfolded himself like a creaky, rusty lawn chair.

  He pulled his datapad close. As soon as he could get up, he needed to be ready to act fast—and not just to take samples to help isolate the cause. He was losing ground every hour on routine maintenance that had to be done. In order to be effective, he needed to make a plan. He called up the schematics of the water and air systems on his datapad, and started writing a message to Yvette to ask for reports on where and when everyone started getting sick.

  His stomach contracted around nothing, as if his bowels had activated a vacuum pump in his gut. Tears came to his eyes.

  Lord, please don’t let Stormie get this.

  * * *

  Monday, 14 January 2036

  The craters they passed started to run together in Stormie’s head: Gruemberger, Moretus, Short, Newton, and a hundred others unnamed until they finally drove between Malapert and Scott. They were running behind schedule now, and started pulling extra driving shifts. Stormie started her eighth rotatio
n six days into the trip, just to the southeast of Malapert Crater. The Malapert Mountain ridge was distinct in the sunlight, the long shadow behind it dark as lunar night.

  This far south, the Sun lit only the peaks of the craters. The solar cells only caught the Sun when the Turtle crested a hill, so almost all lights and nonessential equipment inside were turned off to conserve power. But the shadows below the peaks were so deep that the big lights on the truck were kept burning all the time. Stormie followed the well-worn track, angling a little away from Amundsen Crater as they approached the pole.

  She found it hard to concentrate whenever her imagination took her back to the colony and the misery evident in Frank’s last couple of messages. This was not the time to lose her focus, though: she had to go forward and complete this task, in order to get back to help him.

  Stormie got them within one diameter of Faustini Crater—about thirty kilometers away—by the time her shift ended. She gratefully turned the driving over to Gabe. She had barely finished her supper of crackers and the cold remains of what had been a nice vegetable soufflé when Gabe reported contact with the LICEOM’s radio beacon. Bruce told him to start running the arrival checklist. When Stormie started getting into her suit, Bruce told her to wait—it would be a while yet.

  Gabe stopped the truck at the crest of Faustini Crater. The Sun lit the rim through most of the lunar day, so that by parking there to run the procedure they put a little charge back into the batteries, but the crater interior, thirty-five kilometers across, was completely shadowed. The same was true for the other craters at the Moon’s pole.

  Faustini was near but not at the pole; nineteen-kilometer-wide Shackleton Crater had that distinction. The U.N. had allocated the relatively young Shackleton as a science outpost, even though it was unlikely to have accumulated much in the way of cometary ice, but the enthusiasm of the late ’20s had waned and only a five-member international team was left in the outpost NASA and ESA had set up. Shoemaker Crater, right next to Faustini, had once been considered a good candidate for resupply, with its fifty-kilometer mouth wide open to the sky; the Lunar Prospector spacecraft had crashed into it in 1999 with Gene Shoemaker’s ashes on board, and by the early 2000s astronomers from Cornell along with subsequent orbital missions had ruled it out as a supply point. Faustini itself did not have huge deposits of ice, or the Consortium would not have been able to afford the rights to it, but it had enough to last for a while.