Steel Beach

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I crouched in a pile of chrome-plated pipes not twenty meters from two patrolling figures in spacesuits, trying to pretend I was just another piece of bent pipe. I wasn't quite sure how to go about this. Don't move, and think tubular thoughts, I finally decided, and it had worked so far.

I was keeping one eye on the clock, one eye on the soldiers, and one eye on the blinking red light in my head-up display. Since this adds up to three eyes, you can imagine how busy I was. I was the busiest motionless person you ever saw. Or didn't see.

As if that weren't enough, I was calling every telephone number in my vast mental card file.

Forget those trivial inventions like fire, the wheel, the bow and arrow, the plow. Man didn't become truly civilized until Alex Bell uttered those immortal words, "Shit, Watson, I spilled acid all over my balls." Hiding there with my oxygen running out, my only hope of staying alive lay in getting some help over the telephone, and if it worked I resolved to light a candle every year on Mr. Bell's birthday.

My situation was dire, but it could have been worse. I could have been a member of the King City police dragooned (I later learned) into the first wave of the assault on Virginia City. In addition to the hazards of an armed populace, not to mention the meanest, gamest dog who ever lived, they had the added problem of not having pressure suits when the second wave, which attacked from the surface, began cutting the cables which brought power from the solar panels topside, which powered the null-fields which kept the air in.

That's what had happened just after I was lasered by the last cop. It was the air rushing out of the public square that had first fanned, then extinguished the flames on Winston's corpse.

It wasn't a blow-out like the one at Nirvana, or I wouldn't be here to tell you about it. What we're used to in a blow-out is a lot of air rushing through a relatively small hole. You get picked up and battered, then you get squeezed, and even in a null-suit your chances of survival are slim. But when a null-field goes, it goes all at once, and the air just expands. You get a gentle wind, then poof! Like a soap bubble. And then you get a lot of cops and soldiers grabbing their throats, spitting blood, and falling quietly to the ground. I saw two people die like this. I guess it's a fairly quick, peaceful way to go, but I still get nauseous just thinking about it.

At the time I thought the Heinleiners had done it. It was a logical tactic. It was the way they customarily fought fires, and god knows there were plenty of fires by the time the air went. And it just didn't make sense that their own people would cut the power, knowing the first group didn't have suits.

Well, it was their own people who did it, and it wasn't the only thing about the assault that didn't make sense. But I learned about that much later. Hiding there in the pipes all I knew is that a lot of people had tried to kill me, and a lot more were still trying. It had been a game of cat and mouse for about three hours since the null-field power went down.

The power loss had immediately turned the corridor I meant to travel to the Heinlein from a silvery cylinder into a borehole through eons of trash, just like the one I had traveled to lo those many weeks ago to enter this crazy funhouse in the first place. That was a damn good thing, because not long after the blowout I met the first of many pressure-suited people coming down the path in the other direction.

We didn't actually meet, which was another good thing, because he or she was carrying a laser just like the one that had almost fried me. I saw him (I'm going to say him, because all the soldiers were male and there was something in the way he moved) while he was still some distance from me, and I quickly melted into the wall. Or into where the wall had been, you see. There were thousands of gaps along the corridor large enough for even a pregnant woman to squeeze through.

Once into one of the gaps, however, you never knew what lay beyond. You had entered a world with no rational order to it, a three-dimensional random maze made of random materials, some of it locked in place by the pressure of other junk above it, some of it alarmingly unstable. In some of these hidey-holes you could slip through here and squeeze through there and swing across a gap in another place, like in a collapsed jungle gym. In others, two meters in and you found a cul-de-sac a rat would have found impassable. You never knew. There was simply no way to tell from the outside.

That first refuge was one of the shallow ones, so I had pressed myself against a flat surface and began learning the Zen of immobility. I had several things going for me. No need to hold my breath, since I was already doing that because of the null-suit. No need to be very quiet, because of the vacuum. And in the suit he might not have seen me if I'd been lying right in his path.

I told myself all those things, but I still aged twenty years as he crept by, swinging his laser left and right, close enough that I could have reached out and touched him.

Then he had passed, and it started getting very dark again. (Did I mention all the lights went out when the power failed? They did. I'd never have seen him if he hadn't been carrying a flashlight.)

I wanted that flashlight. I wanted it more than anything in the world. Without it, I didn't see how I'd ever make it to safety. It had already gotten dark enough that I could barely see the useless rifle I'd carried with me, and wouldn't see anything at all when he'd moved a little farther along.

I almost jumped out of my skin when I realized he could have seen the flashing red light on the empty clip as he passed; I'd forgotten to cover it up. If only I had another… then I looked more closely at the clip. It had an opening at the end, and a brass shell casing gleamed in there. I realized it was two clips taped together. The idea was to reverse it when you'd used up the first. God, soldiers are tricky bastards.

So I reversed it, almost dropping first the clip, then the rifle, and I leaned out into the corridor and squeeze off a shot in the direction the soldier had come from to see if the damn thing worked. From the recoil I felt, I knew it did. I hadn't counted on the muzzle flash, but apparently the man didn't see it.

Stepping out into the corridor, I fired a short burst into the soldier's back. Hey, even if I could have shouted a warning to him in vacuum, I really don't think I would have. You don't know the depths you can sink to when all you're thinking about is survival.

His suit was tough, and my aim was not the best. One round hit him and it didn't puncture his suit, just sent him stumbling down the path, turning, bringing his weapon up, so I fired again, a lot longer this time, and it did the trick.

I won't describe the mess I had to sort through to find his light.

My fusillade had destroyed his laser and used up my last ammo clip, so encumbered with only the flashlight and what remained of my wits I set out looking for air.

That was the trick, of course. The null-suit was a great invention, no doubt about it. It had saved my life. But it left something to be desired in the area of endurance. If a Heinleiner wanted to spend much time in vacuum he'd strap a tank onto his back, just like everyone else, and attach a hose to the breast fitting in front. Without a strap-on, the internal tank was good for twenty to thirty-five minutes, depending on exertion. Forty minutes at the outside. Like, for instance, if you were asleep.

I hadn't done much sleeping and didn't plan on any soon, but I hadn't thought it would be a problem at first. All or the corridors were provided with an ALU every half-kilometer or so. The power to these had been cut, but they still had big air tanks which should still be full. Re-charging my internal tank should be just a matter of hooking the little adapter hose to my air fitting, twisting a valve, and watching the little needle in my head-up swing over to the FULL position.

The first time, it was that easy. But I could see even then that having to search out an ALU every half hour was the weakest point in my not-very-strong survival strategy. I couldn't keep it up endlessly. I had to either get out of there on my own or call for help.

Calling seemed to make the most sense. I still had no idea what was happening beyond the limits of Heinlein Town, but had no reason to suspect that if I could get through to a lawyer, or to the pad, my problems would not be over. But I couldn't call from the corridor. There was too much junk over my head; the signal would not get through. However, through sheer luck or divine providence I was in one of the corridors I was fairly familiar with. A branch up to the left should take me right out onto the surface.

It did, and the surface was crawling with soldiers.

I ducked back in, thankful for the mirror camouflage I was wearing. Where had they all come from?

There were not regiments, or divisions, or anything like that. But I could see three from my hiding place, and they seemed to be patrolling except for one who was standing around near the entrance I'd just exited. Guarding it, I presumed. Perhaps he just meant to take captives, but I'd seen people shooting to kill and wanted no part of finding out his intentions.

One of the other things I'd been lucky about was in seeing the man in the square who'd been hit by bullets while wearing his null-suit. Otherwise I might have wrongly concluded the suit, through which nothing could pass, could render me immune to bullets. Which it would… but only at a cost.

This was explained to me later. Maybe you already figured it out; Smith said "as should be intuitively obvious," but he talks like that.

Bullets possess kinetic energy. When you stop one dead in its tracks, that energy has to go somewhere. Some of it is transferred to your body: e.g., the bullet knocks you over. But most of the energy is absorbed by the suit, which promptly freezes stiff, and then has to do something with all that energy. There's no place to store it in the null-generator. Smith tried that, and the generators overheated or, in extreme cases, exploded. Not a pretty thought, considering where it's implanted.

So what the field does is radiate the heat away. From both surfaces of the field.

"I'm sure it's a symmetry we can defeat, given time," Smith told me. "The math is tricky. But what a bulletproof jacket it will make, eh?"

It sure would. In the meantime, what happened is you got parboiled. Getting rid of excess heat was already your biggest problem in a null-suit. You could survive one hit in a suit (several people did), but usually only if you could turn it off pretty quickly and cool yourself. With two or more hits your internal temperature would soar and your brain would cook.

The suit was supposed to turn itself off in that case, automatically. But naturally it wouldn't turn off if there was vacuum outside. It won't do that no matter how extreme conditions inside got; vacuum is always the worst of any set of evils.

If I got shot now, I'd cook, from the skin inwards.

I didn't start out singing hosannas to the name of A.G. Bell. For the first hour I wanted to dig him up and roast him slowly. Not his fault, of course, but in the state I was in, who cared?

After filling my tank again I made my way to the top of the junk pile. This was possible-though by no means easy-because where I was, near the Heinlein, the thickness of the planetary dump was not great. By squirming, making myself small, picking my way carefully I was soon able to stick my head out of the mess. Any of a thousand passing satellites ought to have a good line of sight at me from there, so I started dialing as fast as my tongue could hit the switchboard on the insides of my teeth. I figured I'd call Cricket, because he…

…could not be reached at that number. According to my head-up, which is seldom wrong about these things. Neither could Brenda, or Liz. I was about to try another number when I finally realized nobody could be reached, because my internal phone relied, when out on the surface, on a booster unit that's standard equipment in a pressure suit.

How could I be expected to think of these things? You tap your teeth, and pretty soon you hear somebody's voice in your ear. That's how a fucking telephone works. It's as natural as shouting.

I sure as hell thought about it then, and soon realized I had another problem. The signal from my phone wouldn't get through my null-suit field. The Heinleiners used the field itself to generate a signal in another wave band entirely, so they could communicate with each other, suit-to-suit, and nobody, not even the CC, could overhear them. I was screwed by their security.

I thought about this a long time, keeping one eye on the oxygen gauge. Then I went back to the dark corridor and sneaked up on the body of the man I had killed.

He was still there, though shoved over to one side of the passage. I managed to get his helmet off and lose myself back in the maze, where I used my light and a few bits of metal that came to hand to pry out what I hoped was the booster for his suit radio. I had done my work better than I knew; there was a bullet hole punched through it.

I held on to it anyway. I got another charge of air and went back to the surface, where I used a length of wire to connect my pressure fitting to the radio itself, on the theory that this was the only way for anything to get out of the suit. I switched it on, was rewarded with a little red light going on in a display on the radio. I dialed Cricket again, and got nothing.

So I brought all my vast and subtle technological skills to bear on repairing the radio. Translation: I whanged the sumbitch on the dashboard of the junk rover I was sitting in, and I dialed again. Nothing. Whang. Still not a peep. So I WHANGED it again and Cricket said "Yeah, what the hell do you want?"

My tongue had been leading a life of its own, nervously dialing and re-dialing Cricket's number as I worked my engineering magic on the radio. And now, when I needed it, I couldn't get the damn tongue to work at all, so overwhelmed was I at hearing a familiar voice.

"I haven't got time to dick around here," Cricket warned.

"Cricket, it's me, Hildy, and I-"

"Yeah, Hildy, you cover it your way and I'll cover it mine."

"Cover what?"

"Just the biggest damn story that ever…" I heard the sound of mental brakes being applied with the burning of much mental rubber; after the clashing of mental gears Cricket said, sweetly, "No story, Hildy. Nothing at all. Forget I said anything."

"Damn it, Cricket, is the shit coming down out there, too? What's happened? All I know is-"

"You can figure it out for yourself, just like I did," he said.

"Figure what out? I don't know what you're-"

"Sure, sure, I know. It won't work, Hildy. You've conned me out of a big story for the last time."

"Cricket, I don't even work for the Nipple anymore."

"Once a reporter, always a reporter. It's in your blood, Hildy, and you could no more ignore this one than a whore could keep her legs together when the doorbell rings."

"Cricket, listen to me, I'm in big trouble. I'm trapped-"

"Ah ha!" he crowed, confusing me completely. "A lot of folks are trapped, old buddy. I think it's the best place for you. Read about it in a few hours in the Shit." And he hung up.

I almost threw the radio out across the horizon, but sanity returned just in time. With it came caution, as my eyes, following the would-be trajectory, saw two figures clambering up the junk. They were headed for me, probably on the scent of my transmission. I ducked over the side of the junked rover and dived back into the maze.

I still haven't entirely forgiven Cricket, but I've got to say that love died during that phone call. Sure, I deserved some of it; I'd tricked him often enough in the past. And in his defense, he thought I was trapped in an elevator, as thousands of Lunarians were at that moment, and he didn't think I'd be in any particular danger, and if I was, there wasn't anything he could have done about it.

Yeah, sure. And your momma would have fucked pigs, Cricket, if she could have found any who'd have her. You didn't give me time to explain.

What really high-gravved me was that, when I finally got back in position to call him again, he'd set his phone to refuse calls from me. I risked my neck ducking in for more air then finding a new place to transmit from, and what I got for my efforts was a busy signal.

I got a lot of those in quick succession. Brenda didn't answer. Neither did anybody at the Nipple, which worried me no end. Think about it. A major metropolitan newspad, and nobody's answering the phone?

I knew it had to do with the big story Cricket mentioned. Impossible visions flitted through my head, from a city-wide blowout to thousands upon thousands of soldiers like the ones I'd seen laying waste to the whole planet.

But I had to keep trying. So I went back down into the maze and sought out my favorite airing hole. And two big guys in suits were camped out there, weapons ready.

I'd had ten minutes of air when I first backed into the pile of chrome pipes to hide from the soldiers. That had been seven minutes earlier.

The first thing I'd done was cut back the oxygen dissemination rate in my artificial lung to a level just short of unconsciousness. Ditto the cooling rate. I figured that would stretch the ten minutes into fifteen if I didn't have to move around too much. So far I hadn't moved at all. The blinking red light I was watching was telling me my blood oxygen level was low. Another gauge, normally dormant, had lit up as well, and this one assured me my body temperature stood at 39.1 degrees and was rising slowly. I knew I couldn't take much more without becoming delirious; anything over forty was dangerous territory.

I'm a miserable tactician, I'll admit it, at least in a situation like that. I could see the elements of the problem, but all I could do was stew about it. Those guys topside, for instance. Could they communicate my position to the gorillas guarding the air tank? They were no more than thirty meters above me; if they had any kind of generalship at all a message would soon be arriving to the guards to be on the lookout for a roly-poly, out-of-breath football trophy, known to associate with lengths of chrome-plated pipe.

If so, what could I do about it? There was no hope of making my way through the maze to the next air station-which might well be guarded, anyway. So if these guys didn't find somewhere else to go in the next eight minutes, it was going to be a dead heat (terrible choice of words there) as to whether I died of suffocation or boiled in my own sweat. I didn't really have a preference in the matter; it's something only a coroner could care about.

Brenda Starr, comic-strip reporter, would surely have thought up some clever ruse, some diversion, something to lure those freaking soldiers away from the air tank long enough for her to re-fuel. Hildy Johnson, scared-shitless schoolteacher and former inkster, didn't have the first notion of how to go about it without drawing attention to herself.

There was one bit of good news in the mix. My tongue had continued its independent ways as I crouched in hiding, and soon I was startled by the sound of a busy signal in my ear. I didn't even know who I'd called, much less how the signal got out. I eventually surmised (and later found out it was true) that something in the junk pile was acting as an antenna, relaying my calls to the surface, and thence to a satellite.

So I tried Brenda again (still no answer), and the Nipple (still nothing), and then I dialed Liz.

"Buckingham Palace, Her Majesty speaking," came a slurred voice.

"Liz, Liz, this is Hildy. I'm in big trouble."

There was a long, somehow boozy silence. I wondered if she'd fallen asleep. Then there was a sob.

"Liz? Are you still there?"

"Hildy. Hildy. Oh, god, I didn't want to do it."

"Didn't want to do what? Liz, I don't have time for-"

"I'm a drunk, Hildy. A goddam drunk."

This was neither news, nor a well-kept secret. I didn't say anything, but listened to the sound of wracking sobs and watched the seconds tick off on my personal clock and waited for her to talk.

"They said they could put me away for a long time, Hildy. A long, long time. I was scared, and I felt really awful. I was shaking and I was throwing up, only nothing came up, and they wouldn't let me have a drink."

"What are you talking about? Who's 'they?'"

"They, they, dammit! The CC."

By then I had more or less figured it out. She stammered disconnected parts to me then, and I learned the complete story later, and it went something like this:

Even before the Bicentennial celebration Liz had been firmly in the employ of the CC. At some point she had been arrested, taken in, and charged with many counts of weapons violations. (So were a lot of others; the invasion of Heinlein Town had been armed with weapons confiscated during a huge crackdown-an event that never made the news.)

"They said I could go to jail for eighty years, Hildy. And then they left me alone, and the CC spoke to me and told me if I did a few little things for him, here and there, the charges might be dropped."

"What happened, Liz? Did you get careless?"

"What? Oh, I don't know, Hildy. They never showed me the evidence they had against me. They said it would all come out in the trial. I don't know if it was obtained illegally or not. But when the CC started talking I figured out pretty quick that it didn't matter. We talked about that; you know that, if he ever wanted to, he could frame every person on Luna for something or other. All I could see was when we got to court, it'd be an airtight case. I was afraid to let it get that far."

"So you sold me out."

There was silence for a long time. A few more minutes had gone by. The guards hadn't moved. There wasn't anything else to do but listen.

"Tell me the rest of it," I said.

It seemed there was this group of people out around Delambre that the CC wanted to know more about. He suggested Liz get me out there and see what happened.

I should have been flattered. The CC's estimate of my bloodhound instincts must have been pretty high. I suppose if I hadn't seen anything during that first trip, something else would have been arranged, until I was on the scent. After that, I could be relied on to bring the story to ground.

"He was real interested when you brought in that tape of the little girl. I… by that time I was a wholly-owned subsidiary, Hildy. I told him I could find some way of getting you to tell me what was going on. I'd have done about anything by then."

"The hostage syndrome," I said. The guards were still there.

"What? Oh. Yeah, probably. Or sheer lack of character. Anyway, he told me to hold back or you'd get suspicious. So I did, and you finally invited me in."

And on that first visit she'd stolen a null-field generator. She didn't say how, but it probably wasn't too hard. They're not dangerous unless you try to open them up.

I could put the rest of it together myself. During the next week the CC had learned enough null-field technology to make something to get his troops through the barriers, if not to equip them with null-suits or fields of their own.

"And that's pretty much it," she said, and sighed. "So I guess he arrested you, and probably all those other folks, too, right? Where have they got you? Have they set bail yet?"

"Are you serious?"

"Hell, Hildy, I don't think he could have anything serious on you."

"Liz… what's going on out there?"

"What do you mean?"

"Cricket said all hell was breaking loose, somehow or other."

"You got me, Hildy. I was just… ah, sleeping, until you called. I'm here in my apartment. Come to think of it, the lights are flickering. But that could be just my head."

She was in the dark as much as I was. A lot of people were. If you didn't leave your apartment and you didn't live in one of the sectors where the oxygen service was interrupted, the chances of your having missed the early stages of the Big Glitch were excellent. Liz had been in an alcoholic stupor, with her phone set to take calls only from me.

"Liz. Why?"

There was a long pause. Then, "Hildy, I'm a drunk. Don't ever trust a drunk. If it comes to a choice between you and the next drink… it's not really a choice."

"Ever thought of taking the cure?"

"Babe, I like drinking. It's the only thing I do like. That, and Winston."

Maybe I would have hit her right in the belly at that point; I don't know. I know I was filled with rage at her. Telling her the dog was fried and vac-dried wouldn't have begun to get back at her for what she'd done to me.

But just then I suddenly got real, real hot. I'd already been too warm, you understand; now, in an instant, my skin was so hot I wanted to peel it off and there was a burning ache on the left side of my chest.

The null-suit did what it could. I watched in growing alarm as the indicator that had been telling me how many minutes I had to live took a nose dive. I thought it wasn't going to stop. Hell, it was almost worth it. With the falling gauge came a cooling blast of air all over my body. At least I wasn't going to fry.

I'd finally put together what was happening, though. For almost a minute I'd been feeling short, sharp shocks through the metal pipes I leaned against and the metal brace I had my feet on. Then I saw a bullet hit a pipe. That's the only thing it could have been, I reasoned. It left a dent, a dull place on the metal. Somebody was standing on top of the junk pile and shooting down into it at random. It had to be blind shooting, because I couldn't see the shooter. But the bullets were ricocheting and one had finally struck me. I couldn't afford another hit.

So I grabbed a length of pipe and started toward the corridor. I didn't think I could do much good against the tough pressure suits, but if I swung for the faceplates I might get one of them, and at least I'd go down fighting. I owed it to Winston, if to no one else, to do that much.

Getting to the corridor was like reaching for that top step that isn't there. I stepped out, pipe cocked like the clean-up batter coming to the plate. And nobody was there.

I saw their retreating backs outlined by the light of their helmet lamps. They were jogging toward the exit.

I'll never know for sure, but it seems likely they'd been summoned to the top to help in the search for me. How were they to know the guys on top of the pile were only a few meters directly above them? Anyway, if they'd stayed in place, I'd have been dead in ninety seconds, tops. So I gave them ten seconds to get beyond the point where they could possible see me, and I reached for the ALU adapter hose.

It wasn't there.

It made me mad. I couldn't think of anything more foolish than getting this close to salvation and then suffocating with about a ton of compressed oxygen at my fingertips. I slammed my hand against the tank, then got my flashlight and cast about on the ground. I was sure they'd taken it with them. It's what I would have done, in their place.

But they hadn't. It was lying right there on the ALU's baseplate, probably knocked off when one of the guards decided to rest his fat ass on the tank. I fumbled it in place between the tank and my chest valve, and turned the release valve hard.

I make my living with words. I respect them. I always want to use the proper one, so I searched a long time for the right one to describe how that first rush of cooling air felt, and I concluded nobody's made up a word for that yet. Think of the greatest pleasure you ever experienced, and use whatever word you'd use to describe that. An orgasm was a pale thing beside it.

Why hadn't they taken the connector hose? The answer, when I eventually learned it, was simple, and typical of the Big Glitch. They hadn't known I needed it.

The cops and soldiers who had invaded Heinlein Town hadn't been told much about anything. They hadn't been led to expect armed resistance. They knew next to nothing about the nature of or limitations to null-suit technology. They surely hadn't been told there were two groups, working at cross purposes to the extent that one group would ensure the destruction of the other. All this affected their tactics terribly. A lot of people lived because of this confusion, and I was one of them. I'd like to take credit for my own survival-and not everything I did was stupid-but the fact is that I had Winston, and I had a lot of luck, and the luck was mostly generated by their ignorance and poor generalship.

I had vaguely realized some of this by the time I made my way from the ALU and to a branching corridor I thought would take me to a different surface exit. I didn't know what good it would do me, but it was worthwhile to keep it in mind.

Once on the surface again, I called the Nipple and again got a busy signal, all the time keeping my eyes open for more of the bad guys. I was hoping they were all up atop the junk, possibly stumbling around and breaking legs, heads, and other important body parts. I wished Callie were there; she'd have put a hex on them.

Callie? Well, what the hell. I had to dredge the number up from the further reaches of my memory, and it did no good at all. Not even a busy signal. Nothing but dead air.

Then I remembered the top code. Why did it take me so long? I think it was because Walter really had impressed it on me that the code was not to be used at all, that it existed as an unachievable level of dire perfection. A story justifying the use of the top code would need headlines that would made 72-point type seem like fine print. The other reason is that I had never thought of what was happening to me as a story.

I didn't really expect much from it, to tell the truth. I'd been using my normal access code to the Nipple, and that should have gotten through any conceivable log-jam of calls and directly into Walter's office. So far it had yielded only busy signals. But I punched in the code anyway, and Walter said:

"Don't tell me where you are, Hildy. Hang up and move as far from your present position as you dare, and then call me back."

"Walter!" I screamed. But the line was already dead.

It would be nice to report that I immediately did as he said, that I wasted no time, that I continued to show the courageous resolve that had been my trademark since the first shots were fired. By that I mean that I hadn't cried to that point. I did now. I wept helplessly, like a baby.

Don't try this in you null-suit, when you get one. You don't breathe, so your lungs just sort of spasm. It's enough to make your ears pop. Crying also throws the regulator mechanism out of whack, so that I wasted ten minutes' oxygen in three minutes of hysterics. Trust Mister V.M. Smith not to have reckoned with emotional outbursts when he laid out the parameters.

I had cleverly retained the connector hose to the air tank, so I made my way back there and filled up again. If only I could find a loose, portable tank I'd be able to strike off across the surface. Hell, if it was too big to carry I could drag it. Did I hear someone mention the dead soldier and his suit? Great idea, but my uncanny accuracy with the machine gun had damaged one of the hose fittings. I checked when I borrowed the flashlight, and again-because I needed the air, and who knows, maybe I'd been mistaken-when I salvaged the radio. Libby could probably have fudged some sort of adaptor from the junk all around me, but considering the pressure in that tank I'd sooner have kissed a rattlesnake.

These are the thoughts that run through your mind in the exhausted aftermath of a crying jag. It felt good to have done it, like crying usually does. It swept away the building sense of panic and let me concentrate on the things that needed to be done, let me ignore the impossibility of my position, and enabled me to concentrate on the two things I had going for me, like chanting a mantra: my own brain, which, no matter how much evidence I may have adduced to the contrary, was actually pretty good; and Walter's ability to get things done, which was very good.

I actually found myself feeling cheerful as I reached the egress again and scanned the surface for enemies. Not finding any made me positively giddy. Move from your present position, Walter had said. As far as you dare.

I moved out of the maze and dashed across a short strip of sunlight and into the shadow of the Heinlein.

"Hello, Walter?"

"Tell me what you know, Hildy, and make it march."

"I'm in big trouble here, Wal-"

"I know that, Hildy. Tell me what I don't know. What happened?"

So I started in on a condensed history of me and the Heinleiners, and Walter promptly interrupted me again. He knew about them, he said. What else? Well, the CC was up to something horrible, I said, and he said he knew that, too.

"Assume I know everything you know except what happened to you today, Hildy," he said. "Tell me about today. Tell me about the last hour. Just the important parts. But don't mention specific names or places."

Put that way, it didn't take long. I told him in less than a hundred words, and could have done it in one: "Help!"

"How much air do you have?" he asked.

"About fifteen minutes."

"Better than I thought. We have to set up a rendezvous, without mentioning place names. Any ideas?"

"Maybe. Do you know the biggest white elephant on Luna?"

"… yeeeesss. Are you near the trunk or the tail?"

"Trunk."

"All right. The last poker game we played, if the high card in my hand was a King, start walking north. If it was a Queen, east. Jack, south. Got it?"

"Yeah." East it would be.

"Walk for ten minutes and stop. I'll be there."

With anyone else I'd have wasted another minute pointing out that only left me a margin of five minutes and no hope at all of getting back. With Walter I just said, "So will I." Walter has many despicable qualities, but when he says he'll do something, he'll do it.

I'd have had to move soon, anyway. As we were talking I'd spotted two of the enemy moving across the plain in big, loping strides. They were coming from the north, so I hefted the radio and tossed it toward the southeast. They immediately altered direction to follow it.

Here came the hard part. I watched them pass in front of me. Even in a regular suit I'd have been hard to spot in the shadows. But now I started walking eastwards, and in a moment I stepped out into the bright sunshine. I had to keep reminding myself how hard Gretel had been to spot when I'd first encountered her. I'd never felt so naked. I kept an eye on the soldiers, and when they reached the spot where the radio had fallen to the ground I froze, and watched as they scanned the horizon.

I didn't stay frozen long, as I quickly spotted four more people coming from various directions. It was one of the hardest things I ever did, but I started walking again before any of them could get too close.

With each step I thought of a dozen more ways they could find me and catch me. A simple radar unit would probably suffice. I'm not much at physics, but I supposed the null-suit would throw back a strong signal.

They must not have had one, because before long I was far enough away that I couldn't pick any of them out from the ground glare, and if I couldn't see them they sure as hell couldn't see me.

At the nine-minute point a bright silver jumper swooped silently over my head, not ten meters high, and I'd have jumped out of my socks if I'd had any on. It turned, and I saw the big double-n Nipple logo blazoned on its side and it was a sweet sight indeed.

The driver flew a big oval at the right distance from the Heinlein, which was almost out of sight by then, letting me see him because I had to come to him, not the other way around. Then it settled down off to my right, looking like a giant mosquito in carnal embrace with a bedstead. I started to run.

He must have had some sort of sensor on the ladder, because when I had both feet on it the jumper lifted off. Not the sort of maneuver I'd like to do on a Sunday jaunt, but I could understand his haste. I wrenched the lock door open and cycled it, and stepped inside to the unlikely spectacle of Walter training a machine gun on me.

Ho-hum. I'd had so many weapons pointed at me in the last few hours that the sight-which would have given me pause a year ago, say at contract re-negotiation time-barely registered. I experienced something I'd noticed before at the end of times of great stress: I wanted to go to sleep.

"Put that thing away, Walter," I said. "If you fire it you'd probably kill us both."

"This is a reinforced pressure hull," he said, and the gun didn't waver. "Turn that suit off first."

"I wasn't thinking about decompression," I said. "I was thinking you'd probably shoot yourself in the foot, then get lucky and hit me." But I turned it off, and he looked at my face, glanced down at my naked, outrageously pregnant body, and then looked away. He stowed the weapon and resumed his place in the pilot's seat. I struggled into the seat beside him.

"Pretty eventful day," I said.

"I wish you'd get back to covering the news instead of making it," he said. "What'd you do to get the CC so riled up?"

"That was me? This is all about me?"

"No, but you're a big part of it."

"Tell me what's happening."

"Nobody knows the whole thing yet," he said, and then started telling me the little he knew.

It had begun-back in the normal world-with thousands of elevators stalling between levels. No sooner had emergency crews been dispatched than other things began to go haywire. Soon all the mass media were off the air and Walter had had reports that pressure had been breached in several major cities, and other places had suffered oxygen depletion. There were fires, and riots, and mass confusion. Then, shortly before he got the call from me, the CC had come on most major frequencies with an announcement meant to reassure but oddly unsettling. He said there had been malfunctions, but that they were under control now. ("An obvious lie," Walter told me, almost with relish.) The CC had pledged to do a better job in the future, promised this wouldn't happen again. He'd said he was in control now.

"The first implication I got from that," Walter said, "was that he hadn't been in control for a while, and I want an explanation of that. But the thing that really got me, after I thought about it, was… what kind of control did he mean?"

"I'm not sure I understand."

"Well, obviously he's in control, or he's supposed to be. Of the day-to-day mechanics of Luna. Air, water, transportation. In the sense that he runs those things. And he's got a lot of control in the civil and criminal social sectors. He makes schedules for the government, for instance. He's got a hand in everything. He monitors everything. But in control? I didn't like the sound of it. I still don't."

While I thought that one over something very bright and very fast overtook us, shot by on the left, then tried to hang a right, as if it had changed its mind. It turned into a fireball and we flew right into it. I heard things pinging on the hull, things the size of sand grains.

"What the hell was that?"

"Some of your friends back there. Don't worry, I'm on top of it."

"On top of it…? They're shooting at us!"

"And missing. And we're out of range. And this ship is equipped with the best illegal jamming devices money can buy. I've got tricks I haven't even used yet."

I glanced at him, a big unruly bear of a man, hunched over his manual controls and keeping one eye on an array of devices attached to the dashboard, devices I was sure hadn't come from the factory that built the jumper.

"I might have known you'd have connections with the Heinleiners," I said.

"Connections?" he snorted. "I was on the board of directors of the L5 Society when most of those 'Heinleiners' hadn't even been born yet. My father was there when the keel of that ship was launched. You might say I have connections."

"But you're not one of them."

"Let's say we have some political differences."

He probably thought they were too left-wing. Long ago in our relationship I'd talked a little politics with Walter, as most people did who came to work at the Nipple. Not many had a second conversation. The most charitable word I'd heard used to describe his convictions was "daft." What most people would think of an anarchy Walter would call a social strait-jacket.

"Don't care for Mister Smith?" I asked.

"Great scientist. Too bad he's a socialist."

"And the starship project?"

"It'll get there the day they return to the original plan. Plus about twenty years to rebuild it, tear out all the junk Smith has installed."

"Pretty impressive junk."

"He makes a great spacesuit. He hasn't shown me a star drive."

I decided to leave it at that, because I had no intention of getting into an argument with him, and because I had no way of telling if he was right or wrong.

"Guns, too," I said. "If I'd thought about it, I'd have known you'd be a gun owner."

"All free men are gun owners." No use pointing out to him that I'd been un-free most of my life, and what I'd tried to do with the instrument of my freedom when I finally obtained one. It's another argument you can't win.

"Did you get that one from Liz?"

"She gets her guns from me," he said. "Or she did until recently. She's too far gone in drink now. I don't trust her." He glanced at me. "You shouldn't either."

I decided not to ask him what he knew about that. I hoped that if he had known Liz was selling out the Heinleiners he'd have given them some kind of warning, political differences or not. Or at least that he'd have warned me, given all he seemed to know about my recent activities.

I never did ask him that.

There are a lot of things I might have asked him during the time we raced across the plain, never getting more than fifty meters high. If I'd asked some of them-about how much he knew about what was going on with the CC-it would have saved me a lot of worry later. Actually, it would have just given me different things to worry about, but I firmly believe I do a better job of worrying when I can fret from a position of knowledge. As it was, the sense of relief at being rescued by him was so great that I simply basked in the warmth of my new-found sense of safety.

How was I to know I'd only have ten minutes with him?

He'd been constantly monitoring his instruments, and when one of them chimed he cursed softly and hit the retros. We started to settle to the ground. I'd been about to doze off.

"What's the matter?" I said. "Trouble?"

"Not really. I'd just hoped to get a little closer, that's all. This is where you get off."

"Get off? Gee, Walter, I think I'd rather go on to your place." I'd had a quick glance around. This place, wherever it was, would never make it into 1001 Lunar Sights To See. There was no sign of human habitation. No sign of anything, not even a two-century-old footpath.

"I'd love to have you, Hildy, but you're too hot to handle." He turned in his seat to face me. "Look, baby, it's like this. I got access to a list of a few hundred people the CC is looking for. You're right at the top. From what I've learned, he's very determined to find them. A lot of people have died in the search. I don't know what's going on-some really big glitch-but I do intend to find out… but you can't help me. The only thing I could think of to do is stash you some place where the CC can't find you. You'll have to stay there until all this blows over. It's too dangerous for you on the outside."

I guess I just blew air there for a while. There had been too many changes too quickly. I'd been feeling safe and now the rug was jerked out from under me again.

I'd known the CC was looking for me, but somehow it felt different to hear it from Walter. Walter would never be wrong about a thing like that. And it didn't help to infer from what he'd said that what the CC meant to do when he found me was kill me. Because I knew too much? Because I'd stuck my nose in the wrong place? Because he didn't want to share the super-toothpaste royalties with me anymore? I had no idea, but I wanted to know more, and I meant to, before I got out of Walter's jumper.

Walter, who'd just called me baby. What the hell was that all about?

"What do you want me to do?" I asked. "Just camp out here on the maria? I'm afraid I didn't bring my tent."

He reached behind his seat and started pulling out things and handing them to me. A ten-hour air bottle. A flashlight. A canvas bag that rattled. He slapped a compass into my palm, and opened the air lock door behind us.

"There's some useful stuff in the bag," he said. "I didn't have time to get anymore; this is my own survival gear. Now you've got to go."

"I'm not."

"You are." He sighed, and looked away from me. He looked very old.

"Hildy," he said, "this isn't easy for me, either, but I think it's your only chance. You'll have to trust me because there isn't time to tell you any more and there isn't time for you to panic or act like a child. I wanted to get you closer, but this is probably better." He pointed at the dashboard. "Right now we're invisible, I hope. You get out now, the CC will never figure out where you went. I get you any closer, and it'll be like drawing him a map. You have enough air to get there, but we don't have any more time to talk, because I've got to lift out of here within one more minute."

"Where do you want me to go?"

He told me, and if he'd said anything else I don't think I'd have gotten out of the jumper. But it made just enough sense, and he sounded just scared enough. Hell, Walter sounding scared at all was a new one on me, and did not fail to make an impression.

But I was still balanced there on the edge, wondering if he'd force me if I simply stayed put, when he grabbed me by the neck and pulled me over to him and kissed me on the cheek. I was too surprised to struggle.

He let me go immediately, and turned away.

"You… ah, are you due soon? Will that be-"

"Another ten days yet," I told him. "It won't be a problem." Or it shouldn't be, unless… "Unless you think I'll have to hide for-"

"I don't think so," he said. "I'll try to contact you in three days. In the meantime, keep your head down. Don't try to contact anyone. Stay a week, if you have to. Stay nine days."

"On the tenth I'm damn sure coming out," I told him.

"I'll have something else by then," he promised. "Now go."

I stepped into the lock, cycled it, felt the null-suit switch itself on. I climbed down onto the plain and watched the jumper leap into the sky and dwindle toward the horizon.

Before I even strapped on the backpack bottle I reached up and felt Walter's tear still warm on my cheek.

I'm not sure how far Walter dropped me from my final destination. Something on the order of twenty, thirty kilometers. I didn't think it would be a problem.

I covered the first ten in the long, side-legged stride that Earth-bred leg muscles can produce in Lunar gravity, the gait that, except for bicycles, is the most energy-efficient transportation known to man. And if you think you can eat up the distance that way in an ordinary pressure suit, try it in a null-suit. You practically fly.

But don't do it pregnant. Before long my tummy started feeling funny, and I slowed down, doing nervous calculations about oxygen and distance as I began to get into territory that looked familiar to me.

I reached the old air lock with three hours of spare air, dead on my feet. I think I actually catnapped a few times there, waking up only as I was about to fall on my face, consulting the compass as I wiped my eyes, getting back on the proper bearing. Luckily, by the time that started happening I was on ground I knew.

I had a bad moment when the lock didn't seem to want to cycle for me. Could it be this place had been sealed off in the last seventy years? It had been that long since I used it. Of course, there were other locks I knew in the area, but Walter had said it was too dangerous to use them. But use them I would, rather than die out here on the surface. It was with that thought that the cantankerous old machinery finally engaged and the lock drum rotated. I stepped inside, cycled, and hurried into the elevator, which deposited me in a little security cubicle. I punched the letters M-A-R-I-A-X-X-X. Somewhere not too far away, an old lady would be noting the door was in use. If Walter was right, that information would not be relayed on to the Central Computer.

There's no place like home, I thought, as I stepped into the dimness and familiar rotten odor of a Cretaceous rain forest.

I was in a distant corner of the dino-ranch where I had grown up. Callie's ranch. It had always been hers, the Double-C Bar brand, never a thought of the C amp;M or anything like that. Not that I'd wanted it, but it would have been nice to feel like more than a hired hand. Now let's not get into that.

But this particular corner-and I wondered how Walter had known this-I'd always thought of as Maria's Cavern. There really was a cave in it, just a few hundred meters from where I now stood, and I had made it into my playhouse when I was very young and still known as Maria Cabrini.

So it was to Maria's Cavern I now went, and in Maria's Cavern that I desultorily scraped together a mat of dry moss to lie down on, and on the canvas bag Walter had given me that I intended to rest my head and sleep for at least a week, only I never saw if my head actually made it there because I fell asleep as my head was on the way down.

I actually did get about three hours' sleep. I know, because I checked the clock in my head-up display when the first labor pain woke me up.