The Precipice

SPACE STATION GALILEO

They were gaining on her.

Still wearing the spacesuit, Pancho Lane zipped weightlessly through the lab module, startling the Japanese technicians as she propelled herself headlong down its central aisle with a flick of her strong hands against the lab equipment every few meters. Behind her she could hear the men yelling angrily. It any of those dipbrains have the smarts to suit up and go EVA to head me off, she thought, I’m toast.

It had started out as a game, a challenge. Which of the pilots aboard the station could breathe vacuum the longest? There were six Astro Corporation rocket jockeys waiting for transport back to Selene City: four guys, Pancho herself, and the new girl, Amanda Cunningham.

Pancho had egged them on, of course. That was part of the sting. They’d all been hanging around the galley, literally floating when they didn’t anchor themselves down with the footloops fastened to the floor around the table and its single pipestem-slim leg. The conversation had gotten around to vacuum breathing: how long can you hold your breath in space without damaging yourself? “The record is four minutes,” one of the guys had claimed. “Harry Kirschbaum.”

“Harry Kirschbaum? Who the hell is he? I never heard of him.”

“He died young.” They all had laughed.

Amanda, who had just joined the team fresh from tech school in London, had the face of an angelic schoolgirl with soft curly blonde hair and big innocent blue eyes; but her curvaceous figure had all the men panting. She said, “I had to readjust my helmet once, during a school exercise in the vacuum tank.”

“How long did that take?”

She shrugged, and even Pancho noticed the way it made her coveralls jiggle. “Ten seconds, perhaps. Fifteen.”

Pancho didn’t like Amanda. She was a little tease who affected an upperclass British accent. One look at her and the men forgot about Pancho, which was a shame because a couple of the guys were really nice.

Pancho was lean and stringy, with the long slim legs of her African heritage. Her skin was no darker than a good tan would produce back in west Texas, but her face was just plain ordinary, with what she considered a lantern jaw and squinty little commonplace brown eyes. She always kept her hair cut so short that the rumor had gone around that she was a lesbian. Not true. But she had a man’s strength in her long, muscled arms and legs, and she never let a man beat her in anything — unless she wanted to.

The transfer buggy that was slated to take them all back to Selene was running late. Cracked nozzle on one of the thrusters, and the last thing the flight controllers wanted was a derelict transfer vehicle carrying six rocket jocks; they would be rebuilding the buggy forty-five ways from Sunday while they coasted Moonward. So the six of them waited in the galley and talked about vacuum breathing. One of the guys claimed he’d sucked vacuum for a full minute. “That explains your IQ,” said his buddy.

“Nobody’s made it for a full minute.”

“Sixty seconds,” the man maintained stubbornly.

“Your lungs would explode.”

“I’m telling you, sixty seconds. On the dot.”

“No damage?”

He hesitated, suddenly shamefaced.

“Well?”

With an attempt at a careless shrug, he admitted, “Left lung collapsed.”

They snickered at him.

“I could prob’ly do it for sixty seconds,” Pancho announced. “You?” The man nearest her guffawed. “Now, Mandy here, she’s got the lung capacity for it.”

Amanda smiled shyly. But when she inhaled they all noticed it.

Pancho hid her anger at their ape-man attitude. “Ninety seconds,” she said flatly.

“Ninety seconds? Impossible!”

“You willin’ to bet on that?” Pancho asked.

“Nobody can stand vacuum for ninety seconds. It’d blow your eyeballs out.”

Pancho smiled toothily. “How much money are you ready to put against it?”

“How can we collect off you after you’re dead?”

“Or brain-damaged.”

“She’s already brain-damaged if she thinks she can suck vacuum for ninety seconds.”

“I’ll put my money in an escrow account for the five of you to withdraw in case of my death or incapacitation,” Pancho said calmly.

“Yeah, sure.”

Pointing to the phone on the wall, next to the sandwich dispenser, she said, “Electronic funds transfer. Takes all of two minutes to set up.” They fell silent.

“How much?” Pancho said, watching their eyes.

“A week’s pay,” snapped one of the men.

“A month’s pay,” Pancho said.

“A whole month?”

“Why not? You’re so freakin’ sure I can’t do it, why not bet a month’s pay? I’ll put five months worth of mine in the escrow account, so you’ll each be covered.”

“A month’s pay.”

In the end they had agreed to it. Pancho knew that they figured she’d chicken out after twenty-thirty seconds and they’d have her money without her killing herself. She figured otherwise.

So she used the galley phone to call her bank in Lubbock. A few taps on the phone’s touchtone keypad and she had set up a new account and dumped five months’ pay into it. All five of the other jocks watched the phone’s tiny screen to make certain Pancho wasn’t playing any tricks.

Then each of them in turn called their banks and deposited a month’s pay into Pancho’s new account. Pancho listened to the singsong beeping of the phone as she laid her plans for the coming challenge.

Pancho suggested they use the airlock down at the far end of the maintenance module. “We don’t want some science geek poppin’ in on us and gettin’ so torqued he punches the safety alarm,” she said.

They all agreed easily. So they floated through two lab modules and the shabbylooking habitat module where the long-term researchers were housed and finally made it to the cavernous maintenance unit. There, by the airlock, Pancho chose a spacesuit from the half-dozen standard models lined up against the bulkhead, size large because of her height. She quickly wriggled into it. They even helped her put on the boots and check out the suit’s systems.

Pancho pulled the helmet over her head and clicked the neck seal shut.

“Okay,” she said, through the helmet’s open visor. “Who’s gonna time me?”

“I will,” said one of the guys, raising his forearm to show an elaborate digital wristwatch.

“You go in the lock,” said the man beside him, “pump it down and open the outside hatch.”

“And you watch me through the port,” Pancho said, tapping the thick round window on the airlock’s inner hatch with gloved knuckles. “Check. When I say go, you open your visor.”

“And I’ll time you,” said the guy with the fancy wristwatch.

Pancho nodded inside the helmet.

Amanda looked concerned. “Are you absolutely certain that you want to go through with this? You could kill yourself, Pancho.”

“She can’t back out now!”

“Not unless she wants to forfeit five months’ pay.”

“But seriously,” Amanda said. “I’m wiling to call off the bet. After all-” Pancho reached out and tousled her curly blonde hair. “Don’t sweat it, Mandy.” With that, she stepped through the open airlock hatch and slid down her visor. She waved to them as they swung the hatch shut. She heard the pump start to clatter; the sound quickly dwindled as the air was sucked out of the metal-walled chamber. When the telltale light by the inner hatch turned red, Pancho touched the button that slid the outer hatch open.

For a moment she forgot what she was up to as she drank in the overwhelming beauty of the Earth spread out before her dazzled eyes. Brilliantly bright, intensely blue oceans and enormous sweeps of clouds so white it almost hurt to look upon them. It was glorious, an overwhelming panorama that never failed to make her heart beat faster.

You’ve got work to do, girl, she reminded herself sternly. Turning to the inner hatch, she could see all five of their faces clustered around the little circular port. None of them had the sense to find a radio, Pancho knew, so she gestured to her sealed helmet visor with a gloved finger. They all nodded vigorously and the guy with the fancy wristwatch held it up where Pancho could see it.

The others backed away from the port while the guy stared hard at his wristwatch.

He held up four fingers, then three…

Counting down, Pancho understood.

… two, one. He jabbed a finger like a make-believe pistol at Pancho, the signal that she was to lift her visor now.

Instead, Pancho launched herself out the airlock, into empty space.