Helium3 - 1 Crater (19 page)

Crater found himself admiring the people in those extinct countries who'd sent such machines to the moon, but he also felt sorry for the ones who'd sent along this particular robot.

From his reading of the old USSR, those scientists and engineers might have been shipped off to Siberia which, in those days, was a terrible place. It was still no place to take a vacation, or so Crater had heard.

Crater began to think about time. Time was a peculiar thing and no one had a real grasp on it. Crater had a fair understanding of quantum physics. Albert Einstein, the physicist who had first explained the relationship between time and space, said the only reason time existed was so everything didn't happen at once. During a sermon, the Moontown preacher had once quoted a little piece of Scripture from Ecclesiastes:
He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end
.

Crater sat companionably with the old robot, thinking about time, until he decided it was time for him to go. He was confident he could catch up with the convoy, but not if he kept taking detours.

As he walked back, retracing his path, he came across a set of tracks he hadn't noticed before that crossed his own.

He studied them and concluded he'd never seen such strange tracks. Each was the shape of a U and made deep, gouging marks in the dust. “Gillie, what made those tracks?” he asked.

Unknown
, the gillie said.

Crater was astonished that he'd stumped the gillie. Maybe, he thought, he'd asked the question wrong. He considered a better question, but never got the chance to ask it because that was when the creature that had made the tracks appeared. It was the strangest thing Crater had ever seen: a monster with the head of a dragon, wild eyes and flaring nostrils, and four stout legs that had heavy, thick feet if such strangely shaped things could be called feet at all. The awful creature advanced on Crater, shaking its terrible head, each heavy step producing an angry spurt of dust and leaving behind the strange U-shaped tracks.

:::
TWENTY

L
ooking back on it, Crater would wonder why he hadn't used the rifle on the monster. Maybe it was for the same reason he hadn't been able to shoot the crowhopper. He was soft, that's what Captain Teller had said, and Crater supposed he was right.

When the monster came for him, Crater took off. He ran through a field of craters, leaping over the smaller ones, stumbling across the bigger ones, weaving back and forth where he could. But the thing was too powerful and too fast. It came up behind him, then alongside, bumping its thick shoulder into his, a shoulder that seemed dense as mooncrete and crackling with energy. Crater fell hard into the dust. He scrambled to his feet, started to run again, but then stopped because the creature was standing in his path.

It appeared to be studying him as if to decide what part of Crater to eat first. Crater took a step to the right and the monster matched him with a sidestep in that direction. Crater took a step to the left and it matched his movement again. Since it appeared to be content for the moment, not quite ready to race up and crush the life out of him with its pile-driver feet, Crater was about to ask the gillie what the monster was when the gillie answered on its own.

Gillie believes it is the Earthian animal known as a horse
.

Crater, being well educated by Q-Bess and the denizens of the Dust Palace, knew very well what a horse was and what one looked like, and this wasn't it. Jockey Jill, a diminutive but intense woman, had even taught him about horses in some detail. Looking closer, however, he saw that the creature could indeed be a horse except it was wearing some sort of suit and a helmet. But what was a horse doing on the moon in such a rig?

Crater simply could not accept it, even though the evidence was standing in front of him.

The gillie said,
Let it approach you
.

“How do you know about horses?”

Gillie listens to Jockey Jill
.

Crater waited and, sure enough, the horse took a step toward him, stopped, then took another. It kept raising its head, as if to sniff the air, but of course there was no air except what was in its helmet.

Finally, the great head pushed within arm's reach of Crater.

Touch its nose
.

Crater touched the front of the horse's helmet. He didn't know if the horse was male or female but he said, “Good boy.

That's a good boy.”

The gillie had apparently searched for the horse's comm channel and found it as the horse made a peculiar nickering sound that Crater had never heard or imagined that any animal could make. “Is that sound normal?” he asked, worrying now that the horse might be sick.

Normal for this species
.

Crater noticed something protruding from the thick, armored material on the horse's neck and was startled to see it was a flechette. It had struck at an angle so had been captured by the armor. There was another flechette, Crater could see now, on its flank, similarly captured by the armor. Crater plucked the one from the neck cover, then pulled out the one from the flank. The one from the flank had blood on it, and the horse shuddered when he pulled it free. The flechette had penetrated into the horse, but its suit still hadn't leaked.

“You have a biolastic suit, don't you?” Crater asked. Crater inspected the flank wound and saw no blood leaking out. To repair the sheath that quickly, Crater supposed the biolastic material on the horse was of a superior type.

Then Crater saw a vidpin attached to the armor. He pushed it and read its message.

PEGASUS
Born Stallion Aug. 14, 2116
STEEL PRIZE STABLES
Madison, Alabama
Warhorse: Alabama Irregulars
Silver Moon Medal with four Red Bud Clusters
Eight Campaign Medals including
Battle of Nashville
Battle of Western Kentucky
Battle of Atlanta
Corporate owner: Deep Space Suits, Inc.
Manager: Major Ellis Justice, late of the Ala. Irregs.

“Pegasus.” Crater tried the name on and concluded it was a good one for this big horse, even though it had no wings.

The horse looked back along its track. Nickering softly, it started walking away, and, curious, Crater followed it. The horse walked along the path it had made and kept walking with Crater behind, his rifle at the ready. The crowhoppers that had shot the horse might be nearby. The horse's owner had to be nearby too, and Crater wondered if it might be a lunatic who was so much a
real
lunatic that he had brought a horse from Earth, built it a suit, and kept it. In that case, he would have to be a very wealthy lunatic.

The horse was walking faster than Crater could keep up.

It looked back once, then stopped. Crater walked up next to it and inspected the suit it was wearing. Built into it, unless Crater was mistaking its purpose, was what he thought was called a saddle. Horses had been used by humans for centuries for transportation. He'd seen the old vidpix of American cowboys riding them. With these images in mind, and knowing he could not keep up with the horse, Crater climbed upon the lip of a small crater and stuck his leg over the horse's back, then slipped into its saddle while tucking his rifle beneath elastic straps sewn to the fabric, apparently for such utility.

The fabric over the armor automatically curled around Crater's boots. The horse took a few steps forward, then looked over its shoulder again and waited patiently until Crater saw a button on the saddle. He pushed it, and two straps were unreeled from the nose of the horse's helmet. Crater reached over the horse's neck and took the straps in his hands. There was a snap buckle to join them together, which Crater did, creating what he recalled were called reins. “So I can steer you, right?” he asked the horse, which pondered him with one of its big brown eyes, then turned and began, without warning, to run.

And how it ran!

Crater hung on and it was glorious. Pegasus ran through the crater field and then began to stretch its legs, soaring with every step in great bounds. Ten yards, twenty, fifty, and more!

Crater reckoned Pegasus was going faster than even his fastbug could go. The dust below became a blur but Crater was not afraid. He loved the sensation of being aboard a beast that ran with such fluid grace. The gillie whooped and yodeled as if it were a cowboy from an old western movie. This made Crater laugh, and he whooped and yodeled himself.

The horse ran on, leaping over great craters, up a small hill, launching itself and soaring so high, it was almost as if it were flying. Pegasus, the flying horse in Greek mythology, brought thunder and lightning from Olympus, and everywhere Pegasus's hoof struck the earth, water was supposed to have sprung forth. Crater wished that might also be true on the moon, and maybe it was true because this was truly a miraculous creature. “Fly on, Pegasus!” Crater cried with joy and abandon. He had never, in the entire history of his life, felt such freedom as on the back of the great horse as it galloped and flew.

Crater saw the dustway and a big truck parked on it.

He pulled gently back on the reins, and Pegasus slowed and stopped. Crater got off and led the horse into some rocks for cover. He wanted to study the truck before going any closer.

The truck was a van of some type, designed perhaps to carry Pegasus. Crater activated the zoom setting on his helmet binoculars. His heart sinking, he saw two crowhoppers and their spiderwalkers. He also saw a man lying in the dust, apparently the driver of the truck. He was spread-eagled, his hands and feet tied to stakes driven into the regolith. Crater saw the man's bearded face was twisted in pain. Crater also saw a line of tracks leading off the dustway and realized they were hoof marks. A ramp from the big truck in the back was where Pegasus had come down and apparently gotten away from the crowhoppers.

Crater yelped involuntarily when the crowhopper shot the man tied down.

“Check his suit, gillie,” Crater ordered.

It was a tough order. They were miles away, and the gillie did not know the freq the bearded man's suit was transmitting on, or if it was transmitting at all. A long minute passed before the gillie said,
Five flechettes in the suit, none leaking
.

“A biolastic suit, for certain,” Crater muttered. “But a better one than I've ever heard of. Five flechettes penetrated a suit and none leaking? Amazing.” It was also amazing that a man with five flechettes in him was still alive. Apparently, the crowhoppers were shooting the man with their rifles set to their weakest setting. Crater supposed it was a type of torture.

The gillie transmitted the signal from the man on the ground. “Is that the worst ye can do, ye ugly creatures? Why, that ain't nothin' to me. I'm a moon mountain man, by Joe!

I can shoot straighter, jump higher, cuss worser, fight longer, smell badder, and spit farther than any man on the moon! My maw were a collapsed lava tube and my pap were a volcano!

My brother's the dust and my sis is a roller! My wife's a crater, my kids are Helium-3!”

“Shut up, old man,” one of the crowhoppers croaked. “Nothing you say is going to help you. You will die today.”

“Death ain't nothin',” the tied-up man retorted. “It's how you die. Watch me, boys, and learn somethin'!”

Pegasus walked around the rocks and looked at Crater.

“What?” Crater demanded. “We can't do anything about this.”

The horse kept looking at him until Crater felt ashamed.

He checked his rifle, clicked it to its lowest setting, rethought that, clicked it to its middle setting, then climbed aboard Pegasus.

Crater didn't know why, but the horse made him feel not only brave but almost foolhardy. He faced two crowhoppers, bioengineered Earthian killers. What would the outcome be?

Surely disaster.

Yet he was not afraid.

Crater clamped his legs tight against the sides of the great horse, the material flowing around his legs, steadying him.

“What kind of horse are you?” he asked. Then he knew the answer. It was on the vidpin, after all. Pegasus was a warhorse.

“All right, boy,” Crater whispered. “Let's ride.”

The horse made a shrill sound—an angry whinny. Then Pegasus flew down the hill in great leaps, reaching the crowhoppers in what seemed to Crater no more than a few bounds.

Crater rose up in the saddle and pulled the trigger of his rifle, and one of the crowhoppers fell. The other crowhopper raised his rifle to fire, but Pegasus soared over him, circled behind the truck, then turned and, though Crater scarcely believed it was possible, leapt completely over it. Caught by surprise, the crowhopper fell beneath Pegasus's hooves, never to rise again.

Crater jumped off the horse and ran over to the bearded man. He knelt beside him. “Sir, are you all right?” Crater asked, though five flechettes sticking in him told their own story.

When Pegasus nickered, the man's eyes fluttered and then opened. “Ah, Pegasus,” he said. “You came back to save me, eh?

Good horse.” The man smiled at Crater. “And who are you, boy?”

Crater untied the man and told him who he was and why he was there. The man sat up unsteadily while Crater held his shoulders, giving him support. The flechettes had no doubt bled him. “I'm Ellis Justice,” he said. “And this is my horse, Pegasus. I work for the Deep Space Suit Company. My job is to visit heel-3 towns and demonstrate our wares, which are suits of all kinds, space suits, dust suits, fabric ECP suits, and the latest BCP suits. Pegasus is along to demonstrate the amazing capabilities of our new biolastic material. He also gives rides to the children of these places. Or at least that's what we did until these ruffians killed me. Who are they?”