Helium3 - 1 Crater (5 page)

Petro also saw the new danger. “Crater, maybe it's best to just let old Thumper Tom go.”

Crater wasn't good at making decisions—he was terrible, in fact—but he knew if Thumper Tom was to have a chance, he needed to make one now. He got off his fastbug and ran to one of the shuttles. After hesitating, Petro ran to the other one, yelling, “What's your plan?”

Crater explained the required force vectors as he and Petro cranked the shuttles up and drove them onto the slope behind the overturned scraper. Once in position, they put their winches in neutral, got off and pulled the cables to the scraper, hooked the cables onto its lifting pintles, then ran back to their respective shuttles and wound in the cables, tilting the scraper up and off Thumper Tom. Only his helmet could be seen protruding from a big pile of dust.

Petro allowed a sigh. “I guess I'll dig him out.” He climbed off the shuttle with a shovel in his hand. “Just keep your eye on that roller. Sing out if it moves an inch. Do you hear me, Crater? An
inch
!”

“I hear you, brother,” Crater said, his mind swirling with worries, which for some reason made him add, “Don't worry.”

“Yeah, right,” Petro retorted as he loped to the scraper.

Crater looked across the valley and saw two green suits at the perimeter of the scrape. Someone had called the paramedics but they didn't seem to be in any hurry to help. Likely they had spotted that big new roller too. In the distance, he saw a spray of dust. It was probably the blue banger's fastbug but she still had a way to go before arrival. It was then the gillie announced:
Roller out
.

“Roller out, Petro!” Crater yelled, transmitted instantly by the gillie.

Down the massive roller came. It slammed into the scraper, the impact snapping the cables. Crater ducked as one of them came flying back at him like a giant whip. When he looked up, he saw that Petro had managed to pull Thumper Tom into the clear without being killed. The roller, however, careened on.

Roller will impact western maintenance shed in approximately twenty-one seconds
, the gillie said.
Breach probable
.

The roller was trundling mercilessly across the scrape as if aimed at the western maintenance shed, a big mooncrete hangar that sat partially above the surface on the west side of Moontown. A breach in the shed meant the unsuited mechanics inside would die horrible deaths, their bodies swollen, their insides turned to pink mush.

Crater's instinct took over. He wound the remnant of the cable onto the shuttle winch while simultaneously pushing the accelerator pedal to the floor. He set a course at an angle to intercept the roller, catching vacuum as his shuttle leapt across a narrow, collapsed lava tube. Empty shuttles were fast.

Crater had an angle on the roller so he caught up to it, did a hard steer in front, and jumped off just as it slammed into the shuttle. When Crater looked up from the dust, he saw the roller ricocheting off in a harmless direction. He also saw the shuttle was smashed. The maintenance shed was untouched.

Suit integrity confirmed
, the gillie said, making an automatic report of Crater's biolastic material.

“What about Thumper Tom and Petro?”

Petro nominal. Thumper Tom fifteen seconds to suit failure
.

Crater cringed. “Petro, where are you?” he called, fearful of the answer.

“At the entry hatch,” Petro replied, his tone so calm it sounded as if he were about to yawn. “Paramedics are with me.

Thumper Tom's going to be okay.”

“You saved him!” Crater cried, then let his breath out for what seemed like the first time in hours.

We
saved him,” Petro answered. “And you saved the “orangutans and the entire maintenance shed. We're heroes, Crater!”

“No, we're not,” Crater answered miserably. “We're in trouble. We drove the shuttles without permits.”

Petro laughed and said, “If you could sell simple, brother, you'd be a rich man.”

Crater didn't know how to respond to that, so he didn't.

In any case, it was about then that the blue banger arrived.

“What happened?” she demanded as the other miners climbed up the slope to where Crater was standing. They gawked at the shuttle, which lay smashed in the dust, and the gigantic roller that had finally stopped a mile away. When no team leader seemed to be able to find his or her voice, Montana Bill told the blue banger how the devils had accidentally blown loose not one but two rollers, how one of them had rolled over Thumper Tom's scraper, how Crater and Petro had taken the shuttles and pulled the scraper off Tom, how Petro had dragged the scraper driver clear, and then how Crater had knocked aside the big roller by sacrificing the shuttle, concluding with, “That dang roller would have surely killed every worker in the maintenance shed, Mrs. Hook, and that's a fact.”

Mrs. Hook looked at Crater, then at the devil leader, a man who called himself Boston Blackie. “What do you have to say for yourself, Blackie?” she demanded.

Blackie wasn't about to take the blame. “Third shift probed that area, ma'am, and gave me and my team the all clear. They must have missed those blamed old things. It happens.”

Mrs. Hook turned to Crater as Petro came walking up. “I told you two to stay put,” she growled, but before they could reply, she waved their potential excuses away. “You two boys did a brave thing. Don't expect a medal for what you did but, just for the record, I'm grateful.”

Mrs. Hook warily eyed the flock of white-suited engineers and managers emerging from the airlock and coming in her direction, then said, “All right, people, get back to work. I'll whistle up a float scraper and shuttle and we'll sort this all out later.”

She subsequently did her whistling, then reported to the ghosts as the engineers and managers were called, while her miners, including Crater and Petro, went back to work. Crater tried not to think about how much trouble he and Petro were in for driving the shuttles without permission and destroying one of them too.

Astonishingly, the shift met the production schedule, but just barely; and after it was over, Montana Bill prayed, beseeching the Big Miner to look after Thumper Tom in the company clinic, and wrapped it up with, “It was a scrag shift, Lord, but we got the Colonel his heel-3 anyway. Thank you at least for that. Amen.”

“Amen,” the miners chorused, then headed to the showers.

:::
FOUR

E
very so often, a burst of deadly radiation would escape from the sun and roar across the inner solar system and scour everything in its path. If you were lucky enough to live on a nice, fat planet with an atmosphere and an intact magnetic field, it was not much of a problem. But if you lived on the Earth's moon, which had neither one, you had a big problem. To avoid the deadly results of these outbursts, Moontown's people lived in tubes made of mooncrete set twenty feet underground. Scraper's Row was the largest of the tube neighborhoods and contained seventy-three tubes of residential dimensions.

In the neighborhood called Medaris Acres, eight residencesize tubes were set aside for Colonel Medaris's personal use. Another sixteen tubes in Medaris Acres were assigned to the chief engineer, the doctor, the dentist, the sheriff, and the preacher. Three more residential tubes were set aside for Very Important Visitors.

The “downtown” or administrative tubes, a cluster of twenty business-size tubes, held the company store, the medical clinic, the sheriff's office, the chapel, the theater, the library, the art center, and the engineering and business offices. Connected to the downtown tubes were observation towers where, during the two weeks of the long shadow, the people of Moontown could see a sky so filled with stars it was as if God Himself had placed there an infinite ocean of diamonds for them to admire.

The Dust Palace Bachelor's Hotel contained a cluster of sixteen tubes. Petro's mother, known as Queen Bess or, informally, Q-Bess, ran the Dust Palace, and Crater and Petro shared one of its tubes. Single miners occupied the other tubes, sometimes with hot bunks, meaning as soon as one man got out of it, another took his place. Nearby was a tube cluster that contained the Earthrise Bar & Grill, a place where heel-3 miners were allowed to let off a little steam as long as they didn't get too drunk or too loud or try to kill each other. Petro organized his poker games there but his reputation and ability at cards was such, few Moontown gamblers would play with him anymore, a frustrating situation for the royal boy.

Extra-large tubes were placed north of town for the foundry and processing plants where titanium, platinum, silicon, and iron, byproducts of heel-3 production, were processed. There was also a tank farm where heel-3 canisters were stored and readied for shipment, and two big maintenance sheds, one each on the east side and the west side of town. Beneath the town were the grease traps and bioseptic tanks that processed the inevitable wastes of human habitation.

Happy to be alive, the shift that had just survived the two rollers first entered an airlock where they threw off their dustcovered coveralls and boots, and the dustlock crew—dusties as they were known—took them to be washed and cleaned. The miners next passed through a hatch where there were showers that removed the biolastic sheaths. Helmets, along with bio-girdles, were handed over to the dusties for sanitizing. After donning filter masks, the miners moved to the next dustlock and the water showers that removed all vestiges of dust and the biolastic material, and finally through a series of blowers into the changing lock where they changed into their tube clothes.

In the Dust Palace cafeteria, Crater and Petro and the other first-shift bachelors got their food trays and pushed them down the tubular rack. After a day of being enveloped within the pungent odor of bioprocessed air, the cafeteria's aroma of hot food was delicious to their noses, and their stomachs growled in anticipation. Crater took the soup, the broccoli, the beans, the cornbread, and also loaded up on the carrot cake Q-Bess was famous for. Petro chose entirely brown food: fried potatoes, fried okra, fried shrimp, and fried bread. Of course, none of it was real, being products of the biovats, but it tasted real or at least as real as Q-Bess and her cooks could make it. The spoons and forks Crater and Petro were handed by a cafeteria waiter were moontype, which meant they were six times heavier than they needed to be, giving them the same feel and heft as similar utensils on Earth. That, however, wasn't the reason for their design.

When the pioneer owners founded the heel-3 towns, they were surprised when the young, healthy miners they imported to work the scrapes became sick and feeble after only a few years. Medical examinations revealed their bones had turned brittle, their muscles flabby, and their hearts weak. Living and working in a world that had but one-sixth the gravity of Earth caused the human body to deteriorate in almost every way possible because muscles, bones, and hearts—evolved to work efficiently on Earth—tended to relax in the light gravity of the moon. The solution was to make things much heavier than necessary. Steel shot was the most prevalent material added to increase mass, but molybdenum and titanium slugs were also used because they were byproducts of heel-3 production. Every hatch in most mining towns was moontype, which meant they were designed to require a hefty pull or push. Miners and their families were also encouraged to walk, do push-ups and sit-ups, and participate in weight training. Every child born on the moon grew up lifting weights. The strategy worked. The muscles, bones, and hearts of Moonians, for the most part, were as healthy as if they'd grown up on Earth.

Q-Bess came over and sat on the bench opposite her boys, who were shoveling in their food as fast as good manners would allow. She knew everything that had happened on their scrape and allowed herself a moment of happiness that they were alive.

Crater was such a handsome youngster, and his face reflected sweetness. Petro, she had to admit to herself, was a bit fox-faced and his eyes a little shifty. Unfortunately, the royal Mountbatten-Windsor lineage had more than a few men with that particular aspect although it didn't hamper their intelligence. Or, she thought ruefully, keep them from being attractive to the ladies. Her grandfather, the last king of the United Kingdom, had been a brilliant ruler, but it was a woman who'd betrayed him and brought down the monarchy. Since then, the royal family had been on the run. Eventually, she had landed in Canadalaska where she had married Troyce Jones, a commoner and an engineer hired by the Colonel to help plan Moontown. Petro was their beloved son and, since there were no other males left in the family line, heir to the throne. When Jones had died of dust poisoning, Q-Bess, recognizing there was little or no hope of restoring the monarchy, had taken over the management of the bachelor's quarters and raised Petro as just another Moontown boy.