Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! (14 page)

So they were all racing around with the blood and stuff still covering them and the cows mooing in distress and Jakob breathing through clenched teeth in double time, and only Hester and Oliver could sit in the car with him and try to tend him, ripping away the pants from a leg that was all cut up. Hester took a hand drill to cauterize the wounds that were bleeding hard, but Jakob shook his head at her, neck muscles bulging out. “Got the big artery inside of the thigh,” he said through his teeth.

Hester hissed. “Come here,” she croaked at Solly and the rest. “Stop that and come here!”

They were in a mass of broken quartz, the fractured clear crystals all pink with oxidation. The robot continued drilling away, the air cylinder hissed, the cows mooed. Jakob's breathing was harsh and somehow all of them were also breathing in the same way, irregularly, too fast; so that as his breathing slowed and calmed, theirs did too. He was lying back in the sleeping car, on a bed of hay, staring up at the fractured sparkling quartz ceiling of their tunnel, as if he could see far into it. “All these different kinds of rock,” he said, his voice filled with wonder and pain. “You see, the moon itself was the world, once upon a time, and the Earth its moon; but there was an impact, and everything changed.”

They cut a small side passage in the quartz and left Jakob there, so that when they filled in their tunnel as they moved on he was left behind, in his own deep crypt. And from then on the moon for them was only his big tomb, rolling through space till the sun itself died, as he had said it someday would.

Oliver got them back on a course, feeling radically uncertain of his navigational calculations now that Jakob was not there to nod over his shoulder to approve them. Dully he gave Naomi and Freeman the coordinates for Selene. “But what will we do when we get there?” Jakob had never actually made that clear. Find the leaders of the city, demand justice for the miners? Kill them? Get to the rockets of the great magnetic rail accelerators, and hijack one to Earth? Try to slip unnoticed into the populace?

“You leave that to us,” Naomi said. “Just get us there.” And he saw a light in Naomi's and Freeman's eyes that hadn't been there before. It reminded him of the thing that had chased him in the dark, the thing that even Jakob hadn't been able to explain; it frightened him.

So he set the course and they tunneled on as fast as they ever had. They never sang and they rarely talked; they threw themselves at the rock, hurt themselves in the effort, returned to attack it more fiercely than before. When he could not stave off sleep Oliver lay down on Jakob's dried blood, and bitterness filled him like a block of the anorthosite they wrestled with.

They were running out of hay. They killed a cow, ate its roasted flesh. The water recycler's filters were clogging, and their water smelled of urine. Hester listened to the seismometer as often as she could now, and she thought they were being pursued. But she also thought they were approaching Selene's underside.

Naomi laughed, but it wasn't like her old laugh. “You got us there, Oliver. Good work.”

Oliver bit back a cry.

“Is it big?” Solly asked.

Hester shook her head. “Doesn't sound like it. Maybe twice the diameter of the Great Bole, not more.”

“Good,” Freeman said, looking at Naomi.

“But what will we do?” Oliver said.

Hester and Naomi and Freeman and Solly all turned to look at him, eyes blazing like twelve chunks of pure promethium. “We've got eight Boesmans left,” Freeman said in a low voice. “All the rest of the explosives add up to a couple more. I'm going to set them just right. It'll be my best work ever, my masterpiece. And we'll blow Selene right off into space.”

It took them ten shifts to get all the Boesmans placed to Freeman's and Naomi's satisfaction, and then another three to get far enough down and to one side to be protected from the shock of the blast, which luckily for them was directly upward against something that would give, and therefore would have less recoil.

Finally they were set, and they sat in the sleeping car in a circle of six, around the pile of components that sat under the master detonator. For a long time they just sat there cross-legged, breathing slowly and staring at it. Staring at each other, in the dark, in perfect redblack clarity. Then Naomi put both arms out, placed her hands carefully on the detonator's button. Mute Elijah put his hands on hers—then Freeman, Hester, Solly, finally Oliver—just in the order that Jakob had taken them. Oliver hesitated, feeling the flesh and bone under his hands, the warmth of his companions. He felt they should say something but he didn't know what it was.

“Seven,” Hester croaked suddenly.

“Six,” Freeman said.

Elijah blew air through his teeth, hard.

“Four,” said Naomi.

“Three!” Solly cried.

“Two,” Oliver said.

And they all waited a beat, swallowing hard, waiting for the moon and the man in the moon to speak to them. Then they pressed down on the button. They smashed at it with their fists, hit it so violently they scarcely felt the shock of the explosion.

They had put on vacuum suits and were breathing pure oxygen as they came up the last tunnel, clearing it of rubble. A great number of other shafts were revealed as they moved into the huge conical cavity left by the Boesmans; tunnels snaked away from the cavity in all directions, so that they had sudden long vistas of blasted tubes extending off into the depths of the moon they had come out of. And at the top of the cavity, struggling over its broken edge, over the rounded wall of a new crater …

It was black. It was not like rock. Spread across it was a spill of white points, some bright, some so faint that they disappeared into the black if you looked straight at them. There were thousands of these white points, scattered over a black dome that was not a dome … And there in the middle, almost directly overhead: a blue and white ball. Big, bright, blue, distant, rounded; half of it bright as a foreman's flash, the other half just a shadow … It was clearly round, a big ball in the … sky. In the sky.

Wordlessly they stood on the great pile of rubble ringing the edge of their hole. Half buried in the broken anorthosite were shards of clear plastic, steel struts, patches of green glass, fragments of metal, an arm, broken branches, a bit of orange ceramic. Heads back to stare at the ball in the sky, at the astonishing fact of the void, they scarcely noticed these things.

A long time passed, and none of them moved except to look around. Past the jumble of dark trash that had mostly been thrown off in a single direction, the surface of the moon was an immense expanse of white hills, as strange and glorious as the stars above. The size of it all! Oliver had never dreamed that everything could be so big.

“The blue must be promethium,” Solly said, pointing up at the Earth. “They've covered the whole Earth with the blue we mined”

Their mouths hung open as they stared at it. “How far away is it?” Freeman asked. No one answered.

“There they all are” Solly said. He laughed harshly. “I wish I could blow up the Earth too!”

He walked in circles on the rubble of the crater's rim. The rocket rails, Oliver thought suddenly, must have been in the direction Freeman had sent the debris. Bad luck. The final upward sweep of them poked up out of the dark dirt and glass. Solly pointed at them. His voice was loud in Oliver's ears, it strained the intercom: “Too bad we can't fly to the Earth, and blow it up too! I wish we could!”

And mute Elijah took a few steps, leaped off the mound into the sky, took a swipe with one hand at the blue ball. They laughed at him. “Almost got it, didn't you!” Freeman and Solly tried themselves, and then they all did: taking quick runs, leaping, flying slowly up through space, for five or six or seven seconds, making a grab at the sky overhead, floating back down as if in a dream, to land in a tumble, and try it again … It felt wonderful to hang up there at the top of the leap, free in the vacuum, free of gravity and everything else, for just that instant.

After a while they sat down on the new crater's rim, covered with white dust and black dirt. Oliver sat on the very edge of the crater, legs over the edge, so that he could see back down into their sublunar world, at the same time that he looked up into the sky. Three eyes were not enough to judge such immensities. His heart pounded, he felt too intoxicated to move anymore. Tired, drunk. The intercom rasped with the sounds of their breathing, which slowly calmed, fell into a rhythm together. Hester buzzed one phrase of “Bucket” and they laughed softly. They lay back on the rubble, all but Oliver, and stared up into the dizzy reaches of the universe, the velvet black of infinity. Oliver sat with elbows on knees, watched the white hills glowing under the black sky. They were lit by earthlight—earthlight and starlight. The white mountains on the horizon were as sharp-edged as the shards of dome glass sticking out of the rock. And all the time the Earth looked down at him. It was all too fantastic to believe. He drank it in like oxygen, felt it filling him up, expanding in his chest.

“What do you think they'll do with us when they get here?” Solly asked.

“Kill us,” Hester croaked.

“Or put us back to work,” Naomi added.

Oliver laughed. Whatever happened, it was impossible in that moment to care. For above them a milky spill of stars lay thrown across the infinite black sky, lighting a million better worlds; while just over their heads the Earth glowed like a fine blue lamp; and under their feet rolled the white hills of the happy moon, holed like a great cheese.

Penny Mickelbury

They moved single file through the forest, slowly, one step at a time, the leader stopping occasionally to cock his head to one side or the other, pretending to listen, as if he could discern one night sound from another. He could not. He was a child of the city. His night sounds were sirens and big car engines and tinny juke box noise that escaped from night clubs when the door opened to let someone in or out. He was out here in the woods, in the dark, as part of a mission: Playing his part in the Revolution that would not be televised.

William Rodgers, the leader, stopped because he was tired, he was hungry, and he had a political science paper due on Friday morning that he had to finish writing—and worse—typing. He wished for the umpteenth time that he had not agreed to this mission, but as head of the Black Students Union, he'd had no choice. He was the leader. He had to lead. In truth, though, he was following more than leading. Following the minute pieces of string Eric had taped to tree trunks to mark the way through the unfamiliar wood.

“Damn, it's dark out here!” That made the fourth time that X had stated the obvious. The first two times, Eric and Charlie had co-signed, agreeing that it was, indeed, dark. The third time Tamara had made a sound deep in her throat, but she had not spoken. Now she did.

“Yeah, J.T., it's dark out here. It's eleven o'clock at night and we're out in the woods.”

“I told you, don't call me that slave name. My name is X!”

“Your name is John Thomas Anderson.”

“William, man, I'm telling you: You need to make your woman shut up! She runs her mouth way too damn much.”

“Nobody
makes
me do anything, J.T., especially a nobody like you,” Tam snarled at him, and William thought that he could see her eyes flash in the darkness. “Like somebody would mistake you for Malcolm X,” she added derisively, and tacked on J.T. for good measure, hitting each letter hard and holding on to it, as if savoring the taste made by its sound, though the exact opposite was true.

“We should be almost there,” Charlie Gordon, the youngest of the group, said before J.T. could open his mouth to remonstrate. William had been surprised that he'd even joined them, opposed as he was to this revolutionary manifestation of violence. Charlie was a freshman and everybody genuinely liked him. He was easygoing and surprisingly funny—surprisingly because he was so quiet, much more of a listener than a talker. He hadn't said a word all night until now. William wondered how Charlie knew where they were.

“I think that's right,” William answered, and looked back at Eric for confirmation..

“It is,” Eric said. Probably the only true revolutionary among them, Eric had come up with the idea and the plan to firebomb the two-story building that was the meeting place of the local KKK chapter. It also was the police department and jail, and the police chief was the head sheet-wearer. Eric Mason, senior political science major, knew this because it was his home town, the chief sheet-wearer his personal nemesis.

Three and a half miles due east of the front gate of the state university they all attended, the town might just as well have been on the other side of the moon. This was true for Eric's home town and all their home towns. In big cities and small towns across America in 1968, no matter how loudly James Brown encouraged being Black and proud, no matter how intently Aretha Franklin demanded Respect, they still were perceived as the niggers they'd always been. When the Klan called for a rally and marched down the middle of the town's main street for the purpose of burning Black Power in effigy, it became the social event of the season: Every white person for miles would be in attendance; every Black person for miles would find somewhere else to be. Eric strongly, almost violently, resented the fact that everybody related to him had already left town, though the KKK event would not happen for another three days, on Saturday.

Eric had thought that firebombing the Klan would be a worthy activity for the BSU since the only activity the group had managed, aside from weekly meetings, was a weekly party. The only person who had disagreed out loud was Charlie, and yet here he was, carrying a five-gallon can of gasoline through the woods to be stashed until the night of the Klan rally.