She"d be okay; in the mail-tube rocket, we"ve have more pressure, and more important, more partial- pressure of O2. She"d be all right ... I hoped.
I put her aboard the rocket, threw in a bag of supplies, and squeezed in next to her. It was like being in a sleeping bag together-or a coffin. I positioned myself so I could reach all the controls, took a deep breath and got serious.
Just before lighting the cigar, I remembered the stark terror of riding in the E7 seat of an S-8 sub- hunter "Snark" jet and coming in for my virgin landing on an aircraft carrier. Trusting entirely to the guy on the other end made me more nervous than the idea of landing on a postage stamp. Well, this time, for better or worse, I was the guy with the stick; considering that I"d never flown anything but a troop shimmy over some mountains, I almost wished I were back in the S-8.
I threw the switches, pushed forward on the throttle (oddly similar to a pa.s.senger airliner), and the rocket slid along the tube, launching at ten g"s. Arlene was already out, of course, and missed the pleasure of blacking out with me.
Suddenly, I discovered myself in a strange room, a faint hissing catching my attention. Black and white, no color ... I knew I should know where I was, what all these things, this equipment around me, was.
I should know my name too, I guessed.
Then the sound cut back in; fly, someone said. A command? Fly, fly-"Fly." It was me, my lips, saying the word fly ... the name! Fly, me; my name.
Then I saw color and recognized the jerry-rigged blinking lights and liquid-crystal displays of the mail tube. I"d installed them myself; the mail doesn"t need to see where it"s going, but we did.
Through the slit of a viewscreen, I saw deepest blue with faint, cotton-candy wisps, strings flashing past. I glanced at the altimeter-much too high for clouds.
Ionized gases?
Then something socked me in the face, like a 10mm sh.e.l.l, and agony exploded across my face. At first it was bilateral; then it focused right behind my eye- b.a.l.l.s, like G.o.d"s own worst migraine. For a few seconds I thought my head literally was going to detonate. Then it faded as the blood finally repressurized my cranial arteries and rebooted my brain. I looked at the chronometer: the entire black- out had lasted only forty-five seconds.
It could have been forty-five years.
A low groan announced Arlene"s return to con- sciousness. "Fly," she moaned, "good luck."
I was too busy to say anything. But it was good having her back again. The calculations she"d already worked out for our glide path were okay, and I used the retros to get us on her highway.
As we came in, the ride got b.u.mpier and rougher.
The interior of the little craft started heating up.
Being so close together made us sweat all the faster.When it got over fifty degrees centigrade, beads of perspiration poured into my eyes, interfering with vision.
But the temp continued to rise. The mail tubes are supposed to be insulated-but the skin on this one was built for Mars.
In Earth atmosphere, we were being baked. The temp boiled up past seventy degrees, and I was gasping for air, every breath searing my lungs. My skin turned red and I could barely hold the controls. Another minute and we would be dead.
6.
Fly!" Arlene screamed. "Blow the oxygen!
We"ll lose it, but it"ll heat up and blow out the exhaust, cooling the interior!"
"Not again!" I said.
"Huh?"
"We"ll be low on air again!"
"Do it, Fly, or we"ll fry."
We took turns making the other face unpleasant facts. It was something like being married.
I did as she commanded. The cooling effect made a real difference. My brain was still on fire, but at least I could think again.
"So what systems still aren"t working?" she asked next, still gasping from each searing breath.
This seemed like an opportune moment to be completely honest. "Now that you mention it," I mentioned, "the only one I"m worried about is the landing system."
"What?"
"The thingamabob would have come in useful for landing. What do they call it? Oh yes, the aerial- braking system."
She sighed. If there had been more room in our little coc.o.o.n, she might have shrugged as well. "By- gones," she said. "Sorry for the trouble I caused."
"Arlene, don"t be ridiculous! I was having crazy dreams and was about to go off the deep end myself.
You just went first because you"re . . . smaller." It occurred to me that we were having more of a discussion than was wise under the circ.u.mstances.
"So how in h.e.l.l do we land this puppy?" No sooner were these words out of her mouth than Arlene started yawning.
I figured we should try and set it down anywhere on dry land. Live or die, I wasn"t in the mood for a swim.
If we survived, we could get our bearings anywhere on Earth-pick a destination and then haul b.u.t.t.
We didn"t have any time to waste. Thanks to our stunt with the oxygen, the O2 to CO2 ratio was dropping. I was in even less mood for us to become goofy from oxygen deprivation after watching Arlene go nuts before-thanks, Mr. Disney, but I"m not going back on that ride.
I had to explain this to Arlene, but she was asleep again so I explained it to the Martian instead. He was a little green guy, about three feet high, and I was glad to see him. "About time one of you showed up," I said. "We always expected to see guys like you up hereinstead of all this medieval stuff."
"Perfectly understandable," he said in the voice of W. C. Fields. "These demons are a pain. But they"re welcome to Deimos."
"Why is that?" I asked.
"Confidentially, it"s an ugly moon, don"t you think?
Not at all a work of beauty like Phobos, a drinking man"s moon. Speaking of which, you wouldn"t have some whiskey on you?"
"Sorry, only water."
He was very offended. "You mean that liquid fish fornicate in? We Martians don"t care for the stuff. You can drown in it, you know. Now ours is a nice, dry planet, rusty brown like that car of yours after you abandoned it to the elements. Mars is nice and cold, good practice for the grave. Are you sure you don"t have any booze?"
I figured he was bringing up drowning just to scare me. If Arlene and I didn"t burn up in the atmosphere, there was always a good chance of winding up in the drink and drowning like the Shuttle pioneers had in the 1980s.
Besides, he"d raised a certain issue and I wanted an answer. "Why does Phobos look better to you than Deimos?" I asked.
"My dear fellow, Phobos is the inner moon of Mars. Deimos was always on the outs even before those hobgoblins hijacked it. The outs is a bad place to be, and you are out of time and going to die and betray Arlene and betray the Earth, you puny little man with your delusions."
While he was talking, he was growing in size, and sharp teeth protruded beyond his sneering lips; the eyes flamed red, as the rockets flamed red, as the sky was underneath and overhead all at the same time.
And I was screaming.
"You"re one of them! You"re a demon-imp-specter- thing. You tricked me."
"Fly," said a comforting voice from behind the Martian. "Fly, you"re hallucinating."
"I knew that," I told her as the Martian faded from view. "I knew it all along."
A quick check of the cabin gave a head count of (1) myself, (2) Arlene, (3) no Martians. I checked again to make sure. Yep, just two humans. No monsters. No Martians. Not much air. Definitely not enough air.
"We"ve got to land this quickly," I said.
"Um ... if it"s all the same to you, Fly, I can wait until we can land it safely."
The atmosphere got thick enough that I pulled the cord to extend our mini-wings. Instantly, we started buffeting like mad, shaking so hard I thought my innards would become outards. We rolled, pitched, yawed-triple-threat!-and it was all I could do to hang on to the ragged edge of Arlene"s computer- projected glide path.
The screen displayed a series of concentric squares that gave the illusion of flying through an infinite succession of square wire hoops. So long as I kept inside them, I should go where she projected, some-where in North America, she said; even she wasn"t sure where.
But I kept cutting through the path, coloring out- side the lines. I couldn"t hold it! I"d yank on the stick and physically wrench us back through the wire frames and out the other side (they turned from red to black when I was briefly on the meatball). The best I could do was stay within spitting distance of my proper course . . . and naturally, we were running too hot, much too fast. We were going to overshoot our mark-possibly straight into the Pacific Ocean.
I barely hung on, abandoning retros to guide our two-man "cruise missile" by fins, air-braking to spill as much excess velocity as possible. The ship started shaking. An old silver tooth filling started to ache.
Arlene leaned back against the seat, muscles in her jaw tightening, eyes getting wider and wider. I think she was starting to appreciate the gravity of our situation.
North America unwound beneath the window like a quilt airing out on a sunny day. We were over the Mississippi, sinking lower, falling west, descending fast. Then we entered a cloud bank. We weren"t there very long.
"I know where we are!" shouted Arlene, voice starting to sound funny from the breathing problem. I placed it too. We"d popped out of the cloud bank about 150 kilometers due west of Salt Lake City. The Bonneville salt flats were ideal for a landing-a vast, dry lake bed, nothing to hit but dirt. Very hard dirt.
But we had a chance.
"Spill the fuel!" she screamed, right in my ear, straining against the buffeting. At least we were low enough that we could breathe. I yanked the lever, dumping what little JP-9 remained in the tanks.
The cabin was getting hot again, the structure of the rocket shaking like we were in a Mixmaster, and it was now or never. "Hold on!" I shouted, thinking how stupid it sounded but needing to say something.
Arlene screamed like a banshee-a much more insightful comment.
We came down fast and hard, finally striking the ground at Mach 0.5. The ship shredded on impact, skipping like a rock on the waters of a salt-white lake.
Then it rolled, and Arlene"s elbow jammed into my side so hard it knocked the breath out of me.
End over end we tumbled, and my brains, already fried, scrambled so I didn"t know dirt from sky. We shed bits and pieces from the ship-only the t.i.tanium frame was left, but still we kept rolling.
The ship finally skidded to a stop, on its side, with me underneath Arlene.
For a good five minutes, felt like five hours, we lay silently, dazed, wondering if we had made it or not . . . waiting for the world to stop spinning.
"Are you all right?" Arlene managed to ask.
"I think we"re alive," I said.
The fuel was completely spent, which was just fine with me. No risk of fire or explosion. Now if we could just get out of the thing.Fortunately, the door on Arlene"s side wasn"t jammed. In fact, it wasn"t even with us anymore.
Arlene stumbled out, falling heavily with a grunt. I followed somewhat more gracefully, which was a switch, We"d suffered no injuries, thank G.o.d; I didn"t want us to wind up sitting ducks. If aliens had taken over Utah-a belief held by one of my old nuns many years before the invasion-then we must be on our guard. Someone, or something, would come to find out what had just made a smoking hole in the salt lick.
We took a moment to enjoy being alive and in one piece, enjoying the dusk in Utah, breathing the best air we"d tasted in months. Then we took inventory.
The food and water came through. But the weapons were trashed.
"You said we couldn"t do it," she teased me.
"Never listen to a pessimist," I answered, adding, "and the world is so full of them you might as well give up." She laughed as she playfully punched my arm, numbing me.
Astonishingly, Arlene"s GPS wrist locator was still working. That was one tough piece of equipment! I thought maybe I should buy stock in the company; then I wondered whether any companies still existed.
Maybe the monsters had done what no government was able to do: end all commerce and starve the survivors.
She sat cross-legged and fiddled with the thing, trying to get a fix on our exact position. The satellite should have responded immediately, spotting us with- in a meter or two.
"Getting anything?" I asked, listening to the sym- phony of white noise coming off her arm.
"Nada," she said. "I"ll bet the sat is still up there, but the Bad Guys must have encrypted the signal.
Maybe so humans can"t use them in combat."
"I wish they were all as dumb as the demons," I said.
"Yeah, one spidermind goes a long way. But who cares, Fly? We"ve beaten the odds again. We"re alive, dammit!" She ran across the sand like a kid let loose at the beach. Then she gestured for me to join her. I ran over and grabbed at her. She threw me off balance and I took a tumble in the sand.
"Clumsy!" she said, sounding as young as she had when sleepwalking through her waking nightmare on Deimos; but now was a lot more pleasant.
"We don"t have time for this, you know," I said, but my heart wasn"t it.
"We don"t have time to be alive, or to breathe air.
But here we are, still in one piece. G.o.d, I didn"t think we were going to make it. We got down from orbit with nothing but spare parts, spit, and duct tape, and our bare hands-hah!"
"Frankly, my dear, I had my doubts," I admitted. I couldn"t help running after her. She was right. We kept coming through stuff that should have killed us twenty times over. We weren"t indestructible, but I was beginning to believe in something I"d alwayshated: luck.
People who accomplish nothing in their lives al- ways attribute the success of everybody else to good luck or knavery. I believe you make your own luck: "Chance favors the prepared mind." But in combat, there are too many random factors to calculate.
Arlene and I were feeling c.o.c.ky. We had plenty of reason to be thankful.
"I wonder what the radiation level is here," I said.