Steel Beach (62 page)

But the year 50 wasn’t railroad time. The system wasn’t practical. You still had to wear a garment to protect you from the heat and the cold, and it had to protect you from both—extremes never seen on Earth—while at the same time keeping the vacuum from your skin, bleeding off waste heat, and a host of other requirements. Such garments were available; I’d bought two of them within the last year. They were naturally much improved from the mummy bags the first space explorers wore, but they worked on the same principles. And they worked better than the implanted lungs. If you’re going to have to wear a suit, after all, what’s the point of a thirty minute supply of air in place of a lung? If you plan much of a stay on the surface you’re going to have to back-pack most of your air, just like Neil Armstrong did.

And the Heinleiners did, too, for longer stays. But they’d solved the problem of what to do with the suit: just turn it off when not in use.

I supposed they’d also solved the psychological problem of the suits, which was the panic reflex when one has not breathed normally for some time, but I suspected the answer was the same one a child learns in her first swimming lesson. Do it enough, and you’ll stop being afraid.

I’d done it for fifteen minutes now, and I was still frightened. My heart was racing and my palm was sweating. Or was that Gretel’s?

“You’ll sweat quite a bit,” she said, when I asked. “It’s normal. That layer of air will stay pretty hot, but not too hot to handle. Also, the sweat helps to bleed off the heat, just like it does inside.”

I’d been told the suit’s distance from one’s body fluctuated by about a millimeter in a regular rhythm. That varied the volume considerably, sucking waste air from inside you and expelling it into vacuum in a bellows action. Water vapor went along with it, but a lot just dripped down your skin.

“I think I’d like to go back in now,” I mouthed, and must have done it well enough, because I heard her say “Okay,” quite clearly. That was the same circuitry the CC used to talk to me in private, back when I was still speaking to him. Aside from the respirator/air supply/field generator, and a few air ducts, not much had needed to be done to prepare me for field suit use. Some of that’s because I was already wired to a fare-thee-well, as the CC had pointed out on my direct interface jaunts. Some adjustments had been made to my eardrums to keep them from hurting in fluctuating pressures, and a new heads-up display had been added so that when I closed my eyes or just blinked, I saw figures concerning body temperature and remaining air supply and so forth. There were warning alarms I’d been told would sound in various situations, and I didn’t intend ever to hear any of them. Mostly, with a field suit, you just wore it. And all but a tiny portion of that, you wore inside.

The air lock I’d used to get into the secret warrens was only for inanimate objects, or people wearing inanimate objects, like the old-style suit I’d been wearing. If you had a field suit in, you simply stepped into the wall of mirror and your own suit melted into it, like a drop of mercury falling into a quicksilver pool. That was the only way to get through a null-field barrier other than turning it off. They were completely reflective on both sides. Nothing got through, not air, not bullets, not light nor heat nor radio waves nor neutrinos.
Nothing
.

Well, gravity got through, whatever gravity is. Don’t seek the answer to that one in
these
pages. But magnetism didn’t, and Merlin was working on the gravity part. Follow-up on that still to come.

Just before Gretel and I stepped through I saw part of the mirror wall distorted in the shape of a face. That was the only way to see through the wall, just stick your face in, and even
that
was tough to get used to. Gretel and her brother—what else?—Hansel did it as naturally as I’d turn my head to glance out a window. Me, I had to swallow hard a few times because every reflex I had was telling me I was going to smash my nose against that reflection of myself.

But I had no trouble this time because I wanted very badly to be on the other side of that mirror. I was running by the time I hit it. And of course there was no sensation of hitting
anything
—my suit simply vanished as it went through the larger field—with the result that, because some part of me had been braced for impact, had been flinching, wincing, bracing myself, it was like reaching for that non-existent top step, and I did a comical cakewalk as if the floor was coated with banana peels and came that close to a pratfall any silent film comedian would have envied.

Before you snicker,
you
go and try it.

Gretel claimed to be able to distinguish people’s faces when covered by a null suit. I supposed that if you grew up in one it would be possible; they were still all chrome-plated masks to me, and probably would be for a long time. But I’d figured it was Hansel who poked his face through, since that’s where we’d left him, watching Winston, and it was indeed him who greeted me after my maiden voyage in the new suit. Hansel was a lad of fifteen, a tall, awkward, rather shy boy with a shock of blonde hair like his sister’s and a certain look in his eye I’m sure he got from his father. I thought of it as the mad scientist’s gleam. As if he’d like to take you apart to see how you worked, only he was too polite to ask if he could. He’d put you back together, I hasten to add, or at least he’d intend to, though the skills might not always be up to the intent. He got
that
from his father, too. Where the shyness came from I had no idea. It was
not
inherited paternally.

“I just got a phone call from the ranch,” Hansel said. “Libby says the palomino mare is about to foal.”

“I got it, too,” Gretel said. “Let’s go.”

They were off while I was still catching my breath. It had been a long time since I’d tried to keep up with children, but I didn’t dare let these get out of my sight. I wasn’t sure if I could find my way back to the
Heinlein
alone. Sounds unlikely, doesn’t it? If there’s one thing Lunarians are good at, it’s negotiating a three dimensional maze, or at least we’d like to think so. But the mazes of King City tend to be of two types: radiating out from a central plaza, with circular ring roads, or a north/south up/down grid. The paths of the Delambre Dump were more like a plate of spaghetti. Two days in Delambre would have any urban planner ready for a padded cell. It just growed.

The paths I was now hurrying down had been made by nothing more mysterious than obsolescent tunneling machines—one of the other things Lunarians are good at. They usually bored their way through rock, but the sort of techno-midden stratigraphy found in Delambre presented them no problems; they’d laser their way through anything. The Heinleiners had a dozen of them, all found on site, repaired, and seemingly just sort of set loose to find their own way. Not really, but anyone who had tried to find a rhyme or reason in the pathways had to figure an earthworm would have done a tidier job.

Once the wormholes were there, human crews came in and installed the flooring out of whatever plastic panels were at hand. Since those panels had been a construction staple for over a century, they weren’t hard to find. The last step was to provide an ALU every hundred meters or so. An ALU was an Air Lock Unit, and consisted of this: a null-field generator with logics to run their odd locking systems at each end, a big can of air serviced weekly by autobots, and a wire running to a solar panel on top of the heap of garbage to power the whole thing. When somebody got around to it glow- and heat-wires were strung along the top of the tunnel so they wouldn’t be too cold or dark, but these were viewed as luxuries, and not all parts of the tunnels had them.

A more jack-leg, slip-shod system of keeping the Breathsucker at bay had never been seen on this tired old orb, and nobody with half a brain would trust her one and only body to it for a split second. And with good reason: breakdowns were frequent, repairs were slow. Heinleiners simply didn’t care, and why should they? If part of the tunnel went down, your suit would switch on and you’d have plenty of time to get to the next segment. They just didn’t worry much about vacuum.

It made for weird travel, and another reason to keep up with the children. Both of them were carrying flashlights, which were almost mandatory in the tunnels, and which I’d forgotten again. We came to a dark, cold section and it was all I could do to keep their darting lights in sight. Sure, I could call them back if I got lost, but I was determined not to. It wouldn’t have been
fun
, you see, and above all kids just want to have fun. You don’t want to get a reputation as somebody they have to keep
waiting
for.

It was cold, too, right up to the point of chattering teeth, and then my suit switched on automatically and before I got out of the dark I was warm again. Winston looked back at me and barked. He was still in his old-style suit, Hansel carrying his helmet. They’d wanted me to let them give him a null-suit, but I didn’t know how to explain it to Liz.

The first time the children took me to the farm, I had been expecting to see a hydroponic or dirt-based plantation of the sort most Lunarians know must be out there somewhere, but would have to consult a directory to find, and had never actually seen. I’d been to one in the course of a story long ago—I’ve been most places in my century—and since you probably haven’t I’ll say they tend to be quite dull. Not worth your time. Whether the crop is corn or potatoes or chickens, what you see are low rooms with endless rows of cages or stalls or furrows or troughs. Machines bring food or nutrients, haul away waste, harvest the final product. Most animals are raised underground, most plants on the surface, under plastic roofs. All of it is kept distant from civilization and hardly ever talked about, since so many of us can’t bear to think the things we eat ever grew in dirt, or at one time cackled, oinked, and defecated.

I was expecting a food factory, albeit one built to typical Heinleiner specs, as Aladdin once described them to me: “Jerry-rigged, about threequarter-assed, and hellishly unsafe.” Later I did see a farm just like that, but not the one belonging to Hansel and Gretel and their best friend, Libby. Once again I’d forgotten I was dealing with children.

The farm was behind a big pressure door aboard the old
Heinlein
that said CREW’S MESS #1. Inside a lot of tables had been shoved together and welded solid to make waist-high platforms. These had been heaped with soil and planted with mutant grasses and bonsai trees. The scene had been laced with little dirt roads and an HO gauge railroad layout, dotted with dollhouses and dollbarns and little doll towns of often-incompatible scales. The whole thing was about one hundred by fifty meters, and it was here the children raised their horselets and other things. Lots of other things.

Being children, and Heinleiners, it was not as neat as it might have been. They’d forgotten to provide good drainage, so large parts suffered from erosion. A grandiose plan to make mountains against the back wall had the look of a project never finished and long-neglected, with bare orange plastic matting showing the bones of where the mountains would have been if they hadn’t run out of both enthusiasm and plaster of Paris.

But if you squinted and used your imagination, it looked pretty good. And your nose didn’t need to be fooled at all. Walk in the door and you’d immediately know you were in a place where horses and cattle roamed free.

Libby called to us from one of the little barns, so we climbed up a stile and onto the platform itself. I walked gingerly, afraid to step on a tree or, worse, a horse. When I got there the three of them were kneeling beside the red-sided barn. They had the roof lid raised and were peering down to where the mare was lying on her side on a bed of straw.

“Look! It’s coming out!” Gretel squeaked. I did look, then looked away, and sat down beside the barn, knocking over a section of white rail fence as I did so. Hell, the fence was just for show, anyway; the cows and horses jumped over it like grasshoppers. I lowered my head a little and decided I was going to be all right. Probably.

“Something wrong, Hildy?” Libby asked. I felt his hand on my shoulder and made an effort to look up at him and smile. He was a red-headed boy of almost eighteen, even lankier than Hansel, and he had a crush on me. I patted his hand and said I was fine and he went back to his pets.

I’m not notably queasy, but I’d been having these spells associated with pregnancy. I still had a month to go, far too late to change my mind. It was an experience I wasn’t likely to forget. Trust me, when you get up at three
a.m.
with an insatiable hunger for chocolate-coated oysters, you don’t forget it. The sight of it coming back up in the morning is unlikely to slip your mind, either.

I’d been a little concerned about the pre-natal care I was getting. There was a problem, in that I could hardly go to a clinic in King City, as the medics were bound to notice my unorthodox left lung. The Heinleiners had a few doctors among them and the one I’d been seeing, “Hazel Stone,” told me I had nothing to worry about. Part of me believed her, and part of me—a new part I was just beginning to understand: the paranoid mother—did not. It didn’t seem to surprise her and she took the time to do what she could to put my mind at ease.

“It’s true the stuff I have out here isn’t as up-to-date as my equipment in King City,” she had said. “But we’re not talking trephining and leeches, either. The fact is that you’re doing well enough I could deliver him by hand if I had to, with just some clean water and rubber gloves. I’ll see you once a week and I guarantee I’ll spot any possible complications instantly.” She then offered to “just take him out now and pop him in a bottle, if you want to. I’ll keep him right in my office, and I’ll hook up as many machines as it takes to make you feel better.”

I’d realized she was just humoring me, but I gave it some thought. Then I told her, no, I was determined to stick it out to the end, since I’d come this far, and I said I realized I was being silly.

“It’s part of the territory,” she had said. “You get mood swings, and irrational impulses, cravings. If it gets bad enough, I can do something about those, too.” Maybe it was just a reaction to all the tampering the CC had recently been doing to me, but I refused her mood levelers. I didn’t like the swings, and I’m not a masochist, but if you’re going to do this, Hildy, I told myself, you should find out what it’s like. Otherwise, you might as well just read about it.