The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (19 page)

Having completed business. Dr. Chan said, “Does not the tree in bonsai require water?”

Almost in chorus we agreed that it did. Our host examined the plastic film that enclosed it, then cut it open and most carefully removed the tree and pot. A vase at his desk turned out to be a water carafe; he filled a tumbler, then, using just his fingertips, he sprinkled it repeatedly. While he did this I sneaked at look at his book—a form of snoopiness I can’t resist. It was
The March of the Ten Thousand
, in Greek.

We left Tree-San with him, and Gwen’s case as well.

Our next stop was at Jake’s Steak House. Jake was as Chinese as Dr. Chan but of another generation and style. He greeted us with: “Howdy, folks. What’ll it be? Hamburgers? Or scrambled eggs? Coffee or beer?”

Gretchen spoke to him in a tonal language—Cantonese, I suppose. Jake looked annoyed and retorted. Gretchen threw it back at him. Remarks slammed back and forth. At last he looked disgusted, and said, “Okay. Forty minutes”—turned his back and walked away. Gretchen said, “Come, please. Now we go to see Charlie Wang about suits.”

As we walked away she said privately, “He was trying to get out of doing his best cooking, as it is much more work. But the worst argument was over price. Jake wanted me to keep quiet while he charged you tourist prices. I told him, if he charged you more than he would charge my Papa, then my Papa would stop in next time and cut off his ears and feed them to him, raw. Jake knows that Papa would do exactly that.”

Gretchen smiled with shy pride. “My Papa is deeply respected in Lucky Dragon. Back when I was young. Papa eliminated a boomer here who tried to take something free from a singsong girl, something he had agreed to pay for. Everybody remembers it. The singsong girls of Lucky Dragon made Mama and me honorary members of their guild.”

The sign read: Wang Chai-Lee, Custom Tailoring for Ladies and Gentlemen—p-suit repairs a specialty. Gretchen again introduced us and explained what we needed. Charlie Wang nodded. “Bus rolls at noon? Be here at ten-thirty. In Kong you return the suits to my cousin Johnny Wang at Sears Montgomery, p-suit department. I’ll call him.”

Then we went back to Jake’s Steak House. It wasn’t steak and it was not chop suey or chow mein and it was wonderfully good. We ate until we were full to our eyeballs.

When we got back to Quiet Dreams tunnel, the overhead lights were out and many of the billets were occupied by sleeping figures. A glow strip ran down the side of the billets shelf, where it could not shine into the eyes of a sleeping guest but would light the way of anyone moving around. There was a reading light at Dr. Chan’s desk, shielded from the sleepers. He appeared to be working on his accounts, as he was operating a terminal with one hand and an abacus with the other. He greeted us soundlessly; we whispered goodnight.

Coached by Gretchen we got ready for bed: Undress, fold your clothing and put it and your shoes under the head of your bedroll as a pillow. I did so, and added my cork foot. But I left on my underwear shorts, having noticed that Gwen and Gretchen had left on their panties—and Bill put his back on when he somewhat belatedly noticed what the rest of us did. We all headed for the refresher.

Even this nominal sop to modesty did not last; we showered together. There were three men in the ’fresher when we went in; all were naked. We followed the ancient precept: “Nakedness is often seen but never looked at.” And the three men most strictly followed this rule: We weren’t there, we were invisible. (Save that I feel certain that no male can totally ignore Gwen and Gretchen.)

I could not totally ignore Gretchen and did not try. Naked, she looked years older and deliciously enticing. I think she had a sunlamp tan. I know she had dimples I had not seen before. I see no need to go into details; all females are beautiful at the point where they burst into full womanhood, and Gretchen had the added beauty of good proportions and a sunny disposition. She could have been used to tempt Saint Anthony.

Gwen handed me the soap. “All right, dear; you can scrub her back—but she can wash her front herself.”

I answered with dignity, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t expect to wash anyone’s back, as I need a hand free for grab and balance. You forget that I’m an expectant mother.”

“You’re a mother, all right.”

“Who’s calling whom a mother? I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head.”

“Richard, this is getting to be beneath even my dignity. Gretchen, you wash his back; that’s safest. I’ll referee.”

It wound up with everyone washing whatever he/she could reach—even Bill—and was not efficient but fun, with lots of giggles. They were both of the extremely opposite sex and just being around them was fun.

By twenty-two we were settled down for the night, Gretchen at the end wall, Gwen beside her, then me, then Bill. At one-sixth gee a rock shelf is softer than a foam mattress in Iowa. I went to sleep quickly.

Sometime later—an hour? two hours?—I came awake because a warm body cuddled against me. I murmured, “Now, hon?” Then I came a bit wider awake. “Gwen?”

“It’s me, Mr. Richard. Would you really want to see my bottom turn all pink? And hear me cry?”

I whispered tensely, “Honey, get back over by the wall.”

“Please.”

“No, dear.”

“Gretchen,” Gwen said softly, “get back where you belong, dear…before you wake others. Here, I’ll help you roll over me.” And she did, and took the woman-child in her arms and talked to her. They stayed that way and (I think) went to sleep.

It took me quite a while to get back to sleep.

“We are too proud to Fight.”

WOODROW WILSON
1856-1924

“Violence never settles anything.”

GENGHIS KHAN
1162-1227

“The mice voted to bell the cat.”

AESOP
c. 620-c. 560
B.C.

Kissing good-bye while wearing pressure suits is depressingly antiseptic. So I think and I am sure Gretchen thought so, too. But that is the way it worked out.

Last night Gwen had saved me from “a fate worse than death” and for that I was grateful. Well, moderately grateful. Certainly an old man tripped by a barely nubile female not yet into her teens (Gretchen would not be thirteen for another two months) is a ridiculous sight, an object of scorn to all right-thinking people. But, from the time the night before when Gretchen had made it plain to me that she did not consider me too old, I had been feeling younger and younger. By sundown I should be suffering the terminal stages of senile adolescence.

So let the record show that I am grateful. That’s official.

Gwen was relieved, I felt sure, when at noon Gretchen waved us good-bye from the cab of her father’s rolligon lorry, as we rolled south in Aunt Lilybet’s rolligon bus, the
Hear Me, Jesus
.

The
Hear Me
was much larger than Jinx’s lorry, and fancier, being painted in bright colors with Holy Land scenes and Bible quotations. It could carry eighteen passengers, plus cargo, driver, and shotgun—the last riding in a turret high above the driver. The bus’s tires were enormous, twice as tall as I am; they shouldered up above the passenger space, as its floor rested on the axles, high as my head. There were ladders on each side to reach access doors between the front and rear tires.

Those big tires made it hard to see out to the sides. But Loonies aren’t much interested in scenery, as most Lunar scenery is interesting only from orbit. From the Caucasus to the Haemus Mountains—our route—the floor of Mare Serenitatis has hidden charms. Thoroughly hidden. Most of it is flat as a pancake and as interesting as cold pancakes without butter or syrup.

Despite this I was glad that Aunt Lilybet had placed us in the first row on the right—Gwen at the window, me next, Bill on my left. It meant that we could see all that the driver saw out front and also we could see somewhat out to the right because we were forward of the front axle and thereby could see past the tire. We could not see too clearly to the right, as the plastic of the pressure window was old and crazed and yellowed. But forward Aunt Lilybet had her big driver’s port raised and fastened back; the view was as clear as our helmets permitted—excellent for us; the equipment rented to us by Charlie Wang took the curse off raw sunlight without noticeably interfering with seeing, like good sun spectacles.

We didn’t talk much because passengers’ suit radios were all on a common frequency—a babel, so we kept ours turned down. Gwen and I could talk by touching helmets, but not easily. I amused myself by trying to keep track of where we were going. Neither magnetic compasses nor gyro compasses are useful on Luna. Magnetism (usually none) means an ore body rather than a direction, and Luna’s spin, while it exists (one revolution per month!), is too leisurely to affect a gyro compass. An inertial tracker will work but a good one is extremely expensive—although I can’t see why; the art was perfected long ago for guided missiles.

From this face of Luna you always have Earth to steer by and half the time you have the Sun as well. The stars? Certainly, the stars are always there—no rain, no clouds, no smog. Oh, sure! Look, I have news for any groundhogs listening: You can see stars easier from Iowa than you can from Luna.

You’ll be wearing a p-suit, right? Its helmet has a lens and a visor designed to protect your eyes—that amounts to built-in smog. If the Sun is up, forget about stars; your lens has darkened to protect your eyes. If the Sun is not in your sky, then Earth is somewhere between half and full and earthshine is dazzling—eight times as much reflecting surface with five times the albedo makes Earth at least forty times as bright as moonlight is to Earth.

Oh, the stars are there and sharp and bright; Luna is wonderful for astronomical telescopy. But to
see
stars with “bare” eyes (i.e., from inside your p-suit helmet), just find a meter or two of stove pipe—Wups! no stoves on Luna. So use a couple of meters of air duct. Look through it; it cuts out the dazzle; stars shine out “like a good deed in a naughty world.”

In front of me Earth was a bit past half phase. On my left the rising Sun was a day and a half high, twenty degrees or less; it made bright the desert floor, with long shadows emphasizing anything other than perfect flatness, thereby making driving easy for Aunt Lilybet. According to a map at the airlock in Lucky Dragon Pressure we had started out from north latitude thirty-two degrees and twenty-seven minutes by longitude six degrees fifty-six east, and were headed for fourteen degrees eleven minutes east by seventeen degrees thirty-two minutes north, a spot near Menelaus. That gave us a course generally south—about twenty-five degrees east of south, as close as I could read that map—and a destination some 550 kilometers away. No wonder our ETA read three o’clock tomorrow morning!

There was no road. Aunt Lilybet did not seem to have a tracker, or anything in the way of navigating instruments but an odometer and a speedometer. She seemed to be piloting the way river pilots of old were reputed to find their way, just by knowing the route. Perhaps so—but during the first hour I noticed something: There were range targets for the whole route. As we reached one, there would be another, out at the horizon.

I had not noticed any such guides yesterday and I don’t think there were any; I think Gretchen really did pilot Mark Twain style. In fact I think Aunt Lilybet did also—I noticed that she often did not come close to a range marker as she passed it. Those blazes had probably been set up for occasional drivers or for relief drivers for the
Hear Me
.

I started trying to spot each one, making a game of it: If I missed one, it scored against me. Two misses in sequence counted as one “death” by “lost on the Moon”—something that happened too often in the early days…and still happens today. Luna is a big place, bigger than Africa, almost as big as Asia—and every square meter of it is deadly if you make just one little mistake.

Definition of a Loonie: a human being, any color, size, or sex, who
never
makes a mistake where it counts.

By our first rest stop I had “died” twice through missing ranging marks.

At five minutes past fifteen Aunt Lilybet let her bus roll to a stop, then switched on a transparency that read
:
REST STOP—TWENTY MINUTES—and under it: Late Penalty-One Crown per Minute.

We all got out. Bill grabbed Aunt Lilybet’s arm and put his helmet against hers. She started to shake him off, then listened. I didn’t try to check on him; twenty minutes isn’t long for a rest stop when it involves coping with a p-suit. Of course this is even harder for females than for males, and more time consuming. We had a woman passenger with three children…and the right arm of her suit ended just below the elbow in a hook. How did she cope? I resolved to outwait her, so that the fine for being late would be assessed against me, rather than her.

That “refresher” was dreadful. It was an airlock leading to a hole in the rock, attached to the home of a settler who combined tunnel farming with ice mining. There may have been some oxygen in the pressure gas that greeted us, but the stench made it impossible to tell. It reminded me of the jakes in a castle I was once quartered in during the Three-Weeks War—on the Rhine it was, near Remagen; it had a deep stone privy which was alleged never to have been cleaned in over nine hundred years.

None of us was fined for being late, as our driver was even later. And so was Bill. Dr. Chan had resealed Tree-San with a roll-and-clamp arrangement to permit it to be watered more easily. Bill had solicited Aunt Lilybet’s help. They had managed it together, but not quickly. I don’t know whether Bill had time to pee or not. Auntie, of course, had time—the
Hear Me
couldn’t roll until Auntie arrived.

We made a meal stop about half past nineteen at a small pressure, four families, called Rob Roy. After the last stop this one seemed like the acme of civilization. The place was clean, the air smelled right, and the people were friendly and hospitable. There was no choice in the menu—chicken and dumplings, and moonberry pie—and the price was high. But what do you expect out in the middle of nowhere on the face of the Moon? There was a souvenir stand of handmade items, presided over by a little boy. I bought an embroidered change purse that I had no use for, because those people were good to us. The decoration on it read
:
“Rob Roy City, Capital of the Sea of Serenity.” I gave it to my bride.