Doom. Hell on Earth


     For some reason, the fire monster seemed to have a. 1
     As we hit the roof of Deimos, I looked up.
The pressure dome was cracked. Of course. That
made sense, the way things had been going. Next
thing you knew, thousand-year-old Martians would
come along and wink us out of existence.
     Fly Taggart stared at the crack, and his eyes bugged
out like a frog. I wish he knew a bit more physics; if I
have one complaint about Fly, it's that he doesn't
hold with higher education. The crack was small, and
I could see it wasn't going to leak all the air out of the
dome in the next few minutes. Days, more like; days,
or even weeks. It's a big facility.
     Then I looked past the crack and saw what that
huge Marine corporal was really staring at: we weren't
orbiting Mars anymore!
     The entire moon of Deimos had just taken a
whirlwind tour of the solar system. I swallowed hard;
we were staring at Earth.
     "I ... guess we know their invasion plans now," I
said, feeling the blood rush to my face.
     Fly plucked at his uniform--Lieutenant Weems's
uniform, except he'd pulled off the butter bars--like
it had suddenly started itching, "Well at least we
stopped them," he said.
     "Look again, Fly." The globe was flecked with
bright pinpoints of light, flares of explosives millions
of times more powerful, more hellish, than any we
had ducked or lobbed back here on Deimos. I
     pointed to the obvious nuclear exchange blanketing
our home, dumping like a few billion tons of radia-
tion, fallout, and sheer explosive muscle on--on
everyone we had ever known. "Looks like they've
already invaded."
     Fly suddenly latched onto my arm with a vise grip
of raging emotion. I tried to pry his steel hands loose,
while he hollered in my ear. "It's not over, Arlene!"
PFC Arlene Sanders, United States Marine Corps:
that's me. "We've already proven who's tougher. We
won't let it end like this!"
     Right. Me and Fly and nothing but weapons,
ammo, and a hand with some fingers on it. We were,
going to jump from LEO down to the surface of the
Earth. Or maybe we'd drive the planetoid down and
land it at Point Mugu. I guess you couldn't consider
Deimos strictly a moon anymore, since it appeared to
be mobile.
     We were stuck a mere four hundred klicks from
where we wanted to be: but that was four hundred
kilometers straight up. What's more, we were flying
around the Earth at something better than ten kilom-
eters per second--not only would we have to jump
down, we'd better do one hell of a big foot-drag to kill
that orbital velocity.
     And after that we'd solve Format's Last Theorem,
simplify the tax code, and cure world hunger.
That last one was easy enough to fix. The problem
wasn't that there wasn't enough food; it was just in
the wrong places and didn't last long enough. I once
heard an old duffer say all we really needed was food
irradiation, Seal-a-Meals, and a bunch of rocket mail
tubes to plant the food in the center of the famine du
jour.
     Rocket mail tubes . . .
"Fly," I shrieked, jumping up and down. "I know
how to do it!"
     "Do what, damn it?"
Could we do it? I did some fast, rule-of-thumb
calculations: our mass versus that of a typical "care
package" from Mars, the sort they sent up to the
grunts like me serving on Deimos; the Earth's gravita-
tional pull compared to that of Mars--it's harder to
fly up and down off the Earth's surface than the
Martian surface. Maybe ... no, it would work!
Well, maybe.
     "I know how to get us across to Earth, Fly. Did you
know there's a maintenance shed for unmanned snip-
ping rockets on this dump of a moon?"
     "No," he said suspiciously.
Of course he didn't. He was never stationed here,
like I'd been. It was a garage where the motor-pool
sergeant kept all the mail tubes, the shipping rockets. I
had no idea why they were called "mail tubes"; we
send our mail electronically, as the universe intended.
"A one-way ticket to Earth," I summed up, trying
to penetrate that thick skull of his. "If we can find any
kind of ship, we go home and kick some zombie ass.
Again."
     "All over again," he breathed, catching my drift at
last. "Well, hell, we're professionals at this now!"
We continued looking at the familiar blue-green
sphere of Earth, as the unfamiliar white spots ap-
peared and disappeared all over the globe. An old
piece of advice floated up from deep in my memory:
DON'T LOOK DOWN! We gazed upon white clouds
     so beautiful that they reminded me of what we'd been
fighting to save.
     Were we too late? Part of me hoped so, a part that
just wanted to sit down and rest.
     We'd fought those damned, ugly monsters until we
were too tired to fight--and now it was looking like
we had to do it all over again.
     All at once I noticed a sprinkling of the flares all
over California, my home state. "Oh, God, Fly," I
said, my stomach contracting.
     "Yeah. Terrible." Jesus, couldn't my best bud think
of anything stronger to say when Armageddon came
to your hometown?
     I shook my head. "You don't understand. That's
not what I meant. I mean I don't feel anything." I
trembled as I spoke.
     Fly put his arm around me; well, that was more like
it. "It's all right," he mumbled. "It's not what you
think. There's nothing wrong with you. After what
you've been through, you're just numb. Your brain is
tired."
     I let my head rest on his shoulder. "So my mind is
coming loose. What about body and soul?"
     Right then and there I decided we needed a new
word to describe the state after you've reached ex-
haustion but had to keep going on automatic pilot.
Wherever that state was, Fly and I had been there a
long, long time.
     2
I put my arm around Arlene's shoulders,
     hoping she would understand it meant nothing but
friendship. Oh don't be silly, Fly; of course she
understands!
     Where to begin? I was born at an early age, in a log
cabin I helped my father build. I grew up, joined
the UnitedStatesMarineCorpsSir!--went to fight
"Scythe of Glory" Communist leftovers in Ke-
firistan, punched out the C.O., was banged up in the
brig and sent to Mars with the rest of my jarhead
buddies.
     We up-shipped to Phobos, one of the moons of
Mars--well, now the only moon of Mars--and dis-
covered a boatload of aliens had invaded through the
used-to-be-dormant "Gates," long-range teleporters
from . . . from where? From another planet, God
knows where. Arlene and I battled our way into the
depths of the Phobos facility of the Union Aerospace
Corporation . . . who started the whole invasion,
turns out, by monkeying with the Gates in the first
place.
     It all rolled downhill from there. We ended up on
Deimos somehow--and I'm still not sure how that
happened!--and duked our way up one side and
down the other, killing more types of monsters than
you can shake a twelve-gauge at, finally ending up in a
hyperspace tunnel . . . you'll have to ask Arlene Sand-
ers (Exhibit A, the gal to my left) to explain what that
is. But when we finally killed everything worth killing,
we lucked into stopping the invasion cold. See previ-
ous report-from-the-front for full details.
     In the end, we faced down the spidermind--the
handy nickname chosen for the spider-shaped "mas-
termind" of the invasion, chosen by Bill Ritch,
requisat in pace, a computer genius who helped us at
the cost of his own life.
     Right before defeating the spidermind, I'd thought
there was nothing left in me. I was certain that I
couldn't have continued without Arlene, a physical
reminder of what we were fighting for, like old-time
war propaganda. While she breathed, I had to
breathe, and fight. Blame it on the genes. We'd had
the strength to go on against hundreds of monsters.
We weren't about to let a little thing like the laws of
physics stop us now.
     Arlene couldn't stop looking at California, so I
gently led her away from the sight. "You know,
Arlene, I feel really stupid that I didn't think of the
shed; especially after using the rocket fuel to fry the
friggin' spider."
     She blinked her eyes and rubbed them. I could tell
she was trying not to cry. "That's why you need me,
Flynn Peter Taggart."
     So we went spaceship shopping.
Of course, there was the little matter of adding to
our personal armaments. We hadn't seen any mon-
sters for a while. Maybe we neutralized all of them--
but I wasn't about to count on it.
     "Once, I was asked why I don't like to go out on the
street without being armed," I told Arlene.
     "Must have been an idiot," came the terse reply.
She'd regained her self-control, but she was still acting
defensive. We were good friends, but that made it
easier for her to be embarrassed in front of me.
"No, I wouldn't call her that," I continued. "But
she'd lived a protected life; never came up against the
mother of all storms."
     "What's that?" Arlene wanted to know.
"Late-twentieth-century street slang for when the
bad mother on your block decides it's time to teach
you a lesson. At such times, it is advisable to carry an
equalizer."
     "Like this?" Arlene asked, bending down to re-
trieve an AB-10 machine pistol, her personal fave.
Every little bit helps.
     "If my friend had one of those in her purse--" I
began, but Arlene interrupted.
     "Too long to get it out. I like to carry on my
person."
     "Yeah, yeah. I was about to say if she had carried,
she might be alive today."
     Arlene stopped rummaging through the contents of
a UAC crate and looked up. "Oh, Fly, I'm sorry."
"Sometimes you get the lesson only one time, and
it's pass-fail." I playfully poked the air in her direc-
tion. "Welcome back," I said.
     "What do you mean?" she asked, squinting at me
the way she always did when I made her defensive.
"You can feel again, dear."
     "Oh," she said, her body becoming more relaxed.
"You're right. One person means something. Well,
sometimes . . . if there aren't too many one persons."
"One's real. There's the body on the floor. A
million is just a statistic, no matter how much
screaming the professional mourner does."
     She punched the air back at me. And she smiled.
We didn't talk for a little while. We continued gather-
ing goodies en route to the shed. It didn't take long to
locate; the good news was that it was large and
apparently well-stocked. It would take days to go
through all the crates and boxes; but if the labels on
the outside were accurate, we'd discovered a much
larger inventory of parts than I would have imagined
necessary for Deimos Base.
     The bad news was a complete absence of ships in
any state of assembly. There was nothing to fly!
"Well jeez, I thought it was a great idea," said
Arlene. "Too bad it flopped."
     Somehow it seemed immoral to give up hope while
standing inside Santa's workshop. I began examining
some of the boxes while Arlene kicked one across the
room; but that didn't bother me, she was never meant
for the modern age she was born into. She'd have been
more homey as a freebooter in the days of blood and
iron, when one physically competent woman did
enough in her lifetime to breed legends of lost,
Amazonian races of warrior queens. She had guts; she
had cold steel will. She didn't have patience, but what
the hell!
     I didn't think I would face death as well as she. I'd
go down in a very nonstoic way, kicking death in the
groin if I could only line up my shot.
     I looked inside those boxes--big ones, little ones,
all kinds of in-between ones--and an idea grew in my
head, a few words slipping out.
     "I wonder if it still might be possible to seize the
objective," I muttered.
     Arlene heard, too. "Huh? What do you mean, seize
the objective?"
     I was only half listening. The little voice in the back
of my head drowned her out with some really crazy
stuff: "It seems ridiculous, A.S., but it could work."
3
     The stoic qualities of Arlene Sanders were
better suited to facing death than being irritated by
her old buddy. "Fly, what the hell are you talking
about?" She stomped to where I was going through a
box of thin metal cylinders, perfect for the project
growing inside my head.
     "Yes," I said, "it really could work."
Using the special tone of voice normally reserved
for dealing with mentally deficient children and
drunken sailors, she said: "Tell me what in God's
name you're on about, Fly!"
     I lifted my head from the box. "When I was a kid, I
wanted a car real bad. I mean real bad. Real real, bad
bad."
     "Here we go down memory lane," she said with a
shrug.
     "See, I couldn't afford the car," I said, "but I
wanted one."
     "Real real, bad bad?"
"I mean, I'd have taken anything with wheels and a
transmission. If I couldn't have a six, I'd settle for
four. Three, anything! But no matter how much I
lowered expectations, I still couldn't afford a vehicle."
"Is this going somewhere, Fly, or do I need to
hitchhike back home to Mother?"
     "That's exactly right," I said. "I'm talking about
transportation. I couldn't afford a car--but I could
afford a spare part now and then, and you know how
this ended up?"
     She put her hands on her hips, head tilted to the
side, and said: "Let me guess! You collected spare
parts, and collected and collected, and finally you
were able to build your own F-20! Or was it an aircraft
carrier? Amphibious landing craft?"
     I ignored her. "I built myself a car. Had a few
problems; no brakes exactly, but it ran; and what a
powerful sound that baby made when she turned
over."
     Arlene finally saw where I was headed. Memory
lane dead-ended right here on Deimos. "Fly, you're
BS-ing me."
     "No, I really built an auto . . ."
"You are insane if you think you can build a
freakin' spaceship out of spare parts!"
     I literally jumped up and down. "You thought of it
too," I said. "Great idea, isn't it? We can build a
rocket and get off this rock."
     She was very tolerant. "Fly, an automobile is one
thing. You're talking about a spaceship."
     I looked her straight in the eye. "After all we've
been through, you going to tell me we can't do this?"
She looked me straight back. "Read my lips," she
said. "We can not do this."
     "We have nothing to lose, A.S. It can't be any
harder than taking down the spidermind, can it?"
"You have a point there," she said grudgingly. "So
how do you propose we start?"
     She was always annoyed when I used reality to win
an argument. I knew it was possible. But not without
a manual.
     "We need some tech," I said.
"Tech?"
     "Plans . . . then we can give it to our design depart-
ment."
     "Don't tell me ... I'm the design department."
I smiled. "You're the design department."
     "And what are you, Fly Taggart?"
"Everything else."
     We went looking for a manual. Ten minutes later we
found one in the most logical place, which was the last
place we looked, naturally: next to the coffee maker. I
tried to get Arlene to make us a pot of coffee, but she
stared at me as if I'd grown a third head.
     So I made it myself; I'd forgotten that Arlene didn't
indulge, but that was all right with me. I figured since
I was the production line, I needed all the caffeine I
could survive.
     Next we inventoried everything we had to work
with. Our best choice was to make a small mail rocket
intended for one person, but capable of seating two, if
they were really chummy. I wrote a list of parts
needed and found almost everything within three
hours . . . except for a thingamabob. I knew what it
was really called, but I couldn't think of it. We spent
another hour searching, and though we didn't come
across it, we located more tools that would be of
immeasurable value; a screwdriver, a drill bit, a
magnifying glass, and a paper punch.
     "Enough for now," said Arlene. "I'm sure the
thingamabob will show up before we finish. We'd
better get started ... I have no idea how fast the air is
leaking from the dome; we might have a month, we
might have a couple of days!"
     I wasn't going to argue with an optimistic Arlene.
Hell, I hardly ever argued with the pessimistic one.
"We haven't looked under all the tarps," I said, "and
there are other rooms to check too. But there is one
more shopping expedition required before we start
work. We need enough food and water to hold us
through the job; and all the spare liquid oxygen tanks
and hydrogen tanks we can find."
     Arlene nodded. We were in a race with a bunch of
air molecules, and they had a head start. In addition
to oxygen for fuel, we actually needed to breathe now
and again over the next few days. Weeks, whatever. It
would be cruel fate indeed if I screwed the last bolt
and hammered the final wing nut, only to keel over
from oxygen deprivation.
     My brain was working overtime now: "The pres-
sure is dropping so slowly, we're not going to notice
when it gets dangerous. Can you rig up something to
warn us when to start taking a hit of pure oxygen?"
"And regulate how much we should take. Yeah, it's
a space station ... I don't think I'll have much trou-
ble finding an air-pressure sensor and rebreather kit."
She pulled a gouge pad out of her shirt pocket and
started taking notes. She thought of something I'd
missed: "I'll look for warm clothes too, Fly. The
temperature will drop as we lose pressure."
     "Won't the sun warm us? We're no farther away
than Earth itself."
     "We're underground. All this dirt makes a great
insulator, unfortunately."
     First day, we were good scouts, gathering supplies
for our merit badge in survival. I regretted that we
couldn't move what we needed to a lower level and
seal off one compartment. That would stretch survival
by another month. But hauling the tons of material
we'd need to build a rocket was impossible.
     Arlene scrounged a generous supply of food, most
of it produced under the dome with considerable help
from the Genetics Department. After watching the
monsters produced assembly-line out of the vat, I
hesitated even to eat our own--human experiments
in recombinant-DNA veggies and lab-grown "Meet."
But Arlene wasn't queasy. She preferred the Deimos-
grown peas and carrots to the real delicacy, frozen
asparagus from Earth.
     "I despise asparagus," she insisted.
"All right; so I hate okra." The slimy stuff was one
of my childhood loathings.
     On the second day, we ran head-on into our first
lesson in Spaceship Construction 101: namely, trans-
lating the manual from "techie-talk" into English.
Here, what should we make of this?
     The ZDS protocol provides reliable, flow-
controlled, two-way transmission of unenriched
fuel-cell packet deliverables from nozzle to sock-
et. It is a plasma stream (PLASM-STREAM) or
     packet stream (SOCK-SEQFUELPACKET) pro-
tocol. ZDS uses the Union Aerospace Corpora-
tion double-sequencing directed stream format.
This format provides for nozzle, spray, and
     extern-spray (socket) specification.
NOTE: see the definition for ZDS-redirect in
Section 38.12.
     ACTIVE OR PASSIVE
Sockets utilizing the ZDS protocol are either
"active" or "passive." Nozzle processes must be
directed into passive (external spray) sockets.
They detect for connection requests from deliver-
able processes residing on the same or other
nodes of the fuel-cell packet path. Socket proc-
esses broadcast requests for active (directed
spray) nozzles. They sidestep nominal delivery in
favor of reverse-directed (acknowledging) packet
streams.
     ALL CONNECTIONS BETWEEN NOZZLES
AND SOCKETS MUST BE SET TO DEFAULT
     ACTIVE OR PASSIVE PROTOCOL DEPEND-
ING ON THE ANTICIPATED FUEL-CELL
     PATH DELIVERY PROCESS.
WARNING! Failure to follow UAC active/passive
nozzle-socket connection protocols may result in
unanticipated fuel-cell path combustion with un-
desirable results.
     I could translate the final warning pretty well: if we
didn't figure out what the hell they meant by
"active/passive nozzle-socket connection protocols,"
Arlene and I would become a rather spectacular
fireworks display.
     Arlene was better at figuring it out than I was; she
had actually taken engineering night courses during
her shore tours. I volunteered the use of my hands
and a strong back if she'd turn the technical gobbledy-
gook into the kind of instructions a Marine can
follow: "Put this part here! Tighten that bolt, Ma-
rine!"
     "Yeah, just like you to have the woman do all the
hard work," she said.
     "Just remind me to clean the carburetor before I
work on the piston valves."
     "It's not a car, you moron!"
"Huh. I guess in space no one can hear you make
metaphors." Amazingly, she didn't shoot me.
     Unfortunately, the rockets used by the Deimos
facility--hence all the spare parts--were short-hop,
lightweight supply rockets, never intended to carry a
single human being, let alone two of us ... and never
intended to fight a gravity well like Earth's.
There were a couple large-bore rocket casings left
over from God knows when, back before we had the
MDM-44 plasma motors developed by Union Aero-
space, and this was the key: I figured I could hot-rod a
44 into & bigger cousin, cram it inside one of the old
casings, and have enough juice to fling us off Deimos,
burn into the atmosphere, and brake to a (messy)
landing Somewhere on Earth.
     My main goal was to keep from blowing us up.
After frying our spider baby in JP-9 jet fuel, I had a
new respect for the stuff. It beat the hell out of salad
oil.
     Arlene squatted on an uncomfortable stool translat-
ing technical paragraphs into something I could un-
derstand. My optimist projection was to finish the
task in ten days!
     Reality dragged ass.
Starting our third week, we ran into the first serious
problem. Trying to jerry-rig parts we couldn't find
into configurations we couldn't figure out was a bitch,
and I insisted we needed to test-fire the motor when I
finally got a working model. We didn't have much
time, but the motor was life and death, a must test.
We'd spent two days painfully assembling it, and I do
mean "we." Arlene enjoyed an excuse to get off her
stool; besides, it was a two-man job.
     We finally ended up with a sleek beauty two meters
long and a meter in diameter, almost small enough to
fit inside the old-model rocket skin. Just a few odd
pieces here and there where I thought I could super-
charge the system--or where I couldn't find the
correct part and had to Substitute butter for eggs. A
pair of start cables snaked into the machine from ten
feet away, where a switch box was connected to
twenty-seven fifty-volt ni-cad batteries.
     I'd spent half a day welding steel bars together into
a framework, sort of, kind of approximating the
interior scaffolding in the mail tube. We bolted the
motor inside, mooring it securely to the deck plates.
Last, I attached a highly sensitive pressure sensor to
the forward edge to measure the thrust. I'd trust
Arlene to make the calculations and tell me whether
we would make it into orbit or not.
     "Want to say a prayer?" she asked before I switched
it on.
     "Yeah; I wasn't always in trouble with the nuns.
Maybe I can collect on a few good deeds." Arlene
stationed herself behind a bulkhead; I reached over
and flipped the switch, then dived behind cover.
Superheated gases rushed out the back with a
tremendous roar . . . and I could tell immediately it
was too much force; I'd tweaked my rocket engine too
good.
     But I couldn't switch it off! It was just a model,
designed to burn until the fuel was gone; no cut-off
valve.
     The scaffolding strained, groaning like a dying
steam demon--whoops, remind me later--and I
     knew what was about to happen. "Get your head
down!" I screamed. No use--she couldn't hear any-
thing over the roar of the engine and the scream of
steel twisting and ripping free.
     The mooring tore loose with a horrible, grinding
noise that for an instant even drowned out the 44. My
beautiful, working rocket engine broke free, ate the
pressure sensor with one gulp, and smashed through a
dozen boxes of precious parts before making a smok-
ing hole against the nearby bulkhead, leaving a per-
fectly straight series of holes, like a cartoon.
4
     Destroying a bulkhead on a doomed base, or
even some spare parts, was no cause for alarm.
Destroying the motor was something else again.
Arlene screamed something obscene, but I couldn't
hear her over the ringing in my ears. We got off lucky.
It could have struck the JP-9 and ended everything.
After we extinguished the fire and salvaged what we
could of the motor, Arlene looked at me humorlessly.
"Flynn Taggart, what deviltry did you do to those
poor nuns?"
     "Can you rephrase that, after what we've been
through?" We were both a little punchy, getting by on
shifts of four hours sleep. But no spiderminds were
trying to kill us, no imps throwing a wrench in the
machinery, no hell-princes setting fires worse than the
one we'd just put out. It felt like we were on vacation.
All right, to fill in a bit: an imp is what we dubbed
the brown, spiny, leathery alien that throws flaming
balls of mucus. Hell-princes looked like the typical
"devil" from my troubled youth in Catholic school--
red body, goat legs, horns, and they too threw some-
thing noxious that killed you real dead; we pretty
much decided it had to be an example of genetic
engineering, since it was too close to a human concep-
tion of evil.
     We had also killed demons, which I privately called
pinkies, that were huge, pink, hairy critters with no
brains but an awful lot of teeth; flying, metallic skulls
with little rocket motors; invisible ghosts; and an
unbelievable horde of zombies--spiritually, they
were the worst, for oftener than not, they were our
own buddies and comrades at arms, "reworked" into
the living dead.
     But the granddaddy monster of them all was the
steam-demon, so called because it was a five-meter-
tall mechanical monstrosity with a back rack full of
rockets and a launcher where its hand should have
been. When it moved, it sounded like a steam loco-
motive and shook the ground.
     None of that was important compared to one fact:
Arlene had completely changed her mind about build-
ing the rocket. "I'm sorry I ever doubted you," she
said. "I guess it is possible."
     But now I was the contrarian. "We did all the
calculations right, A.S. We checked and triple-
checked everything . . . How could the engine be so
much more powerful than we thought?"
     She smiled. "Because they obviously deliberately
understated the capabilities in the technical
literature--probably for security reasons."
     "So all our calculations are worthless crap. How are
you going to fly this thing?"
     She didn't seem overly concerned. "Fly, the vehicle
hasn't been built that I can't pilot."
     "Um . . . well, this rocket hasn't been built, has it?"
"You know what I mean! If you build it, I will fly. I
swear."
     "Hm." I didn't know what to say. I had no idea
whether she was or wasn't a hot-shot rocket pilot. We
don't get much call for that in the Light Drop Infan-
try. But now that she believed in the rocket, nothing
was going to stop us.
     There were other motor parts, and we patched
together something I figured was eighty percent ready.
There was no time for better. The air was growing
thinner and the temperature was dropping ... the
crack in the dome was finally taking its toll.
The pressure dropped so gradually, we didn't even
notice. After a while I found myself panting for air
after climbing a ladder, and Arlene had to rest after
every heavy part she handed me.
     Then a couple of days later, I realized my mind was '
wandering in the middle of a task. I focused, then
wandered again.
     Arlene was able to maintain her concentration;
maybe being smaller, she didn't need as high a partial
pressure of oxygen. But both of us were getting mighty
cold.
     When I saw Arlene shivering while working, I made
her throw on a couple of sweaters and did the same.
We wore gloves, except that I kept removing mine
because it interfered with the work. Then my hands
would turn to ice, and I'd put them back on to warm
up before taking another stab at attaching the fine
filaments that ran microvolts to the plasma globules.
Suddenly, the air-pressure sensor started screaming
its fool head off. Arlene and I exchanged a worried
glance, but we didn't need to be told twice. It was time
to start hitting the raw stuff, O2 neat. We took hits off
the same oxygen bottle, trying to limit ourselves to a
few breaths every hour or so, or when we started to get
dizzy or goofy.
     But we just didn't have that much bottled oxygen.
Uncle Sugar packed a lot of air into a single bottle; but
even so, even at the slow pace we used it, we'd run out
of breathing oxygen in just a few more days. We had
more bottles, but we needed them for fuel mixing.
And of course we'd need to breathe more frequently
as the pressure dropped--paradoxically, it was drop-
ping slower now, since there was less pressure in the
dome to push the air out.
     We stretched the bottles as long as we could, but
they ran out while there was still plenty of work left.
I'd done mountain climbing in my native Colorado
before joining the Corps; as the air grew thinner, I
tried to help Arlene deal with it. "Breathe shallowly,"
I said. "Rest, and don't talk except for the job."
The physical exertion wasn't any less, though. We'd
have to stop frequently, gasping and panting. We tired
easily and needed more sleep, but stayed on the four-
hour rotations, creating a cycle of exhaustion we
couldn't break. But sleeping longer would just make
the job take longer, and the pressure would drop lower
in the meantime.
     Low pressure is insidious. There are obvious ef-
fects: exhaustion, trouble breathing, and cold. But
there are other symptoms people don't often think
about: your ears ring; it's hard to hear sounds (thinner
air makes everything sound muffled and "tinny"); and
worst of all, your mind can start to go. Our brains are
built for a certain barometric pressure, and if it's too
high or too low, we start getting strange.
     Or in Arlene's case, hallucinogenic.
"Pumpkin!" she suddenly screamed, waking me
     after two hours of my allotted four. She grabbed a
pump-action riot gun and pounded a shot over my
head, so close it made my skull vibrate.
     "Pumpkin" was our name for the horrible, floating
alien heads--mechanical, I think--that vomited ball
lightning capable of frying you at fifty paces. I threw
myself off the table we used as a bed, figuring the
vacation was over: the aliens had found us at last!
But when I dropped to my knees, Sig-Cow rifle at
the ready, all I saw was the dark hole in the wall left by
my overly enthusiastic motor test of a week ago.
Arlene ran down the passageway ahead of me, firing
wildly; firing at nothing. But those bastard alien
"demons" could be fast! I had no reason to doubt my
buddy as I joined her, ready to do what we'd done
countless times during our assault on Phobos,
Deimos, and the tunnel.
     Then she ran straight into the bulkhead like it
wasn't there, and I suddenly realized something was
seriously wrong with her.
     She knocked herself out. I couldn't look after her
then; I had to make sure about the pumpkin.
     Knuckling the residue of sleep from bloodshot eyes,
I ran like a mother down the corridor, eyes left, right
. . . not wasting a shot but ready for the enemy. For an
instant I thought I saw a flying globe and almost
squeezed off a shot. But it was a trick of peripheral
vision, just a flash of my own shadow.
     A cul-de-sac at the end of the corridor finally
convinced me that there was no freaking pumpkin.
I stood for a moment, desperately trying to get
nonexistent air into my burning lungs. Then I re-
turned to Arlene, who groaned and panted as she
started coming to.
     "Pal, honey, I hate to do this . . . but I've got to
relieve you of your weapon."
     She stared uncomprehendingly.
"There was no pumpkin," I explained. "You're
suffering from low-pressure psychosis."
     "Oh Jesus," she said quietly. She understood.
Sadly, she handed over the scattergun and her AB-10
machine pistol.
     I felt like the bottom of my boots after walking
through the green sludge. You don't relieve a Marine
of his weapon, not ever. By doing so, I'd just effec-
tively demoted her to civilian. And the worst part
was, even she realized now that she'd been halluci-
nating.
     She was crying when we walked slowly back to the
vehicle assembly room, a.k.a. the hangar. I'd never
seen Arlene cry before--except when she had to kill
the reworked, reanimated body of her former lover,
Dodd.
     "Hey," I said a few hours later, "can't we electro-
lyze water and get oxygen?"
     Arlene was silent for a moment, her lips moving.
"Yes," she said, "but we'd only get a few breaths per
liter, and we need the water too, Fly."
     "Oh." Not for the first time, I wished I knew more
engineering. I vowed to take classes when we made it
back home ... if there even was a "back home"
anymore.
     I started having unpleasant dreams, so I didn't
mind giving up more of my sleep allotment. It was
always the same dream, actually. I loved roller coast-
ers as a kid. They were the closest I could get to flying
in those days. I lived only five miles away from a
freestanding wood-frame monster. I thought I would
love nothing better, until they built a tubular steel,
eight-loop supercoaster.
     I'd never been afraid on the old roller coaster. With
all the courage of an experienced ten-year-old, I'd sit
in the car as it slowly reached the top, the horizon
slanting off to my left, and pretend it was the rim of a
planet and I was an astronaut. As it went over the top,
plunging down a cliff of wood and metal, I made it a
point of honor not to hold on to the crash bar. I was
too grown-up for that!
     I was always interested in how things were put
together and how they worked. So I asked about the
new roller coaster. A man who worked at the amuse-
ment park told me stuff he wasn't supposed to say,
stuff he knew nothing about--about how the forces
generated could snap a human neck like rotten cord-
wood, how the auxiliary chain that gave the car
acceleration had a lot of extra strain on it for an eight-
loop ride.
     As I started up the first hill of the new ride, I
thought about what I'd learned. I didn't know it was
all bogus crap made up to impress a ten-year-old.
The first loop, I worried about centrifugal force
snapping my neck; the second loop, I sweated over
velocity tearing me out of my seat; the third loop, I
fixated on the damned chain coming loose; and the
fourth loop was reserved for a ten-year-old having
ulcers over the gears stripping. And then I threw up--
not a good thing to do when you're upside down.
I wonder if that bastard ever knew what damage his
misinformation caused?
     As I grew up, I learned how real knowledge could
banish fear. You play the odds. You focus on the job at
hand. You don't want to mess up. The childhood
trauma was behind me ... until it came back now on
Deimos as I tried to grab a little sleep. Instead of rest,
I was back on that eight-loop metal monster, and now
it turned into the arms and legs of a steam-demon.
When the creature screamed at me and raised its
missile arm, I would always wake up; so I didn't even
have the pleasure of fighting or dying.
     I didn't worry about my stupid dreams, though. It
sure beat fighting the real thing. Besides, I was getting
off easy compared to Arlene.
     I knew things were bad when I tried to wake her up
and she stared with unblinking eyes, not seeing a
damned thing. I realized she was still asleep. I'd read
somewhere that it's risky to wake a person from a
trance state, and I didn't require medical training to
know Arlene was Somnambulist City.
     There wasn't time to go hunting for a medical
library. A quick check of medical supplies produced a
Law Book, wedged between the surgical bandages and
antibiotics. I had to laugh. A text on medical malprac-
tice had made it all the way to a Martian moon, and
now, by way of a hyperspace tunnel, had almost
returned to Earth.
     I wasn't laughing as I returned to Arlene. She
walked in her sleep, striking at the air in front of her.
"Get away," she said to phantoms only she could see.
"I won't leave you. I'll stay, I'll stay!"
     5
If I shouldn't wake her, there seemed no
     reason I shouldn't try to communicate. "Arlene, can
you hear me?"
     "Quiet," she said, "I don't want Fly to hear you.
He's depending on me."
     "Why don't you want him to know about me?" I
asked.
     "Because you're evil," she said with conviction.
"You're all evil, you bastards."
     She walked slowly down the corridor. So long as she
wasn't in danger of hurting herself, I saw no reason to
shock her out of it. "Why are we bad?"
     "You scare me. You make my brother do bad
things!"
     Up to that point I did not know that Arlene even
had a brother.
     It was weird--I thought we'd known everything
about each other's family life. She talked about her
parents and growing up in Los Angeles all the time. I
was uncomfortable pursuing the matter, but I rationa-
lized away my moral qualms and decided to play out
the hand. "Who are we?" I asked again.
     She swayed drunkenly, delivering a monologue like
those weird, old plays from previous centuries. "Bad
things in the air, in the night, making my brother
crazy. He'd never do bad things except for you. I
thought I'd never see you again . . . Why'd you follow
me into space, to Mars, to Deimos? When I grew up, I
thought you weren't real, but now I know better. You
followed me, but I won't let you get inside me; not
inside!"
     When Arlene had kidded me about going down
memory lane, I took it in good humor. But if we were
going to have to relive all the bad stuff from our
childhood as the air leaked away, I was good and
ready to say good-bye to Deimos now, rocket or no
rocket, instead of later.
     In the meantime, what was I going to do about
Arlene? I couldn't let her wander the corridors, argu-
ing with ghosts from her childhood. With time short
and no way to send to Earth for a correspondence
course in psychology, I went with common sense.
"Arlene, we'll make a deal with you," I said. "We'll
stop bothering you and let you get back to Fly."
"In exchange for what?" she wanted to know, quite
reasonably.
     "Because we've moved back to Earth, and you can't
touch us there."
     "Fly and I are building a ship to take us to Earth,"
"Ha, we don't believe you two will get anywhere
near us. You'll be stuck on Deimos forever!"
"That's a lie!" she snapped, and stopped walking.
"We'll fight you again." She stared right at me. "We're
not afraid of your little genetic stupidmen."
"Big words!" I said.
     She came right at me, fists raised, and started
hitting me. As I fended off her blows--not too
difficult, considering the difference in reach--I
yelled, "Hang on, Arlene, I'm coming to help you.
This is Fly, Fly!"
     As I say, I never took any courses in psychology, but
I acted in school plays. And to steal a phrase, it
doesn't take a rocket scientist to go with the flow. I
gave myself a magna cum laude graduation as her eyes
came into focus and she recognized me.
     "Fly? What happened?"
"We've been fighting monsters again."
     She looked around the empty corridor and then
back to me. I didn't have to spell it out. "How much
longer can we take this?"
     "Not a second longer than we have to."
Arlene started seeing weird colors after that--
auras, shadows, and things she wouldn't tell at first.
Sometimes she would put the tech documents down,
sitting quietly with her eyes shut until the colors went
away.
     It scared me plenty, but it terrified her. She was
losing her mind--and she knew it. So when I told her
the engine was eighty percent finished, Arlene urged,
"Fly, forget the other twenty percent. It's done! Let's
blow this popcorn stand."
     I had to be honest. "A.S., there are still a few
systems I don't think are in really good shape."
"We can't wait. We've taken chances with worse
odds than that the whole time we've been on this
rock. Fly, I ... I stopped being able to see color
vision this morning. All I can see is gray--except
when I hallucinate a rainbow-colored aura. And my
peripheral vision is shot." She paused, licking her
lips. "And Fly, there's something else."
     She came close and spoke softly, seriously. "I want
to confess something to you, Fly. What would your
nuns think of that? For the first time I'm really afraid.
I'm afraid I might kill you, thinking you're one of the
monsters. I couldn't stand that."
     The little voice in the back of my head had whis-
pered that possibility when she first imagined the
pumpkin. It was a chance I was willing to take. Even
so, I was glad she, not I, stated the danger loud and
clear.
     I sped up preparations, insisting that Arlene sleep
whenever possibl