Hell on Earth (4 page)

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 whispered 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 possible. The air and pressure problems were getting to me as well, but I handled them better than Arlene.

Of course, the problem with oxygen starvation is that you are not the best judge of your own reason. But the best chance for both of us was to finish the rocket.

And we were close, tantalizingly close.

I suddenly got the creepy crawlies. I recognized the symptom: I was picking up the same psychosis as Arlene. “All right,” I acquiesced, “we go in the next few hours. We have a chance, I guess; eighty percent is eighty points better than zero.”

We got busy. We drank water. We ate a last good meal of biscuits, cheese, fruit, nuts. The Eskimos say that food is sleep, by which I guess they mean if your body can't get one kind of recharge, you might as well take the other.

Arlene abandoned me to work out the telemetry program that would (God willing) launch us, kill Deimos's orbital velocity, dropping us into the atmosphere, then take us down, at which point she'd hand over control to me to find a suitable spot to touch down. Fortunately, it was basically cut-and-paste; I doubt she could have written it from scratch . . . not
in the condition she was in. The hand of God must have graced her, though she'd never admit it, for her to keep it together long enough to patch it together.

As we prepared to leave, I kept running the basic worries through my mind. The mail tubes were designed for Mars, which has only a fraction the atmosphere of Earth and a much lower gravity; the specific impulse developed by the rockets might not be enough to overcome Earth's gravity as we spilled velocity and tried to land. On the other hand, the thick atmosphere might cause so much friction that our little ship would burn up.

The launcher was a superconducting rail gun. Reminded me of the eight-loop wonder at the amusement park back in the Midwest. This time I hoped I wouldn't throw up. At least this piece of equipment didn't have an auxiliary chain . . . so what was there to worry about?

I grunted the launcher around to point opposite Deimos's orbital path. The rocket controls were simple to operate, thank God; throttle, stick, various navigational gear that I didn't really understand, and environmental controls, all ranged around my face in a tremendously uncomfortable position.

Then suddenly, a few hours before our scheduled departure, Arlene totally freaked out.

At first I thought she was joking. She strolled up to me and said, “Don't try to fool me; I know what you
really
are.”

“Yeah, a prize SOB,” I said distractedly. A moment later I was on my butt with Arlene's boot on my chest and a shiv—a sharpened piece of metal—against my throat. Looking into her eyes, I saw the blank look of a zombie . . . and for a moment, Jesus, I thought they'd somehow gotten her, reworked her!

But it was just the low pressure, or maybe slow
oxygen deprivation. I talked to her for five minutes from my supine position, saying anything, God knows what, anything to snap her back to some semblance of herself. After a while she dropped the shiv and started crying, saying she had murdered God or some such silly nonsense.

I wasn't going to abandon her, no matter what; but there was nothing in my personal rule book that said I had to make it any more difficult. We had Medikits in the shed. I gave her a shot. She struggled, coughed, and turned to me. “Why
can't
we eat our brothers?” she asked; then the drug took effect.

She'd be okay; in the mail-tube rocket, we've have more pressure, and more important, more partial-pressure of O
₂
. 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 passenger 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 shell, and agony exploded across my face. At first it was bilateral; then it focused right behind my eyeballs, like God'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 blackout had lasted only forty-five seconds.

It could have been forty-five years.

A low groan announced Arlene's return to consciousness. “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 bumpier 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.

F
ly!” 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 cocoon, she might have shrugged as well. “Bygones,” 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 circumstances.

“So how in hell 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 butt.

We didn't have any time to waste. Thanks to our stunt with the oxygen, the O
₂
to CO
₂
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 here instead 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, somewhere in North America, she said; even she wasn't sure where.

But I kept cutting through the path, coloring outside 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.