Ice Cream and Venom (6 page)

They woke President Carter up in the middle of the night to tell him the mysterious object from Nebraska had been spotted again.

"Do we have a man on the inside this time?" Carter asked.

"Yes sir."

"Ok, then. Take care of it. No witnesses," he said, and then went back to bed.

When he came to, Lee found himself floating weightless, still in the airlock. He attempted to gather his wits, but his head was muddy with confused anger. He floated to the next deck up—the suit lockers—but they were empty. He floated up to the next deck—the kitchen. Grapeape was strapped to a table with what looked like twine. Steve was literally hovering over him, and Susan floating upside down, shining a flashlight on the Mormon's chest.

"What the hell happened?" Lee demanded.

"The cops thought you were kidnapping me, and raided your house," Susan said.

"I know that! I saw that! I mean... uhm..." He couldn't quite think of the right words, so he just asked the same question again, "What the hell happened?"

"Grapeape here got shot," Steve said.

"No, no, I mean why did we drop the cargo silos? You almost wrecked us! You almost killed me!"

"It wasn't me. Everything was going fine—excepting the bullets—until dumbass here hit the 'release' button."

"Oh. Wait, the kid got shot?"

"Yeah," Susan said.

"Is it… serious?"

"Nah," Steve said, "Just meat-shot. Straight in-and-out. Bullet didn't stay in him, didn't hit the bone, didn't hit an artery or anything. Lucky, really. I'm just sewing it up. Hurt like hell when he wakes up."

"How'd you knock him out?" Lee asked

"Didn't. He blacked out from blood loss and fell on the 'release' controls."

"Uhm... are you qualified to do this?" Susan asked Steve nervously.

"Speak up!" Steve said, irritated, "I'm hard of hearing! You need to talk louder or just shut up entirely!"

"Are you qualified to do this?" She asked again, louder.

"Probably not. I was a medic in the war, though obviously there was no training for battlefield surgery in zero G."

Steve suddenly noticed little balls of blood floating around the cabin, and that cleared his mind for some reason. He got a drink of water, then got the small Dust Devil hand-vacuum and started collecting the blood-clouds.

"We need to get him to a hospital," Susan said.

"Yeah, I'm sure that'll go over well," Lee said, "Hi there, we just melted your helipad parking our UFO, can you take care of this fat kid with the bullet wound while we go back into space and run from the cops some more?'"

"You can't just let him die!" she protested.

"True," Lee agreed. "Is he gonna die, Uncle Steve?"

"Eventually, yeah. Twenty or thirty years if he keeps eating the way he obviously does, but he ain't gonna die today."

"Ok, then, let's figure our next move."

They were safely in orbit. The United States had no way to send people up after them; no weapon that could touch them, and even if they did, it was a safe bet that the Nebraska State Police didn't have access to it.

"So what did we lose in those cargo silos?" Lee asked. Steve handed him the manifest.

"Eh, that's not too bad. Nothing crippling in there," Lee said absently.

"We're going to lose the other one, too," Steve said.

"What? Why?" Lee asked.

"We're badly off balance. It's frankly amazing we made it to orbit. Fuel isn't really a problem, but gimbaling the engine that far isn't safe. This is only a prototype, after all."

"Ok, well, so we lose the camper. That's still not too bad. Nothing essential in there. We can still continue on to our objective."

"Wait, what? What objective? I thought your point was just to go into space?" Susan asked.

"Nah, we're going to the moon," Steve said, "Well, we
were
going to the moon. Lee gets the final say on that."

"I'm thinking. That couldn't have been a simple kidnapping thing back there. There had to be two hundred cops, copters, someone hit us with a rocket!"

"That's ridiculous!" Susan said, "You're just being paranoid."

"Someone. Hit. Us. With. A. Rocket." Lee repeated, emphasizing every word.

"I see your point," she admitted.

"It has to be the Feds," Lee said.

"Has to be," Steve agreed.

"Why?" Susan asked.

"We talked about it back at the restaurant—the US is out of the Space Race, at least until the Shuttles go into service, if they ever do. We might be out of it forever. The government has shut down any private industry attempts to get into spaceflight as an industry, they've even flexed their muscle to shut down foreign companies that have tried to do it."

Grapeape woke up, but no one noticed. He pretended to still be asleep.

"Why?" Susan asked.

"I don't know," Lee admitted, "Fear of upsetting the status quo? Let the lid off the pot, and it'll boil over, the government would never be able to control it all, rein people back in."

"That's libertarian crap," Susan said. No one else said anything for a bit.

"We could give ourselves up to the Soviets, ask for sanctuary," Steve said. "We could easily make it to Salyut 6, explain the situation, land at Baikonour. With our house gone, and my notes lost, I'm the only one who knows the secret of the drive system. I'm sure they'd give their eyeteeth for that. I'm just putting it out there."

"You can't be serious," Susan said, "Lee, he can't be serious."

Lee looked pensive, "Well, it would unquestionably save our lives, and it might have the long-term benefit of forcing the US to expand into space, which was our goal anyway..."

"You can't do that!" Grapeape spluttered, startling them all. He looked really angry, really driven, really unlike the fat teenager they'd first met only a few hours before.

"I agree," Lee said, "But it's important to know whether the devil is even open to making deals before you rule that option out."

"So what was the original plan, anyway?" Susan asked.

"We go the moon, set up a big transmitter, and have you broadcast the story back to Earth on live TV. Then we maybe make out some. It was kind of a first-date thing. Phil wasn't really your boyfriend, was he?"

"You mean you picked me just because you want to get in the sack with me?" She was suddenly indignant.

"I think that's oversimplifying things quite a bit, but, back at Red Lobster I said you were pretty."

"You went to all this trouble to get a date?"

"I wanted to impress you," Lee said, sheepishly.

"I
am
pretty impressed," she admitted very quietly.

"We should go back to Earth, turn ourselves in to the authorities. They probably think we're Iranian terrorists or something. If we explain..." Grapeape said.

"Someone. Hit. Us. With. A. Rocket." Lee reiterated.

"Because they thought we were terrorists! If we go back down..."

Lee regarded him silently.

"Not an option," he said, "It's either the Rooskies or the Moon. No third option. Steve, can we get any kind of proof that we were on the moon? Something to convince the media before the Feds can get a hold of us?"

"Yeah, sure: Moonrocks by the bucketful!"

"Nah," Susan said, "They'll just claim you stole them from a museum."

"We've got a Betamax portable video camera system in my cabin." Steve ventured.

"Do we? Really? Why?" Lee asked.

"Never you mind, lad," Steve said. Everyone winced at that.

"Do you have any blank videotape?" Lee asked awkwardly.

"No. But I'll make sure it'll be blank by the time we get to the moon." Everyone winced at this as well.

"Ok, so videotape is good, but it's not entirely conclusive evidence, they'll just say you faked it." Susan pointed out.

"What about this: We go to one of the Apollo landing sites, tape as much as we can, grab some of their left-behind gear, then we fly back, land at the UN, and tell the whole world about it. Kinda like that Andy Griffith show." Lee said. Everyone stared at him blankly.

"You mean the one with Opie and Floyd and..." Grapeape asked.

"No, the one where he's a garbage man who flies to the moon," Lee said. Again, they all stared at him blankly. "I promise you, it's a real show," he said meekly.

"And I get the exclusive?" Susan asked, basically deciding to ignore that whole sub-topic.

"You get whatever you want," Lee agreed.

"Sounds like a plan," Steve said.

"A bad plan," Grapeape said.

"Good or bad, the discussion is now closed," Lee said.

They dropped the third cargo pod in orbit, fired the engines, and went on their way. A thousand miles away, Vladimir Lyakhov and Valeri Ryumin watched the whole thing from aboard the Soviet space station. They contacted ground control in Kosmogorad, who in turn contacted the KGB, who immediately brought it to the attention of Leonid Brezhnev, who was very interested in the information. Very interested, indeed.

In the cockpit, Crazy Uncle Steve was explaining how the rocket worked, mainly to get close to Susan. Elder Grapeape annoyingly insisted on tagging along.

"So how come we're not floating anymore?" The missionary asked. His arm was curled up like a chicken wing. Evidently there actually had been some nerve damage from the bullet. It didn't hurt, in fact he couldn't feel anything at all in it, nor could he extend it.

"We're accelerating. You only float when the ship isn't moving. If we go forward, you fall towards the rear, if we go backwards, you fall towards the front. As long as we keep accelerating at the right rate, we'll keep simulated earth-normal gravity."

"Won't you run out of fuel pretty quickly that way?" Susan asked, leaning a little too close over Steve's shoulder, and accidentally pressing a breast against his neck.

"Using normal fuels, yeah, you'd go dry in nothing flat, but because I'm inescapably brilliant, I've figured out a system that gives ridiculous amounts of power for sustained periods of time."

"Really?"

"Yeah. I first got the idea back in the fifties when I was reading a book by Dr. Robert Car—"

"If we keep gravity the whole way, won't we crash into the moon at a hell of a clip?" Susan asked.

"Yeah, so we won't do that. We'll shut off the engines when we get close to halfway, flip around, start 'em up again, and decelerate at the same rate until we're in lunar orbit. Earth to moon one way, eight hours, spend a couple of hours on the surface sightseeing, we'll have you back home in less than a day. I call it 'trans-linear acceleration.' That's not actually its real scientific name, but I think it's got a catchy ring to it. I got it from 'Salvage One', that Andy Griffith show that Lee was talking about."

"I thought you said..."

"Yeah, I was just screwing with him. I do that a lot."

Just then, Grapeape fainted—perhaps a bit too conveniently—and slumped over on Susan. She reacted almost by reflex, and pushed him away on to another control panel. The ship lurched, and Steve rattled off some fairly rudimentary profanity. "We just dropped some fuel!" he said.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry! I didn't think, I just reacted..." Susan said, "Did we lose much? Will we have to go back to earth?"

"Nah, nah, we've got like ten times as much as we need. The engine is hyper-efficient. I just need to re-calculate for the lighter weight.

Lee was in his cabin when the mid-flight turnaround came, reading the instruction manual for Steve's Betamax. There was a knock on the door, and then Susan floated in without waiting. Her hair was untied, her blouse was partially undone, her shoes were off. There was something about the look on her face that made him mildly flustered.

"I guess I picked a bad day to wear a skirt," she said, and smoothed it down with her hands. Oddly, this had the effect of making it ride up a bit more.

"Form follows function," Lee said stupidly, breaking the mood, "I'm sorry, I don't know why I just said that."

"Me neither. Anyway, it just hit me: I'm further away from Earth than any woman has ever been, and I'm probably the youngest person ever in space."

"Excepting Grapeape"

"Yeah, well, the youngest woman. It suddenly made me feel all flushed and overwhelmed. I didn't want to be alone." She drifted closer to him. "It's so exciting to be here on your first trip."

"It's our third," Lee said.

"Yeah?"

"First one was two months ago, just orbital, to check things out. Second was a month ago, just before you started working on the farm report, we went out a half million miles just to field-test the engines. This is our first trip that actually
goes
anywhere, though." She was closer now.

"You talk too much" she said. Her lips were open, her eyes half-closed.

"I do talk a lot," he said, croaking a bit as his mouth went dry.

"I had something coy to say, but I'm just going to kiss you instead," she said. And then she did. And then they did.

Or at least they tried to. They fumbled with each other's clothes, giggling and tugging and kissing and groping and having a surprising amount of trouble getting naked. Every time they touched, Newton's Third Law of Motion acted as a chaperone, pushing them apart. At first it was fun, but it quickly became distracting, then, Susan banged her head really hard on the ceiling, and Lee's face kept ending up in the sink. They gave up and simply undressed themselves, but the actual act itself was way harder than either of them had expected. Each motion tended to push them apart frustratingly. Zero gravity's effect on blood pressure being what it is, both of them were having a hard time holding on to their arousal. The giggling stopped as the whole thing became more and more of an engineering problem and less and less a momentary outbreak of lust. The only thing that kept them going was their determination to figure a way around it. Lee had a brainstorm, and grabbed two belts from his dresser drawer, cinched them together to make one long belt, and then wrapped it around their combined waists. That solved one problem, but it was incredibly awkward, and then...

"Turnaround complete, restarting engines" Steve said over the PA.

Gravity returned and they crashed to the floor, still strapped together, Lee landing on his back, Susan landing oddly twisted on top of him, knocking the wind out of him and racking him in the groin with one of her knees. He spasmed there, unable to breathe, waves of pain shooting through him, fumbling with the belts, but unable to get them off. Susan's head had knocked hard on the floor when they landed, her face in the carpet. When she pushed herself up on her arms, she had a large bleeding cut on her forehead. Below her, Lee alternately gasped for air and moaned in pain.

"Well that was disappointing," she said.