Steel Beach (61 page)

“I still want to gasp,” I said.

“Say again?”

I repeated it, saying each word carefully.

“That’s just psychotic.”

I think she meant psychosomatic, or maybe psychological. Or possibly psychotic was the
perfect
word. How would
you
describe someone who trusted her delicate hide to a spatial effect that, as near as I could understand it, had no existence in the real world?

The desire to breathe was real enough, even though a suppressor of some kind was at work in my brain cutting off that part of the autonomic nervous system. My body was getting all the oxygen it needed, but when your lungs have been inhaling and exhaling for over a hundred years, some part of you gets a little alarmed when asked to shut it off for an hour or so. I’d been holding my breath for almost ten minutes so far. I felt about ready to go back inside and
gulp
.

“You want to go back inside?”

I wondered if I’d been muttering to myself. Gotta watch that. I shook my head, remembered how hard that was to see, and mouthed “No.”

“Then take my hand,” she said. I did, and our two suit fields melted together and I felt her bare hand in mine. I could see that, if these things ever got on the market, there was going to be a big fad in lovemaking under the stars.

Don’t go shopping for a field suit just yet, though.

They’ll surely be available in a few years, what with current conditions. A lot of people are angry at the Heinleiners for not just bestowing the patents gratis to the general public. I’ve heard mutterings. A lot of good it will do the mutterers; they simply don’t understand Heinleiners. There goddamn sure ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, and they’re out to prove it.

As I write this, the Heinleiners are still pretty pissed off, and who could blame them? All charges have naturally been dropped, the statutes of limitations have expired, as it were. Nobody’s out hunting them. Yet I swore a solemn oath not to reveal the names of any of them until given permission, and that permission has not been granted, and who’s to say they’re wrong? Say what you will about me as a reporter, but I never revealed a source, and I never will. Hence, the girl I will call “Gretel.” Hence
all
the aliases I will bestow on the people I met after I followed Gretel’s trail into the perfect mirror.

And I promised not to lie to you, but from here on in I will not always tell you the whole truth. Events have of necessity been edited, to protect people with no reason to trust authority but who trusted me and then found…  but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The trail of breadcrumbs led into the rubble that washed at the base of the
Heinlein
. At first it seemed as if they vanished into a blank wall, but I found that if I ducked a little there was a way through.

Luckily, I had Winston on a leash, because he was straining to head right into the pile, and god knows if I’d ever have found him again. I shined my flashlight under the overhang—which seemed to be the back end of a vintage rover—and saw it would be possible to squirm my way in. Without the crumbs I never would have tried it, as I could already see four ways to go. But I did go in, wondering all the time just how stable this whole pile was, if I dared brush up against anything.

Not too far in it became clear I was on a pathway. At first it was just bare rock. Soon there was a flooring laid down, made of discarded plastic wall panels. I tested each step cautiously, but it seemed firm. I found each panel had been spot welded to some of the more massive pieces of debris that made up the jackstraw jumble. I further saw, looking around the edge of the roadway, that the ground was no longer down there. My flashlight picked up an endless array of junk. If there’d been any air I might have tried dropping a coin or something; I had a feeling I’d hear it clatter for a long time.

For a while I kept testing each new panel cautiously, but each was as firmly in place as the last. I decided I was being silly. People obviously used this path with some frequency, and despite its impromptu nature it seemed sturdy enough. Flashing my light around above me I could soon see the tunnel itself had been made by some kind of boring machine. It was cylindrical, and a lot of rubbish had been blasted or cut away; I found sliced edges of metal beams on each side of the tunnel, as if the center sections had been cut out. I hadn’t seen it as a cylinder at first because its walls were so relentlessly baroque, not covered with anything as they would be in King City.

Before long I came to a string of lights hung rather haphazardly along the left-hand side of the tunnel. And not long after that I saw somebody approaching me from a good distance. I shined the light at the person, and she shined her light at me, and I saw she was also pregnant and also had a bulldog on a leash, which seemed too much for coincidence.

Winston didn’t put it together. Instead, he plowed forward in his usual way, either to greet a new friend or to rend an enemy into bloody gobbets, who could tell? I could hear the clang over my suit radio when he hit. He sat down hard, having had no visible effect upon the perfect mirror.

Neither did I, though I scrupulously did all the futile things people do in stories about humans encountering alien objects: chunking rocks, swinging a makeshift club, kicking it. I left no scratches on it. (“Mister President, it is my scientific opinion the saucer is made of an alloy never seen on Earth!”) I’d have tried fire, electricity, lasers, and atomic weapons, but I didn’t have any handy. Maybe lasers wouldn’t have been the best idea.

So I waited, wondering if she’d been watching me, hoping she’d had a good laugh at my expense, feeling sure she hadn’t led me this far just to strand me, and in a moment the surface of the mirror bulged and became a human face. The face smiled, and then the rest of the body appeared. At first I thought she was moving forward, but it turned out the mirror was moving back and the field was forming around her body as she simply stood there.

It moved back about three meters, and she beckoned to me. I went to her, and she made some gestures which I didn’t understand. Finally I got the idea that I was to hold on to a bar fastened to the wall. I did, and the girl crouched and held on to Winston, who seemed happy to see her.

There was a loud bang and something slammed into me. Bits of trash and dust swirled, maybe a little mist, too. The perfect mirror was no longer where it had been and the corridor had changed. I looked around and saw the walls were now coated with the same mirror, and the flat surface had re-formed behind me, where it had been originally. A rather dramatic airlock.

For a few more seconds Gretel was still wrapped in distortion, then her suit field vanished and she became the nude ten-year-old who had run through my dreams for such a long time. She was saying something. I shook my head and glanced at the readouts for exterior temperature and pressure—pure habit, I could see and hear the air was okay—then I took off my helmet.

“First thing,” Gretel said, “you’ve got to promise not to tell my father.”

“Not to tell him what?”

“That you saw me on the surface without my suit. He doesn’t like it when I do that.”

“I wouldn’t, either. Why do you do it?”

“You gotta promise, or you can just go home.”

I did. I would have promised one hell of a lot of things to get farther down that tunnel I could see stretching ahead of me. I even would have kept most of them. Personally, I don’t view a promise made to a ten-year-old to be binding, if it involves a matter of safety, but I’d keep that one if I could.

I had a thousand questions, but wasn’t sure how to ask them. I’m a good interviewer, but getting answers out of a child takes a different technique. It would be no problem—the problem with Gretel was getting her to shut up—but I didn’t know it at the time. Right then she was squatting, getting Winston out of his helmet, so I watched and waited. Liz had promised me Winston never bit people unless ordered to do so, and I sure hoped that was true.

Once again Winston came through for me. He greeted her like a long-lost friend, bowling her over in his attempts to lick her face, reducing her to giggles. I helped her get him out of the rest of his suit.

“You could get out of yours, too, if you want to,” Gretel said.

“It’s safe?”

“You might have asked that before I took off the dog’s helmet.”

She had a point. I started peeling out of it.

“You’ve led me a merry chase,” I said.

“It took me a while to convince my father we ought to let you in at all. But I’m never in a hurry about such things, anyway. Do you good to wait.”

“What changed his mind?”

“Me,” she said, simply. “I always do. But it wasn’t easy, you being a reporter and all.”

A year ago that would have surprised me. Working for a newspad you don’t get your face as well-known as straight television reporters do. But recent events had changed that. No more undercover work for me.

“Your father doesn’t like reporters?”

“He doesn’t like publicity. When you talk to him, you’ll have to promise not to use any of it in a story.”

“I don’t know if I can promise that.”

“Sure, you can. Anyway, that’s between you and him.”

We were walking down the round, mirrored corridor by then.

When we came to another mirrored wall like the one I’d first encountered, she didn’t slow down but headed right for it. When she was a meter away it vanished to reveal another long section of walkway. I looked behind us and there it was. Simple and effective. The bored-out tubes were lined with the field, and these safety barriers were spaced out along the way. This new technology would revolutionize Lunar building techniques, whatever it was.

I was bursting with questions about it, but my feeling for her was that it wasn’t the right time to ask them. I was there as the result of a child’s whim, and it would be a good idea to see where I stood with her, get on her good side as much as possible.

“So…  ” I said. “Did you like the toys?”

“Oh, please,” she said. Not a promising beginning. “I’m a little grown up for that.”

“How old are you?” There was always the chance I’d read her wrong from the beginning; she
could
be older than me.

“I’m eleven, but I’m precocious. Everyone says so.”

“Especially Daddy?”

She grinned at me. “
Never
Daddy. He says I’m a walking argument for retroactive birth control. Okay, sure I liked the toys, only I’d prefer to think of them as charming antiques. Mostly, I liked the dog. What’s his name?”

“Winston. So that’s why you talked your father into letting me in?”

“No. I could get a dog easily enough.”

“Then I don’t get it. I worked so hard to interest you.”

“You did? That’s neat. Hell, Hildy, I’d have asked you in if you’d just sat out there on your butt.”

“Why?”

She stopped and turned to me, and the look on her face told me what was coming. I’d seen that look before. “Because you work for the
Nipple
. It’s my favorite pad. Tell me, what was Silvio really like?”

Most of my conversations with Gretel got around to Silvio sooner or later, usually after long and adoring detours through the celebrity underbrush of the current pre-pubescent idols of television and music. I’d interviewed Silvio a total of three times, been at social occasions where he was present maybe twenty times, exchanged perhaps a dozen sentences with him at those functions. It didn’t matter. It was all gold to Gretel, who was easily twice as star-struck as most girls her age. She hung on my every word.

Naturally, I made up a lot. If I could do it in print, why not to her? And it was good practice for telling her all the intimate details of the teeny stars, few of whom I’d even heard of, much less met.

Is that awful? I suppose it is, lying to a little girl, but I’d done worse in my life, and how badly did it hurt her? The whole gossip industry, flagshipped by the
Nipple
and the
Shit
, is of questionable moral worth to begin with, but it’s a very old industry, and as such, must fill a basic human need. I’ve apologized for it enough here. The biggest difference in my stories to her was that, when I was writing it, it was usually nasty gossip. My stories to her were usually nice ones. I viewed it as paying my keep. If Scheherazade could do it, why not Hildy Johnson?

I was grateful that she held my hand on that first stroll on the surface. Breathing is perhaps the most underrated pleasure in life. You notice it when something smells good, curse it when something stinks, but the rest of the time you don’t even think of it. It’s as natural as…  well, see? To really appreciate it, try holding your mouth and nose closed for three minutes, or however long it takes to reach the edge of blackout. That first breath that brings you back from the edge of death will be the sweetest thing you ever tasted, I guarantee it.

Now try it for thirty minutes.

The oxygen in my new lung was supposed to be good for that long, with a five to seven minute margin. “Think of it as thirty,” Aladdin had said, when he installed it. “That’ll keep you safe.”

“I’ll think of it as fifteen,” I retorted. “Maybe five.” I’d been sitting in his clinic at the time, the left side of my chest laid open, the ugly gray mass of what had recently been my left lung lying in a pan on a table like so much butcher-shop special of the day.

“Don’t talk,” he warned. “Not when I’m doing respiratory-system work.” He wiped a drop of blood from the corner of my mouth.

“Maybe one,” I said. He picked up the new lung, a thing of shiny metal with some trailing tubes, shaped very much like a lung, and started shoving it into the chest cavity. It made wet sucking sounds going in. I hate surgery.

I’d have thought it was something brand-new but for my recent researches into vacuum technology. One part of it was revolutionary, but the rest had been cobbled together from things developed and set aside a long time ago.

The Heinleiners weren’t the first to work on the problem of adapting the human body to the Lunar surface. They were just the first ones to find a more or less practical answer. Most of the lung Aladdin put inside me was just an air bottle, filled with compressed oxygen. The rest was an interface device that allowed the oxygen to be released directly into my bloodstream while at the same time cleansing the carbon dioxide. A few other implants allowed some of the gas to be released through new openings in my skin, carrying off heat. None of it was new; most of it had been experimented with as early as the year 50.