“That was a quixotic damn thing to do. But thanks.”
“Nothing. I’ve been wanting to lose a few pounds anyway.” I couldn’t see where she was carrying any extra.
“I know a good exercise,” I said. She smiled without looking up from her tray. “Have anybody for tonight?”
“Kind of thought I’d ask Jeff.. . .”
“Better hurry, then. He’s lusting after Macjima.” Well, that was mostly true. Everybody did.
“I don’t know. Maybe we ought to save our strength.
That third day . .
“Come on.” I scratched the back of her hand lightly with a fingernail. “We haven’t sacked since Missouri. Maybe I’ve learned something new.”
“Maybe you have.” She tilted her head up at me in a sly way. “Okay.”
Actually, she was the one with the new trick. The French corkscrew, she called it. She wouldn’t tell me who taught it to her though. I’d like to shake his hand. Once I got my strength back.
The two weeks’ training around Miami Base eventually cost us eleven lives. Twelve, if you count Dahiquist. I guess having to spend the rest of your life on Charon with a hand and both legs missing is close enough to dying.
Foster was crushed in a landslide and Freeland had a suit malfunction that froze him solid before we could carry him inside. Most of the other deaders were people I didn’t know all that well. But they all hurt. And they seemed to make us more scared rather than more cautious.
Now darkside. A flyer brought us over in groups of twenty and set us down beside a pile of building materials thoughtfully immersed in a pool of helium H.
We used grapples to haul the stuff out of the pool. It’s not safe to go wading, since the stuff crawls all over you and it’s hard to tell what’s underneath; you could walk out onto a slab of hydrogen and be out of luck.
I’d suggested that we try to boil away the pool with our lasers, but ten minutes of concentrated fire didn’t drop the helium level appreciably. It didn’t boil, either; helium II is a “superfluid,” so what evaporation there was had to take place evenly, all over the surface. No hot spots, so no bubbling.
We weren’t supposed to use lights, to “avoid detection.” There was plenty of starlight with your image converter cranked up to log three or four, but each stage of amplification meant some loss of detail. By log four the landscape looked like a crude monochrome painting, and you couldn’t read the names on people’s helmets unless they were right in front of you.
The landscape wasn’t all that interesting, anyhow. There were half a dozen medium-sized meteor craters (all with exactly the same level of helium II in them) and the suggestion of some puny mountains just over the horizon. The uneven ground was the consistency of frozen spiderwebs; every time you put your foot down, you’d sink half an inch with a squeaking crunch. It could get on your nerves.
It took most of a day to pull all the stuff out of the pool. We took shifts napping, which you could do either standing up, sitting or lying on your stomach. I didn’t do well in any of those positions, so I was anxious to get the bunker built and pressurized.
We couldn’t build the thing underground—it’d just fill up with helium 11-so the first thing to do was to build an insulating platform, a permaplast-vacuum sandwich three layers thick.
I was an acting corporal, with a crew of ten people. We were carrying the permaplast layers to the building site- two people can carry one easily-when one of “my” men slipped and fell on his back.
“Damn it, Singer, watch your step.” We’d had a couple of deaders that way.
“Sony, Corporal. I’m bushed. Just got my feet tangled up.’
“Yeah, just watch it.” He got back up all right, and he and his partner placed the sheet and went back to get another.
I kept my eye on Singer. In a few minutes he was practically staggering, not easy to do in that suit of cybernetic armor.