“After you have lived in your suit for a month or so you should be able to survive falling down, but right now you just don’t know enough. Watch.”
The captain flexed and hopped up onto the slab. His feet shot out from under him and he twisted around in midair, landing on hands and knees. He slipped off and stood on the ground.
“The idea is to keep your exhaust tins from making contact with the frozen gas. Compared to the ice they are as hot as a blast furnace, and contact with any weight behind it will result in an explosion.”
After that demonstration, we walked around for another hour or so and returned to the billet. Once through the airlock~ we had to mill around for a while, letting the suits get up to something like room temperature. Somebody came up and touched helmets with me.
“William?” She had MCCOY stenciled above her faceplate.
“Hi, Sean. Anything special?”
“I just wondered if you had anyone to sleep with tonight.”
That’s right; I’d forgotten. There wasn’t any sleeping roster here. Everybody chose his own partner. “Sure, I mean, uh, no. . . no, I haven’t asked anybody. Sure, if you want to. . . .”
“Thanks, William. See you later.” I watched her walk away and thought that if anybody could make a fighting suit look sexy, it’d be Sean. But even she couldn’t.
Cortez decided we were warm enough and led us to the suit room, where we backed the things into place and hooked them up to the charging plates. (Each suit had a little chunk of plutonium that would power it for several years, but we were supposed to run on fuel cells as much as possible.) After a lot of shuffling around, everybody finally got plugged in and we were allowed to unsuit- ninety-seven naked chickens squirming out of bright green eggs. It was cold-the air, the floor and especially the suits-and we made a pretty disorderly exit toward the lockers.
I slipped on tunic, trousers and sandals and was still cold. I took my cup and joined the line for soya. Everybody was jumping up and down to keep warm.
“How c-cold, do you think, it is, M-Mandella?” That was McCoy.
“I don’t, even want, to think, about it.” I stopped jumping and rubbed myself as briskly as possible, while holding a cup in one hand. “At least as cold as Missouri was.”
“Ung.. . wish they’d, get some, fucken, heat in, this place.” It always affects the small women more than anybody else. McCoy was the littlest one in the company, a wasp waist doll barely five feet high.
“They’ve got the airco going. It can’t be long now.”
“I wish I, was a big, slab of, meat like, you.” I was glad she wasn’t.
We had our first casualty on the third day, learning how to dig holes.
With such large amounts of energy stored in a soldier’s weapons, it wouldn’t be practical for him to hack out a hole in the frozen ground with the conventional pick and shovel. Still, you can launch grenades all day and get nothing but shallow depressions-so the usual method is to bore a hole in the ground with the hand laser, drop a timed charge in after it’s cooled down and, ideally, fill the hole with stuff. Of course, there’s not much loose rock on Charon, unless you’ve already blown a hole nearby.
The only difficult thing about the procedure is in getting away. To be safe, we were told, you’ve got to either be behind something really solid, or be at least a hundred meters away. You’ve got about three minutes after setting the charge, but you can’t just sprint away. Not safely, not on Charon.
The accident happened when we were making a really deep hole, the kind you want for a large underground bunker. For this, we had to blow a hole, then climb down to the bottom of the crater and repeat the procedure again and again until the hole was deep enough. Inside the crater we used charges with a five-minute delay, but it hardly seemed enough time-you really had to go it slow, picking your way up the crater’s edge.