Ben Bova - Moonwar

“Hold on,” he said, and immediately felt foolish. What else was Bam trying to do?

“Don’t!” the black man warned. “Fuckin’ rock breaks. It’s as thin as tissue paper. Brittle, too.”

Doug lowered himself to his knees, then got down on his belly and wormed his way toward Gordette.

“Got no purchase for my feet,” Bam said, panting. “Every time… I try to haul my ass up… fuckin’ rock crumbles more.”

“How deep is the hole?” Doug asked. “Can you see the bottom?”

Gordette coughed. “Must go… all the way down… to Chicago. No bottom…”

Inching closer to the man, Doug felt the brittle rock beneath him crack, like thin ice.

He stretched out his arm as far as he could. “Can you grab my hand?”

“I’m runnin’ out of air,” Gordette said, gasping. “Forget it. Get outta here.”

“Grab my hand!” Doug insisted.

“Can’t.”

Doug pushed himself a few centimeters closer. A chunk of the rock floor just in front of his helmet gave way and plummeted down into silent darkness.

“Grab it!”

“Leave me alone…”

With gritted teeth Doug slid closer and wrapped his fingers around Gordette’s wrist just as the edge collapsed into shards and fell away.

Through his suit Doug could feel the vibrations of the servo motors in his glove as they tightened on Gordette’s wrist. The man’s whole weight dangled from Doug’s hand. It felt as if his arm were being wrenched out of its shoulder socket.

“That’s… a helluva grip… you got,” Gordette grunted.

Doug could feel Gordette’s body swaying as it hung in the deep black emptiness. Pain burned through his arm and shoulder. The exoskeleton would keep his fingers clamped on Gordette’s wrist, he knew. Good thing we’re on the Moon, Doug thought. With his spacesuit and all he’d yank my arm right out of my shoulder on Earth.

For moments that stretched like years Doug lay there, flat on his belly, with Gordette hanging in his hand.

“Lemme go…” Gordette panted. “Lemme die…”

“If you go,” Doug said grimly, fiercely, “I go with you. We’re in this together, Bam.”

“You… crazy…”

Doug tried to worm his way back, away from the brittle, crumbling edge of the abyss. Gordette could do nothing to help, even if he wanted to.

Got to haul him out of there, Doug told himself. Got to get him on solid ground before he runs out of air.

But it was almost impossible to edge his way backward with Gordette’s dead weight dangling from his outstretched arm. Grunting, teeth gritted, eyes stinging with sweat, Doug inched back along the glassy rock. It was painfully, agonizingly slow. He felt woozy, head spinning.

“What’re y’all doing down… oh my God!” Edith’s voice.

Doug couldn’t see her, didn’t know how she had gotten there. But she sounded like an angel to him.

“Edith! Where’s the tractor?”

“Right here,” she said, her voice anxious, high. “I rode out on it.”

“Great! Get the tow cable. Quick!”

It seemed to take an eternity and a half for Edith to find the tow cable and then clamber down into the rille behind Doug and tie it to one of the attachment rings on his backpack. She used the cable to climb out again, then went up to the tractor.

“Use the winch,” Doug called to her. “Controls are on the dashboard.”

Edith stared at the dashboard but couldn’t figure out which of the toggles or keypads tan the winch. Instead, she revved up the engines and started backing away, slowly.

“Easy—easy,” Doug’s voice crackled in her earphones. “He’s in a fabric suit.”

Edith thought of all the rodeos she had seen, with cowboys guiding their tough little ponies in steer-roping competitions. Just ease on back, she said silently to the tractor. That’s it, honey, nice and slow and easy.

“Hold it,” Doug commanded. “We’re on safe ground but I think Barn’s passed out.”

Edith clambered down from the tractor and went to the edge of the gulch. Doug was connecting his emergency air hose from his backpack tank to Gordette’s. She shook her head inside her helmet. If it’d been me, I’d of let the sumbitch die down there. He tried to kill Doug!

But she heard Gordette cough and sputter and knew he was going to make it. Doug had saved him.

It took the better part of an hour to get them both out of the rille and their air tanks topped off from the tractor’s supply. Then Edith started back toward Moonbase with Doug sitting between her and Gordette.

For hours Gordette said nothing. The man just sat on Doug’s other side, wrapped in his spacesuit and total silence.

At last Doug said to him, “I’ve been pretty close to death, Bam. It changes your outlook on life.”

“Does it?” Gordette muttered.

“It did for me. I think you’re going to find it will for you, too.”

Gordette said nothing. Edith thought Doug was wasting his breath.

“When we get back to Moonbase,” Doug went on, “you’ll have the chance to start a new life. Start all over, with the past gone forever.”

“Until they throw you out of Moonbase,” Gordette said.

“They’re not going to do that, Bam. With your help, we can beat them.”

“With my help?”

“I want you with us. I want you to be part of Moonbase.”

“Do you?”

“We’ve gone through a lot together, Bam. We’re bound together. Life or death, what affects one of us affects us both.”

Gordette was silent for several moments. Then he said grudgingly, “You got some grip, all right. Once you get your hands on a man you don’t let go, do you?”

“That’s up to you,” Doug answered.

“You’re crazy, you know that?”

“Maybe,” Doug admitted.

“And what about you, lady?” Gordette asked sullenly. “You as crazy as this man here?”

Edith almost snapped out her true feelings. But she realized that Doug had risked his life to save his would-be murderer. And now it all hung on what she had to say.

She swallowed her anger. “If Doug wants you to be with us, that’s good enough for me.”

“You’d trust me?”

Edith blurted, “Not very far. Not at first, anyway.”

For a moment there was silence, then Gordette laughed: a low, ironic chuckle. “Fair enough, I guess. Fair enough.”

Edith wished she could see the man’s face. Doug’s not crazy, she thought. He’s wiser than all of us put together. But I wish I could see Gordette’s face. I’d feel better about this if I could see his eyes.

“Telephone for you, Senator. The White House.”

Jill Meyers looked up from her computer screen. Despite the fact that she had not been a member of the U.S. Senate for nearly six years now, her private secretary still called her ‘Senator’.

“Who is it?” she asked warily.

“The President,” he replied, in his usual near-whisper.

Jill grinned at her oldest assistant, “I guess I can make time for the President.”

Almost instantly the face of an intense young man appeared on her desktop screen. “Justice Meyers? One moment, please, for the President.”

His image disappeared and the screen showed the seal of the President of the United States on a royal blue background. The American eagle held a sheaf of arrows in one talon and an olive branch in the other: war or peace.

It took more than a moment for the President to come on, of course. The power trip. The President doesn’t get on the horn until she’s absolutely certain that the party she wants to talk to is already on the line. No flunkies.