John Varley - Steel Beach

So I grabbed a length of pipe and started toward the corridor. I didn't think I could do much good against the tough pressure suits, but if I swung for the faceplates I might get one of them, and at least I'd go down fighting. I owed it to Winston, if to no one else, to do that much.

Getting to the corridor was like reaching for that top step that isn't there. I stepped out, pipe cocked like the clean-up batter coming to the plate. And nobody was there.

I saw their retreating backs outlined by the light of their helmet lamps. They were jogging toward the exit.

I'll never know for sure, but it seems likely they'd been summoned to the top to help in the search for me. How were they to know the guys on top of the pile were only a few meters directly above them? Anyway, if they'd stayed in place, I'd have been dead in ninety seconds, tops. So I gave them ten seconds to get beyond the point where they could possible see me, and I reached for the ALU adapter hose.

It wasn't there.

It made me mad. I couldn't think of anything more foolish than getting this close to salvation and then suffocating with about a ton of compressed oxygen at my fingertips. I slammed my hand against the tank, then got my flashlight and cast about on the ground. I was sure they'd taken it with them. It's what I would have done, in their place.

But they hadn't. It was lying right there on the ALU's baseplate, probably knocked off when one of the guards decided to rest his fat ass on the tank. I fumbled it in place between the tank and my chest valve, and turned the release valve hard .

I make my living with words. I respect them. I always want to use the proper one, so I searched a long time for the right one to describe how that first rush of cooling air felt, and I concluded nobody's made up a word for that yet. Think of the greatest pleasure you ever experienced, and use whatever word you'd use to describe that. An orgasm was a pale thing beside it.

Why hadn't they taken the connector hose? The answer, when I eventually learned it, was simple, and typical of the Big Glitch. They hadn't known I needed it.

The cops and soldiers who had invaded Heinlein Town hadn't been told much about anything. They hadn't been led to expect armed resistance. They knew next to nothing about the nature of or limitations to null-suit technology. They surely hadn't been told there were two groups, working at cross purposes to the extent that one group would ensure the destruction of the other. All this affected their tactics terribly. A lot of people lived because of this confusion, and I was one of them. I'd like to take credit for my own survival-and not everything I did was stupid-but the fact is that I had Winston, and I had a lot of luck, and the luck was mostly generated by their ignorance and poor generalship.

I had vaguely realized some of this by the time I made my way from the ALU and to a branching corridor I thought would take me to a different surface exit. I didn't know what good it would do me, but it was worthwhile to keep it in mind.

Once on the surface again, I called the Nipple and again got a busy signal, all the time keeping my eyes open for more of the bad guys. I was hoping they were all up atop the junk, possibly stumbling around and breaking legs, heads, and other important body parts. I wished Callie were there; she'd have put a hex on them.

Callie? Well, what the hell. I had to dredge the number up from the further reaches of my memory, and it did no good at all. Not even a busy signal. Nothing but dead air.

Then I remembered the top code. Why did it take me so long? I think it was because Walter really had impressed it on me that the code was not to be used at all, that it existed as an unachievable level of dire perfection. A story justifying the use of the top code would need headlines that would made 72-point type seem like fine print. The other reason is that I had never thought of what was happening to me as a story .

I didn't really expect much from it, to tell the truth. I'd been using my normal access code to the Nipple , and that should have gotten through any conceivable log-jam of calls and directly into Walter's office. So far it had yielded only busy signals. But I punched in the code anyway, and Walter said:

"Don't tell me where you are, Hildy. Hang up and move as far from your present position as you dare, and then call me back."

" Walter !" I screamed. But the line was already dead.

It would be nice to report that I immediately did as he said, that I wasted no time, that I continued to show the courageous resolve that had been my trademark since the first shots were fired. By that I mean that I hadn't cried to that point. I did now. I wept helplessly, like a baby.

Don't try this in you null-suit, when you get one. You don't breathe, so your lungs just sort of spasm. It's enough to make your ears pop. Crying also throws the regulator mechanism out of whack, so that I wasted ten minutes' oxygen in three minutes of hysterics. Trust Mister V.M. Smith not to have reckoned with emotional outbursts when he laid out the parameters.

I had cleverly retained the connector hose to the air tank, so I made my way back there and filled up again. If only I could find a loose, portable tank I'd be able to strike off across the surface. Hell, if it was too big to carry I could drag it. Did I hear someone mention the dead soldier and his suit? Great idea, but my uncanny accuracy with the machine gun had damaged one of the hose fittings. I checked when I borrowed the flashlight, and again-because I needed the air, and who knows, maybe I'd been mistaken-when I salvaged the radio. Libby could probably have fudged some sort of adaptor from the junk all around me, but considering the pressure in that tank I'd sooner have kissed a rattlesnake.

These are the thoughts that run through your mind in the exhausted aftermath of a crying jag. It felt good to have done it, like crying usually does. It swept away the building sense of panic and let me concentrate on the things that needed to be done, let me ignore the impossibility of my position, and enabled me to concentrate on the two things I had going for me, like chanting a mantra: my own brain, which, no matter how much evidence I may have adduced to the contrary, was actually pretty good; and Walter's ability to get things done, which was very good.

I actually found myself feeling cheerful as I reached the egress again and scanned the surface for enemies. Not finding any made me positively giddy. Move from your present position, Walter had said. As far as you dare.

I moved out of the maze and dashed across a short strip of sunlight and into the shadow of the Heinlein .

"Hello, Walter?"

"Tell me what you know, Hildy, and make it march."

"I'm in big trouble here, Wal-"

"I know that, Hildy. Tell me what I don't know. What happened?"

So I started in on a condensed history of me and the Heinleiners, and Walter promptly interrupted me again. He knew about them, he said. What else? Well, the CC was up to something horrible, I said, and he said he knew that, too.

"Assume I know everything you know except what happened to you today, Hildy," he said. "Tell me about today. Tell me about the last hour. Just the important parts. But don't mention specific names or places."

Put that way, it didn't take long. I told him in less than a hundred words, and could have done it in one: " Help !"

"How much air do you have?" he asked.

"About fifteen minutes."

"Better than I thought. We have to set up a rendezvous, without mentioning place names. Any ideas?"

"Maybe. Do you know the biggest white elephant on Luna?"