Ben Bova - Test of Fire

“What?” He saw that Angela was looking up at him. “Dinner? No, not yet.”

“What’s the matter? Are you okay?”

“I’m all right.” He hunkered down on the ground beside her. “It’s just… I’ve never seen an open fire before. It’s fascinating.”

“Oh. Yeah, I guess so.”

Alec saw that there was a blackened metal container rigged on a set of poles, hanging over the flames. Angela called it a pot, but it looked to Alec as if it had started life as a gasoline tank. Now it was cut down, its corner battered and dented.

“Grab some stew and make yourself to home,” she invited.

Alec got up and bent over the pot. Hot fragrant steam bathed his face; the smell was enticing. A simmering liquid bubbled in there, lumpy dark shapes poking out of the seething surface.

Thinking of all the injections and pills he had taken before leaving the satellite station, Alec stirred the concoction with his knife, then jabbed at one of the shapes. He held it at arm’s length, dripping and smoking, as he squatted awkwardly on the ground beside Angela once more.

“It won’t hurt you,” she laughed at him. “It was only a rabbit even when it was alive.”

“A rabbit?” It was the first time he had seen her laughing.

With a nod, Angela asked, “Don’t you have anything you can use for a plate? The stew’s got plenty of good things in it: carrots and leeks and all sorts of herbs.”

“Um… this is fine. I’ve got a messkit back at the truck, but just let me taste…” He bit into the rabbit. Pain! Alec had never felt anything so hot inside his mouth. Coughing, gagging, burning, he finally swallowed the chunk whole.

Angela was pounding him on the back, looking worried and shouting at him, “You want water? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he croaked, eyes tearing. “My mouth is a mass of second-degree burns and there’s a lump of dead rabbit stuck sideways in my guts, but otherwise I’m fine.”

The dozen people—mostly men—around the campfire were staring at him. But they quickly looked away and went back to their own conversations.

Alec managed to down a few bites of the meat without further trouble, once Angela showed him how to blow on the chunks to cool them. He found that it was good. Good enough to make him want more.

“I’ll go find my mess kit.” He started to get to his feet.

“Don’t bother,” Angela said. “Here, use my plate. I’ll wash it off, okay? Then you won’t have to go all the way back to the trucks.”

She leaned forward to reach a small canteen of water that was resting on the ground near the fire.

As she washed off the metal plate and spoon, Alec wondered, Why does she want to keep me away from the trucks?

He ate in wary silence, thinking vaguely about how long the immunizations shots they had given him on the satellite would protect him from local microbes. The stew was hot and strong, spicier than anything he had ever tasted in his life. Angela offered him water in a metal cup.

When he finished the meal he washed off the utensils himself and handed them back to her.

“Is your mouth okay?” she asked, grinning.

“I’ll survive.” In fact, with the hot meal inside him, Alec felt fine and strong. Except for the sunburn glowering on the back of his neck. And then, with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, he remembered everything else: the stolen fissionables, the attack, the loss of the shuttle, the fact that he and his remaining men were stranded a quarter-million miles from home.

He closed his eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath. “I’d better be getting back to my men,” he said to Angela, while a voice inside his head taunted, Failure! Failure!

She got up with him and walked alongside. Alec realized that the only weapon he was carrying was his knife. Angela was completely unarmed.

“Look.” She pointed. The Moon was rising above the tree-fringed horizon. It was nearly full, bright and serene and glorious.

Alec stared at it. The lights of the settlement’s surface domes could not be seen against its whiteness.

“What’s it like?” Angela asked.

“What?”

“Living there… on the Moon.”

“We don’t live on it,” he said. “We live in it, underground. You can’t walk around in the open like this, you need a pressure suit and a helmet.”

“Why?”

“There’s no air.”

Her eyes widened for a split-second, then went crafty. “Now wait… if there’s no air, how can you live there?”

So they sat on a convenient rock, watching the Moon climb higher into the night sky, playing tag with occasional drifting silvered clouds, and Alec explained about lunar life to her. She really doesn’t know, he realized as he told her what a dazzling sight the Earth is. Before long he found himself watching her, instead of the Moon. In the soft light from his home her face seemed to float pale and beautiful against the darkness. Lord, she’s beautiful!

“This is the first time anyone’s told me about these things,” she said, her voice excited. “Dad — I mean, your father, never wants to talk about living there.”

Alec felt his heart turn to ice.

“Strange,” she said, still smiling but with puzzlement in her voice now. “It’s kind of hard for me to call him Dad now… knowing he’s your father.”

“He never told you about the settlement?” Alec asked, his voice sounding cold and distant, even to himself.

Angela shook her head. “He’d always change the subject when I’d ask about that. After a while, I guess I just stopped asking.”

Alec got to his feet. “I’ve got to check my men now. Good-night, Angela.”

“Oh.” She sat there in surprised silence for a moment, then stood up beside him. “Well, goodnight, Alec.” She turned and walked swiftly back toward the campfire.

He didn’t trust himself to say anything more, to call after her. So he tramped in the opposite direction, to the trucks. Disregarding his own orders, he slept out in the open on a stretch of mossy ground near the trucks. He wrapped himself in a plastic tarpaulin and laid his machine pistol by his side. It seemed to take hours for his eyes to close, and when he finally did sleep, he dreamed of his mother.

Ferret slid off the back of the truck and tested his injured leg. It was all right. He could stand on it and walk. The food they had given him had made him strong again, and the leg would heal soon enough.

He limped around the truck and saw Alec stretched out on the ground, the shiny pistol at his side. Ferret crouched so that the guard inside the next truck could not see him, and stared at the pistol. He could snatch it and be off into the woods. They would never find him, and he’d have a wonderful gun for himself.

Dimly he remembered Billy-Joe and the others of the band who had been killed. And his mother, feeding him, crooning him to sleep when he was a baby. They coulda killed me, Ferret said to himself. He coulda killed me. But he didn’t.

The gun was an enormous temptation. But so was the food and medical care and wary but kind treatment these people had given him. I’ll stay with them for a while, Ferret decided. This looks like a good gang to stay with. For now.

Stealthily he climbed back onto the truck and went back to sleep.

The Sun awoke Alec after what seemed like a mere few minutes of dozing. After checking with Jameson to see that everything was all right with the men, Alec walked stiff-jointed and aching to the embers of the campfire. It was smoldering low, but one of the women was putting fresh logs onto it.

“Well, you’re up at last,” Will Russo called to him jovially. He was standing a short distance from the fire, holding a steaming cup in one big hand. Walking around the fire to confront Alec, he said, “Here, have some herb tea. It isn’t terribly good, but it’ll help to start your engines running. If you’d like to shave…”