Joe Haldeman - Earthbound

We went along the paved road for about two hours, uphill and then down. In a valley—actually a “saddle,” I suppose—we turned off at a place marked by a faded orange tape stapled around a tree. It was not so much a trail as a path that had once been mowed. “Bush-hogged” is the verb I remembered from my Florida childhood. I always had the image of a hairy wild pig with tusks, but I suppose a bush-hog was a kind of mowing machine.

My mulish colleague didn’t care for the new trail; the cart didn’t roll smoothly and tugged and jerked on its harness. After a minute it stopped cold, and whacking its flank just gave me a sore hand.

Namir came back and dismounted. “It didn’t like this part coming up.” With his belt knife he cut a supple branch from a sapling, and shook it rattling in the mule’s face, muttering at it in Hebrew. It grunted and started moving.

He handed the switch to me. “It remembered. How sweet.” He remounted the horse in one smooth motion. Riding boots and a holstered pistol. All he needed was a big hat, and maybe a tobacco cigarette.

He was obviously enjoying it. They’d had a couple of horses on his kibbutz, as well as camels. He said as a boy he liked the camels more; they were more like pets, with personality. But he hadn’t ridden one in about a hundred years. He’d ridden horses in the States, back when he led the simple life of an Israeli diplomat and spy.

What different paths we had followed, to wind up so closely entwined. Before he went into space he’d had a full career in that cosmopolitan universe, now as dead as Babylon. New York, Washington, Paris, Moscow, Tel Aviv—all dark and cold now, some in ruins. But he’d lived that life.

What goes through his head? In what languages?

He was a UN diplomat when I was a teenager stepping aboard the Space Elevator for what I thought would be a five-year adventure. While he was going around the world learning and doing, I was stuck in a small town in a cave on Mars. Not even a small town. The same 105 people waging eternal war against dust and boredom.

It never occurred to me that one day I would long for boredom. That I would give anything to be back in that cave with those plain, brave people.

Namir is bullet-brave. But he would have done well in Mars, too. The starship we shared didn’t have one hundredth the floor space we enjoyed in Mars. But with one exception, we stayed away from each other’s throats. I wouldn’t have called it courage then.

The mule’s name was Jerry. I whispered endearments and scratched his rump with the stick when we had to pick up the pace. Namir’s horse waltzed nervously through the underbrush, but Jerry just plodded along, perhaps conserving strength, and kept up well enough.

We stopped before mid-day to rest and eat. Namir emptied all the cartridges out of one magazine, which had fallen into a stream. He cleaned and polished each round before thumbing it back into place.

Thirty rounds. So much of our world was numbers. Five magazines with thirty rounds each. A double-barreled shotgun with nine. I had twenty-seven left for my pistol and two twenty-round clips for the rifle. Two flare pistols. There were seven ampoules left in the first-aid kit, for three people in pain.

My leg was stiffening up, but I could walk. I hoped they had more ampoules back at Funny Farm, but didn’t want to ask. As an experiment, I took a stick of pain gum after we ate. It would probably work fine if I’d been shot in the mouth. It made my tongue disappear, but didn’t do much for the groin.

After about an hour, we got to the stream that fed the pool behind Funny Farm, but we didn’t follow it. It was a couple of miles shorter to cut through the woods, and it was a good thing we went that way. If we’d followed the stream, we might have been too late.

We were a little more than a mile from home when we heard the first crackle of gunfire. It echoed, but there was no mistaking which direction it was coming from.

Namir turned in the saddle and shouted at me: “Stay here with Paul! Get off the trail!” Good idea.

He snapped the shotgun closed. “Wait until the shooting stops,” he said. “If we don’t, if I don’t come back, Elza, you come check.”

“Maybe you should wait,” Dustin said.

“Yeah, maybe I should.” He nudged the horse hard with his heels, and it trotted forward.

“Good luck?” I said. Are soldiers supposed to wish each other luck? The horse was going pretty fast when they disappeared around the bend.

“We should get hidden,” Dustin said. He stroked the mule’s nose. “You’ll be quiet, won’t you?” It tilted its head toward him and wisely didn’t say anything. Neither did I.

The shooting continued as we worked the cart and mule through the brush. It was sporadic, not the steady firefight roar I remembered from Armstrong and Camp David. Bullets getting rare on both sides.

Jerry had always been whickering and grunting at me, but it was quiet as we struggled up a small hill. Dustin’s innate leadership abilities, or perhaps even a mule knows that when people are shooting guns, you don’t want to draw attention. When we got to the top of the rise, he put his big head on my shoulder and breathed hard, but otherwise stayed quiet.

“I’ll go up on the other side,” Dustin said. “Hold fire if I start shooting; I’ll try to draw them away.” He looked at me. “If you have to leave Paul, do it.”

“No,” I said.

“They won’t hurt him. They need him.”

“No. We don’t know who ‘they’ are.”

“If it was you in the cart,” Elza said, “we’d stay with you. So get the fuck over there and protect us.”

He started to say something but turned and went down the slope.

“So are two husbands twice as much trouble,” I whispered to her, “or four times?”

“Eight. These two.” She looked down at Paul. “Hope he’ll be all right.”

“Namir, too.”

She nodded. “He always comes out on top. ‘Always’ meaning so far.” Surprisingly, she knuckled away a tear. “We’re lucky to have them at all.”

“Yeah. What a week.”

She sat down heavily and looked at her weapon, propping it up on the cast. “Piece of shit,” she said neutrally, and pulled the slide back slowly twice, then fast three times. Five cartridges ejected.

The mule stirred restlessly at the sound.

“Maybe you should have swapped,” I said. Her gun had jammed during the melee with the cyclists, but I only found out later; she’d cleared it by whacking it with the cast, and emptied the rest of the clip at them. Then picked up a pistol and made sure the enemy were all dead. Meanwhile, I was distracted by trying not to bleed out.

“Yeah, maybe.” She picked up the loose rounds and wiped them off with her shirt tail and snicked them back into the magazine. “Devil you know. I was tempted by the fancy ones those bicycle assholes had. But I know this one, and we have ammo—”

In the distance, a sustained hammering of automatic fire. Two thumps that must have been a shotgun. Then rifles and pistols crackling.

“Sounds like he got there,” she said.

“Should we…”

“Hold our position, yeah.” Jerry made a chuckling noise, and I stroked his ears.

It was like overhearing an argument between machines, angry plosives with a whine now and then. A bullet ricocheting from metal? No, I’d heard it in the woods before.

We should’ve taken the bulletproof vest from the biker leader. It was all covered with blood and brains, though. So it hadn’t done him much good. But I had to think what an easy target Namir would present, riding slowly on horseback.

At least smart bullets wouldn’t work. Though they seemed to have plenty of dumb ones.

It was quiet for a minute, two minutes, three. “Maybe that’s it,” Elza said.