Irontown Blues

Fifteen

But Gretel wasn’t having it.

There are stories of people surviving for unlikely periods of time in a vacuum. Five minutes? So it has been claimed. But no one has ever documented such a thing. The general opinion is that two minutes is about the limit. Some have been revived beyond that, but they were never good for much anymore, intellectually.

They say you lose consciousness in about fifteen seconds. I think I lasted a little longer than that because I remember being dragged for a moment, then lifted into the air.

Even in Lunar gravity, I was quite a burden for a small ten-year-old girl. But Gretel slung me over her shoulder like a sack of cement. Then I was bobbing up and down as she ran with me.

The last thing I remember was seeing an old familiar sign: a blue circle with the number 8 in the middle. “Oxygen Here!”

Then I was gone.

It seemed they had emergency pressure shelters even in Irontown. Knowing libertarian Heinleiners, all of them suspicious of most public facilities, I would expect to get a bill for using one.

When I came to again, I was lying on the floor of a six-by-six-by-six-foot cube.

Several things happen to you if you’re in vacuum:

The water on your tongue begins to boil. Not because it’s hot but from the zero pressure. I’m sorry to say that you shit yourself. You can’t help it. It’s the gas in your intestine swelling up and forcing its way out. You may also piss yourself and vomit, but I didn’t do either of those.

Still, the emergency cubicle didn’t smell all that great.

The pain was starting to really settle in and make itself at home. I screamed, and blood came out of my mouth. Gretel crouched over me. She was sprayed with blood but didn’t really seem to notice it.

“Your lungs must be damaged,” she said. She seemed almost clinically detached, but I suspected there was screaming panic just underneath. But she was consulting her internal display after googling “Extreme vacuum exposure; treatment of.”

She went to one wall where there was a box with a big red cross on it. She opened it and stuff spilled out in a jumble. She crouched down and sorted through it. She came back with a pair of scissors.

“I need to cut your clothes off,” she said.

“Don’t,” I managed to croak.

“I have to, dude. It’s for the burns. We need to get some air to them.

“Please don’t.”

“I’ll do it quickly.”

The human mind is not able to retain a memory of extreme pain. You would go mad if you could actually call up that much pain or, worse, if the memory sneaked up on you. No, I remember understanding at that moment that I had never experienced anything like the pain I endured as she cut my clothing away. But I can’t remember what it actually felt like.

See, in some places the cloth and plastic of my combat uniform had melted into my skin. They were one and the same and didn’t want to part. Gretel pulled tentatively at first.

“If you’re going to do it,” I croaked, “then just do it!”

So she did. With the sound of tearing cloth, she ripped the awful stuff away from me. Once she turned aside and vomited, but other than that, she was a lot calmer than I would have been.

I passed out at least twice more as she worked. Each time it was a blessing. Each time I woke up again, it was a curse.

When I came to again, she was leaning over me, slapping my face.

“Wake up, man!” she said. “What the hell is your name, anyway?” I saw now that she was crying.

“Christ,” I said.

“Christ? Really?”

“Chris. Christopher Bach, city police.”

“I ought to just leave you alone to die, you bastard. Maybe I will.”

“That would suit me fine,” I said.

“After all I’ve gone through? No way. Now I need you to listen. Please, can you still hear me?”

I saw that she had taken off her jumper. What I could see of her was bony and blood-spattered. I wondered why she had stripped.

“There are things I need. I have to go out and get them.”

“Go ahead. Get out of here.”

“I’ll be back, I promise. Maybe I can find some help, if you creeps haven’t killed all my people.” She had to stop and sob for a moment. Then she wiped tears away with the back of her hand.

“This shelter was designed to be a refuge in case of a sudden blowout. But that’s all. They thought that rescue would come along in an hour or so. And maybe it will… but maybe it won’t. I haven’t been able to talk to any of my family or friends. I googled a few things when we first got here, but now I’m getting nothing. The system seems to be down. I don’t know why. I’m guessing there’s been a lot of damage to the net.”

She almost surrendered to tears again, and I could see her pull herself together. This kid had more moxie than a battalion of Uglies.

“See, there’s no air lock. I don’t need one. Hell, I don’t even need the shelter. What I’m going to have to do is let all the air out of here, open the door, go out, then seal it behind me. I think I can do it in about ten seconds if there’s no one out there shooting at me. You should have enough oh-two pressure again in thirty seconds, tops. I just want you to be ready for it.”

“Your name is Gretel?” Remember, that’s not her real name.

“Yes. Now, are you ready?”

Is anyone ever ready for that? But I nodded.

“I’ll knock three times on the door when I’m back and am about to open the door again. You know not to try to hold your breath?”

“Right. Open my mouth.”

“You’ve got it. I’ll try to be back soon.”

“Gretel? I could sure use a drink of water.”

She looked very upset.

“I’m not sure that’s what you do with a burn patient. I’ll have to look it up, if I can. But first I have to do this. Okay?”

“I’m very thirsty.”

“Just hang on, okay? Be strong, Christopher Bach.”

I nodded. I heard the air hissing out of the chamber, and what little I had in my abused lungs came rushing out, too. Instantly, her nullsuit turned on, and she became a mirror.

And it was a twisted mirror, like before, since it followed the shape of her body only a few millimeters away from her skin. But in her relatively flat chest I could see a twisted reflection of myself.

I’m sure if I had had any air in my lungs I would have screamed. What I saw reflected in her suit didn’t look much like a face.

She was as good as her word, getting out the door and sealing it within ten seconds. Everything dimmed, dimmed some more… and then things slowly came back into focus as the chamber filled with life-giving air. When the correct pressure was reached the air spigot stopped hissing. I was left alone with my thoughts.

I never did get a real good look at the remains of my face. But I can never erase that distorted image of myself from my memory. It was an image out of a horror movie. My nose was gone. The whole left side of my face was mostly missing. In places, the bare bone of my skull was exposed. The hair was scorched off on the left side. I was badly roasted meat.

I try to imagine what someone living in, say, the twentieth century would be going through, looking at a face like that. Knowing that it wasn’t going to ever get much better.

Then there is the question of pain.

I have said that the pain I suffered while in the emergency shelter was indescribable, and it was. But when I was finally taken out of the shelter and put into treatment, the pain was over. For our ancestors, the pain never stopped for the most severe cases.

For a while I thought Gretel was able to deal with the horror of my face, my burned-off arm, and my other terrible burns because, as a resident of Irontown, she sometimes came into contact with the disease and disfigurement junkies who lived there. That was not strictly true. Irontown was not a single bloc of people. In fact, many Heinleiners didn’t accept that they were in Irontown at all. And they could make a pretty good case since nowhere on city maps or regional maps does a place called Irontown appear. It was the same with Heinlein Town. The fact was that Heinleiners looked on the underclass population who were their neighbors — think of it as Lower Irontown — with the same contempt that everyone else did.

A bunch of losers, Gretel said to me once when we were talking about things to try to get my mind off the pain. She had seldom seen the people who had purposely disfigured their faces into things that would make the Phantom of the Opera recoil in terror. The few times she did, she was disgusted, not scared.

All my memories from that point on are mixed together even more badly than before the battle. I never did find out what stuff she had found on the outside, nor where she found it. I knew very little about what she was doing to me, except that most of it was very painful. Oddly, though, some of it didn’t hurt at all.

Later I put myself through a difficult course of learning about burns, stopping every ten minutes or so because I was having a panic attack.

I had the whole miserable spectrum of burns on various parts of my body, from first-degree all the way to fourth-degree. Before, I hadn’t even known there were degrees.

You would think that the worst burns, third and fourth, would be the most painful, but that’s not true. Thirds burn down through the whole of your skin, known as the dermis. Fourths burn down through the muscle, sometimes to the bone. In the past, few people survived fourths without immediate amputation.

But they don’t hurt because they destroy the nerves in the skin. If you look down at yourself and see massive burn damage and you don’t feel any pain, you are in deep trouble. Get yourself to a hospital, at once.

It’s the firsts and seconds that cause the agony. I had a lot of those.

I learned about the Big Glitch in stages, reported to me by Gretel when she had returned from one of her forays Outside. That’s how I began to think of it. Outside. The universe was divided into two more or less equal parts: my six-by-six-by-six cold universe of pain and everything else.

At first I cursed the lack of an air lock on the shelter. Gretel had to come and go as time went on. After the third or fourth time, though, I hardly noticed it. Not long after that she finally located one of the things she had been looking for from the start. She returned from one of her scrounging expeditions with a mask that covered my face, and some extra oxygen bottles to feed it. After that, her comings and goings were less of an ordeal, though I still wouldn’t recommend it the next time you go out into vacuum. She was able to improvise straps to hold the mask securely to my face — or what was left of it — for the fifteen seconds or so when there was no air for me to breathe. Though the pain of the mask was pretty bad, it was better than the sensation of air rushing from my lungs.

Eight days passed.

Eight days? You gotta be kidding, don’t you?

I wish I was.

For much of the first day, we waited to be rescued. But as the hours dragged by, it became more and more clear that we might be on our own, at least for a little while.

There was a small window in the pressure door, just a round bit of glass set into the metal.

The first time I noticed her looking, she quickly ducked down again.

“There’s guys in pressure suits out there,” she whispered. Whispering made no sense, of course, since even shouting through a bullhorn would not have carried through the vacuum outside.

“They’re part of your bunch,” she said. “Soldiers.” She spat out that word with contempt. I wanted to tell her I hadn’t signed up for anything like what actually went down, but who was I kidding? I had joined an invasion force, and it had not gone off according to plan.

“Are they looking this way?”

“I didn’t get a good look. Should I look again?”

Carefully, she edged upward and peered through the glass.

“Okay, I see three soldiers. They’re just standing around, it looks like. They’re holding rifles, I guess. Not like the big laser you had.” She looked back and down and glared at me. She looked back, and gasped.

“Two of them just picked up a body. He’s in a uniform like the one you’re wearing. They’re going away from us, and now they’re… oh, Chris, they just tossed the body on a stack of other ones. A lot of other ones. Soldiers. Civilians. Innocent bystanders, Chris. Are you happy?”

I had never been less happy but couldn’t think of anything to say.

I think this was a few hours after we entered the shelter. I know she had already made her first foray outside, and that time she had not seen anyone moving at all.

We know now that the soldiers had pulled back to regroup, and the Heinleiners had retreated to safety in places that appeared on no maps, pretty much beyond the reach of the invaders.

Gretel was getting increasingly antsy. There were things she needed to get, she told me. The air situation was not critical at that point. We debated whether or not to surrender to the people outside. She was in favor of it, in spite of their menacing appearance with the guns. And there was a risk that our refuge would be discovered anyway. We couldn’t hide in there forever.

I was against it. I couldn’t tell you exactly why. Maybe it was something to do with the Uglies, the mercenary troops from the Outer Planets. There had been something fishy about this operation from the first, but I had been too stupid to smell it.

“I don’t care what you say, Chris. If I don’t get you to a hospital, you’re going to die. I’m going out there.”

“Please, Gretel. Just give it one more hour.” Something inside me was screaming to not let her leave as long as the soldiers were there. I even thought about trying physically to stop her, but clearly that would be impossible. She agreed, reluctantly, and sat down to pout about it. But the next time she looked outside, she found out how right I was.

“It’s a couple of those bigger gorillas. They’re walking up to the others… you said they were cops? There’s about… three, four… I see six of them. The big guys are gesturing to them to…”

She screamed, and fell from her perch on the metal first-aid box. For quite a long time she wasn’t able to find words. Finally she did.

“They’re… they’re killing them!” She screamed it over and over, approaching hysteria. I was utterly frustrated. There were so many things I wanted to do. Get up and look for myself. Go over and put my arm around her. Start screaming myself. But I had to keep my head if she was going to survive. After all she had done for me, it would be just the most terrible thing in the world if she died now.

“Calm down a little, Gretel. Who is killing who?”

It took awhile, but she finally was able to speak again.

“The big gorillas. They just started shooting at the other guys. You said they were cops, like you?”

“They must be. The big guys aren’t part of us.”

“Then who are they? Besides murdering monsters!”

“I’m not completely sure of that myself.” There was no sense scaring her further by saying that they came from that legendary birthplace of monsters, Charon. “Look, Gretel, get up there and look again. See if they’re doing a search.” What we would be able to do about it if they were was a tough question. All I could come up with was for her to throw the door wide and make a run for it.

She didn’t want to get back on the box. Who could blame her? But her bravery continued unabated. She edged up to it and pressed her eye to the glass.

“I don’t see anything except…” She swallowed hard. “Some dead bodies. Six of them. Their suits are punctured, and there’s…” She turned aside and vomited. “There’s frozen blood all around them. They just executed them…” She began to lose it again. I managed to reach over and pat her leg. She calmed down a little.

“I don’t see any of the monsters. I guess they didn’t see us.”

“Maybe they don’t have the same kind of emergency shelters on Charon. Maybe they didn’t recognize what it was.”

“You think so?”

“I will if you will.”

Later we learned what was going on. It was standard procedure for the Charonese when things went belly-up. They were eliminating witnesses who might be able to testify against them in an Interplanetary Court.

Each day that went by, we figured it could not last much longer. And then it lasted another day. No air outside, and no one moving around.

The lack of any sightings of Irontowners was a growing concern. Gretel fretted, unable to understand why none of her friends and family had repaired the damage to the environment and repressurized it. We still had no inkling of what was going on in the larger society, remember. We didn’t know of the chaos that reigned everywhere, of the thousands and thousands of people who lost their lives because the CC became suicidal and went insane. There was no communication on either of our implanted techs. Mine could have been down because of the extensive damage to my head. We thought it was possible that the equipment had been fried, along with my face. But Gretel’s should have worked.

I have since adjusted to a life without being connected to the grid. I no longer can just think a request and have an image pop up in my virtual vision. It’s not as hard as you might imagine though I freely admit that it is inconvenient at times.

There was no food in the shelter, and very little water. We used up all the water on the first day, and were soon very thirsty. I stayed thirsty no matter how much water I drank. If I had more than a few sips, it would come right back up. The trouble was, with no air out there, much of the available water had boiled away. There had been a fountain not far from our shelter, but it was dry. The same with the spigots in the ice-cream parlor and other restaurants around the plaza. She was finally able to locate some five-gallon cans and schlep them back.

Finding food was easy enough. She was small and not very hungry. As the days went by, the stench of the two of us was enough to stun a brontosaurus. Or so she said. I smelled nothing. All I will say about our toilet arrangements was that she came back one day with a bucket. At least the bucket could be pretty much sterilized every time she went outside.

She couldn’t do that with the other source of the stench, which was me. My flesh was putrefying.

Every time she left, I wished she would not come back. And every time she came back, I wished I could just die. But I don’t seem to have suicide in me, and she was not a killer, even a mercy killer. And my body showed an amazing desire to cling to life.

The biggest problem in emergency situations though, as always in Luna, was air. The shelter had enough air for four to six people for about twenty-four hours. Do the math, and that’s somewhere between around one hundred and one hundred fifty man-hours of air. Which should sustain the two of us for forty-eight to seventy hours. In reality, this one hadn’t been serviced in a long time, and there was only about a third of full recommended pressure in the bottles. When Gretel discovered that, she used some words her mother probably wouldn’t have approved of. We only had between sixteen to twenty hours of breathing. It didn’t worry me, for myself, but I was desperate that Gretel should survive. And, of course, I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

There was another factor to consider. Though the nullsuits were superior to the old helmet-and-suit variety of pressure suit, there was this about them: Without a connection to an exterior bottle slung over the back or shoulder, they were only good for about an hour. That was because there was only so much pressurized air you could fit into the lung-shaped internal bottle that took the place of the lung that was removed when the damn thing was installed.

I never knew exactly what Herculean tasks Gretel performed to keep us in air. She would leave and go scavenging, and somehow she found enough stuff to keep her alive and me barely ticking over.

Of course, what we both wanted her to do was explore, range far and wide and find someone to rescue us. But she was too busy scrounging most of the time. She refused to go out until it was absolutely necessary because of the toll we both knew the repeated exposures to vacuum were taking on me. Under the best conditions, she would only be able to range about for half an hour before she had to return and fill her tank again.

Eight days. Eight days like that.

I became increasingly delirious. She talked a lot, mostly to keep herself sane. She told me many things about her life, her family, her hopes and dreams. I remember only a little of that, and I won’t share it with anybody, ever. That is between the two of us.

Then on the eighth day, someone knocked on the door. I don’t remember it, but I’m sure Gretel almost jumped out of her skin. Was this a savior, or a killer?

An ambulance backed up to the pressure door and sealed itself against it. The door popped open. I do remember that, the door opening, light spilling inside, both of us blinking like troglodytes exposed to the sun for the first time. Gretel burst into tears. I wished I could, but I was too far gone.

A nurse later told me that I was as near death as anyone he had ever seen. The only thing I remembered for a long time was waking up once and discovering that the pain was gone.

So was much of my body. The list of things that needed replacing would have stretched to Mars and back. When the repair work is that extensive they bring you back to awareness gradually, so the next two weeks passed in a dreamlike state.

The first lucid experience I had was looking up from the treatment cell, wires and tubes webbing my body from legs to head, to see Gretel looking down on me. She was cleaned up, of course, and wearing clothes for the first time in a long time.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“I just want to thank you, for everything, but I don’t know how I possibly could.”

She shrugged.

“You would have done the same for me.”

That’s all I remember. She left. Later, I tried to find her, but she had vanished back into the secret world of libertarian Irontown.

After the passage of quite a few years, I gave up my search and accepted that I would probably never see her again.

They put me back together, just as good as new. They tried to talk me into getting new cyber implants, but I was adamant on the subject. The CC, or whatever took its place, was never getting into my head again.

It was my body they put together again, of course. As for my mind… that’s still an ongoing project. It will probably never be reassembled just like it was. But I have learned to live with that.