Saturn Run

18.

Early June, six weeks before launch, and the new arrivals were becoming accustomed to their new world. More or less.

Barry Clark was a tall, thin, dark-haired biochemist, an associate professor at Ohio State. Chuck Freeman was a short, stocky, red-haired Marine Corps sergeant. Clark lived near the center of Habitat 2, and was walking down the hall to his room when he saw Freeman—who’d cross-trained as a maintenance tech—unloading a vending machine from a wheeled pallet.

There would be six vending machines in a small room in Habitat 2, so that those who lived there would not have to travel all the way to the Commons, in Habitat 1, to get a simple snack.

With the pallet in place just outside the vending room, Clark saw Freeman lift the heavy machine off the pallet and, taking backwards baby steps, maneuver it into place in the vending room.

“You work out, huh?” Clark asked, as he passed by. The vision of Freeman lifting the machine created a particular mental construct in Clark’s mind. The machines weren’t that heavy in space.

Freeman said, “Ah, it’s four hundred kilos down on Earth. Up here, only forty. Forty kilos, I can handle.”

“When will they be up and running?” he asked.

Freeman patted the machine. “Gotta plug them in and load them up. Four of snacks, two of drinks. If I’d had to carry this baby full of water, it would have been a different story. That’ll add another twenty kilos. Anyway, should have them up in an hour or so.”

“Terrific. Can’t do it fast enough for me.”

Clark went on to his room, where he spent some time reading papers from a seminar he’d continued to teach by vid while on the Nixon. An hour later, feeling peckish and a little thirsty, he stuck his head into the hallway and saw Sandy emerge from the vending room with a pack of crumbless crackers and a candy bar.

“Ah: it’s in.”

“About time,” Sandy said. He was working in the fab shop at the end of the habitat, and continued on his way.

Clark went into the vending room to check out the offerings. He was a biochemist, not a physicist, and though he could have explained the difference between weight and mass had he been given a few seconds to think about it, the concept was not right at the top of his mind when he pushed the button on the drink vending machine.

A bottle of Diet Coke was mechanically pushed into the descent tube. It slowly slid down, in the one-tenth gravity, halfway. And stopped. It wasn’t supposed to stop, not in a vending machine engineered for low-gee. Nonetheless, it stopped.

Clark said, “Goddamnit”—he really wanted the Diet Coke—and slapped the transparent plastic face of the vending machine. The bottle moved down perhaps a half centimeter. “Goddamnit…”

He slapped the machine a couple of times, then did what he’d done on other such occasions at Ohio State: he braced his feet, grabbed the top corner of the machine, and yanked it forward. But the machine weighed only one-tenth of what a similar machine weighed at Ohio State, and the whole thing lurched forward… with the same mass and momentum it’d have had on Earth. The mismatch between the real physics and Clark’s expectations threw him completely off balance. He fell on his ass, directly beneath the machine.

Clark would’ve been fine, maybe bruised but not broken, if he’d been thinking. The vending machine was falling a lot more slowly than it would have on Earth. It’d hurt when it hit him, but if he’d taken it flat the forty-kilogram effective weight wouldn’t have crushed him.

When you’re looking at what experience has previously told you is a half ton of vending machine coming down on you, you don’t think clearly. He tried to roll out of the way.

The machine was falling much more slowly than it would have on Earth, but it was still falling and Clark was still a little clumsy in tenth-gee.

He grabbed the side of the machine. It twisted. He twisted. He almost made it. Not good enough. Forty kilograms of vending machine crunched, edge-on, into his feet, from his ankles to his toes, breaking several bones in the arch of his foot and pinning his feet to the floor.

Clark screamed and fell backwards. Because the machine was no longer moving, he could have picked it up except that he was badly positioned to do that, his two feet pinned and pain surging through his feet.

He tried to pull a foot out, by gripping an ankle and pulling, but the pain was too great and when he let go, he found his hand smeared with blood.

He screamed, “Help! Help!”

Sandy had just unlocked the door to the fabrication shop when he heard the machine hit the floor and Clark scream. He dropped his snacks by the door and ran back up the hallway to the vending machine.

Where the delicacy of real-world mental constructs revealed itself again.

Clark had long hair, and brushed it back out of his face as he struggled with his pinned feet. When Sandy ran up, he looked down at a dark-haired man with blood on his face, his feet pinned…

… by a wall. Two important Guapo leaders had been meeting in a village just off Rio Tinto. American intel had picked up word of the meeting, and had sent in an SSG squad to hit the two enemy big shots. They’d approached the village at three o’clock on a moonless morning, had isolated the targets using laser mikes, and at first light, three shooters had gone into the house where the two leaders were sleeping with their wives. The rest of the squad had set up on two other houses where the leaders’ bodyguards were asleep.

Somebody in the target house had gotten off a shot before they were wiped; the bodyguards came boiling out of the other two houses and were cut down by the waiting SSG members. Then somebody in one of the bodyguard houses had blown a satchel charge, suiciding, and a wall of splinters had punched through the dawn.

One of the splinters, longer than a hand and half as wide, had hit an SSG lieutenant named Roger Jackson in the throat. Jackson had been one of the designated shooters, and had been running out of the house he’d just helped wipe, when the charge went off. In addition to being hit in the throat, his legs were pinned by a falling wall.

Which was where Sandy found him, running around from the other side of the leaders’ house. Jackson, a thin, dark-haired man, was pinned, blood on his face, looking up, trying to call out…

Jackson bled out in a little more than a minute, dying in the now-complete silence of the village. They had to leave him there, running ahead of the Guapo revenge squads, until they were picked up by gunships fifteen miles from the village.

The flashback lasted only a few seconds. Clark looked up at Sandy, crying, “Get it off me, get it off me,” not understanding why Sandy was clutching at the wall. The flashback was absolutely real—Sandy was there, on the Tri-Border, all over again, in the heat and the dust, the smell of blood and raw bloody human meat and chicken shit—and then, just as quickly, the flashback flickered out, and he was back aboard the Nixon.

He asked, “It’s going to hurt when I lift. Can you pull on your legs?”

Clark groaned, “I think so…”

Sandy lifted the machine; it didn’t weigh much even loaded with bottles of liquid. When it was upright, he called for help, and sat next to Clark until help arrived, and after they’d explained what had happened, he wandered off to the fab shop while Clark was carried to the med station in Habitat 1.

The fab shop was empty—a number of people used the shop, but he, Martinez, and Elroy Gorey were the only regulars—and Sandy dragged a chair around to the printer he’d been using, and sat down and picked up a partly printed arch-top guitar body.

The flashback at the vending room had been utterly real, and now little flickers of that day at the Tri-Border began scratching at his mind, like a guttering flame, hot, then gone, then hot again.

A half hour later, he wandered over to Habitat 1, down to his room, dug a case of meds out of his personal kit, popped a blue pill. The pills worked well, but only by ironing out every little crack and fissure in his mind, leaving him feeling like a biscuit… a really bland, flour-and-water biscuit.

Can’t have this, he thought, as he lay back on his bed. If the people running the Nixon understood his condition, they might unload him.

He needed the Nixon.

He really did.