"Ethylene coming up!" Anne said cheerfully. "Lee, once I get Ethyl running, you can restart Ferris. Use the hydrogen reaction, so I can grab the carbon monoxide from Ruth. Once I get that all balanced, we can try Porky."
"'Porky'?" Joe repeated, puzzled.
Lee gave an explosive snort of laughter. "You haven't heard that one yet, have you? The heat cycle on the brickmaker was hogging all the energy, since we haven't got a nuke reactor right now. To use the waste heat to cook the bricks, we need to pull it off the mains and use electric heaters. When I said that to Annie, she said to me: 'Well, yeah, it's the Third Little Piggie.'"
"Lee didn't get it immediately," Reynolds chuckled. "Until I pointed out it was making our house out of bricks."
"You
do
realize we'll need more respectable names for our advanced technology than Ruth, Ferris, Porky, and Ethyl?"
"Joe, stop worrying about the damn investors." Anne coded in several instructions to the system, causing Ruth to increase production and Ethyl to start in. "We've got perfectly good, dull, respectable names full of stupid acronyms for them."
Meryl Stephenson and Bryce Heyers from the next lab poked their heads in. "Hey, guys, can we use some of the— Oh, hi, Joe. Big demo for the boss, eh?"
Joe smiled. "Something like that. Look, I'll be by your lab in an hour or so. We need to—"
A buzzing noise sounded from one of the panels. Reynolds' head snapped around. "That's—"
Joe was just turning towards the panel when the world split open.
Even through his headphones, A.J. heard the sharp boom of the explosion, and felt the floor jolt under his feet. The phones shut off as A.J. leapt from his chair and dashed for the door.
"What happened?"
"I don't know," said Melanie Sherry, standing indecisively. "But it sounded like it came from Engineering."
Other people in the hallway blurred past as A.J. sprinted towards the doors. He burst out into the open.
As he ran towards the testing area, he could see that it was bad. Black billows of smoke, lit from beneath by orange flames, curled upwards from the shattered Engineering wing, near the Atmospherics Testing area. He felt his stomach tighten. Joe had been planning to test some of the catalytic generation processes today.
He skidded to a halt in a scattered jumble of stone and brick. A few others were hesitating, like him, before plunging into the yawning, smoke-belching ruin.
"Joe!" he shouted. "Reynolds! Annie! Lee!" He could hear the distant wailing of fire and emergency medical vehicles approaching.
Setting his jaw, A.J. started in. But then, startled, backed off almost immediately.
Something loomed up in the smoke, emerging slowly, backlit by the flames, seeming almost to materialize like a monster in a bad action movie. It was too wide and squat to be human. A broad, blocky silhouette that wavered like a black ghost . . .
A.J. gave a shout and charged forward. "Joe!"
Joe Buckley gave a faint grin through the soot on his face, as did Reynolds Jones from beneath the reflective heat blanket the two had around their shoulders. "I don't believe it. We made it out alive."
"Christ, what the hell happened? Never mind!" A.J. interrupted himself and reached for the blanket. "Give me that. The EMTs will be here soon."
Wrapping the blanket around himself, he plunged into the building, ignoring the shouts of people behind him.
Acrid chemical vapors spiked into his lungs as he reached into his pouch and grabbed a small, somewhat malleable ball. With all his strength he pitched it into the darkness ahead of him.
His VRD lit up almost instantly, matching the data now coming in from the sensor motes being scattered through the shattered interior by the ricocheting "scatterball" against the filed building plan. The data was patchy but good enough to work with.
The air was bad, very bad, but it wasn't going to kill him right away. Atmospheric chamber gone kablooey. Bodies . . .
There! And alive!
A.J.'s eyes stung terribly, but he blinked and fought the tears away. Then, suppressed a cough with desperate effort. If he started coughing now, he might not stop until he'd finished himself off.
A.J. tapped out commands on the virtual control panel in front of him as he stepped over a sensor-outlined block of rubble to get nearer to the body. The ad hoc network was coming up and trying to link in with the emergency vehicles' frequencies.
There! Got it!
As he squatted next to Anne Calabrio's unconscious body, A.J. broke into the EMT frequency. "I've got a live one in here. We may have a few others. I think . . ."
He almost started coughing, then rasped out: "I think I can get out with her, but tie in with . . . local net. . . maps. . . "
He stopped talking and got Anne's limp form over his shoulders. The body was damnably heavy, even though Annie wasn't at all fat.
A.J. just didn't seem to have much strength. Unusual, for him.
It was puzzling. And the VRD wasn't focusing right at all. What the hell was wrong with it? It was supposed to project straight to the retina, focus shouldn't be . . . a problem . . .
A.J. stumbled and almost fell.
Oh, shit. I'm the one having trouble interpreting
.
He could make out some symbols showing that the conditions were already far worse than they'd been when he entered. His head was spinning. Which way was out?
He couldn't tell. Black smoke was everywhere. Light, he needed . . .needed to find . . .
He was on the ground, blood in his mouth, hurting. He realized he'd fallen. Someone . . . Anne . . . was on top of him.
Got to get up. Get
up
, dammit!
Light drew him. Orange flickering light. No, he realized, that was bad.
Fire bad! Fire bad!
The words came into his head from some long-distant movie.
With a supreme effort, A.J. forced himself upright. The VRD had failed. Maybe the fall, maybe soot on the optics, who knew? It didn't matter. A.J. doubted he could have understood it at this point, anyway.
He dragged his feet forward, one step at a time. Just one step more. Now just another step.
It's a building, not a catacomb! You only have a few
. . .
The wall smacked him in the face.
He knew that wall texture, though. He was near the back of the
Atmospherics area. He'd gotten turned around and headed in just the wrong direction. A hacking cough hijacked his breathing, forcing him to stop and almost drop Anne. Disembodied knives stabbed deep into his lungs. Somehow he got the pain under control, and managed to turn around.
But there looked to be flames everywhere! He'd have to run through . . .
Running seemed out of the question.
A dull explosion punctuated his oxygen-deprived panic.
Move! Have to try!
A.J. managed a sluggish trot. It was already stiflingly hot, but every step towards the flames seemed to double the heat. The pain in his lungs . . .
I can't die yet, dammit. The Faeries haven't flown.
Then he was falling.
A.J. stirred slightly. Joe came alert, looking down at his friend's reddened skin, scorched hair, and streaks of black soot that even scrubbing hadn't yet managed to eradicate. The blue eyes opened slowly.
"J-Joe?" The normally exuberant voice was barely a whisper, almost a hiss.
"Take it easy, man. You were really touch-and-go there for a while. You crazy sonofabitch." He extended a small cup to A.J. "Try to sip a little water."
A.J. sipped, grimacing at the pain in his throat, but sipped more anyway, trying to rehydrate the nearly cooked tissues. "Anne?" he finally managed, his voice now more of a croak.
"Alive. And so are Lee, Susan, and Lindy. Meryl and Bryce, too. Anne's doing fine. She'll have a scar on her head from where a chunk of metal hit her, but the concussion was minor and because she was unconscious and not doing heavy work, her lungs are in decent shape. She didn't inhale much. Lee, well . . . he lost his left leg."
A.J. winced. "Oh, hell."
"Come on, A.J.," Joe almost scolded. "He's lucky to be alive. Wouldn't be—neither would most of the others—if it hadn't been for you."
"
Me?
Ha. I went charging"—he coughed slightly and his eyes watered at the pain—"charging in there like an idiot and got myself trapped. Anne, too. And never did anything at all for Lee."
"You certainly did, you moron," Joe retorted, with a touch of affectionate exasperation. "You also tied all your sensors into the local net, and with that the firefighters and EMTs who just happened to also have masks were able to navigate through the mess and find everyone in jig time. Apparently they caught you just as you were about to fall into the fire. So you did land yourself in the hospital, but you almost certainly kept the rest of us out of the morgue."
A.J. looked somewhat gratified, if still embarrassed over having turned himself into a victim. "Still. With a leg gone, Lee's hopes to be on the mission are over." That was true, but Joe wanted to change the subject. Obviously,
A.J. hadn't yet figured out the implications of Joe's earlier statement that Anne's lungs were okay.
A.J.'s . . . weren't.
His good looks had miraculously come through untouched, except for a small scar on one cheek that would just draw more attention. But A.J., unlike Anne,
had
been breathing heavily in that holocaust.
The air in there hadn't simply been "bad" toward the end. It had been toxic. There'd been almost no oxygen left in the interior of the building. Instead, it had been filled with poisonous vapors from burning plastics, chemicals used in the engineering experiments, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides from the intense heat, particulates—a sheer witches' brew that would have felled most men with a single breath. Joe knew the doctors were astonished that A.J. had survived at all, much less managed to move around as much as he did. Under the flamboyant exterior, the man was about as tough as any human being could get.
A.J. finished the cup of water as a nurse came in, checked his IVs, and went to get the doctor.
"What happened?" he asked, after she left.
"Not quite sure yet," Joe admitted. "It'll be a while. I
think
that we had a leak somewhere that caused oxygen to get into the mix, and once it started running away on us . . . anyway, we'll know in a couple days."
"Play merry hell with our schedule," A.J. said gloomily. Then, obviously trying to cheer up: "Hey, how'd you and Ren get out, anyway? I thought you were a goner!"
"Damn near was. I don't remember it all clearly, and neither does Ren. Near as I can figure, when the tank went up, the shockwave threw both of us towards the wall that blew out. A fire blanket was in the mess next to me, so I threw it over myself and Reynolds, and managed to get him to wake up so we could get out."
"You seem to make a habit out of this kind of thing."
Joe grinned weakly. He had a reputation for nearly getting killed—a climbing accident in which a belaying rope gave way, an explosion in a model rocket when he was a kid, going off a cliff in a car with no brakes, and a few other less spectacular but no less dangerous events.
"It doesn't get any less scary, let me tell you. If anything, it's worse—I'm sure that somehow, somewhere, fate is saving me up for a
really
spectacular finish."
"Well, I guess this one wasn't quite good enough." A.J. leaned back as Dr. Mendoza came in. By the time Mendoza finished his examination, A.J. had actually fallen asleep.
"He must be exhausted."
"He's got a ways to go yet, Mr. Buckley," Mendoza said briskly. "We'll be keeping him here for at least a few days for observation. With all the fumes he inhaled, and the high temperatures, he has significant damage to his lungs. Hope for the best, of course, but Mr. Baker is very lucky to be alive. I will be surprised if he comes out of this with more than eighty percent of his former lung capacity."
Joe grimaced. Eighty percent . . .
That would be enough to knock A.J. off the Mars mission. You didn't send people with respiratory problems into space.
"Please do what you can, Doctor. He's on the short list for the mission."
Mendoza nodded. "I know, and I will. But I can't do miracles. He'll have to do that himself."
Joe couldn't help another smile. "Well, as he'd say himself, that's his main job. Making miracles."
Helen had intended to wait for Glendale outside another lecture late that afternoon, in order to thank him. But the call from Jackie Secord telling her about the accident at Ares not only distracted her for too long, but left her feeling much too depressed. Instead, she returned to her hotel room and spent most of the evening on or by the phone, waiting for further news.
She was finally able to talk to Joe himself. That was a source of much relief, regarding him, of course. But the rest of the situation was very unsettling. In an odd sort of way that Helen still couldn't define—she'd only spent a few hours in the man's actual presence, after all—A.J. Baker had come to be an important person in her life. The idea of him dying was . . . horrible.
Early in the morning, though, Joe called again.
"He'll survive, Helen. The doctors say there isn't any doubt about that at all, any longer."
"Oh, thank God."
There was a little pause. "But he won't be one hundred percent again. Never. The damage to his lungs was just too extensive."
"How bad is it?"
She could almost hear the shrug on the other end. "Depends how you look at it. From the standpoint of most people, not bad at all. After a few months, you really won't be able to tell the difference, under normal circumstances—at least, that's what the doctors say. He won't be running any marathons, of course."
Helen chuckled. "Did he ever?"
"As a matter of fact, he did. Twice, once in the big Boston one. He even had a pretty respectable finish. The truth is, Helen, A.J. is one of the few geeks I've ever known who could have been one hell of an athlete, if he'd wanted to. Which he didn't, but he's always been in top physical condition. Even studies martial arts, if you can believe it. That's partly why he was placed so highly in the running for the expedition. Now . . ."