Helium3 - 1 Crater (22 page)

Crater told her about Pegasus and about Ellis Justice and the crowhoppers that had attacked them. Then he told her about the Umlaps and how the gillie had returned. Maria listened to it all in solemn silence, then said, “I worried about you while you were gone.”

“You did?” Crater fought to hold back a grin but he just couldn't.

“Of course I did!”

“Why?”

“Because you're my friend, Crater.”

“Only your friend?”

“Oh, I see. You want more than that. You know, even when you were calling me bossy, I kind of suspected that. All right.

I will give it due consideration, but don't rush me. Don't rush anything. We're living through a special time. Don't you see that? We need to just be in the moment, not look beyond even if that beyond includes, well . . . us.”

“Of course you're right. We're much too young to get serious,”

Crater responded with a cheerful shrug, even though he didn't mean a word of it.

“You know what we should do?” Maria asked, coyly pressing her helmet faceplate to his, her lips puckered.

He concluded he must be in a dream but, if so, it was a wonderful one. “What?” he asked, dreamily, his lips prepared to kiss hers, at least through the plaston helmet.

“Finish our race!” she cried, pushing him away and laughing. She jumped back into the fastbug and, wheels throwing dust, zipped across the short plain before plunging into another field of craters.

Crater threw himself aboard Pegasus. “Get after her, boy!” he shouted. Pegasus took off, though he had cooled down and couldn't catch up with Maria this time.

When Crater and Pegasus trotted back into the convoy parking area, Captain Teller walked out from the chuckwagon.

“Ellis Justice arrived, told me all, Crater. You apparently did fair work out there.”

“As good as I could manage, sir,” Crater said, climbing down from the great horse.

“These crowhoppers are worrisome,” the captain said.

“Why are they stalking the dustway?”

“I don't know,” Crater said. “Is the convoy ready to roll? If not, I'd like to see Mr. Justice to a doctor, Pegasus to an inside domicile, and the gillie is sick too.”

Teller's face was drawn. “Not to worry. I've dispatched

Justice to the clinic and the horse, per his instructions, will go to the maintenance shed where he will be looked after. As for the gillie, you'll have to take care of it. Unfortunately, there should be plenty of time. The mayor here has declared a weeklong holiday for all government workers to celebrate their team winning the Lunar League Shovelball championship.

That means we can get the trucks serviced—which we have done—but we can't pay the town taxes because the tax office is closed and the local police won't let us leave until we do. See there? They've posted guards.”

“That doesn't make sense,” Crater said.

“Mayor Trakk is eccentric. He hates the Colonel and everything that has anything to do with Moontown. His father was in the Colonel's original party and was dropped off here to build a way station. Something happened—something to do with money, I'm sure—and there was a falling out. Because of that long ago history plus the result of an unfortunate shovelball game, we're stuck. All this and we have crowhoppers afoot. Crater, this convoy is well and truly scragged.”

And so am I
, Crater thought. If the convoy was stuck, he wasn't going to make it to Armstrong City in time to catch the Cycler. He was also doubtful the Colonel would take into account it wasn't his fault. Somehow, Crater knew he had to get the convoy moving, but how? He was just a scout. There had to be a way but, try as he might to come up with an idea, he couldn't come up with a single one.

:::
TWENTY-THREE

I
n the dustlock, the Aristillus dustie told Crater, “You leave your suit here and I'll clean it for you. Tube clothes are in a locker in the shower room if you need some. Just tap your convoy code in the puter to rent them.”

“I don't have a suit,” Crater said. “Just these coveralls.”

He applied a battery-operated current to the helmet base and removed it. “I'll need a place for this.”

The techie took the helmet. “Wearing a biolastic, eh?

There's showers in the second dustlock that'll take the sheath off. There's no biolastic server to put one back on, though.

You'll have to find an ECP suit.”

“No, I won't,” Crater said, taking off the shoulder holster holding the gillie and carefully placing it on a bench, then taking off his coveralls and folding them before handing them over. “This sheath stays on. It's good for six months. There's no bio-girdle required either. The sheath opens and closes, um, down there, and knits itself back together after relief.”

The techie nodded. “One of the new Deep Space suits. They work well.”

Since the dustie was friendly, Crater said, “I'm curious about this holiday for your shovelball team. Who did your team beat?”

“Armstrong City, of course. The Lunar League only has two teams.”

“Your team beat the only other team in your league and your mayor declared a weeklong holiday?”

“What's wrong with that?”

“We need to get our heel-3 to market.”

The dustie chuckled. “Perhaps you haven't heard. Our mayor is eccentric. Is that a gillie? They're illegal, you know.”

“It's also dying,” Crater said.

“Don't let the constabulary catch you with it. They'll run you in, sure. They're a rough bunch.”

Crater thanked the dustie and carried the gillie into the next dustlock to go through the process of dedusting. After he was scrubbed clean in the water shower, he marveled at how the biolastic sheath was almost a second skin, so thin and supple it was as if he didn't have it on at all. He rented tube clothes, strapped the gillie to his arm, then stepped out into a long corridor that was filled with people wandering this way and that, and poking into the shops that lined the hallway. By the lost and sullen looks of most of the people, Crater was sure a lot of them were stranded drivers.

Crater headed for the clinic, finding Justice in a ward staffed by nurses and doctors in starched whites who were efficiently moving about carrying instruments, bedpans, and medicines. Justice was in a bed with starched white sheets, his head resting on a starched white pillow. Everything inside the clinic tube was so white it hurt Crater's eyes, but he appreciated the obvious attempt to make everything look as antiseptic as he supposed it actually was. Certainly, the air had an antiseptic perfume.

Justice had tubes running in and out of him and was asleep when Crater sat down alongside him. Justice opened his eyes and said, “The lookouts on the south perimeter are ready, Major.”

He blinked a few times, then turned his head and smiled in recognition. “Crater. Good to see you, though I just saw you several hours ago. Since then, I've been pinched and prodded and shot full of medicinal bacteria the doctors tell me will soon absorb my pneumonia. Getting some other microbes— perhaps through that yellow tube, I'm not certain—that will soon have me feeling like a sixteen-year-old again. For that I can scarcely wait, as there are several pretty nurses I'd like to chase around the clinic.”

“It's good to see you're being cared for so well, sir,” Crater said. “I'll go see Pegasus to make certain he is as well.”

“You may do that, but I've stayed at Aristillus many a day and the boys in the maintenance shed love that old horse as much as I do. He'll be fine. I'm more concerned about the motorbarn.”

“Captain Teller is seeing to its care, sir,” Crater said.

“So all is well, all is well.”

“Not quite,” Crater said and explained that they were all stuck for a while.

Crater was anxious to see to the gillie. Justice sensed Crater's anxiety and waved him along. “Well, get on and let me sleep. If things open up, don't leave without me and the

Peg, promise? We'd like to get on down to Armstrong City and stay there until this crowhopper business gets settled.”

“How will that be done?” Crater asked.

“I guarantee you Colonel Medaris will see to it,” Justice said. “If this is war, he'll be in his element. He'll pull the other heel-3 towns together, get them organized. They won't like it, but they'll have no choice if these assassins have a larger purpose more than raiding way stations and convoys. Maybe that package you're going after has something to do with it.

The Colonel was always a good one for anticipating what the enemy might do.”

After talking to the head nurse and making sure she understood that Justice was to be given every medical aid possible, and then having his head handed to him by the nurse who let him know, in no uncertain terms, that
every
patient she and her nurses looked after got the same,
superb
care, he left the clinic and walked through the tubes until he reached the shopping tubes. He wandered around until he found a shop that sold puters and readers, called Clara's Puters & Stuff.

The woman at the counter noticed the gillie as soon as Crater walked inside. “My goodness, haven't seen one of those for a very long while! It's illegal, you know.”

“It knows that but it's sick,” Crater said. “Can you help it?”

Then he told her about its encounter with biolastic cellular structure.

“Oh, that Deep Space biolastic bacteria can be a nasty bunch,” she clucked. She delicately withdrew the gillie from its holster and laid it down on a cloth on a workbench, then probed it with her finger. Crater watched it squirm and it made him anxious. “Maybe you shouldn't do that,” he said.

The woman smiled. “I worked with gillies on Earth.

Don't worry. I just wanted to see how much energy it has left.

Precious little, I fear. It's very sick but here's what I can do. I can put it in the detox bath I use for polluted bio-diodes. It will either work or kill it.”

Crater felt he had no choice. “Go ahead,” he said.

She wrapped the gillie in the cloth, then gave Crater a receipt for it. “I'm Clara, by the way. Come back in an hour.

We'll know if the bath is going to work by then or not.”

Crater went looking for Petro, finding him in a side tube that housed a cafeteria unlike any he'd ever seen. The sign over the entrance announced Olde USA Coffee House. It had big shiny metal cylinders that dispensed something hot into plaston cups. There was a pictogram of some drinks that Crater gradually deduced were types of coffee. Until that very moment in the entire history of his life, Crater had never imagined there was more than one type of coffee or, for that matter, why there needed to be more than one. It didn't make sense. Coffee was to help wake you up and get you going on a scrape and that was about all, as far as he knew. But here were people lined up to get coffee in all kinds of flavors and retreating to small round tables where they sat, sipping the hot drink, and generally doing nothing except staring at their readers. It was all very odd. Petro, sitting with Irish over a deck of cards, waved Crater over.

“Captain Teller briefed us about your adventures,” Petro said. “Very well done, but you look kind of glum. What's up?”

Crater told him about the gillie being sick. “How did you get it back?” Petro asked.

Crater gave Petro a condensed version of everything that had happened since he'd gone off with the Umlaps. Petro looked at Crater with astonishment, then whistled. “Well, Crater, I'd say you've done a few crazy things. I admire that.”

“What kind of cafeteria is this?” Crater asked, wanting to get the topic off himself.

“It's not a cafeteria at all. It's a coffee shop like they used to have in the old USA. See the sign and all those kinds of coffee? Pick one out. You can use your convoy number to pay for anything but electronic doodads, clothes, shoes, that kind of thing. Food's covered. Lodging, too, if you can't sleep in your truck.”