Angry Moon

Chapter 42a

     “So, you saw the way it went,” said Benny. “So where is it?”

     Eddie stared out across the desolate lunar landscape, hoping he might catch a glimpse of the reel of tether material. “Well, it rolled that way,” he said, pointing, “but round, rolling things tend to curve as they roll. It could have gone either to the left or the right. Also, it’s probably covered by a dune of moon dust by now. It may be completely hidden from sight.”

     “Let's hope not,” said the Swede. “That would be a rather ignominious end to our mission. Let's split up, then. You go left, I’ll go right.”

     Eddie nodded, forgetting that the other man couldn't see his face, and the two men walked slowly away from the shuttle, kicking every mound of dust they passed on the way.

     It took them nearly twenty minutes to find it. They went over the same ground time and again, staring at every boulder, looking into every depression, kicking every mound of dust until Eddie found himself close to despair. He was haunted by the fantasy that it might be irretrievably lost and that they might have to abandon the mission for such a stupid, mundane reason. Would everyone back on Earth be furious when they returned in defeat, or would they just laugh? A laughter that would follow them to the grave and that would be their legacy for centuries to come?

     Then, as he was going over a patch of land he could have sworn he’d gone over at least twice before, the toe of his boot connected with something solid buried in the dust, and when he looked closer he saw that the swirling wind had excavated a deep depression in the dust on the downwind side, leaving a smooth curve of aluminium exposed to the gloomy lunar twilight. He reached down to grasp hold of it, lifted, and to his relief the reel rose into sight, dust swirling away in the brisk wind. “Found it!” he cried.

     The ground shook again as Benny came loping over. Another moonquake. Not as bad as the first but still worrying. Eddie found himself wondering just how thick the slab of land they were standing on now was. A hundred kilometres? Less? And beneath it, magma. Way hotter than its melting point, spreading heat into the solid rock above and steadily melting it. Magma that was considerably less dense than the solid rock above. The time it took for the magma below to move out of the way was the only thing preventing this last slab of solid ground from sinking faster than it was.

     Eddie forced his mind to stop thinking about it, otherwise he was likely to flip out as Susan had done. He wondered how she was doing, still tied to her seat. Did she regret what she'd done? Was she being consumed by shame and guilt? Or did she still want to sabotage the mission and was just waiting for the opportunity to break free so she could wreak havoc?

     “Okay, me and Paul can handle this now,” said Benny. “Go get him and go fix the mass amplifier.”

     “If it can be fixed,” said Eddie, heading back to the shuttle. “It's the circuit board that worries me the most. I may have to steal some components from something else.”

     “Do whatever you have to do,” said Paul. “So long as we can still fly the ship.” He had appeared at the airlock door and he helped Eddie climb in as he jumped up. “Don’t untie her,” he warned. “No matter how reasonable she seems.”

     “Understood,” replied Eddie, going through into the cabin and then kicking himself up to the cockpit. Susan was still where they'd left her, he saw. Sitting in her seat, her arms by her sides, tied to the support struts by zip ties. A length of electrical cord was wrapped around her chest, holding her to the back of the seat. Her helmet faced forward. He couldn't see If she was looking at him or what the expression on her face was.

     “Hey, Susan,” he said. “How you doing?”

     “About as well as could be expected,” she replied flatly. “My scalp itches, and I won’t be able to scratch it for over two days.”

     “You think you got it bad,” Eddie replied. “I’ve got cooling fluid sloshing around my feet. I'm going to have trenchfoot by the time we get home.”

     “Count yourself lucky,” she said. “They experimented a few years back with putting APA in the water, to make it less viscous, so the pump could be smaller and use less power. They abandoned the idea when they found it gave you cancer. You've got nothing but nice clean water sloshing around your tootsies.”

     “I hear a drill through the heart can be quite bad for you as well.”

     “I'm sorry about that.”

     Eddie opened the casing of the mass amplifier and peered in, frowning at the damage. “Did you know what you were doing when you did this? Were you just out of your mind?”

     “Would it make you feel better if I said I was?”

     “I just want to know if you'd still try to kill me if you could.”

     “If it would stop the mission, yes.”

     “Even though millions would die down on Earth?”

     “This isn't our real life, Eddie. This is just a test, to see who's worthy to join God in Heaven. That's where our real life is. Nobody really dies, don’t you see? Killing someone isn't really such a terrible crime, because you're not ending that person. You're just sending them on somewhere else.”

     “Some people, you might be sending them on to Hell.”

     “If that’s what they deserve.”

     “Do you think that’s what I deserve? Do you think I deserve to be tortured for all eternity?"

     “That's for God to decide. You know your own heart better than I do.”

     She's mad, Eddie decided, a shiver of fear running down his spine. And what was really scary was that there were millions more like her down on Earth, even now, in the middle of the twenty first century. People who, on the outside seemed like perfectly normal, sensible people but who genuinely believed that some of the people around them deserved to be tortured forever. You could argue forever that the early Christians had had no concept of Hell, that the fire and brimstone and devils with pitchforks was an idea that had only arisen in recent centuries, but a great many modern Christians believed it anyway. Believed that there were good people around them who would not only suffer in Hell forever, but who actually deserved it, for the ‘crime’ of believing something different. Eddie glanced over Susan again, and gave silent thanks that she was safely tied to her chair.

     He tried to put her out of his mind and began carefully detaching the damaged circuit board. The HEK17 chip was completely destroyed, he saw, but he was pretty certain there would be a compatible one in the secondary navigation system. They’d have to do without a backup for their trip back home. Everything else that needed replacing was pretty standard and could be found in just about any piece of electrical equipment, including the drill that had caused the damage in the first place. He nodded to himself. He could do this, he thought. Give him a couple of hours and the mass amplifier would be as good as new.

☆☆☆

     Susan watched him from the privacy of her spacesuit helmet, knowing that her face was hidden from him by the darkness. It gave her a strange feeling of safety and security, as if she were hiding. She tested the zip ties holding her arms. With so many layers of material covering her body she could barely feel them, and she thought there might be a little give in them if she worked on them for a while. They were sunk into the folds of her spacesuit, which was a problem, but if she pulled on them just right while Eddie wasn’t looking, she might eventually be able to get one fold under the tie, then another.

     She looked up at Eddie. His attention was now focused entirely on the mass amplifier, his prisoner forgotten. She tensed up and went to work.