Down Under Crater Billy

by Stephen Burns

Illustration by William R. Warren, Jr.

It began with the office routine of Binkovitch telling me, “C’mon, Dave, this baby’s absolutely foolproof.”

Then the schmuck laughed at this several hundredth-odd iteration of a joke that was stump stupid the first time he told it. As usual, that aggravating, annoying, sludgeforbrains haw! haw! haw! made me wish I could reach through the commscreen and whack him one on the top of his pointy head. Preferably with something like a nice big hammer in my hand.

Once again I vowed to actually take one of my unused leaves, venture the hundreds of klicks north to Copernicus Down, visit the UN level, casually drop by UNNTSTOA’s section, pop into his office for our first face to face ever, and proceed to beat the living crap out of him. Since I had no plans to ever risk the ride back to Earth and then visit some tropical paradise like Tahiti, that was—and is—my dream vacation.

I took another look at the invoice inset at the bottom of the screen under Binkovitch’s ugly ferret face. Half a dozen different new items were listed, but one in particular was giving me the sort of sinking feeling the mammoths must have felt when they visited sunny La Brea.

“Well, at least it was manufactured by Mercedes-Motorola Microwerks,” I said, trying to slow my mood’s descent into the tarpit. “Their stuff hardly ever goes screwlzy.”

“Hardly ever,” Binkovitch agreed with an evil grin.

As chief safety officer I had theoretical refusal of any item. But the priority tag the thing carried suggested that trying to navigate the bureaucratic maze it took to do so might be a Voyage of No Return. Aside from that, as CSO it was my job to have those bad feelings—and then translate them into safe testing protocols. My recurring ulcer and chronic insomnia were just fringe benefits.

I sighed. “So when’s it coming?” I was still clinging hopefully to my one fallback position. Maybe I could stall it in the manufacturer’s own testing department for a while longer.

Binkovitch’s grin grew even more hatefully gleeful. “Your chief of testing took delivery on it about twenty minutes ago.”

There was no way for me to avoid dealing with the damned thing. Not if Gloria already had her hands on it.

If you look over any current map of Luna’s Earth-side you’ll see several areas marked with holographic red domes, the legend DANGER! RESTRICTED ZONE! OVERFLIGHT AND/OR LANDING PROHIBITED UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE!

The reason for the mapmakers getting worked up enough to use exclamation points is fairly obvious with most of them. Only a total moron would try to fly over or land on the Laser Power Columns, Meteor Defense Missile Emplacements, or Mass Catapults and risk being broiled like one of the Colonel’s chickens or shot down like a clay pigeon. The human race being what it is, of course a few people do it anyway.

Down in the Midlunar Lowlands at roughly 14°S 50°W is another area deemed dangerous enough for this same exclamation-pointed warning.

That’s where I live and work, along with around five hundred other lost souls trying to live something like normal lives: loving the ones we love, squabbling with the ones we don’t, petting our pets, watching our weight, dreaming of the greener grass on the other side of the fence, and spending the pay we get trying to make existence a little safer for the human race—and for ourselves in the bargain.

We don’t have any big lasers, missiles or catapults, and yet thanks to our reputation almost no one ever tries to fly over us.

The place is off the regular transport routes, out in the middle of dusty nowhere. It’s buried under ten meters of solid rock, and hard to get into or out of as a prison—not that it is one, we’re all here more or less voluntarily.

This hazard-marked place is Home Sweet (or at least Semisweet) Home to all of us living here down under Crater Billy.

Once Binkovitch was done getting his jollies for the day at my expense, I left my office and headed off to check out this new threat to our safety and my sanity. Some items we’ve been given to test bear closer watching than others. I had a feeling that this one would give me eyestrain.

When we were first brought here quite a few people had a hard time adjusting to the ant’s life of tunnels and caverns deep underground. Not me. I’m happy as a heavily medicated clam with the warm glow of lightpipes or sunpanels above me, a grass-covered stone floor under my feet, and nice reassuring rock walls all around me. I love the safety of traveling everywhere on foot in the dreamy lunar gravity, secure in the knowledge that there is no motorized transport to possibly break down or go out of control when it passes by, bringing my life to a sudden messy end.

My office is up on one side of Level 2. Testing Operations is down on the other side of Level 4. The most direct route was to cross my level by the Twomain tunnel, then take the ramps down to 4. There are elevators, but few of us ever risk using them.

I hadn’t gone more than fifty meters down wide, high-ceilinged Twomain, smiling and nodding at neighbors who were out and about when Sorry, the AI face of Crater Billy’s main computer system, spoke up through my wristlet.

“We’ve got a Code C in the kitchen of the communal dining area, Dove,” he said.

“Dave,” I corrected automatically, watching Lucinda Weems and Arturo Genovese prying Community Room 2F’s self-opening doors apart with crowbars as I passed by. We waved at each other.

“Sorry.” This was an apology, not an introduction. We were old friends.

“Forget it.”

He sighed. “I always seem to.”

He did, too. Several times a day. In Jameson Jargon this was an RITG, or Recurring Ineradicable Training Glitch. For my whole life, starting with my birth certificate, most machines handling my name print or speak it as Dove Murphy.

“It’s not your fault, old buddy. So what’s up?” Code C meant that it posed no danger to life, limb, or Crater Billy’s critical systems, and could therefore be considered minor. But as CSO it was my job to know about it. After all, there would be paperwork. There was no actual paper involved, but forms are forever.

“The Kentford ‘Kitchen Magician’ brand NT-based Commercial Duty Food Transformer being tested in the main kitchen turned flaky again. Would you like the gory details?”

I shrugged. “Why not? I’m already having a rotten morning.” In a side tunnel three kids were being stalked by a Sgt. Slaughter action figure gone renegade. They had nets, ropes, and apparently everything in hand. “Don’t forget to report, kids!” I called. They gave me the thumbs up.

“Not as rotten as Vangy Spencer, I think,” Sorry said. “It appears that her wristlet tumbled the enties’ progging. She was talking to her son while setting the transformer to produce a fifteen kilo block of synthetic tofu which she planned to use in one of tonight’s entrees.”

“I assume that’s not what they made.” It was hard to imagine it making something worse than tofu, but put Vangy and enties together and anything could happen.

“You got it. The device produced a fifteen kilo block of syncheese instead. One which combined certain identifying aspects of both Swiss and Limburger.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Ugh.”

“And a fine ugh to you too, white man,” said Jim Tallfeather, who had just come from that general direction. Then he laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. “Don’t go near the kitchen, Dave. It’s a feta worse than death.” He went on, laughing.

“Thanks, Jim, I needed that,” I called after him.

“Jim’s report is quite accurate,” Sorry continued. “The smell flugged all the air sniffers in the area. Furthermore there was a subsidiary bug in the abnaddled progging. It had to do with the Swiss-like gas bubbling the enties put in the product.”

Expect the worst. That’s my motto, my job, and my personal view of an essentially hostile universe. Already I could see what was coming next.

“Let me guess,” I said as I headed down the ramp to level 3. “Since the stuff was made inside the hermetically sealed transformation chamber, the gas bubbles were at a higher pressure than Billy Ambient.”

“An estimated ten times ambient,” Sorry agreed. “So when Vangy opened the chamber the gas inside the cheese expanded almost instantaneously, and it—”

“Went up like a bomb.” I shook my head in glum amazement. Exploding cheese. What a way to make a living. “Since it’s a Code C, I take it Vangy wasn’t hurt.”

“A bit dazed, but essentially unharmed. Jeff and Bob were out in the main dining room having coffee when it happened, so they were onsite in seconds. They handled it.”

“Great. Tell them thanks.” Jeff Handel is my Deputy Safety Officer; a bearded, balding guy in his mid-thirties. No ulcer for him, he’s so cheerful and easygoing that if I didn’t know better I might suspect he didn’t take his job seriously. Bob is Dr. Bob Ross MD; a wiry, dark-haired, very gentle guy who happens to be Jeffs spouse and our Chief of Medical Services. Together they could handle just about anything short of the Apocalypse.

“So what’s happening now?” I asked.

“Bob and one of his nurses are helping Vangy get uncheesed. Jeff is directing a clean-up crew. He and Gabe Delaney from Testing are starting a report.” Sorry paused a moment while the conversations he was having with Jeff and myself converged. “Jeff says to tell you the worst fallout—his word, not mine—is that it may be a few days before the smell completely dissipates.”

I shuddered. “Great.” My father loved limburger, and tried to get me to like it as well, but achieved the exact bilious opposite. It looked like I was going to be eating in my cubby for a few days, falling back on some of the stuff I had socked away in case of something like this.

“Anything else shaking?” I asked as I got off the ramp on level 4.

“Just the usual Code D’s, E’s and F’s. Want details?”

I shook my head. “No thanks. I’ll review them later.”

Another twenty meters walk and I’d reached the armored door separating Testing Operations from the rest of the place. As usual, it was propped open with a rock, a sign that read COME ON IN, LIVE DANGEROUSLY! half-covering the one reading DANGER: PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK. Gloria, that section’s chief, thinks this is funny.

“Consider it done, Dove. Anything else?”

“It’s Dave,” I said, proceeding on at my own risk.

Here’s a little History 101.

First, and as I’m sure you already know, the term abnotech was coined by the famous-as-Einstein polymath Dr. Sarah Jameson back in ’04, the Newton’s Apple leading her to “discover” it’s life with her husband Dick.

It’s not the prettiest of words, but I guess we’re lucky. I mean, she might have decided to call us all dicks.

Within two years she’d gone on to devise the Jameson Scale and her Abnotechnia Level Testing series. A lot of people in quite a few different disciplines tried to shoot down the whole concept, but the more data they amassed and the more graphs they made, the more they proved her right. She got her Nobel in Ought-seven, Dick at her side. Her speech was quite moving. His mike refused to work.

The Jameson Scale of abnotechnia runs from 0 to 10. Almost everyone here down under Crater Billy is at least a 7. Most are 8s or 9s. There are a few 10s, though not that many. That’s because they’re fairly rare, they don’t always lead long lives, and the presence of too many 10s in an artificially maintained environment like ours could make keeping it functioning all but impossible. Not letting any of us anywhere near critical systems down on level 6 helps. Frazzled 1s and 0s working out of a deeply buried bunker six klicks away handle all that, commuting and carrying our supplies through their own tunnel.

Most upper management jobs are filled by 7s like myself, since the problems we cause mostly—a word with one hell of a lot of give to it—tend to be simply aggravating.

Being abnotechs means that through no fault of our own, each one of us has an innate negative effect on mechanical, electrical, electronic, cybernetic and nanotic devices, or any combination thereof.

Why we’re the way we are is still a mystery. Some think it’s our magnetic fields which cause devices to wack out in our presence, but the equipment to measure such things can’t be trusted around us. Others think we’re probability benders, our very existence somehow throwing tiny monkey wrenches into the fundamental machinery of quantum mechanics. Some vote the Black Aura ticket. Since it doesn’t seem to be a curable condition—not even by death; a hearse carrying a dead 7 or over is a lot more likely to break down than normal, the odds increasing with the stiffs rating—the reason doesn’t really matter.

Less than .02 percent of the population tests at over 5, and it isn’t until you go 6 or above that life in our technological society starts getting noticeably troublesome. Watching people misuse their electronic toys, screw up their cars, and get bitten by folding chairs might make you think our numbers would be higher, but abnotechnia is not stupidity, clumsiness, plain unhandiness, or an inability to read directions. It’s something deeper and stranger, buried in our genes or wiring and transmitted on a band nobody’s ever been able to pin down.

We may have only become a sociological quantity in ’04 but we’ve always been around. Not long after the wheel was invented one of us got the First Flat. One of us flushed a dead goldfish down the toilet and accidentally sank Atlantis. One of us got the first wrong number, even though there were only three telephones in existence at the time. We’ve blacked out whole cities by making toast, and crashed whole computer networks by simply pressing ENTER. Devices with multi-million hour MTBF ratings go belly up the instant we buy or try to use them, or they do something their designers never conceived: a car alarm beeper causing every nearby Cash Machine to joyfully spit out hundred dollar bills, or conversely, a simple cash withdrawal setting off every car alarm in a twenty-block radius.

Gloria Lunden was our CTO, or Chief of Testing Operations.

Our jobs were intertwined, and our working relationship somewhat complicated and not always friction free. Two cats with their tails tied together might be an apt metaphor.

New items we were sent were given either Tier 1 or Tier 2 testing. Tier 1 items were first tested by Gloria and her staff in the Testing Operations labs under (in theory, anyway) strictly controlled conditions. Tier 2 items were sent right out into Crater Billy for general usetesting, her staff monitoring the results in both cases. She decided which tier of testing an item got, following guidelines I set and constantly updated as new disasters made me more paranoid. I checked her testing protocols for safety, and co-processed the reports when an item malfed above the Code F (Frigging thing doesn’t work!) level. I wasn’t her boss, but I did have the authority to make her modify her methodology.

Complicating our working relationship was our even more complicated personal relationship—one which had what I thought of as on and off modes. When we were on we lived with each other and spent most of our free time together. When we were off things degenerated into what I think we both imagined married life would be like: lots of fighting and no sex.

I found her in Test Chamber #5, deep in the untidy warren of cubbys and tunnels which made up her realm. Instead of going on in, I just leaned against the door frame and watched her work for a couple of minutes. I was probably smiling. Maybe even drooling.

At this point we’d been in off-mode for a couple of weeks, and I hadn’t been down to Testing for a few days. I’d missed her—not that I’d have ever let her know that. It appeared that she’d missed me too.

Gloria and I knew each other far too well. I’d known she’d want to handle this new item personally. She’d known I’d be down to check it out personally. She’d dressed for the occasion. I knew it the moment I looked at her.

First let me correct an oversight. When I write a report there’s always a spec-file attached describing the item(s) involved. But this isn’t a report and you don’t have a file. So:

I’m not not exactly a little guy. I stand 6' 3''and weigh somewhere around 230 pounds Earth-normal. (Here on Luna things are measured in metric, but people in feet and pounds. It’s illogical, but so what? If you want to get fussy, go convert everything to angstroms.) Although I was big enough to have played football in college I never did; my taste in women and sports—and my mostly nonexistent love-life—had drawn me to Coed Wrestling.

Gloria went to college on a football scholarship and became the foundation of a winning team. She got trophies and set records. The one she’s most proud of still stands to this day; it’s for the number of ambulance calls caused by a single player.

Gloria is a glorious 6' 11½'' tall, and a solid 270 pounds E-n, none of it flab. She’s Woman written in large sure strokes. The first time I saw her I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

She’s made my life a living hell ever since.

Her two favorite lab assistants were helping her tear the shipping crate holding the item apart. Manny’s a 7, a chunky, dark-skinned maniac with a bandito mustache and a mescal-drinker’s eyes. Anna’s an 8, a sallow, ironic blond with troublemaker written all over her long thin face.

But it wasn’t them I was looking at. I only had eyes for Gloria, and while I knew I was being manipulated I wasn’t inclined to complain about it.

Her daunting physique was just barely contained by a pair of faded blue bib overalls worn without benefit of a shirt. The pants had been chopped off high on the thigh to show off a mile of muscular leg, and the bib was straining to contain her considerable bosom in a manner that was nearly button-popping and completely eye-popping. Her broad back was covered only by the biballs’ straps, and my eyes were drawn to her smoothly rippling muscles as she pried a plastic slat off the crate with her bare hands.

I wasn’t able to remember what had put us in off mode, other than that it had been a fight—probably over work. There was undeniably electricity between us, which meant that there were also occasionally power surges, shocks, arcs, brownouts, blackouts, bad connections and yes, even dead shorts.

I could have just stood there watching her and thinking all sorts of interesting things except for the big box of trouble she was uncrating.

“Morning folks,” I said, going on into the chamber.

They all turned my way. Gloria was grinning like a kid unwrapping a giant present on Christmas morning. “Morning yourself, Dave.” She cocked her head, putting her hands on her hips and giving me a bit of eyelash batting. “Are you here to see little old me, or to check out our new toy?”

I found my gaze drifting down to where the tender sidecurves of her breasts disappeared behind the faded denim bib. “Can’t I do both?” This was phase one, the verbal mating dance.

In the background Anna snickered, then told Manny, “Under a minute and he’s toast, man, just like I said.” She held out her hand. “You owe me five.” They were always betting on our fights and patch ups so I ignored them.

Gloria shook her head, brushing her tawny, tightly braided queue back over her shoulder. “Not at the same time. Not properly.”

There was a line you could hang your underwear on. “I see,” I said thoughtfully. “Then I suppose it’s business before pleasure. When do you get off?”

The smile she gave me could have easily turned my brain into the second pyrotechnic fondue of the day. “Hopefully not long after you get to my place tonight. After dinner around seven?”

I wasn’t about to let myself get run down and roped up as easily as that. I had my manly pride to think of, after all.

“Better make it six,” I told her. “At my place. I’ll fix dinner. We had a Code C in the main kitchen a little while ago. I wouldn’t plan on having lunch there either, unless you’re fond of Limburger Surprise.”

Her brown eyes narrowed. “That Kentford unit malfed?”

I nodded. “Vangy and her wristlet discombobulated the enties again. Gabe and Jeff are on it. The report should be posted by noon. Nobody was hurt, but it could have turned out a lot worse.”

“It made an exploding cheese, Boss,” Manny put in, looking up from a pad. He snickered. “The Brie went ba-looey.”

“Damn. We keep getting these goofy ISLs, and every time we think we got them plugged Vangy proves us wrong.” ISLs are Improbable Signal Leakages. Then she laughed. “So it made an exploding cheese. You’ve got to admit that’s pretty funny, no matter how you slice it.”

I scowled at her. When it came to where safety belonged in the overall scheme of things we wouldn’t see eye to eye if you glued our faces together. “Maybe you think so. I don’t.” I pointed at the item they were uncrating. “I sure as hell hope you take that damned thing a lot more seriously.”

She opened her mouth, probably to say something that would start a fight big enough to short-circuit on mode before it even began, then shook her head and gave me an exasperated grin.

“Don’t worry, I intend to.” She even sounded like she meant it. Anyone in their right mind would, but this was Gloria. As a tester she wanted things to fail, and she found spectacular failures the most interesting.

Still, it was time for me to back off a bit as well. “I sure hope so, Gloria. Do you think it can really be trusted?”

She turned to gaze at it. Anna and Manny had gone back to work uncrating the thing. “The theory is sound. The idea is brilliant, even beautiful. Mercedes-Motorola has already tested the hell out of it, but since it needs and they want Jameson approval, we get a chance to play with it.”

I bit back the impulse to say something about “playing” with the thing. Instead I made my position clear right from the start. “I hate the damned thing already.”

She faced me again. “I kind of figured you might, Dave. But I think the test setup I have in mind will meet your approval.”

“What is it?”

An impish grin and shake of the head. “Now you know what happens if I try to put a setup together with you looking over my shoulder.”

“We fight,” I admitted.

“The man’s a master of understatement,” Anna put in over her shoulder. Manny elbowed her in the ribs.

Gloria looped an arm around my waist and gave me a big hug. “Why don’t you make yourself scarce for a couple of hours, my love? When you come back we’ll have the testing setup in place. Then you can look it over, and if you have the slightest doubts about it we’ll work on it until you’re satisfied. OK?”

I had to admit that when it came to setting up tests for especially critical items like this her methodology was fairly rigorously worked out. It was her attitude that caused the problems and gave me indigestion more often than not.

“All right,” I agreed.

She gave me a kiss for being so cooperative, then whispered, “I really do want to keep you satisfied,” in my ear.

I knew she was still talking about her methodology, but not one I cared to have Manny and Anna observe.

History 101 continued:

Toward the end of the 20th century product safety testing was becoming an increasingly important concern. It had to be, because if some dolt managed to poke his eye out while trying to clean his contact lenses with his electric toothbrush there was a better than even chance that the courts would award him a settlement large enough to bankrupt the manufacturer.

All right, perhaps I’m being a tad facetious. For every company sued because there wasn’t a warning label on the chainsaw instructing the operator to not hold it by the end with the sharp whizzing chain, there was another company selling something that was badly designed, shoddily manufactured, inadequately labeled, and put out there with a criminal indifference to the safety of the consumer.

The thing to remember is that we abnotechs aren’t stupid, incompetent or careless—if anything we tend toward the opposite because we learn early on that almost everything in our environment can turn on us. Believe me, being cornered in your crib and reviled by a walking, talking teddy bear run amok can scar you for life. But because of the problems we have with things we often get unfairly lumped in with the blase, boneheaded and braindead.

Anyway, as more and more companies become concerned with product safety, product testing became an integral part of their operations.

Dr. Jameson was one smart cookie. Not long after she documented the existence of abnotechnia she realized just how useful those of us at the high end of the scale could be in product testing. After all, if there was any way for a device to go wacky or do something that would give the manufacturer’s legal department ulcers it was almost certain to happen when an abnotech got their hands on it.

That’s how JTL—the Jameson Testing Labs—was born, and a lot of us who tested at 7 or above ended up as safety testers.

I suppose this was a good thing—though nights when I’m lying awake and grinding my teeth I do wonder. Once Jameson Testing was widely accepted, it closed quite a few career tracks to us 7 and overs. No longer were we allowed to hold technology-dependent jobs where our effect on the equipment could spell disaster. That meant we weren’t allowed to operate any sort of public transport or work traffic control for such transport, or become power plant personnel, or lay hands on heavy-duty networked computer equipment, or have much of anything to do with manufacturing, or—

Well, you get my drift. We couldn’t even holler discrimination because no abnotech with half a brain wanted another abnotech flying the plane they were riding in, or running their life-support equipment during surgery, or operating the chemical plant upwind of them.

Jameson posited and others proved that the more complex a device became the more likely an abnotech was to have an effect on it. A hand-operated can opener can malf in only so many ways. An electric one can malf in more. Put a high-speed netted computer in the hands of a 10. If it continues to function well enough to cause trouble it can cause real trouble, like the Great Minnesota Tax Wipe of ’99.

By about 2017 Jameson Testing had become a standard procedure, making JTL into one of the twenty largest businesses on the planet. It was at about that same time the first NT based devices were submitted for testing.

This proved to be a whole other kettle of piranha. Obviously in the hands of an abnotech a poorly designed entie-based anything could easily do something or become something its designers never envisioned even in their worst anchovy pizza nightmares.

JTL knew entietech was the future, and had no immediate plans to be left in the past. The problem was that their Risk Assessors ran their software, and the idea of mixing us and enties had come up with more red flags than an old Commie May Day Parade. If a contracted abnotech’s influence turned an entie strain dangerously weird and it got loose, all sorts of catastrophic and highly actionable things might happen.

Jameson herself went to the UN, which was thinking along these same lines itself. That’s how UN-NTSTOA—the UN Nano Tech Safety Testing Oversight Agency became another bowl of alphabet soup on its table, and how it built and JTL staffed our deeply buried, completely sequestered enclave down under Crater Billy.

Ten years later the worse-case scenarios haven’t come true. Yet. Nanotech construction takes a certain amount of precision and sophistication to begin with, and knowing what they built was going to be abnotech-tested made manufacturers careful. We’ve helped them learn a lot about designing fool- and abnotech-proof entie-based devices. But new devices and new generations still have to go through our mill if they want a full safety rating.

Children are Jameson-tested at age two, although 8s and up have been known to proclaim themselves in utero by their effect on fetal monitoring equipment; the sonogram machine suddenly showing “Gilligan’s Island” reruns, for instance. Most of us who tested at 7 or above started working as part-time safety testers while children; a young abnotech can generate malfs no adult could ever hope to duplicate. Those of us who’ve turned pro have spent our entire lives as professional guinea pigs.

As Chief Safety Officer it was my job to worry about this new item we were going to test.

It hadn’t even been at Crater Billy for two whole hours and already I was working overtime.

“Well. What do you think?”

I scowled at Gloria a moment, then went back to glowering at the Mercedes-Motorola MicroWerks Model 1-INT airlock. “I hate it.”

“You already said that. Why?”

“Why? We’re living on the god-dammned Moon, Gloria! The air outside ain’t! Lock failure could kill us all.” I waved my arm at the thing. “Just look at it! Call me old-fashioned, but I think airlocks should have nice heavy doors that clang when you shut them, and simple, foolproof latches. Not like that, that thing.”

The thing in question had been set up by the far wall of the testing chamber. It consisted of a burnished steel frame about two and a half meters tall and one and a half wide, a simple control pad on the right side. There was no sign of nice reassuring steel or even polyplast doors inside that frame. Instead there was this faintly gleaming black surface like a curtain made from some heavy metallic cloth.

I was getting the willies just looking at that black barrier because I knew it wasn’t solid like rocks or wood or metal, it was just billions of separate, fallible nanomachines hanging on to each other because they’d been told to, like all the dogs on Earth told to sit at once.

I shook my head. “You’re not getting me anywhere near that thing when there’s vacuum on the other side of it.”

She grinned at me. “Too late, Dave. There’s a storage chamber on the other side of it that’s already been pumped out to surface normal.”

I was aghast. “Are you trying to get us all killed?”

She looped an arm around my waist, probably to keep me from running away. “I don’t want to die. After all, I’ve got a hot date tonight.” A squeeze. “Will you let me give you chapter and verse on the setup before you work yourself into a heart attack?”

“You’re the one giving me a heart attack.” I said accusingly.

She winked. “Maybe later, lover. But trust me, you’re perfectly safe right now. Come on and I’ll show you.”

I let her lead me over to a tabletop display terminal and watched her call up a schematic.

“Here’s the chamber we’re in now,” she said, pointing to a rectangular green box. “It’s 10 meters wide, 8 deep and 4 high. That’s 320 cubic.” Her finger moved to a smaller red box at right angles to it. Red means vacuum. “That’s the other chamber. It’s 2 wide, 10 deep and 3 high—60 cubic. So even if the lock blew there’s still enough air in here for both chambers.”

She looked over at me, trying to hide a smug smile. “But I wanted to make our poor mistreated CSO happy, so—”

Her finger pointed out four white circles at the corners of the chamber. “You know what these are.”

“Barometric Popper valves. A radical change in pressure will trigger them.”

She nodded. “Releasing the pressurized air they’re holding back. Enough air to repressurize the room to Billy Ambient in ten seconds.” She hooked a thumb in one biballs’ strap, self-assured verging on cocky. “I’d say that’s pretty bulletproof. Wouldn’t you?”

“So far,” I said, studying the diagram. The chamber she’d vacced was a dead end. It had a gumby mounted in the ceiling to automatically plug any leaks, which were highly unlikely since there were several meters of solid rock surrounding the chamber except on the side facing us.

I had to admit that Gloria’s design looked fairly well worked out so far. She’s a 7, and her capacity for imagining trouble is almost as finely honed as my own—when she uses it. If there was going to be a weakness in her setup it would be in the safety of the testing staff and subjects. Knowing her cavalier attitude, I planned to go over every detail.

“So what are the test protocols?” I asked, punching in the command to bring up VIEW 2, which was listed on the menu as video from inside the vacced chamber. The schematic vanished.

Manny and Anna had been watching us go over the test plan, remaining uncharacteristically quiet. That ended with Manny going “Whoo-ha!” and Anna squealing “Yuk! They left their socks on!”

There on the screen before us, instead of a video feed from inside the chamber, were Cindi and Ted Nakamura, indeed wearing socks—only socks—and engaging in some quite spirited early-afternoon sex. Cindi was on top. She seemed to stare up at us from the display, eyes widening and face paling when she saw the red active light on their bedside communit.

“Not again!” she wailed. That was my thought exactly. It had only been a month or so before that I’d finally stopped covering all the video pickups if I was doing something I didn’t want broadcast publicly.

“What?” Ted moaned thickly, squinting up at his spouse.

“Sorry!” I said, hastily keying in the command to cut the connection. Instead we were rewarded with an extreme closeup of the action. And I mean extreme.

“How can I help, Dove?” Sorry chimed in, thinking my apology to the Nakamuras had been a call to him.

“Check out the tattoo,” Anna giggled. She and Manny leaned over the terminal for a better look.

Gloria had been trying to keep a straight face, but at this point she lost it, doubling over with laughter.

“Comm-glitch!” I snarled at Sorry. “Fix it!”

Back at the end of the previous century they’d been blithely unable to imagine the sort of potholes, washouts, snarl-ups, side-swipes, sudden detours, strandings, roll-overs, highjackings and head-on collisions possible on the Information Superhighway. If Cindi and Ted were lucky this was only being broadcast Luna-wide.

The table-top display blanked, a final bewildered “What?” from Ted, the last we saw or heard of the Nakamuras that afternoon.

“Erroneous feed stopped. Dove,” Sorry said. “Anything else?”

“Yes,” I snapped. I raised my voice. “Command Mode Invoked. Authorization C-S-O 1 D-W-M. Verify and await instructions.”

“Ready.” Sorry replied, his voice gone toneless and robotic.

“Terminal privacy override invoked. Extract and report on instructions given this terminal in the last five minutes.”

“First command at 1321 hours 42.3 seconds: Display test schematic designated filename—”

“Skip the filenames and times. Next.”

“Second command: Display Menu choice 2, video feed from pickup in area designated Test Chamber 5B. Last Command: Cut all inputs and go to standby. Report concluded.”

“Command mode off.” I let my voice soften. “Thank you very much, Sorry. That’s all for now.”

Gloria had got herself down to where she was only chuckling. I gave her the hairy eyeball. The look on my face made her swallow the rest of her mirth, and she made a face like it had gone down like a bad oyster. Anna and Manny faded back out of blast radius.

Before I could erupt she sighed and held up her hands in surrender. “OK Dave, I get the picture. Never assume anything will work properly.”

“Not when abnotechs are involved.” I glared at the entie airlock as if it was a personal nemesis. “Your setup has been pretty well planned so far, but I’m not going to be satisfied until we have every possible problem covered six ways to Sunday. All right?”

A meek nod. “Safety first, that’s my motto.” Then she peered at me slantwise, brown eyes half hidden by her long lashes. “I’ll follow you sixteen ways to Sunday if that’s what it takes to make you happy.” She laid a hand on my shoulder. “How about a nice cup of coffee while we’re trying to get there?”

It was my turn to sigh. I had to admit that she really was going out of her way to work with me on this and avoid an off-mode-provoking fight, and the airlock was making me more than a little jumpy and short-fused. She hadn’t done anything wrong, and nothing bad had happened. To us, anyway.

“Sure.” I raised my voice slightly. “Sorry, regrets to the Nakamuras. Authorize and notify them of a hazard bonus.”

“Acknowledged.”

“You’re a nice man, Dave,” Gloria purred approvingly. “Just for that I’ll make sure you get a clean cup.”

While she went to pour, Anna and Manny brought chairs over to the terminal, doing their best to look serious.

“So how does this horrible thing work?” I asked, once I was sitting down with a covered cup of coffee in my hand.

Gloria sat down next to me. “To begin with, the enties are derived from M-M’s own version of Hydrofilm.”

Water is a fairly scarce, quite valuable commodity on Luna. And yet most downs have a swimming pool of some sort.

This isn’t quite the extravagance it might seem at first glance. It’s a fairly handy way of storing some of your reserves and yet still getting use out of them. Its presence is reassuring to creatures evolved on a watery world like ours. A pool offers recreation, exercise, and a community focal point with games and events like Wimmens’ Night and the Teen Splash. Swimming is something families can do together here not too differently than back on Earth.

But because of the lowish air pressure most downs maintain, evaporation can be a bit of a problem.

Protecting an open water source is not a problem unique to the Moon. Seeing potential markets both on and off Earth, a company named Sentiease developed and sent us for testing something they called Hydrofilm.

It wasn’t really a film. It was a strain of enties designed to interlock with each other tightly enough to keep water molecules from passing through. The control unit that came with it instructed the enties to maintain different levels of cohesion. They could be made to bunch up and uncover the surface completely, or hang together tightly enough to keep small objects out—a setting which would keep bugs and other airborne contaminants out of a reservoir—but let a swimmer or diver pass through unimpeded. The increased surface tension also helped damp down the waves and splashing, once again a problem in low g.

That was the way Hydrofilm was supposed to work, and that’s the way it did work until Frankie Jeffers, age sixteen, Red Cross certified swim instructor and lifeguard, and a full 10 on the Jameson Scale, laid hands on the control unit.

Sorry has a running program to passively watch for anomalous activities. He called me, and when I got to the pool I found Frankie and his swim class gleefully bouncing up and down atop the water, the abnaddled Hydrofilm having turned the pool into a giant trampoline.

This story illustrates another reason companies willingly pay the heavy freight it takes to have their products abnotech tested. The Serendipity Factor.

Sentiease took Frankie’s discovery and ran with it. This led to a whole new fuel and water storage technology, self-sealing hull coatings for ships and boats and tankers, and a hundred other spinoffs. Other manufacturers started working on their own versions of Super-hydrofilm, but Sentiease was there first, and grew from a smallish maker of industrial/ commercial NT products to one of the Big Kids on the Block by the time they got there.

Frankie’s bonus was big enough for him and his family to retire on, but they’re still here.

Because it’s home.

And because not one in a hundred of us wants to risk the trip back to Earth.

One hour and two cups of coffee later I was about ready to pull on a pressuit’s helmet. Once again Leak’s Law had proved itself; only moments after I suited up, I had to take one. I was going to make myself wait, the suit’s grimly functional facilities being what they were.

Gloria and I had argued about this, of course, me insisting that as Chief Safety Officer and one of the ten most cautious people in Crater Billy it was my duty to be the first one to test this new airlock. She wanted to do it because she’s Testing Chief and believes herself to be indestructable.

I finally won, but it was pyrrhic victory that left me feeling more like a wiener who had volunteered for the fry pan, bun and mustard treatment, than a winner.

“All you have to do is walk through,” Gloria assured me once again. “The enties are progged to part enough to let you out, yet stick so close to each other and the intruding surface—that’s you, my sweet—that no air escapes at the same time. The hole your body creates will close up behind you like it was never there. Now remember, there will be some resistance, so be ready for it.”

I was already in resistance, so I guessed I was as ready as I’d ever be. “I will,” I promised, picking up the helmet.

“We’ve put a good setup together, Dave. There shouldn’t be any problems even if something goes wrong.”

She was theoretically correct. I’d insisted that the outer chamber’s door be closed and locked, and that Gloria, Manny and Anna suit up in case the lock failed, even though worst-case pressure drop probably wouldn’t cause anything worse than earaches and maybe a nosebleed or two. She’d continued to go out of her way to stay on my good side, agreeing with every precaution.

“Once you’re on the other side, go to the terminal at the far end of the room. All you have to do is type in your name. The time, date, your rating, and all the rest will be logged automatically.”

“OK.” I pulled my helmet on and locked it onto its ring. It all sounded easy enough, which of course only increased my gut-level conviction that it probably wouldn’t be.

“Commcheck,” Gloria’s said over my suit’s radio.

“Loud and clear,” I answered, Anna and Manny echoing me.

“Then let’s begin.” If she were only this businesslike all the time we’d fight a lot less. At least while we were working. That’s not what a man wants to hear a woman say before lovemaking. Makes it sound like a test or something.

I took a deep breath, a totally pointless exercise in a pressuit. “Here goes nothing.”

Up close the surface of the lock looked even more like a finely woven metallic cloth, a macro effect of the microlattices the interlocking enties formed. Gloria had called it a “smart solid.” I preferred die dumb kind.

I’d spent part of the two hours between when I’d first seen the thing and this visit having Sorry soothe me with statistics on Mercedes-Motorola Microwerks. They were tied with Blafrica NT and Little Josie’s Tiny Critter Factory for the lowest rate of flakiness in devices we tested. Not one single injury could be laid to their account.

Hoping I wasn’t the first, I reached out my gloved left hand—the fingers I figured I could most afford to lose—and touched the lock’s surface. It felt firm, yet with an inherent give to it, something like human flesh. I found it kind of creepy.

“How’s it feel?” Gloria asked. She was standing right behind me, ready to drag me back if it tried to eat me. If you don’t think that’s possible then you’re not an abnotech who has tried to go through a revolving door or use an elevator.

“It’s kind of, um, strange. I feel resistance, but the harder I push the more give there is, and it—oh—”

The surface gave and my gloved hand slipped into the black stuff fairly easily, like it was something thick but not solid; a bucket of honey for instance. I felt my fingers come out on the other side. “How thick is this crap, Gloria?” I asked in a reasonably calm voice.

“Four centimeters. According to the documentation one centimeter would be more than adequate, but until the material completely proves itself the Merc-Mola engineers are being their usual overcautious selves.” She raised her voice slightly. “Manny?”

“He’s had his hand through for thirty seconds. Surface deflection of the lock in the unopened areas hasn’t changed. Inside and outside pressures are stable to six decimal places. It’s like he had his hand stuck in a solid wall.”

“Thanks, Manny,” I muttered, pulling my hand back slightly to make sure I didn’t.

“Anna?”

“His vitals are high but nominal. No excess fluids in his suit legs. The sniffer inside has picked up a few more air molecules, but only in the PPB range. Too few for a leak. More likely it was air trapped in the weave of his glove.”

“Excellent. Keep monitoring. Well, Dave?”

“Yeah, sure.” There was no point in just standing there like the Little Dutch SpaceBoy. Taking another absolutely pointless deep breath I pushed my arm all the way in and through, then followed it to the other side.

It was like walking through a wall made of thick licorice goo, the stuff sticking tight to me as I went into it. Everything went black as it plastered itself to the faceplate of my helmet, but it peeled right off again a moment later. My movements were slowed, as if moving under extra thick water, but I wasn’t really hindered as long as I kept moving.

“I’m through,” I said, turning back to look. There was no sign there had ever been a me-sized hole in the black surface.

“Well?” Gloria asked impatiently.

I still didn’t like the thing and doubted I ever would. “It didn’t blow up or out,” I answered, half surprised, half relieved, half disappointed. “Yet, anyway. How much air did it let out with me, Anna?”

“The amount’s barely measurable, Dave.”

“OK.” So’s the failure rate of those tabletop display terminals, I said to myself. But now I know that Cindi has a tiny green dragon tattooed in a spot I’ve never seen, not even when she wears that skimpy topless thong bathing suit of hers.

“If anyone can cause a slow leak or weak point or something similar in the lock, it will be one of us,” I said, stating the obvious. “I want pressure, air transfer, deflection—the whole nine yards—monitored constantly. Automatics and alarms are OK, but I want human verification and notation every half hour.”

“Check,” Gloria answered agreeably. “Make it so, guys.” The fact that she was already monitoring these things suggested that she’d expect me to want such precautions. I wasn’t going to disappoint her.

“I’m heading for the terminal now,” I said, knowing she was watching me on the video feed anyway.

It was at the far end, the oversized keys on the suit-adapted manual board easily worked with gloved hands. I punched in my name, the letters appearing on the screen above the keyboard, then cautiously hit enter. That’s a habit most abnotechs have. Hitting that particular key is always a diceroll.

The display changed to read:

JTL/CBTO TEST SERIES #1 OF MERCEDES-MOTOROLA NT-BASED AIRLOCK. SUBJECT DAVE WATSON MURPHY, JTR 7, ARE YOU IN TROUBLE?

A bland, mechanical voice recited these same words in my helmet. It had even gotten my name right. I tapped the NO bar. THANK YOU, it replied. YOUR WORK ACCOUNT WILL BE CREDITED FOR PARTICIPATING IN THIS TEST. YOU MAY NOW EXIT THE TEST CHAMBER. THE STAFF MEMBER OUTSIDE WILL ASK FOR A VOICE VERIFICATION TO PROVE YOU SUCCESSFULLY EXITED THE DEVICE BEING TESTED. PLEASE GIVE IT, OR YOUR PAYMENT WILL BE VOIDED. HAVE A NICE DAY.

“You too,” I told it, watching the screen expectantly. ITS ALWAYS A NICE DAY WHEN YOU GIVE ME INPUT, DAVE, AND I’M SO GLAD YOU WERE THE FIRST.

Just like I’d thought, that damned Gloria had known I’d insist on testing the lock.

As I said before, we knew each other all too well.

Half an hour later we had our pressuits off and were working on another round of coffee while finalizing the test protocols.

“All right, Anna,” I said, “Read them back. I want to make sure I didn’t miss anything.”

“OK.” She peered down at the screen of the pad on her lap. “ ‘At least one test oversight tech is to be on duty here at all times. If not, the chamber must be under full security lock. The outer door is to be closed during testing, but need not be locked. The on duty tech must be wearing a pressuit when nonstaff people are testing the lock; the helmet need not be worn, but must be within easy reach. Monitoring of surface deflection and int-ext pressure will be automatic, with manual verification every half hour. Double redundant sniffers in the evacuated chamber will be active at all times, auto/manually monitored and set to maximum sensitivity to scan for leaks pressure readings might miss.’ ” She looked up from her pad and grinned at me. “Rubber Bend worry you, Dave?”

I had relaxed enough by then to grin right back at her. “You bet your ovaries it does, Anna.”

Looking at the computer records through the lens of Jameson’s discovery had turned up all sorts of interesting information. One juicy bit was that heterosex pairings where at least one partner had a rating of 7 or above had a pregnancy rating higher than the statistical norm. The reason? Failure of birth control, of course—especially barrier methods. The data-sucker who had stumbled across this bobbleup in the graphs had dubbed it the Rubber Bend.

She went back to reading. “ ‘No youths under the age of ten will be allowed to test the lock unless accompanied by an adult guardian. In such cases where such youths are testing the lock, both the guardian and on-duty tech must be in full pressuit and helmet. Passive monitoring for emergencies and anomalies will be carried out by Crater Billy’s AI at all times, notification of an emergency sent to CSO Dave Murphy, DSO Jeff Handel, CTO Gloria Lunden and CMO Dr. Bob Ross if a Code C or above.’ That’s it. Anything else?”

I looked over at Gloria. She was slouched back in her chair watching me, a feather-mouthed cat’s expression on her face.

“Not that I can think of at the moment.” Her smile got wider and a little smug. “—But I’m sure I’ll come across other gaping holes in your methodology which will have to be patched.”

By the look on Gloria’s face you’d have thought I’d given her roses. There were times I wondered if she regarded me as an especially quirky and troublesome device for her to work on.

I stood up. “Post and implement the rules and you can begin testing. I’ll be checking up on you every so often, so don’t get lax.” I headed for the door to let them get on with it, and let me go back to my office and fix a stiff drink. It was still early, but it had already been a long day.

“Don’t forget that you’ve got a hot date tonight,” Manny called as I reached the threshold.

“And remember, the Rubber Bend never sleeps,” Anna added with an evil chuckle.

I hoard food.

Most of us here in Crater Billy do. We also tend to maintain personal supplies of bandages, pain pills, candles, battery lamps, and emergency air and water bottles. Almost every abnotech here owns his or her own personal crowbar. If you had our luck with powered doors you would too.

We had been testing quite a few commercial and consumer food transformers. They were a hot item then—and still are—because they theoretically provided an easy way to transform such cheap and readily available—if completely unappetizing—components as basicalgae, fungamax, yeastmeat and sewage grown aquasoy into something edible and even occasionally tasty. But as the Detonating Limburger Mishap illustrates, some models weren’t quite perfected yet.

Figuring I’d used up my luck for the day testing the airlock, I played it safe with that night’s dinner and assembled a pizza from frozen, fresh and stabilized components. Gloria showed up just as I was putting it into the oven, a Jameson-tested electric I could trust as well as I could trust anything.

I checked the pie every five minutes until it was done. We ate by candlelight, washing it down with a nice synthetic red wine made right on Luna from materials that didn’t bear too close examination, syrupy orchestral versions of the whakmuzik popular in our youth playing in the background. Very cozy and romantic. We made a point of not talking about work.

Jeff was on duty as Safety Officer, but I was still on call. So was Gloria. Being dedicated professionals, we left our wristlets on. But before we got to the point where that was all we had on, I went around and covered every video pickup in my cubby.

As Ted and Cindi had proved just that afternoon, many accidents happen right in the home. I didn’t want us to become another statistic.

Again.

Time passed, the days piling up like paperwork in the Out Basket of Life.

I was busy with the usual disasters and near-disasters, test speccing, report review and the rest of the pulse-pounding minutiae of a Safety Officer’s life.

Gloria and her crew were testing dozens of items other than the airlock, but we both kept a closer eye on that project than any others. Me because I didn’t trust it, her because she was fascinated by the damn thing.

One thing I’ve always had to give her. When she tests something, she tests the living hell out of it. Testing had been going on around the clock since day one, and at the end of three weeks well over a thousand trips had been made through the lock. Billyites had used it singly, in pairs, even three 10’s at once. She had abnotechs stand in the middle of the entie barrier and make calls on their suit radios, play with hand-held games, work pads, and operate kitchen appliances. She herself had stood there mid-barrier and powered up a restricted usage wideband entieprogwiper.

When people weren’t going through it she and her staff shot first rocks and then bullets into the barrier, squirted the control pad with soft-drink, whiskey, solvents, boiling water and liquid nitrogen. She ran a big piece of pipe through it, then taped twelve chairs together and ran them through to see if something that long would confuse the thing. When it didn’t, she tried it with a conga line, complete with musical instruments.

The lock performed flawlessly every time. Only once did it do something unexpected. That was when she tried to throw a bucket of water through it.

The water came out the other side as a smooth black eight-liter balloon, the liquid coated with a thin layer of enties. Since the lock enties were distantly related to Hydrofilm type enties this made a certain amount of sense.

I came in to consult with them on this one, but couldn’t see how it could cause a safety problem unless someone shot a firehose through it long enough to take away enough enties to weaken the barrier past the point where it would hold pressure.

Gloria, Anna and Manny put their heads together for a few minutes, and shortly afterwards they tried just that.

An hour later the bottom half of the evacuated chamber was filled with a bulging black sack of water, and the barrier was still well over three centimeters thick. Manny reported a slight rise in resistance as the barrier thinned. Sorry extrapolated the trend and predicted that the lock would become completely impermeable before it thinned to the two-centimeter mark.

When we brought that first water balloon back in to examine it the enties reabsorbed themselves into the lock itself, and it turned back into a bucket of water—sans bucket—in Gloria’s hands. We wouldn’t have been able to run this test if Anna hadn’t figured out how to run a hose through the lock and into the water bag to pump it dry.

The plan was for the testing to continue for ninety days—longer if there was some sort of mishap. That had evolved into the rule of thumb for abnotech testing. If an item didn’t go abnanas in that period of time then it was probably perfectly safe for the general public.

The mishap occurred at 1:19 AM local of day 43.

At this point Gloria and I were still together. Normally before a month had passed we’d have some sort of fight that knocked us off on mode. Our working relationship was always ready to provide that kind of deal-breaker. Even if we somehow avoided that pitfall there was another argument cycle we’d repeat, a variation on our working relationship.

We are two very different people. I like things stable and certain, with identifiable rules and goals. Gloria gets bored easily and resists commitment. What I find comforting, she finds confining. The more seriously I’d treat her and our relationship, the more she’d treat it—and me—as a joke. Friction would build. The process had started again, but hadn’t reached the blow-up point yet.

43 days together was an all-time record for us.

Records are, as they say, made to be broken.

I was spending that night with Gloria in her messy cubby at one end of the Testing section. She’d gotten all heavy-eyed and yawny not long after dinner and gone to bed early. I read and ignored the tube until almost midnight, then turned in myself. She never stirred when I crawled under the covers beside her.

We were both sound asleep when just over an hour later our wristlets began to shrill the emergency signal and Sorry’s voice came blaring from every output device in the cubby.

“CODE 1 EMERGENCY WITH AIRLOCK TEST! CODE 1 EMERGENCY WITH AIRLOCK TEST! CO—”

“I hear you!” I yelled, trying to get out from under the arm Gloria had flung over my chest and sit up. “Report!” Beside me she groaned and stirred groggily, more asleep than awake.

“It’s Jenny Montez! She’s in the test chamber and I think she’s choking to death!”

“Oh God no,” I whispered, kicking the covers aside and leaping out of bed. Behind me Gloria was trying to struggle to a sitting position with a drunken slowness. I wasn’t going to wait around for her to get her shit together. “Did you Code 1 Bob and a medical team?” I asked as I bolted for the door.

“I’m trying!” He wailed, sounding as desperate as I felt. By the time I reached the cubby’s front door he had it already open for me.

“What about the tech on duty?” I demanded as I went out the door and started running down the corridor, barefoot and bareassed. Staying at Gloria’s had been a stroke of luck. The test chamber was barely a hundred meters away.

“He doesn’t respond to the alarm!” I could already hear it in the distance.

Vowing to have the duty tech’s head on a platter I ran as fast as I could, not even wasting breath on cursing. Crater Billy is like a small town. You know all of your neighbors. Jenny Montez was eleven years old, a 7, the only child of Pete and Luz Montez, and too goddamned young and pretty to die.

Once again Sorry already had the door open when I reached the outer test chamber. I flung myself inside and tried to get a handle on the situation.

I recognized the testing-tech on duty. It was Gabriel Delaney, a fussy, waspish black number-cruncher I’d worked with several times before. Exarmy and a real stickler for rules, he was about the last person I’d have ever expected to find asleep at his post.

But there he was, suited up without his helmet, sacked out in a chair with his cheek resting on its neck-ring.

The alarms were deafening. I might have tried to wake Gabe, but decided if he could sleep through that racket he could sleep through anything.

“Cut the damn alarms!” I bellowed, whirling around to look at the screen which had been set up so the tech on duty could monitor the reads and observe what was happening in the vacced chamber.

The alarms died.

Something like a small sharp sliver of death pricked my heart at what I saw on the screen.

A small pressuited figure lay facedown on the stone floor near the terminal at the far end, its arms and legs twitching spastically. The helmet’s faceplate was turned away, but it didn’t matter. I could see Jenny’s face all too clearly in my mind.

I wasted a couple precious seconds looking at and thinking about the spare pressuits racked on one wall. There was no way in hell I could get into one in less than a minute.

It was then that I saw the fatal flaw I’d left in the test setup. There was no fast, easy way to manually dump air into the other chamber—at least that I could think of right then. The enties could be reset to let air though, but only slowly. Too slowly. The lock couldn’t be simply shut off while there was a pressure differential on either side. For safety’s sake.

I’d known all along that vacuum was the enemy.

I turned to face the lock, took a deep breath, lowered my head and ran full tilt at the shimmering black wall of the airlock.

“Dave!” I heard Sorry yell. “What are you do—”

I never heard the rest. I remember thinking you got my name right! with a sort of detached amazement, then everything went black as I hit the barrier.

It was like running into a wall of thin glue, that weird feeling of resistance sweeping over me, all the more acute this time because I was stark naked.

Then it sort of gave and I was through.

I came out off-balance, stumbled and fell, landing badly and feeling something give in one leg. I lost half of the air in my lungs to a scream the vacuum ate soundlessly. The next thing I knew I was curled on my side on the floor. I was blind. The only thing I could hear was the thump of my heart slamming blood against my aching eardrums. My whole body felt strange and numb, all except for one leg. That felt like it had been chopped off at the knee and the stump nailed shut.

You’ve killed yourself, stupid! I thought, but clung to the hope that dying would take long enough to let me save Jenny.

I couldn’t stand on my messed up leg, so I began scrabble-crawling blindly toward the other end of the chamber on two hands and one knee, every motion setting off a fresh firework of pain in the other. Other than that hotspot I was cold, and getting colder by the second.

After what seemed like forever I stumbled across Jenny’s body.

My lungs were on fire as I ran my hands over her to see if she was moving—she wasn’t but I did think I felt a faint heartbeat through the material of her pressuit—and to orient myself. Then I got turned around with one arm around her chest and started dragging her back toward the lock.

I was blind. The pain in my leg was trying to steal whatever little breath I had left, and my head was spinning so badly it was a wonder I didn’t just go in circles.

I lost my grip on her and crashed into one of the side walls, bashing my head and giving my bad leg another twist. I came within an ace of fainting, but somehow held on.

Several panic-stricken seconds of groping blindly around later I found her again. Hooking my fingers under the cold metal of her suit’s neckring I dragged her forward another few centimeters. Then myself. Then her. By then I was beyond remembering where we were going. All I knew was we had to get there.

To this day I don’t know if I would have made it or not. Saying I doubt it is giving it the benefit of the doubt.

What I do know is that suddenly I was scooped up off the floor, then gently parked on a wide hip like some women carry their children and pressed tight to soft warm flesh.

Mother? I thought crazily, wrapping my arms around my rescuer’s body and holding on tight with a combination of animal instinct and absolute desperation.

Whoever held me bent down. My messed-up leg hit the floor and twisted off sideways. I would have screamed, but the arm cradling me kept my face pressed up against warm fragrant flesh, stoppering my mouth.

So I fainted instead.

When I came to again I wasn’t dead. I have to rate this as one of the nicest surprises of my life.

I opened my eyes to bright strip lights and that alcoholy smell which spells infirmary.

“The sleeper wakens,” said a soft voice beside me. I turned my head. There was Gloria standing beside the table I was on, a fuzzy blue blanket wrapped around her broad shoulders.

I said something witty like “Urg.” My brains were slowly reassembling themselves and my thought processes rebooting, but I wasn’t quite up to coherency yet.

Then an instant later one part of the operating system went back online. “Jenny?” I gasped, trying to sit up.

Gloria put a hand on my chest, holding me down. “She’s OK, Dave.” Her touch was gentle but irresistable. “She’s in the next room. Bob got to her in time. She’ll be just fine.”

I let my head fall back, the events which had brought me to this point doing a fast replay in my head. They got pretty iffy toward the end. “What—what happened?”

She smiled and stroked my cheek. “You saved Jenny.”

“What happened to her?”

She chuckled. “A more severe form of what happened to me, Gabe, Bob, Jeff, and a whole lot of other people who had the same thing for dinner.”

“Dinner?” Either she wasn’t making sense or I’d sustained brain damage.

“Dinner,” Bob said, coming in to stand beside Gloria. He looked tired but pleased. “We all had the pot pies made with food transformer turkey.”

“That damned Kentford unit?” I asked. Gloria nodded. “You mean the stuff it made was poisonous?”

Bob made a face that was half pained, half amused. “I think skewed would be more accurate. The turkey it produced contained over five times the normal amount of L-tryptophan, the enzyme in turkey meat that can make you feel logy or sleepy after eating it. Most of us who had pot pie were sedated to one degree or other.”

“I had liver,” I said. I don’t like it, but had always figured it was good for me. This proved it.

Bob smiled ruefully. “Not me. I had seconds on the pot pie. Jeff almost had to drag me out of bed and keep kicking my butt to keep me moving. It turns out Jenny has a sensitivity to the enzyme. Normal concentrations wouldn’t have bothered her, but she’s a growing girl and had two big helpings at dinner and went back for a third later on. The thing is, children don’t always react to things the same way as adults. In her it first brought on hyperactivity and insomnia, which is how she ended up going for a midnight snack of more turkey pie, and then killing some time by testing the lock in the dead of night. That third helping took her over a threshold and brought on nausea after a while. Her body’s purging itself of what was giving her trouble would have been fine, except that she was in a pressuit and helmet. You know what happened then.”

I shuddered and nodded. “She started drowning in her own vomit.” That’s a particularly ugly way to die.

He patted my shoulder. “Hey, thanks to you we got to her in time.” He looked me straight in the eyes. “You know, not many people would’ve been brave enough to go into full vacuum buck naked to save someone.”

“I think stupid is a lot better word. Besides, I didn’t last long enough to save her. Someone else had to save the both of us.” I looked back up at Gloria. “You, right?”

She shrugged. “You weren’t that far from the lock,” she said, avoiding my gaze. “I’m sure you would have made it.”

“You’re a terrible liar.” I shook my head, remembering. “I was suffocating, crazed with pain, half-conscious, so dizzy I didn’t know which end was up, and blind as a bat in the bargain.” I frowned, suddenly confused. “I was blind in there. I figured the vacuum had wrecked my eyes. How come I can see just fine now?”

She finally met my gaze. “You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

Her face broke into a pleased smile. “No, you never saw it, did you?”

“Saw what?”

“You can see for yourself.” She raised her voice slightly. “Sorry? I know you’re there.”

“I am, and I’m glad you’re all right, Dove.”

“It’s Dave.” It looked like things were back to normal.

“You be nice to him,” Bob warned. “It was Sorry who spotted the pattern in who was acting groggy and told me to check for L-tryptophan.”

“Thank you very much. Sorry,” I said formally. “You can call me Dove anytime.”

“I probably will,” he admitted sheepishly. “So what did you want, Gloria?”

“I’d like you to replay the video record of what happened from the moment Dave entered the outer test chamber. Do a split, showing both inner and outer chambers at once. No sound.”

“No problem.” There was a meter wide screen on the wall facing the examination table. It lit, and after a second the left side showed me running in the door and skidding to a stop, wild-haired, wild-eyed, and naked as the day I was born. The look I gave Gabe could have killed, then I turned to stare at the screen he was supposed to be watching, all the color draining from my face. I gave the slightest shake of my head as I looked at and rejected the pressuits. A second or two later I was running toward the airlock, arms and legs pumping.

“Watch close now,” Gloria said beside me.

I hit the lock, slowing suddenly as I disappeared into it.

The right side of the screen showed me toppling out the other side—

—covered from head to toe in shiny black.

“The human body is largely water,” Gloria said quietly as on the screen I fell, my right leg going off at an angle it had never been designed to bend into, steam shooting from my mouth as I screamed. I winced, remembering how it had felt. At the moment it was blessedly numb.

“You tore hell out of your knee there,” Bob put in, adding his own bit of medical color commentary. “You’re going to be in a cast at least a month.”

The black-coated me began crawling blindly forward, dragging one leg behind me. I could see that my eyes had been open and staring, but they were covered with the same coating of enties as the rest of me. It made my eyes itch and water thinking about it.

I can’t say that it was very enjoyable watching myself scrabbling like a gimpy tar-covered crab toward where Jenny lay. Gloria slipped her hand into mine. “Pretend it’s a movie,” she whispered. “There’ll be a happy ending.”

As painful to watch as that had been, watching myself struggling to drag her back was even worse. I held her hand even more tightly.

Fortunately something easier on the eyes appeared on the left side of the screen. It was Gloria, finally catching up with me. She was nude and magnificent. I was naked, she was nude. I couldn’t have told you what the precise difference was, but I knew it when I saw it.

She went through almost the same routine as I did; eyeing Gabe, taking in the situation on the monitoring screen, glancing at and rejecting the pressuits.

But instead of taking a kamikaze at the airlock the way I had, her gaze went back to the screen. Her eyes narrowed in calculation, and I could almost hear her brain revving up like like a batch of superprocessors given a particularly knotty problem to solve.

I had managed to drag Jenny maybe a meter and a half by then, and was in the process of losing my grip and crashing into a wall like an ant with malting antennae.

Gloria’s gaze swept the chamber like a scanning beam, locking onto the white box by the outer door, her body following after a second later.

She snapped the box’s door open so hard it’s a wonder it didn’t come off in her hand, reached inside, then pulled out an emergency breather mask.

“Now why didn’t I think of that?” I muttered darkly. “Some safety officer.”

Gloria squeezed my hand tightly as on the screen she pulled the mask on and triggered the air cannister. “I had more time to think. That, and I’m a whole lot smarter than you.” I shot her a dirty look. She just grinned.

The Gloria image was heading for the lock now, moving as fast and full of purpose as she ever had on the football field. Lowering her head, she put her arms out in front of her like a diver entering the water and plunged into the shimmering black wall.

She came out the other side all glazed in black like an animated sculpture covered with powdered obsidian.

But not completely covered. Her face was visible. The enties went right up to the rubber seal of the breather mask and stopped, leaving its clear plastic faceplate bare.

I got it then. I’m not usually so slow on the uptake, but I’d had a rough night.

“How did you know it would work like that?” I asked.

She shrugged, her blanket slipping in an interesting manner. “Logic. I’d seen the one part of you that wasn’t covered by enties.”

I studied the screen image of myself dragging Jenny forward centimeter by centimeter, my fingers hooked in her suit’s neckring. Then I saw it. My wristlet, winking in the light as I moved. It was made of metal and plastic, like some suit parts, not overcomplicated water, like skin.

Had I been able to see Gloria coming for me I probably would have broken down and cried. She swept down on Jenny and me like a statue of a goddess come to improbable life, stooped—

“You picked me up first.” I remembered it then.

Another shrug. “You were closest.”

Maybe so, but I could see the look on her face as she picked me up like I was no burden at all, parking me on one round hip and gathering my face to her breast with one arm. Once she had a good grip on me she bent and gathered Jenny up with her other arm. I stiffened when my leg hit the floor, then went limp.

Once she had both of us she headed back toward the airlock. She moved quickly, but with tightly controlled speed. Looking at her face and her posture I got the feeling that if that lock had somehow turned to solid concrete it wouldn’t have slowed her one iota.

Into it she went... emerging into air. The entie bodysuits, which covered both of us, melted back into the barrier as we went through, leaving me naked and her nude again.

Jeff, Anna, Bob and three of his medical people were waiting for her. The went into action, taking Jenny and me away from her and beginning work on us even as they lowered us to the floor.

Gloria stood there, watching intently.

Watching them work on me.

After a moment she peeled off her facemask.

“End replay, Sorry,” she called. The image froze, faded.

But she hadn’t stopped it soon enough. I saw.

Tears in the eyes.

In the face of a woman who took how she felt about me very seriously indeed.

That all happened exactly one year and two days ago.

One reason I remember the date so precisely—and don’t dare forget it—is because we were married two days later. Her all in white—like anyone was going to tell her she couldn’t wear it—and me in a tux with one leg shortened because of my cast. Jenny was Maid of Honor, Jeff and Bob Best Men. Gabe, who had been sleeping-potioned by the same turkey pies which had nearly killed Jenny was ring-bearer. Sorry conducted the ceremony. He even got my name right.

I just got done talking to that moron Binkovitch.

We’re supposed to begin testing the new self-suiting airlocks in about five days. I’m forced to admit that the concept has some merit; the original lock enties have been modified so all you have to do is walk out the lock wearing a breather mask. No matter what you’re wearing—or not wearing—it suits you up as you pass through. The entie coating is also supposed to make regular and construction grade pressuits safer by making them self-sealing. Once again, a concept with some merit.

That ferret-faced weasel Binkovitch says they’re foolproof.

My darling wife can hardly wait to get her hands on them and begin testing.

Me, I hate them already.

We’ll fight about it, sure as my name’s Dove Murphy.

There are some things you can’t expect marriage to change. Not if you want it to work.

Content

Down Under Crater Billy
by Stephen Burns