Orphanage jw-1 Read online

  “Howard, what do I do when I get to the opening?”

  “First, get inside. Then I’ll tell you what to get out of the rucksack and what to do with it.”

  Howard couldn’t plan a coffee break. The other half of his team never finished high school. “Howard, is the human race just making this war up as we go?”

  “We do our best work that way.”

  The rip’s edge loomed a foot above my helmet visor. I looked down. Howard was only forty feet below, but he looked as small as a cake decoration. I took a deep breath, then another, and levered myself above the brink.

  The ripped Projectile skin was two inches thick and the same blue-black color all the way through. I waited as my eyes adjusted to the dark opening. Below the skin, a six-foot lattice of metal as asymmetrical as drool strings made a sandwich filling that separated the outer skin from a second one. The inner skin wasn’t torn. I described it to Howard.

  “It’s a pressure hull,” he said.

  “What now?”

  “Is there a door, a hatch?”

  I shook my head.

  “Jason? You okay?” Howard’s voice rose an octave.

  Any fool who shakes his head at a microphone should be euthanized. “Howard, I don’t see—” Through the dimness I made out indented lines on the inner hull, a parasol pattern. “Wait. There’s something.”

  “It’s a repair hatch. You’re in!”

  “Forgot my key.”

  “Oh.” He paused. “You may not need one. Crawl up to the hatch. It may fail-safe open to motion. So the repairman isn’t stranded in space in an emergency.”

  What if the repairman was waiting for me on the other side of the hatch? My heart raced.

  I pulled myself, all forty pounds, over the torn outer skin, careful not to snag my suit. The skin tear was three feet high. The rucksack and I were four feet thick. I pulled back outside and slipped the sack off. Then I rolled my body into the space between the hulls, dragging the sack behind me in one hand. Lying there, I felt the Projectile’s up-and-down sound vibrating through my thighs and belly.

  I waved my free hand toward the parasol. Nothing. “Howard? The hatch didn’t open.”

  “—whole body.”

  “You’re breaking up.” Part of me hoped he’d say, well, then, come on back down. Good try. Let’s go back to the LEM and fly home. But I knew what he meant. I wormed my whole body closer to the parasol, like low-crawling under barbed wire on the infiltration course.

  The parasol moved.

  Its panels shot back into its rim, like a dilating camera iris.

  “Howard, you were right. It opened.”

  “Jas… hull interferes…”

  The open hatch yawned dark and wide enough to admit me or the rucksack but not both at once. Six feet farther inside a closed door like the first sealed the tube. An air lock. I’d either have to crawl headfirst, pushing the rucksack ahead of me, or back in and drag the sack behind me. If I backed in I could see whether the outer door closed behind me. I’d be pointed the right direction to get the hell out. The inner hatch should open automatically in response to me, like the outer hatch had. Space beyond the air lock would surely be wide enough for me to turn around.

  Feetfirst it was.

  I got shoulder deep through the hatch, dragging the rucksack with instruments, survival gear, and the pistol, and spoke once more. “Howard? I’m going in.”

  Only a crackle came back over the radio. It joined with the oddly familiar up-and-down whoop I had been listening to for the last half hour. The passage was inches wider than my space-suited shoulders. I could barely move my arms. At least backing in like this I would be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel, the way back outside. Headfirst into darkness would have terrified me.

  I wrestled the rucksack past the outer hatch, and it snapped shut.

  I shrank back into the passage and felt with my boots. The inner hatch had opened. I wormed backward, over the inner-hatch lip, then tugged the rucksack toward me. I gathered myself on knees and elbows and let go of the rucksack straps.

  In the instant my hands drew back inside the hatch lip, the inner hatch snapped closed and sealed me in the dark.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I couldn’t see. All I could hear was my own breathing and the unceasing, rising and falling whoop. I pressed my hands on the hatch. It didn’t budge. I pounded, as hard as I dared without risking rupturing my suit. I ran my hands over the walls around me. No doorknob. No lever. “Howard? I’m stuck in here!”

  Not even static came back. The Projectile hull was not only tough, it was radioproof .

  The rucksack lay a foot away, separated from me by a sealed hatch. In the sack lay a flashlight, a gun, food and water that could be taken through a helmet nipple, and all the equipment that was supposed to let me gather intelligence and bring it back. Those things might as well have been back on Earth.

  This was like waking blind in a coffin. Another sound joined the Projectile’s familiar whoop. More rapid, wheezing.

  It was me, panting and buried alive. I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t see. Claustrophobic panic boiled up in my brain.

  I forced myself to think. The visor. The mirrored sunglass layer could be slid up. I moved it and could see again. My breathing slowed.

  The tube I lay in wasn’t completely dark.

  It was circular and crenellated like a drainage culvert. I could see, barely, because it was suffused in purple light that glowed from the walls. The light pulsed in time to the whooping. I twisted to look over my shoulder. My purple sewer pipe corkscrewed out of sight fifty feet ahead, but it was no wider than the air lock.

  I had two options. Wait here and hope Howard or fate would open the hatch. Until my oxygen generator quit or I died of thirst or starved. Option two was I could wriggle, feetfirst, deeper into the Projectile. I might find wide spaces, useful information and a way out. Or I might blunder into something that would kill me.

  I never could sit still.

  The tube’s featureless walls were cut every fifty feet or so with slots maybe three feet tall and two fingers wide. Ventilation ducts? Ventilating what? There must be atmosphere in here. After all, there was an air lock. That meant something had been alive in here to breathe it. Or was still breathing. I wanted that pistol from the rucksack.

  The second set of ventilating ducts caught my thigh for the second time. I worked my hand down to my thigh and felt a lump in my suit. The thigh pocket. I peeled back the Velcro flap and felt the object inside. The flare pistol! My heart leapt. I was armed, sort of.

  I worked my hand up alongside my body until I held the flare gun in front of me. This meant I could shoot anything that tried to sneak up behind me, but anything ahead of me could slink up and bite my feet off before I knew it.

  I backed another hundred feet down the tube, keeping my fingers out of the air-conditioning vents.

  My feet seemed suddenly freer. I wriggled onward. Six feet later, my torso entered a right-angle intersection with a larger-diameter tube. The intersection allowed me room to turn headfirst. And to realize that I could crawl or duckwalk along the bigger tube.

  I sat up in the intersection while purple light pulsed in time to the incessant whooping. I took stock. I was stranded in a labyrinth. The old suits had been retrofitted with up-to-date oxygen generators so I could breathe, indefinitely. I had no food. I had no water. That last wasn’t all bad, as my bladder kept reminding me. My only weapon was a seventy-year-old flare pistol with one big, fat, slow bullet. My mission depended on measuring things, but my measuring equipment sat back outside the hatch that had trapped me in here. This vessel was as big as Dubuque. It surely had more than one door. I’d just keep crawling until I found another one, or I figured out how to open the one where I came in.

  As I traveled, if I couldn’t measure what was in here, maybe I could take samples. I reversed the flare gun in my gloved hand like a geologist’s pick and hammered the curved wall.

 
The gun butt bounced back like a tennis ball off concrete.

  I shrugged. I’d just have to remember what I saw.

  The wide tube was more likely to lead somewhere important, so I changed course.

  I made better time in the big tube, which I thought of as Broadway. Twenty minutes of crawling and griping to myself about the state of my bladder later, Broadway widened into an oval room as tall and wide as a garage. Times Square. Its walls were studded with glowing ovals, green, not purple, and twiggy lumps that could be controls.

  Hair stood on my neck. Somehow, I felt that I wasn’t the only living thing in here.

  I froze in the doorway and squinted as my eyes adjusted. Doorway was as good a word as any.

  Across the room a shadow twitched.

  I should have been terrified. But the enormity of this moment of contact overwhelmed me. My skin tingled.

  The shape was a banana, colored like a new one, green. But five feet long and maybe two feet across the middle. It was as featureless as a banana. No eyes, just white bulges on its head end, no mouth.

  It squirmed, twisted into a question mark, on an oval pedestal that rose out of the floor. Its skin rippled, from the elevated end of its question-mark body to the tail end, like a toothpaste tube squeezing itself. Black goo oozed from the tail into the pedestal.

  For a thousand millennia humankind had wondered whether we were alone in the universe. For countless generations we had imagined and longed. Now, at this moment, the first representatives of intelligent species made physical contact across the cosmos.

  And one of us was on the crapper.

  Inside my helmet, I cleared my throat.

  Chapter Twenty

  I pointed the flare pistol. “Hands up!” Well, what was I supposed to say? Maybe it would get the message from my tone.

  Sluggo—just one look named him for me—curled his head end my way.

  We both froze while my heart pounded.

  A row of the green wall lights flashed. His head end wagged slowly, like a cobra coiling up out of a basket.

  He could be saying hello. He could be hypnotizing me.

  I thumbed back the flare pistol’s hammer.

  He slid off his toilet and circled to my left. He squirmed along, just like a garden snail, but fast. I circled, too, the pistol quivering in my hand.

  I was on his turf. For all I knew, my next step could put me on top of a trapdoor that he could open and flush me into boiling oil.

  Thup.

  I flicked my eyes down. My foot drum-thumped a black, shiny hollow thing as big as Sluggo and shaped like him. It rocked on the floor.

  He jumped at me, I dodged backward, and we ended up ten feet apart.

  “So you don’t like me near your clothes.”

  A bulge grew sideways from his midriff, became an octopus tentacle, and slunk toward a curved, metallic rod lying on the floor next to his outerwear. A gun?

  I poked my gun at Sluggo and tightened my finger on the trigger. “Hold it!”

  He stopped.

  “Good boy.” I nodded.

  His tentacle shot out toward the rod.

  I dived for it. My glove got there first, and the rod skidded beyond Sluggo’s reach.

  Dragging myself off the floor, I planted my body between him and his weapon. I trained the flare pistol on him, then stepped toward him. He retreated. Another step, another backward squirm. The room had no corners, really, but one rounded end narrowed. I herded him back there and trapped him.

  He weaved back and forth. I had him, and he knew it.

  Sluggo collapsed like a punctured balloon.

  I counted ten heartbeats.

  Sluggo didn’t move.

  His color faded.

  More black goo dribbled from his tail.

  “Jeez. You killed yourself.” I stepped back and listened to my breath wheeze inside my helmet.

  Maybe he wasn’t dead. The flare gun dangled from my fingers. I uncocked the hammer, men lobbed the gun and hit him amidships. He didn’t flinch.

  I inched to him, repocketed the flare pistol, and toed him with a boot. It was like kicking Jell-O. He was dead, alright.

  Howard had said a Projectile might have a kamikaze pilot. Sluggo was already dead in his own mind, so swallowing some kind of snail poison pill probably hadn’t fazed him. He had died for God and country, if he had either, rather than be taken alive. I guess that made him a good soldier.

  “Howard?” My radio was deader than Sluggo.

  Then hair stood on my neck like it had when I had come into Sluggo’s presence. Again, I felt I wasn’t alone.

  Something hissed, then something else.

  I turned.

  The doorway I’d entered through boiled with Slugs. They thrashed and wriggled toward me like maggots out of a week-old carp.

  I jumped back, snatched up Sluggo’s metallic rod. Some of the Slugs had them, too, and they seemed to hold them in tentacles they grew from their bodies whenever and wherever they chose. One pointed his gun—that’s how I thought of the metal rods, now—at me and tightened his tentacle around a ring near one end. Trigger! I pointed my rod at him and squeezed the ring on mine.

  Something shot from the tip of my weapon and arrowed through his middle before he could fire at me. He dropped like a hundred pounds of wet liver.

  There must have been forty Slugs behind him. They fanned out from the doorway, and some aimed their guns in my direction.

  I snatched Sluggo from the floor at my feet for a shield and backed toward the doorway at the room’s opposite end.

  The Slugs held their fire. I backed into the tunnel, dragging Sluggo’s carcass.

  Two of them rushed me. The curved weapons had swordlike edges. The Slugs slashed at me with them. I flinched and retreated. If they slashed my suit, I couldn’t cross vacuum back to the LEM if I ever got out of here. And if the atmosphere inside leaked into my suit, it could poison me.

  Before they got closer, I dropped them with a shot apiece from my newfound weapon, then lunged forward and dragged their bodies into the doorway, forming a slimy, green barricade.

  I grabbed my prisoner around his dead middle, hefted him over my shoulder like a flour sack, and scrambled down the passageway. I made good time and managed to avoid snagging either Sluggo or myself in an air-conditioning slot I rounded a bend and found a Slug posse ahead, but with forty Slugs behind me somewhere, I couldn’t retreat

  I blazed away with my stolen weapon and dived through the posse. I have no idea how long or how far I scrambled with them on my heels and Sluggo across my shoulders, or how often they just seemed to materialize in front of me, like they had walked through walls. I’d shoot a couple, dive through, and keep going.

  Sluggo and I didn’t weigh much, but I was sucking wind and sweating buckets. Worse, I was slowing down, and my Slug weapon had stopped firing. Whether I was out of ammunition or I’d broken it I didn’t know.

  Finally, I realized they weren’t back there anymore, and they had stopped popping up in front of me.

  I stopped at an intersection, slid Sluggo to the floor, and sat for a breather, back to the wall and looking in all directions at once.

  Where had the Slugs gone? I’d seen easily forty, killed maybe ten. The lights pulsed, and the alarm kept whooping.

  Alarm. That was the pattern of the whoop and the lights. Alarms said “Beat it!”

  “Abandon ship!”

  Of course. Sluggo dropped dead to avoid capture. His buddies were just as ready to blow this Projectile, and themselves and me, too, into rutabagas to prevent capture. No wonder they had stopped chasing me.

  How long did I have?

  I looked down the narrower, intersecting tube that made this junction. A white rectangle lay on its floor. I crawled to the object and read the words Surviving in the Pacific .

  My travels had brought me full circle, back to the intersection of Broadway and the tube back to the outside hatch. This pamphlet had fallen from my unfastened thigh pocket as I
tugged out the flare pistol.

  The whoop shifted up an octave and pulsed faster. So did the lights.

  The Projectile had entered the final countdown to its death.

  I looked down the narrow connecting tube. One hundred feet away lay the hatch that had imprisoned me. If it would open to motion to let a repair-Slug back in, maybe it would now open to inside motion since the Projectile was near self-destructing. Or maybe the hatch would sense a Slug’s presence and open if Sluggo were near it. Sketchy, but I had no alternative. I pushed Sluggo into the smaller tube, ahead of me, like a laundry bag.

  The narrow tube had been long and slow on the way in. Now it seemed unending, me pulsing and whooping sounds so close together now they seemed nearly constant

  At last I saw the tube’s end. The hatch remained closed. My heart sank, but I pushed Sluggo forward.

  I got him within ten feet of the inner hatch. Nothing. I wiggled him around like an oversized puppet. Nothing.

  How much longer until this thing blew? Minutes? Seconds?

  If I had accepted that Hollywood job on the spot, Aaron Grodt might not have let the MPs take me. I might be lying by a pool under artificial sunlight right now contemplating Chrissy’s monokini and feeling no pain.

  When this thing blew, would I feel anything, or would I disintegrate before my nerve endings could register pain to my brain?

  I rubbed Sluggo headfirst against the hatch. Nothing.

  In an Aaron Grodt nolo, a trapped hero would shoot off the door lock and escape.

  The flare pistol still bulged in my thigh pocket. I drew it, backed off ten feet. Using Sluggo as a shield, I reached around him, aimed at the hatch, then closed my eyes and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing. I squeezed the trigger again, so hard my hand shook. Nothing. My last hope was a seventy-year-old dud.

  I felt the swell in my closed eyes as tears started. I would die here for no reason.