“They ought to shoot you out of a mother-humping cannon,” the super growled.
“I’ll beat it. Give me a chance.”
“The way your hands are shaking? The way your eyes look? You think I’m crazy?”
“Please,” Harry begged. It was the hardest word he had ever spoken in his whole life.
The super stared at him, his face splotchy red with anger, his eyes smoldering. At last he said, “You work alone. You kill yourself, that’s your problem, but I’m not going to let you kill anybody else.”
“Okay,” Harry agreed.
“And if you don’t start shaping up damned soon, you’re finished. Understand?”
“Yeah, but—”
“No buts. You shape up or I’ll fire your ass back to Earth so fast they’ll hear the sonic boom on Mars.”
So Harry got all the solo jobs: setting up packages of tools at the sites where the crew would be working next; hauling emergency tanks of oxygen; plugging in electronics boards in a new section after the crew finished putting it together; spraying heat-reflecting paint on slabs of the habitat’s outer skin. He worked slowly, methodically, because his hands were shaking most of the time and his vision went blurry now and then. He fought for control of his own body inside the confines of his space suit, which didn’t smell like a new car anymore; it smelled of sweat and piss and teeth-gritting agony.
He spent his nights alone, too, in his closet-sized quarters, fighting the need to down a few pills. Just a few. A couple, even; that’s all I need. Maybe just one would do it. Just one, for tonight. Just to get me through the night. I’ll be banging my head against the wall if I don’t get something to help me.
But the spider would tell him, “Fight the monster, Harry. Nobody said it would be easy. Fight it.”
The rest of the crew gave him odd looks in the mornings when he showed up for work. Harry thought it was because he looked so lousy, but finally one of the women asked him why the super was picking on him.
“Pickin’ on me?” Harry echoed, truly nonplussed.
“He’s giving you all the shit jobs, Twelvetoes.”
Harry couldn’t explain it to her. “I don’t mind,” he said, trying to make it sound cheerful.
She shook her head. “You’re the only Native American on the crew and you’re being kept separate from the rest of us, every shift. You should complain to the committee—”
“I got no complaints,” Harry said firmly.
“Then I’ll bring it up,” she flared.
“Don’t do me any favors.”
After that he was truly isolated. None of the crew would talk to him. They think I’m a coward, Harry said to himself. They think I’m letting the super shit on me.
He accepted their disdain. I’ve earned it, I guess, he told the spider. The spider agreed.
When the accident happened, Harry was literally a mile away. The crew was working on the habitat’s endcap assembly, where the curving girders came together and had to be welded precisely in place. The supervisor had Harry installing the big, thin, flexible sheets of honeycomb metal that served as a protective shield against micrometeoroid hits. Thin as they were, the bumpers would still adsorb the impact of a pebble-sized meteoroid and keep it from puncturing the habitat’s skin.
Harry heard yelling in his helmet earphones, then a high-pitched scream. He spun himself around and pushed off as far as his tether would allow. Nothing seemed amiss as far as he could see along the immense curving flank of the habitat. But voices were hollering on the intercom frequency, several at the same time.
Suddenly the earphones went dead silent. Then the controller’s voice, pitched high with tension: “EMERGENCY. THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. ALL OUTSIDE PERSONNEL PROCEED TO ENDCAP IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT. EMERGENCY AT ENDCAP.”
The endcap, Harry knew, was where the rest of the crew was working.
Without hesitation, without even thinking about it, Harry pulled himself along his tether until he was at the cleat where it was fastened. He unclipped it and started dashing along the habitat’s skin, flicking his gloved fingers from one handhold to the next, his legs stretched out behind him, batting along the curving flank of the massive structure like a silver barracuda.
Voices erupted in his earphones again, but after a few seconds somebody inside cut off the intercom frequency. Probably the controller, Harry thought. As he flew along he stabbed at the keyboard on the wrist of his suit to switch to the crew’s exclusive frequency. The super warned them never to use that frequency unless he told them to, but this was an emergency.
Sure enough, he heard the super’s voice rasping, “I’m suiting up; I’ll be out there in a few minutes. By the numbers, report in.”
As he listened to the others counting off, the shakes suddenly turned Harry’s insides to burning acid. He fought back the urge to retch, squeezed his eyes tight shut, clamped his teeth together so hard his jaws hurt. His bowels rumbled. Don’t let me crap in the suit! he prayed. He missed a handhold and nearly soared out of reach of the next one, but he righted himself and kept racing toward the scene of the accident, whatever it was, blind with pain and fear. When his turn on the roll call came he gasped out, “Twelvetoes, on my way to endcap.”
“Harry! You stay out of this!” the super roared. “We got enough trouble here already!”
Harry shuddered inside his suit and obediently slowed his pace along the handholds. He had to blink several times to clear up his vision, and then he saw, off in the distance, what had happened.
The flitter that was carrying the endcap girders must have misfired its rocket thruster. Girders were strewn all over the place, some of them jammed into the skeleton of the endcap’s unfinished structure, others spinning in slow motion out and away from the habitat. Harry couldn’t see the flitter itself; probably it was jammed inside the mess of girders sticking out where the endcap was supposed to be.
Edging closer hand over hand, Harry began to count the spacesuited figures of his crew, some floating inertly at the ends of their tethers, either unconscious or hurt or maybe dead. Four, five. Others were clinging to the smashed-up pile of girders. Seven, eight. Then he saw one spinning away from the habitat, its tether gone, tumbling head over heels into empty space.
Harry clambered along the handholds to a spot where he had delivered emergency oxygen tanks a few days earlier. Fighting down the bile burning in his gut, he yanked one of the tanks loose and straddled it with his legs. The tumbling, flailing figure was dwindling fast, outlined against a spiral sweep of gray clouds spread across the ocean below. A tropical storm, Harry realized. He could even see its eye, almost in the middle of the swirl.
Monster storm, he thought as he opened the oxy tank’s valve and went jetting after the drifting figure. But instead of flying straight and true, the tank started spinning wildly, whirling around like an insane pinwheel. Harry hung on like a cowboy clinging to a bucking bronco.
The earphones were absolutely silent, nothing but a background hiss. Harry guessed that the super had blanked all their outgoing calls, keeping the frequency available for himself to give orders. He tried to talk to the super, but he was speaking into a dead microphone.
He’s cut me off. He doesn’t want me in this, Harry realized.
Then the earphones erupted. “Who the hell is that? Harry, you shit-head, is that you? Get your ass back here!”
Harry really wanted to, but he couldn’t. He was clinging as hard as he could to the whirling oxy tank, his eyes squeezed shut again. The bile was burning up his throat. When he opened his eyes he saw that he was riding the spinning tank into the eye of the monster storm down on Earth.
