I stepped back away from the edge, back into the shadow. "All right, I'm ready."
Alexei reached over and slapped my hands with his. "Good job, Charles Dingillian. We go now. Da?"
" Da."
IN CONTROL
The funny thing, Douglas was right. This was too dangerous for us. This was a mistake. It had been a mistake from the beginning. It was a whole cascade of mistakes–Mom's, Dad's, Mickey's, and all the lawyers and judges who'd stumbled into this with us.
But most of all, it was ourmistake. And everything we were doing now was only making it worse. We were getting farther and farther away from help. Every step we took was only making it harder for someone to find us and rescue us.
And then there was that business with Alexei. The more I thought about what he'd said, the more it pissed me off. He'd threatened to abandon us. He'd gotten us into this and he wasn't going to help us get out–not unless we did it his way. And I didn't like that. And probably neither did Mickey and Douglas. But none of us were talking about it, so maybe that was even more evidence how serious this was.
Or maybe Alexei was right. He was a smuggler and a spy and God knew what else. He knew this stuff. He knew the dangers. And, supposedly, he knew how to avoid them. Maybe it was just an overdose of wunderstormand we were getting panicky.
And then we started down, and there wasn't a lot of time to worry.
The way down didn't look as easy as the way up. Alexei had brought us to a place where the rim walls of two overlapping craters intersected. Most of the slope below us was hidden by long sideways shadows. Even so, we could see that the way down to the floor of the second crater was a broken avalanche of ugly rock. It was a rubble‑strewn slope, gashed by several nasty chasms.
I didn't see how we were going to negotiate it–maybe by jumping from boulder to boulder? But it turned out to be a lot easier than that.
Alexei retrieved the grapple‑dart from where it had secured itself and wound up the cord carefully; then he reloaded the dart gun and sighted down into the rubble and beyond, marking the range to the distant silver plain. He muttered to himself in Russian and I got the feeling he was doing some complex calculations in his head.
Finally, he made a decision. He sighted down into the rubble, tracking the laser dot as far as he could toward some distant landmark. Then he aimed the pistol forty‑five degrees upward, and fired. The grapple‑dart flew up and away, trailing the cord after it in great un‑curling loops. As before, it glittered in the sunlight, yellow against the black sky above.
The dart arced over and down into the gloom below, and as the line fell back into shadow with it, it began blinking out along its length. As before, we had to wait until the butt of the dart‑pistol confirmed that the grapple‑dart had secured itself.
Now Alexei looped the other end around a convenient boulder and began pulling it as tightly as he could. Periodically, he'd turn and look down into the gloomy crater below with his goggles set for light‑enhancement. Then he'd grunt and resume tightening the cord. Mickey helped him. When they were done, we had a Lunar zip line.
"All right, Mikhail,do you want to go first? Or should I?"
"I think you'd better."
Alexei nodded agreement. "I think so too. All right, Dingillians–this part will be easy." From his equipment pack, he produced four little wheels with handles, he handed one to each of us. "Use your grabbers. Click right grabber here, reach up, put wheel on line, click left grabber here. Once you are clicked, you cannot fall off. So enjoy ride. Pick up feet, hold knees as high as you can, ride line all the way down to bottom. Is long way, da!So do not go too fast. Twist handles this way for braking, wheel will slow. Twist other way to release brake. Is good idea to control speed all the way down, especially for beginners. When you get near end, you will see ground getting closer. That is time to go very slow. Even slower than that. Slower than very slow. Do not scrape bubble suit. You will do fine. I promise. Is great fun and best way to go anywhere on moon. Any questions?"
I raised a hand.
"Yes, Charles?"
"Did you do this on purpose?"
"Do what?"
"Choose the bounce‑down sight so far from where we have to go? I mean, couldn't you have brought us down a little closer?"
"I could have, yes. But I wanted the bad guys to look somewhere else. So we hike a little bit and they go to look in six places much farther away. By the time they don't find us, we will be past wherever else they think to look. If I did not think you could handle this, Charles, I would not have used this plan." He added thoughtfully, "I make this plan a long time ago, I am very proud of myself that it works so well. You should be proud too–that you are strong enough to keep up. We are almost on schedule. Wait for my signal. I will call you down as soon as it is safe. Hokay, any other questions? No? I see you all on the bottom." He swung his wheel over the line, clicked onto the handles, kicked off with his feet, and sailed away over the edge.
" Waaaaaaaa‑haaaaa! Hoooo‑hooooooooo‑hooooooooo eeeeeeeyyyy!" He wailed all the way down–or at least as far down as he had the air to shriek. He floated down across the Lunar landscape like something out of a bizarre dream–a silver sprite in a shimmery ball.
And then there was silence. It stretched out for the longest time.
The three of us looked at each other.
"Why doesn't he say something?" I asked.
"Maybe he's concentrating on his landing," Douglas said.
"What if he fell off?"
"He can't fall off."
"What if the bottom of the line is in a jagged rock field and he got punctured before he could warn us? What if it's not safe to go down after him?"
"Charles, stop scaring yourself. Nobody else is going down until Alexei tells us it's safe."
"But if something happened to him–?"
"Nothing happened to him," said Douglas.
We both looked to Mickey.
Mickey was studying the PITA on his wrist. "His signal is clear. His readouts are green. He's alive. He's just not talking. At least, not to us. He might be calling ahead to someone else. Not to worry."
We waited in silence. I looked at the Earth for a while. It hadn't changed its position in the sky. And the terminator line didn't look all that different from before. Most of Africa was still waking up. To another horrible day.We'd only been traveling two hours. We still had a long way to go.
And then, the worst thing of all happened.
Stinky woke up.
And announced, "I gotta go to the bathroom. Where are we?"
Mickey and Douglas and I all groaned at the same time.
"Can you hold it?" said Douglas.
"No," said Stinky. "I gotta go right now!"
"Uh‑oh–" I said. I knew that tone of voice.
And in that same instant, I had a chilling insight about Stinky–and why he was the way he was. I was only angry at Mom and Dad. But Stinky was angry at everyone. It was about control.
Everybody in the family had authority over him. Everybody older had power. He had none. There was only one thing he could say to bring everything else to a stop. There was only one thing he could do to seize control.
And every time he did, everything else came to an immediate stop. At that moment, his single declaration became the ultimate power in the family. Whenever things were totally out of control–there was Stinky demanding, "I gotta go now." If nothing else, he could always be depended on to focus the dilemma on himself.