The thought occurred to me that I might have reacted out of panic. The line had a lot of sag in it. Of course the highest part would be the steepest. Lower down, the line would level off enough that the brakes would be more effective.
The more I thought about it, something felt wrong about this. Al‑exei had planned everything else so carefully; why did he screw this up? Lunar explorers used all kinds of tricks for getting up and down steep slopes. This couldn't have been the first time he'd done this. So why didn't he know better? Had he been careless? Or stupid? Or what?
The ground came gliding up to meet me. Everything was back to slow motion. It was like one of those flying dreams where you drift along like a cloud. I tightened my grip and came to a halt, suspended only a couple of meters above the Lunar dust. The line went on farther, but the ground dropped away again. Maybe this would be a good place to get off … ?
Two meters. I did the math in my head. One‑sixth of two meters. It would be like jumping off a chair. I could do that. "All right," I said. "I've found a stopping place. It's not too far to the ground. I'm going to drop down here. Wait a minute." I looked up at the wheel and the handles and visualized what would happen when I released my grip. The wheel would pop off the line, dropping me down. I just had to be ready. "Here goes–"
My hand came free and I fell. The bubble bounced down onto the ground. I didn't fall over.
"I'm down."
"Good job, Chigger. All right, now move out from under the line. You don't want to get accidentally bumped. We're coming down now. Mickey and I are coming down together."
"Huh?"
"You'll see. Just keep out of the way."
I stared up the line and waited. Several very long moments later, three luminous bubbles appeared very high up. One very large one, and two smaller ones with silver figures inside. They were moving very slow–painfully slow.
"I can see you," I reported.
"We can see you too," Mickey called back. "We'll be down in a bit."
It took longer than a bit, but I could see them clearly, so I wasn't worried. When they finally did arrive, they hung lower on the line than I had. In fact, they were holding their knees up so they wouldn't scrape the ground. They brought themselves to a stop, hanging all together like the last three grapes on the stem. Douglas lowered his long gangly legs to the ground and unclipped himself and Mickey.
He showed me how they'd used some of the leash to the inflatable to tie their two wheels (together to make a kind of pulley rig. With both wheels locked, the cord had to twist around first one wheel, then the other. It couldn't skid–at least not very well.
"We should have thought of this before," said Douglas. "All three of us could have come down at the same time. With your wheel rigged in, we would have had even better control. We did skid a bit at first, but not as hard as you did."
We were on a low hill. Mickey was already settling the inflatable on the level crest of it, opening up the first zipper of the entrance tube so Douglas could go in and take care of Stinky. As soon as Douglas was on his way in, Mickey came over to me and checked my air bottles.
"How bad?" I asked.
"Not as bad as it could have been. You used up half an hour of breathing. Maybe more. You'll just have to swap in one of your O‑bottles earlier, that's all. Later on, we might have to equalize your air supply with mine or Douglas's. What you did was very smart, Chigger–and also very stupid. I hope you realize that. We don't have air to waste. Alexei didn't leave us much margin."
"I didn't have time to think, Mickey."
"I know you didn't. And I'm not bawling you out. We've just got to be more careful from here on. Okay?"
"More careful than what?" I asked.
Mickey looked exasperated. "I mean, we're going to have to think harder. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"Do you understand what I'msaying? Is there anything I could have done different?"
He got it. Or maybe he didn't. "All right. Fine. Let's just drop it."
He turned back to the inflatable. "Doug, do you need my help?"
Douglas was already inside. There was a smaller silver beetle next to him–Stinky. I couldn't see what he was doing, but from his posture, it looked as if he was squatting over a toilet bag. "No, I think we've got everything under control."
Mickey turned to me. "Chigger, you stay here. I'm going to follow the line down to its end and look for Alexei."
"I'll go with," I said.
"I'd rather you didn't. It might not be very pretty–"
"I've seen dead bodies before," I lied. Well, in the movies anyway. "Besides, you might need help bringing back the extra oxygen bottles and all the other stuff that Alexei was carrying."
"All right," said Mickey. "But if you throw up inside your bubble, you'll have to live with it."
"I'll be fine," I said. I hoped I was right. I followed him, hop‑skipping over the hill.
END OF THE LINE
We followed the cord for several hundred meters. The ground was uneven, and generally sloping downward, though here and there it rolled upward too. There were boulders everywhere, of all sizes–some as big as cars or houses, others even bigger; so we couldn't really see too far in any direction. But we weren't worried about losing our way. Not as long as we kept the line in sight. Mostly it was ten or twenty meters over our heads.
Mickey turned his transmitter all the way up and called for Alexei to respond, please.We waited and waited, but there was no answer.
Several times we paused to circle around some of the bigger boulders, just in case Alexei had come down behind one of them, or even on top of one. But if he had, we didn't see him. Mickey kept checking his homing device, but Alexei's beacon didn't register. Maybe he was out of range. That was possible. Or maybe it was no longer transmitting. That was possible too.
Then we came to a place that was very slow going. The boulders were too big and uneven and we had to watch our bounces carefully. When we got past that, we took a short rest, each of us taking a small drink of water. Mickey looked over at me. "Y'know–Chigger, you're a pretty good kid."
I didn't know how to respond to that, so I just grunted something that might have been thanks.
"At first, I thought you were a whiny pain in the ass–but you can take care of yourself. Better than I expected. I respect you for that."
And then he added, "I hope that maybe you're starting to respect me too."
"Yeah, I guess so," I said.
"Charles, you resent me. I see it on your face every time you look at Douglas and me together. And I don't blame you. Douglas and Bobby are all you've got left, and I must seem like an intruder to you."
I didn't know what to say to that either. After a bit, I mumbled half an agreement. "Well, yeah."
"So, let's agree to work together anyway, okay? Because we both care about Douglas. And Bobby."
"Urn. Okay."
We slapped gloves, kind of like a handshake, only clumsy, and then we checked in with Douglas. He told us to be glad that odors cannot travel through the vacuum of space.
We pushed on.
After another fifteen minutes of bouncing and skipping through house‑sized boulders, we came around a tall rocky prominence and stopped. We had finally reached the end of the line. Literally. The place where the grapple‑dart had anchored itself.
Mickey bounced up to the top of a boulder, then bounced over to the next. He tilted himself forward to inspect the dart. "It looks fine," he said. "I'm going to see if I can loosen it and bring it with us. We might need it again."