“What’s a Groucho?”
“Didn’t you ever see a Marx Brothers movie? Groucho Marx used to glide around in a weird lowered position. Long strides with his knees bent.”
“I don’t want to bend my knees.”
“Oh. Okay, no bent knees. But let’s try long smooth strides. That’s more like truckin’.” He hadn’t known that he knew so many famous strides of the past.
“Please, just shut up and walk.”
So they tried gliding, and it seemed to Fred both easier on the lungs and less impactful per step. For sure the g lessened all impacts, and they got along pretty well. Once she stopped him and held on to his arm with both hands, bent over at the waist. A shaft of fear shot through him, as no doubt a shaft of pain was shooting through her. This was how disasters started, he saw all of a sudden. You thought you could make it and then you didn’t, and boom, something happened you could never fix or undo.
His suit’s GPS indicated they were no more than a kilometer from the roadside refuge. “We’re almost—”
“Shut up!” And then with a groan she bent over even farther. Hands on knees, shuddering—
“You’re not going to throw up are you?” he asked, remembering that this was supposed to be very dangerous in a spacesuit. “You can’t.”
“Shut up. I’m not going to throw up. It’s a contraction. And don’t say oh no!”
“Okay, but oh my God, we have to get to that shelter.”
“Give me a second, it should pass.”
Then she lost her balance and he caught her and held her from going down, not sure if that was the right move or not. But it was surprisingly easy, and that gave him an idea.
“Here,” he said. “You only weigh about thirty pounds, and so do I. I’ll carry you for a while.”
“Balance,” she objected, and groaned again.
“I know.” He reached an arm down behind her knees and said, “Hop up into my arms. Let me see how that feels.”
She did that and he lifted her up and into him, took a step back to balance her weight against his chest. One arm under her knees, another behind her neck. She had an arm around his neck, and was like no weight at all, or rather a weight like a bag of groceries; a fairly heavy bag of groceries, but nothing like a person. But she still had the mass of a person, as he would have cause to remember if he lost his balance and they started to fall. In his present state of mind, very close to panic, he couldn’t quite remember the laws of mass and weight and velocity and inertia, but he knew from his time on the moon so far that they were tricky nonintuitive problems for a human brain to solve on the fly. He would have to be extremely careful.
He started out slow and stumped steadily along. After a while he felt he had a handle on it and could tell what would happen step by step, if he could just keep to that rhythm.
“How are you feeling?” he asked at one point.
“Bad.”
Their faces were about six inches apart, separated by their helmet faceplates. He kept his gaze ahead, spotted a little road sign on the left side of the track he was following.
“Looks like we’re almost there.”
“Good. I think I can walk now. The contraction is over, if that’s what it was.”
“Do you want to?”
“Yes.”
So he let her swing down to her feet, holding on to her shoulders until she was upright and steady. They walked to the road sign, which was in Chinese; she said “Good” and they followed a side track to a mound of lunar rubble with an aluminum door in the side facing them.
The door had a manual handle like a commercial freezer door, and when he opened it they found a lock room, with another door on its far side. This one had a number pad over its handle. Again the instruction panel was in Chinese, but Qi read it and said “Oh good,” and after they closed the outer door and heard the lock aerate, she pressed the zero, and the inner door clicked and she opened it. Another lock, another door, and then they were through and in.
Here they found a functional but adequate space, about the size of a studio apartment. Kitchen nook, tiny bathroom with triangular shower, cabinets filled with supplies, two beds and a table with four chairs filling the living space almost completely.
“Have a seat,” Fred said. “We need to get you comfortable. And I want to turn off all our GPSs.”
She sat on one of the beds and started unlatching her helmet.
Turning off their GPSs turned out to be hard. There weren’t on-off switches in any of the systems, as far as Fred could see; they were more in the nature of little transponders, possibly designed to keep working even if the objects they were part of got smashed in an accident. Black boxes. He had to cut the power to all the gauges in their spacesuits to get their GPSs to stop. In their own wristpads he had to open the backs and detach the wires connecting the GPSs to everything else. Messy brutal hardware surgery, and all the while his attempts to focus were badly hampered by Qi’s muttered curses and outright groans from one of the beds. He knew she would never groan if she could have stopped herself.
While he was disabling the GPSs she got out of her spacesuit, and then her clothes. Shocked, Fred looked to the side until she pulled down the sheets and blankets from one bed and sat down on it and pulled a sheet partway over her. She was not a big woman; her belly seemed about as big as the rest of her.
He had seen the thermostat on the shelter’s control panel when turning the building’s system on. Now he asked her what temperature she would like the room to be, but her vastly irritated “I don’t know, how should I know!” left him with no clue as to what would be best. He guessed warm would be good, and set it for twenty-four degrees, hoping his sense of Celsius relative to Fahrenheit was correct. Actually maybe that was too warm, as he saw her face was sweaty, and it seemed likely that she would only get hotter as her efforts increased. He tapped it down to twenty-one.
He went to her side and told her he had disabled their GPS systems.
“Do you have any medical training?” she non sequitured.
“I took a CPR class once,” he said.
“Shit. I’m not having a heart attack here.”
“I know. But if you do I’ll be prepared. Actually,” Fred said, to forestall her snapping at him, and remembering all of a sudden, “once, when I was staying at a friend’s place, I woke up in the middle of the night because there was this whimpering sound coming from under the couch I was sleeping on. I looked under it and it was a dog giving birth, there was already one puppy out. So I sat there helping her while she had four more.”
“No!” she cried. “Don’t tell me that!”
“Well, it was okay for her. So I think you’ll be fine.”
She kept cursing him, but he did his best to ignore that, and in fact he felt a little reassured by this memory from his past. Birth was a natural process. It happened no matter what the mother wanted or knew about it. Then again, as his mind spun through the years, remembering the few encounters he had had with births of any kind, he recalled a doctor friend of his brother’s telling them that attending to births was the scariest thing he did, because, as he had put it, you were dealing with two healthy people, either or both of whom could die on you.
This memory Fred regretted remembering, but there it was, and it wasn’t going to go away. All he could do was hope things went normally for Qi, no matter the vagaries of her pregnancy, which had included g forces from zero to about four or five, not to mention the descent of a steep urban mountain, a solar flare event, and the recent fall on the road outside. There was little he could do if things went wrong, and there was no hiding that from either of them. Here they were.