I heard him as I squeezed myself through the lock and into the newly deployed shelter half-made of memory plastic. He was doing what you might expect a guy named Ukulele Lou to do: singing.
The memory plastic can remember a variety of shapes. This time, since the Pantech was standing on end, and since we'd soon be in vacuum, it was best to be spherical. From the outside it looked like a cubist's idea of an icecream cone, and from inside, the hatch I could open to gain access to the interior was now under my feet, the Pantech becoming my basement. I lifted this hatch and fiddled with the environmental controls, preparing it to accept the external air and water feeds when they were hooked up, just prior to loading aboard the ship.
Luck. I'd need some of it. The trip would be eighty-four days. I had enough food to stretch for about thirty... if I stayed awake and my metabolism worked as usual. I didn't plan on staying awake.
I broke open the package I'd bought from the pusher, took out two of the pills, and swallowed them.
I heard the vacuum alarm going off outside, and I took a deep breath. I realized I'd been taking a lot of them. Now the huge doors to the outside started to rumble up toward the ceiling, and the sound died away as the air puffed out into space.
I felt like I was choking. My tongue seemed to swell until it filled my mouth, and became dry as an old wool sock. I could see the curved wall of my tent bulge outward the tiniest bit, and I was suddenly drenched in sweat.
"To be, or not to be," I gasped. "That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them."
That felt a little better. The conveyor began to move. I was bumped along quickly, and soon loaded onto a cargo pallet. Small robot handlers were climbing all over the pressure crates, metal spiders no bigger than my hand, stabbing shipping labels with red laser lights. I watched as they snapped lines to the pallet's air and water tanks. I saw the two yellow lights at my feet turn to green; I closed the basement hatch and sat down in lotus position as the shuttle truck lumbered out onto the dark surface of Pluto at high noon of a midsummer's day.
I was reminded of a postcard I once saw. Christmas in Vermont. A horse-drawn sleigh wound down a lane between leafless trees, snow-covered hills in the background. Out here the sun cast about as much light as the full moon in that postcard. Dozens of distant, skeletal cargo ships might have been Vermont maples designed by a mad geometer. There was a tractor moving along beside mine, pulling a cargo pallet on skids, that could do for a one-horse open sleigh...
No, sorry. Let's face it. This wasn't Currier and Ives. Those snow-covered hills were massive bergs of frozen methane. The glaciers coming down the sides were solid oxygen and nitrogen—pollutants, actually, not present on Pluto's crust until man arrived. On a busy day at the spaceport the rocket exhausts sometimes melted parts of these glaciers and they became murmuring streams. What a shame no Plutonians actually came out here for a sleigh ride, or to picnic by the little brooks a-gurgling.
I was choking up again, and didn't feel the least bit sleepy.
"Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines."
A movement caught my eye. On the next crawler the corner of a packing crate had popped open from the inside. I saw Lou scramble out and start moving like a scuttling crab, over and around and under the other crates.
Jesus, Lou! He was holding one hand over the crack in his faceplate, and I fancied I could see a fine mist of oxygen snow like a halo around his head. Baby, it was cold outside. Midsummer, and the weather forecast was for another scorching day at 370 below zero. Something must have been wrong with the first crate to force Lou to change his lodgings this late in the game. A problem with the hookups, a defective seal, who knows? But there wasn't a thing I could do to help him.
Like a swimmer in a Siberian lake, you only get a couple of minutes. No spacesuit yet built protects well from frozen methane, and Lou's was an antique.
I watched him pry up the corner of another crate and slither inside. The corner was pulled back into place... and I realized I wouldn't know for another eighty-four days whether or not he was alive or frozen stiff.
When I turned away I seemed to be moving in slow motion. That's when I realized the drugs had started taking effect. It was a pleasant feeling, a warm heaviness in my limbs. My breathing became slow and deep and relaxed. I smiled. I closed my eyes.
I heard a distant wind blowing. There was the sound of dry leaves being swept along. I saw a great hourglass, grains of sand the size of houses rolling silently through the narrow neck. Slowly, the glass turned, the sand tumbled from the bottom to the top, and began to flow quickly in the other direction.
And I'm sorry as hell about this, but I can only report what happened. I'd been watching old movies all my life, and when it came time to flash back on my own life there was no way in the world it would come to me as anything but a black-and-white montage of whirling clock hands and fluttering calendar pages going backward, backward, ever backward in time....
ACT 2
The warm water filled his ears. It made a deep roaring sound. He heard splashes that sounded far away, and he heard his own heartbeat. Air trickled from his lips and nose.
Friends, Romans...
Looking up, he saw the shimmery surface of the water, and beyond that, the dark figure with the ceiling light behind his head, making a halo.
Maybe that's what God looks like, he thought.
Sometimes he could almost see through things. Sometimes things seemed to shimmer, like the water, and he could see beyond them, to some shapeless otherness he could never quite remember. Was he dreaming when he saw these things? Was it remembering?
Remembering...
Friends and Romans and countrymen and ears and... something something something, not to praise him.
Quicksilver bubbles rose toward the looming, dark face. Strong hands on his shoulders. Strong, loving hands, good hands. I only want the best for you, Dodger.
It felt good to lie here. It was warm and it was safe and it was wet, and this is what a baby must feel like in its mommy's tummy.
His heart was pounding louder now. It wasn't fear. He just needed some air, that was all. Babies in their mommies' tummies didn't need air. But once you took that first breath, you sort of got used to it, air got to be something you needed.
Friends Romans lend me your praise him.
A big burst of air broke free and he began to struggle. He didn't want to, he'd been so good, so good so far, but his arms and his legs just wanted to move, and his lungs ached for a sweet breath of air. His small naked shoulders squirmed under the big hands, the good hands. He was so ashamed of himself. Maybe he should just take a big breath of water. Maybe he could learn to breathe water again, since he couldn't seem to learn the important things.
He'd heard it three times now. What was wrong with him, that he couldn't remember after hearing it three times?
It wasn't so bright now. Things were getting dim around the edges. The last of his air leaked from his nose, making hardly any sound at all.
And he had it. He became still as a stone and felt it all burst up from whatever depths it had fallen to when he lost it, and it flowed through his mind and his body, and he was nodding frantically as things got darker and darker.
He was pulled into the air and made a tremendous croaking sound as he filled his lungs and began to spew it out, like vomit.
"Frens romans countrymen lend me yerrears I come to, come to, come to bury Zeezer not t'praze'm," all the air was gone again, so he gasped in another breath, "lives after dem d'good 'soft enter'd with their bones." Pause. Breath. "The noble Brutes has tol' you Zeezer was... was..."