"This is not about pants, Dodge," he said. "This is not about money. This is about... artistic control."
"Sure," Dodger said, nodding furiously. "I'll tell Mr. Peppy—"
"This is about presenting a united front. This is about you and me, about family. It's us against them, Dodger. Us against them. We're outnumbered, always will be. If I can't count on you, who can I count on?"
"You can count on me, Father, I swear I—"
"I don't want to do this, son. But I'm convinced it's the right thing to do. It's the way I learned my lesson, and I think you'll learn from it, too."
"I've already learned, Father."
"Never." Valentine had barely raised his voice, yet somehow the word rang in the empty corridor. He held up a forefinger, wagged it back and forth in front of Dodger's face.
"Never contradict your father in public."
"I won't. I promise."
"Never disagree with me in front of strangers."
And before Dodger could promise again never to go against the family, his father picked him up and shoved him through the open door of the ancient airlock.
This was no ordinary airlock. Regular airlocks had a dozen safety devices. They were connected to the Central Computer, who would become aware each time the lock was cycled. Officially, this airlock didn't exist. It was a fifty-year-old temporary structure, meant to pass pressure-suited work gangs from the completed part of the tunnel to the construction area beyond. Just a great big cylinder, really, nested inside a slightly larger, stationary cylinder. The inner cylinder had a door-sized opening in it. The outer one had two, 180 degrees apart. When the inner opening lined up with the second door, all the air in the smaller cylinder simply blew into vacuum. Simple, quick, and dirty, not the sort of thing that was supposed to exist in the ultrasafe Lunar environment.
That it did exist was the result of oversight. The construction project had gone bankrupt, and all the plans and permits were long forgotten now, moldering in some disused memory chip, filed away with the dissolution papers of the bank that had funded it and the company that had started building it. Years had passed, a building boom had come and gone, and this tunnel and its terminus were now as remote and mysterious as the Roman catacombs or the sewers of Paris. A handful of hoboes knew of it. A few hoboes, and John Valentine.
Dodger had been there twice before. He knew to an exquisite interval how fast the lock rotated. Thirty-five seconds. Fifteen to align the doorways, and another fifteen to complete the cycle, to bring the inner door back into congruence with the door where his father waited. A five-second pause while some machinery reset itself. For the first fifteen seconds Dodger would have air. For the five-second pause, and the fifteen seconds beyond that, he would have none.
But the last fifteen seconds were not what had Dodger worried. He knew people didn't blow up when exposed to vacuum, in spite of some lurid movies he had seen. He'd been there twice before. He knew the human body could easily survive twenty seconds of airlessness. You might bleed a little, and your ears would sure as hell hurt, but it wouldn't kill you. It would scare the shit out of you, make those sessions in the bathtub seem like a walk in the park, but if it would kill him, his father would never have done it.
No, it was the five seconds that worried him. The five seconds when he would once again confront the Daewoo Caterpillar. When the door would yawn wide and he'd see it again, lurking in the shadows.
His father didn't know about the Daewoo Caterpillar, Dodger was convinced of that. If he'd known, he'd never have put his son into the airlock. Dodger had tried to tell him about it, tried more than once, but his tongue seemed to freeze before he could even pronounce the creature's name.
If he lived this time, he promised himself he'd tell his father.
Meantime, he had to hurry.
He was on his knees, and that was no good. Lining the walls of the lock were handholds, and Dodger scrambled to his feet and grabbed two of them. When the air went, it would go violently. The first time he'd been here, his father had tied him to a handhold, and the outrush of air had lifted him from his feet and tried to carry him out with it, out to the Caterpillar.
Five seconds. That's all he had to endure. Five seconds. Maybe the beast was sleeping. It had to sleep, didn't it? Probably not.
The lock was turning now. He could feel the slight vibration under his feet. He looked over his shoulder and saw his father being eclipsed, vanishing as the lock turned away from him. Standing there sternly, his arms folded, his brow furrowed with concern. He knew his father loved him. He knew he was doing this to his son because it was for the best. He'd been wrong. So wrong, to speak up, to take Peppy's side. What could he have been thinking?
He'd been thinking like a star, that's what the trouble was. His father had warned him about that. How money and fame can go to your head, make you feel you were special, like your shit didn't stink.
"And you are special, Dodger," John Valentine had said. "You're special to me, and you have a special talent. A special art. But it doesn't give you the right to be impolite."
And certainly not the right to contradict his father in public. What could he have been thinking? They were a team, surely, but a team had to have a leader, and John Valentine was older and stronger and wiser. He'd been there. He'd seen it and done it. Dodger was still learning.
"Dirty laundry is only to be aired backstage," John Valentine had told his son many times. "Never before the audience. And never in front of the producer."
What had he been thinking?
Well, they'd work it out. He would survive this, and he and his father would be a team again. They'd talk things over in the dressing room, like they always did. They'd present a united front on everything.
Dodger pressed his face against the wall. He was as far from the door as he could get. Maybe it would be safer not to look. Maybe he could cower here, keep his back to the thing, and it would overlook him.
Fat chance.
Unlikely the monster would miss him, and impossible that he could last five seconds without looking.
He didn't last one second.
It started very loudly, as the air tried to force itself through the tiny crack. A shriek, deafening, reminding Dodger of a film he'd seen where an evil witch was pushed into a deep well, screaming all the way down. Screaming, but getting fainter, more distant. This sound quickly lost all its punch, too. The air around Dodger plucked at his clothes with cold fingers, pulled at him, became an instant gale that puffed out his cheeks and drove ice picks into his ears, and brought up a monstrous belch from deep inside him. Then there was nothing but the ringing silence, a sound he knew was not a sound but his tortured ears crying in agony. He turned around.
His heart turned to stone. The Daewoo Caterpillar was there. And it wasn't just lurking in the shadows this time, it was lurching toward him. It was huge, a thing of metal teeth and flailing arms and a hideous, bright yellow body and six great glassy eyes. It reached out one skeletal hand toward Dodger, and the cylinder began to turn. Dodger was frozen tight to the spot, watching in dreadful fascination. Would the door turn away in time, or would the creature reach inside and begin feasting?
With the silence of death, the hand entered the doorway.
The inner-lock cylinder kept trying to close, but the claw was in the way. The lock stopped moving, retreated a few inches, and again tried to close. And again, and again, shuttling back and forth like the doors of an elevator when you stuck your hand between them. The creature seemed stymied by the door, but it wouldn't really matter much longer, because Dodger would soon be dead from lack of air.
So the Breathsucker would get him. If it's not one thing, it's another.