It was Sam who discovered the pinhole in the fuel cell, the eighteenth time we checked out the power supply. I can remember his exact words, once he realized what had happened:
«Shit!»
Sam was a feisty little guy who would have been too short for astronaut duty if the agency hadn’t lowered the height requirements so that women could join the corps. He was a good man, a whiz with a computer and a born tinkerer who liked to rebuild old automobiles and then race them on the abandoned freeways whenever he could scrounge up enough old-fashioned petrol to run them. The Terror of Clear Lake, we used to call him. The Texas Highway Patrol had other names for him. So did the agency administrators; they cussed near threw him out of the astronaut corps at least half a dozen times.
But we all loved Sam, back in those days, as we went through training and then blasted off for our first mission to the Moon. He was funny, he kept us laughing. And he did the things and said the things that none of us had the guts to do or say.
The skipper loved Sam a little less than the rest of us, especially after six weeks of living in each other’s dirty laundry. Sam had a way of almost defying any order he received; he reacted very poorly to authority figures. Our skipper, Lord love him, was as stiff-backed an old-school authority figure as any of them. He was basically a good Joe, and I’m cursed if I can remember his real name. But his big problem was that he had memorized the rule book and tried never to deviate from it.
Well, anyway, there we were, stranded on the lunar surface after six weeks of hard work. Our task had been to make a semi-permanent underground base out of the prefabricated modules that had been, as the agency quaintly phrased it, «landed remotely on the lunar regolith in a series of carefully-coordinated unmanned logistics missions.» In other words, they had dropped nine different module packages over a fifty-square-kilometer area of Mare Nubium and we had to find them all, drag them to the site that Houston had picked for Base Gamma, set them up properly, scoop up enough of the top layers of soil to cover each module and the connecting tunnels to a depth of 0.3048 meter (that’s one foot, in English), and then link in the electric power reactor and all the wiring, plumbing, heating and air circulation units. Which we had done, adroitly and efficiently, and now that our labors were finished and we were ready to leave—no go. Too bad we couldn’t have covered the return module with 0.3048 meter of lunar soil; that would have protected the fuel cells from that sharpshooting micrometeoroid.
The skipper decided it would be bad procedure to let us mope around and brood.
«I want each of you to run a thorough inventory of all your personal supplies: the special foods you’ve brought with you, your spare clothing, entertainment kits, the works.»
«That’ll take four minutes,» Sam muttered, loud enough for us all to hear him. The eight of us were crammed into the command module, eight guys squeezed into a space built for three, at most. It was barely high enough to stand in, and the metal walls and ceiling always felt cold to the touch. Sam was pressed in with the guys behind me; I was practically touching noses with the skipper. The guys in back giggled at his wisecrack. The skipper scowled.
«Goddammit, Gunn, can’t you behave seriously for even a minute? We’ve got a real problem here.»
«Yessir,» Sam replied. If he hadn’t been squeezed in so tightly, I’m sure he would have saluted. «I’m merely attempting to keep morale high, sir.»
The skipper made an unhappy snorting noise, and then told us that we would spend the rest of the shift checking out all the supplies that were left: not just our personal stuff, but the mission’s supplies of food, the nuclear reactor, the water recirculation system, equipment of all sorts, air tanks, the works.
We knew it was busywork, but we had nothing else to do. So we wormed our way out of the command module and crawled through the tunnels toward the other modules that we had laid out and then covered with bulldozed soil. It was a neat little buried base we had set up, for later explorers to use. I got a sort of claustrophobic feeling, just then, that this buried base might turn into a mass grave for eight astronauts.
I was dutifully heading back for barracks module A, where four of us had our bunks and personal gear, to check out my supplies as the skipper had ordered. Sam snaked up beside me. Those tunnels, back in those days, were prefabricated Earthside to be laid out once we got to the construction site. I think they were designed by midgets. You couldn’t stand up in them; they were too low. You had to really crawl along on hands and knees if you were my size. Sam was able to shuffle through them with bent knees, knuckle-walking like a miniature gorilla. He loved the tunnels.
«Hey, wait up,» he hissed to me.
I stopped.
«Whattaya think will get us first, the air giving out or we starve to death?»
He was grinning cheerfully. I said, «I think we’re going to poison our air with methane. We’ll fart ourselves to death in another couple of days.»
Sam’s grin widened. «C’mon, I’m setting up a pool on the computer. I hadn’t thought of air pollution. You wanna make a bet on that?» He started to King-Kong down the shaft to the right, toward the computer and life-support module. If I had had the space, I would have shrugged. Anyway, I followed him there.
Three of the other guys were in the computer module, huddled around the display screen like Boy Scouts around a campfire.
«Why aren’t you checking out the base’s supplies, like the skipper said?» I asked them.
«We are, Straight Arrow,» replied Mickey Lee, our refugee from Chinatown. He tapped the computer screen. «Why go sorting through all that junk when the computer has it already listed in alphabetical order for us?»
That wasn’t what the skipper wanted, and we all knew it, but Mickey was right. Why bother with busywork? We wrote down lists that would keep the skipper happy. By hand. If we had let the computer print out the lists, Skip would have gotten wise to us right away.
While we scribbled away, copying what was on the screen, we talked over our basic situation.
«Why the hell can’t we use the nuke to recharge the fuel cells?» Julio Marx asked. He was our token Puerto Rican Jew, a tribute to the agency’s Equal Opportunity policy. Julio was also a crackerjack structural engineer who had saved my life the day I had started to unfasten my helmet in the barracks module just when one of those blessed prefab tunnels had cracked its airlock seal. But that’s another story.
Sam gave Julio a sorrowful stare. «The two systems are incompatible, Jules.» Then, with a grin, Sam launched into the phoniest Latin accent you ever heard. «The nuclear theeng, man, it got too many volts for the fuel cells. Like, you plug the nukie to the fuel cells, man, you make a beeg boom and we all go to dat big San Juan in thee sky. You better steek to plucking chickens, man, an’ leave the electricity alone.»
Julio, who towered a good inch and a half over Sam, grinned back at him and answered, «Okay, Shorty, I dig.»
«Shorty! Shorty!» Sam’s face went all red. «All right, that’s it. The hell with the betting pool. I’m gonna let you guys all die of boredom. Serve you right.»
We made a big fuss and soothed his feathers and cajoled him into setting up the pool. With a great show of hurt feelings and reluctant but utterly selfless nobility, Sam pushed Mickey Lee out of the chair in front of the computer terminal and began playing the keyboard like a virtuoso pianist. Within a few minutes the screen was displaying a list of possible ways for us to die, with Sam’s swiftly calculated odds next to each entry. At the touch of a button, the screen displayed a graph, showing how the odds for each mode of dying changed as time went on.