I did a little research on tramps and hoboes while struggling through an ill-advised update of The Grapes of Wrath. ("Kenneth Valentine struggles through this ill-advised update as Tom Joad, an asteroid miner thrown out of work when the 'Tailings Crisis' of '86 shuts down all operations. He would have been better off playing this material for laughs, of which there are many, few of them intended."—Daily Cereal) Back then it was boxcars on freight trains, and you would weep in terror to know what these men went through. They rode in them, on them, and under them—"riding the rods"—their bodies inches from the murderous wheels.
Then, as now, the owners of the railroads were aware of the informal passengers, and then, as now, they didn't like it much. What they did about it depended largely on where you hopped the freight, or where you got off.
The clerk I'd bribed had been fully aware of my real intentions. Declaring a live animal was the most common ruse to obtain air and water en route. He'd heard that story about the dog before. (Ironically, I really had a dog, of course, but he would not need any consumables.)
Maybe that clerk meant what he said when he wrote "bitching freeze." It would be one hell of a bitchin' freeze if anything went wrong with any of the Pantech's systems along the way. Or any of the freighter's systems, for that matter, and let's face it, they just aren't as careful about things as they are in even the worst passenger liner. You lose a passenger and it's lawsuit time. If the Pantech sprang a leak I'd be little more than spoiled freight, who shouldn't have been in there in the first place. Like those old 'bos who fell off the rods; gathered up, bagged, and tossed in a hole in potter's field. Maybe a token effort to contact the kinfolk.
We are used to a high standard of safety, and fear of vacuum is the most common phobia, one I share with eighty percent of humanity. Though I believe I have it in a greater degree than most.
Then there are the old space rats like Ukulele Lou. Cracked faceplate and all. He seemed immune to the fears that now began to bore into my spine like an electrified dental drill.
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.