It must have taken a considerable time for the hole to consume the entire angel. What had happened was we had moved far enough that the sun's light no longer reflected from the angel. It was still there, though going away to wherever punctured angels go.
The whole thing made me quite happy for a time. I hardly tasted the awful stuff I was chewing on. But eventually reality intruded again, and I knew it was time to get back to sleep. I really didn't want to, I sort of wanted to skip over what was coming next.
And it was history, after all. Over and done with. In the past.
Oh, poor Sparky.
The Daewoo Caterpillar lurks in cold, airless tunnels far beneath the Lunar surface. Some say the Breathsucker is the worst thing that can happen to you, the worst way you can die. Dodger knew better. Even the Breathsucker was afraid of the Daewoo Caterpillar.
He had encountered the beast twice before. He never got a good look at it, not that he minded. This time he feared he might have to look directly into its dreadful countenance. He was sure it was the last thing his living eyes would see.
Once more Dodger was a toy balloon, hurrying to keep up with his father's headlong progress down the deserted corridor. Deserted? Abandoned, actually. Here and there were piles of steel rods and ceiling panels and other, mysterious building blocks, some under plastic tarps, all of it dusty. It was entirely possible that no one but Dodger and his father had been down this corridor in the last ten years.
Dodger had been down it twice before. He didn't want to get to the end of it again.
His father was holding his hand too tightly. But that was the least of his problems.
He searched for the words that would bring them to a halt.
To be or not to be.
Friends, Romans, countrymen.
Now is the winter of our discontent.
But, soft!
It was useless. He knew all the words, and none would do him any good, because this wasn't about learning, this wasn't the bathtub. This was the Breathsucker, and the Daewoo Caterpillar. This was as bad as it gets.
"Please," he whispered. He tried not to, but the word had just come bubbling from his mouth. He felt a string of spit rolling down his chin, and he wiped at it with his free hand. "Please, what?" his father said. "Please, Father. Please don't."
Those weren't the words; his father kept up his relentless progress toward the end of the corridor. He could see it now, in the widely spaced work lights hanging from strings overhead. The end of the world.
"I'll tell him," he burst out. "I'll tell him how wrong I was. I'll tell Mr. Peppy I'll wear the pants." No reaction. Only a few more yards to go now.
"Let's... let's just go to Mars! Let's forget the whole thing. We have lots of money now. We—"
Suddenly his father's face was before him, filling the whole universe. Those beloved ice-blue eyes. Eyes that flashed now, eyes that glistened with sincerity, eyes that could be bottomless pools of love, eyes you could swim in, warm eyes. But eyes that now betrayed their sadness, that told Dodger he had let his father down. Mad eyes.
John Valentine spoke barely above a whisper.
"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?