The first thing you learn about the famous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is that it was not fought at the O.K. Corral.
No. I’m sorry. That’s not quite accurate. I mean, it’s quite true that the gunfight was only near the O.K. Corral, and not actually in it. That’s a simple fact of history.
But that’s not the first thing you learn.
The first thing you learn about the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is the canonized bullshit with no bearing on what actually happened.
You learn about it from old movies, or holos, or, in my case, that big-budget stage musical that played the Shepardville Dome for years: the silly one where Doc Holliday was a woman, the Clantons spoke in blank verse, and the badges worn by the Earps, just below what would have been their belts, were the only item of clothing that stood between them and full frontal nudity. (Someday, if I ever feel conversational again, you can probably start me off on a two-hour rant by asking me to hold forth on past trends in popular entertainment.)
The story may fade into obscurity for up to thirty or forty years at a time, but something about it keeps exerting a powerful tug, and it keeps coming back, each time twisted out of all recognition for the prejudices of a new generation. I even remember one popular holo, from a season more cynical than most, where the Clantons were peace-loving, unarmed settlers, who wanted only to be left alone, and the Earps were evil corporate types who slaughtered them just to show that they could. I took a perverse pleasure in scrambling that one before I tossed it into the recycle bin.
Peel away all the layers of absolute invention and you find that the gunfight between the Earps and Clantons took place in Tombstone, Arizona, on 26 October, 1881. It was a down and dirty shootout, nominally an act of law enforcement, but one so mired in past grudges that it’s just as easily explained as a street fight between two gangs that hated each other on general principle. If it hadn’t happened that day it would have happened the next day, or the day after that. Little fancy marksmanship was involved, as the two groups started blasting away at each other when they were standing face-to-face, with thirty rounds of ammunition fired in about as many seconds. Far from dashing, heroic, and romantic, it was up-close, ugly, and downright sordid, much more a street execution than a battle between the forces of law and lawlessness.
If Wyatt Earp is still remembered as a hero today, a century into the era of space colonization, it’s at least partially because he survived these events for decades, and therefore got to hang around Hollywood telling his story to the people who made their living deciding what bits and pieces of historical ephemera could be inflated to legend with the help of clever angles and matinee-idol faces.
Since then, the story has been twisted every which way by anybody who wanted to appropriate it for his or her own purposes. The historical facts are available, and far more interesting than anything the holos or movies or even nudie musicals have come up with. But their very malleability is what makes the story immortal. Someday, when mankind cracks the interstellar travel problem—and one of the lesser points of this story is that I know for a fact we will—there’ll be versions with the Earps in spacesuits and the Clanton/McLaury gang as any alien race we don’t happen to like that week. By then, it may no longer be recognizable as an event based on historical fact. Earp himself may be considered no more than myth, like whatever inspired the similar myths of King Arthur and Robin Hood. Hell, he’s halfway there already.
But he’s not alone on that journey.
By the time I entered Malcolm Bell’s story, the Moon had become a crowded world, crammed pole to pole with resorts, cities, factories, and the folly of mankind. But not all of it was crowded equally. All the places where tourists wanted to go were on Nearside, with all the lovely views of the battered blue marble, still shiny and bright despite the scars well visible from the observation domes at Armstrong. Even those of us who’d grown up on Luna and had never set foot on the homeworld still suffering the woes of the last centuries preferred to see the ancestral cradle in our sky.
We weren’t always that philosophical about it, of course. Most of the time, we just liked it there because it was pretty. (There’s a reason lunar residents sometimes called it The Chandelier.) But whatever our reasons, its presence made Nearside prime real estate. Everybody you could deal with wanted to live on Nearside.
Farside was a different story.
On Farside, facing nothing but distant stars and a sun that seemed less than the source of all light than a cruel beacon existing to bring the forbidding landscape into sharp relief, it was easy to feel cut off from all of human history. It therefore became the home of choice for the kind of people who saw that as a selling point. At the time I visited, it was a collection of industries too dangerous to be set down anywhere people lived, and a few scattered homesteads belonging to all the weirdos, misfits, misanthropes, and creeps who preferred solitude to people. It was crazy country, then and now, and the main reason it’s been allowed to stay that way is the general consensus that anybody twisted enough to actually want to live out there was better off living in their self-imposed quarantine anyway.
Of course, humanity being the animal it is, the rest of us sometimes have trouble leaving them the hell alone.
On the day I’m talking about, I arranged for the skimmer to drop me off with less than two hour’s worth of oxygen and not come back for me for at least five.
Bell’s habitat, only a short walk away, was an unlovely oblong metal box, much like the one I live in as an old woman. It was marked only by the usual ten-digit registration number and a series of dents it had collected in its earlier, stupider home at the base of a ridge much given to spontaneous rockslides. The recycling systems and supply dumps in the back took up much more space than his living area could have. The absence of any parked vehicle confirmed what I’d heard about him, which is that it had been a good thirteen years since he’d last bothered to visit the nearest center of population. That was about typical for some of the folks living on Farside. At the time, it made no sense to me, which should tell you a lot about how long ago this was.
I was halfway to his airlock, my ridged boots causing miniature avalanches as I slid down the gentle grade, when an automated signal with absolutely no trace of static came in over my helmet speakers: “. . . trespassing. Repeat, this is private property and you are trespassing. Failure to retreat will result in the activation of security measures, which may result in injury or death. The owner values his privacy and will not suffer a single night’s missed sleep blaming himself for your probably genetic stupidity. Please turn back. Message repeats: this is private property and you are trespassing. Repeat, this is private property and you are trespassing. Failure to retreat will . . .”
I toggled the transmit button. “This is a distress signal. Stranded surveyor, running out of oxygen. Cannot hold out while awaiting relief. Need shelter immediately. Over.”
The signal loop cut off in mid-sentence, replaced by a gravelly voice with a distinct Texas twang. “Now that’s just bullcrap, young lady. I watched that skimmer drop you off. You came here deliberately and you’re hoping to blackmail me into opening my door for you. Isn’t that true? Over.”
I’m afraid I grinned. “It’s true, sir. I did come here deliberately, because I’m hoping to speak to you, but my distress is very real. I am running out of oxygen and I am in imminent danger of death and I do need you to save me. Over.”
“Why would you put yourself in such a brain-dead situation? Over.”
“It’s actually a pretty smart situation, Mr. Bell. Just about everybody I’ve spoken to about you, and everything I’ve read about you, says there’s no real possibility of you allowing me to die. But they also say I need the threat in order for you to let me in. It’s the only way I could think of to speak to you.”
The anger communicated by the next five seconds of absolute silence was an object lesson in the potential information content of dead air. There was none, however, in his voice. “I’ve now recorded your admission that you placed yourself in this position for the express purpose of invading my privacy. Under the circumstances, the crimes you’ve committed just coming here trump all of Farside’s Good Samaritan laws. If I did let you die, no court would convict me.”
“Maybe not,” I said, “but I’m still pretty confident it won’t come to that.”
He cut the connection. A second later, the warning loop returned, reminding me once again that I was headed directly toward a violent and messy death.
I had nothing to lose by continuing to walk forward, the pebbles and dust dislodged by my boots forming a silent cataract that preceded me into the pockmarked valley below. I had chosen lunar daylight over lunar night as the best time to make this approach, mostly because it had struck me as less threatening . . . but now I wondered if this had been a bad idea. The landscape, which had now had a good week and a half to bake, was radiating the heat of the unfiltered Sun back at me . . . and though my suit could take this and worse, there’s a major difference between being protected from a hostile environment and not being able to feel the sweat pooling at the base of my spine.
I reached the bottom of the slope, faced the habitat a mere fifty paces away, and sucked a water tube for a minute or so, as I contemplated the best approach. I wasn’t sure I believed him about the booby traps, but where would I put them, were I an antisocial old coot with a mania for privacy? He wouldn’t put them too near his own walls, lest the shrapnel leave him spilling atmosphere faster than he could lay a patch. Nor would he put them anywhere near his airlock door. He might be just crabby enough to lie in his bunk all day, but he needed the main egress intact so he could get to the supply drops set down no further than twenty meters away, five times a month. Nor would he set his triggers too far from home, out here at the edge of his bowl where the standard warning was still playing in infinite loop. He’d need to be able to justify such extreme measures, if it came to that—and the best way to do that was to give potential trespassers every possible chance to heed his warnings.
No need in tempting fate. I’d be better off sitting still and relying on his sense of humanity. So I sat, turned the cooling unit to the lowest power I could tolerate, and waited, thinking (among other things) of Wyatt Earp.
Four days before I had that skimmer drop me off in front of that tin-can habitat on Farside, I watched half-a-dozen action holos set in the early days of lunar settlement. They made that pioneering time, when the Moon’s entire population was comprised of Ph.D.s and engineers, look like the province of murderers and sociopaths, pursuing blood feuds and exchanging gunfire in the tiny little outposts those early pioneers had dug into the lunar rock. It was, we’re told, a time of outlaws, a time of heroes, a time when only the quick reflexes of a few brave men maintained the fragile order that allowed Luna to become a fit home for millions.
Like most of the stories told about Wyatt Earp, it’s total bullshit.
The truth is that those early engineers were all subjected to exhaustive psych testing before they left the Big Blue. There weren’t any outlaws or crazies among them. If they presented any danger at all to the colleagues who worked alongside them, it was in the very real likelihood that they’d bore each other to death with conversations that had already been recycled past all reasonable usefulness.
There was, in fact, only one actual gunfight in the entire first thirty years of lunar settlement.
Only one.
“What’s your name?”
The signal amplified by my helmet speakers was punctuated by crackles and hiss, a noise ratio not quite bad enough to obscure the old man’s words, but enough to establish that he used antiquated equipment and couldn’t be bothered with tuning his signal enough to ensure clear transmission. I couldn’t help thinking of my great-grandfather, who had always removed his teeth before dealing with anybody outside the family. If anybody had trouble understanding him, that was their problem. As long as they wanted to waste his time, he saw every advantage of making them work for it.
I said, “Jessie James.”
The pause that followed was entirely familiar to me. I heard something like it just about every time I gave a stranger my name, and its Wild West resonances had to hit him harder than just about anybody I’d ever met. “You’re kidding me.”
I shrugged, an absolutely pointless gesture given that it disturbed the broad outlines of my moonsuit not at all. “My parents were history nerds.”
“Were?”
“Sorry. Are.” They were both members of the Lunar History Department at the State University at Grissom, as well as American history buffs by inclination.
“So they’re both alive, then.”
“Yes.”
“Did they neglect you?”
That surprised me. “No.”
“Abuse you?”
“No.”
“Emotionally abuse you?”
“No.”
“They’re good parents, then?”
“Yes.”
“They love you.”
I didn’t understand this line of questioning at all. “Yes.”
“Do you have a lover, Jessie? Maybe a husband or wife?”
“Nobody that serious.” Though there might have been, before a certain obsession had started taking up too many of my waking hours.
“But people who care about you.”
“Yes.”
“And yet,” he said, his voice rising just enough to establish frustration, “you care so little for them that you’re willing to risk breaking both their hearts by throwing your life away on a pointless mission to harass an old man who hasn’t given an interview in decades or even left his home in thirteen years. Forget the way I want to live my life. Think about what your parents want out of theirs. Did they get out of bed this morning wanting to hear that their crazy daughter’s been found, spam in a spacesuit, just ten meters from an old recluse’s home on Farside?”
Damn, he was good. There was no way I could hear that question without feeling a twinge. But I had spoken or corresponded with all five of the people still alive who had begun their own lives as Bell’s children: the two sons living and working on Luna, the pair of daughters working contract work out on the Belt, even the eccentric writer best known for his weekly rides up the Central African Space Elevator, to regale the world with renewed confirmation that the horizon still curved. All five had described themselves as baffled by their long exile from the old man’s life. All five had testified that, the last times they’d spoken to him, he’d still cared about his legacy and place in history. So I countered, “Did your children get out of bed this morning wanting to hear that their heroic old man will always be remembered as the unconscionable son of a bitch who let me die?”
It’s funny. Sometimes you can hear more in a man’s silence than in his angriest words. I heard him stew, heard him thinking of the way the news would spread throughout the system, heard him remembering what it was like to have a legacy, and heard him contemplating the human costs of shitting on it.
He was silent for so long that I felt mortal for the first time today, wondering if I might have guessed wrong. There were, after all, any number of things that could happen to a man’s mind and soul in thirty years of self-imposed solitary confinement. Forget how embittered he must have been just to lock himself away. How insane would he have become in the decades since?
Then the crackle returned. “I don’t appreciate emotional blackmail.”
“Neither do I, sir. That’s not what this is.”
“You don’t know what you’re messing with, here.”
“Then tell me.”
Another pause, too lengthy for comfort.
Then a burst of grudging profanity, and: “Walk where I tell you and only where I tell you.”
I stood up, wincing as my knees creaked. “So there are mines.”
He barked a derisive laugh. “Explosives are weapons for people incapable of arranging precision, who see advantage in laying waste to everything within a given radius. My explosives are nowhere near that wasteful. If you take any wrong step in the next ten meters you’ll find yourself wearing a suit with a clean circular leak about the size of a quarter. If it’s within reach, you might be able to cover it with one hand and survive long enough to walk the rest of the way . . . but that’s only if you see it in time, and correcting for further missteps would become difficult indeed once both hands were occupied. If that happened, I would not have time to suit up and rescue you, and I move too slowly these days to arrive in a hurry. So back up a few steps and follow my instructions. Right now, you’re surrounded by pressure plates on three sides. . . .”
In one of the most popular but least accurate Hollywood versions of the Wyatt Earp story, John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, Tombstone stands against the distinctive formations of Monument Valley.
This must have come as a complete puzzlement to moviegoers who happened to live in the real-life town.
Moreover, the film ends with Earp’s friend Doc Holliday dying from wounds suffered during the gunfight . . . a development that must come as an equal surprise to those who know that Holliday died years afterward, not peacefully but certainly not from violence, in the hospital where he’d retreated to cough away what remained of his tubercular lungs.
Like many versions of the tale, My Darling Clementine had less to do with what actually happened than with the story the people in question wanted to tell.
The same goes with Airless Fury, the most famous fictional treatment of the famous First Gunfight On The Moon. It’s famous now as one of the first non-documentary holos ever filmed by a Moon-based production company. Malcolm Bell, who was at that point naïve enough to sign away the rights to his story without any assurances regarding accuracy of content, always credited it (or, more accurately, blamed it) for his unwanted status as legend. Frankly, it makes My Darling Clementine look like a documentary. My father saw it as a bookish child already versed in the history of his world, and later told me that he started choking on his soda five minutes in and didn’t regain control of his breathing until he left the theatre with friends willing to miss the best part in favor of spending ten minutes pounding on his back.
This is the way Airless Fury tells the story.
Malcolm Bell is a grizzled veteran of the Trans-Tibetan conflict, sick of war, and unable to cope with the memories as long as he remains on Earth. The instant the lunar colonies open up for terrestrial settlers, he applies for a spot and is approved for emigration. He settles in at Li-Tsiu, the first town to accept families, with no ambitions grander than finding work as an environmental engineer, and perhaps meeting a nice girl so he can start the family he’s always wanted.
Then Ken Destry, who had fought alongside Bell during the war, moves in, bringing his vicious streak with him. Destry steals what he wants, bullies whoever he wants, and flouts the law whenever he wants.
Bell, a peaceable sort, tries to reason with the man, but doesn’t take matters into his own hands until Destry, by now wholly out of control, unleashes the full force of his own violent lusts on Connie Perkins, who has only hours earlier accepted Bell’s proposal of marriage. Enraged, doing “what a man’s gotta do,” Bell dons a moonsuit and tracks Destry across the pitted surface, in a quest that ends with both men firing at one another with the home-made projectile weapons that both have improvised from construction materials left lying around during the construction of the Armstrong dome.
Cold Roses, filmed years after Bell entered his self-imposed exile, presented the actual facts of the story, at the expense of much dramatic tension, but failed to erase the lies already set in place. Long before then, he’d come up with a famous response for admirers who wanted to know how much of Airless Fury was accurate. That consisted of a pained look and the simple understatement, “It’s true that we were all on the Moon.” In real life, Bell had never seen combat, in the Trans-Tibetan War or any other. He had never met Ken Destry, either in his previous life on Earth or at any point prior to the incident that planted the seeds of his enduring fame. He went to the Moon not as a refugee winning a lottery, but as a qualified professional with a long resume in his field, who got the job in part because his wife Connie was already working there and was able to pull the strings that found him a position ahead of several applicants with better test scores. Both were on the Moon long before the powers-that-be decided it was time to start recruiting settlers.
Destry’s erratic behavior did render him a menace, but had less to do with any innate meanness in his personal makeup than with degenerative brain damage caused by industrial contaminants in the air supply of the barge he drove back and forth between construction sites, twelve hours a day. He certainly bears no resemblance to the sneering villain familiar from so many versions of his story. Free will was so much not a factor in his conduct that his parents back on Earth received not only his full pension from the Lunar Authority, but also a hefty cash settlement from the company that produced the faulty canisters. In fact, five other lunar residents, who were also exposed to the toxic air but were pulled from their assignments before they suffered permanent damage, received smaller settlements. All had reported feeling on edge lately, though how much that was due to the contamination and how much was just the extreme stress of their duties, remains open to debate.
Finally, it’s true that Destry improvised a rail-gun and did fire on several of the search parties looking for him, causing several injuries but no deaths. But the unfinished Armstrong Dome Airless Fury uses as one famous backdrop had nothing to do with the incident, as that landmark was years away from being needed, let alone proposed, designed, or even partially built.
Airless Fury ends with a furious Malcolm Bell, who has tracked Ken Destry across the Moon’s surface, catching up with him on foot, after a chase that has lasted several days. In real life, Bell had no intention of ever running across Destry. Like everybody else on the Moon, he had heard of Destry’s rampage and followed all the recommended security procedures for keeping out of Destry’s way. He’d even signed on to the general consensus, common once a full week had elapsed without a Destry incident, that the poor man had probably run out of air or food or otherwise succumbed to his condition. But once things began returning to normal, and his own duties began to require a daily commute from his home warren to a new one being excavated thirty kilometers away, he became one of several lunar workers carrying their own railguns just in case the general consensus turned out to be wrong.
Airless Fury got most of the story wrong. It invented some stuff. It omitted other stuff. It left out the single most important fact about the incident, one known only to people who lived on the Moon at the time.
All that said, even Airless Fury was right about one thing.
There certainly was a gunfight.
I still didn’t know whether Bell’s claims of a suit-shredding security system were at all accurate, but I saw no point in testing them. I turned when he told me and stepped where he told me and at one point backtracked several steps because he claimed to have miscalculated and led me over an array he called the Valley of Death, where a single misstep would have reduced my suit to what he called “a loose mesh more appropriate as a bathing suit than as something you’d find useful in vacuum.” By then I was more than half sure that the system belonged to the same species of bullshit as most versions of the gunfight story. A few years later, when he disappeared, leaving in his place the phenomenon that has made his homestead a quarantined site ever since, the authorities searched the land around his sealed habitat and found out that it was all true, a revelation that made my skin prickle from the imagined sensation of blood bubbling in cold vacuum.
But that day I followed his directions and made it inside his airlock in a state resembling the same confidence I’d felt since first plotting this madness of mine. It was a standard box of a chamber, only one square meter at its base, but so squat as far as height was concerned that even I, with my slight dimensions, had to stoop in order to enter. I tried to imagine Bell using it to go in and out and remembered reading that most of the pioneers had been small people, chosen as much for their ability to fit into tight spaces as they were for the length and breadth of their professional resumes. Any illusions I might have had about meeting a legend who would tower over me like some kind of Greek god, his mighty forehead scraping the clouds . . . were stupid on their very face, but remained intact anyway. I knew the stories were bullshit. But this was Malcolm Bell, dammit. Bullshit or not, meeting him was like meeting William Tell, Robin Hood . . . or Wyatt Earp.
The door behind me slid shut, the quaint seal around the rim inflating to produce a seal in a technology that might have been considered old-fashioned when I was born. A few seconds later, I started hearing ambient sound: the hissing of external air, the metallic sound of my boots shifting against the dust-catching grill below. But even as the indicator light over the inner doorway flashed green, I continued to wait.
His voice crackled over the speakers. “It’s safe. You can take your helmet off, if you want.”
I made no move. “Are you going to open the inner door?”
“I haven’t decided yet. But you might as well make yourself comfortable. I promise: I’m not the type to expose an obnoxious busybody to vacuum.”
Yes. But you are the type to surround your home with deathtraps, or at least to say that you have. And yet, what choice did I have? Even in a room stocked with all the air I could breathe in a lifetime, I could still asphyxiate behind the seal of a suit that refused to allow any of it in. So I unlocked my helmet, taking a groundhog’s pleasure in the sibilant hiss of my suit’s pressure equalizing with the somewhat greater concentration of the airlock booth.
Traveling from one pressurized environment to another, you can learn a lot about what somebody’s like from your first taste of their air. In the last few weeks, during my interviews with people who had known Bell back in the day, I’d visited some private habitats inhabited by people who had long since lost the ability to smell themselves and whose stench was thick enough to bring tears to my eyes. Bell’s had the slightest tinge of old-man scent, sweet in a way that suggested daily ingestion of cough drops, but was downright pleasant by comparison. I could even make out some kind of exotic, flowery tinge, which reminded me of the tropical exhibit at Shepardville’s Botanical Gardens: perfume, scented cleaning fluid, or perhaps an indication that the winner of the Moon’s most famous gunfight now spent his years cultivating flowers under a sun lamp. Why not? He had to be doing something in here, all these years.
Either way, I found myself enjoying it. “Thank you.”
“You’re not welcome,” he said. “This is an unconscionable imposition on my time and privacy. Tell the truth, I’m showing you far more hospitality than you deserve.”
I shifted weight from one foot to the other, to cover the embarrassment that made the hackles rise on the back of my neck. “I know. And I’m sorry. Whether it makes a difference or not . . . I do appreciate it.” I waited several long seconds for a response, received none, and ventured, “Maybe I should tell you why I’m here?”
“You don’t have to, Miss Jessie James. There are only a few things this can be about. Either you want to write a book about me, or you need to tell me what I’ve always meant to you, or you want a famous person’s willing participation in an anecdote that you’ll later be able to share with your family and friends. Whatever the particulars, it amounts to nothing more than wanting to approach a monument, chip off a piece for yourself, and walk away carrying it in your pants pocket. This would not be a problem if I wasn’t a man, and there weren’t so many of you, wanting your own pieces, that if I let all of you have what you want there wouldn’t be any of me still left for myself. You want the gunfight story? Go download Cold Roses. It’s pretentious and overwrought, but got at least half of the facts right, all without asking me a single damned thing.”
Another man might have delivered all of that as a plaintive, hysterical rant. From his mouth it sounded like resignation, born from years of sad experience. I wondered how many pushy curiosity-seekers he’d needed to admit as far as his airlock. “I’ve seen Cold Roses, sir. It didn’t tell me what I needed to know.”
“Then download the Commission’s report. It’s the result of a hearing that lasted six weeks, and includes enough detail to choke Oswald Spengler. Unless you’re one of those touchy-feelie types who want to know what it was like, in which case I have no answer more eloquent than, I didn’t have time to stop and think about it.”
His anger didn’t delay me one heartbeat, but I did need several seconds to fight my way clear of that reference to Spengler, whose Decline of the West I had not then read and would not touch until several years into my own self-imposed exile. “No, sir. I don’t need to know about the gunfight. I already know everything I want to know about the gunfight.”
There was another pause, shorter this time. “And that is?”
“You armed yourself in response to a possible threat from a colleague deranged through no fault of his own. He fired on your barge. You fled the vehicle and returned fire. The confrontation lasted several minutes, but sooner or later one of you had to hit his target. The lucky survivor happened to be you. You almost lost your commission, in part because of some zealous prosecutors who accused you of being as dangerous as the man you were fighting, but were cleared of all charges. The tale’s grown in the telling and you’ve been living down your reputation as a hero ever since. But everything else, sir, is just drawing dotted lines between the places where you stood and the places where your rounds hit their respective targets. It’s been dissected and analyzed from every possible angle, hundreds of times, by people far smarter or far more obsessive than I am, and I wouldn’t be here, taking up your time, if all I wanted to do is travel that same ground all over again. For what it’s worth, I’m not even a historian. Whether you believe it or not, sir, I have a reason to be here.”
When he spoke again, his voice betrayed a respect I hadn’t heard there before. “How old are you, young lady?”
“Twenty-four.”
“I thought I detected the arrogance of youth. You do know that I haven’t allowed anybody past the airlock since some six years before you were born?”
“Yes, sir. And if you don’t mind me saying so, it sounds damned pointlessly lonely.”
The words surprised me as much as they must have surprised him. Nothing like them had appeared anywhere on my long list of strategies for getting him to drop the habit of a lifetime and speak to me. Even now, I found them mortifying. I would have pulled the very sentiment from the air, and tucked it away in my pocket, had there been any way of catching up with it and dragging it back. I found myself cringing, half-expecting him to open the outer door and flush me back into vacuum, where all impudent snots belonged.
He surprised me by guffawing.
Malcolm Bell laughed that hard maybe four times in all the time we knew each other. It was a number exactly equal to the number of times he laughed at all. Other people had varying intensity settings, ranging from polite chuckles to uncontrollable giggles. Bell was more than capable of being amused by things other people said, but never laughed out loud unless he could devote his entire being to it, and when he did, it always took him some time to stop.
I must say that I’ve spent a lot of years missing that sound. There’s a certain amount of personal pride that comes with being able to make it happen.
On that day I thought it would never end. But even it trailed off eventually. And he said, “Every thirty years or so, the human race surprises me by producing someone worth making exceptions for. You have your audience, Jessie James.”
The inner door slid open . . .
In just about every version of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Wyatt Earp is a tower of strength, more titan than man, so certain of his own rectitude that it might as well have been this certainty that prevented him from being pierced by any of the bullets fired on that dusty street on Tombstone.
It might even be true.
Certainly, it’s remarkable enough that a man who lived the way he did never did feel the sting of a bullet himself. So many of the legends of his day did. Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and Wild Bill Hickok all died that way—some backshot, others facing their enemies, but all as prone to the effects of violence as any other man. Earp’s own body remained inviolate.
The inescapable impression is that when he stood before the Clantons, exchanging a flurry of bullets at point-blank range, he was tall and unafraid, as aware of his own invulnerability as future generations would be, when they saw his story told and retold in one medium after another.
Again, maybe it’s so. Maybe he was just crazy enough to think that the laws of chance didn’t apply to him.
And maybe he was terrified, and wishing he were anywhere else.
Malcolm Bell sits in the driver’s seat of a Class B Lunar Barge, traveling maybe forty kilometers an hour as he makes his way to a solar array under construction on a ridge a three-hour drive from base. He is under cover, the better to keep his suit temperature within a comfortable mean, despite what will have to be a full day’s trek under the pitiless unfiltered Sun, but as is typical for that time and state of technology, not under air. He is tired. He hasn’t told anybody, but he’s been having trouble sleeping these past few nights, and would have begged off this pain in the ass solo detail, were the local work culture at all tolerant of such frivolities as sick days. Life here, the life they’re still trying to build, is still too precarious for that. The motto is, If you can walk, you can work, and Bell remains too mobile to spend the day in his bunk when he’s part of the machine that makes life on this world possible.
He knows this, but he is also a human being under stress that would break many other untrained men, so his mind is following fourteen separate trains of thought at once. Part of him is thinking about the drive he has already made a dozen times, but part is thinking of a fellow engineer who he considers a real ass, part is trying to remember the name of a popular singer who has been on the tip of his tongue all day, part is looking forward to getting some downtime when he can see his good friends Minnie and Earl, and part is thinking about that poor crazy son of a bitch, Destry.
Shit, Destry.
Bell knows he’s being stupid. There’s no point in worrying about Destry. Worrying about Destry is like worrying about lightning. It strikes or it doesn’t, and if it wants you it will have you. All the worry accomplishes is ruining your day while you wait to find out if the dice rolls, one way or the other. Besides, Destry’s got to be dead by now. There’s no way he’s still out here, running around so far from any supply drops, just looking for another wandering surface rat to ambush. He must be spam in a can, baking inside his suit, perhaps even bursting from his tin shell as the gases build up from within. It’s a disgusting image, but the only possible one, because Destry’s not some unstoppable monster, just a man with the immense misfortune to pull the wrong lottery ticket in the God-has-a-sense-of-humor sweepstakes.
Bell knows all this, in the same way he knows his service codes and his emergency procedures and the words to the current hit song with the easily-mocked lyrics that have burrowed into his skull and now refuse to leave, but he is also a human being, with a human being’s capacity to dwell on bogeymen, and he has been dwelling on the image of his own head bursting into a fog of swiftly-dispersing vapor as his helmet is bisected by another of Destry’s jury-rigged weapons. It’s not suffering that frightens him. It’s the unknowability of the moment. It’s being alive one instant, and dead the next, without so much as a by-your-leave for realization. Why, this very thought, the one he’s thinking now, could be the very last thought he’ll ever have, and he’ll never know it. Or maybe this one is the last. Or this one.
He is lucky that he happens to be not only looking in the right direction but also working himself into a fine state of paranoia when the projectile shatters the air gauge on the control panel before him. This is a vacuum, after all. There is no audible distant gunshot, no musical crunch as the transparency covering the display surface turns to shrapnel. There is just a hole where no hole existed before, and were he not thinking of Destry he could very easily hand himself over to the slaughter by wasting the next few seconds wondering what kind of mechanical blowout could have caused such a catastrophic malfunction. Instead he realizes at once that Destry must be firing at him, from one of the jagged hills that overlook this now well-traveled road. He is therefore already hurling himself to the left—that direction chosen only because it is the nearest way out of there—when a second projectile passes through the spot where he’d been standing and imbeds itself in the control panel, its only lasting effect to provide further grist for the future storytelling mill.
Objects on the Moon fall slowly, by terrestrial standards, even if they don’t want to, and Bell’s desperate dodge develops a certain slapstick flavor as he sinks toward the rocky ground—a good two meters below him, thanks to the barge’s oversize treads—not at all rushed by the knowledge that there’s somebody shooting at him. He is even able to begin his frantic call for help before he hits and commences to roll. “Bell to Control! Request immediate assistance!”
Cliff McRae is the comm-op riding the console that day. He’s from some nowhere in the Texas Panhandle and speaks with an exaggerated version of the cowboy twang that has flavored a disproportionate percentage of NASA’s public speakers for over a century now. “We copy, Bell. What’s the nature of your problem?”
Bell is still tumbling beside the barge he has abandoned. He owes his life to the conservation of momentum, as his trajectory parallels the vehicle’s forward motion, and thus keeps in its shadow where he is shielded, for the moment, from his attacker’s line of fire. This will change in a second, if he cannot regain his feet and keep up. He gasps, “I’m being fired upon from the ridge!”
McRae’s pause lasts a full five seconds. “I’m tracking your location, Mr. Bell. I see you south of Route 7, marker seventeen. Is that affirmative?”
“That’s the route. I don’t know the marker. I’ve abandoned the barge, which is still in motion, and am using it for cover.”
“Have you positive ID on the shooter?”
“Hell, no, I don’t have positive ID! But just how many crazed snipers do we have on this hunk of rock?”
There’s grim amusement in McRae’s reply. “Copied. Stay covered, Malcolm. We’re working on getting you on some reinforcements.”
Meanwhile, Bell has managed to regain his feet and now hustles alongside the barge, which is continuing to roll at a speed he can match as long as he keeps to a slow jog. It’s not easy going. Moonsuits are not made for running, nor is lunar gravity. A normal run for a human being involves a certain number of moments between steps, when both feet are off the ground at the same time, moments when the runner uses gravity to his advantage, and that the Moon insists on using as opportunities for slow-motion ballet. It’s possible to compensate and build up a speed significantly in excess of what the same legs would achieve on Earth, but you pretty much have to be raised on the Moon to pick up the knack.
Bell was born on Earth.
In Tombstone, Arizona.
Running alongside the barge is a stopgap solution at best. True, it does not have a dead man’s switch. That safety measure had long ago been deemed more dangerous than the vehicle could possibly be even as a runaway, since on the Moon it’s far more important to get a failing or incapacitated operator who’s at least headed in the right direction back to base and under air. Truth is, the barge is currently following buried magnetic markers that guide it along a preprogrammed route. But it moves slowly enough for any halfway intelligent sniper, even he’s also a deranged one, to scramble down from his position and take a shot from another angle. Staying close won’t keep Bell out of the line of fire for long.
McRae returns. “Bell? Do you read?”
“I’m working on it.”
“We have three units converging on your position, and are working on getting more. Earliest ETA is thirty minutes. You are advised to keep moving and not attempt to engage Destry unless he forces the confrontation. Do you read?”
“I read,” Bell says. He has a bad thought. “Listen, he might be monitoring this. We better observe radio silence until your people get closer. I wouldn’t want to lead him right to me.”
“Good thinking, Bell. Signing off now.”
Bell regrets the silence the instant the signal cuts out. After all, that might have been the last conversation he’ll ever have with another human being. Would it be that bad to stay on the line? After all, if Destry is monitoring him, the crazy fool now knows that he’s had a chance to call help. Wouldn’t that send him running? Is he that crazy, to stick around and expose himself to an army of rescuers?
It seems unlikely. Mad, even.
Living in the moment, Bell feels the truth anyway.
Destry is exactly that mad, and stalking him.
