Doom. Hell on Earth


     For some reason, the fire monster seemed to have a. 1
     As we hit the roof of Deimos, I looked up.
The pressure dome was cracked. Of course. That
made sense, the way things had been going. Next
thing you knew, thousand-year-old Martians would
come along and wink us out of existence.
     Fly Taggart stared at the crack, and his eyes bugged
out like a frog. I wish he knew a bit more physics; if I
have one complaint about Fly, it's that he doesn't
hold with higher education. The crack was small, and
I could see it wasn't going to leak all the air out of the
dome in the next few minutes. Days, more like; days,
or even weeks. It's a big facility.
     Then I looked past the crack and saw what that
huge Marine corporal was really staring at: we weren't
orbiting Mars anymore!
     The entire moon of Deimos had just taken a
whirlwind tour of the solar system. I swallowed hard;
we were staring at Earth.
     "I ... guess we know their invasion plans now," I
said, feeling the blood rush to my face.
     Fly plucked at his uniform--Lieutenant Weems's
uniform, except he'd pulled off the butter bars--like
it had suddenly started itching, "Well at least we
stopped them," he said.
     "Look again, Fly." The globe was flecked with
bright pinpoints of light, flares of explosives millions
of times more powerful, more hellish, than any we
had ducked or lobbed back here on Deimos. I
     pointed to the obvious nuclear exchange blanketing
our home, dumping like a few billion tons of radia-
tion, fallout, and sheer explosive muscle on--on
everyone we had ever known. "Looks like they've
already invaded."
     Fly suddenly latched onto my arm with a vise grip
of raging emotion. I tried to pry his steel hands loose,
while he hollered in my ear. "It's not over, Arlene!"
PFC Arlene Sanders, United States Marine Corps:
that's me. "We've already proven who's tougher. We
won't let it end like this!"
     Right. Me and Fly and nothing but weapons,
ammo, and a hand with some fingers on it. We were,
going to jump from LEO down to the surface of the
Earth. Or maybe we'd drive the planetoid down and
land it at Point Mugu. I guess you couldn't consider
Deimos strictly a moon anymore, since it appeared to
be mobile.
     We were stuck a mere four hundred klicks from
where we wanted to be: but that was four hundred
kilometers straight up. What's more, we were flying
around the Earth at something better than ten kilom-
eters per second--not only would we have to jump
down, we'd better do one hell of a big foot-drag to kill
that orbital velocity.
     And after that we'd solve Format's Last Theorem,
simplify the tax code, and cure world hunger.
That last one was easy enough to fix. The problem
wasn't that there wasn't enough food; it was just in
the wrong places and didn't last long enough. I once
heard an old duffer say all we really needed was food
irradiation, Seal-a-Meals, and a bunch of rocket mail
tubes to plant the food in the center of the famine du
jour.
     Rocket mail tubes . . .
"Fly," I shrieked, jumping up and down. "I know
how to do it!"
     "Do what, damn it?"
Could we do it? I did some fast, rule-of-thumb
calculations: our mass versus that of a typical "care
package" from Mars, the sort they sent up to the
grunts like me serving on Deimos; the Earth's gravita-
tional pull compared to that of Mars--it's harder to
fly up and down off the Earth's surface than the
Martian surface. Maybe ... no, it would work!
Well, maybe.
     "I know how to get us across to Earth, Fly. Did you
know there's a maintenance shed for unmanned snip-
ping rockets on this dump of a moon?"
     "No," he said suspiciously.
Of course he didn't. He was never stationed here,
like I'd been. It was a garage where the motor-pool
sergeant kept all the mail tubes, the shipping rockets. I
had no idea why they were called "mail tubes"; we
send our mail electronically, as the universe intended.
"A one-way ticket to Earth," I summed up, trying
to penetrate that thick skull of his. "If we can find any
kind of ship, we go home and kick some zombie ass.
Again."
     "All over again," he breathed, catching my drift at
last. "Well, hell, we're professionals at this now!"
We continued looking at the familiar blue-green
sphere of Earth, as the unfamiliar white spots ap-
peared and disappeared all over the globe. An old
piece of advice floated up from deep in my memory:
DON'T LOOK DOWN! We gazed upon white clouds
     so beautiful that they reminded me of what we'd been
fighting to save.
     Were we too late? Part of me hoped so, a part that
just wanted to sit down and rest.
     We'd fought those damned, ugly monsters until we
were too tired to fight--and now it was looking like
we had to do it all over again.
     All at once I noticed a sprinkling of the flares all
over California, my home state. "Oh, God, Fly," I
said, my stomach contracting.
     "Yeah. Terrible." Jesus, couldn't my best bud think
of anything stronger to say when Armageddon came
to your hometown?
     I shook my head. "You don't understand. That's
not what I meant. I mean I don't feel anything." I
trembled as I spoke.
     Fly put his arm around me; well, that was more like
it. "It's all right," he mumbled. "It's not what you
think. There's nothing wrong with you. After what
you've been through, you're just numb. Your brain is
tired."
     I let my head rest on his shoulder. "So my mind is
coming loose. What about body and soul?"
     Right then and there I decided we needed a new
word to describe the state after you've reached ex-
haustion but had to keep going on automatic pilot.
Wherever that state was, Fly and I had been there a
long, long time.
     2
I put my arm around Arlene's shoulders,
     hoping she would understand it meant nothing but
friendship. Oh don't be silly, Fly; of course she
understands!
     Where to begin? I was born at an early age, in a log
cabin I helped my father build. I grew up, joined
the UnitedStatesMarineCorpsSir!--went to fight
"Scythe of Glory" Communist leftovers in Ke-
firistan, punched out the C.O., was banged up in the
brig and sent to Mars with the rest of my jarhead
buddies.
     We up-shipped to Phobos, one of the moons of
Mars--well, now the only moon of Mars--and dis-
covered a boatload of aliens had invaded through the
used-to-be-dormant "Gates," long-range teleporters
from . . . from where? From another planet, God
knows where. Arlene and I battled our way into the
depths of the Phobos facility of the Union Aerospace
Corporation . . . who started the whole invasion,
turns out, by monkeying with the Gates in the first
place.
     It all rolled downhill from there. We ended up on
Deimos somehow--and I'm still not sure how that
happened!--and duked our way up one side and
down the other, killing more types of monsters than
you can shake a twelve-gauge at, finally ending up in a
hyperspace tunnel . . . you'll have to ask Arlene Sand-
ers (Exhibit A, the gal to my left) to explain what that
is. But when we finally killed everything worth killing,
we lucked into stopping the invasion cold. See previ-
ous report-from-the-front for full details.
     In the end, we faced down the spidermind--the
handy nickname chosen for the spider-shaped "mas-
termind" of the invasion, chosen by Bill Ritch,
requisat in pace, a computer genius who helped us at
the cost of his own life.
     Right before defeating the spidermind, I'd thought
there was nothing left in me. I was certain that I
couldn't have continued without Arlene, a physical
reminder of what we were fighting for, like old-time
war propaganda. While she breathed, I had to
breathe, and fight. Blame it on the genes. We'd had
the strength to go on against hundreds of monsters.
We weren't about to let a little thing like the laws of
physics stop us now.
     Arlene couldn't stop looking at California, so I
gently led her away from the sight. "You know,
Arlene, I feel really stupid that I didn't think of the
shed; especially after using the rocket fuel to fry the
friggin' spider."
     She blinked her eyes and rubbed them. I could tell
she was trying not to cry. "That's why you need me,
Flynn Peter Taggart."
     So we went spaceship shopping.
Of course, there was the little matter of adding to
our personal armaments. We hadn't seen any mon-
sters for a while. Maybe we neutralized all of them--
but I wasn't about to count on it.
     "Once, I was asked why I don't like to go out on the
street without being armed," I told Arlene.
     "Must have been an idiot," came the terse reply.
She'd regained her self-control, but she was still acting
defensive. We were good friends, but that made it
easier for her to be embarrassed in front of me.
"No, I wouldn't call her that," I continued. "But
she'd lived a protected life; never came up against the
mother of all storms."
     "What's that?" Arlene wanted to know.
"Late-twentieth-century street slang for when the
bad mother on your block decides it's time to teach
you a lesson. At such times, it is advisable to carry an
equalizer."
     "Like this?" Arlene asked, bending down to re-
trieve an AB-10 machine pistol, her personal fave.
Every little bit helps.
     "If my friend had one of those in her purse--" I
began, but Arlene interrupted.
     "Too long to get it out. I like to carry on my
person."
     "Yeah, yeah. I was about to say if she had carried,
she might be alive today."
     Arlene stopped rummaging through the contents of
a UAC crate and looked up. "Oh, Fly, I'm sorry."
"Sometimes you get the lesson only one time, and
it's pass-fail." I playfully poked the air in her direc-
tion. "Welcome back," I said.
     "What do you mean?" she asked, squinting at me
the way she always did when I made her defensive.
"You can feel again, dear."
     "Oh," she said, her body becoming more relaxed.
"You're right. One person means something. Well,
sometimes . . . if there aren't too many one persons."
"One's real. There's the body on the floor. A
million is just a statistic, no matter how much
screaming the professional mourner does."
     She punched the air back at me. And she smiled.
We didn't talk for a little while. We continued gather-
ing goodies en route to the shed. It didn't take long to
locate; the good news was that it was large and
apparently well-stocked. It would take days to go
through all the crates and boxes; but if the labels on
the outside were accurate, we'd discovered a much
larger inventory of parts than I would have imagined
necessary for Deimos Base.
     The bad news was a complete absence of ships in
any state of assembly. There was nothing to fly!
"Well jeez, I thought it was a great idea," said
Arlene. "Too bad it flopped."
     Somehow it seemed immoral to give up hope while
standing inside Santa's workshop. I began examining
some of the boxes while Arlene kicked one across the
room; but that didn't bother me, she was never meant
for the modern age she was born into. She'd have been
more homey as a freebooter in the days of blood and
iron, when one physically competent woman did
enough in her lifetime to breed legends of lost,
Amazonian races of warrior queens. She had guts; she
had cold steel will. She didn't have patience, but what
the hell!
     I didn't think I would face death as well as she. I'd
go down in a very nonstoic way, kicking death in the
groin if I could only line up my shot.
     I looked inside those boxes--big ones, little ones,
all kinds of in-between ones--and an idea grew in my
head, a few words slipping out.
     "I wonder if it still might be possible to seize the
objective," I muttered.
     Arlene heard, too. "Huh? What do you mean, seize
the objective?"
     I was only half listening. The little voice in the back
of my head drowned her out with some really crazy
stuff: "It seems ridiculous, A.S., but it could work."
3
     The stoic qualities of Arlene Sanders were
better suited to facing death than being irritated by
her old buddy. "Fly, what the hell are you talking
about?" She stomped to where I was going through a
box of thin metal cylinders, perfect for the project
growing inside my head.
     "Yes," I said, "it really could work."
Using the special tone of voice normally reserved
for dealing with mentally deficient children and
drunken sailors, she said: "Tell me what in God's
name you're on about, Fly!"
     I lifted my head from the box. "When I was a kid, I
wanted a car real bad. I mean real bad. Real real, bad
bad."
     "Here we go down memory lane," she said with a
shrug.
     "See, I couldn't afford the car," I said, "but I
wanted one."
     "Real real, bad bad?"
"I mean, I'd have taken anything with wheels and a
transmission. If I couldn't have a six, I'd settle for
four. Three, anything! But no matter how much I
lowered expectations, I still couldn't afford a vehicle."
"Is this going somewhere, Fly, or do I need to
hitchhike back home to Mother?"
     "That's exactly right," I said. "I'm talking about
transportation. I couldn't afford a car--but I could
afford a spare part now and then, and you know how
this ended up?"
     She put her hands on her hips, head tilted to the
side, and said: "Let me guess! You collected spare
parts, and collected and collected, and finally you
were able to build your own F-20! Or was it an aircraft
carrier? Amphibious landing craft?"
     I ignored her. "I built myself a car. Had a few
problems; no brakes exactly, but it ran; and what a
powerful sound that baby made when she turned
over."
     Arlene finally saw where I was headed. Memory
lane dead-ended right here on Deimos. "Fly, you're
BS-ing me."
     "No, I really built an auto . . ."
"You are insane if you think you can build a
freakin' spaceship out of spare parts!"
     I literally jumped up and down. "You thought of it
too," I said. "Great idea, isn't it? We can build a
rocket and get off this rock."
     She was very tolerant. "Fly, an automobile is one
thing. You're talking about a spaceship."
     I looked her straight in the eye. "After all we've
been through, you going to tell me we can't do this?"
She looked me straight back. "Read my lips," she
said. "We can not do this."
     "We have nothing to lose, A.S. It can't be any
harder than taking down the spidermind, can it?"
"You have a point there," she said grudgingly. "So
how do you propose we start?"
     She was always annoyed when I used reality to win
an argument. I knew it was possible. But not without
a manual.
     "We need some tech," I said.
"Tech?"
     "Plans . . . then we can give it to our design depart-
ment."
     "Don't tell me ... I'm the design department."
I smiled. "You're the design department."
     "And what are you, Fly Taggart?"
"Everything else."
     We went looking for a manual. Ten minutes later we
found one in the most logical place, which was the last
place we looked, naturally: next to the coffee maker. I
tried to get Arlene to make us a pot of coffee, but she
stared at me as if I'd grown a third head.
     So I made it myself; I'd forgotten that Arlene didn't
indulge, but that was all right with me. I figured since
I was the production line, I needed all the caffeine I
could survive.
     Next we inventoried everything we had to work
with. Our best choice was to make a small mail rocket
intended for one person, but capable of seating two, if
they were really chummy. I wrote a list of parts
needed and found almost everything within three
hours . . . except for a thingamabob. I knew what it
was really called, but I couldn't think of it. We spent
another hour searching, and though we didn't come
across it, we located more tools that would be of
immeasurable value; a screwdriver, a drill bit, a
magnifying glass, and a paper punch.
     "Enough for now," said Arlene. "I'm sure the
thingamabob will show up before we finish. We'd
better get started ... I have no idea how fast the air is
leaking from the dome; we might have a month, we
might have a couple of days!"
     I wasn't going to argue with an optimistic Arlene.
Hell, I hardly ever argued with the pessimistic one.
"We haven't looked under all the tarps," I said, "and
there are other rooms to check too. But there is one
more shopping expedition required before we start
work. We need enough food and water to hold us
through the job; and all the spare liquid oxygen tanks
and hydrogen tanks we can find."
     Arlene nodded. We were in a race with a bunch of
air molecules, and they had a head start. In addition
to oxygen for fuel, we actually needed to breathe now
and again over the next few days. Weeks, whatever. It
would be cruel fate indeed if I screwed the last bolt
and hammered the final wing nut, only to keel over
from oxygen deprivation.
     My brain was working overtime now: "The pres-
sure is dropping so slowly, we're not going to notice
when it gets dangerous. Can you rig up something to
warn us when to start taking a hit of pure oxygen?"
"And regulate how much we should take. Yeah, it's
a space station ... I don't think I'll have much trou-
ble finding an air-pressure sensor and rebreather kit."
She pulled a gouge pad out of her shirt pocket and
started taking notes. She thought of something I'd
missed: "I'll look for warm clothes too, Fly. The
temperature will drop as we lose pressure."
     "Won't the sun warm us? We're no farther away
than Earth itself."
     "We're underground. All this dirt makes a great
insulator, unfortunately."
     First day, we were good scouts, gathering supplies
for our merit badge in survival. I regretted that we
couldn't move what we needed to a lower level and
seal off one compartment. That would stretch survival
by another month. But hauling the tons of material
we'd need to build a rocket was impossible.
     Arlene scrounged a generous supply of food, most
of it produced under the dome with considerable help
from the Genetics Department. After watching the
monsters produced assembly-line out of the vat, I
hesitated even to eat our own--human experiments
in recombinant-DNA veggies and lab-grown "Meet."
But Arlene wasn't queasy. She preferred the Deimos-
grown peas and carrots to the real delicacy, frozen
asparagus from Earth.
     "I despise asparagus," she insisted.
"All right; so I hate okra." The slimy stuff was one
of my childhood loathings.
     On the second day, we ran head-on into our first
lesson in Spaceship Construction 101: namely, trans-
lating the manual from "techie-talk" into English.
Here, what should we make of this?
     The ZDS protocol provides reliable, flow-
controlled, two-way transmission of unenriched
fuel-cell packet deliverables from nozzle to sock-
et. It is a plasma stream (PLASM-STREAM) or
     packet stream (SOCK-SEQFUELPACKET) pro-
tocol. ZDS uses the Union Aerospace Corpora-
tion double-sequencing directed stream format.
This format provides for nozzle, spray, and
     extern-spray (socket) specification.
NOTE: see the definition for ZDS-redirect in
Section 38.12.
     ACTIVE OR PASSIVE
Sockets utilizing the ZDS protocol are either
"active" or "passive." Nozzle processes must be
directed into passive (external spray) sockets.
They detect for connection requests from deliver-
able processes residing on the same or other
nodes of the fuel-cell packet path. Socket proc-
esses broadcast requests for active (directed
spray) nozzles. They sidestep nominal delivery in
favor of reverse-directed (acknowledging) packet
streams.
     ALL CONNECTIONS BETWEEN NOZZLES
AND SOCKETS MUST BE SET TO DEFAULT
     ACTIVE OR PASSIVE PROTOCOL DEPEND-
ING ON THE ANTICIPATED FUEL-CELL
     PATH DELIVERY PROCESS.
WARNING! Failure to follow UAC active/passive
nozzle-socket connection protocols may result in
unanticipated fuel-cell path combustion with un-
desirable results.
     I could translate the final warning pretty well: if we
didn't figure out what the hell they meant by
"active/passive nozzle-socket connection protocols,"
Arlene and I would become a rather spectacular
fireworks display.
     Arlene was better at figuring it out than I was; she
had actually taken engineering night courses during
her shore tours. I volunteered the use of my hands
and a strong back if she'd turn the technical gobbledy-
gook into the kind of instructions a Marine can
follow: "Put this part here! Tighten that bolt, Ma-
rine!"
     "Yeah, just like you to have the woman do all the
hard work," she said.
     "Just remind me to clean the carburetor before I
work on the piston valves."
     "It's not a car, you moron!"
"Huh. I guess in space no one can hear you make
metaphors." Amazingly, she didn't shoot me.
     Unfortunately, the rockets used by the Deimos
facility--hence all the spare parts--were short-hop,
lightweight supply rockets, never intended to carry a
single human being, let alone two of us ... and never
intended to fight a gravity well like Earth's.
There were a couple large-bore rocket casings left
over from God knows when, back before we had the
MDM-44 plasma motors developed by Union Aero-
space, and this was the key: I figured I could hot-rod a
44 into & bigger cousin, cram it inside one of the old
casings, and have enough juice to fling us off Deimos,
burn into the atmosphere, and brake to a (messy)
landing Somewhere on Earth.
     My main goal was to keep from blowing us up.
After frying our spider baby in JP-9 jet fuel, I had a
new respect for the stuff. It beat the hell out of salad
oil.
     Arlene squatted on an uncomfortable stool translat-
ing technical paragraphs into something I could un-
derstand. My optimist projection was to finish the
task in ten days!
     Reality dragged ass.
Starting our third week, we ran into the first serious
problem. Trying to jerry-rig parts we couldn't find
into configurations we couldn't figure out was a bitch,
and I insisted we needed to test-fire the motor when I
finally got a working model. We didn't have much
time, but the motor was life and death, a must test.
We'd spent two days painfully assembling it, and I do
mean "we." Arlene enjoyed an excuse to get off her
stool; besides, it was a two-man job.
     We finally ended up with a sleek beauty two meters
long and a meter in diameter, almost small enough to
fit inside the old-model rocket skin. Just a few odd
pieces here and there where I thought I could super-
charge the system--or where I couldn't find the
correct part and had to Substitute butter for eggs. A
pair of start cables snaked into the machine from ten
feet away, where a switch box was connected to
twenty-seven fifty-volt ni-cad batteries.
     I'd spent half a day welding steel bars together into
a framework, sort of, kind of approximating the
interior scaffolding in the mail tube. We bolted the
motor inside, mooring it securely to the deck plates.
Last, I attached a highly sensitive pressure sensor to
the forward edge to measure the thrust. I'd trust
Arlene to make the calculations and tell me whether
we would make it into orbit or not.
     "Want to say a prayer?" she asked before I switched
it on.
     "Yeah; I wasn't always in trouble with the nuns.
Maybe I can collect on a few good deeds." Arlene
stationed herself behind a bulkhead; I reached over
and flipped the switch, then dived behind cover.
Superheated gases rushed out the back with a
tremendous roar . . . and I could tell immediately it
was too much force; I'd tweaked my rocket engine too
good.
     But I couldn't switch it off! It was just a model,
designed to burn until the fuel was gone; no cut-off
valve.
     The scaffolding strained, groaning like a dying
steam demon--whoops, remind me later--and I
     knew what was about to happen. "Get your head
down!" I screamed. No use--she couldn't hear any-
thing over the roar of the engine and the scream of
steel twisting and ripping free.
     The mooring tore loose with a horrible, grinding
noise that for an instant even drowned out the 44. My
beautiful, working rocket engine broke free, ate the
pressure sensor with one gulp, and smashed through a
dozen boxes of precious parts before making a smok-
ing hole against the nearby bulkhead, leaving a per-
fectly straight series of holes, like a cartoon.
4
     Destroying a bulkhead on a doomed base, or
even some spare parts, was no cause for alarm.
Destroying the motor was something else again.
Arlene screamed something obscene, but I couldn't
hear her over the ringing in my ears. We got off lucky.
It could have struck the JP-9 and ended everything.
After we extinguished the fire and salvaged what we
could of the motor, Arlene looked at me humorlessly.
"Flynn Taggart, what deviltry did you do to those
poor nuns?"
     "Can you rephrase that, after what we've been
through?" We were both a little punchy, getting by on
shifts of four hours sleep. But no spiderminds were
trying to kill us, no imps throwing a wrench in the
machinery, no hell-princes setting fires worse than the
one we'd just put out. It felt like we were on vacation.
All right, to fill in a bit: an imp is what we dubbed
the brown, spiny, leathery alien that throws flaming
balls of mucus. Hell-princes looked like the typical
"devil" from my troubled youth in Catholic school--
red body, goat legs, horns, and they too threw some-
thing noxious that killed you real dead; we pretty
much decided it had to be an example of genetic
engineering, since it was too close to a human concep-
tion of evil.
     We had also killed demons, which I privately called
pinkies, that were huge, pink, hairy critters with no
brains but an awful lot of teeth; flying, metallic skulls
with little rocket motors; invisible ghosts; and an
unbelievable horde of zombies--spiritually, they
were the worst, for oftener than not, they were our
own buddies and comrades at arms, "reworked" into
the living dead.
     But the granddaddy monster of them all was the
steam-demon, so called because it was a five-meter-
tall mechanical monstrosity with a back rack full of
rockets and a launcher where its hand should have
been. When it moved, it sounded like a steam loco-
motive and shook the ground.
     None of that was important compared to one fact:
Arlene had completely changed her mind about build-
ing the rocket. "I'm sorry I ever doubted you," she
said. "I guess it is possible."
     But now I was the contrarian. "We did all the
calculations right, A.S. We checked and triple-
checked everything . . . How could the engine be so
much more powerful than we thought?"
     She smiled. "Because they obviously deliberately
understated the capabilities in the technical
literature--probably for security reasons."
     "So all our calculations are worthless crap. How are
you going to fly this thing?"
     She didn't seem overly concerned. "Fly, the vehicle
hasn't been built that I can't pilot."
     "Um . . . well, this rocket hasn't been built, has it?"
"You know what I mean! If you build it, I will fly. I
swear."
     "Hm." I didn't know what to say. I had no idea
whether she was or wasn't a hot-shot rocket pilot. We
don't get much call for that in the Light Drop Infan-
try. But now that she believed in the rocket, nothing
was going to stop us.
     There were other motor parts, and we patched
together something I figured was eighty percent ready.
There was no time for better. The air was growing
thinner and the temperature was dropping ... the
crack in the dome was finally taking its toll.
The pressure dropped so gradually, we didn't even
notice. After a while I found myself panting for air
after climbing a ladder, and Arlene had to rest after
every heavy part she handed me.
     Then a couple of days later, I realized my mind was '
wandering in the middle of a task. I focused, then
wandered again.
     Arlene was able to maintain her concentration;
maybe being smaller, she didn't need as high a partial
pressure of oxygen. But both of us were getting mighty
cold.
     When I saw Arlene shivering while working, I made
her throw on a couple of sweaters and did the same.
We wore gloves, except that I kept removing mine
because it interfered with the work. Then my hands
would turn to ice, and I'd put them back on to warm
up before taking another stab at attaching the fine
filaments that ran microvolts to the plasma globules.
Suddenly, the air-pressure sensor started screaming
its fool head off. Arlene and I exchanged a worried
glance, but we didn't need to be told twice. It was time
to start hitting the raw stuff, O2 neat. We took hits off
the same oxygen bottle, trying to limit ourselves to a
few breaths every hour or so, or when we started to get
dizzy or goofy.
     But we just didn't have that much bottled oxygen.
Uncle Sugar packed a lot of air into a single bottle; but
even so, even at the slow pace we used it, we'd run out
of breathing oxygen in just a few more days. We had
more bottles, but we needed them for fuel mixing.
And of course we'd need to breathe more frequently
as the pressure dropped--paradoxically, it was drop-
ping slower now, since there was less pressure in the
dome to push the air out.
     We stretched the bottles as long as we could, but
they ran out while there was still plenty of work left.
I'd done mountain climbing in my native Colorado
before joining the Corps; as the air grew thinner, I
tried to help Arlene deal with it. "Breathe shallowly,"
I said. "Rest, and don't talk except for the job."
The physical exertion wasn't any less, though. We'd
have to stop frequently, gasping and panting. We tired
easily and needed more sleep, but stayed on the four-
hour rotations, creating a cycle of exhaustion we
couldn't break. But sleeping longer would just make
the job take longer, and the pressure would drop lower
in the meantime.
     Low pressure is insidious. There are obvious ef-
fects: exhaustion, trouble breathing, and cold. But
there are other symptoms people don't often think
about: your ears ring; it's hard to hear sounds (thinner
air makes everything sound muffled and "tinny"); and
worst of all, your mind can start to go. Our brains are
built for a certain barometric pressure, and if it's too
high or too low, we start getting strange.
     Or in Arlene's case, hallucinogenic.
"Pumpkin!" she suddenly screamed, waking me
     after two hours of my allotted four. She grabbed a
pump-action riot gun and pounded a shot over my
head, so close it made my skull vibrate.
     "Pumpkin" was our name for the horrible, floating
alien heads--mechanical, I think--that vomited ball
lightning capable of frying you at fifty paces. I threw
myself off the table we used as a bed, figuring the
vacation was over: the aliens had found us at last!
But when I dropped to my knees, Sig-Cow rifle at
the ready, all I saw was the dark hole in the wall left by
my overly enthusiastic motor test of a week ago.
Arlene ran down the passageway ahead of me, firing
wildly; firing at nothing. But those bastard alien
"demons" could be fast! I had no reason to doubt my
buddy as I joined her, ready to do what we'd done
countless times during our assault on Phobos,
Deimos, and the tunnel.
     Then she ran straight into the bulkhead like it
wasn't there, and I suddenly realized something was
seriously wrong with her.
     She knocked herself out. I couldn't look after her
then; I had to make sure about the pumpkin.
     Knuckling the residue of sleep from bloodshot eyes,
I ran like a mother down the corridor, eyes left, right
. . . not wasting a shot but ready for the enemy. For an
instant I thought I saw a flying globe and almost
squeezed off a shot. But it was a trick of peripheral
vision, just a flash of my own shadow.
     A cul-de-sac at the end of the corridor finally
convinced me that there was no freaking pumpkin.
I stood for a moment, desperately trying to get
nonexistent air into my burning lungs. Then I re-
turned to Arlene, who groaned and panted as she
started coming to.
     "Pal, honey, I hate to do this . . . but I've got to
relieve you of your weapon."
     She stared uncomprehendingly.
"There was no pumpkin," I explained. "You're
suffering from low-pressure psychosis."
     "Oh Jesus," she said quietly. She understood.
Sadly, she handed over the scattergun and her AB-10
machine pistol.
     I felt like the bottom of my boots after walking
through the green sludge. You don't relieve a Marine
of his weapon, not ever. By doing so, I'd just effec-
tively demoted her to civilian. And the worst part
was, even she realized now that she'd been halluci-
nating.
     She was crying when we walked slowly back to the
vehicle assembly room, a.k.a. the hangar. I'd never
seen Arlene cry before--except when she had to kill
the reworked, reanimated body of her former lover,
Dodd.
     "Hey," I said a few hours later, "can't we electro-
lyze water and get oxygen?"
     Arlene was silent for a moment, her lips moving.
"Yes," she said, "but we'd only get a few breaths per
liter, and we need the water too, Fly."
     "Oh." Not for the first time, I wished I knew more
engineering. I vowed to take classes when we made it
back home ... if there even was a "back home"
anymore.
     I started having unpleasant dreams, so I didn't
mind giving up more of my sleep allotment. It was
always the same dream, actually. I loved roller coast-
ers as a kid. They were the closest I could get to flying
in those days. I lived only five miles away from a
freestanding wood-frame monster. I thought I would
love nothing better, until they built a tubular steel,
eight-loop supercoaster.
     I'd never been afraid on the old roller coaster. With
all the courage of an experienced ten-year-old, I'd sit
in the car as it slowly reached the top, the horizon
slanting off to my left, and pretend it was the rim of a
planet and I was an astronaut. As it went over the top,
plunging down a cliff of wood and metal, I made it a
point of honor not to hold on to the crash bar. I was
too grown-up for that!
     I was always interested in how things were put
together and how they worked. So I asked about the
new roller coaster. A man who worked at the amuse-
ment park told me stuff he wasn't supposed to say,
stuff he knew nothing about--about how the forces
generated could snap a human neck like rotten cord-
wood, how the auxiliary chain that gave the car
acceleration had a lot of extra strain on it for an eight-
loop ride.
     As I started up the first hill of the new ride, I
thought about what I'd learned. I didn't know it was
all bogus crap made up to impress a ten-year-old.
The first loop, I worried about centrifugal force
snapping my neck; the second loop, I sweated over
velocity tearing me out of my seat; the third loop, I
fixated on the damned chain coming loose; and the
fourth loop was reserved for a ten-year-old having
ulcers over the gears stripping. And then I threw up--
not a good thing to do when you're upside down.
I wonder if that bastard ever knew what damage his
misinformation caused?
     As I grew up, I learned how real knowledge could
banish fear. You play the odds. You focus on the job at
hand. You don't want to mess up. The childhood
trauma was behind me ... until it came back now on
Deimos as I tried to grab a little sleep. Instead of rest,
I was back on that eight-loop metal monster, and now
it turned into the arms and legs of a steam-demon.
When the creature screamed at me and raised its
missile arm, I would always wake up; so I didn't even
have the pleasure of fighting or dying.
     I didn't worry about my stupid dreams, though. It
sure beat fighting the real thing. Besides, I was getting
off easy compared to Arlene.
     I knew things were bad when I tried to wake her up
and she stared with unblinking eyes, not seeing a
damned thing. I realized she was still asleep. I'd read
somewhere that it's risky to wake a person from a
trance state, and I didn't require medical training to
know Arlene was Somnambulist City.
     There wasn't time to go hunting for a medical
library. A quick check of medical supplies produced a
Law Book, wedged between the surgical bandages and
antibiotics. I had to laugh. A text on medical malprac-
tice had made it all the way to a Martian moon, and
now, by way of a hyperspace tunnel, had almost
returned to Earth.
     I wasn't laughing as I returned to Arlene. She
walked in her sleep, striking at the air in front of her.
"Get away," she said to phantoms only she could see.
"I won't leave you. I'll stay, I'll stay!"
     5
If I shouldn't wake her, there seemed no
     reason I shouldn't try to communicate. "Arlene, can
you hear me?"
     "Quiet," she said, "I don't want Fly to hear you.
He's depending on me."
     "Why don't you want him to know about me?" I
asked.
     "Because you're evil," she said with conviction.
"You're all evil, you bastards."
     She walked slowly down the corridor. So long as she
wasn't in danger of hurting herself, I saw no reason to
shock her out of it. "Why are we bad?"
     "You scare me. You make my brother do bad
things!"
     Up to that point I did not know that Arlene even
had a brother.
     It was weird--I thought we'd known everything
about each other's family life. She talked about her
parents and growing up in Los Angeles all the time. I
was uncomfortable pursuing the matter, but I rationa-
lized away my moral qualms and decided to play out
the hand. "Who are we?" I asked again.
     She swayed drunkenly, delivering a monologue like
those weird, old plays from previous centuries. "Bad
things in the air, in the night, making my brother
crazy. He'd never do bad things except for you. I
thought I'd never see you again . . . Why'd you follow
me into space, to Mars, to Deimos? When I grew up, I
thought you weren't real, but now I know better. You
followed me, but I won't let you get inside me; not
inside!"
     When Arlene had kidded me about going down
memory lane, I took it in good humor. But if we were
going to have to relive all the bad stuff from our
childhood as the air leaked away, I was good and
ready to say good-bye to Deimos now, rocket or no
rocket, instead of later.
     In the meantime, what was I going to do about
Arlene? I couldn't let her wander the corridors, argu-
ing with ghosts from her childhood. With time short
and no way to send to Earth for a correspondence
course in psychology, I went with common sense.
"Arlene, we'll make a deal with you," I said. "We'll
stop bothering you and let you get back to Fly."
"In exchange for what?" she wanted to know, quite
reasonably.
     "Because we've moved back to Earth, and you can't
touch us there."
     "Fly and I are building a ship to take us to Earth,"
"Ha, we don't believe you two will get anywhere
near us. You'll be stuck on Deimos forever!"
"That's a lie!" she snapped, and stopped walking.
"We'll fight you again." She stared right at me. "We're
not afraid of your little genetic stupidmen."
"Big words!" I said.
     She came right at me, fists raised, and started
hitting me. As I fended off her blows--not too
difficult, considering the difference in reach--I
yelled, "Hang on, Arlene, I'm coming to help you.
This is Fly, Fly!"
     As I say, I never took any courses in psychology, but
I acted in school plays. And to steal a phrase, it
doesn't take a rocket scientist to go with the flow. I
gave myself a magna cum laude graduation as her eyes
came into focus and she recognized me.
     "Fly? What happened?"
"We've been fighting monsters again."
     She looked around the empty corridor and then
back to me. I didn't have to spell it out. "How much
longer can we take this?"
     "Not a second longer than we have to."
Arlene started seeing weird colors after that--
auras, shadows, and things she wouldn't tell at first.
Sometimes she would put the tech documents down,
sitting quietly with her eyes shut until the colors went
away.
     It scared me plenty, but it terrified her. She was
losing her mind--and she knew it. So when I told her
the engine was eighty percent finished, Arlene urged,
"Fly, forget the other twenty percent. It's done! Let's
blow this popcorn stand."
     I had to be honest. "A.S., there are still a few
systems I don't think are in really good shape."
"We can't wait. We've taken chances with worse
odds than that the whole time we've been on this
rock. Fly, I ... I stopped being able to see color
vision this morning. All I can see is gray--except
when I hallucinate a rainbow-colored aura. And my
peripheral vision is shot." She paused, licking her
lips. "And Fly, there's something else."
     She came close and spoke softly, seriously. "I want
to confess something to you, Fly. What would your
nuns think of that? For the first time I'm really afraid.
I'm afraid I might kill you, thinking you're one of the
monsters. I couldn't stand that."
     The little voice in the back of my head had whis-
pered that possibility when she first imagined the
pumpkin. It was a chance I was willing to take. Even
so, I was glad she, not I, stated the danger loud and
clear.
     I sped up preparations, insisting that Arlene sleep
whenever possible. The air and pressure problems
were getting to me as well, but I handled them better
than Arlene.
     Of course, the problem with oxygen starvation is
that you are not the best judge of your own reason.
But the best chance for both of us was to finish the
rocket.
     And we were close, tantalizingly close.
I suddenly got the creepy crawlies. I recognized the
symptom: I was picking up the same psychosis as
Arlene. "All right," I acquiesced, "we go in the next
few hours. We have a chance, I guess; eighty percent is
eighty points better than zero."
     We got busy. We drank water. We ate a last good
meal of biscuits, cheese, fruit, nuts. The Eskimos say
that food is sleep, by which I guess they mean if your
body can't get one kind of recharge, you might as well
take the other.
     Arlene abandoned me to work out the telemetry
program that would (God willing) launch us, kill
Deimos's orbital velocity, dropping us into the atmos-
phere, then take us down, at which point she'd hand
over control to me to find a suitable spot to touch
down. Fortunately, it was basically cut-and-paste; I
doubt she could have written it from scratch . . . not
in the condition she was in. The hand of God must
have graced her, though she'd never admit it, for her
to keep it together long enough to patch it together.
As we prepared to leave, I kept running the basic
worries through my mind. The mail tubes were de-
signed for Mars, which has only a fraction the atmos-
phere of Earth and a much lower gravity; the specific
impulse developed by the rockets might not be
enough to overcome Earth's gravity as we spilled
velocity and tried to land. On the other hand, the
thick atmosphere might cause so much friction that
our little ship would burn up.
     The launcher was a superconducting rail gun. Re-
minded me of the eight-loop wonder at the amuse-
ment park back in the Midwest. This time I hoped I
wouldn't throw up. At least this piece of equipment
didn't have an auxiliary chain ... so what was there
to worry about?
     I grunted the launcher around to point opposite
Deimos's orbital path. The rocket controls were sim-
ple to operate, thank God; throttle, stick, various
navigational gear that I didn't really understand, and
environmental controls, all ranged around my face in
a tremendously uncomfortable position.
     Then suddenly, a few hours before our scheduled
departure, Arlene totally freaked out.
     At first I thought she was joking. She strolled up to
me and said, "Don't try to fool me; I know what you
really are."
     "Yeah, a prize SOB," I said distractedly. A moment
later I was on my butt with Arlene's boot on my chest
and a shiv--a sharpened piece of metal--against my
throat. Looking into her eyes, I saw the blank look of a
zombie . . . and for a moment, Jesus, I thought they'd
somehow gotten her, reworked her!
     But it was just the low pressure, or maybe slow
oxygen deprivation. I talked to her for five minutes
from my supine position, saying anything, God knows
what, anything to snap her back to some semblance of
herself. After a while she dropped the shiv and started
crying, saying she had murdered God or some such
silly nonsense.
     I wasn't going to abandon her, no matter what; but
there was nothing in my personal rule book that said I
had to make it any more difficult. We had Medikits in
the shed. I gave her a shot. She struggled, coughed,
and turned to me. "Why can't we eat our brothers?"
she asked; then the drug took effect.
     She'd be okay; in the mail-tube rocket, we've have
more pressure, and more important, more partial-
pressure of O2. She'd be all right ... I hoped.
I put her aboard the rocket, threw in a bag of
supplies, and squeezed in next to her. It was like being
in a sleeping bag together--or a coffin. I positioned
myself so I could reach all the controls, took a deep
breath and got serious.
     Just before lighting the cigar, I remembered the
stark terror of riding in the E7 seat of an S-8 sub-
hunter "Snark" jet and coming in for my virgin
landing on an aircraft carrier. Trusting entirely to the
guy on the other end made me more nervous than the
idea of landing on a postage stamp. Well, this time,
for better or worse, I was the guy with the stick;
considering that I'd never flown anything but a troop
shimmy over some mountains, I almost wished I were
back in the S-8.
     I threw the switches, pushed forward on the throttle
(oddly similar to a passenger airliner), and the rocket
slid along the tube, launching at ten g's. Arlene was
already out, of course, and missed the pleasure of
blacking out with me.
     Suddenly, I discovered myself in a strange room, a
faint hissing catching my attention. Black and white,
no color ... I knew I should know where I was, what
all these things, this equipment around me, was.
I should know my name too, I guessed.
     Then the sound cut back in; fly, someone said. A
command? Fly, fly--"Fly." It was me, my lips, saying
the word fly ... the name! Fly, me; my name.
Then I saw color and recognized the jerry-rigged
blinking lights and liquid-crystal displays of the mail
tube. I'd installed them myself; the mail doesn't need
to see where it's going, but we did.
     Through the slit of a viewscreen, I saw deepest blue
with faint, cotton-candy wisps, strings flashing past. I
glanced at the altimeter--much too high for clouds.
Ionized gases?
     Then something socked me in the face, like a 10mm
shell, and agony exploded across my face. At first it
was bilateral; then it focused right behind my eye-
balls, like God's own worst migraine. For a few
seconds I thought my head literally was going to
detonate. Then it faded as the blood finally
repressurized my cranial arteries and rebooted my
brain. I looked at the chronometer: the entire black-
out had lasted only forty-five seconds.
     It could have been forty-five years.
A low groan announced Arlene's return to con-
sciousness. "Fly," she moaned, "good luck."
     I was too busy to say anything. But it was good
having her back again. The calculations she'd already
worked out for our glide path were okay, and I used
the retros to get us on her highway.
     As we came in, the ride got bumpier and rougher.
The interior of the little craft started heating up.
Being so close together made us sweat all the faster.
When it got over fifty degrees centigrade, beads of
perspiration poured into my eyes, interfering with
vision.
     But the temp continued to rise. The mail tubes are
supposed to be insulated--but the skin on this one
was built for Mars.
     In Earth atmosphere, we were being baked. The
temp boiled up past seventy degrees, and I was gasping
for air, every breath searing my lungs. My skin turned
red and I could barely hold the controls. Another
minute and we would be dead.
     6
Fly!" Arlene screamed. "Blow the oxygen!
     We'll lose it, but it'll heat up and blow out the
exhaust, cooling the interior!"
     "Not again!" I said.
"Huh?"
     "We'll be low on air again!"
"Do it, Fly, or we'll fry."
     We took turns making the other face unpleasant
facts. It was something like being married.
     I did as she commanded. The cooling effect made a
real difference. My brain was still on fire, but at least I
could think again.
     "So what systems still aren't working?" she asked
next, still gasping from each searing breath.
This seemed like an opportune moment to be
     completely honest. "Now that you mention it," I
mentioned, "the only one I'm worried about is the
landing system."
     "What?"
"The thingamabob would have come in useful for
landing. What do they call it? Oh yes, the aerial-
braking system."
     She sighed. If there had been more room in our
little cocoon, she might have shrugged as well. "By-
gones," she said. "Sorry for the trouble I caused."
"Arlene, don't be ridiculous! I was having crazy
dreams and was about to go off the deep end myself.
You just went first because you're . . . smaller." It
occurred to me that we were having more of a
discussion than was wise under the circumstances.
"So how in hell do we land this puppy?" No sooner
were these words out of her mouth than Arlene
started yawning.
     I figured we should try and set it down anywhere on
dry land. Live or die, I wasn't in the mood for a swim.
If we survived, we could get our bearings anywhere on
Earth--pick a destination and then haul butt.
We didn't have any time to waste. Thanks to our
stunt with the oxygen, the O2 to CO2 ratio was
dropping. I was in even less mood for us to become
goofy from oxygen deprivation after watching Arlene
go nuts before--thanks, Mr. Disney, but I'm not
going back on that ride.
     I had to explain this to Arlene, but she was asleep
again so I explained it to the Martian instead. He was
a little green guy, about three feet high, and I was glad
to see him. "About time one of you showed up," I
said. "We always expected to see guys like you up here
instead of all this medieval stuff."
     "Perfectly understandable," he said in the voice of
W. C. Fields. "These demons are a pain. But they're
welcome to Deimos."
     "Why is that?" I asked.
"Confidentially, it's an ugly moon, don't you think?
Not at all a work of beauty like Phobos, a drinking
man's moon. Speaking of which, you wouldn't have
some whiskey on you?"
     "Sorry, only water."
He was very offended. "You mean that liquid fish
fornicate in? We Martians don't care for the stuff. You
can drown in it, you know. Now ours is a nice, dry
planet, rusty brown like that car of yours after you
abandoned it to the elements. Mars is nice and cold,
good practice for the grave. Are you sure you don't
have any booze?"
     I figured he was bringing up drowning just to scare
me. If Arlene and I didn't burn up in the atmosphere,
there was always a good chance of winding up in the
drink and drowning like the Shuttle pioneers had in
the 1980s.
     Besides, he'd raised a certain issue and I wanted an
answer. "Why does Phobos look better to you than
Deimos?" I asked.
     "My dear fellow, Phobos is the inner moon of
Mars. Deimos was always on the outs even before
those hobgoblins hijacked it. The outs is a bad place
to be, and you are out of time and going to die and
betray Arlene and betray the Earth, you puny little
man with your delusions."
     While he was talking, he was growing in size, and
sharp teeth protruded beyond his sneering lips; the
eyes flamed red, as the rockets flamed red, as the sky
was underneath and overhead all at the same time.
And I was screaming.
     "You're one of them! You're a demon-imp-specter-
thing. You tricked me."
     "Fly," said a comforting voice from behind the
Martian. "Fly, you're hallucinating."
     "I knew that," I told her as the Martian faded from
view. "I knew it all along."
     A quick check of the cabin gave a head count of (1)
myself, (2) Arlene, (3) no Martians. I checked again to
make sure. Yep, just two humans. No monsters. No
Martians. Not much air. Definitely not enough air.
"We've got to land this quickly," I said.
     "Um ... if it's all the same to you, Fly, I can wait
until we can land it safely."
     The atmosphere got thick enough that I pulled the
cord to extend our mini-wings. Instantly, we started
buffeting like mad, shaking so hard I thought my
innards would become outards. We rolled, pitched,
yawed--triple-threat!--and it was all I could do to
hang on to the ragged edge of Arlene's computer-
projected glide path.
     The screen displayed a series of concentric squares
that gave the illusion of flying through an infinite
succession of square wire hoops. So long as I kept
inside them, I should go where she projected, some-
where in North America, she said; even she wasn't
sure where.
     But I kept cutting through the path, coloring out-
side the lines. I couldn't hold it! I'd yank on the stick
and physically wrench us back through the wire
frames and out the other side (they turned from red to
black when I was briefly on the meatball). The best I
could do was stay within spitting distance of my
proper course . . . and naturally, we were running too
hot, much too fast. We were going to overshoot our
mark--possibly straight into the Pacific Ocean.
I barely hung on, abandoning retros to guide our
two-man "cruise missile" by fins, air-braking to spill
as much excess velocity as possible. The ship started
shaking. An old silver tooth filling started to ache.
Arlene leaned back against the seat, muscles in her
jaw tightening, eyes getting wider and wider. I think
she was starting to appreciate the gravity of our
situation.
     North America unwound beneath the window like
a quilt airing out on a sunny day. We were over the
Mississippi, sinking lower, falling west, descending
fast. Then we entered a cloud bank. We weren't there
very long.
     "I know where we are!" shouted Arlene, voice
starting to sound funny from the breathing problem. I
placed it too. We'd popped out of the cloud bank
about 150 kilometers due west of Salt Lake City. The
Bonneville salt flats were ideal for a landing--a vast,
dry lake bed, nothing to hit but dirt. Very hard dirt.
But we had a chance.
     "Spill the fuel!" she screamed, right in my ear,
straining against the buffeting. At least we were low
enough that we could breathe. I yanked the lever,
dumping what little JP-9 remained in the tanks.
The cabin was getting hot again, the structure of the
rocket shaking like we were in a Mixmaster, and it
was now or never. "Hold on!" I shouted, thinking
how stupid it sounded but needing to say something.
Arlene screamed like a banshee--a much more
     insightful comment.
We came down fast and hard, finally striking the
ground at Mach 0.5. The ship shredded on impact,
skipping like a rock on the waters of a salt-white lake.
Then it rolled, and Arlene's elbow jammed into my
side so hard it knocked the breath out of me.
End over end we tumbled, and my brains, already
fried, scrambled so I didn't know dirt from sky. We
shed bits and pieces from the ship--only the titanium
frame was left, but still we kept rolling.
     The ship finally skidded to a stop, on its side, with
me underneath Arlene.
     For a good five minutes, felt like five hours, we lay
silently, dazed, wondering if we had made it or not
. . . waiting for the world to stop spinning.
"Are you all right?" Arlene managed to ask.
     "I think we're alive," I said.
The fuel was completely spent, which was just fine
with me. No risk of fire or explosion. Now if we could
just get out of the thing.
     Fortunately, the door on Arlene's side wasn't
jammed. In fact, it wasn't even with us anymore.
Arlene stumbled out, falling heavily with a grunt. I
followed somewhat more gracefully, which was a
switch,
     We'd suffered no injuries, thank God; I didn't want
us to wind up sitting ducks. If aliens had taken over
Utah--a belief held by one of my old nuns many
years before the invasion--then we must be on our
guard. Someone, or something, would come to find
out what had just made a smoking hole in the salt lick.
We took a moment to enjoy being alive and in one
piece, enjoying the dusk in Utah, breathing the best
air we'd tasted in months. Then we took inventory.
The food and water came through. But the weapons
were trashed.
     "You said we couldn't do it," she teased me.
"Never listen to a pessimist," I answered, adding,
"and the world is so full of them you might as well
give up." She laughed as she playfully punched my
arm, numbing me.
     Astonishingly, Arlene's GPS wrist locator was still
working. That was one tough piece of equipment! I
thought maybe I should buy stock in the company;
then I wondered whether any companies still existed.
Maybe the monsters had done what no government
was able to do: end all commerce and starve the
survivors.
     She sat cross-legged and fiddled with the thing,
trying to get a fix on our exact position. The satellite
should have responded immediately, spotting us with-
in a meter or two.
     "Getting anything?" I asked, listening to the sym-
phony of white noise coming off her arm.
     "Nada," she said. "I'll bet the sat is still up there,
but the Bad Guys must have encrypted the signal.
Maybe so humans can't use them in combat."
     "I wish they were all as dumb as the demons," I
said.
     "Yeah, one spidermind goes a long way. But who
cares, Fly? We've beaten the odds again. We're alive,
dammit!" She ran across the sand like a kid let loose
at the beach. Then she gestured for me to join her. I
ran over and grabbed at her. She threw me off balance
and I took a tumble in the sand.
     "Clumsy!" she said, sounding as young as she had
when sleepwalking through her waking nightmare on
Deimos; but now was a lot more pleasant.
     "We don't have time for this, you know," I said, but
my heart wasn't it.
     "We don't have time to be alive, or to breathe air.
But here we are, still in one piece. God, I didn't think
we were going to make it. We got down from orbit
with nothing but spare parts, spit, and duct tape, and
our bare hands--hah!"
     "Frankly, my dear, I had my doubts," I admitted. I
couldn't help running after her. She was right. We
kept coming through stuff that should have killed us
twenty times over. We weren't indestructible, but I
was beginning to believe in something I'd always
hated: luck.
     People who accomplish nothing in their lives al-
ways attribute the success of everybody else to good
luck or knavery. I believe you make your own luck:
"Chance favors the prepared mind." But in combat,
there are too many random factors to calculate.
Arlene and I were feeling cocky. We had plenty of
reason to be thankful.
     "I wonder what the radiation level is here," I said.
"Do we have to know?" she asked, skipping. "It
didn't look like any bombs were going off in this
area."
     "Not while we were watching," I pointed out.
"There's no reason to nuke a desert. It's already a
wasteland."
     "You nuke military bases, Arlene. And don't forget
the nuclear testing that's gone on in areas like this."
"Human wars, Fly; and human preparation for
     war. Besides, we don't know for certain we were
seeing nuclear weapons going off; they could be some
other kind of weapon without fallout. Makes it easier
to take over later."
     "Some of these beasties seem to thrive on radia-
tion."
     She stopped playing in the sand and sat down. She
didn't say anything at first, as she poured sand out of
her right boot, but then had an answer for me as she
began unlacing her left one: "The radiation levels on
the base weren't healthy for humans, but they weren't
anywhere near what you'd get from a full-scale nucle-
ar exchange."
     The lady had a point. "You're probably right. You
can thank me for going to such lengths to bring us
down in this location."
     "Ha," she said. "Pure luck. You brought us down
where you could."
     "Skill and perseverance, dear lady. One of these
days, I'll explain my theory of luck to you."
7
     For the moment, I was glad to join her,
sitting in the sandbox. I ignored the little voice in the
back of my head that worked overtime to keep us
alive. It said we didn't have a moment to waste; the
monsters of doom could be upon us any second,
burning away our little victory faster than the setting
sun.
     Comes a time when you have to say the hell with it,
if only for a moment. Arlene and I had recently faced
the worst thing anyone can face, worse than the
monsters or dying in space. We knew what it meant to
lose your sanity . . . and come back to yourself again.
Arlene started whistling "Molly Malone." She'd
picked one of the few songs to which I knew the
words. I sang along. All that was missing was a bottle
of Tullamore Dew, the world's finest sipping whiskey.
As it was, our duet seemed to transform the lengthen-
ing shadows of dusk in Utah into the cool glades of
Ireland. I wondered if doom had come there. Were
there demons in Dublin? Did the men there see little
green leprechauns instead of Martians in their mo-
ment of madness? I wondered about the whole world,
and it was too much for me.
     Right now the world was a stretch of desert in Utah.
What we could do for ourselves, for the human race,
for the world, would be determined here, as it had
been on Deimos, and before that, Phobos. We'd take
it one world at a time.
     I lay back happily for a few moments, watching the
stars wink into existence in the darkening sky.
As night fell, we spotted a glow, due east. That was
the way to bet--Salt Lake City, I guessed. We gath-
ered together what had survived the crash and fol-
lowed the light. We took a break at nine P.M., another
at midnight.
     "How long do you think this is going to take?" she
asked.
     "Not sure, but I'm glad we brought the provisions."
The bag survived the crash just as nicely as we did. We
had water. We had biscuits and granola bars. We had
flashlights (which we wisely didn't use). But I sure as
hell wished we had some weapons, other than one
puny knife in the provisions bag.
     We trekked at night and slept by day. Hell, I saw
Lawrence of Arabia. After Phobos and Deimos and
nearly splattering ourselves over old terra firma, after
all we'd survived, I'd be damned if we were going to
cash in our chips here. Hell, we could go to Nevada to
do that!
     The water held out better than the food. We hud-
dled together in the cold during the day, when we
slept. We could have made a fire, but no point giving
away our location with unnecessary light. And there
was one thing about the situation creepy enough to
encourage caution, even though we hadn't run into
any trouble yet.
     Arlene was the first to notice it: "Fly, there are no
sounds."
     "What do you mean?" I asked. We crunched along
in the night, heading toward a glow that seemed
barely bigger than it was three days ago.
     "The night creatures. No owls . . ."
"Are there owls in the desert?"
     "I don't know, maybe not. But there should be
something. No bugs. No lizards. No nothin'."
I thought about it. "If we've seen the collapse of
civilization, you'd expect wild dogs."
     "There's no coyotes. Nothing. Even out here, there
ought to be something. Unless everything was killed
by the weapons."
     "No, that can't be right. We'd be puking up our guts
by now from poison or radiation. That light suggests
somebody's still in business."
     "I hope so," she said. "So you think that's Salt Lake
City."
     "Should be."
"Salt Lake City, Utah?"
     "Unless it's wintering in Florida."
She was silent for a hundred paces; then she cleared
her throat. "Fly, I have to confess something to you.
Again."
     "Anytime."
"I sort of have a problem with the Mormon
     Church," she said.
Making out her face in the dim light wasn't easy. I
wished we had a full moon instead of the sliver
hanging over us like a scythe. "You were a Mormon?"
I asked.
     "No. But my brother was, briefly."
"You blame the church for ... for whatever hap-
pened?"
     She shook her head. "No, I guess not. He had
problems before he joined the Church; had problems
when he left."
     "Do you think he might be here?" I asked.
"Nah. We lived in North Hollywood. He left for
Utah when he became a Mormon; but after he left the
Church, I don't know what became of him. I don't
care if I ever see him again."
     "I'll never bring it up," I said.
"There's another reason I'm telling you this," she
went on. "I became obsessed with Mormonism while
he was with them. I read books by them and against
them. I even read the Book of Mormon."
     "Maybe that could come in useful," I suggested.
"I doubt it. It just makes me more prejudiced.
Look, Fly, if we find living human beings at the end of
this, we must stand with them and fight with them.
I'm promising you right now I won't discuss religion
with any of those patriarchal..."
     She paused long enough for me to jump in: "I get
the picture."
     "Do you have any opinions abut them?" she asked,
quite fairly.
     "Well, I read an article about them having a strong
survivalist streak; that they stockpile a year's supply
of food and stuff like that. You'll get a kick out of this!
When I visited L.A. once, I took in the sights:
Disneyland, the La Brea Tar Pits, Paramount studios,
the Acker Mansion, and I even found time to go into
their big temple at the end of Overland Avenue.
There's an angel up top with a trumpet; I mistakenly
called him Gabriel."
     "They must have loved that; it's the Angel
Moroni."
     "Well, now I know."
"Heh. I used to drop the i off that name when I used
it."
     I took a deep breath. "Arlene, I'm going to hold you
to that promise not to talk theology with them."
"Scout's honor," she said.
     "Were you ever a Scout?"
She didn't answer again.
     We kept the flashlights off; the glow on the horizon
was the only illumination I wanted in that desert. It
was easy to follow the direction at night. We made
sure that we didn't waste opportunities.
     "You're burning night-light," Arlene would say
when it was her turn to wake me up. Then she'd
snicker, Something amused her, but she didn't let me
in on it.
     Turned out that we ran out of food, but we had
more water than we needed. It took us five days to get
to Salt Lake City, the center of what once had been
the Mormon world. And by God, it still was!
     We lay on our bellies in some brush, shielding out
eyes from the sun, leaning against a side-paneled
truck.
     "They're people!" marveled Arlene as we watched
hundreds of men on the streets in the early dawn.
They relieved other men who'd obviously been doing
the night shift.
     "Where do you think the women are?" I whispered.
"Home, minding the kids. Mormons are so damned
patriarchal."
     "Arlene . . ."
We were in a good spot to see plenty, behind a
wrecked truck on a rise. As the sun crawled up the
sky, shafts of light came through the broken windows
like laser beams, one blinding me for a second. We
positioned ourselves to see more. There was plenty to
see.
     The streets of this garrison town had over a thou-
sand men with guns, and to my surprise I made out a
few women and teenage girls toting heavy artillery.
Arlene gave me one of her funny looks.
     I didn't make her take back anything she'd said;
when a society is threatened, it will do what it must or
go down fast.
     "You don't think they might be working with the
aliens?" asked my buddy. I had the same thought. But
they didn't act zombified, and we'd learned that the
monsters preferred human lackeys in that condition.
The spidermind had made only one exception when it
needed knowledge in the human brain of poor Bill
Ritch.
     We had to make contact with these people, but I
preferred doing it in a way that wouldn't get us shot.
While I was formulating a plan, Arlene tapped me on
the shoulder.
     I turned and found myself staring down both bar-
rels of a twelve-gauge duck gun. It had gorgeous,
inlaid detail work running all seventy-five centimeters
of the stock and barrel. . . and it was attached to a
beefy hand connected to a large body with a grinning,
boyish face topping it off. Twenty-two, twenty-three,
tops.
     "How do?" said the man. His buddy was a lot
thinner, and he held an old Ruger Mini-14 pointed at
Arlene.
     He caught my expression and grinned at me as if he
could read my mind. Here was proof positive we were
facing honest-to-God, living humans: they had pride
in a good weapon.
     "Hi," I said, moving my eyes from man to man.
"Good morning," said Arlene.
     "Hey," said the other man by way of greeting,
noticing how my eyes kept drifting to his piece. "Took
me quite a while to get one of these," he said
conversationally.
     "Beautiful weapon," I said, noticing that the beefy
guy was still calm.
     The thin one nodded and said, "They are compact,
easy handling, fast shooting and hard hitting." He
paused, then added: "Don't you agree?"
     Thunk. The penny dropped. They were testing us!
"Oh, yes," said Arlene, jumping in. The thin guy
looked at her a little funny and waited for me to say
something.
     "One of my favorite weapons," I said. "Hardly any
kick. Not like the bigger calibers."
     Finally the big guy spoke again: "Jerry, these people
don't want a lecture."
     Jerry squinted at him. "They're military. Look at
their clothes." We weren't asked to confirm or deny
anything, so we kept our mouths shut. Jerry had
plenty of words left in him: "They're interested in a
good weapon. Aren't you?"
     He looked straight at me and I answered right away:
"I sure am, especially that one you've got."
Jerry smiled and went on: "Albert gets tired of
hearing me go on about what a good model this is.
They were even reasonably priced until they were
outlawed."
     "Not a problem now," said Arlene. "I'm sure
there's plenty of squashed zombies you can take one
off'n."
     Whenever she spoke, the men seemed a bit uncom-
fortable. I had the impression she was getting off
on it.
     Arlene looked over at me and winked. We'd fought
enough battles to read each other's expressions and
body language. Her expression told me that things
were looking up as far as she was concerned, but she
couldn't resist getting in the act: "I like an M-14," she
said.
     Jesus, it was like going shooting with Gunnery
Sergeant Goforth and his redneck buddies!
     The men started to warm to her a little. "Good
choice for a military gal," said Albert. We all just kind
of stood there for a moment, smiling at each other,
and then Albert broke the ice by changing the subject.
He asked, in the same friendly tone of voice: "You
wouldn't happen to be in league with those ministers
of Satan invading our world?"
     "We were wondering the same thing about you,"
said Arlene. I gave her a dirty look for that.
The beefy kid with the double-barreled duck gun
chuckled. "Don't mind her saying that, mister. It
shows a proper godly attitude. I hope you both check
out; I like you. We talk the same language. But we
can't take any chances."
     They searched us both thoroughly, found the
knife, and impounded it. We were weaponless. In a
way, I was glad. These guys weren't acting like ama-
teurs . . . which meant they had a chance against the
invaders.
     "Okay," said the man with the bird gun, "we'll take
you to the President of the Council of Twelve."
Arlene grimaced, which told me she knew what he
was talking about; but she kept her promise. Not a
word came out of her about the religious stuff. The
title sounded impressive enough to tell me that the
Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints was
still in business big-time.
     Maybe she was right, and they were a cult; but I
don't know any difference between a cult and a
religion except as a popularity contest. They had
survived, and we needed allies against the monsters.
I knew one more thing about the Mormons that I
hadn't mentioned to Arlene during our little chat in
the desert. A friend I trusted with Washington con-
nections told me that a good part of Mormon self-
reliance was to really prepare for every eventuality.
After their tumultuous history, extreme caution was
understandable. Result: there were a lot of Mormons
in the government ... in the FBI, in the various
services, in the CIA, even in NASA. God help anyone
who tried to play Hitler with the Mormons as the
Jews! The Mormons should be ideal allies against a
literal demonic invasion.
     Arlene and I would find out soon enough.
8
     As we were led through the streets of SLC, I
allowed myself to hope that Arlene and I had lucked
out by landing here. If I were still a praying man, I'd
burn candles and say a few Ave Marias that we
wouldn't find a spidermind sitting in the Mormon
Tabernacle . . . which loomed closer and closer, obvi-
ously our destination.
     The people in the street gave us a wide berth as we
passed, but they didn't act unfriendly--just cautious.
No one acted like an idiot. I hoped it stayed that way.
Suddenly, a man on a big motorcycle roared over to
us and stopped a few inches away, kicking up dust. He
wore a business suit. "Hey, Jerry," he said.
"Hey, Nate," said Jerry. "Folks, this is my brother,
Nate. I'd introduce you, but I don't know your
names,"
     "Now, Jerry," said Albert, "you know better than
that. The President of the Twelve hasn't interviewed
them yet. They should give their names to him."
"Sorry."
     "Sounds like they know your names already," said
the man on the cycle, taking off his helmet. These
guys were twins.
     Although Arlene kept her promise about not dis-
cussing theological matters, she leapt into any other
waters that gurgled up around us. "That's a bad
machine," she said.
     Nate proved to be his brother's brother: "You like
this?" he asked with a big grin.
     "They have good taste in guns," said Jerry, spurring
them on. Albert groaned.
     Nate was on a roll: "BMW Paris-Dakar, 1000
cc's ..." He and Arlene went on about the bike for a
few minutes.
     Part of me wanted to strangle the girl; but another
part appreciated what she was doing. Putting the
other guys at their ease is a critical strategy. There
were a lot more men in the street than women, but our
captors--hosts?--remained respectful and polite in
Arlene's presence. A very civilized society.
". . . and the glove compartment can hold five
grenades!" announced Nate, topping off his presenta-
tion.
     "That does it," said Albert. "If these nice people
are spies, why don't you just give them mimeo-
graphed reports?"
     In the short time we'd been prisoners, I'd learned
that there was no genuine military discipline here. I
had mixed feelings about this. The good thing was
that I couldn't believe these casual people had been
co-opted by the invaders. They still talked and acted
like free men. Very loquacious free men!
     As far as getting their president to cooperate with
us, it could go either way. In the land of the civilians,
the Marine is king ... or a fall guy. I was impatient to
find out which.
     "Oh, I almost forgot," said Nate. "I have a message
for you. The President hasn't returned yet."
"You should have told us that right off," said Albert
peevishly. "We'll take them to Holding."
     We entered the Tabernacle. It was nice and cool,
with a fresh wood smell that was clean and bracing.
The floors were highly polished. You wouldn't notice
anything different from the world I'd left on a court-
martial charge that now seemed to belong to a differ-
ent universe.
     Arlene wasn't the only one with a lot of reading
under her belt. I didn't know a whole lot about the
Mormons, although I knew a bit more than I told
her--but I'd read the Bible all the way through,
enough to recognize things the Mormons took for
inspiration from what they accepted as the earlier
Revealed Word.
     In addition, the nuns taught a little about compara-
tive religion, probably so we'd be better missionaries.
I remembered that God was supposed to have given
Moses directions for the construction of the Taberna-
cle. The structure was to be a house constructed of a
series of boards of a special wood, overlaid with gold,
set on end into sockets of silver. In other words, it
wasn't Saint Pete's, but it was no Alabama revival tent
either. The Mormons adapted the idea for a perma-
nent standing structure.
     Right outside the Tabernacle were some more con-
ventional office buildings. We entered one, and were
led into an office by Albert. "I'll bring you something
to eat and drink," he said. I was hungry and thirsty
enough to settle for bread and water. A minute later
Albert returned with bread and water, then left us
alone.
     "Damn," I said; "I was hoping for a more splendor-
ous galley."
     I walked over to a small table, and picked up the
sole object on it: the Book of Mormon: Another
Testament of Jesus Christ. I felt puckish and decided
to tease Arlene a bit. I thought she'd pushed the
envelope too much, encouraging the more talkative of
our captors.
     "Bet you can't remember all the books in here,
Arlene."
     She gave me that look of hers. "Will you bet me the
next decent weapon we find?"
     "Deal," I said.
"Okay," she replied, and rattled them off: "First
and Second Books of Nephi, Jacob, Enos, Jarom,
Omni, the Words of Mormon, Book of Mosiah, Alma,
Helaman, Third and Fourth Nephi, Book of Mormon,
Ether, Moroni. You're not getting out of this, Fly. I get
first pick on the next piece!"
     "Damn!" I said, thoroughly impressed.
"Watch what you say near a holy place."
     "Don't worry about it," came a third voice. Albert
had rejoined us without knocking.
     "Don't you knock?" asked Arlene.
"As soon as you're no longer prisoners," he said,
closing the door behind him. "I just wanted you to
know that I don't think you're spies for the demons."
"We call them aliens," I said. The medieval termi-
nology didn't bother me when Arlene and I were using
it to distinguish the different kinds of monsters. It
seemed very different when talking to a deeply reli-
gious perseon. These things from space could be
killed. They were created by scientific means. In no
way should they be confused with immortal spirits
against which all the firepower in the galaxy would
mean nothing.
     "I understand," said Albert. "Would you mind
telling me who you are and how you came to be
here?"
     "Won't the President ask us that?" I asked.
"Yes."
     "Then why should we tell you?" asked Arlene.
"Because I don't have to be as cautious, and I'm a
fellow soldier."
     "So you should tell us about yourself," I said.
"In time. You don't have to tell me anything either,
but you should consider it."
     "Well," I said, thinking on my feet, "if we talk to
one Mormon, we should probably talk to the leader."
Albert laughed. "We're not all Mormons here," he
said. "Just most of us."
     "Oh?" I said, unconvinced.
"Uh, I am," he cautioned. "Think about it. We're
fighting the common enemy of mankind. We don't
care if you're Mormons. We care that you can be
trusted."
     "Makes sense," admitted Arlene in a tone of voice
so natural that I realized she'd been subtly mocking
them before.
     "I'm of the Church," continued Albert, "but Jerry
and Nate are Jehovah's Witnesses."
     "I thought they didn't fight," said Arlene,
surprised.
     "They are not pacifists, but neither are they of the
Latter-Day Dispensations," he said as warning bells
went off in my head. I prayed I could count on
Arlene's promise to keep her trap shut . . . but she
pressed her lips pretty tight.
     "Latter-day what?"
Albert was more succinct than his friends: "They
believe all the world's governments are works of the
devil. They won't fight their fellow man at the com-
mand of a state. But they can fight unhuman monsters
until Judgment Day."
     "I get it," I said. "Draft protesters in World War
Two--"
     "But volunteers for this," Albert finished.
"What do you mean by, uh, 'dispensation'?"
     He laughed. Apparently we'd fallen into the hands
of someone lacking in missionary zeal, for which I
was grateful. "The United States Constitution was
ordained by God. That's why we didn't like seeing it
subverted. We never know if a governmental person is
good or bad until we see where his loyalty lies. But
you two made a wonderful impression on the Wit-
nesses; I think you'll do fine with the President. If you
change your mind about chatting with me, you will
find me easily enough." He left us with the promise
we would see the President soon.
     Three hours later we were led to the office of the
President of the Twelve. A clean-shaven, elderly man
with pure white hair, a dark tan, and a tailored suit
got up from behind a walnut desk and rested his
hands on his blotter. He kept his distance. He had a
judge's face, carved in stone. If we were assassins, he
was giving us a clear shot at him. But Albert and Jerry
continued to baby-sit, fingers on triggers.
     Mexican standoff. He sized us up. We did the same
to him. He reminded me of a senior colonel in the
Corps, a man used to giving orders.
     Finally, he coughed. "I'm the President here," he
said.
     "You make it sound like President of the United
States," I said.
     He didn't seem to mind. "Might as well be," he
said, "under the circumstances. Who are you?"
We gave him name, rank, and serial number. Being
a gentleman, I let Arlene go first. Then he asked the
sixty-four-trillion-dollar question: "How is it you
come to be here?"
     Arlene laughed and let him have it: "Fly, here--
that's his nickname--Fly and I single-handedly
kicked the spit out of the entire Deimos division of
the alien demons. They moved the Martian moon
into orbit around Earth, but we cleaned their clocks."
The leader of the Mormons said, "This is a time for
mighty warriors. We have many prophecies to this
effect. In the Book of Alma there is a verse that I find
indispensable for morale:
     "Behold, I am in my anger, and also my people;
ye have sought to murder us, and we have only
sought to defend ourselves."
     He smiled, pausing before continuing.
"But behold, if ye seek to destroy us more we will
seek to destroy you; yea, and we will seek our
land, the land of our first inheritance."
     "Those words were spoken by Moroni. We must
gird our loins for battle against the ultimate enemy. At
such times as this even women must be used in a
manner unnatural to them. Do you know how much
Delta-V is required to move a moon, even one as
small as Deimos? Why should I believe you?"
     I blinked, nonplussed by the change in subject.
Glancing quickly at Arlene, I saw she was controlling
her reaction to the "unnatural" crack, her face impas-
sive. Good girl!
     "We, ah, fight the same enemy," I said.
"This is what you purport. You also claim to have
hopped out of orbit and landed on your feet. Pray that
we may prove both to our satisfaction. Until such
time, we must be careful. If what you say is true, you
will be able to demonstrate this to us on a mission.
Only then, if you earn our trust, will you"--he
pointedly stared at me, ignoring Arlene--"be allowed
access to our special wisdom. The audience is over,
and good luck to you."
     I worried that Arlene might say something stupid
when I saw her mouth open and the danger sign of her
eyebrows rising faster than any rocket. Hell, I was
worried about myself. But we were ushered out of
there without any disasters.
     "As far as I'm concerned," said Albert, leading us
back to our room, accompanied by Jerry, "you just
flunked spy school."
     "Huh?"
"I don't imagine a spy would concoct so ridiculous
a story and annoy the President so thoroughly."
I said nothing; privately, I thought that was exactly
what a spy might do. It worked, didn't it?
     We felt tension leaking from the corridor, like air
escaping from the dome on Deimos. At least the
President was taking some kind of chance on us. He
didn't realize how big a chance he'd taken talking that
way to Arlene.
     "We belong to the brotherhood of man," Albert
said. "If you think you have problems now, just wait
until people begin believing your story. Then we'll
start treating you like angels!"
     9
I guess they believed our story, somewhat at
least. Fly and I were left alone at last when that rugged
stalwart, Albert Whatever, scurried off on some er-
rand.
     Fly gestured me close. "We really should report in,"
he whispered in my ear.
     "Report in? To whom?" A good question. If the
country were as devastated as we'd been led to
believe, there wasn't much of a military command
structure left to report to anybody.
     If. . . I saw at once where Fly was coming from.
"How much do we really know about these guys?"
asked Fly, confirming my cognition. "Whose side are
they on?"
     "You'd have a hard time persuading me they're
demon-lovers," I said.
     "All right . . . maybe. They're patriots. But are they
right?"
     Wasn't much I could say to that. Fly had a point. . .
as patriotic and pro-human as these Mormons might
be, they still might be wrong about the extent of the
collapse. "You're saying they could be deluded by
their apocalyptic religion."
     He raised his brows. "Mormons aren't apocalyptic,
Arlene. I think you're confusing them with certain
branches of Christianity. I'm only saying that they're
pretty cut off from information . . . the whole govern-
ment might look like it's collapsed from this view-
point; but maybe if we contacted somebody some-
where else, in the Pentagon or at least an actual
Marine Corps base, maybe we'd get a different pic-
ture."
     "All right. Who, then?"
"Chain of command, Arlene. Who do you think we
should contact?"
     I'm always forgetting about the omnipresent chain.
Usually, all I see are enlisted guys like me, maybe one
C.O.--Weems, in our case. I'm not used to thinking
of the Great Chain of Being rising above my head all
the way up to the C-in-C, the President of the United
States. Guess that's why Fly makes the big bucks (heh)
as a noncom, while I'm just a grunt.
     "Um, Major Boyd, I guess. Or the great-grandboss,
Colonel Karapetian."
     "Hm . . . I'm betting this is a bit above m'lord
Boyd's head. I think we should take this up with God
Himself: the colonel."
     "I agree completely. Got the phone number?"
"Yeah, well, that's the next problem. Surely in a
facility this size, there has to be a radio room some-
where, wouldn't you think?"
     We did a lot of thinking over the next hour; we also
did a lot of quiet, careful questioning, staying away
from those obviously "under arms," questioning the
less suspicious civilians instead. But what we mostly
did was a lot of walking. My dogs were barking like
Dobermans long before we found anything radio-
roomlike.
     The "compound" actually comprised a whole series
of buildings, different clumps far away, and included
a large portion of downtown Salt Lake City. There
were other buildings and residences all around, of
course; SLC is big. Well not compared to my old
hometown of L.A., of course, but you get the idea.
"The compound" might include two buildings and
not include the building in between them; it wasn't
defined geographically.
     However, we quickly discovered we were restricted
to a small, two-block radius surrounding the Taberna-
cle. An electrified fence cut that central core off from
the rest of the facility (and the rest of the city); guards
patrolled the fence like a military base; there were
even suspicious pillboxes with tiny bits of what might
have been the barrels of crew-served weapons poking
out, and piles of camouflaged tarps that might conceal
tanks or Bradleys. And the guards were as tight about
controlling what left the core as they were about what
entered.
     I saw a lump that looked suspiciously like an
M-2/A-2 tank, state of the art; I turned to point it
out to Fly, but he was busy staring at the tall office
building at our backs. "What's that up top of that sky-
scraper?" he asked.
     "Skyscraper? You've lived in too many small towns,
Fly-boy."
     "Yeah, yeah. What's up top there? That metal
thing?"
     "Um ... a TV aerial."
"Are you sure? Look again."
     I stared, squinting to clear up my mild astigmatism.
"Huh, I see what you mean. It could be, but I'm not
sure. You think it's a radio antenna, right?"
"I don't know what they're supposed to look like
when they're stationary, only what they look like on
the box we carry with us."
     "Well, you have an urgent appointment, Fly? Let's
check it out."
     "Sure hope they have a working elevator," he said,
surprising me; I thought after our experiences on
Deimos, he'd never want to look at another lift again.
There was an armed guard at the front entrance of
the building, which was a mere fifteen stories tall. . .
hardly a "skyscraper." The rear entrance was barri-
caded. The guard unshipped the Sig-Cow rifle he
carried. "Aren't you the two unbelievers who claim
they stopped the aliens cold on Deimos?"
     "That's we," I said, "Unbelievers 'R' Us."
Fly hushed me. He always claims I make things
worse in any confrontational situation, but I just
don't see it.
     "The President sent us on an inspection tour," said
Fly with the sort of easy, confident lying I admired so
much but could never pull off. "Supposed to 'famil-
iarize' ourselves with your SOPs." He rolled his eyes;
you could hear the quotation marks around familiar-
ize. "As if we haven't had enough military procedures
for a lifetime!"
     The guard shook his head, instantly sympathetic.
"Ain't it the truth? Few weeks ago, you know what I
was? I was a cook at the Elephant Grill, you know, up
at Third? So what do they make me when the war
breaks out? A sentry!"
     "You know this building well?"
"Well, I should! My fiancee worked here. Before the
war."
     "Look, can you come along with us, show us the
place? I come from a small town, and we don't have
buildings this size. You're not stuck as the only guard,
are you?" There were no other guards in sight; I'm
sure Fly noticed that as well as I.
     "'Fraid so, Corporal."
"Fly. Fly Taggart."
     "I'm afraid so, Fly. I can't leave. Look, you can't get
lost. It's just a big, tall square. See the Tabernacle
there? Anytime you get lost, just walk to the windows
and walk around until you see the Tabernacle. You
can't miss it."
     "You sure it'll be okay?"
"You can't miss it. No problemo."
     "Look, if I get in trouble, is there a phone I can call
down here on?"
     "Sure, use the black phone near the elevator, the
one with no buttons. Just pick it up; it'll ring here."
"Thanks. This way? The elevators over here?"
The helpful sentry showed us how to get to the
elevators. They were actually behind some partitions;
we might not have found them ... for several min-
utes.
     We climbed aboard, and Fly said in a normal
speaking voice, "Don't trust these elevators. May as
well start at the top and walk down, floor by floor,
familiarizing ourselves with the procedures. Then we
can report back to the President and tell him where
we'd do the most good."
     To me, he used hand signals: Start top; find radio;
broadcast report.
     The antenna was atop the roof, of course; but that
didn't mean that's where the radio room would be.
We wandered around every floor, trying to look
official. Early on, I found a clipboard hanging on a peg
in the rooftop janitor's shed, where they kept all the
window-washing stuff. Fly took the clipboard and
made a point of officiously writing down reports on
everybody in every office, with me trailing along
behind looking like his assistant.
     It worked; people tensed up, stopped talking,
worked diligently, and not a one confronted us to ask
us who the hell we were. It helped that Fly had been
inventory control officer for a few months. He stirred
them up and made them sweat.
     Finally, twelve floors down from the top, we found
the damned radio room. Two operators, both civil-
ians. One had a pistol; we were unarmed, of course.
Fly strode in like Gunnery Sergeant Goforth on the
inspection warpath. "On your feet," he barked; the
startled operators stared for a second, then leapt to
their feet and stood at a bad imitation of attention.
"Classified message traffic from the President," he
snarled. "Take a hike."
     "Sir, we're not supposed to--"
"Sir? Do you see these?" He angrily pointed at his
stripes. "Do I look like a God-damned pansy-waist
gut-sucking ass-kissing four-eyed college-boy officer to
you?"
     "No sir! No--ah--"
Fly leaned close, playing drill instructor. "Try
COR-POR-AL, boy. Next time you open that hole of
yours, first word out better be Corporal Taggart."
"C-C-Corporal Taggart, sir! I mean, Corporal
Taggart, we're not supposed to leave."
     "Did you hear what type of message traffic I said
this was?"
     "Classified? Sir--Corporal!--we're fully cleared
for all levels of classification."
     "Do I know that, boy? You got some paper you can
show me?"
     "No, not on me."
"Then take a hike, dickhead. Go back and get
something from your C.O. We'll wait right here."
The man dithered, looking back and forth at the
door, the equipment, and his partner, a small, frail-
looking man who pointedly looked away, saying No,
way, bud, this is your call. "All right. You won't touch
anything while I'm gone, will you?"
     "Scout's honor," sneered Fly. Was he ever a Boy
Scout? I couldn't remember.
     The man slid sideways past Fly and almost backed
into me. I glared daggers at him and he split. After a
couple of seconds Fly turned to the mousy compan-
ion. "What're you still doing here? Get after your
partner!"
     Meekly, the man turned and darted out of the
room.
     "Fly, what's going to happen when they get across
the street and find out there's no message traffic from
the President?"
     "Well, we'd better hurry, A.S., so we're done before
they get back!"
     Fortunately, they'd left the equipment on, because I
had no idea how to turn it on. It was some new,
ultramodern civilian stuff I'd never seen before. I
found a keypad next to a small LED display. At the
moment, it showed the frequency for Guard channel,
plus another freak above that.
     I tapped at the keypad; they hadn't locked it out,
thank God. I typed the freak for North Marine Corps
Air Base, office of the SubCincMarsCom, Colonel
George Karapetian. It was no great trick remember-
ing it; I was the radioman for Major Boyd when we
were stationed on Deimos on TDS to the Navy.
I wandered all over the band from one side to the
other, looking for the carrier. Finally, I found it; it
was weak and intermittent, as if the repeaters were
blown and I was picking up the source itself. But I
boosted the gain, and we were able to pick out the
words from behind the snow.
     I engaged the standard CD encrypter, digitally
adding the signal to a CD of random noise from
background radiation; they had an identical disk at
North--if we were lucky, they'd figure out that the
signal was scrambled and pull their encryption on-
line.
     "Corporal Fly Taggart, commanding officer of Fox
Company, Fourth Battalion, 223rd Light Drop Divi-
sion, to SubCincMarsCom, come in, Colonel
     Karapetian."
Fly broadcast the message over and over, and I
started to get nervous . . . both about the time and
about the lack of response. Finally, a voice sputtered
into life on the line. I recognized it; it was the colonel
himself, not some enlisted puke.
     "Fox, connect me to Lieutenant Weems. Fourth
Battalion, over."
     "Fourth Battalion, Weems is dead; I am in com-
mand of Fox."
     "Who is this?"
"Corporal Taggart, sir."
     "Corporal, give me a full report. Over."
Fly gave the colonel the verbal cook's tour of
everything that had happened to us in the past few
weeks. When he finished, Karapetian was quiet for so
long, I thought we'd lost the carrier.
     "I understand," he said. "Now where the hell are
you? Can you get back here, like yesterday?"
"We're at a resistance center in Salt Lake City," Fly
said. Suddenly, I got an uneasy feeling in my stomach;
should we be spilling this much intel, even to the sub-
Commander in Chief of the Mars Command?
     "Use rail transport," ordered Karapetian. "Get
your butts to Pendleton as fast as you can. We've got
to talk face-to-face about this. Got that, Corporal?"
"Aye, sir."
     "Good. Then I'll expect you tomorrow at--"
With a loud thunk, the entire system died. All the
dials, all the diodes, all the cool flashing lights.
I looked over my shoulder; Albert towered over us,
his face set in a mask of concrete. On one side stood
our friendly guard from the entrance; on the other
was the radio tech Fly had bullied, holding a remote-
control power switch in his hands.
     I gasped; framed in the light, Albert looked like he
had a halo.
     "I'm afraid you're going to have to come with me,"
Albert said.
     "Where?" I asked.
"To the President. Only he can decide cases of high
treason against the Army of God and Man United."
10
     With a heavy heart, I brought our two mis-
creant warriors to the President of the Twelve. I tried
to keep angry thoughts from my mind; judgment and
vengeance are the Lord's prerogatives, not ours.
Besides, I genuinely liked Fly Taggart, and I even
believed his wild story about fighting the alien de-
mons on Phobos and Deimos. And Miss Sanders,
now . . .
     No, that's wrong. I had no right; I didn't even know
her.
     I brought them into the chamber of justice to find
the President and his mast already seated. He wore a
suit; I sighed a hearty prayer of thanksgiving to the
Lord that this was to be mast, not a court-martial; the
President would have worn his robe for the latter.
"Sit," I commanded, putting a heavy hand on each
prisoner's shoulder and pushing him into the waiting
chair.
     "Who speaks for the outsiders?" asked Bishop
Wilston. He was a stickler for legalities.
     "They can speak for themselves," said the Presi-
dent, "this isn't a formal trial. I just want to find out
what the devil happened--and to find out whether
the devil himself was responsible."
     "Or just the imp of stupidity," I said. The President
glared at me; but I learned my manners under his
predecessor, who would listen to even the youngest
child with a mind to speak. This new fellow was from
out of state and a personal mentor of our old Presi-
dent, may he rest in peace.
     "You're rude," said the President, "but you may be
right. Corporal Taggart, as the responsible NCO, what
on Earth possessed you to start broadcasting all over
the globe from our radio room?"
     "Well, um . . ." Fly looked distinctly pink. "It
seemed like a good idea at the time."
     "Why are you so flipping surprised?" demanded
the woman. "Why shouldn't we report to our C.O.?
We just got back from a mission. What the hell did
you expect?"
     For a moment I thought the President was going to
burst a blood vessel. We all turned in annoyance to
Fly; couldn't he control his woman? His team
member?
     He was not a stupid man; he spoke up quickly:
"Arlene is tired, upset--you know how women get."
Now it was Arlene's turn to turn angry-red, opening
and closing her mouth like she wanted to say some-
thing devastating but couldn't even find the words.
Wisely, she pressed her lips together and said nothing.
A soft answer turneth away wrath, says the proverb;
or again, Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is
counted wise. The President was mollified and chose
to take the question seriously.
     "Miss Sanders--"
"Private Sanders, if you will," she said, voice
betraying the seething emotion within. Her red hair
flamed like a burning house, setting off her green eyes.
"Private Sanders, the 'why' is because the entire
military structure of the erstwhile United States, from
top to bottom, has been co-opted by the demons. Our
former government has capitulated . . , they surren-
dered, to put it bluntly, two weeks ago."
     "Oh, really! Maybe everybody but the Marines.
Semper fidel--"
     "Even the Marines," said the President softly. The
sudden change from loud and angry to quiet and cold
lent him an air of authority, as was befitting. I must
admit, the man had the mark of divine awe; the Lord
definitely moved through the President, when he let
Him.
     "Do you two know what you've done?" asked the
bishop. "Even the broadcast itself might have been
traced. But to actually tell the forces of darkness
where we are . . . ! That passes understanding."
"Look, maybe I shouldn't have done that. But they
must already have known this was a pocket of resist-
ance."
     Don't dig yourself a deeper grave, Fly, I thought
urgently. Outwardly, I kept my face impassive; no
need to draw the judges' attention to the attempt at
blame-shifting.
     "But Corporal," said the President, voice at its
quietest and most dangerous, "they did not know that
you were here. If you still maintain that you and
your--your comrade aborted the division invading
through Deimos, don't you think you might have
incurred a special wrath, a wrath now transferred to
us? Perhaps they consider you Demonic Enemy Num-
ber One. Did that cross your mind?"
     Fly remained silent. Good man. So did Arlene.
I stared at the woman; she was not at all bad-
looking, not what I would expect of a female Marine.
I had never served with one in my three years of active
duty service; she looked tough, but not like an Ameri-
can Gladiator.
     In fact, the swell of her breasts and hips was quite
womanly; she would be a sturdy woman, well able to
bear many children and face the rigors of life under
siege. I could almost see her standing in a doorway,
babe in arms ... or lying bare on the bed, awaiting
me--
     Ow! My conscience hammered on my head. What
are you DOING, you godless sinner! Here I was, in the
presence of the representative of Jesus Christ Himself,
and I was mentally undressing this woman!
     Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offense to
me: for thou savorest not the things that be of
God, but those that be of men.
     I concentrated on verses from the Bible and the
Book of Mormon, mentally reciting them so quickly I
lost all track of the trial and Miss Sanders.
When I blinked back, Fly and Arlene looked chas-
tened, humble. They clearly repented of their foolish
act and had found their way back to friendship with
God. Pride and Arrogance were banished--well, for
the moment.
     The President sighed heavily. "Go and be stupid no
more. And prepare for an attack, for surely one
arrives within an hour o