Down Under Crater Billy

“Why? We’re living on the god-dammned Moon, Gloria! The air outside ain’t! Lock failure could kill us all.” I waved my arm at the thing. “Just look at it! Call me old-fashioned, but I think airlocks should have nice heavy doors that clang when you shut them, and simple, foolproof latches. Not like that, that thing.”

The thing in question had been set up by the far wall of the testing chamber. It consisted of a burnished steel frame about two and a half meters tall and one and a half wide, a simple control pad on the right side. There was no sign of nice reassuring steel or even polyplast doors inside that frame. Instead there was this faintly gleaming black surface like a curtain made from some heavy metallic cloth.

I was getting the willies just looking at that black barrier because I knew it wasn’t solid like rocks or wood or metal, it was just billions of separate, fallible nanomachines hanging on to each other because they’d been told to, like all the dogs on Earth told to sit at once.

I shook my head. “You’re not getting me anywhere near that thing when there’s vacuum on the other side of it.”

She grinned at me. “Too late, Dave. There’s a storage chamber on the other side of it that’s already been pumped out to surface normal.”

I was aghast. “Are you trying to get us all killed?”

She looped an arm around my waist, probably to keep me from running away. “I don’t want to die. After all, I’ve got a hot date tonight.” A squeeze. “Will you let me give you chapter and verse on the setup before you work yourself into a heart attack?”

“You’re the one giving me a heart attack.” I said accusingly.

She winked. “Maybe later, lover. But trust me, you’re perfectly safe right now. Come on and I’ll show you.”

I let her lead me over to a tabletop display terminal and watched her call up a schematic.

“Here’s the chamber we’re in now,” she said, pointing to a rectangular green box. “It’s 10 meters wide, 8 deep and 4 high. That’s 320 cubic.” Her finger moved to a smaller red box at right angles to it. Red means vacuum. “That’s the other chamber. It’s 2 wide, 10 deep and 3 high—60 cubic. So even if the lock blew there’s still enough air in here for both chambers.”

She looked over at me, trying to hide a smug smile. “But I wanted to make our poor mistreated CSO happy, so—”

Her finger pointed out four white circles at the corners of the chamber. “You know what these are.”

“Barometric Popper valves. A radical change in pressure will trigger them.”

She nodded. “Releasing the pressurized air they’re holding back. Enough air to repressurize the room to Billy Ambient in ten seconds.” She hooked a thumb in one biballs’ strap, self-assured verging on cocky. “I’d say that’s pretty bulletproof. Wouldn’t you?”

“So far,” I said, studying the diagram. The chamber she’d vacced was a dead end. It had a gumby mounted in the ceiling to automatically plug any leaks, which were highly unlikely since there were several meters of solid rock surrounding the chamber except on the side facing us.

I had to admit that Gloria’s design looked fairly well worked out so far. She’s a 7, and her capacity for imagining trouble is almost as finely honed as my own—when she uses it. If there was going to be a weakness in her setup it would be in the safety of the testing staff and subjects. Knowing her cavalier attitude, I planned to go over every detail.

“So what are the test protocols?” I asked, punching in the command to bring up VIEW 2, which was listed on the menu as video from inside the vacced chamber. The schematic vanished.

Manny and Anna had been watching us go over the test plan, remaining uncharacteristically quiet. That ended with Manny going “Whoo-ha!” and Anna squealing “Yuk! They left their socks on!”

There on the screen before us, instead of a video feed from inside the chamber, were Cindi and Ted Nakamura, indeed wearing socks—only socks—and engaging in some quite spirited early-afternoon sex. Cindi was on top. She seemed to stare up at us from the display, eyes widening and face paling when she saw the red active light on their bedside communit.

“Not again!” she wailed. That was my thought exactly. It had only been a month or so before that I’d finally stopped covering all the video pickups if I was doing something I didn’t want broadcast publicly.

“What?” Ted moaned thickly, squinting up at his spouse.

“Sorry!” I said, hastily keying in the command to cut the connection. Instead we were rewarded with an extreme closeup of the action. And I mean extreme.

“How can I help, Dove?” Sorry chimed in, thinking my apology to the Nakamuras had been a call to him.

“Check out the tattoo,” Anna giggled. She and Manny leaned over the terminal for a better look.

Gloria had been trying to keep a straight face, but at this point she lost it, doubling over with laughter.

“Comm-glitch!” I snarled at Sorry. “Fix it!”