La Difference

Before he could finish, the ground buckled beneath his crawler. It happened with eerie slowness, as most things do on a low-gravity world, but no less inevitably on account of that. Slabs of yellow sulfur gave way like thin ice.

The crawler tipped with that same sense of nightmare leisure. Through the window, Onishi, who was cursing and praying in the same breath, saw Ensign Nango’s crawler go down nose first.

One after another, alarm bells began to ring.

From their hiding place behind a boulder close by the circling crawler, Renée and Alec watched fearfully as the lights from the Japanese vehicles stabbed toward it. When those lights suddenly slewed wildly, Renée let out a whoop that almost deafened her inside her helmet.

She hugged Alec. It wasn’t much of an embrace; the thick suit material saw to that. The crawler pilot did not care.

Alec pressed his helmet to hers. “We did it! We did it!” he shouted over and over. He was yelling in English, but Renée did not care about that, either. She knew what he had to be saying.

They danced round and round in glee, holding each other’s hands. At last, panting, Renée thumbed her portable transmitter. The crawler obediently broke off its circuit and came over to the boulder. With a deep bow, Renée waved Alec into the airlock ahead of her.

Once they were both inside the crawler, they shed spacesuits with cries of relief. No one would be shooting at them now. And neither of them seemed surprised when the shedding did not stop there; tunics and shorts quickly followed. The latter were not made for modesty in any case, having openings here and there for the suits’ sanitary arrangements.

The crawler’s bunk was narrow, and covered only by a thin foam pad. In .18g, that didn’t matter.

“Very glad to see the two of you. To be honest, I didn’t think I would,” said Jacques Guizot, commandant of Lola Station. The office in which he received the newcomers was small and cramped, like all the chambers in the station’s tunnel system. The domes above were abandoned, though thus far the batteries around them had knocked down all incoming missiles.

“To be honest, we didn’t expect to get here,” Renée said.

Beside her, Alec nodded. “We were very lucky.”

“No,” Renée said, giving him credit. “It was your cleverness. If you hadn’t thought of how the Japanese were unfamiliar with Io, we’d have been done for.”

“It never would have occurred to me without you,” he insisted, “and I’m not a good enough driver to have brought it off by myself.”

Guizot raised a bushy gray eyebrow at this mutual admiration society. “What exactly did you do?” he asked at last.

“We lured them into a hot patch,” they said together.

The commandant’s other eyebrow shot up. His thundered laughter was positively Jovian. “Magnificent! How did you manage that?”

“I drove up to the very edge of the patch,” Renée answered, “Then I reversed, backing up in my own tracks till I could turn and skirt the patch. Once I was on the other side, I set the crawler to circle, as if it were disabled.”

Alec took up the story: “Then we both EVA’d and hurried back to sweep away the tracks that showed where we’d turned. Luckily, we were in eclipse-we just had to get rid of a few meters of the trail, what the Japanese headlights would pick up. After that, it was hide and wait and hope.”

“And they fell into the trap,” Renée said. “Literally.”

“Why not?” Alec said. “They were used to driving on Luna, which has been dead for billions of years. But hot patches are places where molten black sulfur reaches the surface. Once it gets up there, it starts to freeze again, and gets covered over by yellow sulfur dust, but underneath-”

“Underneath, it’s still black sulfur,” Messier interrupted with a savage grin, “and a lot like hot black tar. Only the thin crust on top keeps it from showing its true temperature-”

“-which is around 200 Celsius,” Alec finished. “And the crust is very thin. When a crawler tries to cross it“

“Magnificent!” Guizot said again. “Using the enemy’s ignorance against him is a first principle of warfare.”

“My own ignorance, too,” Renée confessed. “I said Luna and Io were much alike. You can imagine, sir, how glad I was to be proved wrong. And, as is more often said in another context”-she looked fondly at Alec-“vive la différence!”