Old Mars

Stone grew concerned that there wouldn’t be enough spiderwire. He had trouble gauging the distance properly. He braced himself. He would have to switch off as soon as he could after she switched on, conserving power and maintaining stability for split seconds. He raised his hand and gave the signal. They knew a sickening few moments while the switch took place, then she was dropping out of sight before coming back into view, a far smaller figure than he had expected.

The blue and red of her suit was just visible, flashing on and off as she fell through a sickening weight of water. Her relative gravity, thanks to the converter, gave her extra resistance, and she stretched out her arms and clasped the n-bomb to her, swinging free over the rosy abyss. She cried out her triumph in a wild yell, her body curving back into the trajectory. He thumped the control and brought her up to where he perched, hanging on with everything but his nails and teeth. He was laughing like a fool as she swung to stand beside him, counting out with elated blows on his arm the measure to activate his helmet’s converter so both were again protected. He could feel her elation as he hugged her tight.

They had the star bomb!

Now, somehow, they had to follow the steps back to the sheltering rock. Inch by inch, they crossed the exposed falls, feet feeling for holds as the minutes slipped by, and they dared not waste a moment trying to see how much time they had before the bomb did what it had been designed to do. The climb back to the walkway seemed to take longer than the whole rest of the mission. Increasingly, the strain on the equalizer became greater. Little bubbles of energy flinched and disappeared into the wavering field.

Stone was almost convinced that they had run out of time and strength. He gasped his surprise when, suddenly, his boots stood on the smooth granite and the bomb was on the ground before them. Manhandling it to the relative quiet of the stone arches, they were at last able to turn off the equalizers. The suit crackled and zipped, revealing flaws that moments later would have meant sudden death.

Stone triumphantly announced their success to Krane over the radio. The Earthman seemed less than overjoyed.

“You have twenty-seven minutes left,” he said. “Do you think you can do it, Stone?”

Yily grinned and began to whistle.

“What’s that?” Krane asked.

“It’s not doing anything,” she said. “ ‘Yankee Doodle,’ right?”

But, even when the tune had been relayed back to them by Krane, only four of the eleven locks protecting the n-bomb snapped open. They needed seven in sequence. “The Yellow Rose of Texas” snapped open two more. “Moonlight on the Wabash” made two snap back. She tried different keys and speeds, new sequences. Two more. One more. But after that it was no good. She was embarrassed. “My grandma came to Mars in the Revival Follies. We used to sing them all before the dope took her.”

“This is getting dangerous,” Krane told them. “Something has jammed. Stop!” Oblivious of his growing concern, they kept trying and kept failing as the minutes and the seconds died. “You’ve got to stop!” Krane told them. “Unless every lock is undone in order, the bomb can’t be neutralized. It took us years to work out those codes. We encrypted everything in easily remembered traditional tunes. We—we haven’t time to work out the codes again! If anything, we’ve complicated the situation. We have eight minutes left.”

Mac hovered over the bomb, trying different force-tools on the remaining locks. “This is hopeless. We could explode the thing at any moment.” He watched the most recently tried force-tool fade from his glove.

“I guess neither of us is musical enough. Time for plan B.” She reached with both hands into her pack and pulled out a large square metal container. Quickly, she dragged off the box’s covering, revealing a compacted canister covered with government warnings, which, as she stroked it with her gloved fingers, began to expand, flopping and twitching like a living thing until it lay in her lap like a long khaki-colored barracuda. “I’d better set this now.”

Stone recognized the unactivated B-9 wombot. He guessed her plan, but he said, “What are you going to do with that?” It was his idea too.

But she wouldn’t stop. “I’m a lot lighter than you. Give me your big scarf,” she said. “Hurry! And some of those tools might prove useful here. I’ll tell you what to do. We need that spiderwire. Can you disconnect it from your suit?”

“I can try.”

So he dragged out his long white scarf. She began to wind the thing around her waist. No clocks or numbers on the bomb told them how much time they had left. They had only their own chronometers. “Seven minutes.”

He was still planning to do the thing himself. “Now,” he said, “get those magnets situated. The scarf will be useful. It won’t bear any serious strain, but it’ll keep the bomb in position while we spiderwire it to the wombot. Leave those ends free. Screw drill might help.”