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BOUNCING OFF THE MOON

Starsiders 2

David Gerrold

for Jim and Betty and Mae Beth Glass, with love

BOARDING

I here's this thing that Dad used to say, when things didn't work out. He would say, "Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time." I never knew if he was serious or if he was doing that deadpan-sarcastic thing he did.

The thing is, it usually wasn'ta good idea at the time.

Like going to the moon. That was hisgood idea, not mine. Not Doug's or Bobby's either. But like all of his good ideas, it worked out backwards. We got to go, and he had to stay behind, still holding his ticket and wondering what happened—the last time I looked back, he had thatlook on his face. And thathurt.

We made it to the elevator with less than six minutes to spare. They were just about to give away our cabin to a worried-looking family waiting on standby. The dad looked upset and the mom started crying when we showed up. They wanted our cabin on the outbound car so desperately that the dad started waving a fistful of plastic dollars at us, offering to buy our reservation—we could name any price we wanted.

Doug hesitated. I could tell he was tempted, so was I—poverty does that to you—but Mickey just pushed him forward and said, "We don't need their money." So we ducked into the transfer pod and the hatch slammed shut behind us with the finality of a coffin lid.

This time, we were going in through the passenger side, and I knew what to expect, so the shift in pseudogravity as the pod whirled up to speed didn't bother me as much as it had before. I'd nearly thrown up when we'd transferred from the car that brought us up the orbital elevator to Geostationary.

Dad's good idea thistime had involved smuggling something—or pretending to smuggle something so the real smugglers would go unnoticed—and in return, he'd get four tickets up the Line, but the only thing he was smuggling was us.He told us we were going on vacation, and it would have been a great vacation, except it wasn't reallya vacation. The whole time, he was planning/hoping that we'd decide to go outbound with him to one of the colonies and not go back to Earth and Mom.

It would have worked if Mom hadn't found out. And if whatever it was that we were supposed to be smuggling hadn't been so important that some really powerful people were trying to track us, bribe us, threaten us, and have us detained by any means possible. It would have worked because after we thought about it, we wantedto go.

So we went. Without Dad.

Without Mom too. The guys in the black hats had shuttled her up. My cheek was still stinging from her last angry slap. It wasn't a great good-bye. And the hurt went a lot deeper than my cheek.

The hatch of the transfer pod opened and we were looking down a narrow corridor. "Come on, let's get to our cabin," Mickey said, giving me a gentle nudge on the shoulder. "The outbound trip is only six and a half hours. I think we should all try to get some sleep while we can."

"I'm not tired!" announced Stinky—he was only Bobby when he wasn't Stinky. "And I'm not going to bed without a hug from Mommy!"

"He's contradicting himself again," I said.

Douglas—also known as Weird—gave me a look, one of the looks he'd learned from Mom. "Charles, if this is going to work, I need your help."He turned back to Stinky, trying to shush him with logic. "Mommy isn't here, remember?"

We were halfway between nowhere and nothingness, on a cable strung between Ecuador and Whirlaway. There weren't many floors left to drop out from under us—and in a few minutes, we'd be dropping even further away at several thousand klicks per hour. Douglas was right. We were on our own.

"Give him to me," I said. In the one-third pseudogravity of the cabin, Stinky was only cumbersome, not heavy. He was still crying, but he reached for me—maybe I should have been flattered, but it seemed like an ominous moment. Was I going to be the Stinky-wrangler now?

Probably.

Douglas was already too much of an adult. He thought logic was sufficient. Well, so did I—but with Stinky, you have to use Stinky-logic, which isn't like adult logic at all. "Hey, kiddo," I said, maneuvering him into a hug. "I didn't get my hug either." He slid his arms around my neck in a near stranglehold. "Attaboy. We'll trade hugs. But no doggy-slurps—"

Even before I finished the sentence, Stinky was already licking my cheek— slurp, slurp, slurp—like an affectionate puppy. It was his favorite game, because I always said, "Yick, yick—bleccchhh! Dog germs!"

And that was all it took. Mommy was forgotten for the moment.

It was an old game—it went back to the time I'd been whining for a puppy, and Mom had said, "No, we can't afford a puppy—and besides, we've got the baby."

"Stinky isn't a puppy!" I answered back.

" Yes, I am!"Stinky had shouted at me. He didn't even know what a dog was then. "Am too!"

And then Weird had said, "Put him on a leash, take him for a walk, you'll never know the difference," and that was how the slurp game began. We didn't have a dog, we had Stinky. But I still would have preferred a dog. Most dogs drop dead by the time they're Stinky's age.

I tried to wipe my cheek, except the little monster had such a hammerlock on me that I couldn't break free. Time for the next move in the game: "No hickeys! No hickeys!" I shouted, and began tickling him unmercifully. He broke free in self-defense, shrieking in feigned panic. I grabbed him in a bear hug, ready to tickle him senseless, then remembered where we were and stopped before he peed in his pants. For a moment, we just stood where we were, him gasping for breath and me just holding on. Hugging.

I flopped backward onto the floor and pulled him down to my lap, curling him into my arms. "I miss Mommy too," I said, almost forgetting about my cheek. He wrapped his arms around me and hung on the way he'd done back in Arizona, in the big meteor crater.

Hard to believe that was only a week ago—Stinky had been acting up, as usual. He'd run away from us, down the path that led around and around, down to the bottom of the crater. He was playing "You can't catch me." Then he tripped and slid down the crater wall, and I'd thought we were going to lose him, but he only slid a little way down and then stopped. I was closest to him—I flattened myself on the ground and tried to get to him.

But when I looked down that steep wall, all the way to the bottom, I was paralyzed. But then Douglas grabbed me and Dad grabbed Douglas and I grabbed Stinky, and somehow we all pulled each other back up onto the narrow path and … for a moment, we hung there on the wall of forever, everyone holding on to each other—and Stinky had wrapped his arms around me like an octopus.

When it happened, I was angry—so angry, I couldn't even say how angry—but the whole thing also left me with a funny feeling about him. About what it would have been like to lose him. And now that he was grabbing on to me the same way again, I began to realize what the feeling was. It was the same thing I felt. A grab for safety.

The difference was that Stinky had someone to hang on to. So did Douglas, now—he had Mickey. I was the only one who didn't. Which was sort of the way I wanted it, at least I thought I did. Except maybe I didn't.

The enormity of what we'd done was just starting to sink in. Mom and Dad's custody hearing had ended up in an emergency court session in front of Judge Griffith. She thought she could resolve it by asking me what I wanted.