GUNFIGHT ON FARSIDE

by Adam-Troy Castro

Illustration by Vincent Di Fate

When is sacrifice not a sacrifice?

The first thing you learn about the famous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is that it was not fought at the O.K. Corral.

No. I’m sorry. That’s not quite accurate. I mean, it’s quite true that the gunfight was only near the O.K. Corral, and not actually in it. That’s a simple fact of history.

But that’s not the first thing you learn.

The first thing you learn about the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is the canonized bullshit with no bearing on what actually happened.

You learn about it from old movies, or holos, or, in my case, that big-budget stage musical that played the Shepardville Dome for years: the silly one where Doc Holliday was a woman, the Clantons spoke in blank verse, and the badges worn by the Earps, just below what would have been their belts, were the only item of clothing that stood between them and full frontal nudity. (Someday, if I ever feel conversational again, you can probably start me off on a two-hour rant by asking me to hold forth on past trends in popular entertainment.)

The story may fade into obscurity for up to thirty or forty years at a time, but something about it keeps exerting a powerful tug, and it keeps coming back, each time twisted out of all recognition for the prejudices of a new generation. I even remember one popular holo, from a season more cynical than most, where the Clantons were peace-loving, unarmed settlers, who wanted only to be left alone, and the Earps were evil corporate types who slaughtered them just to show that they could. I took a perverse pleasure in scrambling that one before I tossed it into the recycle bin.

Peel away all the layers of absolute invention and you find that the gunfight between the Earps and Clantons took place in Tombstone, Arizona, on 26 October, 1881. It was a down and dirty shootout, nominally an act of law enforcement, but one so mired in past grudges that it’s just as easily explained as a street fight between two gangs that hated each other on general principle. If it hadn’t happened that day it would have happened the next day, or the day after that. Little fancy marksmanship was involved, as the two groups started blasting away at each other when they were standing face-to-face, with thirty rounds of ammunition fired in about as many seconds. Far from dashing, heroic, and romantic, it was up-close, ugly, and downright sordid, much more a street execution than a battle between the forces of law and lawlessness.

If Wyatt Earp is still remembered as a hero today, a century into the era of space colonization, it’s at least partially because he survived these events for decades, and therefore got to hang around Hollywood telling his story to the people who made their living deciding what bits and pieces of historical ephemera could be inflated to legend with the help of clever angles and matinee-idol faces.

Since then, the story has been twisted every which way by anybody who wanted to appropriate it for his or her own purposes. The historical facts are available, and far more interesting than anything the holos or movies or even nudie musicals have come up with. But their very malleability is what makes the story immortal. Someday, when mankind cracks the interstellar travel problem—and one of the lesser points of this story is that I know for a fact we will—there’ll be versions with the Earps in spacesuits and the Clanton/McLaury gang as any alien race we don’t happen to like that week. By then, it may no longer be recognizable as an event based on historical fact. Earp himself may be considered no more than myth, like whatever inspired the similar myths of King Arthur and Robin Hood. Hell, he’s halfway there already.

But he’s not alone on that journey.

By the time I entered Malcolm Bell’s story, the Moon had become a crowded world, crammed pole to pole with resorts, cities, factories, and the folly of mankind. But not all of it was crowded equally. All the places where tourists wanted to go were on Nearside, with all the lovely views of the battered blue marble, still shiny and bright despite the scars well visible from the observation domes at Armstrong. Even those of us who’d grown up on Luna and had never set foot on the homeworld still suffering the woes of the last centuries preferred to see the ancestral cradle in our sky.

We weren’t always that philosophical about it, of course. Most of the time, we just liked it there because it was pretty. (There’s a reason lunar residents sometimes called it The Chandelier.) But whatever our reasons, its presence made Nearside prime real estate. Everybody you could deal with wanted to live on Nearside.

Farside was a different story.

On Farside, facing nothing but distant stars and a sun that seemed less than the source of all light than a cruel beacon existing to bring the forbidding landscape into sharp relief, it was easy to feel cut off from all of human history. It therefore became the home of choice for the kind of people who saw that as a selling point. At the time I visited, it was a collection of industries too dangerous to be set down anywhere people lived, and a few scattered homesteads belonging to all the weirdos, misfits, misanthropes, and creeps who preferred solitude to people. It was crazy country, then and now, and the main reason it’s been allowed to stay that way is the general consensus that anybody twisted enough to actually want to live out there was better off living in their self-imposed quarantine anyway.

Of course, humanity being the animal it is, the rest of us sometimes have trouble leaving them the hell alone.

On the day I’m talking about, I arranged for the skimmer to drop me off with less than two hour’s worth of oxygen and not come back for me for at least five.

Bell’s habitat, only a short walk away, was an unlovely oblong metal box, much like the one I live in as an old woman. It was marked only by the usual ten-digit registration number and a series of dents it had collected in its earlier, stupider home at the base of a ridge much given to spontaneous rockslides. The recycling systems and supply dumps in the back took up much more space than his living area could have. The absence of any parked vehicle confirmed what I’d heard about him, which is that it had been a good thirteen years since he’d last bothered to visit the nearest center of population. That was about typical for some of the folks living on Farside. At the time, it made no sense to me, which should tell you a lot about how long ago this was.

I was halfway to his airlock, my ridged boots causing miniature avalanches as I slid down the gentle grade, when an automated signal with absolutely no trace of static came in over my helmet speakers: “…trespassing. Repeat, this is private property and you are trespassing. Failure to retreat will result in the activation of security measures, which may result in injury or death. The owner values his privacy and will not suffer a single night’s missed sleep blaming himself for your probably genetic stupidity. Please turn back. Message repeats: this is private property and you are trespassing. Repeat, this is private property and you are trespassing. Failure to retreat will…”

I toggled the transmit button. “This is a distress signal. Stranded surveyor, running out of oxygen. Cannot hold out while awaiting relief. Need shelter immediately. Over.”

The signal loop cut off in mid-sentence, replaced by a gravelly voice with a distinct Texas twang. “Now that’s just bullcrap, young lady. I watched that skimmer drop you off. You came here deliberately and you’re hoping to blackmail me into opening my door for you. Isn’t that true? Over.”

I’m afraid I grinned. “It’s true, sir. I did come here deliberately, because I’m hoping to speak to you, but my distress is very real. I am running out of oxygen and I am in imminent danger of death and I do need you to save me. Over.”

“Why would you put yourself in such a brain-dead situation? Over.”

“It’s actually a pretty smart situation, Mr. Bell. Just about everybody I’ve spoken to about you, and everything I’ve read about you, says there’s no real possibility of you allowing me to die. But they also say I need the threat in order for you to let me in. It’s the only way I could think of to speak to you.”

The anger communicated by the next five seconds of absolute silence was an object lesson in the potential information content of dead air. There was none, however, in his voice. “I’ve now recorded your admission that you placed yourself in this position for the express purpose of invading my privacy. Under the circumstances, the crimes you’ve committed just coming here trump all of Farside’s Good Samaritan laws. If I did let you die, no court would convict me.”

“Maybe not,” I said, “but I’m still pretty confident it won’t come to that.”

He cut the connection. A second later, the warning loop returned, reminding me once again that I was headed directly toward a violent and messy death.

I had nothing to lose by continuing to walk forward, the pebbles and dust dislodged by my boots forming a silent cataract that preceded me into the pockmarked valley below. I had chosen lunar daylight over lunar night as the best time to make this approach, mostly because it had struck me as less threatening … but now I wondered if this had been a bad idea. The landscape, which had now had a good week and a half to bake, was radiating the heat of the unfiltered Sun back at me … and though my suit could take this and worse, there’s a major difference between being protected from a hostile environment and not being able to feel the sweat pooling at the base of my spine.

I reached the bottom of the slope, faced the habitat a mere fifty paces away, and sucked a water tube for a minute or so, as I contemplated the best approach. I wasn’t sure I believed him about the booby traps, but where would I put them, were I an antisocial old coot with a mania for privacy? He wouldn’t put them too near his own walls, lest the shrapnel leave him spilling atmosphere faster than he could lay a patch. Nor would he put them anywhere near his airlock door. He might be just crabby enough to lie in his bunk all day, but he needed the main egress intact so he could get to the supply drops set down no further than twenty meters away, five times a month. Nor would he set his triggers too far from home, out here at the edge of his bowl where the standard warning was still playing in infinite loop. He’d need to be able to justify such extreme measures, if it came to that—and the best way to do that was to give potential trespassers every possible chance to heed his warnings.

No need in tempting fate. I’d be better off sitting still and relying on his sense of humanity. So I sat, turned the cooling unit to the lowest power I could tolerate, and waited, thinking (among other things) of Wyatt Earp.

Four days before I had that skimmer drop me off in front of that tin-can habitat on Farside, I watched half-a-dozen action holos set in the early days of lunar settlement. They made that pioneering time, when the Moon’s entire population was comprised of Ph.D.s and engineers, look like the province of murderers and sociopaths, pursuing blood feuds and exchanging gunfire in the tiny little outposts those early pioneers had dug into the lunar rock. It was, we’re told, a time of outlaws, a time of heroes, a time when only the quick reflexes of a few brave men maintained the fragile order that allowed Luna to become a fit home for millions.

Like most of the stories told about Wyatt Earp, it’s total bullshit.

The truth is that those early engineers were all subjected to exhaustive psych testing before they left the Big Blue. There weren’t any outlaws or crazies among them. If they presented any danger at all to the colleagues who worked alongside them, it was in the very real likelihood that they’d bore each other to death with conversations that had already been recycled past all reasonable usefulness.

There was, in fact, only one actual gunfight in the entire first thirty years of lunar settlement.

Only one.

“What’s your name?”

The signal amplified by my helmet speakers was punctuated by crackles and hiss, a noise ratio not quite bad enough to obscure the old man’s words, but enough to establish that he used antiquated equipment and couldn’t be bothered with tuning his signal enough to ensure clear transmission. I couldn’t help thinking of my great-grandfather, who had always removed his teeth before dealing with anybody outside the family. If anybody had trouble understanding him, that was their problem. As long as they wanted to waste his time, he saw every advantage of making them work for it.

I said, “Jessie James.”

The pause that followed was entirely familiar to me. I heard something like it just about every time I gave a stranger my name, and its Wild West resonances had to hit him harder than just about anybody I’d ever met. “You’re kidding me.”

I shrugged, an absolutely pointless gesture given that it disturbed the broad outlines of my moonsuit not at all. “My parents were history nerds.”

“Were?”

“Sorry. Are.” They were both members of the Lunar History Department at the State University at Grissom, as well as American history buffs by inclination.

“So they’re both alive, then.”

“Yes.”

“Did they neglect you?”

That surprised me. “No.”

“Abuse you?”

“No.”

“Emotionally abuse you?”

“No.”

“They’re good parents, then?”

“Yes.”

“They love you.”

I didn’t understand this line of questioning at all. “Yes.”

“Do you have a lover, Jessie? Maybe a husband or wife?”

“Nobody that serious.” Though there might have been, before a certain obsession had started taking up too many of my waking hours.

“But people who care about you.”

“Yes.”

“And yet,” he said, his voice rising just enough to establish frustration, “you care so little for them that you’re willing to risk breaking both their hearts by throwing your life away on a pointless mission to harass an old man who hasn’t given an interview in decades or even left his home in thirteen years. Forget the way I want to live my life. Think about what your parents want out of theirs. Did they get out of bed this morning wanting to hear that their crazy daughter’s been found, spam in a spacesuit, just ten meters from an old recluse’s home on Farside?”

Damn, he was good. There was no way I could hear that question without feeling a twinge. But I had spoken or corresponded with all five of the people still alive who had begun their own lives as Bell’s children: the two sons living and working on Luna, the pair of daughters working contract work out on the Belt, even the eccentric writer best known for his weekly rides up the Central African Space Elevator, to regale the world with renewed confirmation that the horizon still curved. All five had described themselves as baffled by their long exile from the old man’s life. All five had testified that, the last times they’d spoken to him, he’d still cared about his legacy and place in history. So I countered, “Did your children get out of bed this morning wanting to hear that their heroic old man will always be remembered as the unconscionable son of a bitch who let me die?”

It’s funny. Sometimes you can hear more in a man’s silence than in his angriest words. I heard him stew, heard him thinking of the way the news would spread throughout the system, heard him remembering what it was like to have a legacy, and heard him contemplating the human costs of shitting on it.

He was silent for so long that I felt mortal for the first time today, wondering if I might have guessed wrong. There were, after all, any number of things that could happen to a man’s mind and soul in thirty years of self-imposed solitary confinement. Forget how embittered he must have been just to lock himself away. How insane would he have become in the decades since?

Then the crackle returned. “I don’t appreciate emotional blackmail.”

“Neither do I, sir. That’s not what this is.”

“You don’t know what you’re messing with, here.”

“Then tell me.”

Another pause, too lengthy for comfort.

Then a burst of grudging profanity, and: “Walk where I tell you and only where I tell you.”

I stood up, wincing as my knees creaked. “So there are mines.”

He barked a derisive laugh. “Explosives are weapons for people incapable of arranging precision, who see advantage in laying waste to everything within a given radius. My explosives are nowhere near that wasteful. If you take any wrong step in the next ten meters you’ll find yourself wearing a suit with a clean circular leak about the size of a quarter. If it’s within reach, you might be able to cover it with one hand and survive long enough to walk the rest of the way … but that’s only if you see it in time, and correcting for further missteps would become difficult indeed once both hands were occupied. If that happened, I would not have time to suit up and rescue you, and I move too slowly these days to arrive in a hurry. So back up a few steps and follow my instructions. Right now, you’re surrounded by pressure plates on three sides….”

In one of the most popular but least accurate Hollywood versions of the Wyatt Earp story, John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, Tombstone stands against the distinctive formations of Monument Valley.

This must have come as a complete puzzlement to moviegoers who happened to live in the real-life town.

Moreover, the film ends with Earp’s friend Doc Holliday dying from wounds suffered during the gunfight … a development that must come as an equal surprise to those who know that Holliday died years afterward, not peacefully but certainly not from violence, in the hospital where he’d retreated to cough away what remained of his tubercular lungs.

Like many versions of the tale, My Darling Clementine had less to do with what actually happened than with the story the people in question wanted to tell.

The same goes with Airless Fury, the most famous fictional treatment of the famous First Gunfight On The Moon. It’s famous now as one of the first non-documentary holos ever filmed by a Moon-based production company. Malcolm Bell, who was at that point naive enough to sign away the rights to his story without any assurances regarding accuracy of content, always credited it (or, more accurately, blamed it) for his unwanted status as legend. Frankly, it makes My Darling Clementine look like a documentary. My father saw it as a bookish child already versed in the history of his world, and later told me that he started choking on his soda five minutes in and didn’t regain control of his breathing until he left the theatre with friends willing to miss the best part in favor of spending ten minutes pounding on his back.

This is the way Airless Fury tells the story.

Malcolm Bell is a grizzled veteran of the Trans-Tibetan conflict, sick of war, and unable to cope with the memories as long as he remains on Earth. The instant the lunar colonies open up for terrestrial settlers, he applies for a spot and is approved for emigration. He settles in at Li-Tsiu, the first town to accept families, with no ambitions grander than finding work as an environmental engineer, and perhaps meeting a nice girl so he can start the family he’s always wanted.

Then Ken Destry, who had fought alongside Bell during the war, moves in, bringing his vicious streak with him. Destry steals what he wants, bullies whoever he wants, and flouts the law whenever he wants.

Bell, a peaceable sort, tries to reason with the man, but doesn’t take matters into his own hands until Destry, by now wholly out of control, unleashes the full force of his own violent lusts on Connie Perkins, who has only hours earlier accepted Bell’s proposal of marriage. Enraged, doing “what a man’s gotta do,” Bell dons a moonsuit and tracks Destry across the pitted surface, in a quest that ends with both men firing at one another with the homemade projectile weapons that both have improvised from construction materials left lying around during the construction of the Armstrong dome.

Cold Roses, filmed years after Bell entered his self-imposed exile, presented the actual facts of the story, at the expense of much dramatic tension, but failed to erase the lies already set in place. Long before then, he’d come up with a famous response for admirers who wanted to know how much of Airless Fury was accurate. That consisted of a pained look and the simple understatement, “It’s true that we were all on the Moon.” In real life, Bell had never seen combat, in the Trans-Tibetan War or any other. He had never met Ken Destry, either in his previous life on Earth or at any point prior to the incident that planted the seeds of his enduring fame. He went to the Moon not as a refugee winning a lottery, but as a qualified professional with a long resume in his field, who got the job in part because his wife Connie was already working there and was able to pull the strings that found him a position ahead of several applicants with better test scores. Both were on the Moon long before the powers-that-be decided it was time to start recruiting settlers.

Destry’s erratic behavior did render him a menace, but had less to do with any innate meanness in his personal makeup than with degenerative brain damage caused by industrial contaminants in the air supply of the barge he drove back and forth between construction sites, twelve hours a day. He certainly bears no resemblance to the sneering villain familiar from so many versions of his story. Free will was so much not a factor in his conduct that his parents back on Earth received not only his full pension from the Lunar Authority, but also a hefty cash settlement from the company that produced the faulty canisters. In fact, five other lunar residents, who were also exposed to the toxic air but were pulled from their assignments before they suffered permanent damage, received smaller settlements. All had reported feeling on edge lately, though how much that was due to the contamination and how much was just the extreme stress of their duties, remains open to debate.

Finally, it’s true that Destry improvised a railgun and did fire on several of the search parties looking for him, causing several injuries but no deaths. But the unfinished Armstrong Dome Airless Fury uses as one famous backdrop had nothing to do with the incident, as that landmark was years away from being needed, let alone proposed, designed, or even partially built.

Airless Fury ends with a furious Malcolm Bell, who has tracked Ken Destry across the Moon’s surface, catching up with him on foot, after a chase that has lasted several days. In real life, Bell had no intention of ever running across Destry. Like everybody else on the Moon, he had heard of Destry’s rampage and followed all the recommended security procedures for keeping out of Destry’s way. He’d even signed on to the general consensus, common once a full week had elapsed without a Destry incident, that the poor man had probably run out of air or food or otherwise succumbed to his condition. But once things began returning to normal, and his own duties began to require a daily commute from his home warren to a new one being excavated thirty kilometers away, he became one of several lunar workers carrying their own railguns just in case the general consensus turned out to be wrong.

Airless Fury got most of the story wrong. It invented some stuff. It omitted other stuff. It left out the single most important fact about the incident, one known only to people who lived on the Moon at the time.

All that said, even Airless Fury was right about one thing.

There certainly was a gunfight.

I still didn’t know whether Bell’s claims of a suit-shredding security system were at all accurate, but I saw no point in testing them. I turned when he told me and stepped where he told me and at one point backtracked several steps because he claimed to have miscalculated and led me over an array he called the Valley of Death, where a single misstep would have reduced my suit to what he called “a loose mesh more appropriate as a bathing suit than as something you’d find useful in vacuum.” By then I was more than half sure that the system belonged to the same species of bullshit as most versions of the gunfight story. A few years later, when he disappeared, leaving in his place the phenomenon that has made his homestead a quarantined site ever since, the authorities searched the land around his sealed habitat and found out that it was all true, a revelation that made my skin prickle from the imagined sensation of blood bubbling in cold vacuum.

But that day I followed his directions and made it inside his airlock in a state resembling the same confidence I’d felt since first plotting this madness of mine. It was a standard box of a chamber, only one square meter at its base, but so squat as far as height was concerned that even I, with my slight dimensions, had to stoop in order to enter. I tried to imagine Bell using it to go in and out and remembered reading that most of the pioneers had been small people, chosen as much for their ability to fit into tight spaces as they were for the length and breadth of their professional resumes. Any illusions I might have had about meeting a legend who would tower over me like some kind of Greek god, his mighty forehead scraping the clouds … were stupid on their very face, but remained intact anyway. I knew the stories were bullshit. But this was Malcolm Bell, dammit. Bullshit or not, meeting him was like meeting William Tell, Robin Hood … or Wyatt Earp.

The door behind me slid shut, the quaint seal around the rim inflating to produce a seal in a technology that might have been considered old-fashioned when I was born. A few seconds later, I started hearing ambient sound: the hissing of external air, the metallic sound of my boots shifting against the dust-catching grill below. But even as the indicator light over the inner doorway flashed green, I continued to wait.

His voice crackled over the speakers. “It’s safe. You can take your helmet off, if you want.”

I made no move. “Are you going to open the inner door?”

“I haven’t decided yet. But you might as well make yourself comfortable. I promise: I’m not the type to expose an obnoxious busybody to vacuum.”

Yes. But you are the type to surround your home with deathtraps, or at least to say that you have. And yet, what choice did I have? Even in a room stocked with all the air I could breathe in a lifetime, I could still asphyxiate behind the seal of a suit that refused to allow any of it in. So I unlocked my helmet, taking a groundhog’s pleasure in the sibilant hiss of my suit’s pressure equalizing with the somewhat greater concentration of the airlock booth.

Traveling from one pressurized environment to another, you can learn a lot about what somebody’s like from your first taste of their air. In the last few weeks, during my interviews with people who had known Bell back in the day, I’d visited some private habitats inhabited by people who had long since lost the ability to smell themselves and whose stench was thick enough to bring tears to my eyes. Bell’s had the slightest tinge of old-man scent, sweet in a way that suggested daily ingestion of cough drops, but was downright pleasant by comparison. I could even make out some kind of exotic, flowery tinge, which reminded me of the tropical exhibit at Shepardville’s Botanical Gardens: perfume, scented cleaning fluid, or perhaps an indication that the winner of the Moon’s most famous gunfight now spent his years cultivating flowers under a sun lamp. Why not? He had to be doing something in here, all these years.

Either way, I found myself enjoying it. “Thank you.”

“You’re not welcome,” he said. “This is an unconscionable imposition on my time and privacy. Tell the truth, I’m showing you far more hospitality than you deserve.”

I shifted weight from one foot to the other, to cover the embarrassment that made the hackles rise on the back of my neck. “I know. And I’m sorry. Whether it makes a difference or not … I do appreciate it.” I waited several long seconds for a response, received none, and ventured, “Maybe I should tell you why I’m here?”

“You don’t have to, Miss Jessie James. There are only a few things this can be about. Either you want to write a book about me, or you need to tell me what I’ve always meant to you, or you want a famous person’s willing participation in an anecdote that you’ll later be able to share with your family and friends. Whatever the particulars, it amounts to nothing more than wanting to approach a monument, chip off a piece for yourself, and walk away carrying it in your pants pocket. This would not be a problem if I wasn’t a man, and there weren’t so many of you, wanting your own pieces, that if I let all of you have what you want there wouldn’t be any of me still left for myself. You want the gunfight story? Go download Cold Roses. It’s pretentious and overwrought, but got at least half of the facts right, all without asking me a single damned thing.”

Another man might have delivered all of that as a plaintive, hysterical rant. From his mouth it sounded like resignation, born from years of sad experience. I wondered how many pushy curiosity-seekers he’d needed to admit as far as his airlock. “I’ve seen Cold Roses, sir. It didn’t tell me what I needed to know.”

“Then download the Commission’s report. It’s the result of a hearing that lasted six weeks, and includes enough detail to choke Oswald Spengler. Unless you’re one of those touchy-feelie types who want to know what it was like, in which case I have no answer more eloquent than, I didn’t have time to stop and think about it.”

His anger didn’t delay me one heartbeat, but I did need several seconds to fight my way clear of that reference to Spengler, whose Decline of the West I had not then read and would not touch until several years into my own self-imposed exile. “No, sir. I don’t need to know about the gunfight. I already know everything I want to know about the gunfight.”

There was another pause, shorter this time. “And that is?”

“You armed yourself in response to a possible threat from a colleague deranged through no fault of his own. He fired on your barge. You fled the vehicle and returned fire. The confrontation lasted several minutes, but sooner or later one of you had to hit his target. The lucky survivor happened to be you. You almost lost your commission, in part because of some zealous prosecutors who accused you of being as dangerous as the man you were fighting, but were cleared of all charges. The tale’s grown in the telling and you’ve been living down your reputation as a hero ever since. But everything else, sir, is just drawing dotted lines between the places where you stood and the places where your rounds hit their respective targets. It’s been dissected and analyzed from every possible angle, hundreds of times, by people far smarter or far more obsessive than I am, and I wouldn’t be here, taking up your time, if all I wanted to do is travel that same ground all over again. For what it’s worth, I’m not even a historian. Whether you believe it or not, sir, I have a reason to be here.”

When he spoke again, his voice betrayed a respect I hadn’t heard there before. “How old are you, young lady?”

“Twenty-four.”

“I thought I detected the arrogance of youth. You do know that I haven’t allowed anybody past the airlock since some six years before you were born?”

“Yes, sir. And if you don’t mind me saying so, it sounds damned pointlessly lonely.”

The words surprised me as much as they must have surprised him. Nothing like them had appeared anywhere on my long list of strategies for getting him to drop the habit of a lifetime and speak to me. Even now, I found them mortifying. I would have pulled the very sentiment from the air, and tucked it away in my pocket, had there been any way of catching up with it and dragging it back. I found myself cringing, half-expecting him to open the outer door and flush me back into vacuum, where all impudent snots belonged.

He surprised me by guffawing.

Malcolm Bell laughed that hard maybe four times in all the time we knew each other. It was a number exactly equal to the number of times he laughed at all. Other people had varying intensity settings, ranging from polite chuckles to uncontrollable giggles. Bell was more than capable of being amused by things other people said, but never laughed out loud unless he could devote his entire being to it, and when he did, it always took him some time to stop.

I must say that I’ve spent a lot of years missing that sound. There’s a certain amount of personal pride that comes with being able to make it happen.

On that day I thought it would never end. But even it trailed off eventually. And he said, “Every thirty years or so, the human race surprises me by producing someone worth making exceptions for. You have your audience, Jessie James.”

The inner door slid open…

In just about every version of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Wyatt Earp is a tower of strength, more titan than man, so certain of his own rectitude that it might as well have been this certainty that prevented him from being pierced by any of the bullets fired on that dusty street on Tombstone.

It might even be true.

Certainly, it’s remarkable enough that a man who lived the way he did never did feel the sting of a bullet himself. So many of the legends of his day did. Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and Wild Bill Hickok all died that way—some backshot, others facing their enemies, but all as prone to the effects of violence as any other man. Earp’s own body remained inviolate.

The inescapable impression is that when he stood before the Clantons, exchanging a flurry of bullets at point-blank range, he was tall and unafraid, as aware of his own invulnerability as future generations would be, when they saw his story told and retold in one medium after another.

Again, maybe it’s so. Maybe he was just crazy enough to think that the laws of chance didn’t apply to him.

And maybe he was terrified, and wishing he were anywhere else.

Malcolm Bell sits in the driver’s seat of a Class B Lunar Barge, traveling maybe forty kilometers an hour as he makes his way to a solar array under construction on a ridge a three-hour drive from base. He is under cover, the better to keep his suit temperature within a comfortable mean, despite what will have to be a full day’s trek under the pitiless unfiltered Sun, but as is typical for that time and state of technology, not under air. He is tired. He hasn’t told anybody, but he’s been having trouble sleeping these past few nights, and would have begged off this pain in the ass solo detail, were the local work culture at all tolerant of such frivolities as sick days. Life here, the life they’re still trying to build, is still too precarious for that. The motto is, If you can walk, you can work, and Bell remains too mobile to spend the day in his bunk when he’s part of the machine that makes life on this world possible.

He knows this, but he is also a human being under stress that would break many other untrained men, so his mind is following fourteen separate trains of thought at once. Part of him is thinking about the drive he has already made a dozen times, but part is thinking of a fellow engineer who he considers a real ass, part is trying to remember the name of a popular singer who has been on the tip of his tongue all day, part is looking forward to getting some downtime when he can see his good friends Minnie and Earl, and part is thinking about that poor crazy son of a bitch, Destry.

Shit, Destry.

Bell knows he’s being stupid. There’s no point in worrying about Destry. Worrying about Destry is like worrying about lightning. It strikes or it doesn’t, and if it wants you it will have you. All the worry accomplishes is ruining your day while you wait to find out if the dice rolls, one way or the other. Besides, Destry’s got to be dead by now. There’s no way he’s still out here, running around so far from any supply drops, just looking for another wandering surface rat to ambush. He must be spam in a can, baking inside his suit, perhaps even bursting from his tin shell as the gases build up from within. It’s a disgusting image, but the only possible one, because Destry’s not some unstoppable monster, just a man with the immense misfortune to pull the wrong lottery ticket in the God-has-a-sense-of-humor sweepstakes.

Bell knows all this, in the same way he knows his service codes and his emergency procedures and the words to the current hit song with the easily-mocked lyrics that have burrowed into his skull and now refuse to leave, but he is also a human being, with a human being’s capacity to dwell on bogeymen, and he has been dwelling on the image of his own head bursting into a fog of swiftly-dispersing vapor as his helmet is bisected by another of Destry’s jury-rigged weapons. It’s not suffering that frightens him. It’s the unknowability of the moment. It’s being alive one instant, and dead the next, without so much as a by-your-leave for realization. Why, this very thought, the one he’s thinking now, could be the very last thought he’ll ever have, and he’ll never know it. Or maybe this one is the last. Or this one.

He is lucky that he happens to be not only looking in the right direction but also working himself into a fine state of paranoia when the projectile shatters the air gauge on the control panel before him. This is a vacuum, after all. There is no audible distant gunshot, no musical crunch as the transparency covering the display surface turns to shrapnel. There is just a hole where no hole existed before, and were he not thinking of Destry he could very easily hand himself over to the slaughter by wasting the next few seconds wondering what kind of mechanical blowout could have caused such a catastrophic malfunction. Instead he realizes at once that Destry must be firing at him, from one of the jagged hills that overlook this now well-traveled road. He is therefore already hurling himself to the left—that direction chosen only because it is the nearest way out of there—when a second projectile passes through the spot where he’d been standing and imbeds itself in the control panel, its only lasting effect to provide further grist for the future storytelling mill.

Objects on the Moon fall slowly, by terrestrial standards, even if they don’t want to, and Bell’s desperate dodge develops a certain slapstick flavor as he sinks toward the rocky ground—a good two meters below him, thanks to the barge’s oversize treads—not at all rushed by the knowledge that there’s somebody shooting at him. He is even able to begin his frantic call for help before he hits and commences to roll. “Bell to Control! Request immediate assistance!”

Cliff McRae is the comm-op riding the console that day. He’s from some nowhere in the Texas Panhandle and speaks with an exaggerated version of the cowboy twang that has flavored a disproportionate percentage of NASA’s public speakers for over a century now. “We copy, Bell. What’s the nature of your problem?”

Bell is still tumbling beside the barge he has abandoned. He owes his life to the conservation of momentum, as his trajectory parallels the vehicle’s forward motion, and thus keeps in its shadow where he is shielded, for the moment, from his attacker’s line of fire. This will change in a second, if he cannot regain his feet and keep up. He gasps, “I’m being fired upon from the ridge!”

McRae’s pause lasts a full five seconds. “I’m tracking your location, Mr. Bell. I see you south of Route 7, marker seventeen. Is that affirmative?”

“That’s the route. I don’t know the marker. I’ve abandoned the barge, which is still in motion, and am using it for cover.”

“Have you positive ID on the shooter?”

“Hell, no, I don’t have positive ID! But just how many crazed snipers do we have on this hunk of rock?”

There’s grim amusement in McRae’s reply. “Copied. Stay covered, Malcolm. We’re working on getting you on some reinforcements.”

Meanwhile, Bell has managed to regain his feet and now hustles alongside the barge, which is continuing to roll at a speed he can match as long as he keeps to a slow jog. It’s not easy going. Moonsuits are not made for running, nor is lunar gravity. A normal run for a human being involves a certain number of moments between steps, when both feet are off the ground at the same time, moments when the runner uses gravity to his advantage, and that the Moon insists on using as opportunities for slow-motion ballet. It’s possible to compensate and build up a speed significantly in excess of what the same legs would achieve on Earth, but you pretty much have to be raised on the Moon to pick up the knack.

Bell was born on Earth.

In Tombstone, Arizona.

Running alongside the barge is a stopgap solution at best. True, it does not have a dead man’s switch. That safety measure had long ago been deemed more dangerous than the vehicle could possibly be even as a runaway, since on the Moon it’s far more important to get a failing or incapacitated operator who’s at least headed in the right direction back to base and under air. Truth is, the barge is currently following buried magnetic markers that guide it along a preprogrammed route. But it moves slowly enough for any halfway intelligent sniper, even he’s also a deranged one, to scramble down from his position and take a shot from another angle. Staying close won’t keep Bell out of the line of fire for long.

McRae returns. “Bell? Do you read?”

“I’m working on it.”

“We have three units converging on your position, and are working on getting more. Earliest ETA is thirty minutes. You are advised to keep moving and not attempt to engage Destry unless he forces the confrontation. Do you read?”

“I read,” Bell says. He has a bad thought. “Listen, he might be monitoring this. We better observe radio silence until your people get closer. I wouldn’t want to lead him right to me.”

“Good thinking, Bell. Signing off now.”

Bell regrets the silence the instant the signal cuts out. After all, that might have been the last conversation he’ll ever have with another human being. Would it be that bad to stay on the line? After all, if Destry is monitoring him, the crazy fool now knows that he’s had a chance to call help. Wouldn’t that send him running? Is he that crazy, to stick around and expose himself to an army of rescuers?

It seems unlikely. Mad, even.

Living in the moment, Bell feels the truth anyway.

Destry is exactly that mad, and stalking him.

I didn’t know what to expect in Bell’s habitat. I had been to a number of other tin cans in the last few months, and had seen interiors that pinged every graph point from pig-sty to robotically antiseptic. I’d even dealt with one well-known figure from the early colonization days, never mind who, whose place was draped with enough pink diaphanous cloth to outfit the classical Turkish harem—and he even dressed the part, though not, I’m sorry to say, playing the part of the sultan. I don’t care how curious you are. You honestly don’t want to know the name.

As if in contrast, Bell’s place was austere to the point of sterility. Function was all. The only real concessions were to comfort, as in the sonic shower with emitters mounted not only on the ceiling, but also along the walls and even in the floor tiles. The bed was made, but configured to recliner outline. There were no artifacts I didn’t recognize, except for a purplish vase shiny enough to cast starbursts wherever it captured the overhead light. It was translucent enough to reveal that it held a substance I supposed to be lunar soil. Not unusual: the stuff is way fertile, and this wouldn’t be the first time a lunar resident collected some for use in his indoor garden.

Bell himself was ancient. That I’d expected. He’d been seventy when he acquired this place as his forwarding address, and well into his eighties the last time he ventured as far as the nearest center of population. The last photograph I had of him had been taken by one member of the appreciative crowd that had followed him around on that occasion. He’d been so rail-thin he’d seemed more vertical slash than man, so hesitant in his gait that my eyewitness reported half-expecting those brittle bones to shatter with every step. His few strands of remaining hair, allowed to grow long as if out of disdain for the waste of time trimming them would be, floated above his dark, liver-spotted scalp like cirrus clouds passing above the curvature of the Earth.

Bell hadn’t answered any questions on that day. From all reports, he’d seemed so overwhelmed by all the attention, so upset by all the questions shouted his way by a crowd that insisted on demanding details about his legendary past, that any intelligence still at play behind those dark brown eyes had disappeared behind a fog of age and confusion. My witness to his visit, groping for a way to describe Bell’s demeanor, on that sad, pathetic visit, seized on stories his grandparents had told him, about a degenerative disease called Alzheimer’s, often associated with advanced years, that had once upon a time been notorious for robbing its victims of thought, memory, and any connection to the people they once were. There was no way Bell could have that. The syndrome didn’t exist any more. But my witness had wondered if he could have something like it. He said that it was the only way to reconcile the icon Bell had been with the shuffling, frightened figure Bell had become.

The Bell I saw now was clearly a man approaching the end of his first century, but his eyes were bright, his movements sure, his speech clear and unslurred by stroke. The son of a bitch even had hair: a full head of dirty cotton wool, a sharp contrast to the light tan of his skin. Some of the old bastards I’d met went days without shaving, but his chin was smooth, his clothing laundered and unfrayed at the seams.

Old. Like I said, ancient. But not decrepit. He was still taking care of himself.

Either he’d gotten better, or his prior fragility had been one hell of an act.

I knew he had to be looking at me. From all available records, he had liked his women, and I was his first female visitor in decades. There was not much to ogle, considering that everything I had was still hidden beneath the bulky lines of my moonsuit. But I had a cute face in those days, if you’re willing to count that eccentric form of cuteness that comes only when the right combination of otherwise awkward features collide in ways that cannot be predicted from even the most exhaustive list of the ways they’re less than ideal when described one at a time. I used to thank God for my big brown eyes, which bound them all together in one acceptable package. They sometimes fooled people into thinking I was beautiful. Without them compensating as heroically as they did, I might have needed to take up residence in a zoo.

He pulled a modular chair from its housing under the retractable desk, indicated that I should make myself comfortable there, and sat on the edge of his bed, his spine as straight as a rod. He gave a doleful shake of his head. “I declare, young lady. In some enlightened societies you’d be boiled in oil.”

“That’s never happened, sir. But I have been stoned, from time to time.”

His lips twitched. “Charming. Gutsy. Well-read enough to possess a working knowledge of antiquarian slang. And a hell of lot prettier than the old photos I’ve seen of your badman namesake. Were I eighty years younger, I might be honestly tempted by you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“It’s not a compliment. Just the simple truth.” He appraised me some more. “You said you’re not a historian, meaning that whatever you seek to learn from me you don’t expect to teach a seminar of yawning, blank-eyed students. You’re also not a reporter. I get that from the fact that reporters are generally only interested in the most obvious thing and you’ve already said you have no interest in discussing the most obvious thing. For pretty much the same reason, I’m also fairly confident in declaring that you’re not some starry-eyed hero worshipper who’s been just aching to meet me since childhood. Am I correct so far?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then I must confess bafflement. So what are you professionally?”

“I’m a junior auditor for the Lunar Internal Revenue Service.”

His eyes widened just enough to reveal the white surrounding all sides of those lucid brown irises. Something that might have been hilarity tugged at his jaw muscles, as he ventured, “Am I going to be sorry I allowed you in here? Are you really just a third-rate functionary intent on impressing her bosses by shining your mighty proctoscope into the moribund finances of a crazy old man?”

“No, sir. My bosses have no idea I’m here.”

“I should say so. I know damn well I owe no stupid taxes.”

I gave him a measured look. “None at all, sir. Not for thirty years.”

Without so much as a single line filling in, he seemed to shed a decade in a heartbeat. Once again, the smile tugged at the corners of his lips. “Continue.”

“Can I have some water first?”

“Be my guest.”

Rather than get up and avail myself to his own supplies I sipped from the straw built into my suit’s collar ring, wincing at the unpleasant warmth of the water—which was a lot like hot coffee, only without flavor. It was pretty piss-poor testimony to the efficacy of my reservoir’s insulated lining, but it was enough to clear the dust from my throat. “Well, you’ve got to understand. I’m the fresh meat in the office, so I get all the busywork, doing reports nobody’s ever going to read.”

“Bureaucracy being the same animal it always was.”

“Right. Well, about a year ago, they assigned me to do a study on the differences between the tax burdens carried by Luna’s various centers of population. There are always differences, you know, no matter how much the powers that be try to keep things equitable.”

“Or looking that way,” he said.

“Right,” I said again. “We all know the system can’t be fixed. It’s always going to be unfair to somebody. Fix one inequity and you cause another one for someone else. The study was a total waste of time that was never going to lead to any substantive change … but it was my assignment, so I dove into it, getting all the expected answers until I found one anomaly that just wouldn’t let me go.”

“Better come out with it, then. I’m an old man. Talking about taxes is taking up far too much of the time I have left.”

He was not going to make me stammer. I’d spent too much time rehearsing this. “It came up when I encountered a small number of people who have been handed lifelong tax exemptions, people who don’t have to pay a cent no matter how long they live. Some of them are members of the clergy, grandfathered in when the churches lost their exempt status. They’re all elderly and beside the point. The rest are all Farside hermits like yourself. The usual explanation has always been that you’re self-sufficient, have no declarable income, and use no government services. But I looked closer and found that it’s not quite as simple as that. The Lunar Authority deeded your plots to you, in perpetuity. It paid for your habitats and continues to pay for your food drops, your oxygen, your maintenance, and your medical care. It also provides you with an income—a quite comfortable income—far in excess of anything you’d need for decades spent avoiding centers of population. That income is paid into an escrow account off-world, which few of you even touch, though some have it paid to family members or favorite charities, and one or two of you have finally given up on living the way you do in order to enjoy a well-funded retirement.”

I took a deep breath. “Those are the cases I find interesting, sir. Whenever one of you rejoins humanity, your tax status reverts to normal. This is a clear indication that the Lunar Authority is paying you to live the way you do. Moreover, it also takes significant pains to ensure that the regions housing you remain undeveloped and that you are not pestered by any bureaucratic interference.”

He favored me with another wry grin. “Current company excluded.”

“Oh, did I give you the impression that there’s anything at all official about this visit? Forgive me, sir. This is me being a private citizen. It has to be. Any questions I asked about your status were either deflected or discouraged. I went to my highest-ranking supervisor to ask about you and was told that pressing the matter was a good way to torpedo my career.”

“Which was,” he guessed, “absolutely the wrong way to handle you.”

I gave him the best shrug I could, which wasn’t a very good one in my moonsuit. “Unfortunately, the best way to make sure I remain interested in something is to warn me it’s none of my business.”

He could only respond with the most doleful headshake possible. “Idiots. Five minutes with you and I could have told them that.”

“So I investigated further and found that the vast majority of the crazy old men, and a few crazier old women, who have given up the company of other human beings in order to lock themselves up in tin cans on Farside, worked those early construction projects at the same time you did. About 60 percent of them lived in the temporary warrens during the same five-year period. Considering that there were, at most, a few thousand people cycling in and out at the time, the odds of that many people from a single population segment all deciding to become hermits in their dotage become downright astronomical. It only got worse once I examined the records more closely and determined that the chances of any first-generation moon rat taking the same late-life path you did only increased the closer their respective tours of duty coincided with one particular day.

“Once I identified that date and found the one element that made it unique, I found a certain clever way to test my results. I researched moon rats who worked the construction sites before and after that day but who happened to be on leave, or off-world, or even incapacitated due to illness or injury, on the day itself. There were about thirty of them. Not one of them became a Farside hermit. But of all the people who were on duty, on that particular day? More than fifty have.

“And it’s not just a time correlation we’re talking about. The chances of one of your co-workers becoming a Farside hermit increases exponentially with their proximity to a certain location on that date. Of the six men and two women who were first on the scene, answering a famous distress call, five lived to age eighty—and all became Farside hermits at about that age. Of all the hundreds of moon rats working Station C, some two hundred kilometers away, none of whom had any direct contact with that prior group until some fourteen days later … maybe twenty did. So what we’re talking about here, sir, is a pair of overlapping bell curves, both centered on the same time and location. The same event.”

I realized my heart was pounding. The shape of this thing I saw was that big, and I had now come close enough to feel its gravity, pulling on my skin. I had to take another sip of unpleasantly warm water, and take another deep breath, before continuing. “Forgive me, Mr. Bell. If it was just you, I’d understand. Post-traumatic stress disorder. If it was just you and a couple of others, I’d understand that too. People get bitter in their old age. If it was just more than a thousand with no apparent connection between them, I’d write that off as well. Humanity’s a funny beast. But when all the evidence indicates a single common denominator … and when you consider the active collaboration of the Lunar Authority itself … then all those rationalizations fail. What we have, sir, is a mystery too big to put down, no matter how much I try. And you’re at the center of it.”

I spread my arms. “I need to know. What else happened on the day of the gunfight?”

It took me a second to realize that I was alone in the habitat.

I’d been talking for five minutes, all in preparation for the question that had taken over my life, over the last year. But at the actual moment I asked the critical question, I’d gathered up all my hope and fear and all my need to know … and looked down at my own lap, afraid to face him now that the issue was out in the open between us.

It must have happened during that moment.

But it was only after I perceived the silence, maybe a full second later, that I looked up, registered what I was looking at, and felt a great black pit open up underneath me.

Malcolm Bell was gone.

Paranoia can be a survival mechanism.

It’s especially so on the Moon, where a lone man being stalked by a deranged colleague cannot be alerted by the sound of boots scraping across soil only a few meters behind him.

Jogging alongside the barge, his field of vision already truncated by the dimensions of his faceplate, Malcolm Bell is more paranoid than most. He whirls every few seconds or so, each time certain that the action is about to reveal the approaching figure of Ken Destry, drawing down on him from point-blank range. Each time he whirls, surveying the dead landscape behind him and the dead landscape to his left and just to be sure the dead road stretching out before him, he knows that he’s too late, and that he’s accomplishing nothing but a close look at the man determined to kill him.

This is not terror. Not exactly. Malcolm Bell works in a dangerous environment alongside other men and women who risk death just by being there, and though like most of them he wonders in his private moments whether he’s truly up to it, he’s determined to be as brave about this as they’d want him to be.

If he must die, it won’t be as a coward.

So it’s not terror Bell feels. It’s something else, and it takes him several minutes of this silliness to finally identify it. It’s instinct, trying to save his life.

There is no particular reason he should listen to it. He doesn’t have enough data to map where Destry is, relative to his own position, and cannot say for sure whether walking alongside the barge is more or less dangerous than any other plan. But he knows it as well as he knows his own name. Destry is nearby, working his way around the rear of the barge. Continuing onward, in this position, gives Bell a life expectancy of minutes.

He doesn’t want to be separated from the barge, because it offers the only protection he can count on, until help arrives. But while it is moving slowly enough for him to keep up with it, and even overtake it if he has to, climbing aboard in these conditions is going to cost him precious seconds. Bell finds himself eerily certain that if he simply grabs a rung and pulls himself up, it will be then that Destry comes jogging around the rear of the barge to blow a hole in him.

So he scans the landscape up ahead, looking for an advantage. And he spots one, in the form of a small rise, maybe half his own height, some twenty meters ahead of him. As he draws closer, he sees it’s a freestanding boulder of some kind, maybe meteor debris, maybe the tumbled remains of some rockslide off one of the nearby ridges. There’s nothing to distinguish it from any other of the other geological crap that makes day-to-day sightseeing on the lunar surface so nonstop delightful. He’s passed it a thousand times, following this route, without ever noticing it. Now, he finds that he loves it about as much as any man could possibly love a rock, so much in fact that had he the time to be giddy about this he might actually offer to marry it.

He loves it because it’s where he needs it to be.

An instant of frenzied calculation and he puts on the speed, focusing on that boulder as if it’s the most important thing in the known universe.

Again, it’s not a graceful run. There is no such thing for men born elsewhere, wearing moonsuits that render their every move ponderous, in gravity that turns the steadiest gallop into a series of unwanted headlong leaps. But Bell, widely considered one of the clumsiest bastards employed in the construction project, finds himself calculating every step with a clarity that always eluded him before. And a good thing, too: for even as he covered half the distance between himself and that wonderful rock, he sees a spot on its surface pop in a little silent burst of dust, and knows that his paranoia has served him well. Ken Destry is behind him, shooting, and survival depends on pulling off this next move perfectly.

Bell leaps to the surface of the boulder, then kicks off to the right, aiming himself at the open cab of the barge, hoping to pass through the threshold and into the cage. It’s a dangerous move, and not just because falling short is a good way to be ground to red pulp in the treads. It’s a dangerous move because even a minor mishap can be fatal. All he needs to become history is to scrape the edge of the hatch the wrong way, and rip a hole in his suit.

Bell threads the needle, bouncing along the corrugated floor of the cab like a stone, tossed slow-motion across the surface of a lake.

His momentum inevitably carries him through the other open hatch on the other side of the cab.

That’s okay.

Because he pulls off another slick maneuver while passing through.

He grabs his handmade weapon and carries it with him as he sails out the other side and back onto lunar soil.

There.

Now the odds are even.

Malcolm Bell had disappeared.

There had been no puff of smoke, no flash of light, no pop of displaced air.

Had there been any visual manifestation of his disappearance, I’d missed it. By accident or design he’d picked the one moment when I would not be able to add any other sensory cues to my general store of knowledge.

But he was no longer sitting on his bed.

Nor was there any question of him using my momentary inattention to dart out of sight and hide. This was a Farside hermit’s habitat. There was a sonic shower (unoccupied) next to a head (unoccupied), storage cabinets (still sealed), a few alcoves too small to cast shadows sufficient to hide a human being (all within my direct line of sight).

I could argue a silent sliding panel of some kind, one that hid a closet-sized space just large enough to house an old man who wanted to play Houdini with the visiting rube. But I had an uncle once, a math teacher, who taught me the best way to avoid panic when facing insoluble problems. He said: Break them down into logic trees. At the very least, you’ll separate what you can figure out from what you can’t.

There were only two possibilities here. Or, at least, two different categories of possibility, each the central root of a thousand more specific explanations that branched out from those central assumptions.

First category: Bell’s disappearance had nothing to do with personal volition. He’d popped out of existence, or to another plane of existence, or just to the roulette table at the Fantazi Casino in Grissom Center, not because he’d wanted to shock and distress the busybody in his living room, but because of other forces beyond his control: say, some three-headed alien inputting the wrong coordinates in his personal teleportation booth a few hundred thousand light years away. Or maybe there’d been a Rapture. Whatever. However you constructed it, maybe he hadn’t expected anything to happen, and was now sitting under a polka-dotted sky, wondering about the fresh madness that had just given his life a brand new dose of surreality.

The chief drawback of every theory that fit under this umbrella was that if it was beyond his control it was also beyond my control, and I’d just exchanged one set of mysteries for another, a billion times bigger, that I couldn’t resolve just by asking a cranky old man a few intrusive questions. So I might as well not even try to explore any of the possibilities that sprung from this particular root. There was no point. By definition, they were beyond me.

So that left the only subcategory of possibility worth worrying about: that Bell had disappeared deliberately, on cue, whether by clever magic trick or extraordinary capability unknown to me.

If I followed that theory to the next set of branching possibilities, I was left with two more. Either he’d vanished knowing that I’d never be able to determine how, or he’d vanished knowing that I could.

If the first was true, I’d reached the deadest of all possible dead ends, and a life-ruining catastrophe as well, as I’d now have to explain why I’d be sending a distress signal from the home of a missing hero. If I took that route, I was in for weeks, maybe even a lifetime, of interrogation by investigators duty-bound to assume that I’d done something to the old man. But again, there was no real profit in exploring that possibility either. If it was just bigger than me, there was nothing I could do to ameliorate it.

But if he’d vanished knowing that I could figure out how…

…well, in that case, he’d left me everything I needed to figure out how.

So I took a deep breath and forced myself to examine his habitat inch by inch.

If there was one word that could have described the ambience, it was functional. There was not a single furnishing, not a single line, that deviated from the practical. He had no art, no knickknacks, no books beyond those he could call up using his links to the hytex network. His home was as austere as a monk’s cell, and from all available evidence he wanted it that way.

Why would a man with a loving family and a sterling reputation do this to himself?

He had been sitting in plain sight, and had disappeared during the length of an eye blink. There’d been no time for him to secrete himself anywhere.

He had not gotten past me. That’s the thing about sitting around in your moonsuit, in a chamber as small as a Farside hermit’s habitat. You’re big and bulky enough to block the entire central passageway. He couldn’t have gotten past me without shoving me aside or bowling me over.

Occam’s Razor held that explanations became more likely the closer I searched the areas nearest the bed. So I searched the bed.

Bell slept on a permafoam mattress, of the sort extruded by a liquid reservoir in the housing below him. The mattress never had to be cleaned, replaced, or hauled away, because the top layer evaporated on a daily basis, replaced by fresh foam as the reservoir extruded more foam to replace it. I’d never used one myself, but had heard that they were well worth the price for anybody with lower back problems. One touch with the palm of my hand and I sighed with envy, despite being half-crazy from other pressing concerns. A night on one of these, whether asleep or engaged in other activities, would be heaven. But its presence meant that he hadn’t found some way to hide under the bed, because the only “under the bed” here would be a vacuum-sealed bladder and a reservoir filled with liquid solution.

The bulkhead that surrounded the bed on three sides was similarly unhelpful. It was solid metal, cold to the touch and absent any obvious seams, even at the corners. There were no sliding panels, no hidden doors, no places that rang hollow in a way that suggested hidden storage spaces behind them. When I took off my right glove and placed my bare hand on that wall, I felt the light vibration that all lunar residents look for, the one indicating that the machinery that makes all our lives possible was still humming away, still doing everything it could to provide the next breath, and the breath after that. This was no surprise. It was what I’d expected to feel. But it still left a serious shortage of answers.

I went back to my chair and sat down again, my eyes fixed on the slight depression his body had left on the permafoam.

Had there been a rug, I would have pulled it up, expecting to find a vertical shaft with a ladder, leading downward into darkness. Had there been any wall hangings, I would have searched for hidden passageways behind those. Had his food dispensary involved a refrigerator rather than a pair of spigots, I would have moved it aside. In any place that showed the touch of a human personality, there would have been any number of blind alleys to search. But this was just a tin box that had once contained an old man, that had then contained me as well, and that now contained only me.

The only anomaly in the entire habitat was the one thing he owned that showed any appreciation for form over function: that uncharacteristically gaudy vase.

What the hell. I picked it up.

It felt like glass, but softer. My fingers left indentations that popped back out and disappeared as soon as I let go. It was also cold to the touch, almost as if it had been refrigerated. I tilted it one way, then the other, watching the substance inside shift like the soil I’d supposed it to be. I sniffed the narrow opening and made a face. Whatever it was smelled like nothing else I’d ever encountered. It wasn’t bad, but rather unfamiliar. I had no referent. After a moment I tilted the bottle further and poured a little, about a spoonful, onto the previously pristine countertop.

It wasn’t lunar soil.

Whatever it was, it was as purple as the vessel that contained it and reflected the overhead light in the same eccentric manner. Most of it had the same texture as talc, but there were also luminescent crystals of some kind. Old-fashioned laundry powder was my first and most hopeless guess, but he was not likely to need it in a habitat that used sonics for cleansing.

I impaled the little pile with my index finger, and then, for no particular reason, just messing around as I tried to figure out what I was looking at, drew a little furrow along the countertop, my fingertip turning the mound into two ridges of approximately equal length.

I remember thinking, This is pointless.

Then the two ridges shifted, on their own, crossing the path I’d drawn between them to reunite into one contiguous pile.

What the hell?

Now one fat ridge, the pile waited for one heartbeat before contracting again, to reform the same irregular cone it had been when I first poured the powder onto the countertop. And I mean the same, exact cone. I would have been willing to bet that not a grain remained out of place, with respect to the places they had occupied before.

I cut the pile in half, moved one pile to the extreme far left of Bell’s countertop, and moved the other to the extreme far right, carving both into S-shapes before leaving them alone to see what they would do.

The two powdery snakes retained their serpentine shapes and slithered toward one another, undulating exactly as a genuine sidewinder might, until coiling together in an exaggerated embrace, at the precise midway point between them. Then their outlines blurred, their substances mixed, and they became, once again, the same dull mound the stuff seemed to prefer, between rounds.

A toy. Like modeling clay, except with a reset button.

I poured out a little more, doubling the size of the mound, and separated the two halves again, this time creating a dam between them by the simple expedient of resting my arm on the countertop between them. This time the whatever-the-hell-it-was showed adaptability. The two piles approached each other, found my arm between them interfering in the happy reunion, and after a moment I could only describe as careful consideration, marched in unison along the length of my arm, to the place where I’d left a centimeter’s clearance between the bulkhead and the tip of my finger. The two halves met and melded at that narrow crossing, reminding me of nothing so much as two long-lost travelers, scaling opposing faces of the same mountain, for a joyous reunion at the summit.

Behind me, Malcolm Bell said, “Yes, it’s alive.”

I whirled and spotted him, returned to the same bed where he’d been sitting before his disappearance. He was exactly the same man he’d been a few minutes earlier, except that the few strands of remaining hair now looked windblown and the furrows on his face now shone with sweat. He was grinning ear to ear, deeply entertained by my confusion.

“And intelligent,” he added.

The room spun. I stared down at the powder on the counter, now circling the base of the vase it had come from as if searching for the opening that would allow it to return home, and managed a weak, “What are you saying?”

He shook his head. “Your mind’s big enough to accommodate it. You just have to throw out enough clutter to make room.”

I glanced back at the counter. The powder was now streaming up the sheer side of the vase, scaling that slick surface as if wholly undeterred by gravity or common sense. My knees had turned to water. I backed away, lowered myself into the guest chair, and stared at him with something approaching awe. “It’s alien, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Y-you’ve made First Contact?”

Now he looked a little disappointed in me. “No, that predated me. This stuff came from the fourth or fifth contact. Less than twenty years ago.”

“What what what what what!?”

“Look, I’m an old man. I don’t have time to break it gently. You came for the truth as I understand it, and I’m giving you the truth as I understand it. You’re just going to have to keep up with me. Suffice it to say everybody working on the Moon at the time of the gunfight was already involved in a historic First Contact situation, one that had absolutely nothing to do with the much more unusual phenomenon Destry represented. We know it was unrelated because when it happened we trucked out by the homestead occupied by those other visitors—we called them Minnie and Earl, and they were two of the nicest folks you’d ever want to meet—and asked them what was up. They could only shrug and say it was a new one on them.”

“What you’re telling me … it’s not in the history books.”

He shrugged. “Well, that’s the thing about history. The people who put it down in books are so concerned about accuracy that they come to give what they’re doing the weight of an exact science. When in truth it’s nothing of the kind. It’s the best available estimate.”

I sipped some more water from my suit reservoir. It had cooled only a little, but its acrid warmth helped anchor me to the here and now in a way that a more palatable drink might not have. I held it in my mouth for several seconds before swallowing, and then faced the old man on the bed with something approaching calm. “Maybe you better just tell me the bottom line.”

“The bottom line? Two moon rats shooting at each other was the very least important thing that happened that day. The bottom line below that? All of us old-timers with Farside hermitages are working on a project with unprecedented implications for the future of humanity. Everything else is footnote.” He lay back on his bed, cradling the back of his head in a basket formed of his own linked fingers. “If you want, you can leave it at that. I’ll call you a ride back to civilization and we can pretend this never happened. Or I can explain the rest of it and you can say goodbye to any ambitions you might have of ending your days surrounded by fat grandchildren, because you will someday lock yourself up in a habitat just like mine. Whatever. It’s your choice. I’ll be outside, waiting.”

Outside?

Before I could ask what he meant by that, he disappeared again.

And this time I was looking directly at him when he went.

It was no conjurer’s illusion.

He lost dimensions one at a time, first going as flat as a photograph printed on poster board, then folding up again to become a straight up-and-down line, then becoming a single bright dot that subsequently disappeared itself, leaving a purple afterimage on my retina.

I need to confess something here.

I’ve only fainted once in my entire life. Just once. I don’t recommend the experience, but I do understand it. It happens when your mind or body or emotions reach a point of absolute saturation and you can only benefit from being turned off for a while.

I’ll bet you’re assuming that this was the moment.

It wasn’t, actually, but I came damn close. I felt my balance go, felt the world turn gray at the edges, felt my eyes start to roll up … and thought to myself, Dammit, no.

It was that simple. I just refused to go. I gripped the edge of the countertop and squeezed, just hard enough to reassure myself of its solidity. I got my breathing back under control, devoted about ten seconds to figuring out what I was going to do next, and did the only sensible thing.

I sat back down in his chair and waited for him to return.

Because of his uncanny luck surviving gunfights, Wyatt Earp is generally imagined to have been a spectacular quick-draw artist and an even better shot. Many of the dramatizations of his adventures feature scenes where he performs ballistic miracles, like gallantly letting some desperado slap leather first, going for his own weapon only then, somehow taking aim before the desperado can get a bead on him, and more often than not showing enough mercy to wound and not kill. In some versions he literally shoots the gun out of the other guy’s hand, without drawing blood.

This is the picture you see in the dictionary if you look up the word nonsense.

In the first place, the handguns of the era were nowhere near that accurate; quick-draw artists and master marksmen did exist, but the skill-set was specialized, and there weren’t many folks willing to risk their own skins drawing down in contests with fixed rules. Nobody, not even Earp, would risk his life pulling a damned fool stunt like trying to shoot a gun out of an enemy’s hand, not even if it was possible. Not when missing and getting gutshot in those years before effective surgery was a good way to spend your last few days sweating in agony on some filthy mattress, entering hell long before you actually died and found out for certain whether you were actually going down or up. The rule then was the same rule that still applies in contests where people find themselves obliged to shoot at one another: If you must pull the trigger, then put the bastard down.

In the second place, even if somebody did possess the accuracy posited by those stories, protracted gunfights rendered those skills irrelevant. Every single shot produced a cloud of gunpowder smoke, larger and more opaque than contemporary imaginations can possibly believe, the effect of any determined fusillade a curtain of haze that burned the eyes and obscured the position of the people firing on you. Hollywood provided clarity so audiences could tell who fired, who missed, who got wounded and who got killed, the very issues that were not always immediately clear to the real people who had stood on those dusty streets, fighting for their lives and helping to construct the lies that would be told about them. So that mythical gunfighter who could drill a hole through an ace of spades at fifty paces might not have been able to see the playing card at all.

Finally, the gunfight that ultimately made Wyatt Earp a legend was a most unusual day for him. He didn’t have daily shootouts. His usual M.O., dealing with armed loudmouths, was to sneak up from behind and club them unconscious. It was dangerous and it was brutal and it minimized the number of dead bodies littering the streets of Tombstone, primarily by rendering far less likely the possibility that Earp himself would ever become one of them. It was also less than perfectly heroic and not exactly the kind of thing that builds legends; few dramatizations of his exploits acknowledge it at all.

Similarly, most of the stories about Malcolm Bell’s quick thinking during the First Gunfight on the Moon turn him into some kind of crack-shot killing machine, up against one of the deadliest killers in the solar system.

I’m sorry, but that’s not true either.

Ken Destry was a man addled by brain damage and suffering the organic after-effects of serious neurological malfunction. He was demented in the medical sense, his reflexes and capacity for abstract thought reduced to the absolute minimum possible for a man still remaining dangerous and mobile. Imagine a rabid dog, attacking everything that moves; it’s dangerous enough, but it’s also uncoordinated, confused, and in great pain. Similarly, Destry might not have known who he was, where he was, or even that his own life was in danger; he certainly hadn’t recognized the one most important thing about the day, the thing that in a perfect world would have made him the legend and put his name on a par with all the great explorers of history. You want to be fair? On that day, there was no Ken Destry at all.

Hurtling from the cab of his barge for the second time in less than five minutes, Malcolm Bell had been determined to hit the ground in a controlled roll, the better to come up shooting.

It has not worked out that way.

Truth to tell, he’s never been called upon to perform acrobatics of this sort in his moonsuit, and has completely misjudged both his landing and his duck-and-roll.

He hits the ground hard, his arms and legs flailing, his body rebounding off the sun baked lunar rock at an angle that leaves him airborne for a period that is probably only a second or two, but which his stressed mind experiences as long unbroken minutes. It is a miracle that he doesn’t crack his faceplate or tear his suit or do himself so much damage inside that thin cocoon of life that Destry’s desire to kill him will be reduced to sheer redundancy. He screams, braces himself in precisely the wrong way, and hurts himself more with his second landing than with his first.

Were this Earth, his slide across the loose Earth might do him some tactical good, by raising a cloud of dirt that would obscure his exact position even as it gives any enemy in sight a rough approximation. But this is the Moon. There’s no air to slow the grit’s return to the ground that birthed it. Ironically enough, Bell’s bumpy landing is as clear to his unseen enemy as it would be to any bad guy in any Hollywood movie.

Bell has almost stopped sliding when he happens to see a rock about the size of his ungloved fist explode into gravel, less than a meter from his face.

He cannot tell where the shooter stands, so he does the best he can and attempts to roll. But the angle is wrong and the gear on his back is too bulky; it digs into the dirt and traps him on his side, a position that will take him precious seconds to escape. He sees another pair of impact points, one where his chest had been a second or so before, one hitting the dirt between his splayed legs. He knows, with absolute certainty, that he’s blown it. That he’s dead. That the next shot will impact his chest, or his faceplate, or the backpack that keeps him alive in this place but is still so bulky and unnatural and goddamned inconvenient that it’s about to kill him anyway.

He knows that even firing is a waste of time. He has no idea where Ken Destry is. He has no time to aim. And last time he fired a weapon he was a lousy shot anyway. But one chance in a million of survival is better than absolutely none, and so he scans the landscape, looking for the shape of a man.

Miracle of miracles, he sees something about twenty meters away: the shape of Ken Destry, trudging toward him. It is not the gait of a healthy man. Destry’s dragging one leg and hesitating before every step, as if needing to debate it first with the parliament of voices that must be vying for supremacy within his compromised brain. Bell would not be surprised to see Destry stiffen up and fall face down before narrowing the distance between them; but he feels a special madness of his own now, one that supersedes any fears he might have about base survival.

For a heartbeat, dancing on the edge of that madness, knowing that he must have cracked his skull in the fall, Bell gibbers. It’s total nonsense syllabification, nothing more. In less than a day he will listen to the playback and marvel over how close he came to losing his mind at this moment. Maybe he did. Maybe it’s madness that will shape him, that will guide his decisions, for the rest of the life he is now destined to spend as icon.

But then Destry stops and raises his homemade rail gun into firing position.

Malcolm Bell is still, miraculously, holding his. He will never remember firing.

Bell reappeared maybe forty minutes after leaving me alone to think. I was looking right at him this time, and was able to follow the evolution from point of light to vertical line to two-dimensional cardboard cutout of a man, though it all happened in less than an eye blink and I could not be sure whether I’d actually seen it or whether it was something my mind had concocted over a fleeting impression. Even expecting it, I came close to fainting. Even frightened, I held on to consciousness anyway. If he was testing me, I wanted to pass.

When he grinned at me, age formed crevasses in both cheeks. “I must have looked like that, that last second before Destry and I drew on each other. It wasn’t the first shock I’d ever had, in the old days—learning that we’d already made First Contact was pretty big, all by itself—but it was the worst. It changed me. Want a drink?”

“Water?” I said.

“Hell no, water. This is like losing your virginity, and calls for a good stiff belt.”

I managed a nod. He fussed around in one of his cabinets and handed me a plastic tube filled with something that looked like orange soda. I popped the membrane and took a suck. It was not an orange soda. I blinked and decided that while I’d enjoyed the experience, it would be wisest to avoid the second sip until the habitat stopped spinning.

“That,” he said, “is fermented druhz, a flowering organism from a world about five hundred and twenty light years from here. I’m not the asshole who first came up with the idea of making alcohol from it, but I must confess a hand in the construction of the world’s first still. I’m afraid I can’t give you some to take home; the Lunar Authority enforces a law mandating life imprisonment for anybody who attempts to smuggle it off Farside.”

“That dangerous?” I croaked.

“No. That secret. We wouldn’t want some talented biochemist to analyze it and come up with anomalies testifying to its origin outside the solar system. You can have as much you want inside these four walls, but I’d advise discretion. The stuff packs a real kick.”

I was just beginning to see how much; my head felt like it was inflating. “You can’t fool me, Bell. You just like getting young girls drunk.”

He snorted, though not without pleasure. “Never needed to, really.” But he took the tube from me and restored it to its rightful place in the cabinet, before sitting on the edge of his bed and giving me the most appraising of all appraising eyes. “So have you decided, Jessie James? Do you want me to call you a ride out of here or do you want to hear the rest of it?”

The question struck me as a formality, taken by a man who could already see what I’d decided from the look on my face. “I’m listening.”

“Right. Bottom line, something discovered by a whole lot of people who’ve lived through great historical events: The dramatic parts aren’t always the parts that prove most pivotal over time. The Great Wall of China was not an effective barrier to invaders, the Pony Express was a total financial failure, and the gunfight between myself and Ken Destry was a stupid, sordid human tragedy that wouldn’t have made a damned bit of difference to anybody’s life but my own … except for the one part that we’ve kept secret, the part that only gets told to promising people who ask the most promising questions.

“The point is, even I don’t remember the gunfight. Not in any real sense.

“And it’s not because I found it so traumatic or because I’ve gotten too old to remember what I had for breakfast this morning. The point is, nobody remembers anything. None of us do. The way the human mind works, I’m not the same entity that experienced the events we’re talking about. I’m the entity that developed from that entity. I have a different mind than the one I had then, and when I think about what happened that day, or any other day, I’m not so much calling up the actual experience as reconstituting the same neurological connections that called up that reconstituted experience last time. What I’m remembering, really, is how to construct the software that simulates the same memory I simulated the last time I bothered to think about it. Follow me?”

It may have been the alcohol, but he’d lost me in record time. “I’m not sure I do….”

He didn’t get upset or angry, as I’d feared. “You know what it’s like to sit here, with me, and listen to me go on. You have a firm grip on that experience, because it’s happening now. But everything in long-term memory is an approximation, stored in a filing system that is not so much a collection of clear snapshots as a collection of instructions for reconstituting flawed approximations of those experiences. For instance, my brain knows that linking a certain number of neurons will call back the taste of my mother’s cherry cobbler, and if I don’t allow myself to question it, I will grin with nostalgia and reflect that the old broad sure knew how to bake. But what I’m actually remembering, when I think about Mom’s cobbler, is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. It may not even be close to what actually happened. In fact, it almost certainly isn’t, because the signal has been degraded, over time, by factors that include my own desire to be charitable to that old woman’s memory, and separate memories of other great cherry cobblers I have known. You follow?”

I couldn’t fathom what this had to do with anything. “This sounds like just a long-winded way of saying that your memories have changed over time.”

“You still don’t get it. To us, the past is nothing but the cat inside Schroedinger’s Box, which we alter in a thousand different ways via our flawed attempts to observe it. It may be that on some level, every two people arguing at length over the precise sequence of events they both remember, are both arguing from positions of equal authority. Inside their heads, they’re both right. Because it’s what’s inside their heads that, to some extent, defines the reality they’re remembering. Or to put it another way, the precise taste of my mother’s cherry cobbler no longer exists, because it only existed in my perceptions in the first place. My current perceptions, a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, are the only way to measure it now, so they’ve changed the reality. They define what the taste always was.”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t see that as anything but semantic … bullshit. There’s got to be some room for objective truth.”

“And there is,” Bell said. “We can’t all decide to believe in Santa Claus and call that bearded old gent into being just because we want the company of somebody like him. Our influence on everyday life is just not that powerful, and the consensus has a leveling effect that prevents any one of us from getting up to too much mischief. But what I discovered that day—what Ken Destry really discovered, if you want to be fully fair about it—is that past and even present objective reality turns out to be a hell of a lot more responsive to our perceptions than anybody ever guessed. Given sufficient encouragement, we can make any number of localized changes as long as we avoid an overwhelming consensus to the effect that we can’t. Do you follow me yet?”

It sounded like total gobbledygook. I tried to say something encouraging, but couldn’t make my mouth form it, and in the end only shrugged.

He sighed, not in any impatient or discouraged manner, but with the sympathy owed another about to follow the path he’d blazed so many years before. “Here it is. Ken Destry may have been the first person on the Moon to ever completely lose his mind. He lost it for reasons that were not his fault, and that don’t reflect on him as a human being, but he lost it just the same. And he didn’t lose it while he was sharing a warren with two hundred other trained workers, capable of imposing their sanity on his insanity. He lost it while he was a closed system, isolated inside a moonsuit, sharing nothing with his fellow humanity, not even the same air. He was, in short, his own Schroedinger’s Box, and he was completely out of touch with reality, including the reality of where he was.”

He took a deep breath. “And that, young lady, brings us back to the most pressing question regarding his rampage, one that bothered all of us at the time, but which has been almost completely ignored in all the histories written since then. It’s a question so obvious that you’re going to feel stupid as hell when I point it out to you.

“You see, Destry was running amuck for close to three weeks by the time I met up with him. During that period, everybody knew he was out of control. Everybody knew he was a threat. Everybody knew he needed to be captured and treated, or at worst killed before he did some serious damage. Nobody, working for any of the six governments and four major corporations on the Moon at the time, was about to welcome him into their own facilities, give him a warm bed for the night, patch his suit, supply him, and then send him on his merry way the next morning, with his condition untreated and his violent madness still out of control. It would have been irresponsible to the point of sociopathy.

“So put together everything you know now and ask yourself the obvious question.

“How did he last that long?

“Where the hell was he getting all his air?”

It has been seven minutes since Malcolm Bell fired his rail through Ken Destry’s head. In that time, he has regarded the corpse from several angles. He has knelt beside it, weeping. He has stood and circled it, as if hoping that another orbit will alter the nature of the crumpled body at his feet. He has rejected the evidence of his eyes and walked away, turning his back on the body, even standing with his arms folded and his booted foot tapping, in a comic parody of the bus station commuter awaiting the belated arrival of the Number Nine. He has imagined the horrific specter of Destry somehow not still dead, and rising zombie-like to attack him from behind; and he has angrily told himself Don’t be stupid, but the madness of the day makes all possibilities equally likely and so he’s whirled, certain that he’ll find the body either gone or lurching toward him, but circumstances are kind and spare him that insanity, at least. He will never admit to hearing the frantic voices shouting at him over his suit radio, the ones demanding his latest status and assuring him that they are almost there; he will later say that shock kept him from registering the voices, but the truth is that he does not want to speak, that he doesn’t trust his own mind to come up with anything coherent or cogent or relevant or even sane. He wants to wait for the promised relief to arrive, so he can hand off the body, return to the barracks, and surrender to about a month and a half of sleep.

He doesn’t see a buggy appear over the nearest ridge and pull to a stop, two spacesuited figures jumping out and approaching him from behind. They have reason to take care. They do not know whether the figure standing before them is the one they’ve come to save or the one they’ve come to save him from. Nor does he know, when he surrenders to a violent shudder visible through the material of his moonsuit, that he almost dies in that moment, as his rescuers twitch too and almost put him down.

But eventually they come close enough to identify him from the markings on his suit, and by then they’re close enough to see Destry too. At which point everything changes.

Destry, who’s as naked as any man can be, which is naked enough for an environment under atmosphere, infinitely more naked in a vacuum that should have killed him even before he was put down by Malcolm Bell’s lucky shot.

It had not been stress or the threat of imminent death, but the sight of Destry exposed to vacuum and still stumbling along the rocks, no worse than drunk, his beard and scraggly hair making him look like a terrestrial hermit disturbed from his cave, that had made Bell’s sanity wobble at that last moment before the two men fired upon one another.

Under the circumstances, it’s a wonder Bell fired at all. Maybe his finger twitched and he got lucky.

The inevitable autopsy on the unfortunate Destry will find no organic damage other than that traceable to the contaminants in the air supply of the suit he no longer wears, and the much bigger, much more catastrophic wound inflicted by Bell. Nothing about his corpse betrays any sign of even momentary exposure to vacuum: not so much as a single burst blood vessel. Nor has Destry missed any meals. Nobody can identify the contents of his stomach; it’s cooked meat, but not of any species anybody can identify. Nor can they identify the soil beneath his fingernails, or the combination of oceanic salts dried on his skin, or the species of mite that has built itself a new home in his matted hair. The insects, if they can be called that, possess no terrestrial DNA.

But that’s all confusion for several days from this moment, after those working on the problem have had time to acclimate to the size of this mystery. Right now is another story. Right now Bell and his colleagues are still absorbing the impact.

The first colleague to reach Bell is Connie Aldrin No Relation, those last two words a nigh-permanent part of her last name, on this world where she has come to build a future. She touches faceplate to faceplate, so muffled sound can pass from one helmet to the other without benefit of broadcast, and asks the big question for the first time.

“How did he do it?”

By the time Bell was finished, I’d asked for and been given another shot of druhz.

Part of me could already feel that his warning had been accurate. What I’d heard had changed me. Wherever I went from here, whatever career I built, whatever relationships I forged, would all lead to me living in a cramped habitat like Bell’s, alone, the secret clutched to my breast like a beloved child who needed to be protected. I might not end up here for decades. He hadn’t. But this was where I was going, someday, and though I should have been horrified by the realization, I also felt a certain odd kind of wonder as well, as if the prospect might not be all that bad.

I said, “This is about those aliens you said your people were in contact with. That … what were their names? Minnie and Earl.”

He shook his head. “We still don’t know for a fact what Minnie and Earl were, or whether ‘alien’ was a fair label for them … but yes, they were our first line of inquiry. After all, they had some capabilities echoing those Destry had demonstrated. But it ultimately didn’t make sense. After all, they’d never been hostile to us: quite the contrary. They were a welcome and even beloved presence. Lending their talents to a threat like Destry was well out of character for them.”

I said, “You don’t know what their agenda was.”

“No, we don’t. Not really. But we knew them. They were good neighbors. It may be a little hard to accept if you weren’t there, with us, but the hard part wasn’t so much believing that they could have given Destry a little technological assistance surviving vacuum, as accepting that Minnie would have had anything whatsoever to do with encouraging him to run around naked.” There was genuine affection in his eyes. “That old girl had some proper ideas. Trust me, I only mentioned Minnie and Earl so you’d know that we were already a little accustomed to unusual conundrums in those days. We always considered their involvement unlikely, and when they confirmed that they didn’t have the slightest idea how Destry had done what he’d done, we heaved a communal sigh of relief and looked elsewhere.

“So we next considered the possibility that Destry’s brain or body had undergone a spontaneous beneficial mutation, perhaps in reaction to the poisons he’d absorbed. But that didn’t work either. None of the colleagues who’d metabolized and recovered from smaller doses exhibited any anomalies at all, and the many experts who looked at the body reported that it was, organically at least, cell by cell the same machine it had always been.

“There have been volumes, all highly classified, written on this stuff, but I’ll bring you to the bottom line. Once the brain boys eliminated all the other theories, including one that blamed me personally for somehow setting up the greatest fraud in the history of the space program, we were left us with only one possibility, the one I’ve already prepared you for: the likelihood that Destry survived vacuum because he was too fried to care that surviving in vacuum was a problem. Somehow, he was able to breathe because he thought he was able to breathe.”

It had been a while since I’d last blinked. I blinked too many times now by way of compensation and said, “But that makes no sense. He wouldn’t be the first crazy person to drown or suffocate. And if it comes to that, crazy doesn’t have to enter into belief. You could remove all the oxygen from your air mixture and I’d lose consciousness and die still believing that I was breathing fine.”

“True,” said Bell, radiating sheer approval at my gift for spotting the obvious objections. “So there had to be more to it, some special way of believing in the unbelievable. Some way Destry found by accident.

“One of the earliest scientists working on the problem explained it to me this way. Imagine a vault door twenty miles wide. Imagine everything you could possibly want in one great big pile on the other side. Imagine there’s only one keyhole. Imagine that while you do have the key, you can only approach the vault blindfolded, from a position that virtually guarantees you cannot find the lock by proceeding in a straight line. Further imagine that you will be given only one try to fit your key into the lock, without scraping the sides … and that the fit will have to be perfect.

“Pretty long odds, right? But it’s worse than that. The keyhole is drilled into that lock at a pretty goddamned strange angle, and will only admit the key if you match that angle precisely. It’s not an altitude you’re likely to guess. In fact, it’s at an angle you’re guaranteed not to guess, if you go by prior experience and rational thinking. Your only real chance is to somehow turn off everything you’ve ever learned or intuited and just go for a totally random approach—which is damned near impossible, given that everything you do is informed by your personal experience. The only consolation you have is the knowledge that if you do somehow manage to find that keyhole, you will be able to mark it for yourself, so you can later find it at will.

“Along comes Destry. His mind has turned to pudding. He’s lost all possible barriers between the real and subjective. He’s no longer self-censoring. He’s thinking random nonsense, and when he takes a random leap at the wall, he defeats the odds, finds the lock, and succeeds in turning the key, probably without even knowing what a remarkable thing he’s just done.

“He might not even be the first. History’s full of unlikely stories about crazy people and visionaries performing acts best described as miracles. Some of those stories are bullshit. Maybe even most of them. Or all. We’re talking about an unusual phenomenon, and bullshit’s a downright common one.

“But given what we know, it’s also not that much of a stretch to wonder whether one or two of those crazy sons of bitches did on Earth what Destry, with his own fried brain, managed to accomplish on the Moon. Maybe one or two of those nutbags who made persuasive claims to be prophets or deities were just schizophrenics who, like him, had guessed right. Maybe one or two of them found the key, the way of thinking, which allowed consciousness to trump time, distance, conventional physics, life and death.

“And maybe we could too.

“All we knew for a fact was that Destry had.

“If so, the only possible way to claim that gift for humanity was to fund what can only be called an Inner Space program, where people were trained to give up the objective in favor of the subjective. Those Innernauts, for lack of a better phrase, had to lock themselves up someplace without other distracting influences, without other people around to tell them they were being stupid, and think. With no guarantee of success, and no advantage except the knowledge that a crazy person found that keyhole before them.

“All you really need, he said, “is a regular supply of people who won’t mind giving up the end of their lives to become Schroedinger Cats.

“Now think.

“Who the hell else are you gonna find to do such a job, except for people who have already spent their lives locked up in tin cans in order to explore the universe? And how are you going to get even them to do it until they’re so old that it’s the last form of exploration they have left?

“I can only tell you this. It took twenty years of nonstop concentration before one of us found the way. Another five before he managed to impart what he knew to another. Another five before the number of people reaching the threshold exceeded one per year. Five after that, and some of us were zipping back and forth on a whim. None of us are yet at the stage where we can do it consistently, which is why I always wear a moonsuit if I step out my airlock door. And we’re still debating safe ways of introducing what we know to humanity at large. But I can say this. Just because I rarely use that airlock … it doesn’t mean that I never leave. Via space or time.”

What followed was not complete silence. The habitat still hummed from the operation of the systems that made life here possible for creatures like myself still handicapped by insufficient skill at dealing with the impossible.

He stood and said, “You’ll always be welcome here, Jessie James. I like you, and as long as I still need to come back here on a regular basis this old homestead will be a much more accommodating place if it saw regular visits from a lady as bright and as charming as yourself. But you’re still young—way too young to waste years sitting on your ass trying to find your way to the same path I’ve found. So, no, I’m afraid I’m never going to give you any lessons. When the time comes, if it’s what you want, you’re going to have to find your own way.

“But I do see potential in you.

“And I do think you’ve earned one free ride.

“There are people I want you to meet.”

He extended his hand.

After a moment, I took it.

*

Many years later—I won’t say how many—the Lunar Authority announced Malcolm Bell’s death. They said that he’d been cremated, as per his own instructions, and scattered throughout the solar system, with some of him added to the atmosphere of soil of each of worlds where humanity had established a foothold. Supposedly a final portion was placed aboard one of the unmanned probes we were still firing into the outer dark, a gesture that allowed commentators the easy observation that he belonged to the stars now. It had been so many years since the gunfight, by then, that the most common reaction was surprise that he’d still been alive at all.

Most of the articles said that he’d been living quietly in his Farside habitat, thinking thoughts that could only be known to him. They said he’d cut himself off from all human contact, save for occasional visits from his physician and from a now middle-aged woman named Jessie James, who his will described as a personal assistant. He left sufficient funds for the maintenance of his habitat, which would be held in trust until the day she could move in herself, at some point in her late old age.

As Bell said that first day, bullshit remains a constant in the universe.

If Bell really died that day, if he was really cremated, the visitors who show up at my front door from time to time wouldn’t be asking about his whereabouts, or the means he’d used to travel there. They wouldn’t ask, every time, whether I’d seen him or whether he and his fellow travelers had ever sent back any useful information. For what it’s worth, I did see Malcolm Bell at least four more times after his supposed cremation, and hope to see him again, though like him I respect the path the luckless Ken Destry forged and won’t share it with anybody who thinks it can or should be learned by simply asking.

All I know is that when the news hit the media, I was doing a routine audit of a certain lunar amusement park, on premises. I immediately announced that I was taking the rest of the day off, put the books away, and began to wander throughout the grounds, passing the laughing children and thundering coasters and the concessions selling the usual variety of food designed to rot your teeth and expand your waistline.

I didn’t know what I felt. Not grief, certainly. I’d expected this news for some time. And not inevitability. I had a husband and a daughter and friends and a career, and though there were still years to go before I’d have to make up my mind for sure, I was still telling myself, in those days, that I wouldn’t ever follow where Malcolm Bell had led. But then why did I keep thinking about it?

I was still wondering by the time I found myself sitting on a park bench opposite the habitat the park had built for its two cloned polar bears. They were popular attractions, and they were more than earning their keep today, with a show of ursine exuberance that amounted to hours spent repeatedly climbing to their habitat’s highest point and launching themselves into the open air only to splash down into their lagoon. Each belly flop was like a thunderclap, each splash an explosion. I wasn’t the only park visitor so delighted that I parked myself at a good vantage point and watched, happy just to witness the simple animal joy they took in being alive.

After a while, though, I focused on the habitat itself. Spacious enough to house the two bears in comfort, it was still not quite as voluminous as it was designed to look. The park had used various design tricks involving light and false perspective to make it look about half again as large. It evoked, without coming close to duplicating, the vast expanses of the Arctic these creatures had evolved to inhabit, a place that no longer existed and that would now kill them as surely as the vacuum outside the dome we used to house ourselves.

The least of the tricks was a mural painted on the crescent-shaped rear wall of the habitat, depicting ice floes and stark blue skies and aurorae and the distant forms of migrating seals. It was a marvelous work of art, that mural; the sculpted stones of the bear habitat seemed to melt into it without quite betraying the place where a false but tangible habitat merged with the backdrop one step further removed from reality.

The mural was meant for the pleasure of humans, not bears. No doubt the bears couldn’t process its images in terms easily translated to the past of their moribund species. But as I sat there, in the warmth of the simulated spring day, I found myself wondering if the bears ever did register the natural home promised by that two-dimensional presentation, and if so whether they could ever be fooled by it; if they ever stared at the nonexistent seals nonexistent kilometers away, found the wall between them and that distant smorgasbord, and puzzled over how to get from here to there. Did they ever think it might be as simple as finding the right angle of approach? As rushing the wall with the right attitude?

Of course not.

They were bears, not philosophers.

But was it possible that it was only this very limitation that made them fail? That a polar bear with the twin gifts of imagination and the way of thinking poor Ken Destry had needed his madness to find, could believe itself past that mural into a place a polar bear would consider home?

It was possible for people. I knew it because I’d seen it. I’d been there.

The only question was whether I could dedicate myself to making the journey.

I won’t pretend that I made up my mind that day. I didn’t move into Malcolm Bell’s old habitat for another thirty years, and I suffered more than my share of doubt and wavering resolve before then. I can only say that I still consider that day a tipping point.

The other worth talking about took place on the day we met, when he asked me to take his hand.

There was a world. It was not a bad world. The trees didn’t look like trees and the mountains didn’t resemble mountains and the sky certainly looked like no sky I’d ever seen, but it was all beautiful and benign, and there was something about the air that energized my lungs and made every ounce of me feel alive. There was a lake, with water pink and subtly perfumed but apparently safe for human consumption, as there were children splashing around it, their play shared by sleek big-eyed things that would remind me of seals if seals had opposable thumbs. A small semicircle of cottages surrounded a beach on one shore, each small, each unpretentious, each flying the flag of the Lunar Authority and in some cases the flag of one of Earth’s antique countries as well.

On the day Malcolm Bell and I strolled down from the hills, not all of those cottages were occupied. The residents were traveling elsewhere. But this was home base, of sorts, and at least twenty people ranging from infancy to late middle age were in sight, recognizing Malcolm Bell and waving at him from the comfort of their respective front porches.

I looked at Bell, who seemed to have dropped thirty years since we left his habitat. His features were still lined and his hair still white, but his eyes were vibrant and filled with something I recognized as love for his neighbors. All of a sudden I felt shy, but I still managed to ask a question. “Are these all Farside hermits?”

Bell laughed out loud. “Most of them. Some found their way on their own. And a couple of others, like this one”—he said, as a figure from one of the nearer cottages hopped off his front porch to greet us—”we brought here because we figured they deserved it.”

The man walking toward us had one of the most heroic, bushy moustaches I’ve ever seen. His gait and his outstretched hand seemed friendly enough, but the warm welcome he conveyed didn’t come anywhere near his eyes. From what Bell told me later, it never did.

Bell’s earlier words, space or time, his later reference to consciousness trumping life and death, hit me again, and I went a little weak in the knees. Extending my hand, I managed a weak, “H-hello. I’m Jessie James.”

The stranger looked like he would like to laugh, but couldn’t. If he was who I thought he was, he was incapable of it. It was just not in his emotional repertoire. “Really?”

Bell was having the time of his life. “No joke. It really is her name.”

The man with the walrus moustache took my hand.

By this time I was more certain than ever that this stranger was about to say he was Wyatt Earp. The real Wyatt Earp, plucked from time and history and even his own death to live a limitless future in the stars. Given what I’d been told that day and the other puzzle pieces I’d be putting together for years to come, it was certainly within the realm of possibility, if only because I wanted it to be and Bell knew how to turn want into have.

But that’s not who this man was.

You see, Malcolm Bell might have become as famous as Wyatt Earp, and the canonization of his name might have echoed much of what happened to Wyatt Earp, but as a man he owed Wyatt Earp nothing. He had other debts to pay.

And I learned what debts when the man with the walrus moustache said, “Pleased to meet you, ma’am. I’m Ken Destry.”