Tales of Old Earth Read Online Free PDF Page A

drag. Trudge, drag. How many centuries had she been walking? Felt like a lot. It was night again. Her arms felt like they were going to fall out of their sockets.
    Really, she ought to leave Burton behind. She’d never said anything to make Martha think she cared one way or the other where her body wound up. Probably would’ve thought a burial on Io was pretty damn nifty. But Martha wasn’t doing this for her. She was doing it for herself. To prove that she wasn’t entirely selfish. That she did too have feelings for others. That she was motivated by more than just the desire for fame and glory.
    Which, of course, was a sign of selfishness in itself. The desire to be known as selfless. It was hopeless. You could nail yourself to a fucking cross and it would still be proof of your innate selfishness.
    â€œYou still there, Io?”
    Click .
    â€œAm. Listening.”
    â€œTell me about this fine control of yours. How much do you have? Can you bring me to the lander faster than I’m going now? Can you bring the lander to me? Can you return me to the orbiter? Can you provide me with more oxygen?”
    â€œDead egg, I lie. Whole. On a whole world I cannot touch. Plath.”
    â€œYou’re not much use, then, are you?”
    There was no answer. Not that she had expected one. Or needed it, either. She checked the topos and found herself another eighth-mile closer to the lander. She could even see it now under her helmet photomultipliers, a dim glint upon the horizon. Wonderful things, photo-multipliers. The sun here provided about as much light as a full moon did back on Earth. Jupiter by itself provided even less. Yet crank up the magnification, and she could see the airlock awaiting the grateful touch of her gloved hand.
    Trudge, drag, trudge. Martha ran and reran and rereran the math in her head. She had only three miles to go, and enough oxygen for as many hours. The lander had its own air supply. She was going to make it.
    Maybe she wasn’t the total loser she’d always thought she was. Maybe there was hope for her, after all.
    Click .
    â€œBrace. Yourself.”
    â€œWhat for?”
    The ground rose up beneath her and knocked her off her feet.
    When the shaking stopped, Martha clambered unsteadily to her feet again. The land before her was all a jumble, as if a careless deity had lifted the entire plain up a foot and then dropped it. The silvery glint of the lander on the horizon was gone. When she pushed her helmet’s magnification to the max, she could see a metal leg rising crookedly from the rubbled ground.
    Martha knew the shear strength of every bolt and failure point of every welding seam in the lander. She knew exactly how fragile it was. That was one device that was never going to fly again.
    She stood motionless. Unblinking. Unseeing. Feeling nothing. Nothing at all.
    Eventually she pulled herself together enough to think. Maybe it was time to admit it: She never had believed she was going to make it. Not really. Not Martha Kivelsen. All her life she’d been a loser. Sometimes—like when she qualified for the expedition—she lost at a higher level than usual. But she never got whatever it was she really wanted.
    Why was that, she wondered? When had she ever desired anything bad? When you get right down to it, all she’d ever wanted was to kick God in the butt and get his attention. To be a big noise. To be the biggest fucking noise in the universe. Was that so unreasonable?
    Now she was going to wind up as a footnote in the annals of humanity’s expansion into space. A sad little cautionary tale for mommy astronauts to tell their baby astronauts on cold winter nights. Maybe Burton could’ve gotten back to the lander. Or Hols. But not her. It just wasn’t in the cards.
    Click .
    â€œIo is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System.”
    â€œYou fucking bastard! Why didn’t you warn me?”
    â€œDid. Not.