Hell on Earth Read Online Free

understated the capabilities in the technical literature—probably for security reasons.”
    â€œSo all our calculations are worthless crap. How are you going to fly this thing?”
    She didn’t seem overly concerned. “Fly, the vehicle hasn’t been built that I can’t pilot.”
    â€œUm . . . well, this rocket hasn’t been built, has it?”
    â€œYou know what I mean! If you build it, I will fly. I swear.”
    â€œHm.” I didn’t know what to say. I had no idea whether she was or wasn’t a hot-shot rocket pilot. We don’t get much call for that in the Light Drop Infantry. But now that she believed in the rocket, nothing was going to stop us.
    There were other motor parts, and we patched together something I figured was eighty percent ready. There was no time for better. The air was growing thinner and the temperature was dropping . . . the crack in the dome was finally taking its toll.
    The pressure dropped so gradually, we didn’t even notice. After a while I found myself panting for air after climbing a ladder, and Arlene had to rest after every heavy part she handed me.
    Then a couple of days later, I realized my mind was wandering in the middle of a task. I focused, then wandered again.
    Arlene was able to maintain her concentration; maybe being smaller, she didn’t need as high a partial pressure of oxygen. But both of us were getting mighty cold.
    When I saw Arlene shivering while working, I made her throw on a couple of sweaters and did the same. We wore gloves, except that I kept removing mine because it interfered with the work. Then my hands would turn to ice, and I’d put them back on to warm up before taking another stab at attaching the fine filaments that ran microvolts to the plasma globules.
    Suddenly, the air-pressure sensor started screaming its fool head off. Arlene and I exchanged a worried glance, but we didn’t need to be told twice. It was time to start hitting the raw stuff, 0 2 neat. We took hits off the same oxygen bottle, trying to limit ourselves to a few breaths every hour or so, or when we started to get dizzy or goofy.
    But we just didn’t have that much bottled oxygen. Uncle Sugar packed a lot of air into a single bottle; but even so, even at the slow pace we used it, we’d run out of breathing oxygen in just a few more days. We had more bottles, but we needed them for fuel mixing.
    And of course we’d need to breathe more frequently as the pressure dropped—paradoxically, it wasdropping slower now, since there was less pressure in the dome to push the air out.
    We stretched the bottles as long as we could, but they ran out while there was still plenty of work left. I’d done mountain climbing in my native Colorado before joining the Corps; as the air grew thinner, I tried to help Arlene deal with it. “Breathe shallowly,” I said. “Rest, and don’t talk except for the job.”
    The physical exertion wasn’t any less, though. We’d have to stop frequently, gasping and panting. We tired easily and needed more sleep, but stayed on the four-hour rotations, creating a cycle of exhaustion we couldn’t break. But sleeping longer would just make the job take longer, and the pressure would drop lower in the meantime.
    Low pressure is insidious. There are obvious effects: exhaustion, trouble breathing, and cold. But there are other symptoms people don’t often think about: your ears ring; it’s hard to hear sounds (thinner air makes everything sound muffled and “tinny”); and worst of all, your mind can start to go. Our brains are built for a certain barometric pressure, and if it’s too high or too low, we start getting strange.
    Or in Arlene’s case, hallucinogenic.
    â€œPumpkin!” she suddenly screamed, waking me after two hours of my allotted four. She grabbed a bump-action riot gun and pounded a shot over my head, so close it