Steel Beach

"Or not solve it. And don't apologize; you're completely right."

The river rolled on, the sun hung there in the painted sky. No time passed, and took a very long interval to do so. Neither of us felt the pressure to speak. I'd have been happy to spend the next decade there, as long as I didn't have to think. But I knew Fox would eventually get antsy. Hell, so would I.

"Can I ask you one more thing?"

He nibbled my ear.

"No, not that. Well, not yet, anyway." I tilted my head back and looked at him, inches away from my face. "Are you living with anyone?"

"No."

"Can I move in with you for a while? Say, a week? I'm very frightened and very lonely, Fox. I'm afraid to be alone."

He didn't say anything.

"I just want to sleep with somebody for a while. I don't want to beg."

"Let me think about it."

"Sure." It should have hurt, but oddly enough, it didn't. I knew I would have said the same thing. What I didn't know is how I would have decided. The bald truth was I was asking for his help in saving my life, and we both knew enough to realize there was little he could do but hug me. So if he did try to help and I did end up killing myself… that's a hell of a load of guilt to hazard without giving it a little thought. I could tell him there were no strings, that he needn't blame himself if the worst happened, but I knew he would and he knew I knew it, so I didn't insult him by telling him that lie and I didn't up the stakes by begging any more. Instead I nestled more firmly into his arms and watched the Columbia roll on, roll on.

We walked back to the trailer. Somewhere in the journey we noticed the river was no longer flowing. It became smooth and still, placid as a long lake. It reflected the trees on the far side as faithfully as any mirror. Fox said they'd been having trouble with some of the pumps. "Not my department," he said, thankfully. It could have been pretty, but it gave me a chilly feeling up and down the spine. It reminded me of the frozen sea back at Scarpa Island.

Then he got a remote unit from the trailer and said he had something to show me. He tapped out a few codes and my shadow began to move.

The sun scuttled across the sky like some great silver bird. The shadow of each tree and bush and blade of grass marked its passage like a thousand hourglasses. If you want to experience disorientation, give that a try. I found myself getting dizzy, swayed and set my feet apart, discovered the whole thing was a lot more interesting when viewed from a sitting position.

In a few minutes the sun went below the western horizon. That was not what Fox had wanted to show me. Clouds were rising in that direction, thin wispy ones, cirrus I think, or at least intended to look like cirrus. The invisible sun painted them various shades of red and blue, hovering somewhere just out of sight.

"Very pretty," I said.

"That's not it."

There was a distant boom, and a huge smoke ring rose slowly into the sky, tinged with golden light. Fox was working intently. I heard a faraway whistling sound, and the smoke ring began to alter in shape. The top was pressed down, the bottom drawn out. I couldn't figure out what the point of all this was, and then I saw it. The ring had formed a passable heart-shape. A valentine. I laughed, and hugged him.

"Fox, you're a romantic fool after all."

He was embarrassed. He hadn't meant it to be taken that way-which I had known, but he's easy to tease and I could never resist it. So he coughed, and took refuge in technical explanation.

"I found out I could make a sort of backfire effect in that wind machine," he said, as we watched the ring writhe into shapelessness. "Then it's easy to use concentrated jets to mold it, within limits. Come back here when we open up, and I'll be able to write your name in the sunset."

We showered off the sand and he asked if I'd like to see a scheduled blast in Kansas. I'd never seen a nuke before, so I said yes. He flew the trailer to a lock, and we emerged on the surface, where he turned control over to the autopilot and told me about some of the things he'd been doing in other disneylands as we looked at the airless beauty falling away beneath us.

Maybe you have to be there to appreciate Fox's weather sculpture. He rhapsodized about ice storms and blizzards he'd created, and it meant nothing to me. But he did pique my interest. I told him I'd attend his next showing. I wondered if he was angling for coverage in the Nipple. Well, I've got a suspicious mind, and I'd been right about things like that often enough. I couldn't figure a way to make it interesting to my readership unless somebody famous attended, or something violent and horrible happened there.

Oregon was a showplace compared to Kansas. I'd like to have had a piece of the dust concession.

They were still in the process of excavation. The half-dome was nearly complete, with just some relatively small areas near the north edge to blast away. Fox said the best vantage point would be near the west edge; if we'd gone all the way to the south the dust would have obscured the blast too much to make the trip worthwhile. He landed the trailer near an untidy cluster of similar modular mobile homes and we joined a group of a few dozen other firework fans.

This show was strictly "to the trade." Everyone but me was a construction engineer; this sort of thing was not open to the public. Not that it was really rare. Kansas had required thousands of blasts like this, and would need about a hundred more before it was complete. Fox described it as the best-kept secret in Luna.

"It's not really much of a blast as these things go," he said. "The really big ones would jolt the structure too much. But when we're starting out, we use charges about ten times larger than this one."

I noticed the "we." He really did want to build these places instead of just install and run the weather machines.

"Is it dangerous?"

"That's sort of a relative question. It's not as safe as sleeping in your bed. But these things are calculated to a fare-thee-well. We haven't had a blasting accident in thirty years." He went on to tell me more than I'd wanted to know about the elaborate precautions, things like radar to detect big chunks of rock that might be heading our way, and lasers to vaporize them. He had me completely reassured, and then he had to go and spoil it.

"If I say run," he said, seriously, "hop in the trailer, pronto."

"Do I need to protect my eyes?"

"Clear leaded glass will do it. It's the UV that burns. Expect a certain dazzle effect at first. Hell, Hildy, if it blinds you the company's insurance will get you some new eyes."

I was perfectly happy with the eyes I had. I began to wonder if it had been such a good idea, coming here. I resolved to look away for the first several seconds. Common human lore was heavy with stories of what could happen to you in a nuclear explosion, dating all the way back to Old Earth, when they'd used a few of them to fry their fellow beings by the millions.

The traditional countdown began at ten. I put on the safety glasses and closed my eyes at two. So naturally I opened them when the light shone through my eyelids. There was a dazzle, as he'd said, but my eyes quickly recovered. How to describe something that bright? Put all the bright lights you ever saw into one place, and it wouldn't begin to touch the intensity of that light. Then there was the ground shock, and the air shock, and finally, much later, the sound. I mean, I thought I'd been hearing the sound of it, but that was the shock waves emanating from the ground. The sound in the air was much more impressive. Then the wind. And the fiery cloud. The whole thing took several minutes to unfold. When the flames had died away there was a scattering of applause and a few shouts. I turned to Fox and gri