Prospectors! by Michael Schulkins

Author:Michael Schulkins [Schulkins, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Bemis had made an error in judgment during our negotiations over The Map. As part of his campaign on behalf of that overpriced piece of paper, he had let slip his knowledge of contour lines, and thereby betrayed his superior understanding of the ways of maps in general. I’d thought at the time that he had done this in an effort to show me up, though in fact he was simply stumping for The Map, but in any event he paid a price for it, because as a result I was piloting the digger when we left Lucky Strike and he was stuck with navigation. He had argued the point, but in the end he hadn’t a leg to stand on, because I possessed a weapon against which he had no defense: namely, my colossal ignorance of the subject. It took only a short time to make my case, and I am proud to say that I was not bluffing. I had come by my lack of comprehension honestly, through years of sloth in general and neglect of contour lines in particular, and when in response to Calvin’s request, I had proposed directing the Beast up a sixty degree incline to escape the confines of a crater—a crater that we were not only not resident in, but were in addition not within fifty miles of—he threw in the towel and took over the work. Therefore, when we left Lucky Strike I was at the tiller, staring out the forward facing viewport as if I were peering through the looking glass into wonderland, and Bemis was on the floor.

There were four viewports on the digger: one forward, to which I was attached for the moment, one aft, and one each to port and starboard. These were about two and a half feet in diameter and circular, like the portholes one finds on the lower decks of a steamship, and the glass in them was comfortably thick, plus each was fitted with a grid of steel wire on its outer side to protect the precious glass against any collisions with wayward rocks that might occur in the process of digging.

Although I had proven that I couldn’t read a map, at least not to the state of perfection necessary to know where I was, I did know where we were in a general sense—akin to knowing that you are in Arkansas as opposed to Massachusetts—which I hope shores up my reputation slightly. At that time, we were traveling along the eastern “shore” of the Mare Imbrium: a prominent, if largely featureless, feature of the Moon’s surface, so immense that it can be seen from Earth with the naked, that is to say the unaided, eye. If you know your Latin, you will understand that Mare Imbrium means Sea of Rains, or even Sea of Showers, if you want to be extreme. Now, I do not pretend to be an expert on Lunar geography (properly called selenography) or on the planet’s meteorology, but

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