Chapter 6
Joey turned sideways to squeeze between the bed and wall of his narrow room. He tossed the comic book into the cubbyhole set in the wall above his bed, then lay down. He gazed out the oval window opposite the door. At night the Milky Way usually shone brilliantly, but the Trojan storm had ejected a lot of dust. It could take months or even years for the cloud to settle back to the surface.
He watched for RN-3b, the moonlet asteroid to RN-3a. After a few minutes, it passed by, a mere crescent low on the horizon, beyond the white dome of the Mushroom.
Joey looked at his drawings, which covered the walls. He looked at his fingers. He looked at his knees. He looked at anything other the comic book. He wished for once he could read something that wasn’t The Book, or based on The Book. He didn’t disagree with The Book exactly. The stories of Olly and the dangers of not following the safety rules made sense. It was the other parts that bugged him. The depiction of Oscar, the good citizen. Those parts made it seem like chipping away at rock was a magical experience beyond the comprehension of man.
The way Joey saw it, his drawing were the opposite of Olly. He paid attention to all the little details just like Oscar. But his dad was right. Drawing itself wasn’t Olly, but drawing when he was supposed to be mining was pure Olly.
In time, Joey picked up the comic book out of boredom. He only looked at the artwork. At least that was interesting. He wanted to know what they used to get the lines so clean and unbroken. With the grease pencil and the grainy marks it made, he could not replicate those lines. Joey liked the look of his drawings but wanted to do more.
There really was no reason to read the comic book. His eyes were hard to hold open now, and he truly did know the story by heart. And he knew exactly why his dad always had him read the same chapter, and got him this particular comic book, on this particular day.
In chapter three, section two of The Book, Olly was distracted by something that wasn’t his job, and that caused an accident. In the comic books the situation changed each time. This time it was a four-seat rock runner that Olly was supposed to be tending. The heavy vehicle crushed Olly when it slid out of its harness. Last time it had been an Angel recharge pump explosion that did in the hapless miner and a dozen others. Olly frequently died. But never on purpose.
Not like Felix.