Buying Time

  Eric pointed out that his attitude toward the astronomical universe was profoundly different, now that he was no longer flesh and blood. With instruments of any subtlety, he could detect the movement of stars from month to month; he could “watch” the waxing and waning of variable stars. These were real in a way they could never have been when he was limited to the human perception of the rate of time’s passing, and to the grossness of human senses. To him the universe was a throbbing, living thing—which he had known intellectually, before. Now he could watch it happen.

  About a day before swingby, the scenery available to the merely human passengers started to change perceptibly, with Mars showing a small disc. Dallas was relieved to have a visible sign of their progress. Maria’s feelings were complicated.

  Maria

  With the approach of swingby, I had a sense of foreboding, which I dismissed as reluctance to have anything alter the status quo. The eleven days had been a small miracle, time out of time for both of us. Not just respite from our troubles.

  This love confuses me. Can you, should you, separate your body from your mind from your heart? Your spirit. Other times in my life I’ve felt there were different kinds of love working at the same time: I could love a man with my mind and loins, and separately love Christ with my spirit, and when the two loves clashed later, in the confessional and penance, there was a rightness and a comfort to that; even to the guilt. This love with Dallas is disturbing in its pervasive unity, even while it’s exhilarating; almost as if he were invading the place that holds my love of God.

  In a century of life I’ve only been swept away like this one time, and it wasn’t a man. After the earthquake that killed my father and brothers, when I was sent to the convent to live, I spent nearly all my waking hours in prayer, praying for the souls of my father and my brothers, and for poor Mother—and poor me!—but mostly trying to understand through prayer how God could have let this happen. My knees swelled up and cracked and bled, and finally the sisters had to carry me to my cell, where they set up a small shrine, and I continued to pray lying down. And though I wasn’t given any answers more satisfying than the ones in the catechism, what I did find was ultimately as comforting, though it can’t really be put into words. A union with the mystery, an ecstatic union which, as King James has it, surpasseth all understanding.

  I’m not ignorant, and I know now that some component of my rapture was slippery adolescent sexuality, redirected. A virgin’s diffuse orgasms. But I also know that God gave us all this complicated plumbing and wiring for a reason, and suspect that it bloomed then in my case to help me through my grief. Dallas would say the stress triggered a body change. I think both statements are the same.

  But these eleven days. We’ve worn clothes only while Eric was with us, which is so absurd it’s given us both giggles. We could do anything in front of Eric, even the things I only have Latin words for, and it would just be data to him. Or it might be cruel, if you can be cruel to a circuit, reminding him of things he can never have again.

  When Mars started to show a visible disc, I went over all the calculations once more from the beginning, independently of the ship’s computer. Eric and I matched the computer’s results to eight significant figures.

  The swingby business would be simpler if Mars didn’t have an atmosphere. In fact, it’s denser than Earth’s at high altitudes, since the more massive planet has a steeper density gradient. It’s still just a few molecules here and there, but we’ll be cutting through at nearly a hundred kilometers per second. When I made a similar maneuver in the Bugatti, on the way to Ganymede, I noticed some vibration due to turbulence. And the Bugatti isn’t dropnose, which might or might not make a difference.

  Two hours before swingby, I made a small course correction that would take us over the north pole; we wanted to bend our trajectory down under the plane of the ecliptic, to point toward Ceres. Mars was about the size of the full moon from Earth, and seemed to grow as we watched, though I knew that was an illusion.

  “Should we have the space suits out? Even put them on?” Dallas asked. I had told him about the turbulence.

  “I wouldn’t bother … there’s no real danger.” Actually, the reason I wouldn’t bother was because if something happened, that would be it. We’d be a loose collection of pieces spinning away from Mars at somewhere between 96 and 120 kilometers per second. Impossible to catch up with. I would just as soon not be in a space suit, waiting to run out of air.

  As it turned out, the situation was not so clear-cut.

  I kept Dallas busy by making sure all the hatches were battened down, litter secured, especially. We needed a short burn, a “kick,” at perimartian, and you wouldn’t want a plastic straw to come hurtling toward you at five gees.

  I deliberately didn’t have us strap in too early, remembering my own trapped feeling, thirty years ago, as Mars loomed closer and closer. You’re going about twenty times as fast as instinct, or intuition, says you should be, since we’re accustomed to low Earth orbit. It feels like you’re going to crash.

  “Two minutes,” I said. “Better strap up.” When Dallas was secure, I told the ship to initiate the attitude adjustment, which was larger than I’d expected. Mars swung and Dallas flinched.

  The planet was getting bigger every second, no illusion. The polar cap came rolling over the horizon toward us. I asked for a ten-second countdown before the burn.

  “One month,” Dallas said.

  “What?”

  “Today’s the fifteenth; it’s been exactly one month since Claudia’s party.” He reached over and stroked my arm. The machine started counting. I blinked back tears.

  Dallas

  The swingby was pretty terrifying even before we knew about the damage. A hundred kilometers a second is a lot faster than I had ever gone before—Mars seemed to hurl itself at us; it looked as if we were going to plow into the polar cap. Goofy started counting down. At “three” we hit turbulence.

  It was like a bumpy road in an old-fashioned car, not a floater. Really bad bumps, like the potholes you’d run over and wonder whether they meant a new axle. I saw the sudden fear on Maria’s face, and my own heart nearly stopped. She looked at me and started to say something, and then the acceleration of the precalculated kick pressed us both deep into our couches.

  For ten seconds the ship bobbed and shook while the engine screamed and the martian landscape sped by underneath us. When the engine cut out suddenly, there was one last shudder, and then the neutral silence and stillness of free fall.

  Maria cleared her throat. “That-wasn’t supposed to happen.” She squeezed her arms gently, painfully. “Ostia! I feel like I’ve fallen down a long flight of stairs.”

  “Yeah, two weeks lounging around in zerogee.” Where it hurt me most didn’t bother her at all, she lacking testicles.

  She undid her straps, wincing, reading my mind, or body: “Be glad you don’t have breasts.” She thumbed the computer. “Give us a general systems check. Was anything damaged by the vibration?”

  No answer.

  She turned it off and on again. “Testing. Do you hear me?”

  Nothing. “Try Eric?” I said. She nodded and I turned him on. “We just came out of swingby and looks like we lost Goofy. Would there be any danger, plugging you into him?”

  “No. Just use the data channel we did before, with the navigation.” I jacked him in, and his reply came before my hand had moved back six inches.

  “It looks like he’s there but we can’t get to him. He’s drawing a normal amount of power but has no data input or output.”

  “Fix?”

  “Maybe somebody could. It might just be a loose connection or a simple component that got zapped. There’s no way for me to tell from here.” The bearded image shook its head back and forth once. “He’s trapped in there deaf and dumb and blind. And he was crazy before. He’s probably not going to be of any more use to you. Maybe you ought to just power him down.”

  “You make it so
und like euthanasia.”

  “Only in a sense. Presumably he’s not the only copy.”

  “Boys,” Maria said, “I think we have a bigger problem than that.” She pointed at the console, where a red light was blinking. “It says ‘life support malfunction.’”

  “Doesn’t say what?”

  “No. I imagine we’re supposed to ask the computer.”

  “Perhaps it considers Goofy to be part of the life support system,” Eric said, “even though it surely has backup computers, not burdened with personalities.”

  “We could look it up in the manual,” I said, “but I’ll bet the only way to get to the manual is through Goofy.”

  “Does it seem colder to you?” Maria asked, almost in a whisper.

  “It isn’t,” Eric said. “That’s psychosomatic. Your autonomic nervous system. It’s been twenty-four degrees centigrade since you woke up this morning.”

  “I guess so.” She rubbed her palms together and blew between them. “Sweating … wait! There is a manual, a paper one.” She pushed herself up so hard she hit her head and knees on the soft ceiling. “Back with the space suits.”

  She went aft to the emergency equipment bay—a closet barely big enough for two space suits and two people, heavily shielded against solar flares—and floated back with a slim booklet, looking disappointed as she riffled through it. “It isn’t very detailed. I don’t know that it will be much help.” She passed it fluttering to me.

  It was even shorter than it looked, since the text was repeated in five languages and a lot of the illustrations were little more than decoration. “Looks more like a sales brochure than a manual.”

  “You’re losing air,” Eric said.

  “What?”

  “This reader you’ve got me in has a weather recorder. Every three minutes it reports temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure. Your air pressure is down a measurable amount.”

  “How much?” Maria asked.

  “One twentieth of one percent. If you were on Earth, I would say take out the umbrellas. Front coming in.”

  “Popped something.”

  “Or hit something,” Eric said. “Did you hear anything that might have been a micrometeorite impact?”

  “It was pretty noisy around perimartian. We could’ve hit a brick and not noticed.”

  “Turbulence,” Maria said.

  “Interesting. Well, if you were holed, the puncture is probably under the vinyl somewhere fore.”

  “Devil to find,” I said.

  “One of you would have to go outside.” That sounded too interesting, with those old commie space suits. “But since the hull is seamless, if you did pop something under stress, it must be either around the air lock, the viewports, or possibly the shieldwall. You could find the leak with a cigarette.”

  “We don’t smoke,” Maria said.

  “Pity. It could save your life.”

  Same old Eric. “There’s probably a detector punk in the first-aid kit,” Maria said, and pushed herself back toward the emergency bay.

  “How long do we have?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a differential equation, since the rate of loss is a function of the amount of loss, complicated by turbulence. If it were a linear relationship, then based on the information I have, you would lose half your air in about fifty hours.”

  “It shouldn’t be any problem, then.”

  “I hope not. It would get lonely without you.”

  The punk gave us some problems at first. It was a long stick of what appeared to be sawdust and glue. Burnt at one end, so it had been used before. But whoever used it had thrown away the instructions.

  The igniter was a battery with a resistance coil and a button. Push the button, it glows red; stick the punk into it, and you’re rewarded with a sputter of jasmine smoke. Then it dampens out.

  On the third try we realized that the punk puts itself out, generating a little shell of carbon dioxide around the coal, if you don’t start waving it around as soon as it lights. Maria was embarrassed; she’d seen a demonstration tape of that when she was in school.

  That brought me up short for a moment. How many of us are left who went to school before spaceflight was common? A few hundred? A few dozen?

  After we figured it out, it only took a couple of minutes to find the leak, around the aft viewport. Long enough to tire of the cloying jasmine perfume.

  The aft viewport had been installed by Mr. Jacobssen himself, so you could enjoy the view while waiting for rations to heat.

  You could just feel the breeze of the air going out with the palm of your hand. It was along the top of the viewport, but I epoxied it all around just in case, and the air pressure stabilized. Then we got down to the real problem: how the hell could we get where we were aiming?

  A high-energy orbit like ours requires frequent small corrections and rather delicate timing. Ceres trundles around the Sun at a measly eighteen kilometers per second; we were playing catch-up at nearly six times that speed. The rule of thumb is to make a correction when two-thirds of the distance has been covered, then another when two-thirds of the remaining distance is covered, and so on. Sooner or later you decelerate, since the folks on Ceres have enough craters already, and the process starts over with a more modest closing velocity. The later you decelerate, the more economical.

  The first problem was finding Ceres. Normally you would just call them up and get on a carrier beam; their instruments would interact with yours and bring you in with maximum safety and economy. But that took AI on both ends, so we would have to just follow the beam, Maria piloting manually. In either case, there was a charge for the service. We had a quarter million in gold and trade goods, not to mention fifty-five thousand-dollar bills, but not a dime in electronic credit.

  “You call them,” Maria said. “Some of them are old-fashioned about dealing with women.”

  Eric gave me the frequency, and I thought for a minute. “This is Fireball 2368 New Mexico calling Ceres Flight Control. Cassius Donato piloting.

  “We have two little problems here. First, main computer’s out; we’ll have to follow your carrier in and perform the rendezvous manually. Second, we don’t have any line of credit, but we have plenty of cash and trade goods. We’ll pay for the carrier after we get to Ceres. Awaiting reply.”

  We were about twelve light-minutes away. I set up the little magnetic chessboard. We let Eric watch on the condition that he was not to say anything.

  Ceres called back in a little less than half an hour, no picture. “Okay, Fireball, we dopplered you outa Mars swingby at eighty-two klicks, our vector. Whatsa hurry, goz?

  “You do have two little problems. One, no way nobody does a manual rendezvous with Ceres. If you was dopplered a tenth of a klick and had a long white beard by the time you got here, we’d still shoot you outa the sky. We live here, goz; we just get one bad landing. You get within ten thousand klicks of rendezvous and we got a five-gigawatt mining laser, turn you inta plasma. Nothin’ personal.

  “That don’t mean you can’t use the carrier wave; you just gotta stop short and get towed in by somebody who can lock into our feedback loop. That’s your second problem: you got to make a deal with somebody here to pay for your carrier and at least make a deposit on the tug.

  “Passive carrier wave’s five thousand rubles, that’s with flight params ad lib. You can call around or you can make a deal with me, Big Dick Goodwin. You agree to pay me six, cash, I put down your five. You don’t pay, I kill you.

  “Most of that’s docking fee and landing tax. You could save twelve hundred with a visual approach, generate your own params, but hey. Make a mistake and I gotta fry you.

  “For the tug, you got a choice of maybe ten, twelve free-lancers, depending on how big Fireball is. I called a friend, Blinky Bukowski, and he offers his services for twenty thousand. That ain’t a bad deal, goz, but call around.

  “You didn’t say what flavor cash you got. Today it’s 1.8504 rubles to the pound, 1.0974 to th
e dollar, 1.5657 to the mark. If you got kopeks or Earth rubles or any kinda soft currency, bring a wheelbarrow of it an’ maybe we’ll talk. Otherwise I’ll get a witness an’ we freeze the transaction at today’s rate.

  “What say, goz? We in business?” The standard “awaiting reply” symbol appeared on the screen.

  “That’s $23,692.36,” Eric said. “I’d try a counteroffer.”

  Maria nodded. “At least round them down. What does each number come to in dollars?” Eric displayed $5,467.47· $18,224.89.

  “The carrier fee’s not negotiable, but everything else is. Tug fee seems high. Any information, Eric?”

  “No—it would be about a quarter that in cislunar space, but you can’t make comparisons.”

  “I say we should be generous on the one that has his fee, and push the other one down,” Maria said. “Tell him he can have six thousand if he can get the tug down to fifteen.”

  It was an interesting way to bargain, twenty or thirty minutes per offer. Epistolary haggling, passing notes. We finished the chess game, me winning for a change, and eventually did get the tug fee down to sixteen thousand dollars. Eric said that we should bill Mitsubishi for it, if we get out of this alive.

  MANIAC STILL AT LARGE!!

  DEATH TOLL MOUNTS TO NINE!!

  Dallas Barr, international playboy immortal, has been charged with four other murders in a sex-and-death trip that spans the planet and boggles the mind!

  Four belated poisoning deaths bring to a total of nine the hapless victims of Barr’s jealous rage. Police, from four countries have pieced together this gruesome scenario:

  At a party in Sydney, Australia, Dallas Barr met Maria Marconi, a mystery woman from his distant past. They had been lovers in 2010, but for seventy years he thought she was dead.

  Passion rekindled, the two millionaires retired to adastra, the immortal elitist starship that is also the world’s most exclusive and expensive hotel. Whatever they did there had to be worth $100,000 a day!

  LESBIAN NYMPHO!!

  Little did Dallas know that his newly rediscovered heartthrob was a pansexual nymphomaniac, willing to try anything twice!! It fell to the unfortunate Lamont Randolph to pass the news on to him.