From personal, confidential testimony of other immortals, police have figured out that Randolph (fellow immortal and veep of General Nutrition in Australia) had been one of Marconi’s lovers in the past, but was jilted in favor of a woman! He had befriended Barr the previous week, and wanted to make sure he knew what was going on!
Randolph evidently gave Barr the lowdown about both of the women from firsthand experience—a three-way bedfest with French immortal Gabrielle Lecompe! He also told Barr about the other immortals she’d opened with: Texas industrialist Helga Moss, Nigerian economist Yakubu Shagari, Alaskan bookmaker Sonny Gaines, and Dallas’s old partner, Australian Eric Lundley. All of them were doomed.
LUNATIC RAGE!!
Far from being grateful for the information, Barr became enraged, and pushed Randolph off the penthouse balcony to his death 170 feet below! After that he returned to his London hotel room (having left no trace of his hop to Australia and back) and then proceeded to a get-together of immortals in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia. There he cold-bloodedly murdered four of Marconi’s lovers, by doctoring their drinks with a slow-acting nerve poison! (The poison was manufactured by Sedlidge Bionica, a firm he founded thirty years ago!)
Then Barr left the party with his old “friend” Eric Lundley, along with the luscious and lascivious Maria Marconi. They hired a water taxi back to their hotel—but they never made it! In the middle of the Adriatic Sea Barr pulled out a gun and murdered both immortals in cold blood, and then assassinated the taxi driver as well.
PERFECT ESCAPE!!
Barr sank the taxi in deep water and swam back to the mainland. By the time the first body floated ashore, he had fled, and was safe in the notorious Conch Republic.
Unable to extradite the murderer from the anarchic island, authorities hired a local private detective to track him down. She became Barr’s ninth victim when a clever booby trap blew her to pieces!
Barr’s appearance may have changed radically—rich criminals often go to the Conch Republic for total identity “laundering”—and by now he could be anywhere in the world! If you run into someone who you think is Dallas Barr, do not attempt to apprehend him!! Immediately contact the local police—then take cover!!
—From Allplanet Fax & Pix, December 4, 2080
Dallas and Maria could read day-old newspapers and week-old magazines by punching them up from a public library data base. None of the news reports they read, from sensational tabloid to stuffy current-events analysis journal, said anything about the possibility that they might have escaped Earth. Of course that didn’t mean that no one suspected, or possibly even knew for sure. The Stileman Foundation appeared to have the media well under control. As the weeks went by, their story drifted from page one back toward oblivion.
Maria
Our flight profile originally called for forty-five minutes of deceleration at three gees, uncomfortable but not dangerous, saving fuel. The tugboat captain Blinky Bukowski was waiting for us about twelve thousand klicks from Ceres. He was actually in Ceres orbit, of course, but the period of the orbit was over two hundred hours, creeping along at about a hundred meters per second.
He talked through the prerendezvous phase with me, and I was comfortable with his competence. He tilted the plane of his parking orbit to match ours, and then timed its circularization so that we both ought to arrive at about the same spot at about the same time. We didn’t plan on mechanical failure, though, least of all of a dramatic kind.
Ceres had been an invisible mote through most of our journey. It was visible the last few days, finally becoming the brightest thing in the sky, and growing into a disc.
It was the size of a Klondike dollar when I flipped us around. Dallas and I strapped ourselves in and waited for the count from Blinky’s computer. I would have to initiate the deceleration manually, which could introduce an error of as much as a tenth or twentieth of a second. A timer would cut it off forty-five minutes and nineteen seconds later, whether or not I was paying attention, or conscious. Then we would look around for Blinky.
The three gees wasn’t too bad. I was tired, though, and closed my eyes after a few minutes, which could have been fatal. But my ears popped suddenly, and I forced my eyes open.
The “life-support malfunction” light was on.
I touched the emergency shutoff button on the armrest and we were weightless. “What’s that?” Dallas said, his voice oddly distant.
“Losing air.” We both looked back at the galley viewport—this time it was the bottom of the “custom-installed” window, and it had popped out so far we could see a thin black crescent of space from across the cabin. Air rushed through it in a constant low sigh.
I was out of my straps first. “Get the suits,” I said unnecessarily, and kicked toward the porthole, ripping off my blouse to stuff in the gap.
There was quite a bit of wind; enough, I was afraid, to suck the blouse on through, but it did hold. It was fairly porous material, though, and I could feel that we were still losing air fast. I told Dallas, and as he brought the space suits over, he stopped at the refrigerator for a beer. That was perplexing, until he shook it up, popped it, and saturated the cloth. It frosted over into a solid mass.
But we had already lost too much air. I was gasping as if I had run several kilometers. Black dots swarmed in front of my eyes and my hands and arms felt palsied. It seemed very cold.
The Russian suits are made to go on quickly: main zipper; gloves; helmet lock. But you have to undress first. I had on dancing tights, and although I could force my thumbs under the waistband, I couldn’t seem to get them down. I was both frightened and somehow giddy, almost giggling at the absurdity of not being able to perform this simple act. Dallas slipped out of his jumpsuit and swam over to help me. I had never seen a man shrink in the cold, of course, and that did make me giggle. Dallas had taken my pants off a few times before, but never with a penis only three centimeters long.
He guided my legs and arms into the suit’s overlong sleeves, closed the main zipper, fitted the helmet, and locked it on. Frigid oxygen filled the suit, and a splitting earache immediately sobered me up. I swallowed hard and yawned, and it went away. Yawning filled my lungs with Lysol vapor, though, and I started coughing, each cough an echoing explosion in the plastic globe. The smell made my gorge rise, but I choked it back in time. Bad enough to have the faceplate clouded with water vapor and saliva specks. A splash of vomit would be death for both of us, the choice between my flying blind choking or trying to survive near-vacuum long enough to clean my helmet.
The time! I gestured wildly at Dallas and kicked back to the acceleration couch as fast as I could. We had decelerated for only a couple of minutes and were hurtling toward Ceres at more than seventy-five kilometers per second. We couldn’t radio them to explain, and even if we could, I doubted that Big Dick what’s-his-name could be talked out of blasting us if we came too close.
At least one thing was working; a green light next to the red one meant that the lost air was being replaced.
Dallas was fast getting dressed. I wasn’t even completely strapped in when he came forward; I grabbed at him and we touched helmets.
“Have to make up for lost time. Get ready for five gees. We’ll do it for a few minutes and then cut back to three. We’ll come up short, too far out from Ceres; but by then the ship will be repressurized, and we can start over.”
“You’re the boss.” His voice sounded like he was in another room.
I tried to think. The timer said 42:01, so we had decelerated for a little more than three minutes before I shut it off. No way to tell exactly how long we’d been in free fall; at least another three minutes. Juggle numbers. Distance with respect to Ceres is D = D0 − v0t + at2, but it’s not that simple; every time you change acceleration you’re in a new regime. I was too foggy to plug the numbers in anyhow. I typed in “4:00” for the five-gee correction and when Dallas gave me his hand signal I pulled the stick back hard, all the way.
The pain was so
sudden and intense it gave me a rush of adrenaline. The life-support unit on the upper back of the space suit kept me from conforming to the acceleration couch properly; it was as if a hundred-kilogram weight had suddenly dropped between the shoulder blades. I blacked out, thinking Dallas will go under, too.
Woke up with Dallas shaking me. “How long on three gees?” he shouted from that other room.
“Thirty-eight minutes,” I dragged out from somewhere. He punched it in and I reached for the vernier stick, and stopped myself just in time before pulling it back. Wouldn’t want to fling Dallas back toward the wine rack at three gees.
Wrong ship. No wine rack on this piece of junk. The black dots swimming had company now, brilliant purple flowers opening and closing. Hard white stars sparkled. I yawned every couple of seconds. Dallas gave the sign and I closed the frozen lump of my hand around the vernier, and pulled it back to the faint click-stop at 3.0 gees.
Three wasn’t nearly as bad as five. But I yawned with almost every breath now. I couldn’t feel my arms and legs beyond elbows and knees. My buttocks and breasts felt icy.
Ostia. The suit was leaking. But the green light was still on; pretty soon the cabin would be up to a livable pressure. If nothing else went wrong. I watched the minutes creep away. Somewhere around thirty I passed out again.
I woke up slightly in luscious free fall. Dallas was whispering from far away, but all I could see was pale white. Ice crystals, I realized, on the inside of my faceplate. The suit wasn’t working well at all. Dallas said the porthole was gone.
No air outside? I could breathe, though. I went back to sleep.
Eric:
Mayday, Ceres.
Ceres:
You got Big Dick Goodwin at Ceres Flight Control. An’ you Fireball 2368?
Eric:
Affirmative, Fireball.
Ceres:
So what happened to, uh, Cassius Donato? Who’re you?
Eric:
I’m Eric Lundley, a passenger. Donato is here but can’t speak to you; the ship’s lost all of its air and the emergency suits don’t have working radios.
Ceres:
Anyone dead?
Eric:
Not yet. One passenger has a defective suit; Donato has just wrapped her in a thermal blanket, but we need to get her out of this bucket as soon as possible.
Ceres:
I don’ know. How close is the tug?
Blinky:
Blinky here. Shit, I couldn’ even find ’em an’t the transmission. Lemme doppler. What’s yer amplitude on the transmission, Big Dick?
Ceres:
Twenty-three-point-eighty-one mikes.
Blinky:
Jus’ second, punch it in … shit. Okay, Fireball. Eighty, ninety minutes before I can get to you. Hold on that long?
Eric:
Suppose we’ll have to.
Ceres:
Hey. I’m slow, but I an’t that slow. How we know this an’t a mutiny situation? I mean, you can talk to us, but the captain can’t. There’s no air but you look okay, beard an’ all. You even look like a fuckin’ pirate.
Eric:
I’m not exactly human. I’m a Turing Image. I find a lack of air invigorating. If I could communicate with Mr. Donato, I would have him come over and wave hello. Alas, we’re not jacked up together, and otherwise, our only link is acoustic.
Ceres:
If the screen’s on, I could hold up a written message.
Eric:
And he would eventually see it. Right now he’s absorbed in trying to glue a plate over the porthole that blew out. It won’t do much good, though. I believe the ship’s life-support system tried to compensate for the drop in pressure by pushing more and more air into the system. I don’t think there’s any left.
Blinky:
This is gonna cost, ya know. I gotta do a fuckin’ EVA?
Eric:
We’ll give you two thousand extra.
Blinky:
Hell, I dunno. Maybe five thousand.
Eric:
Mr. Bukowski. It’s either two thousand or I go on a general frequency and offer fifteen hundred or the lowest bid.
Ceres:
I’d do it, Blinky. Two thousand, that’s eighteen hundred twenty-two rubles. An’t so bad.
Blinky:
Shit. Guess not. Keep the mike open; I’ll come in when we make visual.
Eric:
Thank you, Mr. Bukowski. Ceres, will you write a note explaining things, and hold it up to the lens?
Ceres:
Yeah. Gotta find the pad.
Dallas
I peeked inside the blanket and Maria’s body heat had thawed out her faceplate, but she looked awful. Eyes half shut, mouth open and slack, panting shallowly. She was pale and her lips were turning purple.
At least the air pressure was enough to sustain her. I saw a woman die of slow decompression on the Moon from what turned out to have been a simple maintenance oversight. We tried to carry her back but we were two hours from help. She died choking on bloody foam from her lungs.
So the problem with the suit wasn’t a leak. We probably had zero pressure in the cabin ten seconds after the porthole popped. The oxygen supply in our suits is cryogenic and uses a preheater, which must have been the problem. The air was coming into her suit from the 1/s unit too cold. I couldn’t see any way to investigate it without disassembling the unit.
I wrapped the thermal blanket around as tight as I could with three bungees, which is what I should have done in the first place. But the frost was so frightening that all I could think of was to warm her, holding her. Which was stupid. If my suit was radiating that much heat, I’d have a frost-covered faceplate myself.
I did know enough not to rub. That was one useful thing I learned in the army. If you rub the fingers of a frostbite victim, you could wind up with a handful of loose fingers. Takes forever to grow them back, hurts like hell.
Tried to stop the porthole leak by gluing a dinner plate over the hole with epoxy. It didn’t do a damned thing. Green light merrily blazing, l/s pumping right along, not a molecule of air left in the reserves. I pulled the fuse so the damned system wouldn’t burn itself out, pumping vacuum.
Spent a long time then watching Maria, holding her, trying to will her awake and warm. I almost missed the note. A few seconds after I saw it, it disappeared. Incoming message logo, then Eric’s picture took up one corner of the screen, which was otherwise dominated by a close-up portrait of a bearlike individual, unshaven and wearing a cap that said COKE IZ FIZZ, who blinked both eyes simultaneously once each three seconds, staring. Our mercenary savior.
I waved at him and he waved back. What would have happened if I hadn’t been prepared? If somebody suddenly started cutting through the air lock with a jigsaw laser? Five shatterguns and a crowdpleaser in the pantry.
(Ah, but the shatterguns are NOT FOR USE IN VACUUM. They would make a nice bright flash, announcing your unfriendliness and impotence simultaneously.)
As it was, I opened the inner air lock door, but the outer one was stuck closed because of some brilliant failsafe sensor, so Gospodin Blinky had to jigsaw through.
The short EVA was no problem. The vessels were about thirty meters apart, but he’d strung a cable. I put one arm around Maria, looped the other around the cable, and kicked off. Blinky brought Eric.
Worried as I was about Maria, the sudden beauty outside was still overwhelming. I haven’t done enough space to become jaded. Ceres looked like a caricature of the Moon, outsized craters blistering an absolute crescent; you could only tell it was a sphere by the absence of stars behind the shadow side. In the other direction Jupiter blazed copper-gold, close enough to tell that it was round, which I’d never seen before.
And the stars were as always. Looking at them, you could almost understand religion.
The tug was just an ICF engine bolted to a steel platform with tanks of this and that, heavy-duty winches, and a cartoon of Blinky with the slogan HIRE A M
UTANT. The life-support module was smaller than Fireball’s cabin. But warmer.
It was not a time for modesty. As soon as the inner door closed, I stripped Maria out of the frigid suit. Blinky removed his helmet and gloves and took a soft Woolweave blanket off his restrainer bunk for her, and although he stared at her nakedness, I think he stares at everything.
She was shockingly pale, with waxy patches on her cheeks, breasts, buttocks. In semiconsciousness, she looked old and tired.
“That’s frostbite, goz,” he said. “We better get her some advice.” He punched up a doctor and described the situation. She had us take Maria’s temperature; it was high enough to rule out hypothermia, more life-threatening than frostbite. She said that if there was no obvious breathing problem and a regular pulse, then the main thing was to warm her up slowly. She suggested that I get inside the blanket with Maria, and hold her without rubbing; administer a strong pain-killer as soon as she was awake enough to complain. Blinky gave me a Morphoze popper out of his first-aid kit.
Being bundled together gave me a strangely asexual, almost maternal feeling. Front to back, I alternated warming her face and her breasts by pressing with my hands, resisting the impulse to rub. Freezing my pelvis against her icy behind.
Once he was satisfied that we were doing all that could be done, Blinky suited up again and went out to rig the tow. He couldn’t just attach the cable and blast off, because the towed ship would swing into his ICF exhaust, which was a little hotter than the interior of the Sun. So he winched Fireball straight up underneath the platform, where there were padded clamps of various sizes. He clamped it in and headed toward Ceres with a tenth-gee acceleration.