Analog SFF, June 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I went to my bunk and slept pretty damned well for a guy who only had a few days left to live. But when I woke up my stomach started rumbling and I remembered that I didn't want to starve to death.

  I sat on the edge of the bunk, woozy and empty inside.

  “Good morning, sir,” Forty-niner said. “Does your throat feel better?”

  It did, a little. Then I realized that we had a full store of pharmaceuticals in a cabinet in the lavatory. I spent the morning sorting out the pills, trying to figure out which ones would kill me. Forty-niner kept silent while I trotted back and forth to the bridge to call up the medical program. It wasn't any use, though. The bright boys back at headquarters had made certain nobody could put together a suicide cocktail.

  Okay, I told myself. There's only one thing left to do. Go to the airlock and open the hatches manually. Override the electronic circuits. Take Forty-niner and his goddamned ethics out of the loop.

  Once he realized I had pried open the control panel on the bulkhead beside the inner hatch, Forty-niner said softly, “Sir, there is no need for that.”

  “Mind your own business.”

  “But, sir, the corporation could hold you financially responsible for deliberate damage to the control panel.”

  “So let them sue me after I'm dead.”

  “Sir, there really is no need to commit suicide.”

  Forty-niner had figured out what I was going to do, of course. So what? There wasn't anything he could do to stop me.

  “What's the matter? You scared of being alone?”

  “I would rather not be alone, sir. I prefer your company to solitude.”

  “Tough nuts, pal. I'm going to blow the hatches and put an end to it.”

  “But, sir, there is no need—”

  “What do you know about need?” I bellowed at him. “Human need? I'm a human being, not a collection of circuit boards.”

  “Sir, I know that humans require certain physical and emotional supports.”

  “Damned right we do.” I had the panel off. I shorted out the safety circuit, giving myself a nasty little electrical shock in the process. The inner hatch slid open.

  “I have been trying to satisfy your needs, sir, within the limits of my programming.”

  As I stepped into the coffin-sized airlock I thought to myself, Yeah, he has. Forty-niner's been doing his best to keep me alive. But it's not enough. Not nearly enough.

  I started prying open the control panel on the outer hatch. Six centimeters away from me was the vacuum of interplanetary space. Once the hatch opens, poof! I'm gone.

  “Sir, please listen to me.”

  “I'm listening,” I said, as I tried to figure out how I could short out the safety circuit without giving myself another shock. Stupid, isn't it? Here I was trying to commit suicide and worried about a little electrical shock.

  “There is a ship approaching us, sir.”

  “Don't be funny.”

  “It was not an attempt at humor, sir. A ship is approaching us and hailing us at standard communications frequency.”

  I looked up at the speaker set into the overhead of the airlock.

  “Is this part of your psychological programming?” I groused.

  Forty-niner ignored my sarcasm. “Backtracking the approaching ship's trajectory shows that it originated at Ceres, sir. It should make rendezvous with us in nine hours and forty-one minutes.”

  I stomped out of the airlock and ducked into the bridge, muttering, “If this is some wise ass ploy of yours to keep me from—”

  I looked at the display panel. All its screens were dark: conserving electrical power.

  “Is this some kind of psychology stunt?” I asked.

  “No, sir, it is an actual ship. Would you like to answer its call to us, sir?”

  “Light up the radar display.”

  Goddamn! There was a blip on the screen.

  I thought I must have been hallucinating. Or maybe Forty-niner was fooling with the radar display to keep me from popping the airlock hatch. But I sank into the command chair and told Forty-niner to pipe the incoming message to the comm screen. And there was Donahoo's ugly mug talking at me! I knew I was hallucinating.

  “Hang in there,” he was saying. “We'll get you out of that scrap heap in a few hours.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, and turned off the comm screen. To Forty-niner, I called out, “Thanks, pal. Nice try. I appreciate it. But I think I'm going back to the airlock and opening the outer hatch now.”

  “But sir,” Forty-niner sounded almost like he was pleading, “it really is a ship approaching. We are saved, sir.”

  “Don't you think I know you can pull up Donahoo's image from your files and animate it? Manipulate it to make him say what you want me to hear? Get real!”

  For several heartbeats Forty-niner didn't answer. At last he said, “Then let us conduct a reality test, sir.”

  “Reality test?”

  “The approaching ship will rendezvous with us in nine hours, twenty-seven minutes. Wait that long, sir. If no ship reaches us, then you can resume your suicidal course of action.”

  It made sense. I knew Forty-niner was just trying to keep me alive, and I almost respected the pile of chips for being so deviously clever about it. Not that I meant anything to him on a personal basis. Forty-niner was a computer. No emotions. Not even an urge for self-preservation. Whatever he was doing to keep me alive had been programmed into him by the psychotechs.

  And then I thought, Yeah, and when a human being risks his butt to save the life of another human being, that's been programmed into him by millions of years of evolution. Is there that much of a difference?

  So I sat there and waited. I called to Donahoo and told him I was alive and damned hungry. He grinned that lopsided sneer of his and told me he'd have a soy steak waiting for me. Nothing that Forty-niner couldn't have ginned up from its files on me and Donahoo.

  “I've got to admit, you're damned good,” I said to Forty-niner.

  “It's not me, sir,” he replied. “Mr. Donahoo is really coming to rescue you.”

  I shook my head. “Yeah. And Santa Claus is right behind him in a sleigh full of toys pulled by eight tiny reindeer.”

  Immediately, Forty-niner said, "A Visit from St. Nicholas, by Clement Moore. Would you like to hear the entire poem, sir?”

  I ignored that. “Listen, Niner, I appreciate what you're trying to do, but it just doesn't make sense. Donahoo's at corporate headquarters at Vesta. He's not at Ceres and he's not anywhere near us. Good try, but you can't make me believe the corporation would pay to have him come all the way over to Ceres to save a broken-down bucket of a waterbot and one very junior and expendable employee.”

  “Nevertheless, sir, that is what is happening. As you will see for yourself in eight hours and fifty-two minutes, sir.”

  I didn't believe it for a nanosecond. But I played along with Forty-niner. If it made him feel better, what did I have to lose? When the time was up and the bubble burst I could always go back to the airlock and pop the outer hatch.

  But he must have heard me muttering to myself, “It just doesn't make sense. It's not logical.”

  “Sir, what are the chances that in the siege of Leningrad in World War II the first artillery shell fired by the German army into the city would kill the only elephant in the Leningrad zoo? The statistical chances were astronomical, but that is exactly what happened, sir.”

  So I let him babble on about strange happenings and dramatic rescues. Why argue? It made him feel better, I guess. That is, if Forty-niner had any feelings. Which he didn't, I knew. Well, I guess letting him natter on with his rah-rah pep talk made me feel better. A little.

  It was a real shock when a fusion torch ship took shape on my comm screen. Complete with standard registration info spelled out on the bar running along the screen's bottom: Hu Davis, out of Ceres.

  “Be there in an hour and a half,” Donahoo said, still sneering. “Christ, your old Jerky really looks l
ike a scrap heap. You must'a taken some battering.”

  Could Forty-niner fake that? I asked myself. Then a part of my mind warned, Don't get your hopes up. It's all a simulation.

  Except that, an hour and a half later, the Hu Davis was right alongside us, as big and detailed as life. I could see flecks on its meteor bumpers where micrometeors had abraded them. I just stared. It couldn't be a simulation. Not that detailed.

  And Donahoo was saying, “I'm comin’ in through your main airlock.”

  “No!” I yelped. “Wait! I've got to close the inner hatch first.”

  Donahoo looked puzzled. “Why the fuck's the inside hatch open?”

  I didn't answer him. I was already ducking through the hatch of the bridge. Damned if I didn't get another electric shock closing the airlock's inner hatch.

  I stood there wringing my hand while the outer hatch slid open. I could see the status lights on the control panel go from red for vacuum through amber and finally to green. Forty-niner could fake all that, I knew. This might still be nothing more than an elaborate simulation.

  But then the inner hatch sighed open and Donahoo stepped through, big and ugly as life.

  His potato nose twitched. “Christ, it smells like a garbage pit in here.”

  That's when I knew it wasn't a simulation. He was really there. I was saved.

  Well, it would've been funny if everybody wasn't so ticked off at me. Donahoo had been sent by corporate headquarters all the way from Vesta to Ceres to pick me up and turn off the distress call Forty-niner had been beaming out on the broadband frequencies for all those weeks.

  It was only a milliwatt signal, didn't cost us a piffle of electrical power, but that teeny little signal got picked up at the Lunar Farside Observatory, where they had built the big SETI radio telescope. When they first detected our distress call the astronomers went delirious: they thought they'd found an intelligent extraterrestrial signal, after more than a century of searching. They were sore as hell when they realized it was only a dinky old waterbot in trouble, not aliens trying to say hello.

  They didn't give a rat's ass of a hoot about Forty-niner and me, but as long as our mayday was being beamed out, their fancy radio telescope search for ETs was screwed. So they bleeped to the International Astronautical Authority, and the IAA complained to corporate headquarters, and Donahoo got called on the carpet at Vesta and told to get to JRK49N and turn off that damned distress signal!

  And that's how we got rescued. Not because anybody cared about an aged waterbot that was due to be scrapped or the very junior dumbass riding on it. We got saved because we were bothering the astronomers at Farside.

  Donahoo made up some of the cost of his rescue mission by selling off what was left of Forty-niner to one of the salvage outfits at Ceres. They started cutting up the old bird as soon as we parked it in orbit there.

  But not before I put on a clean new spacesuit and went aboard JRK49N one last time.

  I had forgotten how big the ship was. It was huge, a massive collection of spherical tanks that dwarfed the fusion drive thruster and the cramped little pod I had lived in all those weeks. Hanging there in orbit, empty and alone, Forty-niner looked kind of sad. Long, nasty gashes had been ripped through the water tanks; I thought I could see rimes of ice glittering along their ragged edges in the faint starlight.

  Then I saw the flickers of laser torches. Robotic scavengers were already starting to take the ship apart.

  Floating there in weightlessness, my eyes misted up as I approached the ship. I had hated being on it, but I got teary-eyed just the same. I know it was stupid, but that's what happened, so help me.

  I didn't go to the pod. There was nothing there that I wanted, especially not my cruddy old spacesuit. No, instead I worked my way along the cleats set into the spherical tanks, hand over gloved hand, to get to the heart of the ship, where the fusion reactor and power generator were housed.

  And Forty-niner's CPU.

  “Hey, whattarya doin’ there?” One of the few humans directing the scavenger robots hollered at me, so loud I thought my helmet earphones would melt down.

  “I'm retrieving the computer's hard drive,” I said.

  “You got permission?”

  “I was the crew. I want the hard core. It's not worth anything to you, is it?”

  “We ain't supposed to let people pick over the bones,” he said. But his tone was lower, not so belligerent.

  “It'll only take a couple of minutes,” I said. “I don't want anything else; you can have all the rest.”

  “Damn right we can. Company paid good money for this scrap pile.”

  I nodded inside my helmet and went through the open hatch that led down to JRK49N's heart. And brain. It only took me a few minutes to pry open the CPU and disconnect the hard drive. I slipped the palm-sized metal oblong into a pouch on the thigh of my suit, then got out. I didn't look back. What those scavengers were chopping up was just a lot of metal and plastic. I had Forty-niner with me.

  The corporation never assigned me to a waterbot again. Somebody in the front office must've taken a good look at my personnel dossier and figured I had too much education to be stuck in a dumb job like that. I don't know, maybe Donahoo had something to do with it. He wouldn't admit to it, and I didn't press him about it.

  Anyway, when I finally got back to Vesta they assigned me to a desk job. Over the years I worked my way up to chief of logistics and eventually got transferred back to Selene City, on the Moon. I'll be able to take early retirement soon and get married and start a family.

  Forty-niner's been with me all that time. Not that I talk to him every day. But it's good to know that he's there and I can ease off the stresses of the job or whatever by having a nice long chat with him.

  One of these days I'll even beat him at chess.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Ben Bova

  * * * *

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  * * * *

  Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.

  —Van Wyck Brooks

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Novelette: DEMAND ECOLOGY

  by Craig DeLancey

  * * * *

  Illustration by William Warren

  * * * *

  Sometimes the solution to a problem is obvious—and wrong.

  * * * *

  “Give him another injection,” the captain said.

  A hot burning line shot up my arm. Stimulants.

  “No,” I grunted. I forced my eyelids up. Only one eye came open. I tasted blood in my mouth and had to struggle to swallow. I pushed my swollen tongue forward and found it touched my bloated lip without resistance: my front teeth were gone.

  They had flown me back up to the ship. I was in the med room, strapped to a gurney that was propped up. Commander Ryan and Captain Walters floated before me, roughly aligned as if standing there. The ship's doctor hesitated beside them, a needle in hand.

  After a long silence, the captain said to me, “Why did you do it, Virgil? The whole human race had a stake in this. Our first project beyond our solar system. And you sabotaged it. You destroyed everything.”

  “Alone,” I managed.

  “What?” The captain barked. For a brief moment, he lost his patience and studied control, and kicked the leg of the gurney, making it shake, sending him floating back. Commander Ryan looked sheepish and ashame
d, turning her eyes from this display to look at the floor.

  “Must talk to the ... captain alone.”

  The captain's jaw clenched as he thought about this. Then he said, “All right, clear the room.”

  * * * *

  We had arrived in the Purgatorio system a few e-days before. We pushed heavy velocity when we fell back into regular space, and had to sling close to the alien sun to brake for orbit over Purgatorio. The Kirtpau hull performed as promised, which was almost a disappointment—another reminder of how far beyond human science most of Galactic technology reached. We hardly felt the heat as we punched past the corona at .02 c. The Galactic remora probes—tagging us on the odd chance that humans might surprise them and reveal some value—let go of the hull and drifted into steep comet trajectories, fleeing the fusion fire. They would take some tricky turns around the small inner planets before they reattached to our ship in a few e-days.

  As we lined up for the orbital insertion, Captain Walters, a huge dark-haired man born and raised in Colorado, called out to me in his rasping voice. “Doctor Virgil, any sign of Greete ships in orbit about Purgatorio?”

  “None yet,” I told him. As chief scientist, my main task was to advise on our use of the planet Purgatorio's atmosphere. But during our approach the captain had me watching for the neutrino signature of Greete starships in flight. We did not expect trouble from the Greete, but the captain wanted to be cautious.

  “Okay. Keep watching.” He raised his voice. “Let's focus on this orbit capture. We need to come in close. We're at the limit of our safe speed here as we spin out to match the planet. Stay sharp.”

  His expressive face, with eyes deeply wrinkled from equally frequent smiling and frowning, was shrouded behind dimly translucent black virtching glasses. The design of our Kirtpau ship eschewed hard controls for virtual interfaces, so the ship interior was unadorned brown and gray walls with a rough texture that resembled stone and that smelled pleasantly of wet slate. The main bridge contained only two rows of hastily added human chairs facing each other. Each of the twelve bridge crew wore virtching glasses and waved in the air at controls that others could not see.