by Ben Bova
The courtroom erupted in angry shouts. I thought the audience was going to lynch Sam then and there.
The Beryllium Blonde smiled at the raging spectators and said, barely loud enough to be heard over their yelling, “The prosecution rests.”
The chief judge banged her gavel and recessed for the day, but hardly any of the audience paid her any attention. They wanted Sam’s blood. A cordon of security guards formed around us, looking worried. But as we headed for the door, I saw that Sam was unperturbed by any of the riotous goings-on; his eyes were locked on the Blonde. It was as if no one else existed for him.
THE OUTLOOK WASN’T brilliant that evening. The prosecution had presented what looked like an airtight case. I had no witnesses except Sam, and in our discussions of the case he hadn’t once refuted the prosecution’s testimony.
“You really wiped out the colony of lichenoids?” I asked him repeatedly.
His only answer was a shrug and an enigmatic, “They’re not there, are they?”
“And you actually banged that scientist on the head with an oxy bottle?”
He grinned at the memory of it. “I sure did,” he admitted, impishly.
We were having dinner in our hotel suite. Sam couldn’t show his face in a restaurant, that’s how much public opinion had turned against him. We had needed six security guards just to walk us from the courtroom to the hotel.
“But he wasn’t a scientist,” Sam added, heaping broiled scungilli on his plate. Selene’s aquaculture produced the best shellfish off-Earth, and the hotel’s chef was a Neapolitan master artist.
“He was a science writer for DULL,” Sam went on. “Most of the so-called scientists on Europa were public-relations flacks and administrators.”
“Like Erskine?”
He nodded. “They weren’t doing research. They were busy pumping out media hype about their great green discovery.”
“That’s neither here nor there, Sam,” I said, picking at my own clams posilipo.
“Isn’t it?” He made a know-it-all smile.
“Sam, are you keeping something from me?” I asked.
“Me?”
“If you’ve got some information that will help win this case, some facts, witnesses—anything! We need it now, Sam. I’m supposed to open your defense tomorrow morning and I don’t have a thing to go on.”
“Except my testimony,” he said.
That’s what I was afraid of.
YET THE NEXT morning I put Sam on the witness chair and asked him one single question: “Mr. Gunn, can you tell us in your own words what took place on Europa during the time you were there?”
“Soitinly!” Sam said, grinning.
The judges were not amused. Neither was the Beryllium Blonde, sitting at the prosecution’s table, watching Sam intently, her blue eyes focused on him like twin lasers.
THE WHOLE THING started—Sam said—with the Porno Twins. Cindy and Mindy.
You gotta understand that working those mining ships out there in the Asteroid Belt is hard, lonely work. Sure, there are women among the crews, but there’s always eight or nine more guys than gals on those factory ships, and the guys get—well, the polite word for it is horny.
(The chief judge huffed at that but didn’t interrupt. The Toad snorted. The Beryllium Blonde smiled.)
The Porno Twins supplied a needed service for the miners. Virtual sex, on demand. Oh sure, there were VR services from Earth-Moon, but the time lag meant that you couldn’t do real-time simulations: you had to buy a VR program that was prepackaged. It might have a few variables, but you more or less got a regular routine, take it or leave it.
The Porno Twins had come out to the belt and established themselves in a spacecraft that could swing around the area and maneuver close enough to the factory ships to do real-time simulations. You know, positive feedback and all that. You could talk with ‘em, and they’d respond to you. It was great!
Well, anyway, the guys told me it was great. Some of the women used them, too, but that’s their business. I never did. Virtual reality is terrific and all that, but I prefer the real thing. I want to feel some warmth instead of grappling with an electronic fantasy.
I saw the twins’ advertisements, of course. They were really attractive: two very good-looking dolls who were identical down to their belly buttons, except that one was right-handed and the other was a lefty. Mindy and Cindy. Geniuses at what they did. They were natural redheads, but with VR they could be any color or shade you wanted.
It was the idea of their being twins that made them so popular. Every guy’s got a fantasy about that and they were happy to fulfill your wildest dreams, anything you asked for. And it was all perfectly safe, of course: they were usually a million kilometers away, feeding your fantasy at the speed of light with a real-time virtual reality link.
I had thought about dropping in on them for a real visit, you know, in the flesh. Me and every other guy in the belt. But they stayed buttoned up inside their own spacecraft; no visitors. None of us knew what kind of defenses they might have on their craft, but I guess we all realized that their best defense was the threat of leaving the belt.
So nobody molested them. If anybody gave even a hint that he might try to sneak out to their ship, his fellow miners dissuaded him—as they say—forcefully. Nobody wanted the Twins to leave us alone out in the dark and cold between Mars and Jupiter.
It was sheer coincidence that I happened to be the closest ship to theirs when their life-support system malfunctioned. I guess I’m lucky that way, if you can call it lucky when lightning strikes you.
I was trying to repair the mining boat Clementine when I heard their distress call. Most mining boats have minimal crews; Clementine was the first to be designed to run with no crew at all. Except it didn’t work right.
Mining boats attach themselves to an asteroid and grind up the rock or metal, sort it by chemical composition, and store it in their holds until they make rendezvous with a factory boat and unload the ores. Clementine was chewing up its target asteroid all right, but there was a glitch in the mass spectrometer and the idiot computer running the boat couldn’t figure out which stream of ore should go into which hold, so it stopped all operations halfway into the program and just clung to the asteroid like a scared spider, doing absolutely nothing except costing me money.
So I jetted out to Clementine from Ceres in my personal torch ship, leaving the company’s important business in the capable and well-trained hands of my crackerjack staff. I figured they could run things for maybe four-five days before driving me into bankruptcy.
So I’m in a battered old hard suit hanging weightless with my head stuck in the computer bay and my feet dangling up near the navigation sensors when the radio bleeps.
“This is SEX069,” said a sultry female voice. “We have an emergency situation. Our life support system has suffered a malfunction. Our computer indicates we have only eleven point four days until the air recycling scrubbers fail completely. We need help immediately.”
I didn’t have to look up the IAA registry to find out who SEX069 was. That was the Porno Twins’ spacecraft! I pulled my head out of the computer bay, cracking my helmet on the edge of the hatch hard enough to make me see stars, and jack-knifed myself into an upright position by the set of navigation sensors. Not easy to do in a hard suit, by the way.
Being designed to operate uncrewed, Clementine didn’t have an observation port or even cameras outside its dumb hull. But it had a radio, so I squirted off a message to the Twins as fast as my gloved fingers could hit the keypad.
“This is Sam Gunn,” I said, in my deepest, manliest voice. “Received your distress call and am on my way to you.” Then I couldn’t resist adding, “Have no fear, Sam is here!”
I got out of Clementine fast as I could and into my personal torch ship, Joker. While I was taking off my hard suit I had the Twins squirt me their location and their computer’s diagnostic readings.
Their craft was several million kilome
ters away, coasting in a Sun-centered orbit not far from the asteroid Vesta.
Now, Joker’s built for my comfort—and for speed. Her fusion-MHD drive could accelerate at a full g continuously, as long as she had reaction mass to fire out her nozzles. Any other rock jockey in the belt would have had to coast along for weeks on end to reach the Twins. I could zip out to Vesta in a matter of hours, accelerating like a bat out of sheol.
“SPARE US THE profanity, Mr. Gunn,” said the Toad.
“And kindly stick to the facts of the case,” the chief judge added, frowning. “We don’t need a sales pitch for your personal yacht.”
Sam shrugged and glanced at me. I realized that if he was trying to drum up interest in Joker, he must be feeling pretty desperate, financially.
THE POINT IS—Sam blithely continued—that Joker was the only craft in the belt that had a chance in ... in the solar system, of helping the Twins. Nobody else could get to them in eleven days or less.
But as I sat in the bridge, in my form-accommodating, reclinable swiveling command chair, which has built-in massage and heat units (the chief judge glowered at Sam), and looked into the details of the Twins’ diagnostics, I realized they were in even deeper trouble than I had thought. The graphs on the screens showed that not only had their recycler failed, they were also losing air; must’ve been punctured by a centimeter-sized asteroid, punched right through their armor and sprung a leak in their main air tank. Maybe it knocked out their recycling system, too.
Their real problem was with their automated maintenance equipment. How could their system allow the air recycling equipment to go down? And their damned outside robot was supposed to fix punctures as soon as they happened. Theirs didn’t. It was just sitting on the outer skin of the hull, frozen into immobility. Maybe an asteroid had dinged it, too. Their diagnostics didn’t show why the robot wasn’t working.
They needed air, or at least oxygen. And they needed it in a hurry. Even if I got to them in a day or so and fixed the leak and repaired their recycling system they wouldn’t have enough air to survive.
I spent the next few hours chewing on their problem. Or really, getting the best computers I could reach to chew on it. Joker has some really sophisticated programs in its access (the chief judge scowled again) but I also contacted my headquarters on Ceres and even requested time on the IAA system. I had to come up with a solution that would work. And fast.
By the time I had showered, put on a fresh set of coveralls, and taken a bite of food, the various analyses started showing up on the multiple display screens in Jokers very comfortable yet efficiently laid-out bridge. (“Mr. Gunn!” all three judges yelped.)
Okay, so here’s the situation. The Twins’ air is leaking out through the puncture. I can fix the puncture in ten minutes, while their dumb robot sits on its transistors and does nothing, but they’ll still run out of air in a couple of days. I can give them oxygen from Jokers water tanks— electrolyze the water, that’s simple enough. But then I won’t have enough reaction mass to get away and we’ll both be in trouble.
Now, I’ve got to admit, the thought of being marooned off Vesta with the Porno Twins had a certain appeal to it. But when I thought it over, I figured that although being with them could be great fun, dying with them wasn’t what I wanted to do.
Besides, they flatly refused to even consider letting me inside their leaking craft.
“Oh, no, Mr. Gunn!” they said, in unison. “We could never allow you to board our .ship.”
Cindy and Mindy were on my main display screen, two lovely redheads with sculpted cheekbones and emerald-green eyes and lips just trembling with emotion.
“That wouldn’t be right,” said Cindy. Or maybe it was Mindy.
“We’ve never let anyone into our ship,” said the other one.
“If we let you, then all the other miners would want to visit us, too.”
“In person!”
“In the flesh.”
“But this would be a mission of mercy,” I pleaded.
They blushed and lowered their eyes. Beautiful long silky lashes, I noticed.
“Mr. Gunn,” said Mindy. Or maybe Cindy. “How would you feel if we allowed one of your miners to board our vessel?”
“You’d want the same privilege, wouldn’t you?” the other one asked.
“I sure would,” I admitted, feeling deflated and erect at the same time.
“For your information,” said Cindy (Mindy?), “we’ve received calls from seventeen other mining ships, responding to our distress message.”
“They’re all on their way to us.”
“And they all will want to come aboard once they reach us.”
“Which we won’t allow, of course.”
“Of course,” I said, downcast. “How soon can they reach you?”
“Not for several weeks, at least.”
“We’ve informed them all that there’s no sense in their coming to us, since they can’t reach us in time.”
“But they’ve all replied that they’ll come anyway.”
I wondered who the hell was doing any mining. The Twins could cause a financial collapse of the metals and minerals market at this rate.
“MR. GUNN,” SAID the chief judge sharply, “will you please stick to the facts pertaining to this case? We have no prurient interest in your sexual fantasies.”
“Or your financial problems,” added the Toad.
“But you’ve gotta understand the situation,” Sam insisted. “Unless you can see how the distances and timing were, you won’t be able to grasp the reasons for my actions.”
The chief judge heaved a long, impatient sigh. “Get on with it, Mr. Gunn,” she groused.
OKAY, OKAY. WHERE was I... oh, yeah.
I didn’t believe the computer analyses when I first saw them. But each system came up with the same set of alternatives and the only one that had any chance of helping the Twins was the one I took.
It looked crazy to me, at first. But the computers had taken into account Jokers high-thrust capability; that was they key to their solution.
All I had to do was zip out to Jupiter at three g’s acceleration, grab some oxygen from one of thekice-covered Galilean moons, refuel Jokers fusion generator by scooping hydrogen and helium isotopes from Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, and then roar back to the belt at another three g’s and deliver the oxygen to the Twins.
Simple.
Also impossible.
So that’s what I did.
“MAY I INTERRUPT?” asked the Beryllium Blonde, rising to her feet behind the prosecution’s table.
All three judges looked happy to accommodate her. Or maybe they were just getting tired of listening to Sam. His voice had a kind of nervous edge to it; after a while it was like listening to a mosquito whining in your ear.
“Mr. Gunn,” she said, smiling ingenuously at Sam, in the witness box, “you told this court that you consulted several computer analyses before deciding on your course of action?”
“That’s right,” Sam replied, grinning goofily at her. He seemed overjoyed that she was talking to him.
“And did each of these computer analyses specifically direct you to the Jovian moon Europa?”
Sam shifted a little on the chair. “No, they didn’t. They all showed that Ganymede would be my best bet.”
“Then why did you go to Europa?”
“I was coming to that when you interrupted me.”
“Isn’t it true, Mr. Gunn, that your entire so-called ‘mission of mercy’ was actually a clever plot to break the embargo on commercial exploitation of the Jupiter system?”
That’s where Sam should have said a simple and emphatic no! and let it go at that. But not Sam.
Apparently some things were more important to Sam even than women. He lost his goofy expression and stared straight into her china-blue eyes.
“The IAA’s embargo on the commercial development of the Jupiter system is a shuck,” Sam said evenly.
A general gasp
arose. Even the judges—especially the judges— seemed shocked. For the first time since the trial had begun, the Toad looked angry.
Undeterred, Sam went on, “Why embargo commercial enterprises from the entire Jupiter system? What’s the sense of it? Even if you want to protect those little green things on Europa, just putting Europa off-limits would be good enough. Why close off the whole system?”
“Why indeed,” the Blonde countered, “now that you’ve killed off those poor little green creatures.”
“Would you rather let two human women die?” Sam demanded.
“Two prostitutes?”
“Look who’s talking.”
The chief judge whacked her gavel so hard its head flew off, nearly beaning the clerk sitting at the foot of the banc.
But before the judge could say anything, Sam exclaimed, “One of the issues at stake here is the moral question of human life versus animal rights.”
A rail-thin, bald and bleary-eyed man shot to his feet from the middle of the spectators. “Animals have legal rights! A dog or a cat has just as much right to life and dignity as a human being!”
“Yeah,” Sam retorted, “unless the human being’s life is in danger. If I’m a fireman rushing into a burning building, who am I gonna grab first, a human baby or a puppy dog?”
“Stop this!” the chief judge bellowed, slapping the top of the banc with the flat of her hand. “I will have order in this courtroom or I’ll clear the chamber!”
The gaunt animal-rights man sat down, muttering to himself.
“And you, Mr. Gunn,” said the chief judge, scowling down at Sam, “will not turn this trial into a circus. Stick to the facts of the case!”
“One of the ‘facts’ of this case,” Sam replied evenly, “is the accusation that I wiped out an entire alien life-form. Even if that’s true—and I’m not admitting it is—I did what I did to save the lives of two human woman.”
He turned back to the Blonde. “And they’re not prostitutes; they’re producers of virtual reality simulations. Which is more than I can say for some of the broads in this courtroom!”