by John F. Carr
Instead, Langston turned to the judge and asked, “What happened to Marie? Where is she?” Then raising his voice, “Where’s Marie Ward?”
The judge banged her gavel, “Order, order. Guards, remove the prisoner from my courtroom. Now!”
The last thing Langston remembered hearing was a sound like frying bacon.
Langston was in a daze for the next few days. At first he thought it was just a side effect from the stunners. But as it continued he began to suspect BuReloc put drugs in the gruel they fed the transportees. It would make sense to pacify them.
Eventually he was put on a shuttle with a group of other men. They were ferried up to the Bifrost, an old BuReloc ship, station keeping at the Earth-Moon L2 point. Zero gee made him feel sick. Langston wished BuReloc put drugs in their food for space sickness. But they didn’t care. Once one person threw up, the smell caused everyone else to do the same. It was a chain reaction. The smell was horrible.
After the shuttle docked with the Bifrost, BuReloc guards herded the transportees through the airlock into the ship. The guards held stunners. Langston didn’t want to get stunned again so he pulled himself along with everyone else. Langston was a big man; tall and heavy set. He found it difficult to float through the ship without bumping into the bulkheads.
“Hey buddy, move it along,” a voice behind him said.
“I’m moving as fast as I can. These damn passageways are too narrow for me and I’ve never been in space before,” Langston replied.
Finally they found themselves in a large compartment crowded from floor to ceiling with bunks. There must have been at least a thousand of them. The floor here was curved. When Langston saw that he gave a sigh of relief. He knew that meant the ship, or at least this part of it, could be rotated to produce the feel of gravity once they got underway. The air smelled like the inside of a boot that had been worn too long.
A trustee began talking. Two guards with stunners were on either side of him. “Everyone pick a bunk. It’ll be yours for the next thirteen months. But it won’t be just your bunk. You’ll be hot bunking with two others.”
Someone shouted, “What’s hot bunking?”
“Three transportees will use each bunk. You’ll use it a third of the time, another transportee will use it a third of the time and a third transportee will use it the remainder of the time.”
Someone else yelled out, “Where are our wives, our children?”
The trustee replied, “Every Bureau of Relocation ship’s captain handles transport as they see fit. Our captain separates the men from the woman and children for the entire trip.”
The same voice yelled, “That’s inhumane. We can’t live like this. I want to speak to the captain.”
There were more grumbles.
The trustee just grinned. Then he said, “If you don’t like your new accommodations you’re welcome to walk home.” At the same time the two guards shifted their stunners slightly toward the crowd.
It took a moment for that to sink in. Then the crowd grew silent.
The trustee continued, “You’ll get two meals a day. If you’re not in the mess line on time you wait for the next meal. The heads are over there,” he said pointing. “Through that hatch. That is all.”
Langston felt a tap on his shoulder. The same voice he heard earlier said, “Hey buddy, let’s get that bunk in the corner.” An arm appeared around his side pointing to a nearby space.
The bunks were four high from floor to ceiling. Langston pulled himself over to the corner bunk and grabbed the lowest one. The man behind him took the bunk above him. Stretched out Jonathon couldn’t fit into the bunk. He had to curl up to fit. The bunk above him was just centimeters from his face. He couldn’t turn over without getting out of his bunk. Eventually everyone seemed to find one. There were bunks that were still unclaimed. Langston didn’t understand what the trustee had been talking about.
The man in the bunk above him looked down and said, “My name is George Watson.”
Langston extended his hand. “Jonathon Langston.”
Watson grabbed his hand and said, “Jonathon, do you play chess?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think we can make a chess set? It would help us pass the time if we could play.”
“I can make one. It should be easy enough.”
Over the next week more and more transportees were brought into the compartment. Some came from Luna Base, some directly from Earth. The bunks eventually filled until all of them had three transportees. Then a deep rumbling sound penetrated the compartment and gravity began to slowly return. Langston knew they were under way. The long journey to Haven had begun.
A week after the first Jump a trustee came into the transportee compartment and said, “Watson. George Watson.”
“What do you want with him?” someone asked.
“I have a job for him,” the trustee replied.
Watson knew hiding wouldn’t help so he spoke up. “Here I am.”
“Come over here.”
He walked over to the hatch at the entrance to the compartment. The trustee was holding a tablet. “It says here you were a tech rep. Is that right?”
“Yeah.”
“What was your specialty?”
“Water recycling equipment.”
He lowered his voice. “Okay, we have a problem. We need your help. You’ll get a couple of good meals out of it if you can fix it. If you fix it fast I’ll even let you take a shower.”
Watson was bored. Here was a chance to get out of the transportee compartment. Still he said, “My buddy over there, Jonathon Langston, is good at fixing things too. I need his help. How about if he comes along?”
The trustee thought for a moment, waved at Langston to come over to him and said, “Langston, you too.”
After spending a few hours with the Fourth Engineer it became clear to Watson that the problem wasn’t the water recyclers. They were working to spec. No, it was that there were too many people on the transport for them. The Grand Senate had decreed that the Bureau of Relocation become more efficient. To do so BuReloc began loading their transports with more people than the water recycling systems could handle.
“Jonathon,” Watson said. “This ship is in real trouble. We’re in real trouble. If we don’t get this fixed a third of the people on this ship could die. They have already tied in the ship’s auxiliary water recycling system and we still don’t have enough capacity. I don’t know what more we can do.”
Watson turned to the Fourth Engineer and said, “You’ve got to tell the captain that we need to put into port somewhere to take on more water.”
The Fourth Engineer just laughed. “You crazy? The captain would never do that. He’d be canned if he didn’t arrive at Haven on time. Okay, if you guys can’t fix this it’s back to the holding pen with you.”
“Wait, wait. I didn’t say we couldn’t fix it, I only told you what I thought was the best alternative. My buddy and I can rig up something.”
“You’d better. You’re the ones who’ll be short the water if you don’t. After all, the Humanity League would have their knickers in a twist if we didn’t make sure the women and children got their water first.”
Watson turned to Langston. “Come on Jonathon; let’s look for alternatives.”
Langston replied, “What’s the bottleneck? What capacity do we need to increase to make enough clean water?”
Watson looked at the schematics. “It looks like there are a couple of bottlenecks. Here,” he pointed. “And here.”
“Okay, the biggest problem seems to be the ultraviolet disinfection system. After that it’s the filtration system.”
“We don’t have the parts to build another ultraviolet disinfection system.”
“No, but maybe we can make do.” Turning to the Fourth Engineer Langston said, “I want to see your fusion engine schematics.”
“What? What for?”
“I want to see if there are any pipes running inside the shielding th
at we can run the water through. If we can’t sterilize the water with ultraviolet light maybe we can use radiation from the engines.”
“I’ll talk to the Chief Engineer.”
Langston and Watson were feeling pretty good. They were sitting at a table in the crew’s mess finishing their first meal in over a month that wasn’t protocarb paste. And they’d just had a shower. Not a long one but a navy shower. Still quite a luxury since there was no water for the showers in the transportee compartments. They even wore clean coveralls. The captain had been quite pleased with their work. He had even thanked them personally.
“Jonathon that was a brilliant suggestion using the ship’s engines to sterilize the water,” Watson said.
“You’re the one who figured out how to increase the capacity of the filters.”
Watson paused for a minute then said, “Jonathon, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve heard you mumble a name a few times, when you were concentrating. Who’s Marie?”
Langston’s face fell. A moment later he said, “Marie Ward. She was my colleague.” Then he paused and added, “And I had hoped more. I was sort of sweet on her. She was one of the only women I could talk to.”
“Where is she? Is she with the women and children?”
“I don’t know. We were separated when we were arrested. I haven’t seen or heard from her since.”
Just then the trustee walked over to their table. “Time to go back to your compartment.”
Watson replied, “One more small request.”
“What more do you want?” he replied gruffly.
“Is there a Marie Ward in the women’s compartment?”
Langston’s eyes lit up at the question.
“I guess there’s no harm in checking that for you.” The trustee stopped and raised his tablet. He looked at it for a minute and said, “No, sorry. No one like that is listed here.” Langston’s face became ashen. He realized he’d never see Marie again.
The months dragged on. Word spread among the transportees that Jonathon and George had saved their lives. Like some revered shamans they were now off limits. While others fought, were mugged or even murdered, Jonathon and George were left alone. Every few days someone was killed or committed suicide. When that happened the trustees would come into the compartment and pick a couple of transportees at random to haul the body away to be spaced. They never chose Jonathon and George. And like shamans, transportees began coming to them to fix things. They developed a reputation that they could fix nearly anything. Finally, the Bifrost made its last Jump. They had reached the Byers’ System.
2076 A.D., Luna
The CoDominium’s Luna Base was built to withstand a nuclear attack. Only an asteroid strike could destroy it. Deep beneath the moon’s surface, Vice Admiral Sergei Lermontov met with his visitor; a very important one. Lermontov’s base quarters were spacious and one of the few places the Admiral felt free to talk openly. He had it swept daily by a handpicked team from Fleet Intelligence. His guest was sitting in his office. Around him were mementoes from a score of worlds. On the wall in front of the desk was a large viewscreen; currently turned off.
“So, my friend, you want to set up a secret research facility to study black holes? What happened to you out there?”
Grand Senator Martin Grant sat holding a glass of single malt scotch whiskey from Inveraray. “It’s hard to explain, Sergei.”
“I read Captain Ramsey’s report. I know he found a black hole. We named it Harriman’s Black Hole after the Henry Hudson’s brave captain. It is a shame we don’t have more men like him in the Fleet.” He paused for a moment, shrugged and then added looking at his visitor, “Or in the Senate.”
“I agree, Sergei, but damn it all to hell, we don’t. We have the people we’ve got. And I can’t get you any more funding for this project but I think it’s important. You’ll have to cut funding someplace else.”
“We need a new source of funds, Martin.”
“We’ve spoken of this before, Sergei. I only have one solution.”
“Tanith? The borloi trade? No!”
“Yes, Sergei.”
“Have we really fallen so far, Martin?
Even in the low lunar gravity Senator Grant looked tired and pained. He took a sip of scotch before answering, “I think it is time, my friend.”
“No, I do not agree. Maybe someday but not today. I will find the funds somehow.”
“All right, it’s your decision. Thank you, Sergei. Now, where should we build this research facility? As you said it needs to be secret. We’d be lucky to end up on Fulson’s World if this ever got out. Makes me think it has to be out-system.”
“Sparta. I think Sparta makes the most sense. It is very Earth-like except for the gravity which is stronger than standard. The terraforming packages have been successful. There are many unpopulated islands far away from the main continent. I’ll contact King Alexander. That way we will keep it in the family and keep it hidden.”
“Okay, it’s up to you. By the way, has your intelligence advisor found anything useful?”
“Not much. BuInt has been very thorough as usual. It is serendipity that Professor Stirner found one short report of an old experiment. I will send it along to the research team.”
“Thank you. One last thing. We have a request from our lead scientist, Marie Ward.”
“Yes?”
“She was arrested with a co-conspirator, a scientist by the name of Jonathon Langston. She says he’s brilliant and we need him. I checked; he was sentenced to Haven. To make this research team work we’re going to have to begin exiling more scientists to Sparta. But, we’ll need to do it very carefully. Here’s one who’s not on the books.
Lermontov raised one of his shaggy eyebrows, “I can send a team, my friend. I will call the mission a training exercise. But, Haven is a harsh world. He may not be alive.”
“I know that Sergei but we could use him if he is. If they find him send him directly to Sparta.”
“As you wish, Martin.”
2077 A.D., Haven
Jonathon Langston and George Watson landed on Havenhold Lake next to Splashdown Island. The transportees were taken by boat to the Processing Center for P&A, preparation and assignment.
“Mr. Langston, Mr. Watson, please come in and take a seat. I’m your assignment officer. The captain of the Bifrost speaks very highly of you. In fact he has authorized us to cancel your debts.”
“What debts?” Watson asked.
“Why, surely you didn’t think your trip here was free. All transportees are charged for their food, water, air and transportation. It doesn’t matter,” he said waving his hands back and forth. “As I said, your debts have been canceled.”
“That sounds a lot like slavery,” Watson replied.
“Not at all. Everyone is given the opportunity to pay off their debts. Once they pay them off they are free to do whatever they please,” the official replied smoothly knowing full well it was rare for it to be that easy. He continued moving the conversation along. “In any case, I understand you both have a talent for repairing tech. There are several companies looking for people with your abilities.”
Langston had his guard up so he asked, “What if we don’t want to sign up with a company?”
“There are people who freelance. I suspect with your reputations you wouldn’t have much of a problem making ends meet. But you’d really be better off working for a company. I know that Haven Hydrogen Generation and Servicing is looking for technical people. They’re building a refueling station on the moon Ayesha. I know the new Chief Administrative Officer over there. I can put in a good word for you with her. If you don’t want to go off-world the mining companies are looking for technical people on the northern steppes.” He lowered his voice and said, “But I’ll tell you confidentially that’s a pretty dangerous place right now. I think H2GAS would be your best choice.”
“Can we sign up with them later if we want?�
�� Watson asked.
The assignment officer sighed. He had enough experience to know he wasn’t going to get a spiff for these two; at least right now. Oh well, he thought. Then aloud he said, “Sure, just tell them I recommended you.”
“God it’s cold,” Langston said shivering. “And this is summer.” He was from Minnesota and his ancestors from Norway before that. He wondered why he hadn’t adjusted faster to Haven’s climate. Was it the thinner air? Or maybe it was the difference between the Bifrost’s point-five gravity and Haven’s point-nine gravity? He didn’t know but he was glad he had grown a beard. It helped keep his face warm. Though there was one surprise when it grew out. There were a few streaks of gray in it. He had expected his beard to be the same sandy brown color as his hair.
Langston was in Castell City, the largest city on Haven. Which wasn’t saying much. It was dimday. He and Watson had just had a rare luxury, beer with dinner at a local dive. They were walking back to their room. Langston looked up. The big gas giant Cat’s Eye hung in the sky. It was seven times the size of Luna from Earth. It was beautiful. Even so he said, “I wish it was cloudy. Damn those fourth power laws.”
Langston turned to his companion, “George, did you hear what I just said?”
Watson wasn’t paying attention. He was looking down a side alley. Langston followed his gaze and peered deep into the darkness. It looked like two men were beating someone up. Watson grabbed Langston’s sleeve and began pulling him away. “Let’s get out of here, Jonathon. We don’t want to get involved.”
Langston had been on Haven only a standard month but had seen numerous muggings and a couple of murders. Haven was better than the BuReloc ship but not by much. He didn’t know why but he yelled, “Hey you!”
One of the attackers stopped and looked down the alley at him. “Mind your own business, bub.”
Watson said again, “Come on, Jonathon, let’s go.”
Something snapped in Langston. He pulled his arm away and started into the ally. There was a short section of two-by-four on the ground. Langston picked it up and began to run toward the attackers. He turned his head back and yelled, “George, get help, even a Deacon.” Then he turned his head back down the alley and yelled, “You there, stop it.”