Tales of Time and Space

by Allen Steele

  Which, in fact, they did not. It wasn’t until after Achilles lifted off from the asteroid, though, that only a few people knew why.

  I was one of the first to learn the truth. I was at my desk when Alberto Diaz called. Would I please come upstairs? This was the first time I’d heard from him in a couple of months, and I was beginning to wonder if he’d forgotten about me. Better late than never, though. I put down what I was doing and took the elevator to the top floor. His assistant was waiting for me; another offer of coffee, then she escorted me to an oak-paneled executive boardroom.

  Alberto was seated the far end of a long table, the only person in the room. Well, not exactly; he was only person physically in the room. Behind him was a massive wall screen, and on the screen, bigger than life, was Jerry Stone.

  Jerry seemed to be staring straight at me, an amused smile upon his face. “We received this about twenty minutes ago,” Diaz said, and that was when I realized that Jerry’s image was a vid frozen in replay. “Sit down. You need to hear this.”

  I took a seat across the table from him. Diaz waved a hand above an embedded remote, and Jerry came to life. “Hello, Paul. I assume Al has asked you to hear this, and that he obeyed my instructions to keep you in the dark until he heard directly from me. So now that you’re here, let me tell you what’s going on.”

  Jerry’s hand moved forward; apparently he was sitting on a camp stool in front of a camera he was operating himself. The image pulled back a little, and now I saw that he was in a pressurized compartment: burnished steel walls, a couple of control panels, a ceiling handrail. A hardsuit dangled from a rack, its helmet upon a shelf above it.

  “Yes, I’m in space,” Jerry said, “but I’m not where you might think I’d be. Can you guess where? I’ll give you a hint…I’m so far away that two-way conversation is impossible unless you’d care to wait about fifteen minutes to hear me reply to anything you might say.” His smile became playful. “And, no, I’m not on Mars.”

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Diaz watching me expectantly. I looked at him. “If he’s not on Mars, then he must be…” And then I remembered Achilles. “Oh, no. You can’t be serious. Tell me he’s not…”

  “That’s right.” Jerry was keeping up his end of an imaginary conversation, but nonetheless I had the eerie feeling that he’d heard me. “I’m on 2010 TK7. After I spoke with you, I left Earth the very next morning and boarded the Achilles two days later. No one except Alberto, the ship’s crew, and a few ground controllers knew I was aboard. I didn’t tell anyone else, not even the company directors. And in case you think this is a hoax…”

  Jerry stood up. There was just enough gravity to keep him seated so long as he remained still, but the momentum of getting up from his stool was enough to cause him to float upward. The camera tracked him as he rose to the low ceiling above him. “See? Not a gag. And if you’re still not convinced…”

  Still grinning, he grabbed hold of a handrail and pulled himself toward the camera. He disappeared behind it; a moment later, the image jiggled a little, then there was a soft snap as Jerry detached the camera from its mount. The image blurred as Jerry carried the camera toward a small porthole set in the center of a pressure door. His face was reflected in the glass for a second, then the view through the porthole sharpened as he focused the lens. Now we could see the asteroid surface; in the foreground were several cargo containers, apparently left behind by the Achilles before it left, and farther away were the solar array and parabolic dish of the beam projector.

  “Here’s my new home,” Jerry continued, off-camera. “I’m in the airlock, the only part that’s above the surface. Before they left, I had the crew excavate the first four rooms of the underground shelter where I’ll live. They left the laser drills and other excavation equipment, along with plenty of building material, so I’ll be able to complete the project. It’ll take a while to finish, but I’m calling it the Stone House.”

  The camera jiggled again as Jerry reattached it to the mount, then he reappeared. “They’ve left me enough food, water, and air to keep me alive for a couple of months, and I’ve arranged for unmanned beamships to regularly bring supplies from the Moon.” His expression became a little more serious. “I don’t want any visitors. I mean it. No one, repeat, no one has permission to come out here. If any other ships comes out this way, I won’t give permission for it to land or let anyone through the airlock.”

  Jerry didn’t sit down, but instead stood in front of the camera. “How long am I going to be here? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll be back in a few months. Maybe a few years. Or maybe never.” He shrugged. “Believe me, I haven’t done this without studying it carefully. If all goes well, I should be able to live here indefinitely. As for the obvious question…”

  He paused, looking away for a moment. “Well, that’s a little hard to explain. Let’s just say that I’m sick of people and I want to get away for awhile. I’m rich enough that I can do whatever I want, and this is what I want to do.”

  The smile suddenly returned. He looked straight at the camera again. “Anyway…well, there it is. Write a press release, call a press conference, do whatever you need to do. Any further communications will come straight from me to you. Your job is to be my surrogate…my eyes, ears, and mouth. If you or anyone else has questions, send me either a memo or a vid, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Alberto will take care of business while I’m gone, but you’ll be my voice. Got it?”

  The smile faded. “I guess that’s about all for now. Let me know what the media says about all this…” An abrupt laugh. “No, on second thought, don’t. They’re a big reason why I’m doing this.” Another shrug. “Keep in touch, all right? Merry Christmas, and so long…”

  He reached toward the camera. The screen went dark.

  I let out my breath, then looked across the table at Diaz. Arms folded across his chest, he gazed back at me, his expression implacable. “You knew he was going to do this?” I asked, and he slowly nodded. “Why?”

  “You heard him. He wants to get away from people.” He shook his head. “It’s his money, his life. If that’s what he wants to do…”

  He didn’t finish the thought. He was curiously indifferent; apparently he thought Jerry’s move was only temporary and that he’d return in a month or two. “Yeah, well—” I pushed back my chair—“maybe I better get started on that press conference. The media is going to love this.”

  “I’m sure they will.” Diaz watched as I stood up. “Just one thing…the next time you hear from him, let me know what he says before you go public with it, okay?”

  “Sure. But why…?”

  “Maybe it’s best that you do.” He hesitated. “Don’t tell anyone I said this, but I’m not sure Jerry is still sane.”

  That’s what a lot of people said after the story broke.

  The Achilles expedition had been minor news before I heard from Jerry, but it jumped to the big-font headlines after I put out the release. So many people showed up for the press conference, we had to move it to an auditorium, and forget the coffee and sinkers.

  No one was interested in photon beam propulsion or even 2010 TK7. What they wanted to know was why one of the world’s richest men decided to become a hermit on an asteroid so far away that a Tibetan monastery would have been a Park Avenue penthouse by comparison. Jerry Stone had always been a figure of interest, but in recent years he’d faded from view; that changed the moment ConSpace revealed that he’d taken up residence on 2010 TK7.

  As Jerry’s spokesman, I was careful with what I told the media. I struck to the essential details, giving them the first four of the five w’s—who, what, when, and where—while staying clear of the fifth—why—as much as possible. I assured them that Jerry was still the company’s president and CEO, and that he would continue being involved with both day-to-day operations and long-range decision making. I showed them an edited portion of the vid he’d sent from the asteroid, carefully leaving out the part where he bec
ame vague about his return plans, and said that he was tired of dealing with the human race.

  Alberto Diaz was in the room. He quietly stood off to one side, leaning against the wall as he silently watched me field questions from the press. I’d offered Alberto a chance to speak, but he didn’t take it. He seemed content to let me be Jerry’s ombudsman, and I was glad that he did. I hadn’t yet made up my mind about Jerry’s mental health, but I sure as hell didn’t want a senior executive who thought the boss had gone off the deep end to be talking to the press.

  The story hit the news sites and became an instant sensation. Across the entire width and breadth of webspace, everyone weighed in with their opinions, informed or otherwise. By then, I’d moved to a new office, this time on the top floor, complete with my own window and a door I could shut whenever I pleased. I was no longer a cube gnome, but I paid for my newfound status with an increased workload; the first week, all I did was take care of interview requests. Those were easy to handle; Jerry wasn’t interested in talking to anyone except me. What was more difficult was telling reporters why no one would be able to visit him even if they tried to hire a spacecraft pilot to carry them out to 2010 TK7. Try explaining orbital mechanics to someone who barely understands Newton’s third law, and see how far that gets you.

  Did people think Jerry had flipped out? Yep. In fact, that was the general consensus: Jerry Stone had gone mad, nuts, bonzo, bull goose crazy, or however you want to say it, and that was why he’d moved to a remote asteroid. I relayed the most pertinent commentary to the Stone House, yet Jerry didn’t respond. No matter how stupid or unkind the remarks were, he kept himself above the fray, which was exactly what he should have done.

  As usual, the story faded after about ten days or so. A movie star got caught in bed with someone who was neither his wife nor the legal age of consent, and the celebrity kick-me sign was removed from Jerry’s back. I still received the occasional interview request, but otherwise, my job became easier.

  I was still Jerry’s point man, though, which meant that all communications between him and ConSpace’s various directors, division heads, and senior managers filtered through me. On a daily basis, I received an average of two dozen memos—at least half of them flagged Urgent—which needed to be sent to 2010 TK7. I’d forward them to the operations center, which would transmit them to ConSpace’s deep-space communications network, which in turn would relay them to Jerry…and then everyone would sit back and wait for a reply. If we were very lucky, we’d get a response within half an hour. That meant Jerry was reading his email and considered the issue to be important enough to warrant an immediate reply. Most of the time, though, we would have to wait hours, even days, to hear back from him…if at all. After a while, Jerry developed his own method of dealing with stuff he didn’t consider to be worth his attention: cold silence. I’d ping him a couple of times, reminding him that he hadn’t responded to a particular message, and then I’d have to go back to the person who sent the original memo and tell them that the boss wasn’t interested in anything that they had to say. Think that’s fun? Get your ear chewed off a few times by someone who obviously thinks you’re an uppity little roadblock, and let me know if you still do.

  Most of the time, Jerry’s communiqués took the form of written memos, each signed with his digital signature. On occasion, though, I’d receive a vid, relayed straight to my office from the ops center. About three weeks after he moved to the asteroid, Jerry startled me by shaving his head; he explained that having hair was a nuisance in 2010 TK7’s almost non-existent gravity, so he’d decided to get rid of it. Jerry had always been a rather charismatic person, but it was surprising to find just how much that depended on a full head of hair: bald, he looked like a monk. I tried to keep those pictures from going public, but they inevitably did, and they convinced a lot of people that Jerry had lost his mind.

  His changed appearance was only his first surprise. The second came during the sixth vid he sent me. That was when a fogz showed up.

  Jerry was in the midst of answering a question from the company’s propulsion lab when a fuzzy red-and-white object floated between the camera lens and him. At first I thought it was a sweater, then it twisted around and I found myself staring at two brown eyes that mischievously regarded me from above a short canine muzzle.

  It was a fox. Or at least that’s what I thought it was. Startled, I recoiled from the screen at the same time that Jerry gently grabbed the animal by the long, soft-looking fur at the back of its neck.

  “Reynard! Behave!” Jerry pulled the fox away from the camera. Its mouth stretched into a wily, sharp-toothed grin as it settled into the crook of Jerry’s arm, its long white-tipped tail curling around his neck. “Sorry ’bout that,” he said apologetically. “Sometimes they get in the way.” Then he realized that I’d probably have no idea what he was holding. “This is Reynard. He’s one of three fogzes I’ve brought with me as companions. I kept them in biostasis until a few days ago. I wanted to make sure that the Stone House’s life-support system was adequate for all four of us before I woke up Ren and Sylva as well.”

  “That’s nice,” I murmured. I’d lately started talking to Jerry even though he couldn’t hear me. “What the hell is a fogz?”

  Reynard bent forward to lick Jerry’s cheek. For all the world, he could have been a puppy. “Thanks, pal,” Jerry said, his grin matching his pet’s, as he shifted Reynard from one arm to the other. “In case you’re wondering…a fogz is my invention. Well, sort of. I asked the guys at a bioengineering company I own if they could give me a pet that would be suitable for microgravity. They chose the domesticated Russian fox. A little tinkering with its genome, and they came up with these guys. We call ’em fogzes…short for zero-g foxes.”

  He let Reynard go, and I noticed for the first time that the fogz’s legs were stunted while its tail was longer and bushier. Reynard kicked off from Jerry and flagellated its tail to propel itself across the compartment. “I’ve got two males and a female,” Jerry said as he watched it go. “None of them are neutered, so I expect that it won’t be long before Sylva has kits. I’d offer to send you one…they’re really sweet…but I don’t think he or she would be happy on Earth. Too much gravity. But at least I’ll have plenty of friends to keep me company.”

  I was glad to hear that Jerry wasn’t entirely alone out there. However, the fact that he was committed to raising generations of fogzes made me realize that he’d been fudging things a bit when he said that he might come home soon. This, and the fact that an unmanned cargo beamship was already scheduled to be launched from lunar orbit, hinted that Jerry was going to be out there longer than a few months.

  This worried me, so I called Charles David, his personal physician. Charlie came over later that day, and I showed him the vid I’d just received. He didn’t say anything until it was over, then he sat back in his chair and let out his breath.

  “How long has Jerry been out there?” he asked. “Be specific, if you can.”

  I checked my calendar. “Four months, two weeks, three days, and…um, call it twelve hours.” I thought about it another moment, then added, “That’s not counting the month or so it took the beamship to get him there.”

  “Okay…almost six months, total. That’s not so bad. It takes cycleships six months to get to Mars, and their carousels don’t spin the entire time. And the old American and Russian spacers used to live on the first space stations for up to two years, although they were usually in sad shape when they came home.” He frowned. “But still…I’m worried about him.”

  “I was afraid you might say that.” I glanced at my office door to make sure it was closed. “If he stays out there too long…”

  “It’s going to affect his long-term health, yeah. Do you know if he’s exercising regularly? I told him that he needed to spend at least an hour a day on the treadmill.”

  “I don’t know. He’s never mentioned it to me.” In fact, in all the vids he’d sent me, I’d never seen a tread
mill anywhere in the background. Perhaps one had been sent with him, but he’d never unpacked it.

  “If he’s not exercising daily, and he doesn’t come home in another month or two, he’d need significant rehabilitation before he can walk again.” Charlie hesitated. “And if he remains out there much longer than that, then his cardiovascular system will undergo significant deterioration. Bone calcium loss, muscle atrophy…sure, he may be able to stay alive indefinitely so long as he remains in low gravity and doesn’t expose himself unnecessarily to cosmic radiation. But coming back to Earth could be fatal.”

  I didn’t say anything for a second or two. In none of his memos or vids had Jerry had given me any indication that he planned to leave 2010 TK7 any time soon. In fact, only the other day he’d sent me the final list of things that he wanted to be placed aboard the cargo ship. Along with a larger industrial-grade excavation drill and several pallets of building materials—he was planning to expand his subsurface living quarters, including an addition to his greenhouse—he’d requested sufficient food, water, and compressed air to get him through another six months. And aside from a modified powersat construction pod that he could use for station repair, he didn’t have a spacecraft out there, or at least one capable of bringing him home.

  “I’ll remind him of that,” I said. Charlie David might be Jerry’s doctor, but I didn’t want to risk telling him anything that might go public. One of the sleazier newsites had a standing offer of $50,000 for juicy info about Jerry—that’s how the shaved-head pictures got out—and even a physician’s confidentiality can be bought.

  “Do that, please. At the very least, remind him to wear his biomonitor bracelet. I’ve tried to keep tabs on him, but he forgets to put it on in the morning.”

  Jerry went halfway with me. He began wearing the bracelet constantly. Returning to Earth, though, was another matter entirely.

  The months went by, and Jerry Stone didn’t come home. The months became a year, and Jerry stayed where he was. A year became two years, then three, then more…and by then it was obvious that 2010 TK7 had a permanent resident.