by Ben Bova
As we approached the beanbag, our collision-avoidance radar started going crazy.
“It’s surrounded by smaller chunks of rock,” Sam muttered, studying the screen.
From the copilot’s chair I could see the main body of the asteroid through the cockpit window. It looked hazy, indistinct, more like a puff of smoke than a solid object.
“If we’re going to orbit that cloud of pebbles,” I said, “it’d better be at a good distance from it. Otherwise we’ll get dinged up pretty heavily.”
Sam nodded and tapped in the commands for an orbit that looped a respectful distance from the beanbag.
“How long are we going to hang around here?” I asked him.
He made a small shrug. “Give it a day or two. Then we’ll head off for ‘The Rememberer.’ ”
“Sam, your wedding is in two days.” Speaking of remembering, I thought.
He gave me a lopsided grin. “Jill’s smart enough to figure it out. We’ll get married at ‘The Rememberer,’ outside, in suits, with the sculpture for a background. It’ll make terrific publicity for my tour service.”
I felt my eyebrows go up. “You’re really thinking of starting tourist runs out here to the Belt?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“I thought that was just your cover story.”
“It was,” he admitted. “But the more I think about it, the more sense it makes.”
“Who’s going to pay the fare for coming all the way out here, just to see a few rocks?”
“Gar, you just don’t understand how business works, do you?”
“But—”
“How did space tourism start, in the first place?” Before I could even start thinking about an answer, he went on, “With a few bored rich guys paying millions for a few days in orbit.”
“Not much of a market,” I said.
He waggled a finger at me. “Not at first, but it got people interested. The publicity was important. Within a few years there was enough of a demand so that a real tourist industry took off. Small, at first, but it grew.”
I recalled, “You started a honeymoon hotel in Earth orbit back then, didn’t you?”
His face clouded. “It went under. Most of the honeymooners got space sick their first day in weightlessness. Horrible publicity. I went broke.”
“And sold it to Rockledge Industries, right?”
He got even more somber. “Yeah, right.”
Rockledge made a success of the orbital hotel after buying Sam out, mainly because they’d developed a medication for space sickness. The facility is still there in low Earth orbit, part hotel, part museum. Sam was a pioneer, all right. An ornament to his profession, as far as I was concerned. But that’s another story.
“And now you think you can make a tourist line to the Belt pay off?”
Before he could answer, three things happened virtually simultaneously. The navigation computer chimed and announced, “Parking orbit established.” At that instant we felt a slight lurch. Spacecraft don’t lurch, not unless something bad has happened to them, like hitting a rock or getting your airtight hull punctured.
Sure enough, the maintenance program sang out, “Main thruster disabled. Repair facilities urgently required.”
Before we could do more than look at each other, our mouths hanging open, a fourth thing happened.
The comm speaker rumbled with a deep, snarling voice. “Who are you and what are you doing here?”
The screen showed a dark, scowling face: jowly, almost pudgy, dark hair pulled straight back from a broad forehead, tiny deepset eyes that burned into you. A vicious slash of a mouth turned down angrily. Irritation and suspicion were written across every line of that face. He radiated power, strength, and the cold-blooded ruthlessness of a killer. Lars Fuchs.
“Answer me or my next shot will blow away your crew pod.”
I felt an urgent need to go to the bathroom. But Sam stayed cool as a polar bear.
“This is Sam Gunn. I’ve been trying to find you, Fuchs.”
“Why?”
“I have a message for you.”
“From Humphries? I’m not interested in hearing what he has to say.”
Sam glanced at me, then said, “The message is from Mrs. Humphries.”
I didn’t think it was possible, but Fuchs’s face went harder still. Then, in an even meaner tone, he said, “I’m not interested in anything she has to say, either.”
“She seemed very anxious to get this message to you, sir,” Sam wheedled. “She hired us to come all the way out to the Belt to deliver it to you personally.”
He fell silent. I could feel my heart thumping against my ribs. Then Fuchs snarled, “It seems more likely to me that you’re bait for a trap Humphries wants to spring on me. My former wife hasn’t anything to say to me.”
“But—”
“No buts! I’m not going to let you set me up for an ambush.” I could practically feel the suspicion in his voice, his scowling face. And something more. Something really ugly. Hatred. Hatred for Humphries and everything associated with Humphries. Including his wife.
“I’m no Judas goat,” Sam snarled back. I was surprised at how incensed he seemed to be. You can never tell, with Sam, but he seemed really teed off.
“I’m Sam Gunn, goddammit, not some sneaking decoy. I don’t take orders from Martin Humphries or anybody else in the whole twirling solar system and if you think . . .”
While Sam was talking, I glanced at the search radar, to see if it had locked onto Fuchs’s ship. Either his ship was super stealthy or it was much farther away than I had thought. He must be a damned good shot with that laser, I realized.
Sam was jabbering, cajoling, talking a mile a minute, trying to get Fuchs to trust him enough to let us deliver the chip to him.
Fuchs answered, “Don’t you think I know that the chip you’re carrying has a homing beacon built into it? I take the chip and a dozen Humphries ships come after me, following the signal the chip emits.”
“No, it’s not like that at all,” Sam pleaded. “She wants you to see this message. She wouldn’t try to harm you.”
“She already has,” he snapped.
I began to wonder if maybe he wasn’t right. Was she working for her present husband to trap her ex-husband? Had she turned against the man whose life she had saved?
It couldn’t be, I thought, remembering how haunted, how frightened she had looked. She couldn’t be a Judas to him; she had married Humphries to save Fuchs’s life, from all that I’d heard.
Then a worse thought popped into my head. If Sam gives the chip to Fuchs I’ll have nothing to offer Humphries! All that money would fly out of my grasp!
I had tried to copy the chip but it wouldn’t allow the ship’s computer to make a copy. Suddenly I was on Fuchs’s side of the argument: Don’t take the chip! Don’t come anywhere near it!
Fate, as they say, intervened.
The comm system pinged again and suddenly the screen split. The other half showed Judge Myers, all smiles, obviously in a compartment aboard a spacecraft.
“Sam, we’re here!” she said brightly. “At ‘The Rememberer.’ It was so brilliant of you to pick the sculpture for our wedding ceremony!”
“Who the hell is that?” Fuchs roared.
For once in his life, Sam actually looked embarrassed. “Um . . . my, uh, fiancée,” he stumbled. “I’m supposed to be getting married in two days.”
The expression on Fuchs’s face was almost comical. Here he’s threatening to blow us into a cloud of ionized gas and all of a sudden he’s got an impatient bride-to-be on the same communications frequency.
“Married?” he bellowed.
“It’s a long story,” said Sam, red-cheeked.
Fuchs glared and glowered while Judge Myers’s round freckled face looked puzzled. “Sam? Why don’t you answer? I know where you are. If you don’t come out to ‘The Rememberer’ I’m going to bring the whole wedding party to you, minister and boys’ choir and all.”
“I’m busy, Jill,” Sam said.
“Boys’ choir?” Fuchs ranted. “Minister?”
Not even Sam could carry on two conversations at the same time, I thought. But I was wrong.
“Jill, I’m in the middle of something,” he said, then immediately switched to Fuchs: “I can’t hang around here, I’ve got to get to my wedding.”
“Who are you talking to?” Judge Myers asked.
“What wedding?” Fuchs demanded. “Do you mean to tell me you’re getting married out here in the Belt?”
“That’s exactly what I mean to tell you,” Sam replied to him.
“Tell who?” Judge Myers asked. “What’s going on, Sam?”
“Bah!” Fuchs snapped. “You’re crazy! All of you!”
I saw a flash of light out of the corner of my eye. Through the cockpit’s forward window I watched a small, stiletto-slim spacecraft slowly emerge from the cloud of pebbles surrounding the asteroid, plasma exhaust pulsing from its thruster and a bloodred pencilbeam of laser light probing out ahead of it.
Fuchs bellowed, “I knew it!” and let loose a string of curses that would make an angel vomit.
Sam was swearing too. “Those sonsofbitches! They knew we’d be here and they were just laying in wait in case Fuchs showed up.”
“I’ll get you for this, Gunn!” Fuchs howled.
“I didn’t know!” Sam yelled back.
Judge Myers looked somewhere between puzzled and alarmed. “Sam, what’s happening? What’s going on?”
The ambush craft was rising out of the rubble cloud that surrounded the asteroid. I could see Fuchs’s ship through the window now because he was shooting back at the ambusher, his own red pencilbeam of a spotting laser lighting up the cloud of pebbles like a Christmas ornament.
“We’d better get out of here, Sam,” I suggested at the top of my lungs.
“How?” he snapped. “Fuchs took out the thruster.”
“You mean we’re stuck here?”
“Smack in the middle of their battle,” he answered, nodding. “And our orbit’s taking us between the two of them.”
“Do something!” I screamed. “They’re both shooting at us!”
Sam dove for the hatch. “Get into your suit, Gar. Quick.”
I never suited up quicker. But it seemed to take hours. With our main thruster shot away, dear old Achernar was locked into its orbit around the asteroid. Fuchs and the ambusher were slugging it out, maneuvering and firing at each other with us in the middle. I don’t think they were deliberately trying to hit us, but they weren’t going out of their way to avoid us, either. While I wriggled into my spacesuit and fumbled through the checkout procedure Achernar lurched and quivered again and again.
“They’re slicing us to ribbons,” I said, trying to keep from babbling.
Sam was fully suited up; just the visor of his helmet was open. “You got the chip on you?”
For an instant I thought I’d left it in the cockpit. I nearly panicked. Then I remembered it was still in the waistband of my shorts. At least I hoped it was still there.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got it.”
Sam snapped his visor closed, then reached over to me and slammed mine shut. With a gloved hand he motioned for me to follow him to the airlock.
“We’re going outside?” I squeaked. I was really scared. A guy could get killed!
“You want to stay here while they take potshots at us?” Sam’s voice crackled in my helmet earphones.
“But why are they shooting at us?” I asked. Actually, I was talking, babbling really, because if I didn’t I probably would’ve started screeching like a demented baboon.
“Fuchs thinks we led him into a trap,” Sam said, pushing me into the airlock, “and the bastard who’s trying to bushwhack him doesn’t want any living witnesses.”
He squeezed into the airlock with me, cycled it, and pushed me through the outer hatch when it opened.
All of a sudden I was hanging in emptiness. My stomach heaved, my eyes blurred. I mean there was nothing out there except a zillion stars but they were so far away and I was falling, I could feel it, falling all the way to infinity. I think I screamed. Or at least gasped like a drowning man.
“It’s okay, Gar,” Sam said, “I’ve got you.”
He grasped me by the wrist and, using the jetpack on his suit’s back, towed me away from the riddled hulk of Achernar. We glided into the cloud of pebbles surrounding the asteroid. I could feel them pinging off my suit’s hard shell; one of them banged into my visor, but it was a fairly gentle collision, no damage—except to the back of my head: I flinched so sharply that I whacked my head against the helmet hard enough to give me a concussion, almost, despite the helmet’s padded interior.
Sam hunkered us down into the loose pile of rubble that was the main body of the asteroid. “Safer here than in the ship,” he told me.
I burrowed into that beanbag as deeply as I could, scooping out pebbles with both hands, digging like a terrified gopher on speed. I would’ve dug all the way back to Earth if I could have.
Fuchs and the ambusher were still duking it out, with a spare laser blast now and then hitting Achernar as it swung slowly around the ’roid. The ship looked like a shambles, big gouges torn through its hull, chunks torn off and spinning lazily alongside its main structure.
They hadn’t destroyed the radio, though. In my helmet earphones I could hear Judge Myers’s voice, harsh with static:
“Sam, if this is another scheme of yours . . .”
Sam tried to explain to her what was happening, but I don’t think he got through. She kept asking what was going on and then, after a while, her voice cut off altogether.
Sam said to me, “Either she’s sore at me and she’s leaving the Belt, or she’s worried about me and she’s coming here to see what’s happening.”
I hoped for the latter, of course. Our suits had air regenerators, I knew, but they weren’t reliable for more than twenty-four hours, at best. From the looks of poor old Achernar, we were going to need rescuing and damned soon, too.
We still couldn’t really see Fuchs’s ship, it was either too far away in that dark emptiness or he was jinking around too much for us to get a visual fix on him. I saw flashes of light that might have been puffs from maneuvering thrusters, or they might have been hits from the other guy’s laser. The ambusher’s craft was close enough for us to make out, most of the time. He was viffing and slewing this way and that, bobbing and weaving like a prizefighter trying to avoid his opponent’s punches.
But then the stiletto flared into sudden brilliance, a flash so bright it hurt my eyes. I squeezed my eyes shut and saw the afterimage burning against my closed lids.
“Got a propellant tank,” Sam said, matter-of-factly. “Fuchs’ll close in for the kill now.”
I opened my eyes again. The stiletto was deeply gashed along its rear half, tumbling and spinning out of control. Gradually it pulled itself onto an even keel, then turned slowly and began to head away from the asteroid. I could see hot plasma streaming from one thruster nozzle, the other was dark and cold.
“He’s letting him get away,” Sam said, sounding surprised. “Fuchs is letting him limp back to Ceres or wherever he came from.”
“Maybe Fuchs is too badly damaged himself to chase him down,” I said.
“Maybe.” Sam didn’t sound at all sure of that.
We waited for another hour, huddled inside our suits in the beanbag of an asteroid. Finally Sam said, “Let’s get back to the ship and see what’s left of her.”
There wasn’t much. The hull had been punctured in half a dozen places. Propulsion was gone. Life support shot. Communications marginal.
We clumped to the cockpit. It was in tatters; the main window was shot out, a long ugly scar from a laser burn right across the control panel. The pilot’s chair was ripped, too. It was tough to sit in the bulky spacesuits, and we were in zero gravity, to boot. Sam just hovered a few centimeters above his c
hair. I realized that my stomach had calmed down. I had adjusted to zero-gee. After what we had just been through, zero-gee seemed downright comfortable.
“We’ll have to live in the suits,” Sam told me.
“How long can we last?”
“There are four extra air regenerators in stores,” Sam said. “If they’re not damaged we can hold out for another forty-eight, maybe sixty hours.”
“Time enough for somebody to come and get us,” I said hopefully.
I could see his freckled face bobbing up and down inside his helmet. “Yep . . . provided anybody’s heard our distress call.”
The emergency radio beacon seemed to be functioning. I kept telling myself we’d be all right. Sam seemed to feel that way; he was positively cheerful.
“You really think we’ll be okay?” I asked him. “You’re not just trying to keep my hopes up?”
“We’ll be fine, Gar,” he answered. “We’ll probably smell pretty ripe by the time we can get out of these suits, but except for that I don’t see anything to worry about.”
Then he added, “Except . . .”
“Except?” I yelped. “Except what?”
He grinned wickedly. “Except that I’ll miss the wedding.” He made an exaggerated sigh. “Too bad.”
So we lived inside the suits for the next day and a half. It wasn’t all that bad, except we couldn’t eat any solid food. Water and fruit juices, that was all we could get through the feeder tube. I started to feel like a Hindu ascetic on a hunger strike.
We tried the comm system, but it was intermittent, at best. The emergency beacon was faithfully sending out our distress call, of course, with our position. It could be heard all the way back to Ceres, I was sure. Somebody would come for us. Nothing to worry about. We’ll get out of this okay. Someday we’ll look back on this and laugh. Or maybe shudder. Good thing we had to stay in the suits; otherwise I would have gnawed all my fingernails down to the wrist.
And then the earphones in my helmet suddenly blurted to life.