Buying Time

by Joe Haldeman

  They went through the metal and explosive detector, which noted the weapons in their luggage and bond-locked it until Denver. Down the escalator into a brightly lit slum. A couple of dozen idlers, dull eyes and bright, watched them descend. There were four other bodyguards; they all exchanged nods.

  “This don’ look too bad,” the black man said. “None of our favorites.” There was trash everywhere, bottles and needles.

  In one corner an old man masturbated a handful of blood. The white guard kicked a bottle at him. “Give it a rest, Pops. Ya broke it again.” Pops ignored the advice.

  Five cars showed up right on time; the Atlanta shuttle, twenty-two minutes after the hour. The cars were fairly clean, each with eight rows of three overstuffed “seats,” upended couches, half of them occupied. They waited outside the Atlanta/St. Louis car while most of the passengers filed out, and then were admitted, one at a time, as the door read their tickets, bodyguards last.

  When they’d all backed into place, standing facing the direction of travel, a holo woman floated high in front. “Please do not interfere with the seat restraints.” A cage of stiff belts snaked out to enclose each traveler as the car rolled into darkness. They click-whirred through an air lock. “There will be approximately one hundred seconds of acceleration now. For your comfort and safety you may wish to remain facing straight ahead.” In absolute silence an invisible three-gee hand pressed down on them. “Then, after four minutes’ coasting, we will reverse the seats and decelerate for another hundred seconds. This will be Atlanta. Please remain in your seats for rerouting to St. Louis. Thank you and have a nice day.” She faded and was replaced by a holo extolling the virtues of Atlanta.

  Maria

  The whole trip to Denver took less than thirty minutes, though I wouldn’t have minded spending more time and traveling in less frightening surroundings. In Denver we rented a floater and skimmed down to White Sands. It was beautiful desert, but both of us napped through part of it, the floater on auto.

  The owner of the used GenDyne/AMC hybrid said he would meet us at the White Sands parking area, coordinates G-35, spot so-and-so, the static test stand. We were a little early, but he was waiting for us.

  Lester Jacobssen was a surprise to me. All the rocket jocks I’d met were young or immortal. Jacobssen looked about ninety and not likely to make ninety-one. He was in a motorized wheelchair, dwarfed in the shade of a huge white Stetson.

  We identified ourselves as Jack and Mary Culpepper. In fact, he was ninety-two, as he pointed out in his second breath, born in 1988, “the last year America had a sane President.” That meant something to Dallas; he laughed along with the old man. I was busy trying to smile and fight the coldness inside, that sometimes comes unexpectedly. I was eighteen when he was born. I could have a child this old, if I could have had a child. My knees trembled with the familiar memory of the deep cold mortal pain, the botched operation that sent me to the Stileman Clinic. The cancer in my womb that was suddenly everywhere. “Sorry?”

  “I said you’d like to see it, wouldn’t you? Before you pay all that money?” He had a querulous, uncertain voice. The businesswoman in me cut thirty thousand off the price, maybe forty. This was a man who needed money, I supposed for a Stileman.

  “Of course. The outside first.”

  It was an old-fashioned dropnose design, as were all the pre-’75 GenDynes, with stubby Thermlar wing covers retrofitted. Its shortcomings in that regime were unimportant to us, since we’d be going through the atmosphere only twice.

  I ran a thumbnail along the not-too-shiny skin. “The hull’s pretty badly pitted.” I took a small magnifying glass out of my purse—glad for the first time in ten years to have it—and peered at the skin. You couldn’t see anything. “Look at this, Jack.”

  Dallas took the glass and stared at the featureless smooth silver. He nodded soberly. “Gonna cost a pile.”

  “The last time I had it plated it was only eight thousand,” Jacobssen protested.

  “Yeah, well, that was a long time ago. Obviously.” Dallas handed back the glass and sighted down the hull. “Jesus, I don’t know about these dropnose jobs.”

  I picked up the strategy hint from his tone of voice. “Now, Jack. We knew all the Europas were dropnose.”

  “Europas, yeah.” He nodded absently. “We used to call ’em Fireballs.”

  “That’s why I switched out the power train,” Jacobssen said, almost whining. “You can’t git anything more reliable than that AMC.”

  “Maybe not in America.”

  “You said you wanted to buy American this time,” I said with a slightly bitchy attitude. The old man turned to me hopefully. “Could we see the inside, Mr. Jacobssen?”

  “Sure, I’ll—”

  “Just a goddamned minute,” Dallas said. “I’m not through here.” He walked around the ship for precisely one God damned minute, peering into the reaction chamber, fingering the recessed landing lights. He kicked the tires on the landing gear.

  Frigid air spilled out when the air lock irised open. The old man rolled onto a wheelchair lift, and up and in, and we followed him.

  The inside was not as comfortable as my Bugatti. You don’t expect even old spaceships to be shabby, since they aren’t lived in that much and don’t have to contend with the kind of entropy, dust and gravity and sunlight, that wears down an earthbound room. But this one did show its years and kilometers; it could have used a bit of paint and lacquer and reupholstery. A squirt of deodorant wouldn’t have hurt. I felt a little pity for the old man. He couldn’t see that a thousand dollars spent on cosmetics would have paid back twentyfold in his asking price.

  I think that’s characteristic of rocket jocks, though. The inside can look like a parrot’s cage if the power train is a percent or two over the original specs.

  The emergency equipment bay had an inspection seal on it that was nine years old. I popped it and took out the two space suits, standard Soviet one-size-fits-nobody military issue. They smelled slightly of Lysol and had permanent creases where they’d been folded. “You’ve never used these?”

  “Nope,” he said proudly. “Never had a speck of trouble.”

  “Good thing,” Dallas said. “Suits could blow at those creases. Shoulda rolled ’em.”

  “They came with the ship that way.” Dallas shrugged.

  I rolled the suits and put them back, then shuffled sideways to get past the two men and sit down in the acceleration couch. It was slick plastic and not clean; made my skin crawl. We couldn’t afford the Bugatti glove leather, but I’d have to find something.

  Like most American marques, the control boards were overautomated and underinstrumented. Except in one particular: “Where’s the cube interface?”

  “Don’t have no cube interface.”

  “But the advertisement said you had AI navigation and communication.”

  “Yeah,” Dallas said. “What’re you tryin’—”

  “It does, it does! Sixth-generation Japanese, but it’s resident. You don’t need no cube.”

  “It was made before the cube standard, is what you mean.”

  “I like it better.”

  I didn’t. With a cube interface, we could have had Eric as an AI backup. “Does it have a vocal I/O?”

  “Sure, the red TALK button down in the corner of the right panel.”

  I pushed it. “Good morning,” it said. “May I be of service?”

  Dallas cringed. “It’s afternoon. Goddamned Japanese accent.”

  “Maybe it’s morning in Japan,” Jacobssen said lamely.

  “Can you talk to another computer?” I asked it.

  “Of course, my lady. In eight languages.”

  Dallas rolled his eyes. “I’ll go get Eric.”

  Jacobssen was visibly relieved to have Dallas gone. “You got somebody else with you?”

  “In a way. He lives in the computer.”

  “A course. Heard a those.”

  I studied the controls. “Have you ever d
ocked this thing cold? Without target feedback control?”

  “Well … don’t know where I’d do that, you know? Used to take it all the time to the Moon and went out to Deimos a couple times. That’s all feedback, even the fuel dump.”

  “I see.”

  “Where you fixin’ to go, you need to dock cold?”

  Lying is the best policy. “We thought we might do some Earth-orbit prospecting. Check out old satellites for salvage.”

  “Ah. They’re all picked over.”

  “It would just be for fun.”

  “Funny idea of fun,” he griped, supersalesman. “The Moon, now. That’s my idea of a place.”

  Dallas came back and gave me a little nod, signifying that Eric had been primed. I turned him on and said, “Talk to the autopilot, Eric. Try Japanese.”

  “Okay.” What followed was one of those strange computer-to-computer things. I can follow technical Japanese pretty well, though not as well as Dallas, and for about ten seconds I could understand their exchange about the machine’s experience and capabilities. But they talked faster and faster, until it was like a couple of Japanese chipmunks scolding each other, and finally just a warbling bleedle-eep-bleep that could have been any language.

  Eric came back down to earth suddenly. “I don’t think I would buy it, Mary.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s too old a program, sixth-generation. I don’t know about his responses to some of my queries.…”

  “You can reprogram the autopilot,” Jacobssen said. “I could cut the price enough to pay for that.”

  I tried not to smile. We had flushed the quarry and he was moving into range. “It’s not that simple.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Eric said. “The pilot is the ship, to a large extent. If you switch out the pilot you have to retrain the ship. It takes time and money.”

  “Look.” He was actually sweating in the refrigerated air. “Can we talk without the computer?”

  “Sure,” Dallas said, straight-faced. I turned Eric off.

  “You’re both immortals, aren’t you?” We nodded. “So look. I want the treatment, the Stileman, and I don’t have time to fuss and fiddle.”

  “You have an appointment?” Dallas asked.

  “Tentative. I have to show financial proof by the fourth of next month.” He spun the wheelchair around so he was looking away from us, out the small porthole by the galley. He was silent for a moment.

  “We weren’t going to do it, me and Edna. Edna was my wife, we never had enough to both do it, or even one of us. So I lost her seventeen years ago, and I figured, well, you know. Join her before too long.

  “But that’s a funny thing about money, isn’t it? You work all your life and can’t quite make it, but then you relax and don’t give a shit, excuse me ma’am, and it just rolls in. Couple of years ago I was in spittin’ distance of a million pounds. Started to think about the Stileman.

  “Then I got this cancer of the pancreas. Sort of puts a time limit on it.” His voice was trembling. “Couple of weeks I got to go to London … or go to bed.”

  This was not an act. “How much do you have?” I asked.

  He fumbled with his credit flash, having to punch in a correction twice, then held it up to me: £893,667.

  “So you need a little over a hundred thousand pounds,” Dallas said. “Call it a hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars, this morning’s exchange rate.”

  He checked the flash and nodded cautiously.

  “We could do it,” I said to Dallas.

  “I don’t know. Let’s check the thrust.”

  “The thrust is fine,” Jacobssen said, relief palpable in his voice, as if he hadn’t just talked himself out of thirty thousand dollars. “It’s rated five gees max, fuel consumption twelve microAvs per second. Go ahead and crank her up. Guarantee she’ll crack max.”

  I turned the key and gave it the tiniest drip of fuel. The engine hissed outside and there was a creaking sound, the ship settling forward into the arms of the testing bed.

  “Feels solid,” Dallas said, confirming that we hadn’t gone sliding across the New Mexico desert. “Give it to her.”

  “Just a second.” I pushed the TALK button. “Display the testing bed data, please.” A screen lit up in front of me with the sigil of the U.S. Department of Transportation. I slammed the manual control as hard as I could, all the way forward—American control sticks have this annoying resistance built in, so you’ll feel as if you’re really doing something—and the gee number climbed up to 5.0 in about three seconds, the engine’s whine going to a roar and then a scream. Then it crept up to 5.4 over the next ten seconds. That was impressive, both for the speed of onset and the fact that it exceeded its rating by eight percent. I cut it off and nodded to Dallas.

  “Okay, then,” he said. “We won’t haggle. We’ll go one sixty-eight, give you plenty of walking-around money between now and your Stileman.”

  “It’s a deal.” He reached under his chair seat and brought out a stiff envelope with all the paper work. Eric notarized the bill of sale and recorded it with White Sands, Washington, and Geneva.

  Jacobssen’s eyes bugged out when Dallas produced the money in currency. American currency, unlike Italian, has magnetic encoding you can check with your credit flash, and he apologized for checking out a few random bills—but after all, um, paper money … He didn’t want to say that only criminals closed deals with bales of currency. Dallas told him it was “mad money” we’d won gambling up in Vegas; using it this way, we wouldn’t have to pay taxes. The title transfer on a used machine can be for “one dollar and other assets, real and intangible.” He seemed a little relieved at that, and at my suggesting that he go ahead and check out every bill; we weren’t taking off this very minute. Besides, the transaction was contingent on a test flight, one orbit.

  (It seemed odd to me that the money would change hands first, though of course it made perfect sense from the seller’s standpoint. Otherwise, if we crashed trying it out, he would have no spaceship, no money, and a staggering lawsuit from the damage that “his” negligence caused. From our side of the transaction, well, I supposed we could still get our money back if the ship crashed.)

  I had Dallas take the floater back to Hertz while I kept an eye on the ground crew, who extricated the Europa from the test bed and prepared it for takeoff. The old man evidently did check every one of the 168 bills, meanwhile.

  When the machine was properly pointed down the hangar access lane, I got inside, to wait for Dallas in the air conditioning. I turned on Eric.

  “Good job,” I said. “We knocked him down thirty-two thousand.”

  “What … you mean you actually bought that old crate?”

  Interesting feeling, a mixture of chagrin and fear. “Oh, no. I thought you were … I thought Dallas told you to bluff!”

  “He did, but I wasn’t. I suppose we should have had some signal. He turned me off before I could elaborate. That brain is less than useful. It gives wrong answers and defends them.

  “The previous owner may have been unaware of this. His flight log, ever since the AMC power source was installed, shows nothing that would challenge even a beginning pilot. He was under external control almost all of the time, so the AI unit hardly had a chance to wake up.”

  “Is there anything we can do about it?”

  “I don’t know. Dallas didn’t used to be a very good pilot. You are, evidently.”

  “I am. But I’m accustomed to the best equipment; that makes it easy.”

  “This should be an interesting challenge, then. I can help you with orbital elements and such, and Old Brainless-san there might be able to do shared-control radar feedback things. That’s the only way they’ll let you near Ceres.”

  “That’s what they say. Though I could probably do it without the feedback; when I got my license first they still made you dock cold.”

  The air lock irised, and Dallas swung in. “Let’s go!”

  “Bad news,” I
said, and told him about Eric’s reservations. Eric elaborated that the AI unit was probably worse than useless, since it had plenty of speed and computational power, but its personality interfered with its professional judgment.

  “If you bought a new GenDyne, anything after ’72, the AI commo and guidance wouldn’t have a Turing Image imposed. That was a marketing ploy for a few years; people felt more comfortable with a ‘person’ in charge.” I’d never heard of that, but then I didn’t follow American fads.

  “But it’s not a big danger, is it?” Dallas said. “You’ve driven ships without artificial intelligence. You didn’t use AI docking with adastra, did you?”

  “It’s in the circuit as a failsafe. If I’d made a large error, it would’ve sent an overriding command.” Some rocket jocks made fun of European sports ships like mine, since they gave you the feeling of seat-of-the-pants control without actually putting you at risk, if you should make a drastic error. The AI failsafe makes decisions a million times faster than you can push a button.

  But I’ve always liked the feeling, the illusion, of being in charge. So now it might pay off. “Let’s take on some fuel and get our basic stores aboard, go up and try a couple of orbits. If it doesn’t work out, if I don’t like the way it handles, we can cancel the deal and start over.”

  “Better hurry, then. Want the guy to be alive when we come back.”

  Nobody with any sense goes up, even just to low Earth orbit, without a week’s worth of air, water, and food. It would be embarrassing to run out of air, waiting for a service vehicle to find you.

  We went ahead and filled up everything, including fuel, since you get better prices with large quantities. If we decided to cancel the deal and buy another, we could transfer the stores easily enough. Most rocket jocks kept their vehicles at White Sands. Maui costs a great deal more for parking and will refuse any ship that doesn’t have the Faraday cage and trolley adapter for the launch tube.

  I could read Dallas’s thoughts as we looked over the menus for the dehydrated meals. Space is not the place for people accustomed to dining, rather than feeding.