The Sam Gunn Omnibus

Marooned

Those bastards at Rockledge have shown their hand at last. They’re going to kill me and my partners and steal my claim to Pittsburgh and the metals we’ve mined. As well as the water and volatiles we got from Aphrodite.

I’m beyond anger. A kind of a cold freeze has gripped me. I can’t even work up the satisfaction of screaming and swearing. They’ve marooned us on the asteroid; me and all my partners. We’ll die on Pittsburgh. I’m talking into the recording system built into my space suit. Maybe someday after we’re all dead somebody will find us and listen to this chip. If you do, take our bodies—and this chip—straight to the IAA’s law enforcement people. Murder, piracy, grand larceny, conspiracy, kidnapping—and it all goes right to the top of Rockledge. And God knows who else.

I don’t even feel scared. I’m just kind of numb. Dumbstruck. Like being paralyzed.

Erik is the one. Smiling, blond, slow-witted Erik is the mastermind that Rockledge planted on the Argo. It’s like one of those damned mystery novels where the murderer turns out to be the stupid butler. Who would have suspected Erik? Not me, that’s for sure.

Lonz, Will and I had put in a long, tough day finishing up our operations on Pittsburgh. All the mining and smelting equipment we had put onto the asteroid was finally shut down. That cluster of steel grapes bulked very nicely on one side of the ship. The sheets of platinum and the ingots of gold and silver were all neatly tucked into our cargo bays. Our identification beacon was on the asteroid, beeping satisfactorily.

I scrolled through the checklist on the main console’s screen one final time. We had done everything we had to do. The partners were all asleep—at least they were all in their beds. Or somebody’s beds.

“Okay,” I said to Lonz. “That’s it. Let’s see the nav program and set up the trajectory for home.”

“Um, there’s been a change in the mission plan, Sam,” Erik said.

I turned around from the console to look at him. I hadn’t even realized he’d entered the control center. His usual station was down by the galley, next to the lounge. He stood in the middle of the floor, smiling that slow, genial smile of his, like always.

“Whattaya mean?” I asked.

“We can’t start the homeward trip just yet,” he said.

“Why not?”

His smile didn’t change one iota as he explained, “We’ve got to put you and your partners off the ship first.”

“Put me and … ?”

“You’re staying on Pittsburgh, Sam,” Erik told me. “You’re not coming back.” And he pulled a slim little automatic pistol from his belt. It looked big enough to me, probably because he pointed it straight at my eyes.

“What the hell are you talking about?” But the sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach told me that I knew the answer to my own question.

I spun around toward Lonz and Will. They both looked unhappy, but neither one of them made a move to help me.

“You guys, too?” All of a sudden I felt like Julius Caesar.

“You wouldn’t believe how much money we’ll be getting,” Will muttered.

“For chrissakes, didn’t I treat you guys fair and square?” I yelped.

“You didn’t make us partners, Sam,” said Lonz.

“Holy shit. Why didn’t you tell me you were unhappy? I could’ve …”

“Never mind,” Erik said, suddenly forceful, in charge. “Sam, you’ll have to stay in your quarters until we get everything arranged. Don’t try anything. I don’t want to make this messy.”

Three against one would have made a mess all right, and the mess would be me. So I huffed and puffed and slinked to my quarters like a good, obedient prisoner. My mind was spinning, looking for an out, but I didn’t know what they planned to do. That made it tough to figure out my next move. I heard them attach some kind of a lock to the outside of the door as soon as I closed it after me. And then all my lights went off; not even the emergency lamps lit. They had cut off all electrical power to my quarters. No lights, no computer access, no communications with anybody, nothing but darkness.

And waiting.

After a few hours they bundled us all into space suits and—one by one—had each of us jet from the Argos main airlock to the surface of Pittsburgh, where we had left the mining and smelting equipment. I was the last one to be pushed out.

“We’ve set up an inflated dome for the eight of you,” Erik said, with that maddening slow grin of his, “and stocked with enough food to last a few months.”

“Thanks a bunch!” I snapped.

“We could have killed you all outright,” he said. “I thought I was going to have to after I made that slip about Liechtenstein in the lounge one of the first nights out.”

I felt like a complete idiot. It never occurred to me that one of the guys I hired might be the Rockwell plant.

The sonofabitch knew what he was doing; I have to hand him that. If he had tried anything violent all eight of us would have fought for our lives. As far as I could tell the only weapon they had was Erik’s one pistol. He might have killed several of us, but we might have swarmed him under. Lonz and Will, too. Eight against three. We might have carried it off.

But Erik worked it like an expert. He isolated us into individuals and, instead of killing us outright, merely forced us to go from the ship to the asteroid. Merely. It was a slow way of killing us. Food and shelter notwithstanding, nobody will return to Pittsburgh in less than a couple of years. Nobody can, even if Erik would leave us a radio and we screamed our lungs out for help.

“This is piracy,” I said as the three of them nudged me toward the airlock. “To say nothing of murder.”

“It’s business, Sam,” Erik said. “Nothing personal.”

I turned to Lonz. “Do you think he’s going to let you live?” Then to Will. “Or you? Neither one of you is going to make it back to Earth.”

Lonz looked grim. “They’re giving us enough money to set us up for life. There’s no reason for us to talk, and no reason for Erik to worry about us.”

I huffed at him from inside my helmet. “Dead men tell no tales, pals.” Then I snapped the visor shut and stepped into the airlock.

“I’m sorry, Sam.” I heard Will’s voice say, muffled by my helmet.

“Sorry don’t get the job done,” I answered in my bravest John Wayne imitation.

Then the hatch closed and the pumps started sucking the air out of the lock.

The outer hatch slid open. There was Pittsburgh, hanging big and black and ugly against the even blacker background of space. Through the heavy tinting of my visor I could only see a few of the brighter stars. They looked awfully cold, awfully far away.

“Get going Sam,” Erik’s voice sounded genially in my earphones, “or we’ll have to open your suit with a laser torch.”

Like walking the goddamned plank. I jetted over to the asteroid. Sure enough, there was an inflated dome next to the equipment we had left. And seven space-suited figures standing outside it. Even in the bulky suits they looked scared shitless, huddled together, clinging to one another.

I planted my feet on the asteroid and turned back toward the Argo, spinning lazily against the backdrop of stars.

Raising one clenched fist over my head I yelled into my suit radio’s microphone, “I’ll see you—all of you—hanging from the highest yardarm in the British fleet!”

It was the only damned thing I could think of. About five minutes later a blazing flare of light bellowed from the Argo’s rocket nozzles and the ship—my ship—suddenly leaped away and dwindled in the dark sky until I couldn’t see it any more.

To say that my partners are upset is putting it so mildly that it’s like saying that Custer’s Seventh Cavalry was not terribly friendly with the Sioux Nation.

They’re terrified. They’re weeping. They’re cursing and swearing and calling down the wrath of the gods. Who (as usual) remain totally aloof and unconcerned about our plight. It took me nearly half an hour to get them to stop babbling, and by that time I finally got it through my thick skull that they’re mad at me!

“This is all your fault!” Rick Darling screamed at me. “I begged them to let me stay on the ship. I promised them I’d never inform on them. I even told them that I was glad they wanted to get rid of you! But they wouldn’t listen! Now I’m going to die and it’s all your fault!”

Funny thing is, each and every one of them is yelling some variation of the same story. Each one of them begged Erik to let them stay aboard, promised to go along with killing me—and all the others—providing they were allowed to get home safely.

Erik didn’t take any of them up on their offers. Not even Sheena, who had a helluva lot to offer. The sonofabitch must be made of very strong stuff. Either that or he’s gay, which I doubt, because Darling would’ve probably bent over backwards for him if that’s what he wanted.

They’re being so goddamned rotten that they’ve almost made me forget who our real enemy is. I let them babble and gabble and just clumped across the rough, pitted surface of Pittsburgh and went inside the dome Erik had so thoughtfully left for us. I ought to mention that the asteroid’s too small to have any noticeable gravity. We’re all outfitted with small magnets on our boots, which work very nicely on a body made predominantly of iron. But even though walking is as easy as stepping across a newly painted floor that’s still slightly tacky, my body’s feeling all the old sensations of nearly zero gravity.

I’m smiling to myself. As soon as my partners calm down enough to take stock of their situation, they’re going to get good and sick. I’m certain that Erik hasn’t included space-sickness medications in the pile of supplies he’s left us.

Good! Serves the whining little pricks right.

Sure enough, they’ve all been sick as dogs for the past two days. I felt kind of queasy myself for the first few hours, but I got over it quickly enough.

I’ve spent the time checking out just how much Erik left us, in his less then-infinite kindness. It’s not much. Eight crates of food briquettes; about enough to last six months. No medical supplies, not even aspirin.

The dome’s got air and water recyclers, offloaded from Argo’s spares. But no backup equipment and no spare parts. If anything goes wrong with the machinery, we die pretty quickly.

So our prospects are: (1) we starve to death in six months; (2) we die from lack of water or air if either of the recyclers craps out on us; or (3) we start murdering each other because there’s nothing else for us to do but get on each other’s nerves.

At least inside the dome we can get out of the space suits. There’s no furniture in here; nothing to sit on but the crates of food briquettes, eight inflatable sleeping rolls, and a zero-gee bathroom facility. The toilet seems to work okay, although there’s only the one of them. The women bitch about that constantly. Me, I worry about how much radiation we’re absorbing; the metallized plastic of this dome doesn’t stop cosmic ray primaries, and if there’s a solar flare we’ll probably get cooked inside of an hour or two.

There’s also the possibility that a smaller asteroid might puncture our dome. That would be absolutely poetic: killed by an asteroid striking another asteroid.

Reality is setting in.

My seven keen-minded partners are mostly recovering from their zero-gee puking and starting to realize that we are well and truly marooned on this chunk of nickel-iron. With only six months worth of food.

They’ve even stopped hollering at me. They’re getting morose, just sitting around this cramped little dome like a bunch of prisoners waiting for dawn and the firing squad.

“Would’ve been kinder of Erik to kill us outright and get it over with,” said Bo Williams.

The others are sad-faced as basset hounds with toothaches. Trying to sleep on a three-centimeter-thick inflatable bag laid over a rough floor of solid nickel-iron does nothing to improve anybody’s disposition.

“If that’s the way you feel about,” Lowell Hubble said to Bo, from behind his inevitable pipe, “why don’t you just commit suicide and save us the self-pity? That would leave an extra ration of food to the survivors.”

Williams’ shoulder muscles bunched underneath his grimy shirt. “And why don’t you try sucking on something else than that damned pacifier?”

“Why don’t you both shut up?” Marj snapped.

“I think this entire line of conversation is disgraceful,” said Jean. “If we can’t behave like polite adults we should leave the dome until we’ve learned how to act properly.”

We all stared at her. I started to laugh. In her own prissy way, Jean was right. We need some discipline. Something to keep our minds off our predicament.

“Maybe we ought to draw lots,” Grace suggested with mock cheerfulness. “Short straw goes outside without a suit. Maybe we could stretch the food long enough …”

“And even add to our food supply,” Williams said, eying Darling grimly. “Like the Donner party.”

Sheena’s eyes went like saucers. “Eat… ? Oh, I could never do that!”

“People do strange things when they’re starving,” Hubble said. He looked over at our overfed Mr. Darling, too.

If Rick understood what was going through their minds, he didn’t show it. “If only there was some hope of rescue,” he mewled. “Some slightest shred of hope.”

It hit me right then.

“Rescue, my ass!” I said. And before Jean could even frown at me, I added, “We’re gonna save ourselves, by damn!”

They laughed at Columbus. They laughed at Edison and the Wright brothers and Marconi.

None of my beloved partners laughed at me when I said we’d save ourselves. They just kind of gaped for a moment, and then ignored me, as if I had farted or done something else stupid or vulgar.

But what the hell, there isn’t anything else we can do. And we need some discipline, some goal, some objective to keep our brains busy and our minds off starvation and death. Instead of breaking down into an octet of would-be murderers and cannibals, I dangled the prospect of salvation in front of their unbelieving eyes.

“We can do it!” I insisted. “We can save ourselves. We can turn this little worldlet of ours into a lifeboat.”

“And pigs can fly,” Bo Williams growled.

“They can if they build wings for themselves,” I shot back.

Darling started, “How on earth do you propose …”

“We’re not on Earth, oh corpulent critic of the arts. Erik thinks he’s got us marooned here on Pittsburgh. But we’re gonna ride this rock back to the Earth/Moon system.”

Jean Margaux: “That’s impossible!”

Marj Dupray: “It beats sitting around and watching the food supplies dwindle.”

Grace Harcourt: “Can you really do it, Sam?”

Sheena Chang: “What do you think, Lowell?”

Hubble, our resident astronomer, took the pipe out of his mouth and squinted at me as if he had never seen me before. His mustache was getting ragged and grayer than usual. He needed a shave. All us men looked pretty shaggy, except for Darling, whose cheeks were still as smooth as a baby’s backside. Is he permanently depilated, or doesn’t he have enough testosterone in him to raise a beard?

Hubble said, “To move this asteroid out of its present orbit we’d need a propulsion system and navigational equipment.”

“We’ve got ’em,” I said. “Or at least, we can make ’em.”

I know the mining and smelting facilities inside out. We had left the equipment here on Pittsburgh. My idea had been, why drag them all the way back home when you’ll want them at the asteroid on the next trip out? The equipment’s nuclear powered, of course: you’d need solar-cell panels as big as cities to generate enough electricity at this distance from the Sun.

When Sheena found out we had two (count ’em, two) nukes on Pittsburgh, she gasped with alarm. “But nuclear power is bad, Sam. It’s got radiation.”

“Don’t worry about it, kiddo,” I told her. “They’re shielded real well.” I didn’t bother to inform her that her gorgeous body was getting more radiation from cosmic primaries than all the nuclear power plants on Earth gave off.

My idea was to use the mining lasers to slice off chunks of the asteroid, then use the smelting facility to vaporize the metal instead of just melting it down. If we could direct the vapor properly it’d push us like a rocket exhaust. I figured we could scoop out a pit in the asteroid’s surface and use it as a rough-and-ready rocket nozzle. Or maybe one of the existing craters that’ve put the pit in ol’ Pittsburgh would do.

We wouldn’t need pinpoint navigation. All I’d need was to get us moving at a good clip toward the Earth-Moon system. Once we crossed the orbit of Mars the automated meteor-watch radars’d’ pick us up. Hell, Pittsburgh’s big enough to scare the bejeezuz out of the IAA. An asteroid this big, heading for the Earth-Moon system? They’d at least send a robot probe to check us out; maybe a manned spacecraft with enough extra propulsion aboard to nudge us away from the inhabited region. Either way, there’d be a radio aboard and we could yell for help.

Damn! Hubble’s done some calculations on his wrist computer and given me the bad news. Oh, my scheme will work all right, but it’ll take seventy or eighty years before Pittsburgh gets past the orbit of Mars.

“She’s just too massive,” Hubble said. “If we want to accelerate this asteroid that quickly we need a lot more energy than we can get by burning off mass at the rate the smelting facility can produce.”

Gloom. All seven of them became even more morose than ever. I felt down, too. For a while. Then Sheena saved the day.

(Not that we can tell day from night on Pittsburgh. The only way we can keep track of time is by the clocks built into our wrist computers. Even though the asteroid’s slowly tumbling as it swings through space, inside the dome we get no sensation of daylight or nighttime. The sky’s always dark, even when the Sun is visible outside. Our mood matched our environment: cold, dark, dreary.)

Sheena came up to me while I was trying to decide whether I’d make dinner out of a green briquette or a red one. They both looked kind of brown to me, but that may have been just the lighting inside the dome, which was pretty low and murky.

“Sam,” she said. “Can I ask you a favor?”

We were all so glum and melancholy that I had forgotten how beautiful Sheena was. Whether it was natural or surgically enhanced, even in the shabby unwashed blouse and slacks she’d been wearing for days on end she looked incredibly lovely. I forgot about food, temporarily.

“A favor?” I said. “Sure. What is it?”

“Well…” she hesitated, as if she had to put her thoughts together. “Since we won’t be using the mining equipment and all that other stuff, can’t we toss those ugly old nuclear generators out? I mean, they can’t be doing us any good sitting out there making radiation….”

I jumped to my feet so hard that my magnetic soles couldn’t hold me and I went skyrocketing straight up to the top of the dome.

“YAHOO!” I yelled. My seven partners gaped up at me. To say they were startled would be a very large understatement.

I turned in midair and glided down onto Lowell Hubble’s shoulders. “The nukes!” I yelled, tapping out a jazz rhythm on his head. “Instead of using them to generate electricity we can explode the mothers!”

It took a while for me to calm down enough to explain it to them. There was enough energy in the nuclear piles of our two generators to blast out a sizeable portion of Pittsburgh—enough to propel us back toward the inner solar system.

“Like atomic bombs?” Bo Williams actually shuddered. “You’ve got to be crazy, Sam.”

But Hubble was pecking away at his wrist computer. I could tell he was almost as excited as I was: he had even dropped his pipe.

“You can’t set off nuclear explosions here,” Grace said, looking kind of scared. “You’ll get us all killed.”

I gave her a grin and a shrug. “Might as well go down fighting. You want to wait until we put long pig on the menu?”

She didn’t answer.

But Jean did. “Interplanetary law forbids using nuclear explosives in space unless specifically permitted by the IAA and under the supervision of their inspectors.”

“So sue me,” I told her. “Better yet, call the friggin’ IAA and have them come out here and arrest me!”

Hubble had a different kind of objection. “Sam, I don’t know if you can get those power piles to explode. They have all sorts of safeguards built into them. They’re designed to fail-safe, you know.”

“Then we’ll have to pull ’em out of the generators and disengage all their safety systems.”

“But the radiation!”

“That’s what robots are for,” I said grandly.

I should’ve known that those friggin’ simpleminded robots we have for working the mining and smelting equipment couldn’t handle the task of disassembling the nuclear reactors. Three of our five stupid tin cans can’t even move across the goddamned surface of Pittsburgh; it’s too rough for their delicate goddamned wheels. They’re stranded where they sit. The two that can move aren’t strong enough to pry the power piles out of the generators. Sure, everything here is in micro-g, but those piles are imbedded inside deep shielding, and friction makes it tough to slide them out.

I won’t bore you with all the details. I had to ask for volunteers. I knew I’d have to go out there myself, but I’d need more than my two hands to get the job done.

I didn’t expect any of my brave little partners to volunteer. They never had before, and what I was asking them to do now was really risky, maybe fatal.

To my surprise, Lowell Hubble raised his hand. “I’m too old to start a family,” he said quietly, glancing at Sheena sideways.

We were standing in a little circle inside the dome. I had outlined what needed to be done and what the dangers were. I had also told them very firmly that I would accept only male volunteers.

“Nonsense!” Jean snapped. “That’s male chauvinist twaddle.”

As soon as Hubble put his hand up, Jean raised hers. “I’m too old to want to start a family,” she said firmly.

The others glanced around at one another uneasily. Slowly, very slowly, each of them raised their hands. Even Sheena, although her hand was trembling. I felt kind of proud of them.

We did it by lottery. Almost. I wouldn’t let Hubble out of the dome. I needed him for all the calculations we had to do, and maybe later for navigation, if all went well. Bo Williams hated that, I could tell, but he didn’t complain. He could see that there’s no use risking the one guy who can handle the scientific end of this madness. It’s not just the radiation. What’ll we do if Hubble trips out there and one end of the power pile mashes his head?

Chauvinist or not, I just took Bo and Darling out with me. Darling looked so scared I thought he was going to crap in his space suit, but he didn’t dare complain a peep. We got the first pile out from behind its shielding okay, and then skeedaddled back inside the dome and let the robots finish the work. The dosimeters built into our suits screeched a little and flashed their yellow warning lights. Once we got back into the dome they went back to green, though.

A good day’s work. Maybe we’ll make it after all.

According to Hubble’s calculation, if we can make just one of the power piles explode it’ll provide enough impetus to push Pittsburgh out of its orbit and send it zooming toward the inner solar system.

“You’re sure?” I asked him.

He nodded like a college professor, the pipe back between his teeth. “If you can get it to explode.”

“It’ll explode, don’t worry. Even if I have to beat it with a baseball bat.”

He gave me a slightly amused look. “And where are you going to find a baseball bat?”

“Never mind that,” I said. “Will we be safe? I don’t really want to kill us if I can avoid it.”

“Oh, safe enough, if you place the pile on the far end of Pittsburgh and set it off there. I’ve worked out the precise location for you.” “We won’t get a fatal dose of radiation or anything?” “No, the mass of the asteroid will protect us from radiation. Since there’s no air outside the dome there will be no aerodynamic shock wave. No heat pulse or fallout, either, if the pile is properly sited in a crater.” “Then we’ll be okay.”

“We should be. The only thing to worry about is the seismic shock. The explosion will send quite a jolt through the body of the asteroid, of course.”

“I was wondering about that? How many gs?”

He frowned slightly. “That’s right, you astronauts think in terms of g-forces.” “Don’t you?”

“No. I was more concerned with Pittsburgh’s modulus of elasticity.” “It’s what?”

He gave me a faraway look. “The explosion will send a shock wave through the solid body of the asteroid.” “You already said that.”

“Yes. The question is: will that shock wave break up the asteroid?”

“Break it up? Break up Pittsburgh?”

“Yes.”

“Well, will it? Will it?”

“I don’t think so. But I simply don’t have enough data to be certain.” “Thanks,” I said.

So our choice is to sit on this rock until we starve to death or maybe blow it to smithereens with a jury-rigged atomic bomb. I’m going with the bomb. And keeping my fingers crossed.

Okay, we’re all in our pressure suits, inside the dome, lying flat inside our pitiful little inflated sleeping bags. When I press the button on the remote control unit in my hand the feebleminded robot out there on the other end of Pittsburgh will pull the control rods out of the power pile and it’ll go critical in a matter of seconds. Here we go.

Soon’s I work up the nerve.

Good news and bad news.

The pile exploded all right, and jolted Pittsburgh out of its orbit. The asteroid didn’t break up. None of us got killed. No significant radiation here in the dome, either.

That’s the good news.

There’s plenty of bad. First off, the explosion slammed us pretty damned hard. Like being kicked in the ribs by a big bruiser in army boots. We all slid and tumbled in our air bags and went sailing splat into the wall of the dome. Damned near tore it open before we untangled ourselves. Arms, legs, yelling, bitching. Good thing we were in the space suits; they cushioned some of the shock. The sleeping bags just added to the confusion.

Even so, Bo Williams snapped a shin bone when he slammed into a food crate. The rest of us are banged up, bruised, but Bo is crippled and in a lot of pain. Jean, of all people, pulled the leg straight and set the bone as well as anybody could without x-ray equipment.

“The last time I had to do anything like this was on a walking tour of Antarctica,” she calmly told us.

We tore the offending food crate apart to make a splint for Bo’s leg. A walking tour of Antarctica?

But the really bad news came from Lowell Hubble. He took a few observations of the stars, made a couple of calculations on his wrist computer, and told me—privately, very quietly—that the blast didn’t do enough.

“Whaddaya mean, not enough?” I wanted to yell, but I whispered, just like he did. The rest of the gang was clustered around Bo, who was manfully trying to bear his pain without flinching. The undivided attention of the four women helped.

“The explosion just didn’t have enough energy in it to push our orbit toward the Earth,” Hubble whispered. Drawing circles in the air with the stem of his pipe, he explained, “We’re moving inward, toward the Sun, all right. We’ll cross the orbit of Mars, eventually. But we won’t get much closer to Earth than that.”

“Eventually? How soon’s that?”

He stuck the pipe back in his mouth. “Three and a half years.”

I let out a weak little whistle. “That won’t do us a helluva lot of good, will it?”

“None at all,” he said, scratching at his scruffy chin.

I felt itchy, too. In another week or two my beard will be long enough to be silky. Right now it just irritates the hell out of me.

“We’ve got the other nuke,” I said.

“We’re going to need it.”

“I hate to have to go through the whole damned exercise again—pulling the pile out of its shielding, dismantling the control systems. We’re down to one usable robot.”

“I’ll volunteer, Sam.”

I turned and there was Rick Darling standing two meters away, a kind of little-boy look of mixed fear and anticipation on his fuzzless face.

“You’ll volunteer?” My voice squeaked with surprise.

“To work with you on the nuclear pile,” he said. “You tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

“You’re sure you want to?”

His lower lip was trembling. “Sam, I’ve been completely wrong about you. You are the bravest and strongest man I’ve ever met. I realize now that everything you’ve done has been for our own good. I’m willing to follow you wherever you choose to lead.”

I was too shocked to do much more than mumble, “Okay. Good.” Darling smiled happily at me and went back to his food crate.

Saints in heaven! I think Rick Darling is in love with me.

Well, we both took enough radiation out there to make our suit dosimeters screech. They went all the way into the red. Lethal dose, unless we get medical attention pretty damned quick. Fat chance.

We got the pile out of the generator, ripped out most of the safety rods, and put it where Hubble told us it has to be in order to push us closer to Earth. It took hours. The goddamned tin shit-can of a robot broke down on us halfway through the job and Darling and I had to manhandle the load by ourselves.

We didn’t do much talking out there, just a lot of grunting and swearing. Don’t let anybody tell you that working in microgravity is easy. Sure, things have no weight, but they still have mass and inertia. You try traipsing across the surface of an asteroid with the core of a nuclear reactor practically on your back, see how much fun you get out of it.

Anyway, we’re back in the dome. Hubble’s gone outside to check the position of the pile and to rig a line so we can yank out the last of the control rods manually. Marj and Grace are out there helping him. Sheena and Jean are here in the dome, hovering over Bo Williams. He’s got a fever and he doesn’t look too damned good.

While we were taking off our space suits Darling said to me, “You don’t have to be afraid of me, Sam. I know you don’t like me.”

“I never saw anything to like,” the words popped out of my mouth before I knew it, “until today.”

“I just want your respect,” he said.

“You’ve got it.”

“Would—would you stop calling me names, then? Please? They really hurt.”

There were tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry… Rick. I did it without thinking.”

He said, “I know you’re hetero. I’m not trying to seduce you, Sam. I just want to be your friend.”

I felt about an inch tall. “Yeah. That’s fine. You’ve earned it.”

He put out his fleshy hand. I took it in mine. We didn’t really shake; we just grasped each other’s hand for a long moment until I was too embarrassed to look at him any longer. I had to pull away.

It’s boom time again.

We’re all back in our suits, lying on the floor, wedged against the food cartons which are now up against the dome wall. Hubble’s calculated which way the blast will push us, and I’ve tried to arrange us so we won’t go sliding and slamming the way we did last time.

It took hours to get Bo Williams into his space suit, with his leg in Jean’s makeshift cast. He’s hot as a microwaved burger, face red, half unconscious and muttering deliriously. Doesn’t look good.

I’ve got the control box in my hand again. If this blast doesn’t do the job we’re finished. Probably finished anyway. I’ve picked up enough radiation to light a small city. No symptoms yet, but that’ll come, sure enough.

Okay. Time to press the button. Wonder if this rock’ll stand up to another blast?

What a ride!

The seismic shock lifted us all off our backs and bounced us around a bit, but no real damage. Bo Williams must’ve been unconscious when the bomb went off, or else the belt knocked him out.

A few new bruises, that’s all. Otherwise we’re okay. Hubble went outside and took some sightings. We’re definitely going to cross Mars’s orbit, but it’s still going to take a couple-three months. Then it’s just a matter of time before the IAA notices us.

If we don’t starve first.

Disk’s memory space is running low.

Bo Williams died today, probably from infection that we didn’t have the medicine to deal with. We sealed him inside his space suit. Erik’s legally a murderer now. I guess Lonz and Will are, too. Or accessories, at least.

Been fourteen days since we lit off the second nuke. Hubble says we’ll cross Mars’s orbit in ten weeks. Definitely. He thinks.

Dome’s starting to smell bad. I think the air recycler’s breaking down. Food’s holding out okay; nobody has much of an appetite.

The air recycler’s definitely on the fritz. All of us are dopey, sluggish. And irritable! Even sweet-tempered me is—am?—snapping at the others.

There’s nothing to do. Terminal boredom. We just lay around and try to avoid each other. Munch on a crapburger now and then. And wait.

Disk’s almost full. I won’t say anything else until it’s the end.

The air in here’s as bad as Los Angeles before they went to electric cars. Grace is coughing all the time. My eyes burn and I feel as slow and stupid as a brain-damaged cow on downers.

Most of the others sleep almost all the time. Like babies. They only get up to eat and use the toilet. And snarl at each other.

Hubble’s looking grim. We’re nowhere near the orbit of Mars yet and he knows as well as I do that the air’s giving out.

Darling popped the question. Said it was his dying wish. I gave him a backhand smack across the chops and told him to get lost. He burst into tears and skittered away. Should’ve been kinder to him, I guess. We are dying. Not much farther to go.

The lord helps those who help themselves!

I am sitting in a private cubicle aboard the bridge ship Bosporus. A friggin’ luxury yacht, compared even to the good old Argo.

You know the IAA intends to place five bridge ships in constant transit between Earth and Mars. Like trains running on a regular schedule. They’ll be loaded up in the Earth-Moon region and then ply their way out to Mars with all the supplies and personnel that the scientists need for their ongoing exploration of the Red Planet.

And the bridge ships will make it safer and a lot cheaper for settlers to move out past the Earth-Moon system. I had thought that they’d help a lot with the eventual spread of the frontier into the Asteroid Belt and even beyond.

Well, anyway, Bosporus is the first of the bridge ships, and she’s on her shakedown cruise. The IAA diverted her to come out and take a look at Pittsburgh.

Why? Because the old automated surveillance satellites still orbiting the Earth detected our two nuclear blasts, that’s why! Three cheers for bureaucracy!

Way back in the middle of the last century, when there was something called a Cold War simmering between the U.S. of A. and what used to be the Soviet Union, both sides were worried sick about the other guy testing nuclear weapons. So they each put satellites into orbit to spot nuke tests anywhere on Earth—or even in space.

Well, the Cold War ended but the surveillance satellites kept being replaced and even upgraded. The bureaucracy just kept rolling along, building new and better satellites and putting them on station regular as clockwork. Oh, they gave a lot of excuses for doing it: making sure that small nations didn’t develop nuclear weapons, using the satellites to make astronomical observations, that kind of garbage. I think the satellites are now tied into the IAA’s overall surveillance net: you know, the sensors that look for meteoroids that might hit the Earth or endanger habitats in the Earth-Moon region.

Whatever—our two nuclear blasts rang alarm bells all over the IAA’s sensor net. Then they saw good old Pittsburgh all of a sudden trucking toward the inner solar system. The Argo was on its preplanned trajectory, cruising back toward lunar orbit with its cargo of metals, water, and volatiles. Erik, bless him, had already reported a fatal accident that had killed the eight of us.

Somebody pretty high up in the IAA decided to send the Bosporus out for a look at Pittsburgh. We got saved. It wasn’t just in the nick of time; we could have probably lasted another few days, maybe a week.

But good enough for government work.

You never saw such a commotion. I’m not only rich, I’m a friggin’ hero!

The media swarmed all over us. They didn’t wait for the Bosporus to make its way back to the Earth-Moon area. They bombarded us electronically; interviews, book contracts, video deals. And right behind them came the lawyers: IAA red-tape types wanting to know how dare I set off unauthorized nuclear explosions in space. Litigation sharpies trying to get their slice of the profits that both Rockledge and S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited, are now claiming. Criminal prosecutors, too, once they learned about Bo Williams’s death and heard me screaming about piracy.

Sheena’s a star again. She’s already shooting footage for a docudrama about the flight. Grace is negotiating a book contract. Marj has seventeen design salons from around the world begging for her talents.

Hubble—well, he’s an academic, really. He’ll go back to his university and try to live down the notoriety. Rick Darling. I just don’t know what he’s going to do. He’s independently wealthy now; or he will be, once we sort out the legalities and split the profits. He hasn’t made another pass at me. In fact, he’s been staying as far away from me as he can.

Which suits me okay. I took Jean to dinner in the Bosporus s one and only wardroom last night, fed her a bottle of their best wine, and relocated that vulnerable spot of hers. We spent the night making the stars dance.

They’re treating us for radiation disease, of course. When the Bosporus’s medical officer found out how much radiation I had absorbed, he put on a long face and tried to break it to me gently that I would never be able to father any children. I grinned at that, which I guess puzzled him. Until he asked me to strip and he saw the neat lead-lined jockstrap I wear.

This is just to put a finish on these recordings. I’m going to lock them away with orders that they’re not to be touched by anybody until ten years after my death.

Erik was sentenced to life imprisonment, which means he’ll be frozen in a vat of liquid nitrogen and kept like a corpsicle until social scientists prove they can rehabilitate murderers. Maybe they’ll thaw him out in a century or two. I hope not. I would’ve preferred it if they’d stuck him on an asteroid and sent him sailing out beyond the orbit of Mars. See how he’d like it.

I feel bad about Lonz and Will. They were both sentenced to twenty years at the penal colony on Farside. I had to testify at the trial, and even though I put all the blame on Erik, I had to admit that Will and Lonz went along with him in the whole nasty deal.

The one thing that frosts me is that Erik absolutely refused to implicate Rockledge. Took all the blame himself. They must have threatened his family or something, those fat-cat bastards.

Okay. That’s it. Funny sitting here listening to my own voice for hours on end. There’s a lot more I could put onto these disks, more details and stuff, but what the hell, enough’s enough.

They’ll be sore as hell at me if any of this leaks out. Every one of my erstwhile partners is telling his or her version of the story. Selling, I should say, not just telling. Sheena’s got a video series going, “Queen of the Asteroids.” She’s fun to watch, but the stories are yecchh.

Oh, yeah. One thing that I shouldn’t forget. The IAA scientists propositioned each of the women partners. I guess “propositioned” isn’t the right word.

Once we were landed at the Moonbase medical facility for further antiradiation therapy and the inevitable psychological counseling, a group of scientists asked each of the women if they would consider having a baby. In the interests of science. To see what effect the radiation exposure would have. Maybe they’d be sterile. Maybe they’d have two-headed triplets.

It would all be clinically clean and scientifically pure. Artificial insemination and all that. Two with sperm from the males who were also on the asteroid, two with donor sperm from strangers. Maybe they even wanted to throw in a placebo, I don’t know.

Each of the women turned them down flat. I think. Jean is staying at Moonbase for the time being, which is not like her at all. Marj set herself up in Bermuda, where she’s franchising various Dupray space-inspired fashion lines to the highest bidders. Good old Grace gave me a kiss goodbye and high-tailed it to California as soon as the medics would let her go. Her book’s going to be a best-seller, I guess, even though what I’ve managed to see of it looks more like fiction to me than fact. But what the hell!

They’ve all gone their separate ways. Rick Darling’s bought himself a villa in the big new bridge ship, Golden Gate.

Me, I’m heading back for Pittsburgh. The asteroid’s swung around the Sun and she’s heading back toward the Belt. She’s still got billions and billions of dollars worth of valuable metals, and I intend to get them, now that the courts have given me clear title.

But this time I’m going alone, except for some really top-notch robots.

It’ll be lonely, out there all by myself.

Thank God!