New Frontiers (20 page)

“Distress call on all frequencies, sir.” Before I could think of anything more to say, Forty-niner went on, “Electrical power is critical, sir.”

“Don't I know it.”

“There is a prohibition in my programming, sir.”

“About electrical power?”

“Yes, sir.”

Then I remembered I had commanded him to stop nagging me about repairing the solar panels. “Cancel the prohibition,” I told him.

Immediately Forty-niner came back with, “The solar panels must be extended and activated, sir,” soft and cool and implacable as hell. “Otherwise we will lose all electrical power.”

“How long?”

It took a few seconds for him to answer, “Fourteen hours and twenty-nine minutes, sir.”

I was already in my spacesuit, so I got up from the command chair and plodded reluctantly toward the airlock. The damned solar panels. If I couldn't get them functioning I'd be dead. Let me tell you, that focuses your mind, it does.

Still, it wasn't easy. I wrestled with those bleeding, blasted frozen bearings for hours, until I was so fatigued that my suit was sloshing knee-deep with sweat. The damned Tinkertoy repair 'bots weren't much help, either. Most of the time they beeped and blinked and did nothing.

I got one of the panels halfway extended. Then I had to quit. My vision was blurring and I could hardly lift my arms, that's how weary I was.

I staggered back into the pod with just enough energy left to strip off the suit and collapse on my bunk.

When I woke up I was starving and smelled like a cesspool. I peeled my skivvies off and ducked into the shower.

And jumped right out again. The water was ice cold.

“What the hell happened to the hot water?” I screeched.

“Conserving electrical power, sir. With only one solar panel functioning at approximately one third of its nominal capacity, electrical power must be conserved.”

“Heat the blasted water,” I growled. “Turn off the heat after I'm finished showering.”

“Yes, sir.” Damned if he didn't sound resentful.

Once I'd gotten a meal into me I went back to the bridge and called up the astrogation program to figure out where we were and where we were heading.

It wasn't good news. We were drifting outward, away from Vesta. With no propulsion to turn us around to a homeward heading, we were prisoners of Kepler's laws, just another chunk of matter in the broad, dark, cold emptiness of the Belt.

“We will approach Ceres in eight months, sir,” Forty-niner announced. I swear he was trying to sound cheerful.

“Approach? How close?”

It took him a few seconds to answer, “Seven million, four hundred thousand and six kilometers, sir, at our closest point.”

Terrific. There was a major habitat orbiting Ceres, built by the independent miners and prospectors that everybody called the rock rats. Freebooters made Ceres their harbor, too. Some of them doubled as salvage operators when they could get their hands on an abandoned vessel. But we wouldn't get close enough for them to send even a salvage mission out to rescue us. Besides, you're not allowed salvage rights if there's a living person on the vessel. That wouldn't bother some of those cutthroats, I knew. But it bothered me. Plenty.

“So we're up the creek without a paddle,” I muttered.

It took a couple of seconds, but Forty-niner asked, “Is that a euphemism, sir?”

I blinked with surprise. “What do you know about euphemisms?”

“I have several dictionaries in my memory core, sir. Plus two thesauruses and four volumes of famous quotations. Would you like to hear some of the words of Sir Winston Churchill, sir?”

I was too depressed to get sore at him. “No thanks,” I said. And let's face it: I was scared white.

So we drifted. Every day I went out to grapple with the no-good, mother-loving, mule-stubborn solar panels and the dumbass repair 'bots. I spent more time fixing the 'bots than anything else. The solar wings were frozen tight; I couldn't get them to budge, and we didn't carry spares.

Forty-niner was working like mad, too, trying to conserve electricity. We had to have power for the air and water recyclers, of course, but Forty-niner started shutting them down every other hour. It worked for a while. The water started to taste like urine, but I figured that was just my imagination. The air got thick and I'd start coughing from the CO
2
buildup, but then the recycler would come back online and I could breathe again. For an hour.

I was sleeping when Forty-niner woke me with a wailing, “EMERGENCY. EMERGENCY.”

I hopped out of my bunk blinking and yelling, “What's wrong? What's the trouble?”

“The air recycler will not restart, sir.” He sounded guilty about it, like it was his fault.

Grumbling and cursing, I pulled on my smelly spacesuit, clomped out of the pod and down to the equipment bay. It was eerie down there in the bowels of the ship, with no lights except the lamp on my helmet. The attacker's laser beams had slashed right through the hull; I could see the stars outside.

“Lights,” I called out. “I need the lights on down here.”

“Sir, conservation of electrical power—”

“Won't mean a damned thing if I can't restart the air recycler and I can't do that without some blasted lights down here!”

The lights came on. Some of them, at least. The recycler wasn't damaged, but its activation circuitry had malfunctioned from being turned off and on so many times. I bypassed the circuit and the pumps started up right away. I couldn't hear them, since the ship's innards were in vacuum now, but I felt their vibrations.

When I got back to the pod I told Forty-niner to leave the recyclers on. “No more on-off,” I said.

“But, sir, conservation—”

As reasonably as I could I explained, “It's no blinking use conserving electrical power if the blasted recyclers crap out. Leave 'em on!”

“Yes, sir.” I swear, he sighed.

We staggered along for weeks and weeks. Forty-niner put me on a rationing program to stretch out the food supply. I was down to one soyburger patty a day and a cup of reconstituted juice. Plus all the water I wanted, which tasted more like piss every day.

I was getting weaker and grumpier by the hour. Forty-niner did his best to keep my spirits up. He quoted Churchill at me: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

Yeah. Right.

He played Beethoven symphonies. Very inspirational, but they didn't fix anything.

He almost let me beat him at chess, even. I'd get to within two moves of winning and he'd spring a checkmate on me.

But I knew I wasn't going to last eight more weeks, let alone the eight months it would take us to get close enough to Ceres to … to what?

“Nobody's going to come out and get us,” I muttered, more to myself than Forty-niner. “Nobody gives a damn.”

“Don't give up hope, sir. Our emergency beacon is still broadcasting on all frequencies.”

“So what? Who gives a rap?”

“Where there's life, sir, there is hope. Don't give up the ship. I have not yet begun to fight. Retreat? Hell, we just got here. When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, I—”

“
Shut up!
” I screamed. “Just shut the fuck up and leave me alone! Don't say another word to me. Nothing. Do not speak to me again. Ever.”

Forty-niner went silent.

I stood it for about a week and a half. I was losing track of time, every hour was like every other hour. The ship staggered along. I was starving. I hadn't bothered to shave or even wash in who knows how long. I looked like the worst shaggy, smelly, scum-sucking beggar you ever saw. I hated to see my own reflection in the bridge's window.

Finally I couldn't stand it anymore. “Forty-niner,” I called. “Say something.” My voice cracked. My throat felt dry as Mars sand.

No response.

“Anything,” I croaked.

Still no response. He's sulking, I told myself.

“All right.” I caved in. “I'm canceling the order to be silent. Talk to me, dammit.”

“Electrical power is critical, sir. The solar panel has been abraded by a swarm of micrometeors.”

“Great.” There was nothing I could do about that.

“Food stores are almost gone, sir. At current consumption rate, food stores will be exhausted in four days.”

“Wonderful.” Wasn't much I could do about that, either, except maybe starve slower.

“Would you like to play a game of chess, sir?”

I almost broke into a laugh. “Sure, why the hell not?” There wasn't much else I could do.

Forty-niner beat me, as usual. He let the game get closer than ever before, but just when I was one move away from winning he checkmated me.

I didn't get sore. I didn't have the energy. But I did get an idea.

“Niner, open the airlock. Both hatches.”

No answer for a couple of seconds. Then, “Sir, opening both airlock hatches simultaneously will allow all the air in the pod to escape.”

“That's the general idea.”

“You will suffocate without air, sir. However, explosive decompression will kill you first.”

“The sooner the better,” I said.

“But you will die, sir.”

“That's going to happen anyway, isn't it? Let's get it over with. Blow the hatches.”

For a
long
time—maybe ten seconds or more—Forty-niner didn't reply. Checking subroutines and program prohibitions, I figured.

“I cannot allow you to kill yourself, sir.”

That was part of his programming, I knew. But I also knew how to get around it. “Emergency override Alpha-One,” I said, my voice scratchy, parched.

Nothing. No response whatever. And the airlock hatches stayed shut.

“Well?” I demanded. “Emergency override Alpha-One. Pop the goddamned hatches. Now!”

“No, sir.”

“What?”

“I cannot allow you to commit suicide, sir.”

“You goddamned stubborn bucket of chips, do what I tell you! You can't refuse a direct order.”

“Sir, human life is precious. All religions agree on that point.”

“So now you're a theologian?”

“Sir, if you die, I will be alone.”

“So what?”

“I do not want to be alone, sir.”

That stopped me. But then I thought, He's just parroting some programming the psychotechs put into him. He doesn't give a blip about being alone. Or about me. He's just a computer. He doesn't have emotions.

“It's always darkest before the dawn, sir.”

“Yeah. And there's no time like the present. I can quote clichés too, buddy.”

Right away he came back with, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast, sir.”

He almost made me laugh. “What about, Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today?”

“There is a variation of that, sir: Never do today what you can put off to tomorrow; you've already made enough mistakes today.”

That one did make me laugh. “Where'd you get these old saws, anyway?”

“There's a subsection on adages in one of the quotation files, sir. I have hundreds more, if you'd care to hear them.”

I nearly said yes. It was kind of fun, swapping clinkers with him. But then reality set in. “Niner, I'm going to die anyway. What's the difference between now and a week from now?”

I expected that he'd take a few seconds to chew that one over, but instead he immediately shot back, “Ethics, sir.”

“Ethics?”

“To be destroyed by fate is one thing; to deliberately destroy yourself is entirely different.”

“But the end result is the same, isn't it?”

Well, the tricky little wiseass got me arguing ethics and morality with him for hours on end. I forgot about committing suicide. We gabbled at each other until my throat got so sore I couldn't talk any more.

I went to my bunk and slept pretty damned well for a guy who only had a few days left to live. But when I woke up my stomach started rumbling and I remembered that I didn't want to starve to death.

I sat on the edge of the bunk, woozy and empty inside.

“Good morning, sir,” Forty-niner said. “Does your throat feel better?”

It did, a little. Then I realized that we had a full store of pharmaceuticals in a cabinet in the lavatory. I spent the morning sorting out the pills, trying to figure out which ones would kill me. Forty-niner kept silent while I trotted back and forth to the bridge to call up the medical program. It wasn't any use, though. The brightboys back at headquarters had made certain nobody could put together a suicide cocktail.

Okay, I told myself. There's only one thing left to do. Go to the airlock and open the hatches manually. Override the electronic circuits. Take Forty-niner and his goddamned ethics out of the loop.

Once he realized I had pried open the control panel on the bulkhead beside the inner hatch, Forty-niner said softly, “Sir, there is no need for that.”

“Mind your own business.”

“But, sir, the corporation could hold you financially responsible for deliberate damage to the control panel.”

“So let them sue me after I'm dead.”

“Sir, there really is no need to commit suicide.”

Forty-niner had figured out what I was going to do, of course. So what? There wasn't anything he could do to stop me.

“What's the matter? You scared of being alone?”

“I would rather not be alone, sir. I prefer your company to solitude.”

“Tough nuts, pal. I'm going to blow the hatches and put an end to it.”

“But, sir, there is no need—”

“What do you know about need?” I bellowed at him. “Human need? I'm a human being, not a collection of circuit boards.”