“Power system storage failure,” I read. “See a qualified technician immediately for replacement of storage unit. Unauthorized attempts to repair the system may further damage the SafetySuit’s operation and void its warranty. Power remaining for normal operation: 4 hours, 17 minutes, 51 seconds.”
Not only had I irreparably destroyed the suit’s recharging system, I had also discharged most of its stored-up power.
My torpid brain kept my eyes focused on the ever-diminishing seconds of my remaining life without really registering them.
That was when I began to panic.
I might well have arrived in Earth orbit literally frozen into a fetal crouch if yet another factor over which I had absolutely no control hadn’t come into play.
It took me a long, long while to become aware of it. Finally, however, I noticed that my powersuit and I were no longer huddled in the beltship’s easy chair; now we were floating a good 20 centimeters above it.
Sluggishly my brain began to function again.
I was no longer constrained by the puny .1 gravity of the accelerating ore-ball. Some time in the 15 minutes and 43 seconds since I’d last been really aware of the remaining time in the powersuit, the Express’s propulsion system had shut itself off. According to VettiLou Propokov’s programming, we were now drifting towards Earth at a constant 305 klicks per second—without gravity.
I floated aimlessly around the cabin, my mind racing furiously. No gravity, no gravity, no gravity—how did that help me in my present predicament?
I couldn’t see that it did.
Did it, in fact, make things worse?
My focus came back to the inexorable passage of time in my faceplate display: 3 hours, 43 minutes, 07 seconds remaining in my powersuit.
The absence of gravity was definitely making things worse: just thinking about it, I had already wasted sixteen minutes of my few hours of remaining life.
For want of anything better to do, I let my gloved hands clumsily explore the various pockets and pouches attached to the powersuit. All of them were empty—except one.
Here I found two meters of neatly coiled recharge cable that some tidy soul had conscientiously tucked away for future repairs. On the end unchewed by my hypothetical Cerean rat was the universal adapter plug. One side of the plug had several lines of fine print on it. Squinting, I read:
“Your SafetySuit has been designed to work on its custom-made, built-in, 28-volt alternating current storage unit. Any attempt to recharge it from a standard 28-volt, direct-current prime power outlet without the use of this adapter will result in severe damage to the SafetySuit and will void any warranty or guarantees regarding its power unit.”
So I’d plugged an AC suit into a DC outlet. To laugh or to cry, that was the question.
Instead, I uttered a sharp scream of rage and threw the plug so viciously into the galley that I was launched backwards across the cabin. Tumbling and waving my arms, I ended up with my head rapping the porthole beside the airlock. Through the porthole I stared vacantly into the darkness of the ore-ball’s interior. Somewhere on the far side of the blackness I could catch a few faint glints of light reflected from the beltship’s cabin. The barrels of booze they’d stored aboard for the alcoholic Crown Prince Ata, I told myself idly, and tugged my mind back to—
Barrels of booze?
Of 180 proof booze?
Two seconds later I had pulled myself down to the airlock and was fumbling frantically with its controls.
If only the barrels were small enough to go through the airlock....
They were—with one centimeter to spare.
If there’d still been any gravity, of course, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. Even without it, the 250-liter double-walled, stainless steel barrels still retained all of their mass and inertia. It was all I could do to pry them away from their fittings and then slowly shepherd them over to the beltship. By the time I’d manhandled the seventh and final barrel through the airlock and into the almost negligible remaining cabin space there were only twenty-seven minutes of power remaining in the suit—its life-support system had been working double-overtime to keep me warm in the icy chill of the ore-ball.
Now two of the barrels lay on my bunk, one sat upright in the easy chair with another perched on top, and the three others filled what remained of the deck space. There was just enough room on top of those three to lay the mattress I’d previously taken from the bunk. When the ore-ball flipped over and began its deceleration three days and fourteen hours out of Earth, and gravity returned to the cabin, I’d need somewhere to sleep.
Assuming, of course, I was still alive...
Once again free of the confines of my powersuit, I inspected the seven barrels of high-class rot-gut. The Crown Prince either had a very catholic taste in alcohol or his well-wishers on Pallas were taking no chances in trying to capture his fancy. Each barrel of “Genuine Hygeian Eau de Vie, Guaranteed 180 Proof” was a different flavor: plum, passion fruit, apricot, pineapple, cherry, mango, and pear.
Eau de Vie, according to my limited knowledge of French, seemed to mean Water of Life. I supposed that if you were alcoholic enough, it probably was. In my own particular case, I fervently hoped it would live up to its name.
I cast a thoughtful eye upon the two barrels lying lengthwise on the bunk. I would start with them because their bungholes were already pointed towards the ceiling, but I’d start carefully. I’d already nearly irredeemably doomed myself with my feckless recharging of the powersuit. Another mistake of that seriousness, I knew, would absolutely kill me.
I tugged at my chin. I needed three things: a wrench to unscrew the stainless steel plug from the bunghole; a wick; and a starter.
The wrench was easy. Along with half a dozen other basic tools I found one in the galley’s closet.
The wick was almost as easy. A spare shirt labeled 100 percent cotton that I’d tucked away in a drawer behind the bunk was torn into strips.
The starter was harder. In fact, half an hour later, I was still thinking about it, with an ever-mounting degree of panic lurking a hair’s breadth away.
There was nothing at all in the belt-ship to start a fire, no matches, no electric sparker, no cook top, no soldering iron.
Not even two sticks to rub together.
The people who design and furnish beltships don’t want you to have fires on board.
Think, White, think!
While I was thinking, I unscrewed the plugs from the two barrels of hootch that occupied my bunk. Purely out of intellectual curiosity I stuck a finger into the liquid in the closer of the two. It felt cool but not icy, and certainly not frozen; the drums, I realized, were actually enormous thermos bottles with half a dozen centimeters of vacuum between their double steel walls. Cautiously I licked my finger. VettiLou Propokov was right: the Water of Life was both sweet and sticky and yet harsh enough to peel the skin from the back of your throat. The pineapple was really bad; the cherry, on the other hand, perhaps wasn’t all that awful. Thoughtfully, I stuck my finger in again, licked it clean. A warm glow ran through my body. It had been a long time since my last Pernod and water at the Cafe des Mondes. And I was awfully, awfully cold....
The Devil was shaking me violently by the shoulder. “It’s time to go to hell, White!” he was shouting at me, “time to go to hell!” All around his evil red face, orange and yellow flames flickered and twisted. I moaned feebly. Already the heat was overwhelming—and I wasn’t even in hell yet. Even when I was dead, life wasn’t fair....