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.