“Spare us the profanity, Mr. Gunn,” said the Toad.
“And kindly stick to the facts of the case,” the chief judge added, frowning. “We don’t need a sales pitch for your personal yacht.”
Sam shrugged and glanced at me. I realized that if he was trying to drum up interest in Joker, he must be feeling pretty desperate, financially.
The point is—Sam blithely continued—that Joker was the only craft in the belt that had a chance in … in the solar system, of helping the Twins. Nobody else could get to them in eleven days or less.
But as I sat in the bridge, in my form-accommodating, reclinable swiveling command chair, which has built-in massage and heat units (the chief judge glowered at Sam), and looked into the details of the Twins’ diagnostics, I realized they were in even deeper trouble than I had thought. The graphs on the screens showed that not only had their recycler failed, they were also losing air; must’ve been punctured by a centimeter-sized asteroid, punched right through their armor and sprung a leak in their main air tank. Maybe it knocked out their recycling system, too.
Their real problem was with their automated maintenance equipment. How could their system allow the air recycling equipment to go down? And their damned outside robot was supposed to fix punctures as soon as they happened. Theirs didn’t. It was just sitting on the outer skin of the hull, frozen into immobility. Maybe an asteroid had dinged it, too. Their diagnostics didn’t show why the robot wasn’t working.
They needed air, or at least oxygen. And they needed it in a hurry. Even if I got to them in a day or so and fixed the leak and repaired their recycling system they wouldn’t have enough air to survive.
I spent the next few hours chewing on their problem. Or really, getting the best computers I could reach to chew on it. Joker has some really sophisticated programs in its access (the chief judge scowled again) but I also contacted my headquarters on Ceres and even requested time on the IAA system. I had to come up with a solution that would work. And fast.
By the time I had showered, put on a fresh set of coveralls, and taken a bite of food, the various analyses started showing up on the multiple display screens in Jokers very comfortable yet efficiently laid-out bridge. (“Mr. Gunn!” all three judges yelped.)
Okay, so here’s the situation. The Twins’ air is leaking out through the puncture. I can fix the puncture in ten minutes, while their dumb robot sits on its transistors and does nothing, but they’ll still run out of air in a couple of days. I can give them oxygen from Jokers water tanks—electrolyze the water, that’s simple enough. But then I won’t have enough reaction mass to get away and we’ll both be in trouble.
Now, I’ve got to admit, the thought of being marooned off Vesta with the Porno Twins had a certain appeal to it. But when I thought it over, I figured that although being with them could be great fun, dying with them wasn’t what I wanted to do.
Besides, they flatly refused to even consider letting me inside their leaking craft.
“Oh, no, Mr. Gunn!” they said, in unison. “We could never allow you to board our .ship.”
Cindy and Mindy were on my main display screen, two lovely redheads with sculpted cheekbones and emerald-green eyes and lips just trembling with emotion.
“That wouldn’t be right,” said Cindy. Or maybe it was Mindy.
“We’ve never let anyone into our ship,” said the other one.
“If we let you, then all the other miners would want to visit us, too.”
“In person!”
“In the flesh.”
“But this would be a mission of mercy,” I pleaded.
They blushed and lowered their eyes. Beautiful long silky lashes, I noticed.
“Mr. Gunn,” said Mindy. Or maybe Cindy. “How would you feel if we allowed one of your miners to board our vessel?”
“You’d want the same privilege, wouldn’t you?” the other one asked.
“I sure would,” I admitted, feeling deflated and erect at the same time.
“For your information,” said Cindy (Mindy?), “we’ve received calls from seventeen other mining ships, responding to our distress message.”
“They’re all on their way to us.”
“And they all will want to come aboard once they reach us.”
“Which we won’t allow, of course.”
“Of course,” I said, downcast. “How soon can they reach you?”
“Not for several weeks, at least.”
“We’ve informed them all that there’s no sense in their coming to us, since they can’t reach us in time.”
“But they’ve all replied that they’ll come anyway.”
I wondered who the hell was doing any mining. The Twins could cause a financial collapse of the metals and minerals market at this rate.
“Mr. Gunn,” said the chief judge sharply, “will you please stick to the facts pertaining to this case? We have no prurient interest in your sexual fantasies.”
“Or your financial problems,” added the Toad.
“But you’ve gotta understand the situation,” Sam insisted. “Unless you can see how the distances and timing were, you won’t be able to grasp the reasons for my actions.”
The chief judge heaved a long, impatient sigh. “Get on with it, Mr. Gunn,” she groused.
Okay, okay. Where was I… oh, yeah.
I didn’t believe the computer analyses when I first saw them. But each system came up with the same set of alternatives and the only one that had any chance of helping the Twins was the one I took.
It looked crazy to me, at first. But the computers had taken into account Jokers high-thrust capability; that was they key to their solution.
All I had to do was zip out to Jupiter at three g’s acceleration, grab some oxygen from one of thekice-covered Galilean moons, refuel Jokers fusion generator by scooping hydrogen and helium isotopes from Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, and then roar back to the belt at another three g’s and deliver the oxygen to the Twins.
Simple.
Also impossible.
So that’s what I did.
“May i interrupt?” asked the Beryllium Blonde, rising to her feet behind the prosecution’s table.
All three judges looked happy to accommodate her. Or maybe they were just getting tired of listening to Sam. His voice had a kind of nervous edge to it; after a while it was like listening to a mosquito whining in your ear.
“Mr. Gunn,” she said, smiling ingenuously at Sam, in the witness box, “you told this court that you consulted several computer analyses before deciding on your course of action?”
“That’s right,” Sam replied, grinning goofily at her. He seemed overjoyed that she was talking to him.
“And did each of these computer analyses specifically direct you to the Jovian moon Europa?”
Sam shifted a little on the chair. “No, they didn’t. They all showed that Ganymede would be my best bet.”
“Then why did you go to Europa?”
“I was coming to that when you interrupted me.”
“Isn’t it true, Mr. Gunn, that your entire so-called ‘mission of mercy’ was actually a clever plot to break the embargo on commercial exploitation of the Jupiter system?”
That’s where Sam should have said a simple and emphatic no! and let it go at that. But not Sam.
Apparently some things were more important to Sam even than women. He lost his goofy expression and stared straight into her china-blue eyes.
“The IAA’s embargo on the commercial development of the Jupiter system is a shuck,” Sam said evenly.
A general gasp arose. Even the judges—especially the judges—seemed shocked. For the first time since the trial had begun, the Toad looked angry.