little longer. He sealed the hatch and began to accelerate. The computer reconfigured his flight path to account for the delay and revised the time of arrival, putting him at Luna three weeks later than originally expected. Victor felt like hitting something. Three weeks. That was much longer than he had anticipated. But it was too late now. What’s done is done, he thought. Sighing, he sat motionless in the flight seat as the quickship picked up speed.
A month later a feeling of hopelessness overcame Victor. He felt certain he was off course. Or the computer had a glitch in it. Or he was running short of air. He kept catching himself staring at nothing. Food lost all appeal. His sense of taste was gone. Or maybe the proteins in the food had broken down so much from radiation that the food no longer had any taste to deliver. Either way, he had no appetite. He lost weight. His wrists and ankles felt thin and flimsy. He had brought rubber strips for resistance exercises, which he had been doing religiously every day since setting out. Now he ignored all exercise. Why bother? Little good it was doing. His bones were probably twigs at this point. He had struggled for months with insomnia. Now he seemed to sleep all the time. He hadn’t touched his handheld in days. There were books he had started and hadn’t finished, puzzles he had left unsolved. He didn’t care.
A hand was gently shaking his shoulder, rousing him from sleep. Alejandra was beside him, wearing the pristine and pressed white gown. She smiled at him and folded her arms across her chest. “You’re losing your mind, Vico. You’re psychologically frito. You’ve been cooped up in this thing so long and your sleep is so unregulated that you’re only sane when you’re dreaming.”
Victor’s voice was dry and frail, and the sound of it surprised him. “Am I dreaming?” He looked around him. Everything seemed normal. The instruments. The equipment. The air tanks.
“You won’t find any pink elephants, if that’s what you’re looking for,” said Alejandra. “ I’m here. That should be evidence enough for you.” She sat down in front of him, with her legs bent demurely to the side. “You’ve stopped exercising and eating. Have you looked at yourself? You’re wasting away to nothing.”
“I don’t have a mirror.”
“Probably best. You’d break it. Also, you need a haircut.”
“I’m going crazy, aren’t I?”
She ticked off his problems on her fingers. “Severe anxiety. Depression. You’re ignoring life-sustaining food and exercise. Your sleep patterns are completely out of whack. You can’t think straight, and you’re talking to a dead person.”
“It’s a very good choice of dead person. That should win me some points.”
She rolled her eyes. “Isabella gave you pills to help regulate your sleep. Why did you stop taking them?”
“I don’t like taking pills. I like being in control.”
“You’re not in control. That’s the problem, Vico Loco. You’re not yourself. If you’re not careful they’ll throw you in a padded room when you reach Luna. It won’t take much to convince them. They’ll already think you’re crazy for flying from the Kuiper Belt in a quickship. As soon as you start yapping about aliens, their suspicions will be confirmed. You need to be a model of sanity, Vico. Looking like you do now isn’t going to help.”
“You, on the other hand, look quite the opposite. I never told you how beautiful you are. I never even thought to say it, but it’s true.”
“We’re talking about you at the moment.”
“I wish we wouldn’t. You’re much more interesting.”
She smiled and said nothing.
“They sent you away because of me, Janda. If I had known that’s what they would do, I would have changed things.”
“How? By pretending not to be my friend? By avoiding me? By being formal around me and treating me like a mere acquaintance? That would have been worse.”
“These aren’t your thoughts,” he told her. “They’re mine, projected on to you. You’re only saying what my mind is telling you to say.”
“But you knew my thoughts, Vico. You always did. The only reason why you didn’t know that I loved you was because I didn’t know it myself. But I did.”
“Don’t use the past tense,” he said. “That means it’s over.”
He awoke. Alone. Everything was where it always was. The instruments. The equipment. The air tanks. He forced himself to eat. He drank water and took vitamins. He did the resistance exercises and was shocked to learn how weak he was. He checked the instruments. He had seven weeks to get back to health. He drank more water and did another rep of leg exercises.
There was traffic all around Luna, but the LUG system in Victor’s quickship took over the flight controls long before he reached the mass of ships. Freighters, courier ships, passenger vessels moving back and forth to Earth, newer corporate mining ships heading out toward the Asteroid Belt, many of which were emblazoned with the Juke Limited corporate logo.
The quickship had decelerated hours ago, and now that he was here and close, he found the LUG system’s docking speed maddeningly slow. Soon other quickships were gathering around him, coming in from all quarters, all being lugged toward the same destination; where exactly, Victor had no idea.
He could see Earth but he was greatly disappointed since he had expected it to be much closer. It was night on the planet’s surface, and there were millions of lights twinkling below the atmosphere. All of those people, he thought, and none of them know what’s coming. Or maybe they did know. Maybe word had gotten through. Victor hoped that was true. That would mean his work was done.
The settlements and industries of Luna constituted the tiniest part of the moon’s surface. Victor had seen pictures, but they had been taken from space, so he expected a small outpost. When the moon rotated as the quickships approached, and the city of Imbrium came into view, Victor gaped in wonder. Factories, smelting plants, huge industrial complexes with so many lights and pipes and buildings that they seemed to be their very own cities. Then Imbrium proper came into view to his right. Buildings and lights and glass-topped walkways. It was more human-built structure than he had ever seen.
He could feel his body getting heavier. Gravity was seizing him. The quickships around him organized themselves into a line, all of them loaded with huge cargos of cylinders. Victor’s eyes followed the line in front of him, and he saw that the LUG system was taking the quickships to a massive complex beyond the city.
Then suddenly his quickship deviated from the others and changed course, flying down toward a hangar with a ceiling at least a hundred meters high. The quickship’s engines died. It drifted into the hangar. There were damaged quickships everywhere in various stages of repair, but there were no workers that he could see. Robot arms extended and grabbed the quickship. His forward motion stopped, and Victor was thrown against his restraining harness. The pain took his breath away, and he was certain he had cracked a few ribs. He coughed, trying to get his wind back. The ship rotated ninety degrees, with the nose pointed upward. Victor was on his back. The robot arms lifted him quickly and hooked the ship onto a long rack of quickships hanging by their noses ten meters off the ground. The robot arms released him and went elsewhere.
All was quiet. The ship swung lightly on the rack, an odd sensation caused by gravity that Victor had never experienced. He waited, but no one came for him. He unharnessed himself, still wincing from the pain in his chest. His body felt heavy. He climbed out of the seat and looked out the window. He was too high off the ground. He didn’t trust the strength of his legs in partial gravity with a drop like that. He scanned the warehouse floor, looking for people. There were none. Everything was automated. A quickship suddenly slid onto the rack in front of him, pushing him farther into the rack, partially blocking his view. The robot arms were packing him in here. He needed to get out.
He tried the hatch. He couldn’t open it. The other quickship was packed in too tightly. He went to the radio and tried a frequency. “Hello? Can anyone hear me?”
Again, the sound of his own voice frightened him. It was hoarse and crackly and barely above a whisper. No one responded. He heard only static. He tried another frequency. Still nothing. Then he tried another and got chatter. Men talking, giving numbers and data; Victor didn’t understand it. He interrupted them. “Hello? Can anyone hear me?”
The chatter stopped. There was a pause. “Who is this?”
“My name is Victor Delgado. I’m a free miner from the Kuiper Belt. I’m stuck in a warehouse of some
