“Sir, what are the chances that in the siege of Leningrad in World War II the first artillery shell fired by the German army into the city would kill the only elephant in the Leningrad zoo? The statistical chances were astronomical, but that is exactly what happened, sir.”
So I let him babble on about strange happenings and dramatic rescues. Why argue? It made him feel better, I guess. That is, if Forty-niner had any feelings. Which he didn’t, I knew. Well, I guess letting him natter on with his rah-rah pep talk made me feel better. A little.
It was a real shock when a fusion torch ship took shape on my comm screen. Complete with standard registration info spelled out on the bar running along the screen’s bottom: Hu Davis, out of Ceres.
“Be there in an hour and a half,” Donahoo said, still sneering. “Christ, your old Jerky really looks like a scrap heap. You musta taken some battering.”
Could Forty-niner fake that? I asked myself. Then a part of my mind warned, don’t get your hopes up. It’s all a simulation.
Except that, an hour and a half later, the Hu Davis was right alongside us, as big and detailed as life. I could see flecks on its meteor bumpers where micrometeors had abraded them. I just stared. It couldn’t be a simulation. Not that detailed.
And Donahoo was saying, “I’m comin’ in through your main airlock.”
“No!” I yelped. “Wait! I’ve got to close the inner hatch first.”
Donahoo looked puzzled. “Why the fuck’s the inside hatch open?”
I didn’t answer him. I was already ducking through the hatch of the bridge. Damned if I didn’t get another electric shock closing airlock’s the inner hatch.
I stood there wringing my hand while the outer hatch slid open. I could see the status lights on the control panel go from red for vacuum through amber and finally to green. Forty-niner could fake all that, I knew. This might still be nothing more than an elaborate simulation.
But then the inner hatch sighed open, and Donahoo stepped through, big and ugly as life.
His potato nose twitched. “Christ, it smells like a garbage pit in here.”
That’s when I knew it wasn’t a simulation. He was really there. I was saved.
Well, it would’ve been funny if everybody wasn’t so ticked off at me. Donahoo had been sent by corporate headquarters all the way from Vesta to Ceres to pick me up and turn off the distress call Forty-niner had been beaming out on the broadband frequencies for all those weeks.
It was only a milliwatt signal, didn’t cost us a piffle of electrical power, but that teeny little signal got picked up at the Lunar Farside Observatory, where they had built the big SETI radio telescope. When they first detected our distress call, the astronomers went delirious: they thought they’d found an intelligent extraterrestrial signal, after more than a century of searching. They were sore as hell when they realized it was only a dinky old waterbot in trouble, not aliens trying to say hello.
They didn’t give a rat’s ass of a hoot about Forty-niner and me, but as long as our Mayday was being beamed out, their fancy radio telescope search for ETs was screwed. So they bleeped to the International Astronautical Authority, and the IAA complained to corporate headquarters, and Donahoo got called on the carpet at Vesta and told to get to JRK49N and turn off that damned distress signal!
And that’s how we got rescued. Not because anybody cared about an aged waterbot that was due to be scrapped, or the very junior dumbass riding on it. We got saved because we were bothering the astronomers at Farside.
Donahoo made up some of the cost of his rescue mission by selling off what was left of Forty-niner to one of the salvage outfits at Ceres. They started cutting up the old bird as soon as we parked it in orbit there.
But not before I put on a clean, new space suit and went aboard JRK49N one last time.
I had forgotten how big the ship was. It was huge, a big massive collection of spherical tanks that dwarfed the fusion drive thruster and the cramped little pod I had lived in all those weeks. Hanging there in orbit, empty and alone, Forty-niner looked kind of sad. Long, nasty gashes had been ripped through the water tanks; I thought I could see rimes of ice glittering along their ragged edges in the faint starlight.
Then I saw the flickers of laser torches. Robotic scavengers were already starting to take the ship apart.
Floating there in weightlessness, my eyes misted up as I approached the ship. I had hated being on it, but I got teary-eyed just the same. I know it was stupid, but that’s what happened, so help me.
I didn’t go to the pod. There was nothing there that I wanted, especially not my cruddy old space suit. No, instead I worked my way along the cleats set into the spherical tanks, hand over gloved hand, to get to the heart of the ship, where the fusion reactor and power generator were housed.
And Forty-niner’s CPU.
“Hey, whattarya doin’ there?” One of the few humans directing the scavenger robots hollered at me, so loud I thought my helmet earphones would melt down.
“I’m retrieving the computer’s hard drive,” I said.
“You got permission?”
“I was the crew. I want the hard core. It’s not worth anything to you, is it?”
“We ain’t supposed to let people pick over the bones,” he said. But his tone was lower, not so belligerent.
“It’ll only take a couple of minutes,” I said. “I don’t want anything else; you can have all the rest.”
“Damn right we can. Company paid good money for this scrap pile.”
I nodded inside my helmet and went through the open hatch that led down to JRK49N’s heart. And brain. It only took me a few minutes to pry open the CPU and disconnect the
