The worst parts were the silence, the unvarying temperature, the darkness. A human brain needs constant external stimulus or it starts to malfunction. And the time was fast approaching when the sound of my voice inside his helmet would no longer be enough to preserve his mental health—though he still hadn’t started talking to his unknown parents. I would have done what I promised, I swear. But I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. And he still had moments of lucidity now and then that made me think about things I’d never considered before.
“Raymond, you think Makrow will end up getting rid of Giorgio Weekman himself? He’s not worth anything to Makrow outside of this system, and Makrow doesn’t seem like the sort of person—the sort of Cetian, I mean—that travels with excess baggage.”
“If it’s any consolation to you, I think that’s exactly what he’ll do. I’d been thinking the same thing, Vasily. There’s Cetians and Colossaurs all over the galaxy, they say, but as to humans, outside of here—”
“But that poor bastard Giorgio must still believe they’re going to take him. I almost feel sorry for him. I would have treated him nicer. A fast, merciful death, no fooling around. But his palsies are likely to jettison him far from nowhere, in some binary system’s Oort cloud. Well, at least he’ll get to see other suns in the end. I’d like to visit them. Raymond, you ever left the Solar System?”
“No, Vasily. All of us, all the pozzies, are on board the Burroughs. In fact, this is the first time I’ve ever left the station in all my fifty-seven years. And I’d gladly have skipped the trip, now that I think of it.”
“Good thing at least one of us still has a sense of humor. But know what, pozzie? I can’t say I’m going to die happy. Not if I’ve never seen the stars, never flown across the galaxy. The aliens always say we’re not ready yet, but I say: who are they to decide for us? Who told them they could set themselves up as our lords and gods, with the right to rule over life and death for humanity?”
“Technology.”
“Fuck technology. Don’t you think we’d be better off now if they’d left us alone? We have heaps of wonderful little gadgets and they might as well’ve told us they work by magic. Not like they ever taught us how they work or what theories they’re based on. We let them turn us into a race of customers. We don’t invent anything—what’s the point? The aliens already invented more than we could dream up in a thousand years. Get me? I don’t think they really even want our raw materials. All they want is to keep us down, keep us like this, neuter our initiative.”
“Vasily, that’s an interesting intergalactic version of an old conspiracy theory, and I hate to contradict you and tear your theory down—but I know the merchants, and I know that they aren’t faking their greed for raw materials, not in the least.”
“Raymond, enough shitting around. It’s time. Open my fucking valve before I change my mind. Been nice knowing you, really. If I had another life to live I might even think about becoming a cop, if I could have you for a partner.”
“Wow, sounds like a declaration of true love.”
“Go to hell, bag of bolts.”
“We’re here already. But changing the subject—you haven’t told me about your parents.”
“Fuck my parents and my whole family. I want you to open my valve, I’m telling you.”
“You’re sure?”
“Sure as I’ll ever be. Okay, I still remember I’m an orphan, but my mind is going, I can tell. Over your shoulder, I see three stars moving toward us, and stars don’t move.”
But his mind was perfectly clear. The fact was (thank God—any God, to be on the safe side), those weren’t stars.
The three ships from the Milano 5 asteroid prospecting fleet found us on day seventeen of our ordeal, nearly a million miles from the orbit of what had once been Asteroid G 7834 XC. Their hypersensitive instruments succeeded where the Chimera’s sensors had failed. Was it once more due to Vasily’s strange power, or dumb luck?
No matter. The point is, there they were.
It took the miners ten minutes to decide whether to rescue us after they detected our image. It’s easy to imagine the “humanitarian” discussion they had after discovering us: a tranquil, disinterested debate about rewards for rescues, criminal responsibility, and the odds of going to prison, about what would happen if they decided to play dumb and keep going while hushing it all up….
Luckily you can still find a hint of ethics even among asteroid prospectors, that mutant subspecies of space rat. They helped me pull Vasily aboard (his legs, like the rest of his muscles, were no longer responsive after floating in total weightlessness without any exercise for more than two weeks). They grumbled about how he was draining their reserves of blood plasma and fresh food, but they also did their minimal bit to help El Afortunado’s debilitated body get back to more or less working order by repeatedly administering general dialysis and intravenous metabolic treatments.
But their protests grew louder and angrier, almost spilling over into mutiny, when I pulled my extraordinary police authorization on them by asking them (by which I mean ordering them) to send us off in one of their three ships to the nearest base where we might catch a rapid spacecraft to the Burroughs.
There was shouting, cursing, wailing, and exclamations of “that’s what we get for rescuing a damn pozzie alien-hugger” from a couple of crew members. But when one of the prospectors, who evidently invested all his profits in anabolic steroids and nutritional supplements (he wasn’t very tall, but his arms were thicker than my thighs and his back was so broad he would only look small next to a Colossaur—so broad that it would be easier to jump over him than to walk around him—and also covered with hair) decided to resort to stronger measures, putting an electric stiletto to my throat when he thought I wasn’t looking, I had to show him that the extraordinary powers of the Burroughs Space Station Positronic Police Force aren’t based solely on rational persuasion and an assumption of good behavior. I’d left all my weapons on the shuttle, but a positronic robot’s synthetic muscles don’t grow weak after three or even three hundred weeks without exercise and in zero gravity.
After I reduced the rash gorilla’s stiletto to a spark-spewing knot and rearranged his overdeveloped right arm into an anatomically dubious angle dangling from his shoulder, his shipmates suddenly became a lot more collaborative.
A lot quieter, too.
That’s why I didn’t hear until the third day, just a few hours before we landed at the zero-g cubbyhole that the zero-prospect miners called a base, that Vasily had guessed right.
An unidentified ship, coming from an undetermined direction, had attacked the Estrella Rom three days earlier, hitting it with so much firepower that all the Romanis’ combined defenses were unable to resist after the first volley.
The Chimera destroyer (it could only have been Makrow and his sidekicks, though the bit about the “unidentified ship from an undetermined direction” showed that the aliens were being as hard-nosed about censorship as ever—perhaps for good reason this time; if the human police knew what was orbiting their Earth, they might have refused en masse to man their ships) didn’t stop at blasting the whole flimsy structure of the wheel to smithereens. With sadistic thoroughness, they hunted down every wretch, one by one, who hadn’t been lucky enough to die in the explosive decompression that blew the shabby station apart when its seals failed. Escape pods and space suits alike became target practice for their sick game of shipwreck hunting. And by all accounts their aim was excellent. The thuggish miner I had beaten described to me, vindictively and with every gory detail, how Earth police were still finding punctured pressure suits and pulverized pods all over the orbit.