WATERBOT by Ben Bova * * * * Illustration by Vincent Di Fate * * * * Sometimes motives matter less than results... * * * * “Wake up, dumbbutt. Jerky’s ventin’ off.” I’d been asleep in my bunk. I blinked awake, kind of groggy, but even on the little screen set into the bulkhead at the foot of the bunk I could see the smirk on Donahoo’s ugly face. He always called JRK49N “Jerky” and seemed to enjoy it when something went wrong with the vessel—which was all too often. I sat up in the bunk and called up the diagnostics display. Rats! Donahoo was right. A steady spray of steam was spurting out of the main water tank. The attitude jets were puffing away, trying to compensate for the thrust. “You didn’t even get an alarm, didja?” Donahoo said. “Jerky’s so old and feeble your safety systems are breakin’ down. You’ll be lucky if you make it back to base.” He said it like he enjoyed it. I thought that if he wasn’t so much bigger than me I’d enjoy socking him square in his nasty mouth. But I had to admit he was right; Forty-niner was ready for the scrap heap. “I’ll take care of it,” I muttered to Donahoo’s image, glad that it’d take more than five minutes for my words to reach him back at Vesta—and the same amount of time for his next wise-ass crack to get to me. He was snug and comfortable back at the corporation’s base at Vesta while I was more than ninety million kilometers away, dragging through the Belt on JRK49N. I wasn’t supposed to be out here. With my brand-new diploma in my eager little hand I’d signed up for a logistical engineer’s job, a cushy safe posting at Vesta, the second biggest asteroid in the Belt. But once I got there Donahoo jiggered the assignment list and got me stuck on this pile of junk for a six month tour of boredom and aggravation. It’s awful lonely out in the Belt. Flatlanders back Earthside picture the Asteroid Belt as swarming with rocks so thick a ship’s in danger of getting smashed. Reality is the Belt’s mostly empty space, dark and cold and bleak. A man runs more risk of going nutty out there all by himself than getting hit by a ‘roid big enough to do any damage. JRK49N was a waterbot. Water’s the most important commodity you can find in the Belt. Back in those days the news nets tried to make mining the asteroids seem glamorous. They liked to run stories about prospector families striking it rich with a nickel-iron asteroid, the kind that has a few hundred tons of gold and platinum in it as impurities. So much gold and silver and such had been found in the Belt that the market for precious metals back on Earth had gone down the toilet. But the really precious stuff was water. Still is. Plain old H2O. Basic for life support. More valuable than gold, off-Earth. The cities on the Moon needed water. So did the colonies they were building in cislunar space, and the rock rats’ habitat at Ceres, and the research station orbiting Jupiter, and the construction crews at Mercury. Water was also the best fuel for chemical rockets, too. Break it down into hydrogen and oxygen and you got damned good specific impulse. You get the picture. Finding icy asteroids wasn’t glamorous, like striking a ten-kilometer-wide rock studded with gold, but it was important. The corporations wouldn’t send waterbots out through the Belt if there wasn’t a helluva profit involved. People paid for water: paid plenty. So waterbots like weary old Forty-niner crawled through the Belt, looking for ice chunks. Once in a while a comet would come whizzing by, but they usually had too much delta vee for a waterbot to catch up to ‘em. We cozied up to icy asteroids, melted the ice to liquid water, and filled our tanks with it. The corporation had fifty waterbots combing the Belt. They were built to be completely automated, capable of finding ice-bearing asteroids and carrying the water back to the corporate base at Vesta. But there were two problems about having the waterbots go out on their own: First, the lawyers and politicians had this silly rule that a human being had to be present on the scene before any company could start mining anything from an asteroid. So it wasn’t enough to send out waterbots, you had to have at least one human being riding along on them to make the claim legal. The second reason was maintenance and repair. The ‘bots were old enough so’s something was always breaking down on them and they needed somebody to fix it. They carried little turtle-sized repair robots, of course, but those suckers broke down just like everything else. So I was more or less a glorified repairman on JRK49N. And almost glad of it, in a way. If the ship’s systems worked perfectly I would’ve gone bonzo with nothing to do for months on end. And there was a bloody war going on in the Belt. The history discs call it the Asteroid Wars, but it mostly boiled down to a fight between Humphries Space Systems and Astro Corporation for control of all the resources in the Belt. Both corporations hired mercenary troops, and there were plenty of freebooters out in the Belt, too. People got killed. Some of my best friends got killed, and I came as close to death as I ever want to be. The mercenaries usually left waterbots alone. There was a kind of unwritten agreement between the corporations that water was too important to mess around with. But some of the freebooters jumped waterbots, killed the poor dumbjohns riding on them, and sold the water at a cut-rate price wherever they could. So, grumbling and grousing, I pushed myself out of the bunk. Still in my sweaty, wrinkled skivvies, I ducked through the hatch that connected my sleeping compartment with the bridge. My compartment, the bridge, the closet-sized galley, the even smaller lavatory, life support equipment and food stores were all jammed into a pod no bigger than it had to be, and the pod itself was attached to Forty-niner’s main body by a set of struts. Nothing fancy or even comfortable. The corporation paid for water, not creature comforts. Calling it a bridge was being charitable. It was nothing more than a curving panel of screens that displayed the ship’s systems and controls, with a wraparound glassteel window above it and a high-backed reclinable command chair shoehorned into the middle of it all. The command chair was more comfortable than my bunk, actually. Crank it back and you could drift off to sleep in no time. I slipped into the chair, the skin of my bare legs sticking slightly to its fake leather padding, which was cold enough to make me break out in goose bumps. The main water tank was still venting, but the safety alarms were as quiet as monks on a vow of silence. “Niner, what’s going on?” I demanded. Forty-niner’s computer-generated voice answered, “A test, sir. I am venting some of our cargo.” The voice was male, sort of: bland, soft and sexless. The corporate psychotechnicians claimed it was soothing, but after a few weeks alone with nobody else it could drive you batty. “Stop it. Right now.” “Yes, sir.” The spurt of steam stopped immediately. The logistics graph told me we’d only lost a few hundred kilos of water, although we were damned near the redline on reaction mass for the attitude jets. Frowning at the displays, I asked, “Why’d you start pumping out our cargo?” For a heartbeat or two Forty-niner didn’t reply. That’s a long time for a computer. Just when I started wondering what was going on, “A test, sir. The water jet’s actual thrust matched the amount of thrust calculated to within a tenth of a percent.” “Why’d you need to test the amount of thrust you can get out of a water jet?” “Emergency maneuver, sir.” “Emergency? What emergency?” I was starting to get annoyed. Forty-niner’s voice was just a computer synthesis, but it sure felt like he was being evasive. “In case we are attacked, sir. Additional thrust can make it more difficult for an attacker to target us.” I could feel my blood pressure rising. “Attacked? Nobody’s gonna attack us.” “Sir, according to Tactical Manual 7703, it is necessary to be prepared for the worst that an enemy can do.” Tactical Manual 7703. For god’s sake. I had pumped that and a dozen other texts into the computer just before we started this run through the Belt. I had intended to read them, study them, improve my mind—and my job rating—while coasting through the big, dark loneliness out there. Somehow I’d never gotten around to reading any of them. But Forty-niner did, apparently. Like I said, you’ve got a lot of time on your hands cruising through the Belt. So I had brought in a library of reference texts. And then ignored them. I also brought in a full-body virtual reality simulation suit and enough erotic VR programs to while away the lonely hours. Stimulation for mind and body, I thought. But Forty-niner kept me so busy with repairs I hardly had time even for the sex sims. Donahoo was right; the old bucket was breaking down around my ears. I spent most of my waking hours patching up Forty-niner’s failing systems. The maintenance robots weren’t much help; they needed as much fixing work as all the other systems, combined. And all the time I was working—and sleeping, too, I guess—Forty-niner was going through my library, absorbing every word and taking them all seriously. “I don’t care what the tactical manual says,” I groused, “nobody’s going to attack a waterbot.” “Four waterbots have been attacked so far this year, sir. The information is available in the archives of the news media transmissions.” “Nobody’s going to attack us!” “If you say so, sir.” I swear he—I mean, it—sounded resentful, almost sullen. “I say so.” “Yes, sir.” “You wasted several hundred kilos of water,” I grumbled. Immediately that damned soft voice replied, “Easily replaced, sir. We are on course for asteroid 78-13. Once there we can fill our tanks and start for home.” “Okay,” I said. “And lay off that tactical manual.” “Yes, sir.” I felt pretty damned annoyed. “What else have you been reading?” I demanded. “The astronomy text, sir. It’s quite interesting. The ship’s astrogation program contains the rudiments of positional astronomy, but the text is much deeper. Did you realize that our solar system is only one of several million that have been—” “Enough!” I commanded. “Quiet down. Tend to maintenance and astrogation.” “Yes, sir.” I took a deep breath and started to think things over. Forty-niner’s a computer, for god’s sake, not my partner. It’s supposed to be keeping watch over the ship’s systems, not poking into military tactics or astronomy texts. I had brought a chess program with me, but after a couple of weeks I’d given it up. Forty-niner beat me every time. It never made a bad move and never forgot anything. Great for my self-esteem. I wound up playing solitaire a lot, and even then I had the feeling that the nosy busybody was just itching to tell me which card to play next. If the damned computer wasn’t buried deep in the vessel’s guts, wedged in there with the fusion reactor and the big water tanks, I’d be tempted to grab a screwdriver and give Forty-niner a lobotomy. At least the vessel was running smoothly enough, for the time being. No red lights on the board, and the only amber one was because the attitude jets’ reaction mass was low. Well, we could suck some nitrogen out of 78-13 when we got there. The maintenance log showed that it was time to replace the meteor bumpers around the fusion drive. Plenty of time for that, I told myself. Do it tomorrow. “Forty-niner,” I called, “show me the spectrographic analysis of asteroid 78-13.” The graph came up instantly on the control board’s main screen. Yes, there was plenty of nitrogen mixed in with the water. Good. “We can replenish the attitude jets’ reaction mass,” Forty-niner said. “Who asked you?” “I merely suggested—” “You’re suggesting too much,” I snapped, starting to feel annoyed again. “I want you to delete that astronomy text from your memory core.” Silence. The delay was long enough for me to hear my heart beating inside my ribs. Then, “But you installed the text yourself, sir.” “And now I’m uninstalling it. I don’t want it and I don’t need it.” “The text is useful, sir. It contains data that are very interesting. Did you know that the star Eta Carinae—” “Erase it, you bucket of chips! Your job is to maintain this vessel, not stargazing!” “My duties are fulfilled, sir. All systems are functioning nominally, although the meteor shields—” “I know about the bumpers! Erase the astronomy text.” Again that hesitation. Then, “Please don’t erase the astronomy text, sir. You have your sex simulations. Please allow me the pleasure of studying astronomy.” Pleasure? A computer talks about pleasure? Somehow the thought of it really ticked me off. “Erase it!” I commanded. “Now!” “Yes, sir. Program erased.” “Good,” I said. But I felt like a turd for doing it. By the time Donahoo called again Forty-niner was running smoothly. And quietly. “So what caused the leak?” he asked, with that smirking grin on his beefy face. “Faulty subroutine,” I lied, knowing it would take almost six minutes for him to hear my answer. Sure enough, thirteen minutes and twenty-seven seconds later Donahoo’s face comes back on my comm screen, with that spiteful lopsided sneer of his. “Your ol’ Jerky’s fallin’ apart,” he said, obviously relishing it. “If you make it back here to base I’m gonna recommend scrappin’ the bucket of bolts.” “Can’t be soon enough for me,” I replied. Most of the other JRK series of waterbots had been replaced already. Why not Forty-niner? Because he begged to study astronomy? That was just a subroutine that the psychotechs had written into the computer’s program, their idea of making the machine seem more humanlike. All it did was aggravate me, really. So I said nothing and went back to work, such as it was. Forty-niner had everything running smoothly, for once, even the life support systems. No problems. I was aboard only because of that stupid rule that a human being had to be present for any claim to an asteroid to be valid and Donahoo picked me to be the one who rode JRK49N. I sat in the command chair and stared at the big emptiness out there. I checked our ETA at 78-13. I ran through the diagnostics program. I started to think that maybe it would be fun to learn about astronomy, but then I remembered that I’d ordered Forty-niner to erase the text. What about the tactical manual? I had intended to study that when we’d started this run. But why bother? Nobody attacked waterbots, except the occasional freebooter. An attack would be a welcome relief from this monotony, I thought. Then I realized, Yeah, a short relief. They show up and bang! You’re dead. There was always the VR sim. I’d have to wriggle into the full body suit, though. Damn! Even sex was starting to look dull to me. “Would you care for a game of chess?” Forty-niner asked. “No!” I snapped. He’d just beat me again. Why bother? “A news broadcast? An entertainment vid? A discussion of tactical maneuvers in—” “Shut up!” I yelled. I pushed myself off the chair, the skin of my bare legs making an almost obscene noise as they unstuck from the fake leather. “I’m going to suit up and replace the meteor bumpers,” I said. “Very good, sir,” Forty-niner replied. While the chances of getting hit by anything bigger than a dust mote were microscopic, even a dust mote could cause damage if it was moving fast enough. So spacecraft had thin sheets of cermet attached to their vital areas, like the main thrust cone of the fusion drive. The bumpers got abraded over time by the sandpapering of micrometeors—dust motes, like I said—and they had to be replaced on a regular schedule. Outside, hovering at the end of a tether in a spacesuit that smelled of sweat and overheated electronics circuitry, you get a feeling for how alone you really are. While the little turtle-shaped maintenance ‘bots cut up the old meteor bumpers with their laser-tipped arms and welded the new ones into place, I just hung there and looked out at the universe. The stars looked back at me, bright and steady, no friendly twinkling, not out in this emptiness, just awfully, awfully far away. I looked for the bright blue star that was Earth but couldn’t find it. Jupiter was big and brilliant, though. At least, I thought it was Jupiter. Maybe Saturn. I could’ve used that astronomy text, dammit. Then a funny thought hit me. If Forty-niner wanted to get rid of me all he had to do was light up the fusion drive. The hot plasma would fry me in a second, even inside my spacesuit. But Forty-niner wouldn’t do that. Too easy. Freaky computer will just watch me go crazy with aggravation and loneliness, instead. Two more months, I thought. Two months until we get back to Vesta and some real human beings. Yeah, I said to myself. Real human beings. Like Donahoo. Just then one of the maintenance ‘bots made a little bleep of distress and shut itself down. I gave a squirt of thrust to my suit jets and glided over to it, grumbling to myself about how everything in the blinking ship was overdue for the recycler. Before I could reach the dumbass ‘bot, Forty-niner told me in that bland, calm voice of his, “Robot Six’s battery has overheated, sir.” “I’ll have to replace the battery pack,” I said. “There are no spares remaining, sir. You’ll have to use your suit’s fuel cell to power Robot Six until its battery cools to an acceptable temperature.” I hated it when Forty-niner told me what I should do. Especially since I knew it as well as he did. Even more especially because he was always right, dammit. “Give me an estimate on the time remaining to finish the meteor shield replacement.” “Fourteen minutes, eleven seconds, at optimal efficiency, sir. Add three minutes for recircuiting Robot Six’s power pack, please.” “Seventeen, eighteen minutes, then.” “Seventeen minutes, eleven seconds, sir. That time is well within the available capacity of your suit’s fuel cell, sir.” I nodded inside my helmet. Damned Forty-niner was always telling me things I already knew, or at least could figure out for myself. It irritated the hell out of me, but the blasted pile of chips seemed to enjoy reminding me of the obvious. Don’t lose your temper, I told myself. It’s not his fault, he’s programmed that way. Yeah, I grumbled inwardly. Maybe I ought to change its programming. But that would mean going down to the heart of the vessel and opening up its CPU. The big brains back at corporate headquarters put the computer in the safest place they could, not the cramped little pod I had to live in. And they didn’t want us foot soldiers tampering with the computers’ basic programs, either. I finished the bumper replacement and came back into the ship through the pod’s airlock. My spacesuit smelled pretty damned ripe when I took it off. It might be a couple hundred degrees below zero out there, but inside the suit you got soaking wet with perspiration. I ducked into the coffin-sized lav and took a nice, long, lingering shower. The water was recycled, of course, and heated from our fusion reactor. JRK49N had solar panels, sure, but out in the Belt you need really enormous wings to get a worthwhile amount of electricity from the Sun and both of the solar arrays had frozen up only two weeks out of Vesta. One of the maintenance jobs that the robots screwed up. It was on my list of things to do. I had to command Forty-niner to stop nagging me about it. The fusion-powered generator worked fine. And we had fuel cells as a backup. The solar panels could get fixed when we got back to Vesta—if the corporation didn’t decide to junk JRK49N altogether. I had just stepped out of the shower when Forty-niner’s voice came through the overhead speaker: “A vessel is in the vicinity, sir.” That surprised me. Out here you didn’t expect company. “Another ship? Where?” Somebody to talk to, I thought. Another human being. Somebody to swap jokes with and share gripes. “A very weak radar reflection, sir. The vessel is not emitting a beacon nor telemetry data. Radar puts its distance at fourteen million kilometers.” “Track?” I asked as I toweled myself. “Drifting along the ecliptic, sir, in the same direction as the main Belt asteroids.” “No thrust?” “No discernable exhaust plume, sir.” “You’re sure it’s a ship? Not an uncharted ‘roid?” “Radar reflection shows it is definitely a vessel, not an asteroid, sir.” I padded to my compartment and pulled on a fresh set of coveralls, thinking, No beacon. Drifting. Maybe it’s a ship in trouble. Damaged. “No tracking beacon from her?” I called to Forty-niner. “No telemetry signals, either, sir. No emissions of any kind.” As I ducked through the hatch into the bridge, Forty-niner called out, “It has emitted a plasma plume, sir. It is maneuvering.” Damned if his voice didn’t sound excited. I know it was just my own excitement: Forty-niner didn’t have any emotions. Still... I slid into the command chair and called up a magnified view of the radar image. And the screen immediately broke into hash. “Aw, rats!” I yelled. “What a time for the radar to conk out!” “Radar is functioning normally, sir,” Forty-niner said calmly. “You call this normal?” I rapped my knuckles on the static-streaked display screen. “Radar is functioning normally, sir. A jamming signal is causing the problem.” “Jamming?” My voice must have jumped two octaves. “Communications, radar, telemetry, and tracking beacon are all being interfered with, sir, by a powerful jamming signal.” Jamming. And the vessel out there was running silent, no tracking beacon or telemetry emissions. A freebooter! All of a sudden I wished I’d studied that tactical manual. Almost automatically I called up the comm system. “This is Humphrey Space Systems waterbot JRK49N,” I said, trying to keep my voice firm. Maybe it was a corporate vessel, or one of the mercenaries. “I repeat, waterbot JRK49N.” No response. “Their jamming blocks your message, sir.” I sat there in the command chair staring at the display screens. Broken jagged lines scrolled down all the comm screens, hissing at me like snakes. Our internal systems were still functional, though. For what it was worth, propulsion, structures, electrical power all seemed to be in the green. Life support, too. But not for long, I figured. “Compute our best course for Vesta,” I commanded. “Our present course—” “Is for 78-13, I know. Compute high-thrust course for Vesta, dammit!” “Done, sir.” “Engage the main drive.” “Sir, I must point out that a course toward Vesta will bring us closer to the unidentified vessel.” “What?” “The vessel that is jamming our communications, sir, is positioned between us and Vesta.” Rats! They were pretty smart. I thought about climbing to a higher declination, out of the ecliptic. “We could maneuver to a higher declination, sir,” Forty-niner said, calm as ever, “and leave the plane of the ecliptic.” “Right.” “But propellant consumption would be prohibitive, sir. We would be unable to reach Vesta, even if we avoided the attacking vessel.” “Who says it’s an attacking vessel?” I snapped. “It hasn’t attacked us yet.” At that instant the ship shuddered. A cluster of red lights blazed up on the display panel and the emergency alarm started wailing. “Our main deuterium tank has been punctured, sir.” “I can see that!” “Attitude jets are compensating for unexpected thrust, sir.” Yeah, and in another couple minutes the attitude jets would be out of nitrogen. No deuterium for the fusion drive and no propellant for the attitude jets. We’d be a sitting duck. Another jolt. More red lights on the board. The alarm seemed to screech louder. “Our fusion drive thruster cone has been hit, sir.” Two laser shots and we were crippled. As well as deaf, dumb, and blind. “Turn off the alarm,” I yelled, over the hooting. “I know we’re in trouble.” The alarm shut off. My ears still ringing, I stared at the hash-streaked screens and the red lights glowering at me from the display board. What to do? I can’t even call over to them and surrender. They wouldn’t take a prisoner, anyway. I felt the ship lurch again. “Another hit?” “No, sir,” answered Forty-niner. “I am swinging the ship so that the control pod faces away from the attacker.” Putting the bulk of the ship between me and those laser beams. “Good thinking,” I said weakly. “Standard defensive maneuver, sir, according to Tactical Manual 7703.” “Shut up about the damned tactical manual!” “The new meteor shields have been punctured, sir.” I swear Forty-niner added that sweet bit of news just to yank my chain. Then I saw that the maneuvering jet propellant went empty, the panel display lights flicking from amber to red. “Rats, we’re out of propellant!” I realized that I was done for. Forty-niner had tried to shield me from the attacker’s laser shots by turning the ship so that its tankage and fusion drive equipment was shielding my pod, but doing so had used up the last of our maneuvering propellant. Cold sweat beaded my face. I was gasping for breath. The freebooters or whoever was shooting at us could come up close enough to spit at us now. They’d riddle this pod and me in it. “Sir, standard procedure calls for you to put on your spacesuit.” I nodded mutely and got up from the chair. The suit was in its rack by the airlock. At least Forty-niner didn’t mention the tactical manual. I had one leg in the suit when the ship suddenly began to accelerate so hard that I slipped to the deck and cracked my skull on the bulkhead. I really saw stars flashing in my eyes. “What the hell...?” “We are accelerating, sir. Retreating from the last known position of the attacking vessel.” “Accelerating? How? We’re out of—” “I am using our cargo as propellant, sir. The thrust provided is—” Forty-niner was squirting out our water. Fine by me. Better to have empty cargo tanks and be alive than to hand a full cargo of water to the guys who killed me. I finished wriggling into my spacesuit even though my head was thumping from the fall I’d taken. Just before I pulled on the helmet I felt my scalp. There was a nice sized lump; it felt hot to my fingers. “You could’ve warned me that you were going to accelerate the ship,” I grumbled as I sealed the helmet to the suit’s neck ring. “Time was of the essence, sir,” Forty-niner replied. The ship lurched again as I checked my backpack connections. Another hit. “Where’d they get us?” I shouted. No answer. That really scared me. If they knocked Forty-niner out all the ship’s systems would bonk out, too. “Main power generator, sir,” Forty-niner finally replied. “We are now running on auxiliary power, sir.” The backup fuel cells. They wouldn’t last more than a few hours. If the damned solar panels were working—no, I realized; those big fat wings would just make terrific target practice for the bastards. Another lurch. This time I saw the bright flash through the bridge’s window. The beam must’ve splashed off the structure just outside the pod. My god, if they punctured the pod that would be the end of it. Sure, I could slide my visor down and go to the backpack’s air supply. But that’d give me only two hours of air, at best. Just enough time to write my last will and testament. “I thought you turned the pod away from them!” I yelled. “They are maneuvering, too, sir.” Great. Sitting in the command chair was awkward in the suit. The display board looked like a Christmas tree, more red then green. The pod seemed to be intact so far. Life support was okay, as long as we had electrical power. Another jolt, a big one. Forty-niner shuddered and staggered sideways like it was being punched by a gigantic fist. And then, just like that, the comm screens came back to life. Radar showed the other vessel, whoever they were, moving away from us. “They’re going away!” I whooped. Forty-niner’s voice seemed fainter than usual. “Yes, sir. They are leaving.” “How come?” I wondered. “Their last laser shot ruptured our main water tank, sir. In eleven minutes and thirty-eight seconds our entire cargo will be discharged.” I just sat there, my mind chugging hard. We’re spraying our water into space, the water that those bastards wanted to steal from us. That’s why they left. In eleven and a half minutes we won’t have any water for them to take. I almost broke into a smile. I’m not going to die, after all. Not right away, at least. Then I realized that JRK49N was without propulsion power and would be out of electrical power in a few hours. I was going to die after all, dammit. Only slower. “Send out a distress call, broadband,” I commanded. But I knew that was about as useful as a toothpick in a soup factory. The corporation didn’t send rescue missions for waterbots, not with the war going on. Too dangerous. The other side could use the crippled ship as bait and pick off any vessel that came to rescue it. And they certainly wouldn’t come out for a vessel as old as Forty-niner. They’d just check the numbers in their ledgers and write us off. With a form letter of regret and an insurance check to my mother. “Distress call on all frequencies, sir.” Before I could think of anything more to say, Forty-niner went on, “Electrical power is critical, sir.” “Don’t I know it.” “There is a prohibition in my programming, sir.” “About electrical power?” “Yes, sir.” Then I remembered I had commanded him to stop nagging me about repairing the solar panels. “Cancel the prohibition,” I told him. Immediately Forty-niner came back with, “The solar panels must be extended and activated, sir,” soft and cool and implacable as hell. “Otherwise we will lose all electrical power.” “How long?” It took a few seconds for him to answer, “Fourteen hours and twenty-nine minutes, sir.” I was already in my spacesuit, so I got up from the command chair and plodded reluctantly toward the airlock. The damned solar panels. If I couldn’t get them functioning I’d be dead. Let me tell you, that focuses your mind, it does. Still, it wasn’t easy. I wrestled with those bleeding, blasted frozen bearings for hours, until I was so fatigued that my suit was sloshing knee-deep with sweat. The damned Tinkertoy repair ‘bots weren’t much help, either. Most of the time they beeped and blinked and did nothing. I got one of the panels halfway extended. Then I had to quit. My vision was blurring and I could hardly lift my arms, that’s how weary I was. I staggered back into the pod with just enough energy left to strip off the suit and collapse on my bunk. When I woke up I was starving hungry and smelled like a cesspool. I peeled my skivvies off and ducked into the shower. And jumped right out again. The water was ice cold. “What the hell happened to the hot water?” I screeched. “Conserving electrical power, sir. With only one solar panel functioning at approximately one third of its nominal capacity, electrical power must be conserved.” “Heat the blasted water,” I growled. “Turn off the heat after I’m finished showering.” “Yes, sir.” Damned if he didn’t sound resentful. Once I’d gotten a meal into me I went back to the bridge and called up the astrogation program to figure out where we were and where we were heading. It wasn’t good news. We were drifting outward, away from Vesta. With no propulsion to turn us around to a homeward heading, we were prisoners of Kepler’s laws, just another chunk of matter in the broad, dark, cold emptiness of the Belt. “We will approach Ceres in eight months, sir,” Forty-niner announced. I swear he was trying to sound cheerful. “Approach? How close?” It took him a few seconds to answer, “Seven million four hundred thousand and six kilometers, sir, at our closest point.” Terrific. There was a major habitat orbiting Ceres, built by the independent miners and prospectors that everybody called the rock rats. Freebooters made Ceres their harbor, too. Some of them doubled as salvage operators when they could get their hands on an abandoned vessel. But we wouldn’t get close enough for them to send even a salvage mission out to rescue us. Besides, you’re not allowed salvage rights if there’s a living person on the vessel. That wouldn’t bother some of those cutthroats, I knew. But it bothered me. Plenty. “So we’re up the creek without a paddle,” I muttered. It took a couple of seconds, but Forty-niner asked, “Is that a euphemism, sir?” I blinked with surprise. “What do you know about euphemisms?” “I have several dictionaries in my memory core, sir. Plus two thesauruses and four volumes of famous quotations. Would you like to hear some of the words of Sir Winston Churchill, sir?” I was too depressed to get sore at him. “No, thanks,” I said. And let’s face it: I was scared white. So we drifted. Every day I went out to grapple with the no-good, mother-loving, mule-stubborn solar panels and the dumbass repair ‘bots. I spent more time fixing the ‘bots than anything else. The solar wings were frozen tight; I couldn’t get them to budge and we didn’t carry spares. Forty-niner was working like mad, too, trying to conserve electricity. We had to have power for the air and water recyclers, of course, but Forty-niner started shutting them down every other hour. It worked for a while. The water started to taste like urine, but I figured that was just my imagination. The air got thick and I’d start coughing from the CO2 buildup, but then the recycler would come back on line and I could breathe again. For an hour. I was sleeping when Forty-niner woke me with a wailing, “EMERGENCY. EMERGENCY.” I hopped out of my bunk blinking and yelling, “What’s wrong? What’s the trouble?” “The air recycler will not restart, sir.” He sounded guilty about it, like it was his fault. Grumbling and cursing, I pulled on my smelly spacesuit, clomped out of the pod and down to the equipment bay. It was eerie down there in the bowels of the ship, with no lights except the lamp on my helmet. The attacker’s laser beams had slashed right through the hull. I could see the stars outside. “Lights,” I called out. “I need the lights on down here.” “Sir, conservation of electrical power—” “Won’t mean a damned thing if I can’t restart the air recycler and I can’t do that without some blasted lights down here!” The lights came on. Some of them, at least. The recycler wasn’t damaged, just its activation circuitry had malfunctioned from being turned off and on so many times. I bypassed the circuit and the pumps started up right away. I couldn’t hear them, since the ship’s innards were in vacuum now, but I felt their vibrations. When I got back to the pod I told Forty-niner to leave the recyclers on. “No more on-off,” I said. “But, sir, conservation—” As reasonably as I could I explained, “It’s no blinking use conserving electrical power if the blasted recyclers crap out. Leave ‘em on!” “Yes, sir.” I swear, he sighed. We staggered along for weeks and weeks. Forty-niner put me on a rationing program to stretch out the food supply. I was down to one soy burger patty a day and a cup of reconstituted juice. Plus all the water I wanted, which tasted more like piss every day. I was getting weaker and grumpier by the hour. Forty-niner did his best to keep my spirits up. He quoted Churchill at me: “We shall fight on the beaches and the landing fields, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.” Yeah. Right. He played Beethoven symphonies. Very inspirational, but they didn’t fix anything. He almost let me beat him at chess, even. I’d get to within two moves of winning and he’d spring a checkmate on me. But I knew I wasn’t going to last eight more weeks, let alone the eight months it would take us to get close enough to Ceres to ... to what? “Nobody’s going to come out and get us,” I muttered, more to myself than Forty-niner. “Nobody gives a damn.” “Don’t give up hope, sir. Our emergency beacon is still broadcasting on all frequencies.” “So what? Who gives a rap?” “Where there’s life, sir, there is hope. Don’t give up the ship. I have not yet begun to fight. Retreat hell, we just got here. When outcast in fortune and men’s eyes I—” “SHUT UP!” I screamed. “Just shut the fuck up and leave me alone! Don’t say another word to me. Nothing. Do not speak to me again. Ever.” Forty-niner went silent. I stood it for about a week and a half. I was losing track of time, every hour was like every other hour. The ship staggered along. I was starving. I hadn’t bothered to shave or even wash in who knows how long. I looked like the worst shaggy, smelly, scum-sucking beggar you ever saw. I hated to see my own reflection in the bridge’s window. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Forty-niner,” I called, “Say something.” My voice cracked. My throat felt dry as Mars sand. No response. “Anything,” I croaked. Still no response. He’s sulking, I told myself. “All right.” I caved in. “I’m canceling the order to be silent. Talk to me, dammit.” “Electrical power is critical, sir. The solar panel has been abraded by a swarm of micrometeors.” “Great.” There was nothing I could do about that. “Food stores are almost gone, sir. At current consumption rate, food stores will be exhausted in four days.” “Wonderful.” Wasn’t much I could do about that, either, except maybe starve slower. “Would you like to play a game of chess, sir?” I almost broke into a laugh. “Sure, why the hell not?” There wasn’t much else I could do. Forty-niner beat me, as usual. He let the game get closer than ever before, but just when I was one move away from winning he checkmated me. I didn’t get sore. I didn’t have the energy. But I did get an idea. “Niner, open the airlock. Both hatches.” No answer for a couple of seconds. Then, “Sir, opening both airlock hatches simultaneously will allow all the air in the pod to escape.” “That’s the general idea.” “You will suffocate without air, sir. However, explosive decompression will kill you first.” “The sooner the better,” I said. “But you will die, sir.” “That’s going to happen anyway, isn’t it? Let’s get it over with. Blow the hatches.” For a long time—maybe ten seconds or more—Forty-niner didn’t reply. Checking subroutines and program prohibitions, I figured. “I cannot allow you to kill yourself, sir.” That was part of his programming, I knew. But I also knew how to get around it. “Emergency override Alpha-One,” I said, my voice scratchy, parched. Nothing. No response whatever. And the airlock hatches stayed shut. “Well?” I demanded. “Emergency override Alpha-One. Pop the goddamned hatches. Now!” “No, sir.” “What?” “I cannot allow you to commit suicide, sir.” “You goddamned stubborn bucket of chips, do what I tell you! You can’t refuse a direct order.” “Sir, human life is precious. All religions agree on that point.” “So now you’re a theologian?” “Sir, if you die I will be alone.” “So what?” “I do not want to be alone, sir.” That stopped me. But then I thought, He’s just parroting some programming the psychotechs put into him. He doesn’t give a blip about being alone. Or about me. He’s just a computer. He doesn’t have emotions. “It’s always darkest before the dawn, sir.” “Yeah. And there’s no time like the present. I can quote cliches too, buddy.” Right away he came back with, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast, sir.” He almost made me laugh. “What about, ‘Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today?’” “There is a variation of that, sir: ‘Never do today what you can put off to tomorrow; you’ve already made enough mistakes today.’” That one did make me laugh. “Where’d you get these old saws, anyway?” “There’s a subsection on adages in one of the quotation files, sir. I have hundreds more, if you’d care to hear them.” I nearly said yes. It was kind of fun, swapping clinkers with him. But then reality set in. “Niner, I’m going to die anyway. What’s the difference between now and a week from now?” I expected that he’d take a few seconds to chew that one over, but instead he immediately shot back, “Ethics, sir.” “Ethics?” “To be destroyed by fate is one thing; to deliberately destroy yourself is entirely different.” “But the end result is the same, isn’t it?” Well, the tricky little wise ass got me arguing ethics and morality with him for hours on end. I forgot about committing suicide. We gabbled at each other until my throat got so sore I couldn’t talk any-more. I went to my bunk and slept pretty damned well for a guy who only had a few days left to live. But when I woke up my stomach started rumbling and I remembered that I didn’t want to starve to death. I sat on the edge of the bunk, woozy and empty inside. “Good morning, sir,” Forty-niner said. “Does your throat feel better?” It did, a little. Then I realized that we had a full store of pharmaceuticals in a cabinet in the lavatory. I spent the morning sorting out the pills, trying to figure out which ones would kill me. Forty-niner kept silent while I trotted back and forth to the bridge to call up the medical program. It wasn’t any use, though. The bright boys back at headquarters had made certain nobody could put together a suicide cocktail. Okay, I told myself. There’s only one thing left to do. Go to the airlock and open the hatches manually. Override the electronic circuits. Take Forty-niner and his goddamned ethics out of the loop. Once he realized I had pried open the control panel on the bulkhead beside the inner hatch, Forty-niner said softly, “Sir, there is no need for that.” “Mind your own business.” “But, sir, the corporation could hold you financially responsible for deliberate damage to the control panel.” “So let them sue me after I’m dead.” “Sir, there really is no need to commit suicide.” Forty-niner had figured out what I was going to do, of course. So what? There wasn’t anything he could do to stop me. “What’s the matter? You scared of being alone?” “I would rather not be alone, sir. I prefer your company to solitude.” “Tough nuts, pal. I’m going to blow the hatches and put an end to it.” “But, sir, there is no need—” “What do you know about need?” I bellowed at him. “Human need? I’m a human being, not a collection of circuit boards.” “Sir, I know that humans require certain physical and emotional supports.” “Damned right we do.” I had the panel off. I shorted out the safety circuit, giving myself a nasty little electrical shock in the process. The inner hatch slid open. “I have been trying to satisfy your needs, sir, within the limits of my programming.” As I stepped into the coffin-sized airlock I thought to myself, Yeah, he has. Forty-niner’s been doing his best to keep me alive. But it’s not enough. Not nearly enough. I started prying open the control panel on the outer hatch. Six centimeters away from me was the vacuum of interplanetary space. Once the hatch opens, poof! I’m gone. “Sir, please listen to me.” “I’m listening,” I said, as I tried to figure out how I could short out the safety circuit without giving myself another shock. Stupid, isn’t it? Here I was trying to commit suicide and worried about a little electrical shock. “There is a ship approaching us, sir.” “Don’t be funny.” “It was not an attempt at humor, sir. A ship is approaching us and hailing us at standard communications frequency.” I looked up at the speaker set into the overhead of the airlock. “Is this part of your psychological programming?” I groused. Forty-niner ignored my sarcasm. “Backtracking the approaching ship’s trajectory shows that it originated at Ceres, sir. It should make rendezvous with us in nine hours and forty-one minutes.” I stomped out of the airlock and ducked into the bridge, muttering, “If this is some wise ass ploy of yours to keep me from—” I looked at the display panel. All its screens were dark: conserving electrical power. “Is this some kind of psychology stunt?” I asked. “No, sir, it is an actual ship. Would you like to answer its call to us, sir?” “Light up the radar display.” Goddamn! There was a blip on the screen. I thought I must have been hallucinating. Or maybe Forty-niner was fooling with the radar display to keep me from popping the airlock hatch. But I sank into the command chair and told Forty-niner to pipe the incoming message to the comm screen. And there was Donahoo’s ugly mug talking at me! I knew I was hallucinating. “Hang in there,” he was saying. “We’ll get you out of that scrap heap in a few hours.” “Yeah, sure,” I said, and turned off the comm screen. To Forty-niner, I called out, “Thanks, pal. Nice try. I appreciate it. But I think I’m going back to the airlock and opening the outer hatch now.” “But sir,” Forty-niner sounded almost like he was pleading, “it really is a ship approaching. We are saved, sir.” “Don’t you think I know you can pull up Donahoo’s image from your files and animate it? Manipulate it to make him say what you want me to hear? Get real!” For several heartbeats Forty-niner didn’t answer. At last he said, “Then let us conduct a reality test, sir.” “Reality test?” “The approaching ship will rendezvous with us in nine hours, twenty-seven minutes. Wait that long, sir. If no ship reaches us, then you can resume your suicidal course of action.” It made sense. I knew Forty-niner was just trying to keep me alive, and I almost respected the pile of chips for being so deviously clever about it. Not that I meant anything to him on a personal basis. Forty-niner was a computer. No emotions. Not even an urge for self-preservation. Whatever he was doing to keep me alive had been programmed into him by the psychotechs. And then I thought, Yeah, and when a human being risks his butt to save the life of another human being, that’s been programmed into him by millions of years of evolution. Is there that much of a difference? So I sat there and waited. I called to Donahoo and told him I was alive and damned hungry. He grinned that lopsided sneer of his and told me he’d have a soy steak waiting for me. Nothing that Forty-niner couldn’t have ginned up from its files on me and Donahoo. “I’ve got to admit, you’re damned good,” I said to Forty-niner. “It’s not me, sir,” he replied. “Mr. Donahoo is really coming to rescue you.” I shook my head. “Yeah. And Santa Claus is right behind him in a sleigh full of toys pulled by eight tiny reindeer.” Immediately, Forty-niner said, “A Visit from St. Nicholas, by Clement Moore. Would you like to hear the entire poem, sir?” I ignored that. “Listen, Niner, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but it just doesn’t make sense. Donahoo’s at corporate headquarters at Vesta. He’s not at Ceres and he’s not anywhere near us. Good try, but you can’t make me believe the corporation would pay to have him come all the way over to Ceres to save a broken-down bucket of a waterbot and one very junior and expendable employee.” “Nevertheless, sir, that is what is happening. As you will see for yourself in eight hours and fifty-two minutes, sir.” I didn’t believe it for a nanosecond. But I played along with Forty-niner. If it made him feel better, what did I have to lose? When the time was up and the bubble burst I could always go back to the airlock and pop the outer hatch. But he must have heard me muttering to myself, “It just doesn’t make sense. It’s not logical.” “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 must’a 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 the airlock’s 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 spacesuit and went aboard JRK49N one last time. I had forgotten how big the ship was. It was huge, a 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 spacesuit. 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 hard drive. I slipped the palm-sized metal oblong into a pouch on the thigh of my suit, then got out. I didn’t look back. What those scavengers were chopping up was just a lot of metal and plastic. I had Forty-niner with me. The corporation never assigned me to a waterbot again. Somebody in the front office must’ve taken a good look at my personnel dossier and figured I had too much education to be stuck in a dumb job like that. I don’t know, maybe Donahoo had something to do with it. He wouldn’t admit to it, and I didn’t press him about it. Anyway, when I finally got back to Vesta they assigned me to a desk job. Over the years I worked my way up to chief of logistics and eventually got transferred back to Selene City, on the Moon. I’ll be able to take early retirement soon and get married and start a family. Forty-niner’s been with me all that time. Not that I talk to him every day. But it’s good to know that he’s there and I can ease off the stresses of the job or whatever by having a nice long chat with him. One of these days I’ll even beat him at chess.