New Frontiers

by Ben Bova

Halpern tried to hide the pleasure he felt as he made his way across the room to the table where Franklin, Gorton, and Nottingham were sitting.

  “The defender of our rights and privileges,” Franklin said, beaming, as the judge sat down.

  “By golly,” said Gorton, “I’ve got to hand it to you, your honor. It’s high time somebody stood up for what’s right.”

  Nottingham was a bit more subdued. “From what I understand, you have agreed that the outcome of this duel will decide whether or not the women’s petition will be accepted.”

  “That’s right,” Halpern said, as the Hispanic waiter placed his brandy and soda in front of him. “If she wins, the Men’s Bar will be opened to women.”

  “But she won’t win,” Gorton said. Then he added, “Will she?”

  “How could she,” Franklin said, “against the club’s best shot?”

  “You’ve agreed on the setting?” Nottingham asked.

  “A frontier saloon in the Old West,” said Halpern as he reached for his drink. With a smile that was almost a smirk he added, “She’ll have to come in through the ladies’ entrance, I expect.”

  * * *

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING Halpern had his chauffeur drive him back to the shopping mall where the VR Duels, Inc. facility was. Franklin, Gorton, and Nottingham were already there, even though he arrived scrupulously on time. Ms. Harte was nowhere to be found.

  Typical woman, Halpern said to himself. Late for the appointment. Then he thought, Maybe she won’t show up at all. The idea pleased him immensely.

  Franklin and the others looked very serious as they stood in the anteroom waiting for his opponent.

  “Relax,” Halpern told them. “The purity of the Men’s Bar will not be defiled.”

  At that moment Ms. Harte burst into the room, looking rather like a worried high school student who’d been sent down to the principal’s office for discipline.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said, avoiding Halpern’s stern gaze.

  Halpern felt growing impatience as the same bright-smiling technician carefully went over each and every detail of the duel, the sensor suit, and the helmet he would have to wear. Get on with it! he railed at her silently. But he kept his face and demeanor perfectly polite, absolutely correct. He allowed himself to show no hint of impatience.

  “You’ll have to stand on your feet for this duel,” said the technician just before she closed the door of the booth, leaving Halpern clothed in the nubby sensor suit and unwieldy biker’s helmet. The helmet felt heavy, and he couldn’t get over the feeling that some kind of loathsome bugs were worming their way under his skin.

  The technician shut the door at last. Halpern stood alone for a long moment that seemed to stretch indefinitely. The booth was narrow, confining, its walls smooth and bare.

  “Okay,” he heard a man’s voice in his helmet earphones. “Activating Halpern-Harte duel.”

  The world went completely dark for an instant, then a brief flare of colors swirled before his eyes and he heard a muted rumbling noise.

  Abruptly he was standing at the bar of an Old West frontier saloon, crowded with rough-looking men, bearded and unwashed, smelly. Over in one corner a man who looked suspiciously like Rick Gorton was banging away at a tinny-sounding piano. It can’t be Gorton, Halpern said to himself. Looking at the piano player more closely, Halpern saw that he had a bushy red beard and his fingernails were cracked and dirty.

  “What’re you having, Judge?”

  Halpern turned and saw the bartender smiling at him. The man looked a little like Herb Franklin, but much younger, more rugged, his beard darker and rather bedraggled. A badly stained apron was tied around his ample middle.

  “Judge?” the bartender prompted.

  “Brandy and soda,” said Halpern.

  The bartender’s bushy brows hiked up. “You want to put sarsaparilla in your brandy, Judge?”

  Halpern thought a moment, then shook his head. “No. Water. Brandy and a glass of water. No ice.”

  The bartender gave him a puzzled look, then reached for a bottle, muttering to himself, “Ice?”

  Halpern looked up at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. He saw that he was wearing a long black frock coat and a black, wide-brimmed hat. On his right hip he felt the weight of a heavy pistol. A Colt six-shooter, he surmised. Not the sleek, well-balanced Glock automatic he used at the target range in the club’s basement. This thing felt like a cannon.

  “Brandy and water,” the bartender said, slapping two glasses onto the surface of the bar. Some of the water splashed onto the polished wood.

  Halpern took a cautious sip. It was awful. Like vinegar mixed with battery acid, he thought.

  Turning, he surveyed the crowded barroom. Lots of dusty, unshaven, grubby men in boots and grimy clothes lining the bar. Others sitting at tables. Looked like an intense game of poker was going on in the farthest corner. Everybody carried a gun; some of the men had two. He almost expected to see John Wayne come sauntering through the swinging doors. Or Clint Eastwood, at least.

  The swinging doors did indeed bang open, and a tiny, almost elfin figure stepped in. Wearing scuffed cowboy boots, faded Levis, an unbuttoned leather vest over a checkered shirt, and a beat-up brown Stetson pulled low. Gritty with trail dust. She had a Colt revolver strapped to her hip.

  Halpern recognized Ms. Harte, just barely. He saw the blazing anger in those china-blue eyes.

  She took five steps into the barroom and stopped, facing Halpern.

  “Judge,” she called across the crowded saloon, “you hanged my kid brother for cattle rustlin’ that he didn’t do.”

  The barroom went totally silent. Instinctively Halpern pushed the edge of his frock coat away from the butt of the pistol holstered at his hip.

  “The jury found him guilty,” he said, surprised at the quaver in his voice.

  “’Cause you threw out the evidence that would’ve cleared him, you sneaky polecat.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “You callin’ me a liar? Go for that hawgleg, Judge.”

  With that Ms. Harte started to draw the six-shooter from her holster. Halpern fumbled for his gun. It was huge and heavy, felt as if it weighed ten pounds.

  To his credit, he got off the first shot. The plate glass window behind Ms. Harte shattered. She fired once, twice. He heard glassware smashing on the bar behind him. Men were diving everywhere to get out of the line of fire. Halpern saw the piano player spin around on his little stool, eyes wide, a lopsided grin on his thickly bearded face.

  He fired again and a chair two feet to Ms. Harte’s left went clattering across the floor. This isn’t like target shooting! Halpern realized. Not at all.

  A bullet tore at his frock coat, and Halpern felt a sudden need to urinate. He fired at his unmoving opponent and her hat flew off her head. She didn’t even wince. She shot again and more glassware exploded behind him.

  Gripping his cumbersome long-barreled pistol in both hands, Halpern fired once again.

  Ms. Harte toppled over backward, her smoking pistol flying from her hand. Her bright blue eyes closed forever.

  For a moment Halpern was plunged into utter darkness. Then he felt the VR helmet being lifted off his head. The young woman smiled at him warmly.

  “You won, Justice Halpern. You won the duel.”

  Halpern licked his lips and then smiled back at the technician. “Yes, I did, didn’t I? I shot her dead.”

  On shaky legs he stepped out of the virtual reality booth. Ms. Harte was coming out of the booth on the other side of the room. She smiled weakly at him.

  “Touché,” she called across the chamber.

  Halpern bowed graciously. Perhaps there is something to this dueling-machine business, after all, he thought.

  * * *

  IT WAS A seafood restaurant: small, slightly tatty, and completely on the other side of the city from the supreme court’s building and the Carleton Club.

  Herb Franklin smiled as he got to his f
eet to welcome his luncheon guest. He had barely had a chance to sit at the table; she was right on time.

  “Congratulations,” he said to Roxanne Harte, Esq.

  Ms. Harte smiled prettily as she took the chair that Franklin held for her.

  “It did come out pretty well, didn’t it?” she said.

  Franklin took his own chair as he said, “The supreme court handed down its decision this morning. Duels in properly registered dueling-machine facilities are now recognized as legally binding. First state in the union to go for it.”

  “A precedent,” said Ms. Harte, as she picked up the menu that lay atop her plate.

  “This state is a trendsetter.” Franklin was beaming.

  “Justice Halpern voted with the majority?” she asked.

  Nodding vigorously, Franklin told her, “He wrote the majority opinion, no less.”

  Ms. Harte smiled prettily. “I’ll bet VR Duels, Inc. will declare a dividend.”

  “Very likely,” Franklin agreed happily. “Very likely.”

  They both ordered trout, and Franklin picked a dry white wine to go with the fish.

  “I really want to thank you,” Franklin said, once they had sipped at the wine. “I know it was quite a sacrifice for you.”

  “Sacrifice?”

  “The club’s board turned down your petition about the Men’s Bar.”

  Ms. Harte shrugged prettily. “It wasn’t my petition. I don’t care about your old Men’s Bar.”

  “Oh,” said Franklin. “When I first talked to you about it, I thought—”

  “I’m not a radical feminist. The petition was just the bait for your trap. And it worked.”

  Franklin nodded, a little warily, and turned his attention to the trout.

  She said, “So now the good citizens of this state can settle their differences with a duel in virtual reality.”

  “Under the specified conditions. Both parties have to sign a formal agreement to make the results of the duel binding on them.”

  She took another sip of wine, then said. “It’s funny. You told me that Justice Halpern was a champion pistol shot, but he was worse than I am.”

  “There’s a big difference between shooting at a target and firing at someone who’s shooting back at you,” Franklin said. “And that Dragoon’s revolver we gave him is a lot different from the Glock he’s accustomed to.”

  “I suppose,” Ms. Harte agreed faintly. “But boy, he was a really rotten shot, you know. I deliberately missed him four times and I still had to pretend to be hit; he never came close to me.”

  Franklin hissed, “For God’s sake don’t let anyone else know that! If it ever gets back to him…”

  “Don’t worry, my lips are sealed,” she replied. “After all, an assistant district attorney has got to have some discretion.”

  With a relieved chuckle, Franklin said, “You’ll get the next opening in the DA’s office. It’s all set. We just have to wait a few months so Halpern doesn’t start putting two and two together.”

  She nodded, but then asked, “So why did you go through all this? Why are you so intent on getting VR duels accepted as legally binding?”

  Franklin eyed her carefully for a long, silent moment. At last he answered, “Several reasons. First, it will help people get their differences settled without waiting for months or even years for a court to come to a decision for them.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Second, it will unclog court calendars. A lot of petty nuisance suits will disappear. People will fight duels instead of calling for lawyers.”

  “Lawyers’ incomes will go down, you know.”

  “Yes, but it’s all for the best,” Franklin said loftily. “It will make our society better. Healthier. People will take out their aggressions in harmless but emotionally satisfying virtual reality duels. As a former psychologist, I’m certain that it will be a great benefit to society.”

  “Really?”

  “So some lawyers won’t make as much money,” he went on. “They won’t have as many ambulances to chase. So what? Money isn’t everything. We have to think of the greater good.”

  “I see.” Ms. Harte broke into a knowing grin. “And just how much money have you invested in VR Duels, Inc.?”

  Franklin tried to keep a straight face but failed. Smiling like a true lawyer, he replied, “Quite a bit, Roxanne, my dear. Quite a healthy goddamned bit.”

  INTRODUCTION TO

  “MARS FARTS”

  First, I should apologize for the somewhat vulgar title. But, as you will see, it really is appropriate.

  Satellites placed in orbit around the planet Mars have detected occasional whiffs of methane gas in the thin Martian atmosphere. They seem to appear seasonally, in the springtime.

  Methane is a compound of carbon and hydrogen. The gas is quickly broken up into its constituent elements by solar ultraviolet radiation. The freed hydrogen presumably wafts to the top of the atmosphere and eventually boils away into space.

  So the methane is destroyed almost as soon as it is produced. Yet something produces fresh methane every year.

  On Earth, microbes living deep underground use the energy of our planet’s hot core to drive their metabolism. They eat rock or iron and excrete methane.

  Could such methanogenic bacteria be producing the methane found in the Martian atmosphere?

  Here is a frontier to be explored!

  MARS FARTS

  “A CATHOLIC, A Jew, and a Muslim are stuck in the middle of Mars,” said Rashid Faiyum.

  “That isn’t funny,” Jacob Bernstein replied, wearily.

  Patrick O’Connor, the leader of the three-man team, shook his head inside the helmet of his pressure suit. “Laugh and the world laughs with you, Jake.”

  None of them could see the faces of their companions through the tinting of their helmet visors. But they could hear the bleakness in Bernstein’s tone. “There’s not much to laugh about, is there?”

  “Not much,” Faiyum agreed.

  All around them stretched the barren, frozen, rust-red sands of Utopia Planita. Their little hopper leaned lopsidedly on its three spindly legs in the middle of newly churned pockmarks from the meteor shower that had struck the area overnight.

  Off on the horizon stood the blocky form of the old Viking 2 lander, which had been there for more than a century. One of their mission objectives had been to retrieve parts of the Viking to return to Earth, for study and eventual sale to a museum. Like everything else about their mission, that objective had been sidelined by the meteor shower. Their goal now was survival.

  A barrage of tiny bits of stone, most of them no larger than dust motes. Once they had been part of an icy comet, but the ice had melted away after God-knew-how-many trips around the sun, and now only the stones were left when the remains of the comet happened to collide with the planet Mars.

  One of the rare stones, almost the size of a pebble, had punctured the fuel cell that was the main electrical power source for the three-man hopper. Without the electrical power from that fuel cell, their rocket engine could not function. They were stranded in the middle of the frozen, arid plain.

  In his gleaming silvery pressure suit, Faiyum reminded O’Connor of a knight in shining armor, except that he was bending into the bay that held the fuel cell, his helmeted head obscured by the bay’s upraised hatch. Bernstein, similarly suited, stood by nervously beside him.

  The hatch had been punctured by what looked like a bullet hole. Faiyum was muttering, “Of all the meteoroids in all the solar system in all of Mars, this one’s got to smack our power cell.”

  Bernstein asked, “How bad is it?”

  Straightening up, Faiyum replied, “All the hydrogen drained out during the night. It’s dead as a doornail.”

  “Then so are we,” Bernstein said.

  “I’d better call Tithonium,” said O’Connor, and he headed for the ladder that led to the hopper’s cramped cockpit. “While the batteries are still good.”

  “H
ow long will they last?” asked Bernstein.

  “Long enough to get help.”

  It wasn’t that easy. The communications link back to Tithonium was relayed by a network of satellites in low orbit around Mars, and it would be another half hour before one of the commsats came over their horizon.

  Faiyum and Bernstein followed O’Connor back into the cockpit, and suddenly the compact little space was uncomfortably crowded.

  With nothing to do but wait, O’Connor said, “I’ll pressurize the cockpit so we can take off the helmets and have some breakfast.”

  “I don’t think we should waste electrical power until we get confirmation from Tithonium that they’re sending a backup to us.”

  “We’ve got to eat,” O’Connor said.

  Sitting this close in the cramped cockpit, they could see each other’s faces even through the helmet visors’ tinting. Faiyum broke into a stubbly-chinned grin.

  “Let’s pretend its Ramadan,” he suggested, “and we have to fast from sunup to sundown.”

  “Like you fast during Ramadan,” Bernstein sniped. O’Connor remembered one of their first days on Mars, when a clean-shaven Faiyum had jokingly asked which direction Mecca was. O’Connor had pointed up.

  “Let’s not waste power,” Bernstein repeated.

  “We have enough power during the day,” Faiyum pointed out. “The solar panels work fine.”

  Thanks to Mars’s thin, nearly cloudless atmosphere, just about the same amount of sunshine fell upon the surface of Mars as upon Earth, despite Mars’s farther distance from the sun. Thank God for that, O’Connor thought. Otherwise we’d be dead in a few hours.

  Then he realized that, also thanks to Mars’s thin atmosphere, those micrometeoroids had made it all the way down to the ground to strafe them like a spray of bullets, instead of burning up from atmospheric friction, as they would have on Earth. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, he told himself.

  “Tithonium here,” a voice crackled through the speaker on the cockpit control panel. All three of them turned to the display screen, suddenly tight with expectation.

  “What’s your situation, E-3?” asked the face in the screen. Ernie Roebuck, they recognized: chief communications engineer.