My Favorites

by Ben Bova

  “He’s letting him get away,” Sam said, sounding surprised. “Fuchs is letting him limp back to Ceres or wherever he came from.”

  “Maybe Fuchs is too badly damaged himself to chase him down,” I said.

  “Maybe.” Sam didn’t sound at all sure of that.

  We waited for another hour, huddled inside our suits in the beanbag of an asteroid. Finally, Sam said, “Let’s get back to the ship and see what’s left of her.”

  There wasn’t much. The hull had been punctured in half a dozen places. Propulsion was gone. Life support shot. Communications marginal.

  We clumped to the cockpit. It was in tatters; the main window was shot out, a long, ugly scar from a laser burn cut right across the control panel. The pilot’s chair was ripped too. It was tough to sit in the bulky spacesuits, and we were in zero gravity, to boot. Sam just hovered a few centimeters above his chair. I realized that my stomach had calmed down. I had adjusted to zero G. After what we had just been through, zero G seemed downright comfortable.

  “We’ll have to live in the suits,” Sam told me.

  “How long can we last?”

  “There are four extra air regenerators in stores,” Sam said. “If they’re not damaged, we can hold out for another forty-eight, maybe sixty hours.”

  “Time enough for somebody to come and get us,” I said hopefully.

  I could see his freckled face bobbing up and down inside his helmet. “Yep . . . provided anybody’s heard our distress call.”

  The emergency radio beacon seemed to be functioning. I kept telling myself we’d be all right. Sam seemed to feel that way; he was positively cheerful.

  “You really think we’ll be okay?” I asked him. “You’re not just trying to keep my hopes up?”

  “We’ll be fine, Gar,” he answered. “We’ll probably smell pretty ripe by the time we can get out of these suits, but except for that, I don’t see anything to worry about.”

  Then he added, “Except . . .”

  “Except?” I yelped. “Except what?”

  He grinned wickedly. “Except that I’ll miss the wedding.” He made an exaggerated sigh. “Too bad.”

  So we lived inside the suits for the next day and a half. It wasn’t all that bad, except we couldn’t eat any solid food. Water and fruit juices, that was all we could get through the feeder tube. I started to feel like a Hindu ascetic on a hunger strike.

  We tried the comm system, but it was intermittent, at best. The emergency beacon was faithfully sending out our distress call, of course, with our position. It could be heard all the way back to Ceres, I was sure. Somebody would come for us. Nothing to worry about. We’ll get out of this okay. Someday we’ll look back on this and laugh. Or maybe shudder. Good thing we had to stay in the suits; otherwise, I would have gnawed all my fingernails down to the wrist.

  And then the earphones in my helmet suddenly blurted to life.

  “Sam! Do you read me? We can see your craft!” It was Judge Myers. I was so overjoyed that I would have married her myself.

  Her ship was close enough so that our suit radios could pick up her transmission.

  “We’ll be there in less than an hour, Sam,” she said.

  “Great!” he called back. “But hold your nose when we start peeling out of these suits.”

  Judge Myers laughed, and she and Sam chatted away like a pair of teenagers. But then Sam looked up at me and winked.

  “Jill, I’m sorry this has messed up the wedding,” he said, making his voice husky, sad. “I know you were looking forward to—”

  “You haven’t messed up a thing, Sam,” she replied brightly. “After we’ve picked you up—and cleaned you up—we’re going to go back to The Rememberer and have the ceremony as planned.”

  Sam’s forehead wrinkled. “But haven’t your guests gone back home? What about the boys’ choir? And the caterers?”

  She laughed. “The guests are all still here. As for the entertainment and the caterers, so I’ll have to pay them for a few extra days. Hang the expense, Sam. This is our wedding we’re talking about! Money is no object.”

  Sam groaned.

  In a matter of hours, we were aboard Judge Myers’ ship, Parthia, showered, shaved, clothed, and fed, heading to The Rememberer and Sam’s wedding. Sam was like Jekyll and Hyde: While he and I were alone together, he was morose and mumbling, like a guy about to face a firing squad in the morning. When Judge Myers joined us for dinner, though, Sam was chipper and charming, telling jokes and spinning tall tales about old exploits. It was quite a performance; if Sam ever got into acting he would win awards, I was sure.

  After dinner Sam and Judge Myers strolled off together to her quarters. I went back to the compartment they had given me, locked the door, and took out the chip.

  It was easier this time, since I remembered the keys to the encryption. In less than an hour I had Amanda’s hauntingly beautiful face on the display of my compartment’s computer. I wormed a plug into my ear, taking no chances that somebody might eavesdrop on me.

  The video was focused tightly on her face. For I don’t know how long, I just gazed at her, hardly breathing. Then I shook myself out of the trance and touched the key that would run her message.

  “Lars,” she said softly, almost whispering, as if she were afraid somebody would overhear her, “I’m going to have a baby.”

  Holy mother in heaven! It’s a good thing we didn’t deliver this message to Fuchs. He would’ve probably cut us into little pieces and roasted them on a spit.

  Amanda Cunningham Humphries went on, “Martin wants another son; he already has a five-year-old boy by a previous wife.”

  She hesitated, looked over her shoulder. Then, in an even lower voice, “I want you to know, Lars, that it will be your son that I bear, not his. I’ve had myself implanted with one of the embryos we froze at Selene, back before all these troubles started.”

  I felt my jaw drop down to my knees.

  “I love you, Lars,” Amanda said. “I’ve always loved you. I married Martin because he promised he’d stop trying to kill you if I did. I’ll have a son, and Martin will think it’s his, but it will be your son, Lars. Yours and mine. I want you to know that, dearest. Your son.”

  Humphries would pay a billion for that, I figured.

  And he’d have the baby Amanda was carrying aborted. Maybe he’d kill her too.

  “So what are you going to do about it, Gar?”

  I whirled around in my chair. Sam was standing in the doorway.

  “I thought I locked—”

  “You did. I unlocked it.” He stepped into my compartment and carefully slid the door shut again. “So, Gar, what are you going to do?”

  I popped the chip out of the computer and handed it to Sam.

  He refused to take it. “I read her message the first night on our way to the belt,” Sam said, sitting on the edge of my bed. “I figured you’d try to get it off me, one way or another.”

  “So you gave it to me.”

  Sam nodded gravely. “So now you know what her message is. The question is, what are you going to do about it?”

  I offered him the chip again. “Take it, Sam. I don’t want it.”

  “It’s worth a lot of money, Gar.”

  “I don’t want it!” I repeated, a little stronger.

  Sam reached out and took the chip from me. Then, “But you know what she’s doing. You could tell Humphries about it. He’d pay a lot to know.”

  I started to reply, but to my surprise I found that I had to swallow hard before I could any words out. “I couldn’t do that to her,” I said.

  Sam looked square into my eyes. “You certain of that?”

  I almost laughed. “What’s a few hundred million bucks? I don’t need that kind of money.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Yes, dammit,
I’m certain!” I snapped. It wasn’t easy tossing away all that money, and Sam was starting to irritate me.

  “Okay,” he said, breaking into that lopsided smile of his. “I believe you.”

  Sam got to his feet, his right fist closed around the chip.

  “What will you do with it?” I asked.

  “Pop it out an airlock. A few days in hard UV should degrade it so badly that even if somebody found it in all this emptiness, they’d never be able to read it.”

  I got up from my desk chair. “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  So the two of us marched down to the nearest airlock and got rid of the chip. I had a slight pang when I realized how much money we had just tossed out into space, but then I realized I had saved Amanda’s life, most likely, and certainly the life of her baby. Hers and Fuchs’s.

  “Fuchs will never know,” Sam said. “I feel kind of sorry for him.”

  “I feel sorry for her,” I said.

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  As we walked down the passageway back toward my compartment, curiosity got the better of me.

  “Sam,” I asked, “what if you weren’t sure that I’d keep her message to myself? What if you thought I’d sneak off to Humphries and tell him what was on that chip?”

  He glanced up at me. “I’ve never killed a man,” he said quietly, “but I’d sure stuff you into a lifeboat and set you adrift. With no radio.”

  I blinked at him. He was dead serious.

  “I wouldn’t last long,” I said.

  “Probably not. Your ship would drift through the belt for a long time, though. Eons. You’d be a real Flying Dutchman.”

  “I’m glad you trust me.”

  “I’m glad I can trust you, Gar.” He gave me a funny look, then added, “You’re in love with her, too, aren’t you?”

  It took me a few moments to reply, “Who wouldn’t be?”

  So we flew to The Rememberer with Judge Myers and all the wedding guests and the minister and boys’ choir, the caterers and all the food and drink for a huge celebration. Six different news nets were waiting for us: the wedding was going to be a major story.

  Sam snuck away, of course. He didn’t marry Jill Myers after all. She was so furious that she . . .

  But that’s another story.

  AFTERWORD: 1491

  One of the attractions that lures writers to tackle science fiction stories, as opposed to other genres of fiction, is science fiction’s connection with the real world.

  What? I can hear you gasping. Stories about the distant future or the remote past have a connection with the real world? Aren’t they fantastic tales, wish fulfillments, or dreams about the utopias (and dystopias) that our descendants may encounter?

  Some are just that, of course. But the best science fiction tales are like telescopes that show us the possibilities of the future. Predictions, warnings, visions of what might happen to the human race in coming years. Or centuries. Or millennia.

  For example, cast your mind back to the year 1491. I know, that’s in the past, not the future. But bear with me for a few moments.

  In 1491, Europe was a collection of losers. The great and wealthy powers of the world lay to the East: the Muslim nations of Turkey, Persia, and such; fabled India, mysterious and remote China.

  Europe was where the losers were shoved. Over the ages the original Stone Age inhabitants of Europe were drowned in newcomers from the East, who had been pushed away from the wealth and knowledge of the great empires of the Orient until they ran into the barrier of the Atlantic Ocean and could retreat no farther.

  Losers.

  The Atlantic was truly a barrier in 1491. Europeans ventured out onto its stormy seas just a little bit. A few of the Vikings—brave and desperate for land—actually crossed the ocean and established colonies in the lands they found on the other side of the Atlantic, but they told no others about their discoveries, and their colonies eventually withered.

  So the Europeans huddled in their crowded lands, bickering and fighting with one another, while the rich and powerful nations to the east prospered.

  Until 1492.

  The Europeans learned to build ships that could cross the Atlantic safely. They sailed west, hoping to reach the fabled wealth of China and India.

  Instead, they found a New World. And built new nations, new civilizations that changed the entire world, eventually. Changed it for the better.

  The greatest discovery they made was the realization that they had no need for kings and hereditary gentry. They could govern themselves. They discovered (invented?) democracy.

  We are the inheritors of that discovery. We have been born into a world that is far richer in wealth and freedom than any of the civilizations that preceded us, thanks to the treasures of new resources and new freedoms that our forebears have developed.

  And today, we stand on the edge of a new sea, just as dark and dangerous as the Atlantic once was. And even more promising. A new sea that begins a hundred miles above your head.

  The new sea of space.

  This generation of humankind—our generation—has an opportunity that has not been offered to humanity since 1492. In merely the brief forays into space that we have made so far, we have found treasures of natural resources large enough to completely transform civilization, to erase poverty and build a new global civilization of wealth and freedom.

  A few bold and farsighted humans have already begun this quest. They are the leaders of humankind’s new era of expansion, outward to the moon and Mars, then farther until we have reached all the bodies of the solar system. And ultimately to the stars themselves.

  Our future is limitless.

  You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

  the end . . . of the beginning