Buying Time Read online

  You will find that no yacht, of whatever price, exceeds the Bugatti Galileo in actual maximum range and sustained acceleration. No yacht can outperform the Galileo.

  Only Bugatti provides twin inertial confinement fusion engines, for both sustained power and insurance against engine failure. (Yachts with less range may not need the insurance, but with Galileo the adventurous may explore the far reaches of the asteroid belt, and even beyond—well outside the range of any service and emergency vehicles.)

  The Bugatti is for those who agree that space travel should be more than an orbital shortcut over the oceans or the occasional weekend on the Moon.

  Bugatti—for those who know that life is always new when there are new worlds to conquer.

  Dallas arrived in Hawaii two days early, the Singapore business having been less complicated than Kamachi had predicted. Already worth a quarter million pounds, less than a week out of the clinic, Dallas let himself relax. One day for beaches and bars, the next for morning skin diving, alone, and an aimless dawdle through the forest preserve on Kauai.

  As arranged, he met Maria outside Spaceport Maui at noon the next day. After a quick bad lunch at the cafeteria, she led him to the runway, where the Bugatti sat like a shiny black panther poised to leap. Dallas was impressed.

  “I’ve never owned one quite this elegant,” he said, running his hand along the sweep of the carbon filament wing, careful not to cut himself on the edge. “You actually took it all the way to Jupiter?”

  “I did,” she said, looking pleased. “The company said that’s the farthest anyone has gone in one of theirs.”

  “I can imagine. It’s so small.” The entire ship was less than twenty meters long, half of that engine and fuel tanks. “Where’d you carry the extra fuel?”

  She opened the sliding air lock door; the inner door irised automatically, a luxury Dallas thought he would rather do without. “Right along here,” she said, gesturing. “I had them take out the passenger seat, shower, and galley, and put in a ten-thousand-liter auxiliary tank.”

  “That’s about double?”

  “Almost. Anyhow, I filled it up at the Exxon dump in high orbit, then did a long burn to Ceres; topped off the tanks there, then burned and deburned to Ganymede Station, where I refueled again.”

  “Enjoy Novysibirsk?”

  “I enjoyed bathing, after three weeks. Showering in one-twentieth gee is a strange experience. Novysibirsk is strange, too, especially Ceres. Sort of a male world. Like the old cowboy movies, but with modern conveniences. And vices.”

  “Never been there. Sounds dangerous.”

  “Not at all, really. If you’re not a cowboy yourself.”

  “Yeah, I imagine.” The mounting ladder was automatic, too. They climbed inside.

  It was small but opulent. The acceleration couches in front were upholstered in milk-white leather. The floor, which of course would see little use, was covered with a custom-designed Oriental carpet. The galley had an Italian coffee machine and a large wine rack that rotated slowly, to keep the corks from drying out in zerogee. An ebony-and-bone screen gave privacy to the head and shower. The walls, panelled in warm grey silk, were graced by antique Japanese watercolors.

  “You stripped all this down for the Jupiter flight?”

  “All except the paintings. If I were to do it again, I would leave in the coffee machine, I think; the instant was so bad I stopped drinking it. Long solo flights are easier with coffee.”

  “With wine, too, I should think.”

  She laughed. “Grappa. Less redundant water mass.” Maria could stand up straight, walking to the couches; Dallas had to stoop slightly. “Use the head if you want.”

  “I’ll wait for zerogee. More of a challenge.” (That was another refinement. Most spaceship heads were fan-operated; worthless in gravity.) They started strapping in. “Better tell me where the barf bags are, though.”

  “Under the left armrest. You get space-sick, pobrecito?”

  “No, the shots work for me, for the balance problem. It’s just Maui.”

  “We’re safer than White Sands.” She saw he was strapped in and fed the engines a few drops of fuel. There was a high-pitched hiss and they rolled forward. “Four times safer, launch by launch.”

  “Statistics,” Dallas said, staring out the cockpit as the hangar door rolled open for them. “If I die in a launch, I want it to be my own fault. Not some damned sea gull.”

  She smiled over at him. “They fixed that. There hasn’t been a bird on the track in years.”

  “Yeah, right.” Dallas took out a barf bag and tucked it under a shoulder strap. “Years.”

  * Required in Common Europe and North and South America. Dealers in other locations may not be required to carry certification, though all Bugatti dealers do so as a matter of policy.

  Dallas

  It wasn’t very rational of me to feel more nervous at Maui. You aren’t really in control during boost phase from Sands either; anything serious that goes wrong will be over in a microsecond.

  But rolling down that track pinned down by five gees of electromagnetic acceleration—and then being suddenly flung free—well, it may save fuel, but if you can buy a spaceship you can afford a little extra gas.

  There were three others in the queue ahead of us—a Mercedes and two dumbos, a shiny NASA one and a beat-up rocknik one. A nice long wait for Maria to get weighed and do redundant system checks, and for me to sit and try to think about something else.

  It takes about three minutes at this end, mostly to evacuate the big air lock chamber. Then a short countdown and you spend more than a minute mashed under five gees, total silence and darkness (except for the entertaining spurious colors your crushed eyeballs generate), and then—save for a few milliseconds as you flash through the automated air locks at the exit—you’re suddenly screaming through thin air at about ten times the speed of sound.

  “You going to kick in while you’re still in the tube?” You’re allowed to if your exhaust volume is small enough.

  “The last few seconds, yes. It’s more comfortable that way, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah.” Otherwise you have a second or so to free fall, and then the jets kick in. Feels something like falling off the high board and hitting the water in a belly flop.

  Finally a light blinked green, and we rolled into the black mouth of the air lock. It closed behind us and the only light was the cluster of instruments in front of Maria, a collection of dim green and orange blobs. There was a loud clunk and then the hammering of a pump that got quieter as it sucked the air out.

  “Ready?” Maria said.

  “Oh yeah. Looking forward to it.” I did literally look forward, to keep from spraining my neck, and reached back to smooth down any wrinkles in the cloth of my shirt. Maria did the same: it can be like a dull knife blade pressed down on your kidney.

  Then a faint metallic voice counted down from ten. I took a deep breath and belatedly remembered I should have hyperventilated. Then we started rolling.

  They’d improved the start a little since the last time I’d been talked into leaving from Maui. It wasn’t a sudden five-gee slap but, rather, a slow buildup over several seconds. The giant eased himself onto your chest, stomach, and abdomen in almost total silence. People amused by knuckle-poppings and eructations must find the onset of acceleration hilarious.

  It felt as if I could breathe only a fraction of a cupful of air at a time, and only take it halfway down my throat at that. I knew that the panic screaming in my brain was just a result of too much carbon dioxide in the blood—the skin diver’s first response (diving without a breather), which he learns to ignore. It’s easier to ignore in the water. I wished I could see the clock that Maria was probably staring at. I wished I could see Maria. Not enough to risk a broken neck, though.

  I felt a welcome increase of crush—Maria’s engines adding their bit—and we were suddenly dazzled by noontime sun in a cloudless sky of deepest ultramarine. Straps cut into should
ers and waist with the sudden braking, hitting air; then the comparatively soft weight of about three gees, headed up.

  Maria flipped a few switches, the snaps loud in the thin cockpit air. “You okay?”

  “Fine.” I lifted a heavy arm and laboriously returned the barf bag to its home. I couldn’t tell whether she had seen the gesture.

  The sky got steadily darker as we blasted up and to the east; the ocean horizon’s curvature became more pronounced. Then we were finally weightless. My stomach did a reflex “uh-oh” but decided to relax.

  Maria unbuckled fast, saying something in Italian, and smoothly kicked off back to the head. A lot of women have that problem with sustained high acceleration. I couldn’t feel too superior, lying there dopey with a kicked-in-the-balls malaise. I should get one of those fancy hydraulic suits.

  Some more Italian from the head, and a girlish laugh. Then the toilet cycled, and the screen clicked open and shut, and she swam back to the cockpit.

  “What’s so funny?”

  She stopped her forward progress with a light palm touch to the control board and hovered next to me. “I’m tattooed … look at this.” She slipped open the throat of her blouse and lifted the bra to show how its lace edge had imprinted a pattern on the top of her breast. “It’s down below, too. Never wear frilly underwear in five gees.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” I made a grab for her, more than half in earnest.

  “No time.” She gave me a peck on the forehead and pushed off, back to her place. “Should be coming in pretty soon.”

  You could see adastra’s support structures for several minutes before the ship itself was visible: shiny, perfectly round bubbles of hydrogen and oxygen, gleaming metal stock, girders, floating in clustered jumbles like huge jackstraws.

  The ship would eventually be a streamlined wedge, streamlining being necessary even in “empty” space, if you go fast enough. They were planning to top out at about three one-hundredths of the speed of light. Most of the wedge right now was a gossamer skeleton, just becoming visible when Maria touched the yaw jets and the sight slid away to port.

  She stared at the stern monitor and tapped the yaw jets again at just the right moment; no wasting fuel by nudging back and forth. The blinking red light of adastra’s dock drifted to the center of the screen and stopped directly on the vernier line. “Very nice,” I said.

  She smiled and nodded. “Let’s see how close they let me get before they—”

  The radio came on, suddenly loud. “Bugatti one-six-four-nine-I-T, slow down! You’re closing at over eighty.”

  “Seventy-eight,” she said sotto voce. “Will comply.” She gave the main jet a long and a short. “How’s that?” she asked the radio. “I can’t go any slower. We’re not that immortal.”

  “Well done. Prepare to surrender control in approximately ninety seconds.”

  Docking in low orbit is fairly complicated, since any appreciable change in velocity results in a new orbit. (That’s true farther out, of course, but it’s less pronounced.) You can’t just aim for the dock; you’ll miss entirely or even crash.

  Eyeballing it, you want to fiddle pitch and yaw so that the “horizontal” vernier of your stern monitor lines up with the plane of your orbit, with the dock an appropriate distance above or below. If the dock’s dead on the “vertical” line, you should be able to come in with just the main jet. In practice, you have to be damned good to do it. It looked as if Maria could have, if adastra had let her. Like most large structures, though, it controlled final approach.

  I cinched my straps tight and so did Maria. The radar-feedback computers that take care of the last couple of hundred meters aren’t subtle or gentle. They don’t want to have to turn you around, so they tend to give you one big blast and then a series of short ones.

  This time it was only two. The first one rattled my teeth, and the second was hardly noticeable. Then we tapped the dock and padded clamps closed on us with a creaking sound.

  Maria closed down the board and unstrapped in a hurry, kicked off, and drifted sternward. “We may have to move pretty fast. Some docks don’t seal too well against a hull curvature this extreme.” She came back shepherding both our bags.

  “Okay. I’ll be ready to jump.”

  “One way or the other.” She took my hand and we kicked over to the door. “Follow what I do, though. If the leak’s too bad I’ll zip up and go back inside—it’s a fast door; you wouldn’t want to be caught on the wrong side of it.”

  There was a scrape and a rattle from outside, and then a “bing-bong” that signaled mating was complete. We squeezed into the broom-closet air lock space and sealed the door behind us. Her left hand over the red emergency slap plate, she thumbed the OPEN button.

  My ears popped. There was a loud hiss of escaping air, and a red light was blinking stroboscopically. Maria kicked off in a slow graceful roll, suitcase held to her chest, and I followed with a headfirst uphill dive. It was cold, maybe ten below, but the accordion dock was only about five meters long. The opposite air lock opened as we approached, closed behind us, and cycled quickly.

  A smiling, handsome man was waiting for us. I wondered whether it would have been a woman for a male pilot.

  “I hope the holding slips are heated,” Maria said to him. “If my ship gets that cold, you’re going to owe me for several million lire worth of leather upholstery and vintage wine.”

  The man nodded without changing expression. “It will be no problem,” he said with a surprising Russian—rocknik?—accent. “Your visas, please?” We handed them over, along with passports. He kept nodding as he inspected them, initialed a couple of places, and handed them back.

  “You have no objection to sharing living quarters?” We didn’t. “Good. Follow me, please. Leave your baggage.”

  Moving with exaggerated slowness for the benefit of those of us who had not brachiated for several million years, he glided from handhold to handhold, following a line of blue tape labeled “TO HUB.”

  This part of adastra was presumably unfinished, just a gloomy volume of indeterminate hugeness. It appeared to be the space between the inner and outer hulls of the ship, curved metal surfaces separated by about ten meters. Occasional light showed a sparse forest of spidery girders stretching off in every direction.

  “This whole volume can’t be pressurized,” Maria said. “Not all around the ship.”

  “No. One sector at a time, as it is being worked upon. Follow me.”

  This was fairly daunting. A tunnel barely wider than my shoulders, totally dark. Claustrophobes need not apply to adastra. He clipped a flashlight to his belt so that Maria could gauge her distance as we glided up or down. I maintained my distance from Maria by the simple expedient of colliding with her periodically.

  “We are approaching a membrane,” he said, and disappeared with a fluttering sound. Then Maria and I went through, into light and sudden pain. Inner ear. I pinched my nostrils shut and blew slightly, gestured; she did the same and thanked me.

  This tube was not quite so narrow, and was translucent and glowing deep red. Previously the air had had the thin sharp smell of low-pressure oxygen, seasoned with grease and welding flux. Now the air was thicker, more humid, as if people might live here. I looked toward my feet as we moved away from the “membrane.” It was just a series of flexible baffles slit along most of two diameters. I’d read about them somewhere, a kind of air lock between areas of high and low pressure. A little leaky but simple and fast. If one side had a sudden drop in pressure, the whole thing would collapse into an impermeable seal.

  I wondered why the red light. Maybe to trigger some pre-infantile birth canal memory. The side of the tube was wet, with condensation, and warm. You couldn’t have seen in there, could you? I don’t remember that far back.

  I looked up at Maria and forgave myself a temporary obsession with female parts. What sort of attraction was this, born of four days together, that lasted and grew for seventy years? We had joked about
it, and said some obvious things, and never seriously used the word “love.” How could I love someone knowing I would lose her in a year or two; how could she love someone and still want to die? But if it wasn’t love, we were both in serious trouble. Glandular regression to puberty. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on her.

  Watson Hygiene Account

  Tentative script for Dallas Barr 40-second endorsement

  HIGH SCALE—

  A marina, night, full moon. Good-looking man and woman, clothing informal but expensive and sexy, walking along the dock hand in hand. They’re talking in whispers. They approach his yacht, which has one dim interior light, and stop. She hesitates, nods.

  He helps her down into the yacht. Backlit, we see her begin to undress. The light goes out.

  Dallas Barr walks along the dock, following their path. As he approaches the yacht, we hear a glissando of silvery laughter.

  Barr turns. MEDIUM CLOSE-UP as he speaks.

  Barr

  Lucky man, eh?

  (The laugh again)

  Not so lucky.

  ANOTHER ANGLE: BOAT STARTS TO ROCK SLIGHTLY

  Barr, cont.

  She has AIDS X. In two

  months he’ll be dead.

  (Beat)

  She’s not out to get him.

  She doesn’t know she

  has it. She won’t have

  any symptoms until a

  month after he’s dead.

  Then she’ll die, too …

  along with everyone else

  she’s been

  intimate with since June.

  ANOTHER ANGLE: SOUNDS OF LOVEMAKING

  Barr, cont.

  Everyone who didn’t use

  Airskins.

  He holds an Airskin up, draped over his palm; a pencil spot (polarized to give rainbow reflection) picks it up.

  BCU AIRSKIN

  Barr (V.O.), cont.

  Not just a condom—it

  had better not be, since

  it costs ten times as

  much—the Airskin is

  only a few molecules

  thick, invisible except for