My touchpad got screwy and Control Panel said its driver was missing, so I reinstalled Windows and lost all my bookmarks in the process. Unfortunately I didn't have slashdot messages bookmarked on the other computer. Slashdot has no link that I can find and its FAQ doesn't mention messages.

So if someone could shoot me the URL I'd appreciate it, I like reading you guys' journals and "messages" is how I get there.

I finished this story early January, and it's made the rounds of magazines it would fit in that I submit to, except Analog and the new site Compelling SF. Compelling has "Agoraphobia" and it will be six weeks before I can submit anything else, and Analog holds on to them for six months. So you guys get it. It will be in a future book titled "Voyage to Earth and Other Stories". If it's borked, go to a less retarded site

          Iâ(TM)m going to kill a planet. I donâ(TM)t know how yet, but I swear Iâ(TM)m going to do it.

        I was making a routine prospecting run and got a radio message from my best friend. As luck and coincidence would have it, the radio relay was only a little over two light hours awayâ"and Roger was either dying or already dead.

        The radioâ(TM)s message started âoeWarning! Anyone who hears this, stay away from Darius. This is probably the deadliest planet in the galaxy. If you land here, youâ(TM)ll die here. Iâ(TM)ll probably be dead by the time you receive this message.â

        Darius? He was prospecting in the Luhman system, the same system that I was, and I didnâ(TM)t even know it. I doubt he knew I was in the system, too. I hadnâ(TM)t heard from him in months, and here he was only between a light hour and three away. I wondered what he was looking for? I was after rare earths. This system was supposed to be a lot like the solar system and weâ(TM)d mined quite a bit of it from our own asteroid belt. Most of the rare earths in the belt, in fact. But Darius? What of value could possibly be there?

        I couldnâ(TM)t bring myself to leave him there despite his dire warnings, at least until Iâ(TM)d heard the entire thing and knew he was... Oh, God. Roger!

        I started the jump drive and in half an hour Iâ(TM)d be on my way to Darius to see if there was any way I could help him survive. I listened to the rest of the message as the engines warmed up.

        âoeI donâ(TM)t remember the crash, but I suspect it was the cornodium that caused it. Do not land on this planet!â

        I wondered what in the galaxy cornodium was. Iâ(TM)d never heard of the stuff before.

        âoeI woke up on the floor with a terrible headache, not knowing where I was. Hung over, maybe? I sat up and looked around. No, I was in the pilot room of my craft and wouldnâ(TM)t have been drinking. I got up with my head reeling, and stumbled to the controls.

        âoeIt looked like Iâ(TM)d crashed on Darius, the third orbit out from Luhman. Thatâ(TM)s the weirdest star system weâ(TM)ve found so far, weird because it was so much like the sun, and its planets were so much like our own solar systemâ(TM)s planets. Darius even has a giant satellite like Earth does, and the Luhman system even has a ring of asteroids between the fourth and fifth planets, just like the solar system. Nature is really strange sometimes.

        âoeI was looking for cornodium. Only small amounts had been found anywhere, and my calculations said the substance would be here, and likely vast riches of it. I donâ(TM)t know how many of us prospectors roam the galaxy these days, but weâ(TM)ve looked for valuable ores either not readily available or not available at all in our own system on hundreds of thousands of planets, and cornodium had only been found on six of them. None had much of it. It had all been mined and taken to Earth, less than a ton of the substance.

        âoeI didnâ(TM)t know much about cornodium despite doing as much research as I could about it. It was discovered only ten years ago and had revolutionized high end electronics, and the highest end at that because the stuff was so rare, and therefore very expensive. All I knew about cornodium was that they used it for power generation, but I had no idea how they got power from it. I didnâ(TM)t know what the stuff is or why itâ(TM)s so rare, but I didnâ(TM)t care. All I knew was that it was rare and very expensive, and if I found a planet with it Iâ(TM)d be rich, so I learned as much about its origins as I could. I was sure Darius fit the bill. If I was right Iâ(TM)d be as rich as my buddy who had found all that gold and platinum. I know now. Lot of good it will do a dead man.â

        I choked up again; Roger was thinking of me as he died.

        âoeWell, I would have been rich. It was obvious Iâ(TM)d crash landed on Darius.

        âoeMy head was bleeding, which explained the headache. I ignored it; I needed to assess my situation and get help if necessary.

        âoeI checked the controls, and yep, I was screwed. I tried to radio for help, but radio only goes at the speed of light and the closest radio relay craft was thirty light minutes away. I sent a distress signal, knowing it would be over an hour before I heard back.

        âoeTwo hours later it dawned on meâ"the antenna was on the bottom of the craft to better communicate with bodies one was taking off from or landing on. No one had heard me.

#
        âoeLike I said, Darius is really weird. Theyâ(TM)d only surveyed it by telescope so far, but Itâ(TM)s exactly like Earth and its moon, with two exceptions: the land masses are quite different, and there is no life whatever. The air is mostly nitrogen like Earth, with about the same amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide, and science couldnâ(TM)t explain where the oxygen came from. On Earth, it comes from vegetation and photosynthesis, but Darius was completely lifeless.

        âoeThat didnâ(TM)t matter to me, though. I needed to find the cornodium I was certain was here and stake a claim.

        âoeThe trouble was, I seemed to have wrecked my craft, and it was all I had. It was insured, of course, but with my antenna busted how could I collect on the insurance? And find the cornodium and stake a claim?

        âoeI decided to go outside and think about it, since I needed to see how much damage was done in the crash. After all, what danger could there be? This planet was lifeless, including microbial life. It being lifeless was, of course, the biggest mystery, even bigger than where all the oxygen had all come from. The planet was perfect for life to have formed, yet it hadnâ(TM)t. It should have even had sentient life, even though so far our own species was the only sentience we had ever found, which still puzzled evolutionists. Weâ(TM)d discovered lots of life in the galaxy, but most of it was no higher form of life than bacteria, and none smarter than a cow is on Earth.

        âoeI got out to do an outside inspection, and wow, I was right; the cornodium was everywhere, just laying on the ground! One piece looked like a daisy; nature comes up with some strange coincidences, and I laughed at it. There was a weird sound in the air, and I couldnâ(TM)t figure out what it was or where it was coming from.

        âoeIt looked like Iâ(TM)d smashed up the bottom of my craft pretty good. Iâ(TM)d have to find a way to make the radio work, and I decided to eat lunch and take a short walk first, since I was going to need all my brain and it didnâ(TM)t seem to be working right, so I decided to give it a break. I ate lunch and went back outside.

        âoeDarius reminded me of Mars, except there was air and water. And mud. And the skyâ(TM)s blue when Luhman is shining. It wasnâ(TM)t the same color as Mars, either, more brown than orange, with all of the patches of the bright blue cornodium. Lots of large areas didnâ(TM)t show dirt, just piles of small to tiny pieces of cornodium. And that strange sound, and it was heavy like Earth and the horizon was different than Mars, but it still reminded me of Mars, anyway. I donâ(TM)t know why.

        âoeIt wasnâ(TM)t all that muddy, kind of like dry dirt that had a small shower maybe the day before and there were enough rocks to keep my boots from getting too nasty. Most of the rock and gravel was cornodium.

        I figured the planet wouldnâ(TM)t be lifeless for long; this system had only been discovered six months ago. I came out as soon as Iâ(TM)d heard of it, because I had a hunch based on what Iâ(TM)d read about cornodium: it had only been found on lifeless planets with gravities between Marsâ(TM) gravity and one point five Earth gravities within a starâ(TM)s âoeGoldilocks zoneâ, and Darius fit perfectly. I wondered why nobody else had figured that out, the numbers were all there.

        âoeI walked up a shallow incline, and when I reached the top I saw in the distance what looked like it might have been a large machine, halfway buried. I started walking toward it to investigate, but it started sprinkling and the sky looked menacing, so I went back to my ship. I needed to work on that radio, anyway. Iâ(TM)d have to find some wire that didnâ(TM)t feed the radio or kitchen or air refreshment to use as an antenna.

        âoeShortly after I was inside my craft it started storming badly, with thunderâ(TM)s noise and the windâ(TM)s howl echoing through the boat constantly. I searched the ship for wire I could scavenge from the wreckage without stopping the kitchen or radio. I found enough to reach just outside, and now needed something to use as an antenna.

        âoeI thought of what had looked like half-buried machinery, and hoped there was wire in it, since all I would need for an antenna was a little more wire. I figured to go exploring it as soon as the storm abated.

        âoeIt stormed all afternoon and half the night. The next morning when I woke up, Luhman was shining brightly in a cloudless sky. I ate breakfast, despite not being very hungry, and packed a lunch, because it had looked like the machine might be quite a way off. It seemed Iâ(TM)d gotten a concussion in the crash, because my head still hurt, and I was still weak and disoriented. My stomach was a bit queasy, too, especially after breakfast.

        âoeIt was a two hour walk to the machine, and I had to rest halfway there. Where was my normal stamina? I should have been able to sprint to it. âProbably has to do with the concussion,â(TM) I thought. I still wasnâ(TM)t thinking clearly.

        âoeThe thing was bigger and farther away than it looked. Space ship, perhaps? I looked for a door or a window or a hatch. I didnâ(TM)t find one, but I did find an opening where the thingâ(TM)s metal had torn; it had to be some sort of craft, although it was nothing like any craft Iâ(TM)d ever seen or imagined.

        âoeI didnâ(TM)t find any wire, but I did find a steel rod I could use for an antenna, and two statues of some weird animal Iâ(TM)d never heard of, made of cornodium. There were strange sounds coming from the statues, which were clothed in rags. Art? Or... A chill went up my spine. Were these intelligent aliens that had somehow become cornodium? I thought of when Iâ(TM)d seen what looked like a flower made of cornodium earlier, and had thought it was one of those coincidental freaks of nature.

        âoeBy then I wasnâ(TM)t feeling well at all. In fact I felt downright sick, and decided to go back to my boat. I went outside, and noticed that my skin had taken on a slightly bluish tint.

        âoeBy the time I got back I was weak and shaky, and cold. Really cold, as if Iâ(TM)d been in the snow in summer clothes, even though the day was very warm, almost hot. It only took a minute to hang the rod from the wire and start the radio.

        âoeI had made quite a few incredibly profound discoveries, discoveries that were incredibly important to humanity. Iâ(TM)d found evidence of alien intelligent life in the crashed alien craft, and another alien was taking me overâ"the planet itself. Rather than being lifeless, the planet itself is alive. It grows, reproduces, and eats. The cornodium is its brain! I now know why the strange sounds were coming from the alien statues; the planet was trying to taunt me in an alien language. Itâ(TM)s talking inside my head right now, in English. I... I have to... I have to set this on repeat... before Darius...

        âoeWarning! Anyone who hears this, stay away from Darius. This is probably the deadliest planet in the galaxy. If you land here, youâ(TM)ll die here. Iâ(TM)ll probably be...â

        I shut it off and saved my best friendâ(TM)s last words, tears welling up in my eyes. Even if I could have gotten to him in time, I couldnâ(TM)t have rescued him. I doubt itâ(TM)s possible to land safely on Darius, as I suspect it caused Rogerâ(TM)s craft to crash land.

#

        The jump drive made it seem like I got to Darius immediately, but it would have actually been five to twenty minutes later when I really got there, and hours since he had sent the message. I went into orbit around Darius and called the survey bureau and staked a claim to it. Nobodyâ(TM)s going to make batteries out of my friend! And Iâ(TM)m going to contact the authorities when I get to Earth and see if I can get the use of cornodium outlawed before all life there becomes cornodium. And Iâ(TM)m going to learn everything I can about the stuff. Including how to kill it.

        God, but the government is exasperating! I not only didnâ(TM)t make any progress getting cornodium outlawed, I was issued a gag order! The substance promised to do wonders for the economy, because it seemed to produce free energy, despite the laws of thermodynamics.

        But of course it wasnâ(TM)t doing that. It was getting energy from somewhere, and I was convinced that the somewhere was from the energy in life forms that were, little by little, becoming cornodium themselves. My friend Roger who had died and become cornodium died in a about a day, but it had been a planet that was almost completely covered in cornodium. People, animals, and plants on Earth were only exposed to tiny amounts of it. They would die of old age before becoming cornodium, because there was so little of it.

        But eventually Earth would become cornodium, I was sure. Ultimately enough live matter would become cornodium that it would awaken and eat everything that lived on Earth.

        Iâ(TM)m a very wealthy person, having discovered a planet that was mostly made of gold and another made of mostly platinum, two metals that are incredibly useful in electronics, and my mining licenses donâ(TM)t come cheap. I decided to buy as much cornodium as I could, hopefully all of it, and send it to Darius. I hoped I could afford it.

        Iâ(TM)d bought half a ton at ridiculous prices when the government stepped in again. Iâ(TM)d dropped all the cornodium on Darius, and they took Darius from me. Imminent domain. There were a year of legal battles but I lost. Sure, I made a fortune on it, and I was now the richest individual on Earth, but damn it, I wanted Earth to live and these idiots were going to kill it!

        Crap. What to do next? I decided to chance ignoring the gag order and talk to a scientist, and contacted a local university. I was to have a meeting with a Dr. Felber, a materials scientist who was studying cornodium and trying to find a way to make artificial cornodium and a way to recharge cornodium batteries. I was a little uncertain about what the outcome might be, what with the gag order and all.

        She turned out to be a delightful woman, but of course the court order had me worried. âoeDr. Felber,â I said, âoeIâ(TM)ve been under a gag order about cornodium, and Iâ(TM)m not supposed to talk to anyone at all about it or theyâ(TM)ll put me in prison. Can you keep this to yourself?â

        She became a bit pensive. âoeNot if itâ(TM)s something subversive.â

        âoeIt isnâ(TM)t. I have a recording of a dead friend that Iâ(TM)m not allowed to play anywhere, and if they knew it existed it wouldnâ(TM)t exist. They had erased it from the radio relayâ(TM)s data banks, but didnâ(TM)t know Iâ(TM)d kept a copy.â

        She raised an eyebrow. âoePlay it,â she said. I did.

        When it was finished, she said âoeIâ(TM)ve been exposed.â

        âoeYes,â I replied, âoeand so have I. But there is so little of it youâ(TM)ll be dead of old age long before it affects the tissues; Roger was on a planet where most of the whole crust was covered in cornodium. But we need to save the Earth!â

        âoeYes,â she agreed, âoeBut how?â

        âoeI donâ(TM)t know, youâ(TM)re the scientist. How can we kill it?â

        âoeKill what?â she asked.

        âoeKill Darius,â I said vengefully.

        âoeKill a planet?â

        âoeYes,â I replied, âoebefore it kills us! It will, you know, if it lives.â

        She looked doubtful. âoeIâ(TM)m going to have to study that sample some more, our present theories may all be wrong. That recording explains a few things that had puzzled us and may be a paradigm changer. Iâ(TM)ll get back to you. Donâ(TM)t worry, this is between us.â

        A year and a half later rumors started leaking about government mining expeditions that had gone to Darius, all of whom had âoemysteriouslyâ disappeared. It was no mystery to me; those people were now all cornodium, no longer human, or even alive as we know life. They had been eaten by the evil monster that was Darius.

        Friends and relatives of the missing people were served the same gag order that I had been served, and a few were jailed after publicly complaining. So far, it was only rumor as far as the public was concerned... for now. Later on, a lot of politicians lost their jobs. But Iâ(TM)m getting ahead of myself.

        Six months after the rumors started, Dr. Felber emailed me. âoeSee what I foundâ is all the email said. So I did, and visited her at the university.

        âoeItâ(TM)s easy to kill,â she said when I visited her. âoeMiddle C.â

        âoeMiddle C?â I asked, perplexed.

        âoeTwo hundred sixty one point six Hertz,â she replied. âoeThat tone kills it. Earth is full of music, including that note, which we think is why they ever run down at all, so we have nothing to worry about.â

        My jaw dropped. âoeSo if Roger had been playing music there he wouldnâ(TM)t have died?â

        âoeMaybe, maybe not. It might have taken a very loud continuously operating tone generator, and even that might not have been enough.

        âoeThere are only tiny amounts in any one place on Earth, where thereâ(TM)s lots of music, and cornodium batteries last ten years or more, and most of Darius is covered in the stuff.

        âoeIn any case, even if he had lived, the cornodium would have been useless. Like the Land Bridge theory was replaced by continental drift, and the solid state universe was discarded in favor of the big bang theory, all of our theories about what made it vibrate were completely wrong.

        âoeWe had believed that the vibration was caused by some process internal to the substance and trying to find where its power was stored; we had thought it must have been a chemical reaction that we hadnâ(TM)t found. It made perfectly logical sense, since it seemed that the energy drained like a normal old fashioned chemical battery, except far more slowly and they couldnâ(TM)t be recharged. People have been seriously injured trying to recharge them.â

        Wow. Dead cornodium wasnâ(TM)t useless. I wondered why nobody thought of military and construction applications, since such a small amount was so explosive; the cornodium in a thousand watt battery was only about a cubic centimeter in size, although most of the battery is the piezoelectrics and the battery takes up a lot more room than a cubic centimeter, more like four cubic decimeters, and that thousand watts lasts for ten years or more. Yes, Iâ(TM)d learned a lot about cornodium since Darius had murdered Roger.

        Of course I didnâ(TM)t say anything; kept to myself this could bankroll whatever it took to kill Darius. I needed to get that planet back.

        And kill the evil thing and let the military and construction crews blow the stuff up. Roger didnâ(TM)t deserve to die like that! Iâ(TM)d had my legal team negotiating with the government for months by then, ever since the rumors about the missing miners had started floating around.

#

        Six months after that the government, failing to find a way to mine Darius, ceded the planetâ(TM)s rights back to me, at twenty percent of what theyâ(TM)d paid me for it. Of course there were a lot of lawyers involved, but I can afford the best, and you can trust that I hired the best. When you need a lawyer, the most expensive one you can afford is usually your wisest investment.

        The next day I was in orbit around Darius with a drone, a tone generator tuned to middle C, and a hamster. I would have used a plant, but didnâ(TM)t know how long it took for plant tissue to become cornodium, but it takes about a day with a mammal on Darius. I sent the drone down, wondering if it would crash.

        It didnâ(TM)t, so the cornodium had affected Roger before he even landed. If heâ(TM)d landed on autopilot the fool might have lived. But probably not.

        This was a truly evil thing, and I planned to destroy it, full of hate for my friendâ(TM)s tormentor and executioner. Hate for the monster that had eaten him. Hate for the evil that wanted to consume all life.

        Forty eight hours later the drone returned, with a cornodium statue of a hamster. Damn, the doctor was wrong. Oh, well, my cornodium hamster would pay for the trip and a whole lot more. That was a valuable statue, at least after it was made into batteries.

        It was a six month jump from Luhman to Sol, and I donâ(TM)t understand the math behind that at all. The jump seemed instantaneous to me, but it was six months later when I arrived. The part I donâ(TM)t understand is it should have been years instead of months, and a whole lot more than only six. I simply donâ(TM)t understand jump drives. Yeah, they covered them in pilot school, but I just didnâ(TM)t get it. It has something to do with artificial worms drilling holes or something, and has a lot of really complicated math that has to do with space, time, and gravity. Like I said, itâ(TM)s over my head. Iâ(TM)m lucky I passed the test, it was multiple choice and I guessed at a lot of it.

        In any case, when I got back to Earth I of course visited Dr. Felber, who told me âoeWe have additional data since you left. The sonic frequency must be out of phase to discharge the cornodium; if itâ(TM)s in phase it strengthens it. Itâ(TM)s still dangerous to Earth!â

        âoeHave you said anything to anyone else?â I asked. âoePlease donâ(TM)t let anyone know cornodium batteries are rechargeable! My God...â

        âoeWell, finding a way to recharge them was one of my original goals, but donâ(TM)t worry. This thing needs to be gone before we are. Iâ(TM)m working with an engineer on a device that will take the cornodiumâ(TM)s frequency and send it back out of phase. Iâ(TM)ll email you when itâ(TM)s done.â

#

        It only took a month and I was on my way back to Darius with my drone and another hamster. Again the generator was sounding middle C, but the computers had measured and sent a perfectly out of phase middle C. I waited the two days to see if it would come back a hamster or a cornodium statue of a hamster.

        I got my hamster back, alive and bewildered. But maybe hamsters are always bewildered, I donâ(TM)t know. Anyway, it worked. I could mine explosives to make up for my losses now, then figure out how to kill this horrible thing once and for all. By âoethis horrible thingâ I mean the monster, Darius, of course. That bitch has to die! I returned to Earth to talk to Dr. Felber again, and maybe talk to my government contacts whom I had sought out during and after the gag order and imminent domain court proceedings, about sales of explosives to them. It would depend on what Dr. Felber said.

        Dr. Felber was pleased that the experiment was a success. âoeAdd more amplifiers,â she said, âoethen blow up the dead parts.â

        Blow up the dead parts? Not me, I was going to mine it and sell it to the government like a patriot and let them blow it up. But I took her advice on the amplification.

        But first I needed to do one more experiment before talking to my government contacts, to see how much of Darius died from the out of phase middle C. I had one constructed that would run for two days then attempt to âoerechargeâ it with electricity. According to Dr. Felberâ(TM)s theories, it should explode several square kilometers of the planetâ(TM)s surface.

        It didnâ(TM)t. So she had some calculating to do, I guessed. I sent a drone down to collect a hamster-sized chunk of dead cornodium for her to examine.

        I jumped, and six months later even though it seemed like a second later I was in orbit around Earth, and talking to Dr. Felber again the next day. âoeIt should have worked,â she said. âoePuzzling. Weâ(TM)ll examine the sample you brought back and call when we have an answer.â

        âoeOkay,â I said.

        I waited in the Bahamas on a beach. No point stressing about it, weâ(TM)d kill that terrible thing eventually.

#

        I sat on that beach for months. Finally Dr. Felber contacted me. âoeIt has to be processed before itâ(TM)s explosive,â she said.

        âoeProcessed?â I had no idea how these batteries worked, even though Iâ(TM)d tried to learn. It did make me think of something Roger said in his warningâ"it had stormed when he was there. If raw cornodium had been explosive it would have blown him up.

        âoeGround into a fine powder. Do that and the individual grains all sing in harmony, and you can turn that into a lot of electricity with a piezoelectric device, a really small one. Here, Iâ(TM)ll show you the math...â

        âoeDonâ(TM)t bother,â I interrupted, âoeI wouldnâ(TM)t understand it anyway.â

        âoeWell, okay,â she said, âoebut we can still kill Darius if you can afford it.â

        âoeI can afford it,â I said. âoeHow?â

        âoeIt emits sound. Kill a patch with your biggest amplifier and send a robot with a sound meter tuned to middle C to see how much is dead, and you can kill Darius a little at a time.â

        âoeYes!â I exclaimed. âoeLet that bastard suffer!â God, but I hated Darius because of poor Roger, who had been killed with extreme malice. It had to have been horrible for him.

        I teared up a little. It seemed I wasnâ(TM)t going to sell anything to the government, since dead, unprocessed cornodium was worthless. But that wasnâ(TM)t what made me tear up, I was thinking of poor Roger. I missed my old buddy terribly. We were partners way back when these boats needed two people to fly them, and still got together all these long years later. We had some great times, and I was looking forward to more good times. But it was too late now.

        The next day I made the jump to Darius with a huge bank of midrange speakers, a phased C tone generator, and fifty thousand watts of amplification, with all of it mobile. I sent a robot with a sound meter down with them.

        The next day the robot reported a dead zone a hundred meters wide, so I sent all the equipment moving in an ever widening spiral. When this land mass was clean Iâ(TM)d move it all to another land mass and get to work there. I figured it would take months to kill the entire planet, but I was determined.

        A week later the spiral, now a hundred kilometer radius, wasnâ(TM)t widening. Apparently, dead cornodium could regenerate in the presence of live cornodium. I left the equipment there running in circles, not wanting my meager progress to be erased, and went back to Earth for more sound equipment. Before I left I had a drone land with a robot to collect a few hundred kilos of live cornodium to bankroll the venture with.

        Killing Darius would be worth the incredible riches I was going to destroy by killing it. Poor Roger!

        I got to Earth immediately six months later. I sold the cornodium, mostly to Chinese buyers, and bought a huge number of mobile amplifiers, speakers, and the computerized gizmos that sent cornodiumâ(TM)s middle C signature back out of phase. I also bought the nicest casket I could find for Roger, and hired an engineer. An expensive one who had several different engineering degrees.

        I worried about taking all that cornodium to Earth, but the newspapers said that there was a backlash against cornodium and the rich people who used it, and middle C phase generators were becoming popular among normal folks who couldnâ(TM)t afford cornodium devices and were afraid of them. Justifiably afraid, I thought, despite Dr. Felberâ(TM)s initial reassurances. That relieved me quite a bit.

        I thought it was funny, I was very wealthy and rather than using cornodium devices, I was the first to call for their prohibition. But I did have more cornodium than anyone, a whole planet full, even though I was extirpating all of it. Well, what I didnâ(TM)t sell to mostly China, at least.

        A year later, Darius seemed completely dead. There wasnâ(TM)t a milligram of cornodium on any of the land masses at all, even dead cornodium; Iâ(TM)d mined it all and sent it to the heart of the perpetual fusion explosion known as Luhman.

        It looked like Darius had destroyed an intelligent species from what few artifacts had surfaced. The planet had been lifeless for a long, long time and very little was left to tell us about these aliens, but this monster had very obviously destroyed a great spacefaring civilization.

        Of course, before mining the dead cornodium and sending it to the star we recovered the cornodium bodies of the people who had tried to mine cornodium for the government, Darian artifacts (We found a cornodium Darian, but we donâ(TM)t know if it was the intelligent species), and the intelligent aliens Roger found that Darius had eaten, and shipped them to Earth. The bodies, both alien and human, were now dead cornodium and therefore harmless as long as they were kept away from live cornodium. The few ruins of stone buildings stayed, as did Rogerâ(TM)s ship and the alien ship. Maybe some day they would be tourist attractions.

        I thought I had beaten the evil monster, but I hadnâ(TM)t.

        I had several tons of Earthian dirt shipped to Darius for its microbes, and enough grass seed to wipe out the supplierâ(TM)s inventory. I was determined to bring Earthian life to Darius, starting with grass and then with cows, and other species of flora and fauna later. I had a home by the sea side built there, and a shrine and burial site for Roger. I really missed Roger and the good times weâ(TM)d had together.

        I ran the C generator for a year just in case, with nary a peep from it, and finally shut it off. I shouldnâ(TM)t have.

        I went back to Earth for a visit, and to buy supplies. The few folks I had hired took care of my grass and cows when I was gone. Those cows were incredibly useful, widening the zone where plants would grow.

        Back on Earth, the Chinese had really taken to cornodium batteries. They actually believed that the batteries promoted health! Very wealthy Chinese folks powered their entire households with cornodium batteries. The government there had outlawed phased C generators, saying they were a plot to ruin the Chinese economy.

        However, in the Americas, particularly South America, most communities had outlawed cornodium. It was illegal in all of Peru and Venezuela, as well as most communities in the rest of the countries in those continents. It was also illegal in much of New Zealand, Australia, and in parts of many African and Asian nations. Europe was in the grip of a massive economic recession, so there were very few cornodium devices there. Most of the world got power from rooftop solar panels and back yard windmills. China was the only country still using fossil fuels, and was the only country to outlaw the phased C devices.

        They had also developed something called âoetwist jump radioâ. I donâ(TM)t understand how it works, but it has something to do with âoetwisted pairs of photonsâ. At any rate, it made communication instantaneous no matter how far away the other radio was... well, usually. Sometimes there were lags, and the theoretical physicists were still trying to figure out why.

        This was a real breakthrough in communications, since normal radio was useless between stellar systems, and messages had to be sent physically on a ship with jump drive.

        Of course, I bought five of them.

        After visiting friends and family I returned to Darius with all sorts of seeds, several honeybee hives, some pigs, chickens, a few other animals, my new twisted radios, and other supplies. Darius would become a pest-free paradise.

        A few months later I made the mistake of wading in the ocean for an hour or two, maybe even longer. It made me weak and dizzy and nauseous and I had a terrible headache, so I headed back to the house. I noticed that my skin seemed to have a slight blue tint, as if I were really cold, and I felt like I was freezing.

        On a hunch I turned the C generator on, and it came on very loud; there was cornodium somewhere, and lots of it.

        The cornodium it was reacting to was in me! I was suffering from cornodium poisoning, the same thing that had killed Roger.

        The ocean... Iâ(TM)d forgotten about aquatic life, and apparently the seas, rivers, and lakes were full of that damned cornodium. I got a blanket and sat weakly on a recliner, hoping the C generator would help.

        It did. An hour later my chills became a fever, and I threw up my breakfast. The vomit was blue, and later my urine and feces were blue as well. I was perspiring profusely, and my sweat came out with a blueish tint. I couldnâ(TM)t eat at all for a week, and it was a sick, painful, miserable month before I was anywhere near normal.

        When I was mostly over the poisoning I returned to Earth again to hire another engineer to help me figure out how to kill the rest of Darius and to talk to Dr. Felber about sending an out of phase signal underwater. It turned out that she knew little about underwater sound, but put me in touch with a sonic engineer who could, and he got me acquainted with another engineer who specialized in robotic submarines. Both agreed to visit Darius and work on the underwater sonic equipment.

        The news on Earth was all about a panic in China, and it was about cornodium. It seems that a large part of the very wealthy Zhejiang Provence had succumbed to cornodium poisoning, and thousands of people and uncounted plants and animals there were now cornodium. The Chinese government quickly outlawed cornodium and cordoned the area with phased C generators. They then confiscated every cornodium device in China and sent them to the sun, and suspended trade with any country where cornodium was legal.

        The engineers and about fifty other folks went to Darius with me and a great big load of supplies, as I had more and more people working for me on Darius now. It wouldnâ(TM)t be long before Darius was self-sufficient, at least as far as food was concerned. Weâ(TM)d need to import some robotic harvesters soon.

        Everyone wore a C generator on their belts to protect against cornodium poisoning, and we put up large phased C generators every hundred meters along all the planetâ(TM)s seashores.

        Of course, one of the workers, new to Darius, got drunk and fell into the ocean. His two drunken buddies hauled him out laughing, and took him home. They werenâ(TM)t laughing for long, though, as all three developed mild cases of cornodium poisoning. Even a âoemildâ case is pure sick and painful misery, but at least now we knew that a C generator was a cure.

        A message came over the twist radio from a doctor on Earth saying that one of the men had gotten a routine physical before coming to Darius, and his test results showed that he had developed a small tumor in one of his lungs and had to return to Earth for treatment immediately. It was the man who had drunkenly fallen into the water. The message had been terribly lagged, and should have reached Darius months before we did.

        The engineers, both family men, went back to their families on Earth. I accompanied the three of them, deciding to get a physical myself; I hadnâ(TM)t seen a doctor in years and actually worried a little about the cornodiumâ(TM)s effect on my health after I found out about the guyâ(TM)s tumor. After all, who knows? The stuff might cause cancer or something later.

        The doctor said she was amazed at my health. I was almost fifty, and she said I looked thirty five and my vitals were normal for a healthy twenty five year old!

        Sheâ(TM)d been the doctor Iâ(TM)d seen years earlier, and asked when Iâ(TM)d had my mole removed and who had done the surgery. âoeI didnâ(TM)t,â I said. âoeI hadnâ(TM)t noticed it was missing.â

        âoePuzzling,â she said. âoeThey donâ(TM)t usually go away by themselves. Your vitals are puzzling, as well. Iâ(TM)ve never seen anyone your age so healthy.â

        After I left, the fellow with lung cancer whose name I canâ(TM)t remember called, saying he was going back to Darius with me.

        âoeBut you need cancer treatment,â I exclaimed.

        âoeNope, the doc said he couldnâ(TM)t understand it, but there wasnâ(TM)t any cancer. Said none of my vitals were anything like they were when I saw him seven months ago either, said I was healthy as a twenty year old. My warts went away, too!â

        I called Dr. Felber and told her what had happened, that it looked like controlled cornodium poisoning could cure some diseases. âoeWell, I donâ(TM)t know,â she said, âoea sample size of two isnâ(TM)t very meaningful. Iâ(TM)ll talk to some of my colleagues.â

        When I got back to Darius I stopped decontamination of one medium sized lake. After all, if this was a cure for cancer...

        Five months later Dr. Felber showed up with over a hundred other scientists, from different fields; biochemists, chemists, biologists, materials scientists like her, and a lot more.

        One of the scientists was dying of liver cancer, contracted because of exposure to some chemical when he was young. He ran straight into the lake as soon as he left the ship!

        None of my crewpeople went into the water to drag him out, since theyâ(TM)d seen how nasty even a mild case of cornodium poisoning was. However, after quite a while two dumbass PhDs waded in and got him out. They all got sick, of course. The scientist with the cancer almost died, I think. He was in the water a long time before his fellow scientists even missed him, and the cancer had weakened him considerably.

        He did recover, though, and there was no cancer afterward. Three out of three!

        A year later Dr. Felber published her teamâ(TM)s first report. Cornodium attacked the simplest life, like viruses, first. Next was microbial life, then aberrant cells in the higher life form, then that life formâ(TM)s healthy cells. It affected plants far more slowly than animals.

        Weâ(TM)d not just cured cancer, but almost all diseases. It wouldnâ(TM)t cure diabetes, or arthritis, or baldness, or disease caused by genetics, or mental illnesses, but there were other treatments and cures for those ailments. It would cure the common cold or flu, but the cure was far worse than the disease in those cases. Believe me, you have to be really sick or dying before youâ(TM)ll want to get cornodium poising, even a mild case.

        So weâ(TM)re building a health facility around that lake, and decontamination of the rest of the aquatic bodies continues, as does the research. Right now the biologists are testing its effects on heart disease in rodents, since the worry is that the cornodium may make it worse rather than better, weâ(TM)ll see.

        Roger and I were hailed as heroes, saviors of the Earth. He hadnâ(TM)t died in vain after all.

        I do worry, though. What if thereâ(TM)s another cornodium planet somewhere?

The first copy of Random Scribblings came about a week ago, and I was happy that there only needed to be some very minor changes to some of the graphics, and the cover needed to be completely redone. They shipped the corrected copy Monday, so I'll probably get it next Monday.
        I'm releasing it on June nineteenth, and having a book release party at George Ranks from noon to two. I'll have copies of books for sale, including the new one that won't be in bookstores until late July at the earliest.
        I'm also raffling off a hardcover copy of Yesterday's Tomorrows. No purchase is necessary but food and drink will be available. I may raffle off a copy of the new book as well.
        So if you're in Springfield Sunday the nineteenth, drop by and say "hi". You may get a free book out of it!

People try to put us d-down
Hard for us to get around
Things kids say sound awful c-c-cold
'cause I didn't die before I got old

This is my generation
This is my generation, baby

Why don't you all f-fade away
I can't dig what kids all s-s-say
I'm not trying to cause a big s-s-sensation
I'm just talkin' 'bout my g-g-g-generation

This is my generation
This is my generation, baby

Why don't you all fu-fu-fu go away
Forgot what I was going to say
I'm not trying to cause a b-big s-s-sensation
I'm just talkin' 'bout my g-g-generation

This is my generation
This is my generation, baby

People try to put us d-down
Hard for us to g-g-get around
Things they say sound awful c-c-cold
I didn't die before I got old

This is my generation
This is my generation, baby

A photo of me with a phone from 2020

Note: Typed this out last year but never got around to posting it.
        Iâ(TM)ve been meaning to install Linux on this notebook for quite some time, and finally got around to it Friday.
        I started using Linux back in 2002 with Mandrake, and I loved it. They later renamed it Mandriva, and I kept using it. Then I found out that they were disbanding and patches would stop coming, so I switched to kubuntu, which is Ubuntu with a KDE desktop instead of that God-awful Gnome desktop. It ran happily on an old HP tower for years until the old tower had a severe hardware failure. I still need to take its hard drive and video card out and install them in the old Dell, which isnâ(TM)t on my network because itâ(TM)s running XP.
        My first notebook I had like this one was stolen in a burglary five or six years ago. It was the same model as this, and it ran kubuntu very well, far better than its native Windows. With Windows I had to run a program from the ISP to get wi-fi working on it, but it just worked fine on kubuntu without my having to do anything.
        So Friday I put it on this notebook dual-boot, since I need Microsoft Word even though I hate Microsoft Word. Knowing it would take a while I plugged in its power, and plugged it into the network for more speed. It took ten minutes to get my part of the installation done, and watched the news as Linux installed.
        I booted it up when I was done, and egad, KDE! What have you done?! Yes, itâ(TM)s a beautiful desktop, but it isnâ(TM)t the same KDE Iâ(TM)ve been using for almost fifteen years.
        What the hell, you stupid wet behind the ears software designers, are you NUTS? Look, you dumbasses, changing an interface all around for no good reason is just brain-dead stupid. I donâ(TM)t want to learn a brand new God damned interface unless itâ(TM)s instantly recognizable as an improvement, and this is about the same stupid move Microsoft made with Windows Eight. Look, you morons, if I wanted to learn a new interface Iâ(TM)d install Gnome or something.
        Next I wanted to hear music, so I needed on the internet. I tried to connect to my server but simply couldnâ(TM)t get on with the wi-fi. Strangely, I was able to connect with someone elseâ(TM)s unsecured wi-fi. It had gotten on the internet easily with the network card plugged in.
        Someone had said that Libre Office could read and write .doc files well, so I tried it. First I opened an Open Office document, and the font face was some cartoonish sans serif font instead of Gentium Book Basic.
        Then I opened a .doc file, and it opened, although instead of Courier it had a different sans serif face.
        I wanted to get at some files on my external hard drive, so I plugged the network cable in. It indicated a connection, and I could get on the internet through the router, but the external drive didnâ(TM)t show up.
        I doubt thatâ(TM)s the OSâ(TM)s fault, though, since it wouldnâ(TM)t let me connect with my own wi-fi but was fine with someone elseâ(TM)s. Iâ(TM)m pretty sure itâ(TM)s that damned modem-router that the cable company makes me rent. Iâ(TM)d change ISPs if I werenâ(TM)t planning to move next Spring.
        At any rate, KDE now sucks. Someone said XCFE was good, Iâ(TM)ll have to try it.

(Note: I've been way too busy)

If this is mangled, go here.
        I received a strange note, made of cut up magazines pasted to paper and slipped under my door. It read âoeYour muse has been kidnapped. If you want her back, meet under the Facebook Street Bridge after dark. Bring your wallet, passport, and an umbrella.â
        Crap, my muse was gone? I looked, and sure enough it was missing. It's really important to me, so I got my passport, made sure my wallet was in my pocket, and took an umbrella, even though the weatherman said there was no chance of rain. I went to the bridge around sunset and waited.
        The weatherman was wrong. As I waited under the bridge it started pouring. A little after dark a black limousine pulled up, and the rear door opened. âoeGet in,â a woman's voice said. I did.
        A mean looking short haired blonde in the front passenger seat was pointing a very large black handgun at me. âoeYou're not Neo,â the skinny dark haired girl in the back said accusingly.
        âoeMe?â I replied, scared to death. Or scared of death, maybe. âoeNo, I'm mcgrew, I don't know any Neo. I'm missing some property and someone said to wait under this bridge and I could get it back.â
        âoeOh,â said the blonde, putting the gun away. âoeMorpheus said to give you this,â and handed my muse to me!
        I put my muse in my jacket and started to open the door. The blonde had her gun out again. âoeFifty bucks, asshole!â
        I gave her two twenties and a ten. âoeWhy was I told to bring a passport?â I asked. The dark haired skinny girl laughed. âoeMorpheous was just fucking with you. Now get out!â
        I still can't figure out what that was all about...

I doubt the magazines will want this and I haven't given you guys any new stories for months. Since slashdot won't fix its text mangler I've posted it here.

It's that time of year again. The time of year when everyone and their dog waxes nostalgic about all the shit nobody cares about from the year past, and stupidly predicts the next year in the grim knowledge that when the next New Year comes along nobody will remember that the dumbass predicted a bunch of foolish shit that turned out to be complete and utter balderdash. I might as well, too. Just like I did last year (yes, a lot of this was pasted from last year's final chapter).

I've lost the URL to my slashdot "messages", damn it!

Some of these links go to S/N since they don't have slashdot's patented text mangler. Stories and articles meant to ultimately be published in a printed book have smart quotes, and slashdot isn't smart enough for smart quotes.

As usual, first: the yearly index. Articles and stories slashdot has mangled the text in are at S/N without the mangling. Slashdot should be ashamed!

Journals:
the Paxil Diaries
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014

2015 articles:
Where's my damned tablet?
Are printed books' days numbered?
A suggestion to mobile browser makers and the W3C
Futurists...
"My God! It's full of fail!" -David Bowman
Where's my fridge??
1950s TV
What a mess!

Sci-Fi:
Nobots
Mars, Ho!
Yesterday's Tomorrows
Stupid Tourist!
Amnesia
Stealth
Voyage to Earth
Plutus' Revenge

There are six more stories finished and one started, but I'm giving the magazines first crack at them. They are:

Dewey's War
The Exhibit
Sentience
The Naked Truth
Cornodium
Weird Planet
Trouble on Ceres
The Prisoner

All except The Prisoner are finished or in final edit except The Prisoner. That one has me stuck, and it may never be finished.

Last years' stupid predictions:
I got one wrong; Random Scribblings didn't come out. I could have published it this year, but since the subtitle is "Junk I've Littered the Internet With for Two Decades" I decided to add this years scribblings and a little of next year's to it.

This year's predictions: same as last year's, with one addition. I'm not going to predict publication of Voyage to Earth and Other Stories because chances are it won't be done. As I write this the stories finished so far make up 36,000 words, which is halfway there at least. But I will predict:

Someone will die. Not necessarily anybody I know...
SETI will find no sign of intelligent life. Not even on Earth.
The Pirate Party won't make inroads in the US. I hope I'm wrong about that one.
US politicians will continue to be wholly owned by the corporations.
I'll still be a nerd.
You'll still be a nerd.
technophobic fashionista jocks will troll slashdot.
Slashdot will be rife with dupes.
Many FPs will be poorly edited.
Slashdot still won't have fixed its patented text mangler.
Microsoft will still suck

Happy New Year! Ready for another trip around the sun?

I was watching the morning news the other day, and opened the computer to record KSHE's "Lone Klassic"... and it was in Linux. What the hell? Apparently I should have shut it off the night before, because Microsoft had apparently installed an update and then rudely and maliciously rebooted the computer. It was in Linux because kubuntu is the default OS in GRUB. So I rebooted again, selected Windows, and the little thing came up and... just sat there. Ten minutes later I still had a black screen.

I pulled the battery and tried again. Ten minutes later and I still had a black screen. So when I'd yanked the battery again and restarted it, I selected "Windows Recovery" from GRUB. An Acer screen came up with selections for reinstalling Windows. The first wiped the hard drive, the second kept your files. I picked that one; there was data on the hard drive I hadn't backed up in a few days, including a new story I'd started the night before and was on a roll with.

Twenty minutes later the first progress bar said "1%".

I'd decided a long time ago to get a DVD burner for the old Dell, until about three weeks ago when I'd taken it apart to install the video card and hard drive from the old HP that had computed its last. There were no slots that would fit the card (older computer than I thought, I guess) and the drive ribbon was a single drive ribbon. I probably have a spare double drive ribbon in the basement, but since the card wouldn't work in the Dell, there really wasn't any point. I'd decided then to get an old laptop that already had a DVD burner. So this was the time, because I had writing to do and the install was going to take all day and half the night.

I drove to the pawn shop and bought an HP laptop with Windows 7 and a DVD burner. It's a lot bigger than I like a laptop to be, but the smaller, cheaper one with a DVD burner ran Window 8, and I didn't want to deal with that garbage. Windows 7 is still the least annoying and least problematic of all of MS's OSes.

Of course I had to download Windows Defender and Firefox with IE, install Firefox, uninstall Norton and McAfee and Bing Bar and all the other effluent that comes with a new computer, reconfigure everything, and download and install Open Office and all the other programs I need.

Meanwhile, the Windows reinstall on the Acer had hung. Damn, I was going to lose everything I'd written the day before, since Windows had surely overwritten GRUB. I got lucky; it hadn't. So I went into Linux to copy everything to thumb drives, since I still can't get it on my network (time to try a new distro). I even found some movies I thought I'd permanently deleted by mistake months ago!

After I saved the data on thumb drives I rebooted again, went back into Windows restore and let it wipe the drive. That was the next morning, and it took all day. By then I had the new laptop running pretty smoothly and was writing again. The next day was mostly spent getting the old Acer back to normal. I was amazed and pleased that it had destroyed neither Grub nor Linux.

I'd lost a few passwords and haven't yet reset them all, and lost all my bookmarks.

That new computer is too big, but it's a lot faster than the Acer.

So I turn the TV on this morning and it wouldn't pick up channel 49. Flipped through the stations, and all of them had really screwy colors. I have my fingers crossed that it's the converter and not the TV, since the converter had fallen off the shelf last night. I hope it is, because they're not expensive and TVs are. I'll find out when I play a DVD.

If this won't render properly just go here

        A year or so ago, an executive from an electronics company (Apple, if I remember correctly) spoke of the lack of innovation in television sets since the 1950s, and my reaction was âoeHeâ(TM)s either stupid or thinks I am.â
        In the 1950s televisions had knobs on the set for changing channels. Remote controls were brand new, expensive, limited in capability, and used ultrasound rather than infra-red.
        The screens were vacuum tubes, and most were monochrome. Color television was brand new, and it was nearly 1960 before any stations started broadcasting in color. Rather than being rectangular, color sets were almost round; even black and white sets werenâ(TM)t true rectangles.
        They had no transistors, let alone integrated circuits; the IC had yet to be invented, and transistors were only used by the military. They were a brand-new invention. TVs didnâ(TM)t have the âoeno user-servicable partsâ warning on the back. When the TV wouldnâ(TM)t come on, as happened every year or three, the problem was almost always a burned out vacuum tube. One would open the back of the set and turn it on. Any tubes that werenâ(TM)t lit were pulled, taken to the drug store or dime store for replacement. If that didnâ(TM)t fix the problem you called an expert TV repairman.
        The signal was analog, and often or usually suffered from static in the sound, and ghosts and snow in the picture.
        There was no cable, and of course no satellite television since nothing built by humans had ever gone into space.
        However, there is one thing about television that hasnâ(TM)t changed a single iota: daytime TV programming.
        In the 1950s most folks were well paid, and a single paycheck could easily pay for a familyâ(TM)s expenses. Most women, especially mothers, stayed home. As a result, daytime TV was filled with female-centric programming like soap operas, game shows, and the like. Usually there were cartoons in the late afternoon for the kids.
        Today the rich have managed to get wages down so low that everyone has to have a job. The demographics of daytime television have radically changed as a result. Now, rather than housewives (of which few are left, and we now have house husbands), who can watch daytime TV? Folks home from work sick, both men and women, folks in the hospital, the unemployed, and retired people.
        Yet daytime TV is still as female centered as it was when I was five. Soap operas, talk shows with female hosts and female guests discussing topics that would only appeal to women, and game shows.
        Whatâ(TM)s wrong with the idiots running our corporations these days?

I'm actually looking for two things: good magazines I haven't found, and good magazines to submit science fiction stories to. I also want to know where I can find your favorite magazines; I've been getting them at the Barnes&Noble in town, but they sell out quickly. Once all they had was three copies of F&SF, and I found it to be excellent. Another time I found five titles, but I haven't seen Asimov's there, and I always liked that one.

Analog was excellent as well, as they've always been. The British Interzone was very well designed, with excellent layout and large amounts of excellent artwork, but I didn't like any of the writing. It just didn't suit my taste.

I have yet to find any decent online mags, I'm sure you guys can supply me with that.

I plan to buy a house next spring, so I'll almost certainly need a new refrigerator. There's a problem: they don't make the fridge I want, and never have. I can't figure out why.
        Refrigerators today are quite different than antique ones, using a different coolent because of the ozone layer, better insulation, the use of rare earth magnets in the motors, and other improvements.
        But they're still incredibly wasteful.
        The fridge I want has two vents outside, much like dryer vents but insulated. There is an electronic outside thermometer, one in the refrigerator, and one inside the freezer.
        When the temperature outside is above seventy fareignheight, the heat taken from the fridge is vented outside, so the air conditioner doesn't have to work harder to cool the hot air refrigerators let out inside the house.
        Under seventy the air is vented into, rather than outside, the house. If the heat is on, it doesn't work as hard.
        But most of all is winter. It's ludicrous that we pump the heat from our freezers with a lot of energy expenditure, while freezing air is right outside that could come in the intake hose and freeze and cool your food. At freezing, this fridge doesn't need the compressor at all and compressors take a lot of energy to operate.
        I don't know why nobody is selling those things.

It was the only life-bearing planet in the entire universe; the very first planet to have life. It was the only planet in existence to have the conditions necessary for biogenesis, including being a double planet, each orbiting each other. The double planet was one of the keys of biogenesis, because of the tides. The timing of orbits and gravities had to be perfect, as well as chemical and photonic conditions.

        Life has a hard time getting started. This was the first planet on which it was possible. It would be billions of years before any other planet had these conditions.

        In time, its rotation slowed as its sister planet Theia went farther away and took up an eccentric orbit around the star.

        It was a very rich planet. Rich in metals, rich in diversity of vegetation once life had evolved that far, vast riches of water, and very rich in hydrocarbons. It was rich in chemicals and conditions conducive to abiogenesis. One of the planet's fauna evolved to the point of sentience, then the arts, than the sciences, until their technologies were very advanced. By the time this had come about, though, the slightly smaller sister had wandered away. The Vulcans never knew of it.

        The Vulcans were a very religious people who worshiped Plutus, a god everyone could see and love. When the heretic prophet Ragnarok was twenty three, he warned them that Plutus had told him to inform everyone that he was commanding them to explore outer space, that there were vast riches there, and their very existence depended on it.

        But space exploration isn't cheap, and the Vulcans couldn't see any monetary payback, only expense. Space travel wasn't started.

        Fifty years later Ragnarok spoke of an evil that only Plutus could save them from, and said it was on its way, and called it Theia. He spoke before a crowd one day, saying Plutus had spoken to him in a dream. As they listened intently, he informed them that their god was angry because they had never left Vulcan and was going to destroy the Vulcans, and Ragnarok and his family were the only ones who would survive the cataclysm unless he told anyone of his dream, in which case he would die instantly and his family would perish as well. His blasphemy was met with a storm of stones, and he died there broken and bloody. The mob then murdered his family and set his house on fire.

        But Ragnarok was right. The rich are never satisfied with their riches, so poured more and more of their seemingly limitless hydrocarbon riches into industry and commerce, all worshiping Plutus with all their hearts. Technology brought wealth, and was developed to a very high degree.

        A century after the would-be savior Ragnarok was stoned to death, the Vulcan culture was already in decline. They developed space travel, but they never saw the signs of the decline. The denizens of a declining civilization never do. But space travel was developed despite its seemingly nonexistent to meager payoff, and a colony was planted on the next planet out from theirs, the third, and another on the fourth. The third planet was uninhabitable because of its almost completely nitrogen atmosphere, and space men and women had to wear oxygen masks and very heavy clothing outside. It was very cold there, having very low concentrations of greenhouse gasses. The planet was called âoeSchneeâ.

        Schnee was the reason space travel was actually developed on Vulcan. Vulcan had been much like Raj a few centuries earlier, but had gradually warmed, becoming hotter and drier. The area near the equator become a desert with fewer and fewer forms of life, and its oceans started shrinking, the water entering the atmosphere as vapor and staying there. Collecting this water was very expensive, so they started looking at Schnee for water. It was a hard life for the scientists and ice miners there, many of whom froze to death.

        The fourth planet, Raj, was much nicer. It had a nitrogen atmosphere with plenty of oxygen for animals to breathe, and carbon dioxide for plants to breathe and warm the planet, so had very comfortable temperatures near its equator. Scientists were there before too long, followed by rich tourists, followed by rich immigrants who went for its beautiful weather and the wonderful Marineris Ocean's seashores. As Vulcan became hotter, Raj became the star's ruling planet. All still worshiped Plutus.

        Vulcan was dying, but wasn't yet dead when Theia returned. It had been in its eccentric orbit for billions of years, its orbits often changed drastically by a gas giant and a ringed planet.

        Theia seemed to be headed directly to Raj! It came very close, its gravity from its larger mass than Raj's and its nearly all iron composition tearing away almost all of Raj's atmosphere. Animals, including the sentient Rajians whose ancestors had immigrated from Vulcan died in hours. Flora came to its end shortly later.

        Raj's gravity altered Theia's course, and it was now headed directly to Schnee. Vulcan had fallen so far that its meager population of Vulcans had no idea of the destruction that had hit Raj, now dead, and what awaited Schnee. It mattered not to them, for they knew that they were doomed. Ragnarok's prophesy was well on its way to being true -- but no one would be left alive to tell tales of the blasphemous prophet.

        The Vulcans on Schnee saw Theia coming, but were helpless to do anything about it. There were few of them left, as well.

        At first it was a white dot in the night sky that got brighter and brighter every evening, then bigger and bigger. Before long it was a huge circle. It hit Schnee with tremendous force, releasing tremendous energies. It made a giant splash of molten rock and metal, and steam from the suddenly boiled ice. Vulcans who still had binoculars could see rings around Schnee, but there were few Vulcans, let alone binoculars. They, the few animals, meager vegetation, and microbes in Schnee's atmosphere that had ridden to Schnee with the Vulcans were the only life in the entire universe.

        Plutus had his revenge, making Vulcan so hot anything combustible burned, and soon there were rivers of flowing lead. Schnee was covered in an ocean of magma, and Raj was hit by so many meteors that all traces of Vulcan activity were erased completely. Plutus had not only destroyed the Vulcans, but all evidence of their very existence.

        It was finally only the microbes in Schnee's atmosphere that lived, who had no way of appreciating the beauty of Schnee's rings. Which was a pity, as they were very beautiful rings indeed.

"How you been, old man?"
        "Wild Bill! I haven't seen you since... damn. You haven't aged a day!"
        "I've been in space, you quit. You know space travel slows aging. So how've you been? I've been doing runs to Titan since the discovery."
        "Bill, it's fantastic. My beer is the best selling beer on Mars, and they want us to import it to Earth. Can you believe it? And I have the cost down really low since I bought that warehouse to grow the ingredients in. I'm almost as rich as my wife!"
        Bill laughed. "How is Destiny?"
        "Oh, man, she's doing better than me. She's getting the damned Nobel Prize! She's going to be famous. I'm so damned proud of her!"
        "Damn, that's hundreds of years old, not many prizes more prestigious than that. What did she get it for?"
        "Her new telescope. She never told anybody but me, but her first PhD thesis was rejected; they didn't think her theory was sound. After she got her doctorate she decided to prove her theory and built that telescope here. The results were that her theory was on the money. They replicated it on the moon and got the same result and it was a huge paradigm shift in the astrophysics world. I'm really proud. So we're going to Earth. I'm taking a shipload of beer with me."
        "Yeah, you always liked beer. I remember your last trip."
        John laughed. "Fuck you, Bill, I'm not drinking it, I'm selling it. Earth is importing it from Mars."
        "Earth is buying beer from Mars? Even with the shipping costs? What the forgswaggle?"
        "Young man!" an old woman at the other end of the bar admonished, "Watch your fucking language, asshole!"
        "Oh, shit, I didn't see you down there, Mrs... Ferguson, wasn't it? Terribly sorry, it won't happen again."
        "I remember you, too, you foul mouthed asshole. Now watch your fucking mouth!"
        "Yes, ma'am. John, Earthians are buying beer from Mars?"
        John laughed. "Rich dumbasses trying to be cool. Mars is cool now, I could piss in a can and they'd buy it."
        "I'm headed for Earth in a week, maybe I'll be your captain. When you leaving?"
        "About a week. Hope you're running my load."
        "Maybe I will. Hope so, anyway."
        "Our friend Tammy's going, too. She's getting some kind of award for her work with the droppers and the discoveries she's made, although it isn't the Nobel. She found that Mars was perfect for curing dropheads; they hate low gravity when they're high, so being on Mars helps when they're withdrawing, as well as what she learned on the trip here."
        "I don't think I met her when I was on your boat."
        "Probably not, although she was probably watching you have fun with the whores. She never said anything about it, though."
        "What??"
        "She was studying them. Her research led to a cure for drop addiction, which is what her award was for. Her first success works for me now, she's the morning bartender. All of them are employed now, mostly in construction and robot repair."
        "Is Mars still short of robots?"
        "Not since that factory opened two years ago."
        "I'm surprised you don't have robots tending bar, then."
        "Screw that. People don't go to bars to drink, they go to bars to socialize; bars are full of lonely people. If there's nobody to talk to but a damned robot they're just going to walk out. I do have a tendbot for emergencies, like if one of the human bartenders is sick and we don't have anyone to cover. The tendbot will be working when we're going to Earth, but I avoid using it."
        Bill took another sip of his beer. "How the hell did you learn to make such good beer, John?"
        "Lots of books, lots of classes; I minored in chemistry, and lots and lots of trial and error."
        "Well, I can sure see why you're exporting it. This stuff could make me an alcoholic! Damn but your beer is good," he said, draining the glass.
        "Want another one?"
        "Well, I was only dropping by to say 'hi' but this is some damned good beer. Yeah, one more and I have to go, but I think I'll take a case with me. Damn, but this is some good beer!"
        An Asian woman walked in. "Lek!" John said. "Back so soon?"
        "I forgot my purse," she said, retrieving it from a drawer behind the bar.
        "Lek, Meet my oldest friend, Bill. Bill, Lek here is one of my best assets. She's been studying and knows five languages. That's a hell of an advantage in a Mars bar, since we get people from all over Earth coming here."
        "Pleased to meet you, Lek. Where are you from? Chicago?"
        She laughed. "No, but my English teacher was from Chicago. I'm from Bangkok."
        "You really speak English good!"
        John laughed. "Not so good when I first met her but you could understand her."
        "It was nice meeting you, Bill, but I have to run, I have a class in half an hour. See you tomorrow, John."
        "Oh, Lek, you're sure you don't mind doing the evening shift when I'm gone?"
        "No, I told you, it's fine. Tips are better at night, anyway. See you!"
        Bill said "Damn but this is good beer. Give me another one, John!"

        Bill was, indeed, their captain. Of course, he was running a first class ship this load. First class ships had two dozen docks so passengers could take their own transportation with them if they so chose. John, Destiny, and Tammy took the houseboat up. A large chemical rocket took his huge load of beer up.
        Bill met them at the dock, and John introduced Bill to Tammy. Bill showed them their suites, and when the last of the half-dozen or so other passengers embarked and the robots finished moving John's huge load of beer, Bill left orbit.
          After settling down in their quarters, John and Destiny decided to have lunch in the commons. There was a very large, scary looking black man in a business suit sitting at the bar and sipping a martini. He took notice when they walked in.
        "Excuse me, sir," the large fellow said, "Are you John Knolls?"
        "Yes, sir," John replied. "And you are...?"
        "Dick Martin, Mister Knolls. I love your beer! My houseboat's half full of your beer, you can't get beer as good as yours on Earth!"
        "Well, thank you, Mr. Martin. What do you do?"
        "I'm an engineer. I work for this shipping company. Had to go to Mars to oversee the installation of some equipment I designed. Sure will be glad when I get back to Earth!"
        John laughed. "I'll probably be glad to get back to Mars. After five years of Martian gravity I'm going to hate Earth."
        Martin laughed. "I probably won't much like it after two months on Mars, either. I'm sure not looking forward to the centrifuge. But I'm looking forward to getting back, they have a new toy I want to play with."
        "They didn't tell you? We'll be at over a gravity by the time we reach Earth."
        "Really?"
        "Yes, between the two of us my wife and I hold nearly a third of the company's stock. We can pretty much do as we please. It probably won't take a week to get there. So, what kind of toy?"
        Dick grinned. "Company toy. We're getting some of those new molecular printers, can't wait to try it out."
        "Molecular printer?"
        "Yes, it's a printer that builds objects molecule by molecule. You can get some pretty wild stuff from it. I feel like a kid at Christmas!"
        Destiny had ordered pork steaks, fried potatoes, broccoli, and green beans cooked with pork bacon. "John," she said, "The food's here."
        "It was nice meeting you, Mr. Martin. Please excuse me."
        The large man went back to his cocktail and John sat down with Destiny as a portly, shabbily dressed, nerdy looking young man came in frowning, and ordered a double whiskey from the tendbot.
        John and Destiny finished their lunch, John remarking that those were the best green beans he'd ever eaten.
        Destiny laughed. "It's the pork bacon."
        Pork was incredibly expensive because of Earth's environmental regulations.
        "Those pork steaks were pretty good, too," John said. They had coffee and pie, and went back to their quarters. Destiny put on a new holo and they watched it, drinking Knolls' Stout Lager.
        They had dinner in their suite, and went to the commons for cocktails. Destiny ordered a zinger splash, and John ordered a Knolls lager.
        The nerdy looking fellow fell off his stool as Bill came in. "God damn it," he said, "this is why I hate passenger runs. At least the damned drunk didn't start a fight." He called a medic to take the drunk to his quarters.
        "Hi, guys," he said to the Knolls. "Destiny, John tells me you're getting the Nobel Prize! Is he bullshitting me?"
        Destiny laughed. "No, he's right. We're going to Stockholm."
          "Man, that's great," he said. "You must be really proud!"
        Tammy walked in as Destiny said "Well, duh! Jesus, Bill, it's the Nobel!"
        John laughed. "Told you, asshole. I wouldn't shit you about anything like that."
        "Hi, guys, Captain. What's up?" Tammy said.
        "Tammy, Captain Kelly here is my oldest friend. We went to high school together. Bill, this is our good friend Tammy Winters. I've known her for five years or so and she and Destiny have been friends since college. She's a scientist, too. She's going to Sweden for the Rudolf Virchow Award."
        "Congratulations, uh, Doctor? What's that award?"
        Tammy smiled. "Just Tammy, Captain. It's for my research in prostitute communities. It took the anthropology world by storm, but not near as big a storm as Destiny's telescope caused!"
        "Wow, you guys are going to be famous!"
        Tammy laughed. "Destiny will, I'll just make the other anthropologists jealous. I'm getting an APA, too, but you don't get famous for those, either. Where's that waiter? WAITER!"
        Destiny laughed. "Yeah, I'll be famous for fifteen minutes."
        A waiter came over apologizing profusely. John frowned. Tammy ordered. John said "I hate those damned talking robots, glad I'm not running these boats any more. Do they all talk now, Bill?"
        "Yeah, most of them. Especially on passenger boats. Another reason I like cargo runs."
        The large black man walked in. John waved, and he walked over. "Hi, Mister Martin," John said.
        "Call me Dick, sir."
        "Don't call me sir, call me John!"
        Dick smiled, and asked "Did that jerk leave?"
        "What jerk?" Bill asked.
        "Fat dorky looking guy that was in here earlier. My God but he was annoying."
        Bill said "Well, if it's the guy I think you're talking about, he passed out. A medic rolled off with him." A thin, attractive black women walked in. "Oh, excuse me, folks," Dick said, and walked over and met the woman.
        An elderly lady entered. "Uh, oh," John said. "Mrs. Ferguson. You're in trouble, Bill. I wonder why she's going to Earth? And how she got a first class ticket?"
        Mrs. Ferguson spied Bill, frowned, and walked over. "Well, if it isn't the asshole with the foul mouth! They're letting a dickhead shitmouth like you be captain?"
        "I watch my language when I'm on duty, ma'am. I'm sorry I offended you."
        Dick called out from the next table, "Blagger off, you busdown forgswaggled fognart!"
        The old woman got a disgusted look on her face and left in a huff. Everyone burst out in riotous laughter. Bill shook Dick's hand and bought him and his wife a drink. They were all becoming a little intoxicated. Another couple and a single man came in, but by then they were too drunk to worry about, or be able to remember, names anyway.
        It had started to become sort of a party, but Bill and Tammy seemed to be hitting it off, and since five years later John and Destiny still felt like they were on a honeymoon, went home to cuddle to a movie, cuddle to twentieth century music, and go to bed.
        "Pork sausage again? You said it made you feel guilty!"
        Destiny smiled. "I told you, it's because I'm frugal. Tammy says I might be nuts. But this is paid for, part of a first class ticket!"
        John laughed. "Tammy's right. You're nuts!"
        Destiny grinned and dug into the ham and cheese omelet with a side of pork sausage.
        Bill's eight o'clock adjustments needed no adjusting, and he wondered if the whole trip would be this easy. After all, it was only going to take a little more than a week, since their gravity would have increased to one point four by the time they docked, and Mars and Earth were pretty close right now.
        John and Destiny were coming out of their suite as he was inspecting that section. "Bill," John said, "you look like hell!"
        "Man, I am so damned hung over... man. Me and Tammy sure tied one on. Damn, but I like that woman! Uh, don't tell her I said that."
        John laughed. "She has PhDs in psychology and anthropology, dumbass. She already knows."
        "Well, shit!"
        Destiny laughed. "Don't worry, Bill, Tammy studies what she studies because she loves people and studies how to make them hurt less. She'd never hurt you on purpose, and I'd bet she knows you better than you know yourself. Doing inspections?"
        "Yeah."
        "We're just going for a walk. Want some company?"
        "Sure, but I can't let you downstairs. John knows that." They were walking past the cargo area.
        John and Destiny both started laughing. "What's so funny?" Bill asked, perplexed.
        "You!" they both said in unison. John added, "Computer: open C-17." The door opened.
        "What the..." Bill started. "What... Damn it, John, how in the hell did you do that?"
        Destiny laughed. "Bill, only my dad and Charles have more stock in this company than John and I do. We own the damned ship. But to tell you the truth, I really don't want to go up and down five flights of stairs."
        John laughed. "That's one reason I retired. I hated those God damned stairs! Hey, come in here, I opened the door to show you something."
        "You opened the door to freak me out!"
        "Yeah, but I still want to show you something. My new cans and bottle labels." He opened a case and handed a can to Bill.
        "Knolls' Martian Ale? Funny name for a lager."
        John laughed. "I don't just make lager. So what do you think about the new design?"
        "I don't know. Why is Mars white?"
        "Because it's ale. Lager is green and pilsner is red."
        "Why?"
        "You going to pay me tuition? Look it up."
        Bill laughed. "Asshole," he said. "Going downstairs?"
        Destiny said "I don't think so" in almost unison with John, who instead said "No fucking way in hell!"
        Bill's alarm went off. "God damn it," he said."
        "What's the problem?" Destiny asked.
        "I can't talk about it. John knows that."
        Destiny laughed. "You work for me, Bill. I can fire you, you know." He looked at John, who said "It's okay, what's the danger?"
        "A pirate." John and Destiny looked at each other. "A pirate?" John asked.
        Bill shook his head. "Beats the hell out of me, that's what the computer said." They all went to the pilot room.
        Bill sat in the pilot seat. It looked like the pirate was trying to communicate. There was only one ship, which puzzled all of them. Bill let him communicate.
        "Stand and deliver!" the pirate ordered. All three burst out laughing. "What the hell does that mean?" Bill said, and pressed a button. "What do you want, dumbass?"
        "You will surrender your ship or be destroyed!"
        All three laughed even louder; these ships were nearly impervious to weapons, especially the weapons available to pirates. An atomic explosion couldn't even damage it unless it detonated less than two hundred meters away, and the pirates had no atomics.
        "Do your worst," Bill told the pirate, laughing.
        Lasers and chemically propelled projectiles rained on the ship, of course with no effect. "Should I kill him?" Bill asked. It would have been easy.
        "No," John said, "Kill his ship, hit it with an EMP and have the company come out and snag his ass. That boat is surely stolen, the company might make some cash and you might get a raise."
        "I don't know," Bill said. "Bastards have killed our friends."
        "Everybody dies," John said. "Not everybody spends their life in prison before they do. Give him an EMP, lots worse than an atomic, and you might get a raise."
        Bill disabled it with an EMP and called the company. The three of them started towards the commons for a cup of coffee before Bill finished inspections when another alarm went off.
        "Damn it," Bill said, pulling out his phone. "Ladies and gentlemen, your attention, please. We will be experiencing lowered gravity for a short while. Please excuse the inconvenience." The three of them walked back to the pilot room, and Bill slowed the ship down.
        Suddenly Bill said "Holy shit!"
        "What?" John asked.
        "There's a ship headed right for that meteor shower we slowed down for, and he's really hauling ass! It's one of ours," he added. "Didn't see it until he passed us, he's in full stealth mode."
        "Damn it," John said. "What the hell is wrong with its captain? Pirates got him?"
        "One of our ships? Not very likely," Bill said.
        "It must be. Why would that captain drive right into a rock storm?"
        They watched the computer display in horror as the other ship went through the rocks. Bill spoke on the phone again, alerting the company about what had just happened. When the meteor shower passed, he sped the ship back up and they headed to the commons for their delayed coffee.
        Tammy was in there with coffee and a stylus tablet, so they started to join her, but the obese drunk, now sober, walked up and said "Excuse me, Captain..."
        "Yes?" Bill answered.
        Bill saw the big knife way too late and found himself on the floor, bleeding from the abdomen.
        "I'm the captain now," the fat man said, waving the big bloody blade. "Nobody but me can get you to Earth alive."
        "Think so?" Tammy said. "Think again." She kicked the knife out of his hand as a medic swiftly wheeled in, then she whirled around and kicked him in the head. He went down hard.
        John was tending to Bill, and took his taser and handcuffs. Dick walked in with his wife as the medic rolled off with Bill, Tammy following.
        "Oh, my God!" Dick exclaimed. "What happened?" John was cuffing the portly fellow. Another medic wheeled up.
        "That asshole tried to murder my best friend," John said.
        Dick was wide-eyed. "We're in trouble. How will we get to Earth without a captain?"
        "Don't worry," John said, "I ran boats like this one for a quarter of a century.
        Dick gave him a puzzled look. "You can't be much older than thirty."
        John laughed. "Space. Times on a boat are different than standing still time, I'm almost fifty. We'll be fine. Look, Dick, I have to make sure that asshole pirate is locked up and see how bad off Bill is." He went to sick bay while Destiny took over assuring passengers in the commons that everything was going to be all right.
        The flabby man was strapped firmly to the medic. Bill was pale, but awake. Tammy was there with him. John asked "How did you do that, Tammy? That was amazing!"
        She grinned. "Lek gave me lessons, said she owed it to me for curing her drop addiction. I never thought I'd have to use it!"
        Bill groaned. "John, what am I going to do? I have to get us to Earth, but it's going to be a while before I can get out of bed."
        "Tell the computer to transfer control to me and I'll take care of it. And the paperwork."
        "God, John..."
        "Forget it, Bill, I want to get us there in one piece too. Just get your rest and I'll take care of things until you can get around again."
        Bill asked "What the hell was that guy's problem?"
        John shook his head. "Fucking pirate. Another one. I'll question him when he wakes up. Look, I'm going to the pilot room to send paper and look at your schedules. I'll come back as soon as I can."

        "Look, Mrs. Ferguson, everything will be all right!"
        "But Miss..."
        "It's Doctor, Ma'am. Doctor Knolls. It will be okay! Really!"
        "Doctor? You don't look like a doctor. But there isn't anybody to run the ship!"
        "I told you John was a captain in this very company for over two decades, and he was the best. There's nothing to worry about."
        "Well, frankly, 'Doctor', I'm afraid I simply don't believe you. John's been tending that bar for years and just isn't old enough to have been a captain for that long. For that matter that foul-mouthed captain that got hurt is barely old enough to be a captain. And how long have you been in practice, 'Doctor'?"
        Destiny laughed. "I'm not that kind of a doctor, I'm an astrophysicist. A scientist. And John's a whole lot older than he looks because he spent half his life in space. The faster the ship goes, the faster time goes outside the ship as far as the people inside are concerned. He and Captain Kelly are both almost fifty; they went to high school together. They just look young, John's fifteen years older than me but he doesn't look it."
        "Well," the old woman said dubiously, "At least he doesn't have a foul mouth. At least he's a gentleman. I sure hope you're not lying to me, young lady!" she added sternly, with a glare. "Where is he, anyway?"
        "Questioning the would-be assassin."
        "Well, thank you, I guess. Bartender! Another martini, you mangy metal monstrosity!"
        "Here you are, ma'am," the robot said, handing her the drink.
        "Fuck off, junkpile. God, but I hate talking robots!"
        Destiny laughed. "So does John. Robot, give me a Knolls Ale and shut up."
        "I always did like that boy. He's really a captain?"
        "Yes. Over twenty years."
        "He's really fifty?"
        "Yes, like I said, space travel."
        "Gee, I should have been a captain!"
        Destiny laughed. "You still live the same number of years, your time. It's just that when you travel, more time passes on the planets than you experience."
        Mrs. Ferguson shook her head. "That relativity stuff is over my head."

        "How are you feeling, Bill?"
        "Better than I was before the robot did surgery. I still hurt like hell. Is my ship all right? Did the pirate wake up?"
        "Yeah, she's fine, just did inspection for you. Everything's shipshape despite our acceleration. Surprising."
        "They're doing a lot better job of designing and building these things than when you were captain. If that had been an old boat that went through those meteors it would have surely been destroyed, and it's been years since one of the robots or wall panels caught fire. I'm worried about engine forty two, though, watch that one close."
        "Why? What's wrong with it?"
        "Do you know how an ion engine works?"
        "No."
        "Well, I can't explain it to you then, but the wiring looks different than the wiring on the other motors. It worries me, I wish I was an engineer. I'm afraid that if we shut it down it will explode."
        "What?"
        "Like I said, I'm not an engineer but I can read a schematic, and since you don't know how they work I can't explain it, but it looks to me like they screwed up the wiring. Is the pirate awake?"
        "Yeah, and I wasn't the least bit nice to the asshole. He spilled, though. Seems that he was in cahoots with the pirate you disabled; that guy was early, or Skankley was late."
        "Skankley?"
        "His name, Robert Skankly. He was supposed to take over the ship before the other pirate engaged, and the two of them would lock up the passengers in the other boat and either collect ransom or work them to death.
        "You were targeted because of Destiny; Dewey would have paid a king's ransom to get us back.
        "Stupid pirates. How long is the medic going to keep you here?"
        "It says sometime tomorrow, but I'll be restricted to light duty. You'll still have to do downstairs inspections for me."
        "Damn. I wish we hadn't ordered full gravity."
        "You'll be glad when you get to Earth and don't need the centrifuge. I wish we had an engineer."
        "I guess. But we do have an engineer, Dick."
        "Who?"
        "Dick Martin, the big black fellow. He's an engineer for the company but I don't know what his specialty is. I'll talk to him. I'm going to go to the commons and see if I can do anything helpful there; they're sure to worry since you're stuck in sick bay. If Dick's in there I'll talk to him. Call if you need anything."
        "Thanks, John."
        "Don't mention it."
        John could see why Bill was worried; you would expect all the wiring on all the motors to be identical. When he reached the commons, the passengers were already calm, even having a good time. Almost all the passengers were drinking and laughing, and he saw no sign of unease at all. Destiny and Tammy were sitting at a table. He walked up and sat down. "I expected everyone to be worried, considering what happened tonight."
        "It was Tammy," Destiny said. "That's her field."
        Tammy laughed. "It was gin. I couldn't do anything with Mrs. Ferguson, but she listened to Destiny. At least after a few martinis."
        They chatted a while, and Tammy went to visit Bill in sick bay. John and destiny had two more drinks and went back to their cabin.
        The next morning John did Bill's eight o'clock pilot room duties, and as he headed past the commons on his way downstairs, he spied Dick standing by the bar drinking coffee, and sauntered over to talk to the large black man. "Excuse me, Dick."
        "Hi, John, what's up?"
        "Uh, its..." he looked around. "Kind of... can I talk to you in private?"
        Dick frowned. "Sure." They walked out to the hall. "You said you're an engineer for the company, what kind of engineer?"
        "Electrical, why?"
        "Because Bill says the wiring on engine number forty two is different than all the other engines."
        "Oh, my God!" Dick exclaimed. He would have gone pale if his skin could have allowed it. "A Richardson Death Ship! We need to have everyone evacuate to their houseboats immediately and sit tight there."
        "What?!" Exclaimed John.
        "No time, give the order to the passengers and I'll explain."
        "Okay." John spoke into his phone. "Attention, passengers. An emergency has arisen aboard ship. Please evacuate to your houseboats and wait there until things are normal. We apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you. Captain Knolls out.
        "So what's wrong, Dick?"
        "Five years ago, an electronics hobbyist was Mr. Osbourne's intern. He found a schematic wiring diagram that was wrong, and showed it to his boss, the company president. Well, the chief technical officer and five engineers got fired for that bad schematic, and rightfully so.
        "It was wired into ten ships, all of which had to be rewired. Every single one of those three hundred ion engines on each of the ships. We worried that someone would miss an engine and they'd have a death ship. You might make a hundred runs, but sooner or later that thing's going to blow. And when it's shut down is when it will blow.
        "We called this model the 'Richardson Death Ship'. This ship is one that had to be rewired, and it looks like they missed a motor."
        "But these things will take an atomic!"
        "That's why it's so dangerous in here and safe in the houseboats. When that engine blows, all the force will be inside the ship; outside will be fine except right outside the docks by storage; we'll open the inside door to the airlock and if it blows, the force will go there rather than to houseboat locks."
        "Let's go talk to Bill."
        "You should evacuate until I can study the schematics and see if I can rewire it while it's running."
        "No, I can't. I'm captain until Bill's back on his feet. Come on."

        An hour later, Dick met Bill and John in the sick bay, where the robot was just releasing Bill for light duty. "I can fix it," Dick said. "I'll need some wire and alligator clips, and a wire cutter."
        "They're by each generator, forty two is closer to port. I'll show you."
        "No, you and Bill better get to safety. No sense anybody but me gets killed."
        "No," John said. "I'll help. Bill, wait in your boat. How long will it take you, Dick?"
        "Maybe an hour. There's nothing you can do to help, and it's incredibly dangerous."
        "I can hand you tools. That's an order. Come on."
        The medic Bill was on rolled to his houseboat, and John and Dick climbed down into the bowels of the giant ship. John was indeed helpful and it only took forty five minutes. Dick stood up and brushed himself off. "Okay, you can shut it off now and I'll take the board out, and the passengers can Re-embark."
        "We can shut it down from here," John said, and did so. He addressed the public address, telling passengers they could come back on board, that the situation was resolved. He and Dick trudged up the steps at almost Earth gravity.
        "I hope I'm getting paid for this!" Dick said, panting.
        "Yeah, you're getting paid. And you're getting a raise, too."
        "How do you know?"
        "I'm on the board of directors."
        "Oh."
        "Look, Dick, everybody's going to want to know what's going on, explain it so they don't really understand but are calmed down and satisfied."
        Dick grinned. "I can do that."
        "Dick, you're a hero, you know. I'm buying you a drink when we get to the commons!"
        Dick shook his head. "I'm no hero, it's just that I'm the only guy who could do it."
        "Bullshit, you could have waited in your houseboat while I played Russian roulette in the pilot room shutting that damned engine down, but you risked your life. That makes you a hero."
        "John, you were there, too."
        John shrugged. "Nah, part of what a ship's captain is paid for is hazardous duty. I'm used to it, did this for more than twenty years. Uh, please don't let the other passengers know how much danger we were all in."
        Dick laughed. "I know company policy, don't worry."
        They reached the commons and John asked Dick what he was drinking. Dick shrugged. "Martini, I guess."
        A robot wheeled over. "What would you gentlemen like?" it asked.
        John answered "A martini and a Knolls stout lager, a shot of bourbon and for you to shut up, you metal monstrosity."
        Dick laughed. The robot said to him "And what would you like, sir?"
        "God damn it, you stupid pile of wires, the martini is for him and I told you to shut up. Now shut the fuck up and get us our drinks and I don't want to hear another word from you."
        The robot rolled rapidly away and Dick said "I hate talking robots, too."
        "Almost everybody does. Somebody should talk to engineering, I guess."
        "John, I am an engineer and I hate 'em. But management wants to show off our superior technologies."
        Bill came in on his medic, now folded into a chair shape. "Hi, guys. Damned robot won't let me walk."
        "Well, you probably shouldn't, then," John replied.
        "I hate taking orders from a damned robot," Bill growled. "Where's that damned bartender? I could really use a shot and a beer right now."
        Others started in, and Dick got busy confusing the other passengers with what folks outside the technical fields call "technobabble". The robot finally returned with the drinks, and Bill said "What took you so damned long, junkpile?"
        The robot turned its camera towards John and froze. "Robot?" Bill said. "Bartender!"
        But the bartender wasn't going to move; lights weren't even shining. It stood there like a statue. "Must have broke, maybe its battery or something came loose," Bill said.
        "Fuck it," John said, "I'll tend the God damned bar. Call for a server, would you?"
        Dick had joined the others at the bar, speaking the engineer's perplexingly complex jargon and baffling everyone, all but Mrs. Ferguson pretending to understand. "Damned kids today, they just don't talk the same language!"
        John walked around the bar as Destiny and Tammy came in. Destiny laughed. "Told you so," she said. "He loves tending bar!" She walked around and kissed him.
        "Damned robot broke, Bill's calling a repairbot."
        Dick looked at the dead robot and said "That's an R 15 XB. A repairbot can't fix those."
        "Why not?"
        "They're brand new, I didn't even know we had them in deployment and can't figure out why they did, because the repairbots haven't been fully reprogrammed yet. I'll look at it."
        His wife laughed. "Dick's happiest when he's up to his elbows in wiring," she said. "John reminds me of him."
        Dick tinkered with the robot while John tended bar and everyone else drank and chatted. Finally Dick walked back to his stool while the robot wheeled around to the other side of the bar. "Cool," John said. "What was wrong with it?"
        Dick snickered. "It's a safety bot. Brand new and more bugs than a picnic."
        "Safety bot?" Mrs. Ferguson asked. "Oh, hell, why do I bother?"
        "Well," Dick began, "hundreds of years ago there was this guy named Asimov who wasn't even an engineer, but was a biochemist who wrote fiction on the side. Well, this guy coined the word 'robotics' and dreamed up what he called the 'three laws'. It was all fantasy, when he wrote it there were no robots and computers were brand new and so primitive they weren't really computers, but some people called them 'electronic brains'. This guy had his robots run by positronic brains."
        "So what's this guy's fiction got to do with that bartender?"
        "The 'laws' were safety devices, and the company has been trying to program something similar into our robots. From what I could gather, this one had two conflicting demands and couldn't cope and just shut down. I did a system reset and it's fine. Guess I should file a bug report."
        He sat down with the captains and the scientists and ordered a drink from the server. "You told the robot to shut up, and the captain here told it to talk. It's easy to fix, there's a reset button right inside the panel. You'd think they could have programmed the repairbots to push the damned button when they couldn't figure it out.
        "Programmers... they need to learn engineering. Or maybe psychology. They should at least learn how a computer works, but I don't think they teach that in programming school."
        John said "The stupid robot should be able to figure it out."
        Dick grinned and shook his head. "Robots can't think."
        "But theyâ(TM)re networked with the computer, and it can figure ship trajectories. I can't do that. They have encyclopedic memories, I don't."
        "Do you know what an abacus is?"
        "Of course, they used them thousands of years ago to do simple arithmetic."
        "So how many beads would it take for it to become intelligent?"
        "I don't get it."
        Mrs. Ferguson, sitting at the bar, overheard. "Well, at least I'm not the only one. How can something with that much knowledge be so stupid?"
        "I get it," Destiny said. "They used to have non-electronic books. Before there were computers, books were just lots of sheets of paper with information printed on them, bound together. A book held encyclopedic memories but had no memories of its own."
        "Exactly. As to how it does calculus, it's pretty much done like an abacus works. Ever heard of a slide rule?"
        John shook his head. "Nope."
        Destiny said "I do. They looked like measuring rules, but there was an inside part that slid and a clear piece. Line the numbers up right and it would do multiplication, division, logarithms, all kinds of math. Engineers used them before they had computers."
        "That's right, and a computer doesn't know that two times two is four any more than a slide rule does. When you tell it to tell you two times two, it takes the binary number two and shifts it to the left."
        "I don't get it," Mrs. Ferguson said.
        "Neither do I," John agreed.
        "I'll show you how to do binary arithmetic some time," Destiny answered. "I had to learn it for that telescope. Speaking of which, will we be turning around in a couple of days, Bill?"
        Somebody called out from the bar "the bartender quit again."
        "Damn it," Dick said. He reset the robot and told it "Robot, do not talk. If someone asks you a question, display the answer on your screen. Do you acknowledge?"
        The screen flashed "yes".
        "Stupid programmers," Dick said.
        Bill finished his beer and said "well, I'd better call it a night." Everyone else partied on.
        The next day was "turnaround" day, when the ship turned around and used its thrusters as brakes; they were two thirds of the way there by now, three days into the trip, and traveling at fantastic speeds. They would reach Earth two days later.
        Bill was healing rapidly, thanks to the healing drugs that had been developed a century earlier. No longer confined to a wheelchair, he was using a cane to get around. He met John, Destiny, and Tammy for breakfast after his eight thirty chores in the pilot room.
        "Did you guys order yet?"
        "No," John said. "We waited for you. Robot!"
        "Yes sir?" the contraption said. "Are you folks ready to order?"
        "Yes," John said, "I'll have scrambled eggs, toast, bacon, and hash browns and you'll just shut up and bring our food when the rest have ordered. I want no noise from you, if you need to talk, print it out instead."
        Its screen printed out "yes si" and it froze.
        "God damn it," Bill said. "I'm hungry. Glad Dick showed me how to reset that damned thing." He opened the server's panel and reset it."
        "Are you folks ready to order?" It asked aloud.
        "Damn it..." John started.
        Bill said "John, let's get our food before you tell it to shut up, I'm hungry. It might lock up again."
        John frowned and repeated his order. The robot asked "pork or turkey bacon, sir?"
        "It doesn't matter."
        Destiny, of course, ordered sunny side up, pork sausage, and hash browns. Tammy had the same, and Bill had a steak and cheese omelette.
        Drinking their coffee after the meal was eaten, John asked Bill how long before turnaround.
        "Three hours."
        "Okay, I'll do inspection in an hour and a half. I'm just going to sit in the basement while you turn around, I don't want to climb those damned stairs twice. It's heavy, we must be at Earth gravity by now."
        "One point two. We'll be at one point four right before free fall."
        Destiny and Tammy were talking about fashion, celebrities, and mathematics. Mrs. Ferguson came in and ordered a martini. John looked at his phone and said "Right on time!"
        "What?"
        "Mrs. Ferguson, always has a morning martini or four, usually at my bar. I hope that damned barbot doesn't run all my customers off. But it's doing the morning shift, and besides Mrs. Ferguson, stupid tourists, and captains getting in from a long run not many people are there then, anyway. Robot, more coffee and do it quiet."
        Bill laughed. "Well," he said, "I'm going to inspect cargo, anybody feel like going for a walk?"
        "Sure," said Tammy. "I'll go along." They excused themselves, while John and Destiny drank more coffee.
        Two hours later, John was at the ship's lowest level inspecting the engines for Bill. He wondered why the robots couldn't just medic Bill down, but he was used to machinery enough to know that it was pointless to even ask the question.
        As he was inspecting the last engine, Bill called. "We may have a problem, John. The computers disagree about a reading on number one twenty, one says a slight overvoltage, one an undervoltage, and the other two read normal."
        "I ran across that on my last run. Probably nothing, I'll check it out again." He did, and as he expected there was an electrical fault in a connector that made an occasional spike or drop in voltage, too quickly for all four computers to measure at once. He shut it down and informed Bill.
        Half an hour later they were weightless for a couple of minutes while Bill reversed the ship's orientation, and then they all got heavy again. John inspected everything again, and to his surprise nothing was amiss. Something almost always broke turning them around when he was captain. He guessed that Bill was right, that they were building them better.
        Except, he thought grimly, it had been a Richardson Death Ship.
        By the time he reached the top of the stairs he was winded. "Damn," he said out loud, "I need more exercise." He went to his cabin, collapsed on the couch, and called Destiny. "Hon, I'm too beat to move. I'm going to have the robot make dinner, are you hungry?"
        "Yeah, just have it make what you're having. I'm in the commons with Tammy, I'll be 'home' in a while."
        "Robot," John said, "Two rare steaks, two baked potatoes; one with butter and one with sour cream, two salads with ranch dressing, and green beans made with pork bacon. Oh, and bring me a beer. And shut up." He put a zero gravity football game on the video, San Francisco against Osaka.
        Zero gravity games were popular in deep space, but there were no professional players out that far. John thought about buying a pro team and moving it to Mars.
        Nah, he had too much on his plate already, what with the bar, the brewery, and the farm... and watching his stocks and bonds.
        Destiny came in right before dinner was finished cooking, just as John finished his first beer. He got another, and Destiny got her third.
        As usual, the commons was pretty full at dinner time; at least, the huge thing was as full as the small number of passengers could make it, which was very little at all. Bill came in and sat down with Tammy. "Where's John and Destiny? I thought we were eating together tonight?"
        She laughed. "Climbing stairs almost killed John."
        Dick was at the bar with a martini and Mrs. Ferguson, and his phone rang. "Excuse me," he said, and answered his phone. After talking a minute he pulled the standard forty by one hundred millimeter phone into a tablet almost a third of a meter wide and about quarter of a meter tall.
        "Well, I'll be damned," Mrs. Ferguson said. "What will they come up with next?"
        Dick studied something on the large tablet, which showed no sign of seams, then folded it back up and put it in his pocket. "Where'd you get that, Mr. Martin?" she asked.
        Dick smiled. "Made it myself, prototype for a new product the company is rolling out."
        "How does it work... oh, hell, never mind, I wouldn't understand it, anyway. But I thought you said you were an electrical engineer?"
          "Does this thing look like there's no battery? If it does, I designed it well. It's a phone. It has radios and computers and microphones and cameras and all the other electronics in any phone or tablet. Of course, I didn't design the whole thing all by myself, making this thing took teamwork."
        "Fascinating! ...HIC... Oh, my, please excuse me, Mr. Martin, but I think I had one too many of these. I think I'll lay down for a while." She got up and staggered. Dick and Bill helped her to her quarters and returned to the commons, laughing.
        "She's a character," Bill said. Dick laughed.
        John and Destiny never showed up; they were sleeping on their couch, having fallen asleep while listening to music and cuddling. Bill left after three beers, and the little party dwindled quickly after that.
        The next morning, John woke up in bed to the sound of Destiny's snoring. He didn't remember waking up and going in there, but they must have. "I'd better let her sleep," he thought, "she drank twice as much as me. She's going to be HUNG over!"
        The robot made coffee and he drank a cup while catching up on business, then went to the commons to meet Bill and Tammy for breakfast. Bill was in there by himself, and Bill asked "Where's Destiny?"
        "Still sleeping. I got a little drunk last night and she was wasted. Where's Tammy?"
        Bill laughed. "Same as Destiny. Wasted. While me and Dick helped Mrs. Ferguson to her room she had three cocktails. I only drank three beers and wasn't even buzzed, but Tammy kind of went wild with the booze last night. She's really going to regret it!"
        The robot came by and took their orders.
        "I'm still wondering what was up with the ship that went through those rocks," Bill said. "I'll probably never know."
        "Yes, you will. I found out this morning. It was a shipping run from the belt to Earth and the captain, William Smith, got injured. Something in storage fell and hit him on the head and gave him a concussion. The poor guy got amnesia, had no idea where he was or even who he was."
        "Is he going to be okay?"
        "Yeah, after therapy. We're not sure how extensively those rocks damaged his ship. It's going to be discussed at the next board meeting, poor guy couldn't reach his phone or tablet that he dropped when he got hit, and the door locked behind the medic that took him to sick bay. We need to make sure nothing like that happens again!"
        The robot wheeled up with their food, and they ate in mostly silence. When they were finished they continued to drink coffee as the robot cleared the table. John looked at his phone. "I wonder where Mrs. Ferguson is? She almost always has a martini by now."
        Bill laughed. "She was drunker than anybody. I'm sure she's still asleep."
        Dick walked in looking rather rumpled, wearing a polo shirt and slacks rather than his customary business suit. He waved at Bill and John and spoke to the tendbot. "Eggnog, real eggnog with a real raw, unpasteurized egg yolk and milk and cinnamon and a double shot of rum. And shut up, for God's sake!"
        John laughed. Bill said "I'll bet we're the only two on board right now that isn't hung over or sleeping it off. You missed a hell of a party..." when his phone interrupted him. He glanced at it.
        "Damn."
        "What's wrong?"
        "Skankly's loose. Here, take a taser and help me find the bastard. I wish Tammy was awake, but she'd be way too hung over to be any help."
        "I'll get the son of a bitch," John said. "Lock yourself in the pilot room so I don't have to go down those damned stairs again." They went out as Dick nursed his eggnog.
        John heard a woman scream and took off at a run toward the sound. There was Skankly, threatening one of the passengers, Mrs. Dillon, with a steak knife. John wondered how he got out and where in the hell he got hold of a knife. "Drop it, asshole," John ordered. Skankly whirled around, and John hit him with the taser, took his knife, and cuffed him.
        "I ought to cut your heart out right now, you worthless piece of shit. Any more trouble from you and you're a corpse, got it?"
        "Oh, you'd murder me?" the fat man snarled.
        "Nope, self defense." He cuffed Skankly to a chair, cut off all of Skankley's clothing and started moving the rest of the furnishings out of the room as he called Bill, who joined him in moving furniture into the hall.
        They went through Skankley's belongings and found an electronic lock pick. Just then Bill's phone sounded. "Shit," he muttered. "More pirates!" he said to John. They went to the pilot room.
        They were relieved that there were only thirty ships, so they were in no real danger. Bill wished again that it was a pure cargo run, so he could have a little fun angering the pirates before he disabled them all, but simply launched two EMPs and called the office to have them collect the ships and their pirates.
        They reached orbit the next day without further incident, and John met his mother in law for the first time, who had traveled by ocean liner.
        Bill and Tammy were married a month later at the rim of the Grand Canyon. After the ceremony and at the wedding party, Destiny asked Tammy where they were honeymooning.
        "Mars," she said.
        "Mars?" Destiny responded. "Why Mars?"
        "We're taking more droppers there for treatment."
        John shook his head sadly. "Hell of a honeymoon with those monsters on board. More like a nightmare than a dream."
        Destiny laughed. "Tammy can handle them."
        "Yes," Tammy said, "We've learned an awful lot about them in the five years since that last trip. It won't be a problem."
        "What about pirates?" John asked. "Still a lot left."
        Destiny laughed. "You know what happens when pirates attack a ship with Tammy and droppers!"
        John leaned back. "You're right. Poor pirates!"