On the Starry Road

She'd reached the pantry and was rummaging through the shelves. "Busting out of places always makes me work up an appetite," she said. "Mind if I rustle us something up?"

"Be my guest. Mi spaceship es tu spaceship."

So while I navigated, she puttered around at the cook top, and before long an appetizing aroma began to fill the cabin. She brought over two steaming bowls of chili. She sat down in the copilot seat and looked up through the viewport.

"Looks like we're heading further out," she said.

"A little business I've got to take care of. Hope you don't mind. It won't take long. Then we'll head back in, and I'll drop you wherever you want to go."

The chili was pretty good; just enough kick, not too much cumin. If she was going to be tagging along, I was glad she was pulling her weight. I held up my spoon approvingly.

"You're going to make me wish I had a regular crew."

"How come you don't?"

"Oh, you know. Not that big of an operation."

She shrugged. "Don't you get lonely?"

That was a question I didn't much bother to ask myself.

--

Later that evening we were up at the viewport looking out at the gossamer fringe of the galactic disc.

It's coded into our genes, I guess, our penchant for looking out the window when we're on the road. Watching the fence posts swishing by, the waves slapping the bow, the glimpses of fields in the chinks between clouds. Even up in outer space, where distances are vast and progress is all but imperceptible, we sit for hours looking out the window imagining the fence posts swishing by.

"Were you really going to just run off into the desert?" I asked.

Her focus wandered back inside the ship. "Guess I hadn't really thought it through."

"What would you have done if you'd made it?"

"I'd have thought of something." She rolled her head and shoulders. "Or not. The zoo wasn't that bad a place, actually. Zorgy takes pretty good care of his specimens. Underneath all that mucus he has a heart of gold. Or three of them, or however many he has. Still, though, the quake just seemed like too good of an opportunity not to take advantage of."

I couldn't really argue with that.

"Did you really think I was a monkey?"

It's a shortcoming of mine that I'm frequently being reminded of, my propensity for trusting my brain more than my common sense. "I thought that's what the sign meant."

"And you were going to fuck me anyway?"

I blushed. "I didn't think I had much choice." It wasn't like homologs were a completely different species. And it wasn't like she hadn't been able to communicate her consent. Still, though, I could see that she might have been under a certain amount of pressure to fulfill management expectations.

"Did you have to... put on demonstrations like that very often?"

"Every once in a while."

"Well, I'm sorry about that."

"Oh, a girl doesn't mind getting her pearl polished every now and then." She said it matter-of-factly, as if it no longer really had anything to do with the two of us.

--

Eventually, the chronostat began to dial down the cabin lights. It had been a long day.

I pulled the sleeping bag out from its cubby. "I usually just rig it up here in the cabin," I said. "You can use it. I'll sleep in my seat."

"It'll hold two, won't it?"

It's pretty standard practice for astronauts to share sleeping bags. One of the first things you learn in space camp is to recalibrate your sense of personal space. In the cramped, topsy-turvy confines of a spaceship, crewmates are always bumping into each other in awkward and potentially embarrassing ways. You just learn to put up with a closer degree of interpersonal proximity. If there are two astronauts and only one bag, it's way more comfortable to share it than to have to strap yourself into your seat. The gentlemanly thing to do, though, is to let the other person suggest it.

So we got into the bag, her facing one way, me facing the other. Because of the minimal gravity there was not that much bodily contact. Like two standees on the subway.

She turned her head and met my eye, letting me know that she was aware that I was aware that her pearl had ended up not getting polished that afternoon after all.

But I was kind of tired. And it's a captain's responsibility to run a tight ship.

"Night," I said.

--

There is no such thing as morning in outer space, not in the strict astronomical sense at least. The chronostat gives a semblance of it by slowly bringing up the cabin lights. The passenger was still slumbering peacefully. I eased out of the sleeping bag and drifted over to the cook top, being careful not to jerk the strap.

I put the kettle on but watched it closely and took it off before it whistled. The second semblance of morning in space is the dark-roasted aroma of a good cup of coffee.

I floated up to the viewport. We were headed out, and the pattern of stars was not at all familiar. The emptiness between them was the utter blackness of the intergalactic void.

I don't know about you, but I always get a little apprehensive whenever I get out that close to the edge. We tend to take the laws of physics for granted. We're used to things behaving the way we expect them to behave. We see the same old familiar spectral lines coming in from distant galaxies and just assume that nature must work the same way there as it does here.

But it's not lost on me that those spectral lines, even though they come from far away, are still produced within galaxies, not between them. And I can't help but wonder whether their production might depend to some extent on the local gravitational curvature at the site where they're produced. And I can't help but be aware that the edge of the galaxy is the verge of a vast discontinuity in local gravitational curvature.

So whenever I get out that far my spidey sense is always reminding me that I may be toeing the edge of a deep cosmic chasm in the way that physics operates. I'm always relieved when I still wake up, when water still boils, when coffee still brews, when aromas still waft. But I tread gingerly. Just a half parsec more and who knows what might happen.

There was a flutter in the strap. The passenger had turned in her sleep. The bag had drifted open a bit, leaving her soft figure partially uncovered. Her face was peacefully at rest, her skivvies comfortably rumpled. There was hardly a trace of the shameless homu I vaguely remembered from the day before. Instead I saw a young girl, no older than I was, all on her own, a million miles from home.

She fidgeted again. She stretched. She scratched her side. She looked sleepily over toward the cook top. Eventually she kicked off from the bag. She filled the kettle and bobbed there, yawning, until it whistled. She rustled a cup from the shelf, shook in some crystals, poured in the steaming water. Whether she realized it or not, she was replenishing the homey smell of morning and reconfirming the laws of physics as we know them.

She noticed me at the viewport and floated up to join me. We sipped our coffee and looked out at the unchanging spacescape and its imaginary fence posts.

--

Later that morning I was at the console, checking our course. The girl drifted over and took a peek. It was kind of ridiculous, really, trying to hide our destination from her. She would see it when we got there anyway. Maybe it wouldn't be that big a breach to let her in on the mission.

"So you know how to read spectral reflection charts?"

She gave me the who-do-you-think-you're-patronizing frown of a seasoned prospector.

I pulled a topo chart up on the screen. It covered six seemingly uninteresting sectors right up along the outer rim. At this scale the res was pretty low, and nothing looked any different than you might expect in any other uninteresting section of the galaxy. I let her look until I was sure she'd come to that same conclusion herself.

I zoomed in on sector three. Even at the slightly higher res there was still nothing special. A noiselike spatter of pixels. I zoomed in again to the upper right quadrant. You could start to see individual stars and nebulae now, red dwarfs mostly, an occasional main-sequence yellow. Again it was nothing she wouldn't have seen in the countless other quadrants she'd undoubtedly pored over on her travels.

I pointed to a tiny yellow speck. "Zorago's so-called Paradise. Perhaps you've heard of it." Then I pointed to a faint bluish haze on the other end of the screen. I zoomed in twice more to the max res available in the standard cosmological survey. She leaned in closer. It was a patch of planetoids. You couldn't make out any of them individually.

I brought up the menu bar along the bottom of the screen. Albedo showed the expected surface reflection of a swarm of rocky asteroids. Magnetometry was a bit unusual, as it showed a consistent field. She noticed that. X-band resonance showed a pronounced iron profile, not too surprising. But the Y-band resonance showed several very bright speckles, indicating potentially rich veins of higher-atomic-weight ore.

She was looking pretty intently now. "So what are you thinking? Platinum?"

I pushed the next-to-last button. The Z-band. Uniformly black, as you might expect, except for four solitary pixels that were off the charts.

"Anomaly," she said. "Mirten-Zeebler effect."

I overlaid the Y- and Z-band plots. The four brightest pixels in the two plots were in perfect registry.

"Maybe," I said.

I pressed the last button. The screen showed a typical noisy scatter except for four bright spots.

"Oh, come on," she said. "Densitometry? You can't trust densitometry readings on low-res topos."

"Look at the values."

She put her hand over mine to mouse to the first spot. The number didn't seem to make any sense.

"Oh, come on," she said. "That's transuranium."

She moused over the second bright spot. And the third. And the fourth.

"Oh come on," she said. "The only way to get a number like that is if the whole planetoid..."

She looked at the numbers again. "There's no such thing."

She brought back up the Z-band chart.

She looked at me.

"Is there?"

"Worth checking out, wouldn't you say?"

--

It took us three days to get there. The girl was an agreeable passenger. She made sure not to take up more than her fair share of cabin space. She helped with the cooking and the other chores. She dusted off the music player and programmed a playlist of Betelbop, Linda Ronstadt, and Dvorak. She sat at the viewport and got tears in her eyes looking out at the willowy wisps of the Milky Way to the plaintive strains of the New World Symphony.

On one of the days I got out the bungees and we did some exercise. We both worked up a sweat, and I rigged the curtain so we could sponge off. It was the first time we'd been naked together since our escape. I went at it space-camp style, sponging her posterior aspect first and then proceeding to her anterior.

My assessment of her aerodynamicity had been essentially correct. She was as sleek as a hood ornament: her anterior projections streamlined--an integral part of her superstructure--her lower confluence trim and efficient. She actually did have a body that could have served quite well between ports without any need of artificial covering.

I managed to remain unresponsive as she sponged me. I took that as an indication that not only the laws of physics but the laws of physiology as well were affected by our proximity to the discontinuity.

In any event, a taut ship demands space-camp discipline. As soon as we'd finished bathing we put away the curtain, redonned our skivvies, and got on with our other chores.

--

The girl earned her keep for sure when we finally made it to our destination. It was a lot harder than I had anticipated to match up the bright pixels on the topo charts with actual bodies of rock, let alone to navigate to them through the dense three-dimensional asteroid field.

But she was pretty good on the radar densitometer, and my old RX87 worked like a champ. After a couple nerve wracking hours we touched down on a lumpy object about fifteen miles across. Our retros blew away enough of the surface dust to expose big patches of smooth, obsidian purple. The densitometer reading was pegged to the limit. We looked at each other and grinned.

"It's too big to tow, with this ship anyway," I said, looking out. "But if my guess is right, those rocks over there should be worth a couple hundred times their weight in platinum. If we can take back just a few of them, we should be able to afford a rig as big as we need to come back for the rest."

--

The element I was betting on, of course, was eleventy-sixteenium, a.k.a. eka-plutonium, atomic number 126, the heaviest element in the periodic table. While most of the transuranic elements are highly radioactive and very short lived, a few isotopes of eleventy-sixteenium occur in a so-called island of nuclear stability and are thought to have half lives of millions of years. Because it's so dense, eleventy-sixteenium is expected to have many practical applications, including the shielding of spacecraft from cosmic rays. Spectral evidence suggests that it is produced in supernova explosions, and scientists have long suspected that it may occur naturally in some rare-earth minerals. But it has never yet been found.

"Until now!" we cheered.

But there was a problem. In order to collect the rocks we'd have to make an extra-vehicular. And we couldn't do that because the two of us were still linked together by the damn strap.

"Don't you have an external manipulator?" she asked.

"It's not long enough. It can reach down to the ground but not much farther. We could pick up a couple pebbles maybe. Enough to establish our claim, but not enough to afford a tug."

"Well, let's take a look at your EV suit at least."

I pulled it out from the locker. It was a dirty, off-white color, showing the wear and tear of several previous expeditions. It was still airtight, though, and reasonably flexible.

"Is there any way we could both fit in together? What if I rode piggyback and scrunched my head way down?"

It was worth a try. We detached the life support from the back of the suit and connected it to the umbilical. I got into the pants, and she got on my back, wrapping her legs around my waist. There was no gravity to speak of, so it was easy enough for her to adjust her position. But even though the upper part of the suit was fairly roomy, it wasn't nearly roomy enough to pull down over the two of us.

She studied the situation. "What if we undo these two seams in the back and add in some more material?" I had repair glue and two utility bags we could use. It was pretty risky, though. As a general rule, you don't want to go cutting up your space suit. But, when there's a rock pile of eleventy-sixteenium at stake...

She worked deftly and neatly. She cut an upside-down U in the back of the suit, making a large flap. Then she pieced in the fabric from the two utility bags, gluing carefully along the seams and edges.

When she was done it looked like a space suit for a hunchback. We tried it on and were able to pull the top down over us, as long as she wrapped her arms and legs around me pretty tight. I was able to fasten the top securely to the pants and get my head through the neck hole.

"How are we doing down there?"

"So far so good," came her muffled reply.

"Shall we see if it will hold pressure?"

"Go for it."

I double checked the umbilical connection. "Here's the remote display for the life support," I said, handing it down. "Keep an eye on it."

Then I put on the helmet and fastened the gloves.

"OK, here goes nothing."

I flipped the switch to depressurize the cabin. The pumps started up. The cabin pressure needle started dropping.

"Ten P.S.I... Now eight... Now six. I don't hear any obvious leaks. How's everything down there?"

"Suit pressure's holding," she said. "Everything seems OK."

"Now two. Let me move around a little to make sure." I raised my arms up over my head, then out to the side. I took a couple steps back and forth. I could feel her arms around my chest. "Cabin's down below oh point one. Suit still holding?"

"Rock solid."

"Well, we've got the cabin depressurized. Shall we just go ahead and try the EV?"

"Might as well. What exactly do you want me to do?"

"Just hold on tight. Keep your eye on the life support. I don't think we'll have any trouble getting through the hatch, but I can't see back there, so let me know if I bump you into anything."

"Roger."

The air pump turned off. I unlatched the hatch and eased it open. Even though there wasn't any gravity, it was a little clumsy maneuvering with her extra inertia. I hoisted the life support to bring it along.

"I guess we'll only get about half the normal excursion time since there's two of us. But that should be enough. Ready?"

"Ready."

I opened the hatch the rest of the way. The ground outside was faintly lit by the lights of the ship, but the sky was vacuum black. I turned around and backed through the hatch, then let myself bump down the ladder. The obsidian patches were pretty slick, and with the lack of gravity it was impossible to get any traction. I hooked the suit tether onto a stanchion, then hoisted myself over to the tool locker. I took out a grabber and a basket.

I knew she couldn't see anything, so I tried to provide a little commentary. "The whole place is like different shades of super intense purple. There's no gravity to speak of, so I can't walk at all. I'm going to use the grabber like a ski pole to scoot us over to that pile of rocks we saw."

It was slow going, but we got there.

"OK. I've got the first rock into the basket. Now the second."

"We're losing suit pressure.'

"Huh?"

"We must have sprung a leak. The pressure's dropping."

I reached for another rock, thinking I'd have to expedite the collection.

"It's dropping faster. Nine now, We've got to get back to the ship."

There was just one more plump specimen...

She gave my collar a fierce yank. "Back to the ship, goddammit. We're below eight."

I got the message. I reached for the tether, dropping the grabber in the process. I gave a strong pull, hoisting us back toward the ship.

"Seven, goddammit!"

We were coming in fast toward the tool locker. I twisted my legs up to stop us. The rocks I'd collected flew out of the basket. We banged off the ship clumsily, but I managed to grab the stanchion and keep the back of the suit from smashing into the ground.

"Six!"

I pulled us hand over hand up the rungs and in through the hatch. Then I had to spin around without hitting anything and shut and latch it.

I was panting pretty heavily. I could feel the lack of pressure inside the suit. I slammed the switch to repressurize the cabin. The pumps kicked in. I could feel her struggling to breathe against my back. I took in as deep a breath as I could and held it until the cabin pressure came up to four and a half. Then I unlatched the helmet and started to breathe again.

"Are you OK?" I asked down into the suit.

No response.

I pulled off the gloves and disengaged the helmet.

"Oof," came her voice from down inside the suit.

"Are you OK?"

"... bit winded."

I unlatched the top of the suit and wriggled it off. We were both panting heavily. She unwrapped herself from her cramped perch around my back.

It was not the triumphant return I'd envisioned. We looked out the viewport but couldn't even see the rocks I'd collected. They must have flown quite a distance. I hadn't closed the tool locker. That meant we couldn't even take off unless we went out again and closed it. And we couldn't do that unless we were able to get the EV suit patched up. The girl examined it carefully, but she couldn't find the leak.