The idea of “races” had been gone long ago in antiquity. When commercial air travel had been developed halfway through the twentieth century was the beginning of the end; before that, and many decades afterwards, the idea of race was merely exploited. After air travel, people intermingled to the point that everyone had DNA from every “race.” The idea of race itself had always been a huge ignorance.
But something similar existed, in the looks of Earthians and spacers, although they weren’t “races.” The spacers, those living on Mars and the larger asteroids, were all very well fed. There were farming and ranching domes on Mars and the larger asteroids, and had been exporting food to Earth for centuries. Somewhere with gravity as low as an asteroid had people wanting to weigh more. You needed weighted “gravity belts” on most asteroids. Well fed children grow taller and fatter than those who are malnourished.
The Earthians weren’t so lucky. Food was scarce on Earth. In the centuries since the industrial revolution they had polluted the planet with chemicals and plastics and pretended that there was a real away to throw things. Maybe they actually believed it, as illogical and irrational as that is. They had burned coal and oil and chemicals derived from those substances and had released all sorts of toxins, as well as gasses that trapped heat in the atmosphere.
Space wasn’t heaven, but Earth was hell, or at least a pretty good impersonation of hell. An Earthian considered any spacer obese, while they themselves were skin and bones, and a lot shorter than a spacer. Poor nutrition stunts children’s growth, and everyone there was always hungry. You could see the ribs of anyone not wearing a shirt, and near the equator obesity would have been fatal, had obesity existed there. The very richest Earthians weighed between what normal Earthians and spacers weighed. As was the case through history, the rich were taller than the poor, simply from having good nutrition all their lives.
The planet’s climate had changed rapidly in the twenty first century before combustion was outlawed by international treaty, and for a very long time afterwards. There were horrible storms; cyclones and hurricanes on land (rather, storms as wicked and even more so), five mile wide EF-5 and even stronger and larger tornadoes, monstrous wildfires, floods, and landslides on various areas of the globe. Earthians had moved underground, coming up topside on sunny days when the wind wasn’t blowing too briskly; eighty kilometer per hour winds were far from unusual anywhere. Nobody lived anywhere near low lying land because of flooding; flooding is deadly to anyone living underground.
Travel was almost all underground, except on the nicest of days, if anywhere was bicycling distance. The age of the airplane and automobile was long past, and the age of the spaceplane was dwindling. But Earth was finally cooling, and the weather not quite as deadly.
Everyone’s skin was shades of brown from “tanning” themselves topside, even using ultra violet lamps underground, but the spacers were pale. What a spacer con-sidered “dark skinned” was actually not very dark at all, as the spacers were pale from lack of sunlight. Generally, “dark skinned” spacers were descended from Africans, and “light skinned” Earthians were generally descendants of peoples in the Nordic countries, but again, everybody was from every-where.
There were some vitamins that were naturally occurring in Earthians because of sunlight that spacers had to add to their diets. However, there were still some Earthians lighter skinned than most spacers, and some spacers with darker skins than most Earthians.
Neither group thought highly of the other group.
Mrs. Harrington would become a gossip. Only those privy to company documents would know her first name; she was just “Mrs. Harrington” who had been widowed from Colonel Harrington two years earlier. Whose army he had been a colonel in was anybody’s guess. Even though she held a doctorate in statistics, she insisted on “Mrs. Harrington.”
She was sixty one years old and had been born and raised on Mars, and had never been in space before. She was widowed when her husband had died two years earlier at the hands of pirates, on a business trip to the asteroid Sylvia. It had been his first time in space, also having spent his life on Mars. Piracy was almost the only danger left in space.
It had been rumored that he was somehow connected to the Martian government. Actually, he had been a GOTS in-dustrial spy. The pirates that murdered him could have actually been rival shippers. Mrs. Harrington thought the heartbreak would kill her, and was surprised when it didn’t. She heard about the trip to Alpha Centauri and thought she could escape her loneliness; she had few friends, and none close, and she and her husband had been childless as so many spacers were. She signed up, was tested and interviewed and briefed on the danger to her sanity and how the psychologists theorized that they could prevent or alleviate it.
William Lathiter was a Cererian who had moved to Mars after collage to pursue a doctorate in geology, after which he got married to a Martian and stayed on Mars. He was tying up one of the last loose ends before taking the space plane to the Titanic in three weeks, writing to his surviving friends. The worst part of old age is that your friends all die. And spouses. And sometimes even children.
Like everyone else composing a letter, he dictated it to the computer, and the computer rearranged it as if it was writing a book. Human writers had been made obsolete by computers centuries earlier.
His computerized letter read,

Dear Harry,
I’m sorry to say that I won’t see you when you get back from your Saturn run, but I only see you every few years, anyway. I’m leaving Mars.
I’m not sure why I decided to do this. Maybe because I’m old and my wife and most of my friends are dead. You’re still alive but you’re always space hopping. Jerry’s still alive, but he might as well be dead, all he does is sit in a tavern all day. It’s usually Knolls’ Brewery. Ken is retired on Vesta. He jokes that he’s waiting for it to finish growing into a whole planet. But we don’t see each other, except on video because of the pirates, and radio lag can get pretty bad, you know. Joe’s still on Ceres, he doesn’t have to retire for another four years but he says they’re trying to force him out. And he’s a damned good electrician, has a Master’s degree in electrical engineering! I went to high school with his big brother, I’ve known him forever.
What I’m talking about is Anglada-Escudé, but nobody has called it that for at least a century. Before I was born, anyway. Everybody calls it Anglada, except the kids. They call it Angie. Nobody knows how it got its name. After all, it’s only a little more than a parsec away, so the cave men probably knew about it.
Anyway, I’m going there.
I’ve read up on it. Its history is really creepy.
It’s a little bigger than Earth, and has some water, which is surprising so close to the star. That’s about all they know about it that they didn’t know hundreds of years ago.
But anyways, they’ve been talking about this “expedition”; they like to make it sound exciting and adventurous, since they lost the... I can’t pronounce it, it’s in ancient Russian; different countries used to have different languages. It sounds like “Donner Party” to my ears, the robot ship that disappeared. That’s what’s spooky about it. The crazy Donner guy that held a party to kill people is a really bad name. There weren’t any people on the ship, thank God. They promised that won’t be our ship’s name, since we’re not Earthian. I don’t care what they call it, as long as it’s not named after a catastrophe or a villain. I hear they’re calling it the Titanic, that sounds safe enough. Nice, strong name.
Anyway, they’ve been talking about it for years. A robot ship disappeared. So what. I kind of ignored it.
The Earthians aren’t what they used to be, or so I’ve heard. You’ve probably heard too, even though you’re not around much. Everything is illegal there, you know democracy died planet-wide a century ago. I’m surprised they could scrape up enough cash to send an automated expedition like that. Combustion is still illegal there, even though they’ve had global cooling for over a century. Mining is illegal, smoking is illegal (and I do love my ganja, almost as much as you do), and speaking out against anything concerning the government can get you jailed or shot, while we Martians can say “Mayor Putin is a pig-fucking pile of shit” or worse. I feel sorry for ‘em.
This trip isn’t from the Earthians, it’s from a bunch of rich do-gooders from Vesta, really rich kids. The Knolls fortune kids, who think mankind can have a new, free, un-overpopulated planet. They say that Earth’s four billion people are way too many, even though it was more than twice that populous before the Yellowstone catastrophe killed two hundred million immediately, and the billions more who died from from fire and hunger and small scale war until civilization regained its balance. Glad I didn’t live back then, aren’t you?
I was always really skeptical. What’s wrong with Mars? Hell, our terraforming is coming right along. All the ice from Saturn to fill the Valles Marineris, it’s been there since before I was born, small asteroids from the belt for more mass, although they worry about affecting the orbit. And they had started digging a hole for a giant magnet to protect against cosmic rays and the solar wind. It turns out they changed their minds after a couple of fatalities and just put a lot of electromagnets around the globe instead. They have the advantage of generating carbon dioxide from carbon to help warm this cold planet while generating electricity for the magnets, and they say it’s making the air pressure increase slightly. I didn’t know there was any pressure at all outside the domes. They say that in a hundred years or so you’ll be able to grow some species of plants at the equator, another hundred and you won’t need an environment suit outside, only an oxygen mask. Eventually you won’t even need that, although you’ll never have air as thick as in a dome. The dome generators are still fusion, though.
It’s a good thing we found all that carbon in the belt, since Earth stopped selling coal and oil three centuries ago. It’s all illegal there now. Everything is, I hear.
I was walking past the Knolls brewery, you know the place, it’s huge. Like always, Jerry was perched on a stool in front of the bar, you could see him through the big picture window. I went in to say “hi.” The bartender, a young, attractive dark skinned woman with curly black hair, beat me to it.
“Hi. Whatja need?” she asked with a dimpled smile as I walked up to a stool by Jerry. She must have been the child of an Earthian. It made her more attractive, somehow.
“Knolls lager, draft. Okay if I smoke?”
“Light ‘em if ya got ‘em.” She must have been a military veteran. I lit a big hand-rolled muggle.
“Hey, Jerry, what’s goin’ on?” I asked as I sat down, knowing the answer before even asking. It would be nothing, you know all Jerry does is drink. I hit the doob and handed it to him. The bartender put a beer and an ashtray by me, the ash tray sucking the smoke inside itself and emitting its dim glow.
“Anglada.” He hit the joint and handed it back.
“Anglada? What about it?” I dropped the ash into the tray, it giving its characteristic flash like the affordable ones always do. You can print an old fashioned ash tray like George Washington used with his hemp, but smokeless ash tray printers are specialized, expensive things. The ones like the bar had weren’t very expensive, but most smokers’ homes had the non-electric Washington trays any printer can make. Did they have the smokeless ones before you started your run? All the bars have them now.
He pointed to the television set. “Been watching it on the TV.” I looked up, it was showing a string of GOTS ships waiting to be set in a big circle, hooked together. Just one is huge, maybe twenty or thirty stories tall, like a skyscraper outside the sky. It looked on the television like there must have been two dozen ships connected, not yet making a circle. They only do that occasionally and only when necessary for huge loads.
“They’re recruiting youngsters,” Jerry informed me.
“Huh? Kids? They’re sending KIDS?”
“No,” he said laughing. Like I said, I really didn’t follow the Anglada nonsense. “They’re taking old retired people like us. Somebody realized that a lot, or maybe most of old folks get set in their ways and just don’t like any kind of change. Like one guy way back in the twentieth century I read about who had used an outhouse all his life...”
“What’s an outhouse?” I interrupted.
“The twentieth century was a long time ago, you know, and really, really primitive. They used to dig deep holes in the ground, far away from the house, and build a little hut with a seat with a hole, like a toilet. Anyway, this guy’s middle aged son built a real bathroom in his dad’s house, for his mom, but Dad kept using the outhouse until he died.
“So they figured the time dilation wouldn’t bother a geezer like it does a kid, the old are mostly out of the societal and technological loop already, anyway. Old dogs and new tricks, you know.”
“So what do the kids do?”
“They sign a contract and they’re set for life. They’re the Solar team and monitor the transmission from the Centauri team. They’ve worked out a means of communication, but it’s slow. Long before they reach the heliosphere they’ll be impossible to understand without recording it and playing it back at a far faster speed than recorded. They’re really paid well on top of the government payment and only work an hour a month except the first month, with a six month vacation every five years. They’re recruiting from all over the belt. Hey, Mary, could I get another one?”
I stifled a yawn. I really didn’t give a shit, but Jerry’s a friend, one of the few of you still alive. Well, almost alive. “So,” I said, “What’s the catch?” and took a big sip of my beer and lit the joint back up and hit it.
He snickered. “Not much of one. You’re not allowed much travel outside your home world because of the pirates, like anybody goes anywhere they don’t have to anyway, and going to Earth is forbidden.”
I exhaled, laughed, coughed, and handed it to him, eyes watering. “Earth? Why would anybody want to go to that shithole? Do you know how God damned heavy it is there? Rob had to go there for work a few years ago, says it was pure hell and the next time he’d quit his job first. But Anglada? You’re goin’?”
He grinned widely. “What, and give up paradise? I’m happy right here at the brewery watching television.”
The cute young bartender asked us if we needed fill ups. I did, and of course Jerry did. Jerry likes to drink. A lot. He has to take medicine for his liver, and two hundred years ago he would have been dead.
I lit the halfway gone roach back up, hit it, and handed it to Jerry. He held up his hand in the “no thanks” gesture; it is some pretty good stuff. And he was drinking. I put it out and put it in my tin for later.
“Yeah,” I said after a good hearty cough, “it sounds awful boring. Fifty years to get there? What do you do on the way, drink and watch TV?”
Either Jerry didn’t get the joke, or he ignored it. “It’s sixty two years here on Mars but less than ten on the ship. They get gravity from constant acceleration. They have everything you’ll find in a dome. Except you won’t get to see any new movies or read any new books because of how time gets weird, and when you get there you’ll have fifty years of books, movies, and music to catch up on. Four years after you get there, that is. And you’re not there on vacation, they pick people who would be useful in the trip. Math guys, technicians, engineers. Of course scientists will be itching to go, even though they’re long past being over the hill.”
“Not much need for a geologist on a space ship,” I said grinning. “Maybe they’ll hire me for my guitar talent!”
He laughed. I won’t play in front of anybody because I’m not a very good guitar player and I’ve told everybody that.
The weed was doing strange things to time. It seemed like we’d been talking for five minutes, but the clock said different and I was at the bottom of my second beer. “Another one?” she asked.
“Huh? Oh, uh, yeah.” I was stoned, might as well get drunk, too. I fired up the roach again, hit it, and handed it to Jerry, who took it this time. Probably too drunk to notice how stoned he was getting, or remember that he’d turned it away. He handed it back, but it had burned all the way to the clip.
“I wonder what its geology is like?” I wondered.
“Huh? What were we talking about?”
“We were talking about...” all of a sudden I didn’t have a clue. “Uh, I don’t remember.”
“Anglada,” said the television.
“Oh, yeah,” Jerry said. I almost fell out of my stool laughing. Looking back, I’m not sure why, but it was hilarious at the time. As I laughed, the television continued, “...will need surveyors, geologists, hydrologists...” I didn’t hear the rest, because I kind of wasn’t paying attention. Geologists? Hmm...
You know, maybe I do know why I decided to go, crazy as it sounds. You know my wife died a month after I retired five years ago. I don’t know why they won’t let you work past sixty. Rob died the year before last, have you heard? Anyway, he told me that on Earth everybody had to work until they died. That stinks. Rob said the whole planet stinks like burned plastic, shit, rotten garbage, and a lot of nasty smells he had never smelled before, but I don’t think he was all over the whole planet. It isn’t like Mars, with a few hundred domed cities and nothing in between.
I was a mess after Angie died, right after you left for Saturn. You know both of our sons had moved to Earth decades ago. I guess they got used to the smell and the gravity after a couple of years, you have to wear an exoskeleton there unless you’re a native, you know. Even then, Earthians who have spent a decade or more in low gravity environments like the Martian and asteroid domes need exos when they get home. Rob said the gravity there was torture.
My boys thought they could get rich shipping stuff that was needed in the belt and illegal on Earth. I’ll be damned if I know why they thought that, it seems that it would be easier to export stuff from the belt. But I haven’t heard from them since their mother died. Both of them were married, one has a son. His wife died when she had him.
You would have thought they’d stick around to help the old man out after their mom died, but probably wanted to get rid of the grief as soon as they could. I can’t blame ‘em, I wish I could. I was a real mess for a really long time after she died. She was so young, only a year older than me! I’m still grieving.
Of course, you might not have heard yet that conditions deteriorated so much between us spacers and the Earthians that we won’t let them past the moon, and they won’t let us go there any more. Who the hell would want to? Except greedy little shits like my boys, ready to take advantage of the poor brain-damaged Earthians. What they did to their planet is a crime.
Then my boy Arnold got himself killed in some sort of freak accident, and I couldn’t even go to his funeral! God damned politics. I never met my grandson, he’s four. I wonder what will happen to him? His mother died in childbirth, that’s really common on that nasty planet. I hear the life expectancy there is fifty five, that’s even younger than Angie and me were when she died. Arnold was only thirty eight when he died, he was ten years younger than Dave.
The boat to Anglada might be like a new life. It’s not like much is left on Mars for me. Not since Angie died... come to think of it, the kids call Anglada “Angie.” Probably has something to do with it. So I logged on to their website, it was being advertised everywhere. Somebody sure had a lot of money.
The website had the antique holographic background with the writing an inch in front of the screen. I haven’t seen a site like that since I was a kid, have you? Nobody uses the holos any more because they’re not always easy to read, and they give some people headaches.
There was a button, or a picture of one, to click to get rid of the Grandpa Olds setup and replace it with something more modern and easier on the eyes. I wish people who program this stuff would think about things like that.
Well, anyway, I need to get ready for the trip. The ship leaves in three weeks.
Write back! I hope I see you again, buddy.

He hit “send” and went in the living room with a jar of beer and a pipe. He hit the pipe, took a big sip of his Knolls, and picked up his guitar. Who cares if you have no talent if you enjoy it?
Elsewhere on Mars, Bill Kelly was two hundred forty five years old. Going by the calendar, that is. If he’d spent his whole life in one place he would have died well over a century earlier. But his actual age, in the time that he had experienced personally, was sixty one, according to the GOTS records from the various vessels he had captained. He was living in a houseboat in a Martian dome.
Bill was a retired GOTS ship captain whose favorite runs had been runs that could teach him something, which usually meant cargo runs, preferably long runs without human cargo, so he could read. The longer the trip, the more time outside the ship stretched; or inside it, shrank. It depends on your perspective.
He hadn’t experienced the time travel madness because he wasn’t out of society’s reach, even if the radio did sound weird, and he didn’t have the effects in the strange shrunken time you get with spending years accelerating, like the ill-fated Sirius craft had. But there was almost always something new to learn, because of how fast time went outside the ship.
They had solved what they had called the “vibrato problem” where streamed digital audio breaks into small chunks as a ship travels fast enough, by stretching the analog sound that the digital signal had always needed to be converted to. The faster the distance between your radio and and one traveling was increased, the slower and lower pitch the sound was. It sounded as if they had transmitted an analog signal rather than digital. It had its limits. At a high enough speed, streaming just wouldn’t work.
Bill was a born nerd. At one time a century or two earlier when he was young, he had managed to get a third of a G out of batteries; a G is an Earth gravity, a third is about like on Mars. Mars gravity is about the top thrust of a fission ship. He tried to explain how he got that much thrust out of batteries to the engineers, but they couldn’t understand him; sometimes autistics like Bill have communication difficulties. And often self-taught folks like Bill didn’t have the proper vocabulary to convey the knowledge of something he had figured out to someone who had learned the subject in school. Think Michael Faraday, who confounded his fellow scientists for lack of the means to describe electromagnetism; James Maxwell finally explained what Faraday knew with the mathematics Faraday, who had little formal education, lacked.
He had married a scientist he’d met on a run when his ship had crossed paths with an old friend of his, another GOTS captain, in space. Bill retired from being a space captain after he got married. They lived on Earth, in Arizona. Back then, Earth wasn’t all that bad except for the gravity and the storms, as it was still democratic, and Bill had been born in Toronto. She, an award-winning psychologist, was the love of his life. He would have followed her anywhere.
Then they fell out of love and were divorced and Bill got his old job back; they hadn’t wanted to let him go in the first place. He moved back into his houseboat after the divorce, and lived in it on Mars between runs, then after his mandatory retirement, until GOTS called him again.
He would have died over a century earlier if he hadn’t gotten divorced; in real time rather than the time he was living, anyway. At speeds from a thrust of a third of a G or more, time gets strangely weird, enough to be noticeable. But when you’re in space for months, you wouldn’t know how much time had passed, anyway. Three months to a Martian was between two weeks and a month’s worth of entropy on a ship, depending on its thrust and how far it went. The last time he had seen her was when she was eighty seven. She looked a hundred eighty seven, he had thought, and she had been born twenty years later than him. He had been captain of a space ship when she was an infant.
Bill garnered forty two patents. If that doesn’t make you a nerd, I don’t know what does. He was no dummy. But all good things must come to a stupid end, and he was offered a choice. Retire and enjoy retirement, or retire and hate life.
The logical reason was, well, beyond the reach of most of us because, well, face it, we don’t really use our heads very often. We’re dumbasses. But Bill was pretty logical, the nerd.
He was happy tinkering in his workroom, and was even happier when they called him to pilot a boat to Anglada. Wherever that was, one of the asteroids he hadn’t been to, maybe, or some moon somewhere like around Saturn or Neptune or somewhere. They were not only going to have him pilot a craft, but they said it was going over a parsec away! Let’s see, what’s a parsec in AU... gotta look that up...
He didn’t let on, but he would have been happy piloting a garbage truck to Deimos and back every day.
He had been living on Mars between runs and after retirement, and sold his houseboat when he found out how long the trip was going to be, as all of the docks were all used for linking the ships together. The landing craft were stored in one of the ships in a giant airlock, still too small for a large houseboat like Bill had. Taking it with him this trip was out of the question.
A lot of spacers were on the expedition because they were having a hard time at things, and all of them were in life’s senior years. Mary Watkins was one of them and sick of life. She was sixty three years old, and had been married three times and divorced twice. Her second husband had died of some cancer or another. She didn’t bother wondering if she was still a widow after she married Alex, that asshole.
Mary was a gambler, and after taking her third husband to the cleaners in court, the gambling machines cleaned her out, but good.
She was three years too old to legally go back to work; the mandatory retirement age was sixty. That was the law. There weren’t enough jobs for the young, and after age sixty you got a bigger government check.
Mary thought it was stupid. The law had started centuries ago, when the overpopulated Earth was in charge of the whole solar system. The whole universe, the arrogant sparkheads thought. Stupid. The spacer communities needed workers!
She was fine when she could just spend her days gambling. But her luck had run dry, followed by her ex-husband’s money. She had done well at first, earning more than him as a microbiologist until the divorce when she was fifty eight. The asshole should have left that young bimbo alone, and especially should have made sure nobody got video. It’s not like it’s the year 1666.
Mary walked into the bar not long after Jerry had left, and sat at the same seat. There was a man who had also come in after Jerry left, sitting at a corner and strumming a guitar and doing some very impressive classical pick work. Mary ignored him. The bartender walked up. “Hi, Mary, the usual?”
“Hi, Mary. Yeah.”
“...spend the rest of your days in paradise!” the television squawked. Mary gave Mary her beer as Mary lit a one hitter. “Got an ash tray, Mary?”
“Sure, here you go.”
“Do you wonder how long your Flatingstrigger will last?” the television asked. “Our insurance...”
“What’s that TV going on about?” Mary asked.
“The Anglada expedition.”
“The what? What’s an anglada?”
“It’s a planet named Anglada. It’s more than a parsec away and they’re going there.”
“What’s a parsec?”
“Hell if I know.”
The television, or rather a person pictured on it, said “They’re letting people work after sixty?”
“Yes. In fact the minimum age is fifty five,” somebody else pictured said.
Mary had been a microbiologist. “Hmmm,” she said. She thought she smelled money.
The guitar player, Bob Black, was so good he didn’t even have to think while playing, unless he was learning a brand new song. His fingers knew where to go and what to do, and as he played, his eyes were on the television.
Bob was a celebrity throughout space, widely known as the best guitarist in the solar system. All of the recorded music came from Earth, and on Earth, music had lost all of its charm and magic. It had become just another money making commodity that had lost all of its artistry and heart when computers took over writing and performing art, music, and literature. There were few human artists left anywhere, and no professionals; musicians lived on their government check and seldom were ever paid for performing. What non-artistic people don’t understand is that writers must write, musicians must play, sculptors must sculpt, and there’s little if anything they can do about it, they’re as good as addicted.
Bob’s fame had started to become annoying to him. That woman who had just come into the bar was one of the very few who didn’t fawn over him and ask for an autograph like the bartender had. At least he got a free beer out of it. He had become very tired of being famous, and the trip to Anglada seemed an escape from his fame. He wondered if they would want a musician? He would be fifty five right before the takeoff, barely old enough.
On Ceres, meanwhile, Joe McCarthy didn’t know what he was going to do with himself. He was an electrician, a fusion generator technician with an engineering degree, and a damned good one. The trouble was, he got that good with years and decades of experience, and now he was going to have to retire in three years, damn it.
He left his shift at Ceres generator twelve to go home to a ranch style house a few kilometers away. All the houses in the dome were the same, except for color and orientation. All had been printed from the same pattern by the same printer, with utilities and other fixtures later added by robots.
He had been arguing with his boss about the equip-ment. There was one part in particular that Joe said urgently needed replacing, and his boss basically told him the vulgar spacer version of “go fly a kite” with an added insult, the little twerp.
Joe was in a pretty bad mood as he limped to his floater. With Ceres’ weak gravity, wheeled vehicles were useless. Most people didn’t even use floaters, since everywhere was walking distance, but Joe had injured his leg playing zooterball, and the government bought him one. Floaters floated on air, propelled and steered by small fans under the vehicle and piloted by computers. He cursed as it almost hit a garbage can, then slowed down. As he cursed the computer that had almost dented his floater, he tried unsuccessfully to get out of his bad mood. No sense making a bad day worse.
He got home and went into the kitchen and unsealed a jar of beer and took it in the living room and turned on the video, and filled his bong. The television was showing a disaster from history, when Ceres had a power failure and a serious air leak.
He changed the channel. He didn’t want to think about the power company and his stupid asshole boss.
“...ot completely destroyed, but will be out of service for a month while it’s rebuilt. And now the weather.” It didn’t help his mood. What was going to be out of service? And this channel had no rewind.
He changed the channel again, then thought, “weather”? Were we going to get hit with another meteor shower? The last one had damaged the dome. He changed it back. “...of the choicest beef. Shop...”
Damn it. He changed it again, and song and laughter filled the air. “The hills are alive, with the sound of Yoshyosh.” A different voice, unaccompanied by violins and harps, said “Yoshyosh, the belt’s finest malt liquor.” He grinned at the thought of a parody of that commercial he’d seen, where the music had been accompanied by the sound of someone being violently ill.
“And we’re back! Fascinating, Doctor Miller. So you think the elderly will be fine on their return?”
“That’s the theory, they’ll see when they return, most of the rest of us will all be dead from old age by then. The dangers are explained well to them.”
This was strange, and interesting. Elderly? You never heard of the elderly on the news. But then, he seldom watched the news, he was just stream surfing.
Twenty minutes later he was at his tablet to sign up for the trip. Fuck that young twerp and his biased attitude towards those his senior. With his extensive training and experience with fusion generators he was sure to be picked.
He thought back to school, decades earlier. His classes said that the first fission generators had actually been only steam power, and the only difference between fission and coal generators had been the heat source and the pollution they left behind. The newer fission generators changed the gamma rays and other radioactivity directly into electricity, like a solar panel changes photons to electrons, with no waste or pollution besides its manufacture, and a lot fewer parts. And the old steam generators produced radioactive waste, which was almost as bad as the poisons and carbon released into the atmosphere with coal. The modern fusions captured the energy released when hydrogen atoms fused together to become helium, a very useful element, instantly changing the released subatomic energy particles to electrons and channeling them. It had taken centuries for people to figure out how to do that; the first fusion generators those centuries ago also used steam to generate electricity. The age of steam was hundreds of years earlier.
The web site looked like it was made back when fission generators ran on steam. There must be a way to normalize this thing...
Meanwhile on Earth, Billy was lost. Not in the sense that he didn’t know where he was, he was in the hospital. It was in the sense that nothing made sense. Daddy had died, and he was living at Uncle Bill’s house now. Uncle Bill and Aunt Nancy were nice, but they weren’t Daddy.
He didn’t know what to do without his daddy. And then Aunt Nancy went to jail after the police shot Uncle Bill and him.
Billy spent a lot of time crying. He’d loved Daddy so much, and Aunt Nancy and Uncle Bill were always so nice to him. He also spent a lot of time in useless rage, but tears were no more useful. And at his age he didn’t ponder things like that, anyway.
Billy was sitting next to his uncle on the couch when his uncle was shot. The bullet that killed Uncle Bill had grazed Billy’s side, and he would have a prominent scar. Very unusual, but it would go away with time and doctoring.
Then one day a strange looking woman came into his hospital room. She wasn’t dressed like a doctor. “Hi, Billy. I’m Mister Norton.”
Mister? He... she? Had no beard, but sounded like a grown up man.
“Hi, Mister Norton.”
“You don’t have any relatives on Earth?”
“Only Aunt Nancy, but the police took Aunt Nancy away after they shot me and killed Uncle Bill.”
“We’ve found that you have a grandfather on Mars.”
“A what?”
“A grand dad. Your father’s father. Would you like to go to Mars?”
“I don’t know. Are they mean like they are here?”
Norton scratched his jaw. It made a sound. “I’ve never been there, so I don’t know. But I’d go if they let me.”
“You can’t go?”
“No, Earthians aren’t allowed past the moon. But your grandfather is your nearest relative, and he’s a Martian so you can go. I wish I could. All that the government knows what to do with you is to send you to your grandfather on Mars. I’ll be back next week when you’re released.”
“Uh, g’bye.”
“Goodbye, and good luck.”
The beardless man left and Billy started crying again. The hurt in his soul was even worse than the hurt in his side.