Doctor Guisewild was awakened by his phone. The ship’s computer was screaming through it, “emergency, room A-31...emergency, room A-31...emergency, room A-31...emer...”
He hit the stop button, jumped out of bed, and ran down the hall in his underwear, carrying his tool bag. A-31 would be Mary’s room. She had spoken to him first thing that morning, and he suggested she see Jerry. He feared Jerry or Ralph may have made a big mistake, but he didn’t know what.
General practitioner physicians had been trained as well in psychology as they had been trained in gerontology, treating the brain and nervous system as any other of the body’s organs and related systems.
She had finally seen Ralph the first thing that morning. She had avoided him ever since she had overdosed on whiskey. For the first time in her life she felt lonely. All her life she had been the greediest, most selfish person ever, and when her victims would no longer associate with her, she’d moved on to a different crowd.
Now there were no more crowds to move to, no more asteroids, and no more planets, except the one they were traveling to, and there were no people there, nobody new to defraud. There were no longer millions of people on dozens of asteroids, now there were only a few dozen people in total. Hers was the most successful of all the methods of stealing. Her victims didn’t even know they were being stolen from. Usually, anyway. But her personality fit her evil soul, and people usually grew tired of it. Sometimes quickly, like with Will, but usually after quite a long time.
When she told Doc this, or rather a dishonest version of it, he referred her to Jerry, as this was obviously out of his field. Of course, she couldn’t tell Jerry that. She actually didn’t understand it that way, but telling anyone how she actually felt really went against her grain, and she had only voiced half of it to Doc.
Jerry knew what her real problem was, but she wasn’t at a point where he could do much yet, because she didn’t really know yet and he had to lead her to the knowledge safely and gracefully, so when he could see that she was becoming uneasy and would probably bolt, he just suggested that she see Doctor Guisewild for a drug he would write down for her to take to him, as he wasn’t licensed as a drug dispensary.
Rather than seeing Doctor Guisewild, who had told her to see Jerry, she sat in her room with a bottle of high octane whiskey. She didn’t plan on going to bed that night. This was it. She would wait until “night” when everyone was asleep, and then...
Doc rushed into her room to see her hanging from a bedpost by a blouse. She had taken off her watch, which was how emergency services were normally alerted when someone in a dome had a medical emergency, but on a GOTS ship, the ship itself listened to every breath and every heartbeat of every person onboard. Nobody really needed a watch on a GOTS vessel.
He put oxygen infusers on her head and chest as a medic rolled in; she was unconscious from asphyxiation, but her heart had not stopped. She was now stable, and the medic rolled to the infirmary with Doc trailing. He wondered if she would have any brain damage, and if so, how much? He would have to talk to Ralph and Jerry after she became conscious, and double check the readings on the instruments, once in the infirmary.
Nobody but Mary knew yet that her “suicide” wasn’t really an attempt to stop living, it seemed. But it was a fake. Her sick, evil, scheming mind had deduced that perhaps what she needed was sympathy. Poor poor pitiful me. She had taken off her watch, to make them think that she thought that its removal would stop it from triggering emergency services. She hadn’t realized how much danger she had placed herself in. Trying to pretend to hang herself, she had hung herself.
Doc went back home and back to bed.
Bill woke up at his normal time, if time on a ship like this could be considered “normal,” as the coffee made itself. The robot put it on the kitchen table as he got dressed and his breakfast prepared itself.
“Normal,” of course, is changeable and may not even really exist. In 1920, horses were normal and automobiles were strange expensive toys that rich men owned. In 2020, automobiles were normal and anyone on a horse was a rich person and their expensive living toy. In both years, wearing a mask was normal, as there were world-wide pandemics in both years, but almost never else were masks normal.
Bacon, eggs, and toast was still a normal breakfast hundreds of years after the invention of the telegraph, and since before indoor plumbing was normal. Bill had oatmeal.
He finished his breakfast, took a shower, got dressed, and went to the pilot room. Of course, the first thing to be done was to check all of the computer readouts. All were normal. Then he checked the computer logs, and was startled but not surprised to see the attempted suicide. Of course, as captain, he would have to visit that ornery woman in the infirmary. Mort wouldn’t have gone at all, he thought. He walked to the infirmary, planning to start inspection there.
“Say, Bill,” Jerry said.
“Hi, Jerry, Ralph, Doc. How’s she doin’?”
Harold was still groggy, having had his sleep disturbed by Mary’s “suicide.” He sipped his coffee and said “Don’t know yet. She might not even wake up, but there’s brain activity. She needs to be awake for further tests. I’ll keep you and these guys posted.”
“Thanks, Doc. I’ll see you guys, I have to inspect everything.”
As he left, Jerry said “It’s a fake.”
“Huh?” said Doc. “She’s really in a real coma from lack of oxygen. She might suffer brain damage or even die!”
Ralph’s face was a cross between a grin and a smile. “Jerry’s not saying she’s okay, he’s saying that she was trying to fake suicide and screwed it up and almost killed herself for real. Sociopaths don’t suicide. Here, when she wakes up, add this to her IV.” He did something to his phone, and Harold looked at his.
“I don’t get it, how will this help?”
“You can read a lot faster than I can talk, and there’s a four week course on this. It’s in the library.”
By the time Bill’s inspection rounds came to the entertainment center, the last place to inspect, there were a couple dozen people at tables eating breakfast. No one was at the bar. After inspection Bill sat at the bar and ordered coffee from the robot and made the table to display the book he had discovered in the ship computer’s library.
The holographic book looked like a real antique book made from paper. It was a very, very old novel, titled Foundation, written by a biochemist about a future “psychohistory.” He read about a page, and looked for another book; the archaic language was barely readable. He picked another oldie, but this one was only a century old. And, of course, an alarm on his phone went off.
It never fails.
He hurriedly looked at his phone; there was a fire in Mary’s room! How could that happen? It had been well over a century since cleaning robots caught fire.
Shit. He rushed down there, despite the fact that the room would be locked with the light above the door flashing red. The lights weren’t noticeable unless lit.
It’s easy to put out a fire in a room in outer space, as long as no one is inside of it. You just vent the inside air outside into the vacuum. The ship did this automatically in an unoccupied room, sealing it from the rest of the ship before venting. The rule was simple: in case of fire, get the hell out of there as fast as you can. The faster you get out, the sooner the air can be removed and the fewer of your belongings will be burned up.
By the time he got there, the emergency was over, with the smoke and flame blown out. He inspected, like the book said, but he was not a trained fire inspector and couldn’t find the cause. He had his engineers look at it, and they couldn’t tell how it started, either.
The next “Saturday night” was night club night, as had been usual. The trio sat up their instruments as the crowd, which tonight would be nearly everyone on board, trickled in.
“Nice crowd,” Bob said.
“I’m nervous,” said Sue.
“Normal for a big crowd like this. You’ll be okay unless you’re too scared to play. Will, do you have that part down pat yet?”
“Good enough, I guess. That recording was really hard to learn. But you know, we need a drummer.”
Sue laughed. “Do you have any idea how far away the nearest drummer is?”
Bob replied “The last drummer died a hundred seventy five years ago, and his craft died with him.”
“We could use a comput...”
“Hell, NO!” Bob and Sue interrupted in unison.
“Well, maybe Joe or somebody would want to learn.”
“How?” Bob asked. “Who’s going to teach him? Where would he get drums?”
“How did you learn to play guitar?”
“My grandpa taught me.”
“Nobody taught me.”
“Me, either,” Sue added. “He’ll have to learn by himself like I did, and like Will did. We’re practicing a lost art!”
Will replied “I’ll see if Joe wants to learn, he always did like music.”
“I guess it’s curtains for us,” Bob interjected.
“Huh?”
“Time to play. Will, your part comes first.” The stage lights lit as he stepped up to the front edge of the stage, controlled by a computer, of course. “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming tonight,” Bob’s amplified voice announced. There was no visible microphone as had been used at the birth of amplified sound, but tiny computer-controlled mics in the ceiling and floor that were focused on the source of the sound to be amplified. In this case it was Bob’s mouth. “May I please introduce, William Lathiter!”
The crowd applauded softly and Will played, then Bob joined in, followed by Sue’s flute. Bob started singing. “There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold, and she's buying a stairway...”
Harold’s phone went off. “Never fails,” he said under his breath, and got up and walked to the infirmary.
Mary had woken up groggily, and didn’t remember going to bed, or the faked suicide that had almost killed her. She didn’t yet realize that she was in the hospital, or that she was paralyzed.
Harold walked in. “How you feeling?”
Just then was when she realized that she couldn’t move. “Doc! I can’t move! What happened? Am I in the hospital?”
“Yes. You can’t move?”
“No! I...”
“Here,” the doctor said, and pulled out a hypodermic patch. He placed it on her arm for a second. “Now?”
“No.”
He had, of course, been coordinating with Ralph and Jerry. She was terrified of them, but had no feelings about the physician at all. They had told him to get her used to the hypo, which hadn’t been a needle since antiquity, but a small device called a “patch.”
Bill walked in, somewhat annoyed as Harold had been, having been alerted when Doc had. He hadn’t had the musical performance interrupted, but rather his work in the pilot room. He had halfway finished an onerous task when the rule book said he had to greet an awakening passenger in the infirmary. He would have to start it all over when he got back.
Bill, like Harold, was a professional who didn’t let his annoyance show. “Hello, Mary, how are you feeling? Doc says...”
Doc interrupted him. “She seems to have had some sort of accident and can’t move.”
Bill’s Asperger’s got in the way for a second, but he powered his way through it. “Oh?”
“Yes, she’s become paralyzed. Possibly a reaction to the whiskey she had last night,” he lied, “but she could have fallen, although the instruments didn’t say so. They can’t catch everything.”
Bill could tell he was lying and wondered if Mary could, too. But he knew the ship and she didn’t, and she was partly anesthetized and not all the way awake. “Well, good luck. I have to go redo that... uh, I have some chores. Bye.” He went back in the pilot room.
Meanwhile, the band played on. They finished the show, and as people were leaving and the robots were cleaning up they sat at a table as a robot brought drinks. Joe was at the bar, and moved over to their table. “Great show, guys. I really loved that first song, never heard anything like it. Seems like it was missing something, though.”
All three started laughing. Joe looked puzzled.
“Drums!” Will said.
“Huh?”
“Drums. Another instrument, percussion. It keeps time.”
“Doesn’t the computer do that?”
Bob laughed. “Drums were the second musical instrument, after the human voice, and the first instrument ever invented, probably more than ten thousand years ago. Computers have only been around for a few hundred. Want to join the band?”
“Huh?”
“We need a drummer, even if the last one hadn’t died over a century ago, and there still aren’t any outside the solar system, or even inside it.”
“I don’t know how to play drums.”
Will said “Nobody does. I didn’t know how to play guitar until I taught myself.”
“Can’t teach an old dog new tricks!”
“Bullshit. Unless you have untreated Alzheimer’s, and they wouldn’t have accepted you for the expedition if you had. Give it a try?”
“Well... where would I get drums?”
A month later he was in a store room the robots had set up, with a very large part of the wall appearing to be a different room and connected to the ship’s impressive sound system, the third dimension added to the ancient video recordings by a computer. Turning photographs into holograms had been possible for two centuries, although they didn’t quite look real somehow.
He was beating on a set of drums, a large, impressive set copied identically from the twentieth century Ludwigs. Bob had chosen them, based on his antique music history collection. The best drummers had used them in the twentieth century, his documents told him. Plus, he liked the weird name.
They sounded terrible. At least until he and Bob had gotten them in tune, the robots had been abysmally incompetent at tuning drums. Bob and Joe had done it by ear, matching the recorded sound from the antique recordings. One would have thought the computers in the robots could match the frequencies, but computers can’t think and drums are quite a bit harder to tune than a guitar.
But Joe was getting better. It still didn’t sound very good, despite the drums being in tune.
Mary had regained much of her strength, and was getting around in a wheelchair. Although she didn’t remember the “attempted suicide” or that she was looking for sympathy, she actually got some. A wheelchair will do that for you, although crippling yourself is a terrible way to get sympathy. But Mary suffered from sociopathy, not Munchausen syndrome.
Doc had administered the drug Jerry and Ralph both recommended. The book explained that it eventually built up empathy where there had formerly been little or none, and included the scientific studies. Harold found them fascinating.
It was originally an offshoot of a drug that was invented to cure lack of libido in women who suffered from it, which had been the cause of many divorces before the drug was developed.
It was worse afterwards, and before the drug was out of trials the trials were quickly stopped. It not only gave a woman a libido, the libido was completely out of control, and worse, the drug was physically addictive. Withdrawal was always fatal, not only for the addict but for anyone around when they were withdrawing. Captain Kelly’s ex-wife, a psychologist, had been the one to find a workable treatment, which involved, among other things, going to Mars from their native Earth. “Droppers,” as they were called, didn’t like low gravity.
It led to the drug to treat the lack of empathy, which is the root cause of sociopathy, affecting the amygdala differently than the older formula. Like sufferers of many other mental illnesses, sociopaths fear treatment. Unlike its precursor drug, it wasn’t addictive, and in fact the contrary; a side effect was temporary but prolonged paralysis.
She rolled into the commons for a beer. Still too weak to lift a glass, she would have the robot bring a straw. The show would start soon, and this was the first time she had attended in weeks.
The band was at a table by the stage. Antique tunes from the birth of recorded music to the death of recorded human music was playing, thanks to Bob’s extensive music collection. He had been disgusted long enough by that God damned computer garbage that he had replaced it with his own, vast collection of human music that covered hundreds of years of recording.
Bob and Will were discussing sheet music on a tablet on the table. There were no drums on the stage, as Joe needed a whole lot more practice before he could feel comfortable playing in front of people, but he had actually become pretty good, for a beginner.
Mary’s chair elevated itself to bar stool height as she reached the bar. She lit a doobie as the robot set a mug of beer with a straw in it and an ash tray in front of her. There were two empty stools next to her, but few empty tables. It was a good crowd.
The band got on stage to start having a good time playing, as playing children always do. Of course, nobody ever really grows up, not even the geriatric. Not inside, anyway. Some people’s souls die, but otherwise there’s a child inside every old codger.
Bill finished up in the pilot room, cursing that damned Mort for dying, and hurried to the commons. Maybe he could actually catch a show tonight, if that damned phone would shut up and let him be for a while. He sat down next to Mary, who started trying to get the best of him, female style.
Nobody ever really grows up. She pulled out a joint.
Bill wrinkled his already wrinkled old nose. “Excuse me,” he said, and moved to the table Walt was sitting at by himself where the band had been sitting, with a smokeless ash tray and nobody smoking.
“That Mary!” he said. “I’m glad I’m not Ralph or Jerry. Damned woman was hitting on me. I’m four times her age!”
Joe grinned. “Is that what the company records of your entropy say?”
“No, that’s what the tax collector says, charging me a year’s taxes for a three month run.”
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We’re going to start with a very, very old number called ‘Moondance’.”
Sue started playing her flute.
Harold, as usual, was missing the show, dealing with the various miseries elderly geezers always have most of the time, especially on a Saturday night. It seemed everybody started hurting or couldn’t breathe or something every Saturday. He was treating George, whom he thought was his last patient.
“It hurts when I raise my arm like that.”
“Then don’t do that.”
“Ha, ha,” George replied sarcastically.
“Look, George, gettin’ old ain’t for wimps, you know? You think I don’t have all the aches and pains and heartaches and misery as everybody else on the ship?”
“Can’t you give me something?”
“You have arpirin, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but...”
Harold rolled his eyes. “Let me tell you a little ancient medical history. About eighteen hundred, not sure the actual year...”
“Krodley! Ancient is right. How could it apply today? They didn’t even have electricity, did they?”
“I don’t know, but they made a drug named ‘morphine’ out of a plant that’s now extinct, called a poppy. It was kind of like a modern pain diffuser, but if you took too much for too long, you had a physical need for it and would die without it, and taking too much at once would kill you, so they made strict rules; laws, actually, for its use.
“They developed more and more powerful drugs in that class, but in the twentieth century fascism was born, and was nearly wiped out in a world wide war but the nascent movement started taking hold world wide in the twenty first...”
“They taught us all this is high school!”
“Not all of it, they didn’t. Just about how the entire planet became a fascist dictatorship. Now, the drug industry...”
“The drug what?”
“Believe it or not, producing drugs, actually all aspects of health care in the world’s biggest economy between the twentieth and twenty first centuries was monetized. A diabetic without the means to afford enough insulin was doomed to a horrible death by ketoacidosis...”
“You lost me.”
“Their blood turns to acid.”
“They were really that cruel?”
“That’s what happens under fascism. Poverty could result in death by torture. But anyway, the opioids, as they were called, were legally only used for acute pain until the heartless drug dealers, very rich people who made medicines that doctors prescribed, somehow convinced everyone that their drugs could be safely used for chronic pain. The result was millions of people addicted to the drugs the drug salesmen pushed, dying from overdoses, stealing to support their habits... it was awful. Believe me, you don’t want to go back to that. How about using a diffuser if it hurts that bad?” His instruments told him that George was in less pain than he was.
He shook his head. “I can’t think straight with one of those.”
“Drugs would be worse. Let’s get a beer and listen to some music.”
“It’s Saturday?”
“Well, yeah!”
They walked down, and entered the room as raucous applause was ringing. “Good,” Doc said, “We didn’t miss it!”
Before they reached a table, the applause died, and Bob’s amplified voice said “Thank you! Thank you! You’ve been a great audience, we’ll see you next Saturday!”
“Well, shit.”
“Sorry.”
The next “Wednesday” after practicing a couple of songs, Bob said “Well, what do you think, Will?”
“He’s ready.”
“Sue?”
“Yeah, I agree. He’s getting pretty good.”
“Well, Joe?”
“Well, I don’t know, what if I freeze up?”
Bob said “I can set the lighting so you won’t see anything but your drums, and in case you still freeze up I’ll have it set so that spotlights only shine on anybody performing. Remember, they never heard “Stairway” with drums before. The ancient recording hasn’t even played before the shows.”
“Well, I guess.”
Bill dodged another rock, or ice chunk, or something. It was nothing like the earlier iceberg’s close call, and only needed a tiny course correction. Nobody had to strap down. But boy, he thought, this trip’s a rock show. There are more rocks and ice cubes than I’ve seen in space before. Will it be like this all the way to Anglada?
But he was traveling far faster than he ever had before, in fact faster than anyone but the Sirius expedition had ever traveled. And not only does time slow down, mass increases. The craft’s enormous mass had greatly disturbed the movements of thousands of rocks, boulders, mountains, asteroids, and comets. It would be hundreds of years before the effects would be seen, and nobody was likely to figure out its cause.
Earthians in the southern hemisphere would see a lot of shooting stars, Rio de Janeiro would be completely destroyed by an asteroid, and a Martian dome would have a close call. But not for hundreds of years. Right then, “right then” being a meaningless concept in this context, Mary was in the commons with a deck of playing cards, teaching Sylvia and Mrs. Harrington how to play Snap the Packle. Not that it would do anybody any good without money.
Two days later there were four of them playing Packle as the band set up; most of what was being set up were drums for Joe. “Think you can start the show? You do that one song really good. How about it?”
“What if I freeze?”
“Well, hell. I was going to start off by introducing you...”
“I know everybody on the ship!”
Bob sighed. “But I’ll introduce you as our drummer after the song’s finished, then, and if you freeze I’ll start off with Stairway like we did before.”
“Packle!” someone yelled from the back of the room.
“If they do that while we’re playing I’m going to knock whoever it is right off their chair!” Will said as Joe screwed the last thumbscrew on the last cymbal.
Bob sighed again. “I think Jerry or Ralph might have something to say about that. Look, Joe, whenever anybody yells ‘packle,’ hit your snare and your bass and your cymbal. Make some noise.”
Will grinned. “Even better. Everybody ready?”
“Packle!” someone yelled.
CRASHBOOMKLANG!!
The whole room became quiet, everyone staring at Joe. Joe giggled, and broke into a guffaw. Pretty soon everyone in the room was laughing. Then...
The sound of bang boom boom bang, boom boom boom boom bang boom boom bang, boom boom boom, bang, bang bang bang bang bang, then guitars, one a bass guitar that Will had been learning, followed by Sue singing “Been a long time since a rock and roll...”
Joe had become a musician. For real!
“Damn, that’s loud,” someone in the back said. Of course, no one heard him. It was loud. When you have drums, most other instruments need amplification.
Doc was in the infirmary with a patient, missing the show, as usual. Later as he was treating his last patient, he said “Think you’ll be okay now, Vickie?”
“Yeah, I can breathe now. Thanks, Doc!”
“Don’t mention it. I think I’ll go to the commons.”
“I think I’ll read. See you.”
“See you.”
Vickie went toward her rooms, and Harold walked toward the commons. Damn, that’s loud, he thought, hearing a very loud drum solo. “I hope nobody’s hurt,” he said out loud, and walked faster, wondering what kind of horrible accident was causing that racket. “Sounds like something went wrong with the machinery,” he said. “I sure hope nobody gets hurt!”
But this was the first time anyone alive, except the musicians, had ever heard the first musical instrument ever invented and the first time anyone living had ever done a drum solo, and computers never did drum solos.
A day later, Doc traded Mary’s wheelchair for a walker. Monday it was a cane. Wednesday she walked to Doc’s office carrying it, to drop it off. He wasn’t in his office.
He was in the infirmary with Annie McGee, a very short, skinny (for a spacer) eighty year old biologist who had fallen and broken her hip. Harold was worried, as many of his patients her age who had similar injuries died from them.
Of course, it necessitated surgery. The robots were working on her. She had opted for sedation, saying “Hell, yes I want fucking sedation! Before you put that damned lardlicker on my forehead I couldn’t fucking stand it!” Harold had marveled at her grasp of vulgarity, cursing as well as any eighteenth century sailor, or twenty third century marine.
Mary dropped off the cane and went to the commons for lunch. She was looking forward to Saturday. She wanted to dance. Never mind that dancing was almost as obsolete as human musicians, at least in space. Dance had run in her family and her Earthian immigrant parents had taught her. They had told her that her great great grandparents were famous professional dancers. Mary never believed that, getting paid to dance? Nonsense!
She sat at a table and ordered lunch, and fired up a doobie. This stuff Ralph’s growing ain’t bad, she thought, but she missed her four twenties. She thought that was a really stupid thing to call muggles, but she loved the taste and the high of that brand.
But Ralph’s a pretty good gardener, she thought, and took another toke before having a huge coughing fit.
Doc came in. Mary said “Doc, I dropped off the cane at your office.”
“Thanks.” He sat down at a different table. Annie’s surgery had gone well, and he had adjusted the pain diffuser on the back of her neck so she would be paralyzed from the chest down, and the pain would be felt painlessly, its presence there noticeable but not mattering.
The diffuser was glued to the back of her neck. If it came loose, the shock of the sudden pain could be fatal, as well as re-break the bone and necessitate further surgery if she survived the shock.
She read a magazine on a tablet. She laid it down suddenly. “Shit! Layno! Fucking Grodlick! Mut! ¡Mierda! Merde! Der'mo! Kak! I’m going to miss the gackle hurling show Saturday! Trumpshit fucklecropper!” She cursed for a full five minutes before picking her “book” back up, just as Bill rang the doorbell.
“Can I come in?”
“Sure. I’d get up, but...” she said grinning.
“Are you going to be okay?”
“I guess, ask Doc. Gonna miss the fucking graplehung show Saturday, though, damn it.”
“Probably be a few weeks, won’t it?”
“Yeah, and Doc says I’m haven ta larn how ta walk again when he can taken the diffuser off,” she said, her Vegan accent slipping through. “I caint larn nothin’ at my age! Hooda heard o’ anybody larnin ta walk at eighty!”
“Well, you’ll be in a wheelchair before you can walk, but I’ll bet Doc will have you running the hundred yard dash in ten seconds!”
She laughed. “I ain’t ran nowhere for twenty years, sonny!”
Bill laughed. “Sonny? Annie, I’m almost four times your age!”
She frowned. “I’m eighty, boy!”
Bill laughed. “I’m two hundred and forty five.”
“What? That’s impossible!”
“When we land you’ll be about a hundred and ten, depending on what year it is back in reality.”
“Two forty five! Damn, and I thought I was old!”
“Glad you’re going to be okay, Annie. I have to go take readings, but I’ll talk to Will and see if we can get the show on your holo screen.”
Every wall on the ship was a holographic screen, able to change colors at will, display artwork, holographic movies, anything. Most people ignored the walls, though, as if it was still the year 1498 and paint wasn’t holographic. Your wall was your holographic television; any wall. It was installed exactly like paint had been installed back in the seventeen hundreds before the wallpaper fad took hold in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds.
He took his readings in the pilot room and went to lunch. Joe was there, and he asked about setting things up so Annie could watch and listen from her room.
“Packle!” someone yelled from the crowd.
“I hate that game,” Joe said.
Bob set it all up the next day. Unlike early digitally recorded music, which had a frequency response limited to just above the range of human hearing, modern recordings were done at a hundred times the sample rate of the original digital music, leaving in all the ultrasonic harmonics that perceptibly color the audible frequencies that were missing in early digital recordings. It was truly like being in the room with the musician, even though the musician was a computer on a different world. Of course, there was no way to add the missing samples from the primitive digital recordings.
After Harold visited Annie the next day, he called on Bob to see if he had recorded any of the concerts. “Everybody seems to get sick or hurt or something every Saturday night.”
“Hmm, we haven’t been recording them, but since you said something I don’t see why not. I already have the holographic cameras set up for Annie, and the sound system is built-in. We might actually make some money out of it when we get back.”
“If we’re still alive.”
“I’ll only be seventy five. It’s not like I’m from Earth!”
Doc laughed. “If you were from Earth you’d probably already be dead. They don’t live very long there.”
“Hey, we could replay them in the commons a few days later!”
“You could add your music to the antique stuff you replaced the computer music with.”
“I didn’t think of that, we could!”
“Don’t replace it all, I love most of the earliest stuff, the stuff from the twentieth century.”
“Packle!” came from somewhere in the room.
“You mean like Jolson, Goodman, Dorsey?”
“Yeah, they were good, but Berry, Clapton, Hendrix, Van Halen... Shit.” His phone alerted. “Annie’s robot called.” He got up and ran.
“Hope she’s alright,” Bob said as Doc ran out. Robots didn’t usually call unless the patient was close to death. He rushed into her room.
She was reading, and looked up. “Doc? You okay?”
Harold looked puzzled. “I was going to ask you the same thing.” He pulled out his phone to look at her vitals. All were as would be expected if the computer hadn’t signaled she was dying.
“I’m fine, Doc, but you look a little frazzled.”
“Equipment malfunction. Scared the hell out of me, I thought you were dying!”
She laughed. “Not yet, Doc!”
He texted Bill about the malfunction, hoping nothing like that would happen to the engines. Bill also hoped nothing like that happened to the engines, but that’s why there were four separate computers in parallel running the ship. A stray x-ray or gamma ray photon could, despite the ship’s magnetic shields, hit a transistor and change a one to a zero. That can be catastrophic in a digital computer that’s running life-critical systems.
Saturday before the music started, Bill was in the commons at a table by himself by a wall. Of course, there was no ash tray; they attracted smoke. There were already quite a few people there, and more were slowly trickling in.
One of the antique songs that Bill didn’t particularly care for was playing. “Stayin’ alive! Stayin’ alive!” it crooned. He thought of the possible doom any trip subjected one to, when Mary walked up to his table.
“Come dance with me!” she ordered.
“No, thank you,” he replied.
“Oh, come on!”
“Tried it once, hated it.”
“Suit your self,” she said, and walked away frowning, looking for someone else to pester, not realizing that she was being a pest. Bill was amused.
“Packle!” someone yelled from across the room.
“I’m starting to hate that game,” Bill said, although there was no one close enough to hear him. A robot rolled over to fill his beer, ignoring his comment. The band trickled in one by one and sat at a table near the stage, their instruments already set up and tuned. Bob came in last, carrying a hard body guitar case, despite his normal guitar on a stand on the stage. Mary walked up.
“Anybody want to dance?”
Nobody wanted to dance. She went to the bar.
“New axe?” Will asked.
“Kind of. Just had the robots print it out. It’s a Dobro.” He took it out of its case and handed it to Will. Will played a one-handed G chord and a surprised look came over his face. “I want one of these!” He took it by the neck and played an A minor. “Wow!” he exclaimed.
“Packle!” The game, apparently, went on. Or more likely, several being played at once. Mary and Mrs. Harrington had started an onboard fad.
Shortly before the band assembled on stage, when they were nearly ready to play, someone yelled “Packle!” Originally a gambling game, they had been using doobies to keep score, and were starting to refer to joints as “packles.” Will lit one and passed it to Bob.
The robot bartender was as busy as a robot could be, all six telescoping arms swiftly dispensing drinks and ash trays, while three wait robots (nobody knew why they were called that, and few cared) ferried drinks and ashtrays on their trays to patrons at tables.
Someone started to yell “packle” and was interrupted by someone louder yelling “ROCK AND ROLL!” followed immediately by Joe. “Bang boom boom bang, boom boom boom bang boom boom bang, boom boom boom, bang, bang bang bang bang bang...”
It was loud. You couldn’t even hear the yelling of packle players, let alone the gurgling bongs, although once the sound of a dropped beer bottle shattering was audible. As usual, Harold was stuck in his office treating a patient. At least, he thought, I can see the show now. Tomorrow, anyway.
Mary had been trying, very unsuccessfully, to get anyone to dance with her. She sure wasn’t going to dance by herself.
Dancing had never caught on in the “little worlds” as Earthians often called the inhabited bodies. Some had often tried to dance, but even on Mars an attempt to dance was pathetic, and with a gravity belt it would be unwieldy. On an asteroid it would be impossible, but it was still widely practiced on Earth. The state psychologists saw to that.
The next day Mary posted an ad for dancing lessons in the commons before sitting down at the table where Mrs. Harrington, Sue, and Annie were playing Packle.
She had become a new woman, thanks to Ralph and Jerry’s treatment.
Nobody could believe it. Nobody did believe it, wisely figuring that it was just another of her evil little selfish tricks to get over on people. But the psychologists believed it. But they knew of her treatment, nobody else but Harold and Bill knew.
“We can’t follow the normal procedures,” Ralph said.
Jerry laughed and shook his head. “Maybe we should have waited until we were back to the solar system!” Ralph joined the laughter. After a life of sociopathy, the sociopath is untrustworthy, and nobody can believe that this tiger can change its stripes. Ordinarily, instruction would be the same as had been given way back in the twenty first century to those who had been treated successfully for substance abuse disorder: move to a different city. With substance abuse, it was to get away from “triggers” that would seduce the addict to use again. For sociopaths, it was because there was no way anyone would believe there had been any change, especially since the sufferer didn’t see it. And sociopaths were used to new crowds, unlike addicts, but they were over half a parsec from the nearest new city.
Mrs. Harrington had become friendly with Mary even before her treatment. Her autism got in the way of discerning Mary’s dishonesty, or her sudden honesty. She just didn’t notice, other things were more important. Like that still unsolved four hundred year old math riddle that often haunted her, especially whenever it woke her up in the middle of the night with the answer that she always forgot before she could jot it down. She could almost see the answer.
“Packle!” Sue yelled, breaking Mrs. Harrington’s reverie. “Fuckletrumper!” said Annie, and threw her cards down. Mary was losing, and nobody cared, or even noticed. This despite the fact Mrs. Harrington hadn’t been paying attention; she’d been holding a winning hand for ten minutes. The three each threw a muggle on the pile on the table. She collected the pile and lit one, passed it, and coughed.
Mrs. Harrington finally noticed her hand. “Oh, my!”
“What?”
“What do you do when you have two packles?”
Sue said “And tell everybody after somebody just collected?” and laughed. “You kick yourself in the ass and start paying attention!”
Mrs. Harrington reddened. It made Mary feel bad, and she patted her on the shoulder. “Don’t feel bad, you should have seen some of the stunts I pulled when I first started playing!”
Of course, Sue was sure Mary had an ulterior motive. She knew her. At least, she knew the the pre-treatment Mary. “New game?”
“Sure,” Mary agreed. “Mrs. Harrington?”
“Okay. Who’s dealing?”
“Sue.”
Rather than his customary paper book, Ralph had a tablet in his hands as he watched his subjects, with a book showing on it. He saw the change in Mary, as did Jerry, but nobody else seemed to; or at least, believed it if they noticed it. It was too bad she hadn’t gotten treatment before the journey, he thought.
It was sad. The poor woman.