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Heatship

Frank Fucile

    As blue Earth loomed closer below the blinding Sun (shaded only slightly by the ceiling filter) we prepared to convert the Prometheus to reentry configuration, beginning by retracting its thirty-three giant photosails. As we neared the Sun in the past few months, we had increasingly shed our clothing until now we were stripped to heatship casual: anti-radiation briefs to cover our bits and our scrawny tattooed bodies tanned to an almost uniform shade of orange-brown despite daily sprayings of relatively effective anti-burn coat. The heatship had been soaking up as much energy as it could and storing it in its batteries for the long trip back to the edge of the solar system, where it would only have a trickle of photons from the perpetual night sky.
    Captain OHandley looked like an Irish pirate with his white-streaked red beard and shaggy floating hair, but his eyes and nose were Asian and his voice Plutonian, widening out in flat aaas to comment distantly on the blackness surrounding us. OHandley loved to sail in open space with the clear polymer bubble above us the only thing between our bronze bodies and the blue-orange photosails floating overhead in empty space. In the pinholed night of our year-long voyages he would proclaim, “And this aaalso has been one of the daaark places of the waaarld,” and laugh stupidly at himself. In addition to being a self-styled literary enthusiast, OHandley fancied himself a direct descendant of the old days of sailing in an open boat at the mercy of the winds and the tides. Now he basked in the distant glow of the planets, stars, and moons that had plagued his distant ancestors, harnessing the power of their photons through the Prometheus’s array of solar cells and photosails and amplifying it in massive hydrogen engines, simultaneously heating the deck and cooling the cargo hold. The term Radiation-Collecting PhotoElectric-Steered Thermal Separation Drive Space Vessel seemed too pretentious, so we called it a heatship.
    The Prometheus was a custom job OHandley had built with his family’s fortune. He was a decadent gentleman adventurer who traveled with an impressive library and all-male crew at his disposal. His Plutonian forefathers had been renegade members of the intelligentsia who had escaped to the colonies during the anti-intellectual twitch of the late twenty-first century. Even though they had been successful colonists and businessmen well-versed in technology, they never lost their appetite for knowledge in the form of the old-fashioned paperback. As a result, the older members of OHandley’s crew (particularly myself and my buddy Eskimo Joe) were a self-selected bunch of wannabe intellectuals. The same couldn’t really be said of the younger crewmen.
    The Prometheus’s cargo hold was full of Kuiper Belt ice bound for The Big Melted Popsicle (as Joe used to call it). Not that they don’t have freezers down there, but if you’re a rich asshole on a dying planet, why not have your ice flown in from the distant outer reaches of the motherfucking solar system? Especially if inside is the famed Plutonian hash grown under UV lamps in microgravity, baked lovingly in hyperpressurized fission ovens, and pressed into blue-black bricks in the cold space ice. The Plutonians had been pulling off this crazy business model since they settled generations ago, and the Earth’s tangle of crumbling and soaring economic classes managed to keep it profitable.
    I of course know this story of the reasons for the Plutonians’ unlikely success because OHandley had drilled it into my head with his stoned ramblings for the past fifteen years I’d worked for him. “Once we sailed to harvest whale oil.” (I remember him thumping a battered copy of Moby Dick on the crystalline roof and drifting down to snag a foothold on the deck.) “Then came coal power. Then we hauled crude.” (He opened his arms to the blank sky and let the book drift away from him.) “Now we have a purely heat-based economy.”

    After pulling in the sails, we brought up our heat shield, shutting out the swirl of sea and cloud below us and encapsulating the ship’s deck. The artificial light cells came up, and we strapped ourselves into our bridge seats, calculating speed and trajectory. After the bumpy mess of passing through the atmosphere we activated breaking thrusters, deployed chutes, and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico. The shields came down and the bridge opened up onto blue sky and green sea. A couple of the greenhorns looked a bit weepy, but the shift to blue after almost two years of black was dramatic even for the old salts. Though certainly nothing in my life ever compared to that first moment. For a man to grow up without ever seeing the Sun as anything but a distant star, and for his home, his real original ancestral home, to be an invisible speck snuffed out.
    We know after this shore leave we’ll be hauling passengers and products up to the colonies. And it’ll be a serious, fully-clothed, respectable transport of businesspersons, their families, and their consumer goods instead of sexed-up hashed-out pirate anarchy. Joe used to say the civvies we transported were rats leaving a sinking ship. That’s probably what his grandparents told him about abandoning their ancestral oil-field ice sheet for Europa.
    As we unbelted, the misty reveries of the greenhorns were literally crushed by a gravitational force greater than any they had felt before (making them realize how useless those half-assed lifting sessions in the inertial gym were). I even felt sluggish under Earth weight then, and I was in my peak condition. Half the crew wanted to lay down on deck, and OHandley wobbled out in a goddam tricorn hat with a cutlass strapped on his waist, lit a corncob pipe, and shouted, “Raise the sails to caaatch the wind or we’ll never make New Aaarlens.”
    The greenhorns moaned, some of them maybe expecting OHandley would actually produce a set of masts and canvass sails and force them to climb through the rigging in their weakened state. But they were still in their space minds. Us older crew knew the Captain was on our side, because now all of a sudden this was Earth, and we were spacers, and systemic pariahs at that. As the bubble came down wind breezed across the deck. A breeze with a smell, the first in two years. And if you’ve been on land before you know what that salt smell means. The bubble is off and you stick with your crew and your captain. Because down there you’re weak. You can feel it in your body and see it in people’s faces.
    I gave the greenhorns this sermon in my capacity as first mate while the more experienced of us punched up the command sequences for raising a photosail in full Earth gravity. We couldn’t afford to waste energy by running the thrusters on battery power.
    After plotting our course, the older mates began drifting below decks to change into their land threads. Even if we couldn’t be as strong as we needed to for the natural world we could at least be covered up. Some crewmen went with nondescript outfits while others went with retro-wear. Though they sometimes won’t admit it, nostalgia for old Earth can be even stronger among space truckers than civvies. I changed into a grey three-piece suit I had picked up on Mars the last trip (but no shoes or tie, for a less restricted feel). Eventually the greenies caught on and put on street clothes or even space threads if they had no other option. I’ve seen kids get beat up on the docks for coming off the ship in nothing but their shorts.
    The dockworkers who unloaded our cargo were always burly men in stained clothing who glared at us suspiciously, resented us for our weakness, despised our way of life. It was rare to get off the dock without somebody at least being called a faggot. As we approached port the veterans fixed themselves into a cold posture and attitude. I stole my last glance at Joe in his jeans and leather jacket. He had been ignoring me since we had put the heat shield up. It seemed to happen farther from port every time. I thought maybe we wouldn’t bunk together on the haul back, but it would be a long trip. I watched him grease his hair like he always did in heavy gravity.

    We coasted into port at night under battery power to a shadowy crowd of figures pacing on the dock of the city we called New Orleans. Actually it was somewhere in the area that used to be Arkansas, but it’s too depressing to call it New New Orleans. Everybody always expected these dockhands to be gang thugs, but only the oldest salts who knew the secrets of the Prometheus’s amplification engines realized how deep OHandley was in with the syndicates.
    Despite the heatship’s exceedingly frugal use of photoelectric and solar energy, its amplification and battery systems required an embarrassing amount of hydrogen to keep running. So Interplanetary Hydrogen secretly sponsored the Prometheus and most other heatships as a distraction from their ongoing rape of Earth’s atmosphere. In return OHandley traded his Plutonian hash to the Delta Mob (which had a controlling interest in Interplanetary Hydrogen) and got dockworkers who didn’t ask questions.
    Very few crewmen were actually aware of this system, and in fact a lot of greenhorns saw working on a heatship as some kind of utopian lifestyle outside the pervasive corruption of terran politics.
    And maybe this was why the dockmen hated us so openly. We came off our ship wiggling bare toes on the wet wooden planks of the pier, and it must’ve looked like we were convinced not only that Earth was a wonderful place to be but also that we were actually making it better. And the grim-faced workers sneered at our scrawny bodies in the halogen light and murmured insults as we staggered past on unsteady legs. They winked and laughed and whistled at us. Some would flash the guns in their waistbands as a way of telling us what kind of place this was in case we had any doubts.
    But there was one man that night whose blank stare straight into me carried something entirely separate from disdain. He was dressed in a polo shirt and khakis, very unlike a dockworker. Cold eyes and face shaded by black hair. A body less robust than the other hands, casually leaning against the lamppost instead of standing with the men near the edge of the dock.
    At first I thought he was a new recruit who hadn’t yet developed a disdain for spacers, but when he caught up to OHandley and me later that night in the bar, he and the Captain looked at each other with the kind of vague familiarity that signaled something was afoot.

    The man tapped his fingers on the dark countertop and smirked at the Captain, who ordered him a beer. His sweaty hair stuck out in all directions.
    I turned my blurry eyes away from him to Joe in the corner, sipping his whiskey and staring at his shoe.
    “Who’s this scrawny weirdo you’re with?”
    I looked up to see the dockworker chuckling at me. It wasn’t quite an insult, so I didn’t say anything, though I did find it odd for him to call me weird when I was sitting next to a grown man in what amounted to a pirate costume.
    “Sammy,” OHandley said, gesturing to me with one hand as he stroked his beard with the other, “meet Tyler, our man inside.”
    I squeezed hard as I could on the handshake and didn’t look him in the eye.
    “You boys better be careful around here.”
    Boys? Careful of what?
    “Gonna be some big changes.” Tyler swigged his beer and tilted his head towards me.
    “Go ahead,” OHandley said, then murmured something into his hand about trade secrets.
    Tyler and OHandley guffawed for a second.
    Then Tyler leaned in. “Hydrogen market’s goin bust.”
    He said it so quickly I wasn’t sure he meant it. Especially when Interplanetary claimed the economy would be stable for at least another century. But I’ve already established what crooked fuckers Interplanetary Hydrogen were.
    “Overhead’s skyrocketing. They’re running out of materials. Plants are either shutting down or being forced out by the locals, and they’re running out of places to dump the carbon. We’ve got about a month, maybe a month and a half before hyperinflation hits.”
    It had happened before after all, with gas, with coal, with ethanol. It was only a matter of time.
    OHandley looked into his foamy mug.
    I clenched my toes on the wet tile floor.
    Tyler leaned in closer, spoke faster, whispering. “You can’t fuck around with this long-haul space captain shit anymore. You gotta break with the Delta Mob and get on board with my plan.”
    OHandley spat. “The faaack can you do fer me?”
    “Even if you sail back out before the crash you won’t be able to make it back without a refuel. And out there you’ll be up shit creek with those useless photosails.”
    OHandley shook his head and slammed his empty glass on the table. “Some faaackin beer daaammit!”
    “The only way you can stay afloat is to drop that rig of yours into a Mercury orbit and convert it into a sunmill. And I’ve got the plans to do it. We’ll make a killing selling the energy to Interplanetary.”
    It was cruel to tell such an old and passionate man he could never go home, but Tyler was right. The business model was completely fucked without cheap hydrogen.
    The Captain finally had his heat economy.
    Sensing either an argument or very secret dealmaking coming on, I slid off my stool and padded over to Joe in the corner. He was still alone, finishing that glass of whiskey, and scratching something into the table with his butterfly knife.
    “Having fun?” I said.
    “Fuck off,” he muttered.
    I sat down across from him. His hair was brushed over to the side apparently from falling asleep somewhere, making him look like a drunken Inuit Fonzie.
    “Buy me a beer,” he said after a long silence.
    When I came back with the beers he had reanimated enough to be flipping through a pocket book of poems.
    “Oh come on you’ll have time to read on the way back. Now’s the time to party.”
    “I’ve been drinkin since we got in.”
    “Fuck you put that book away and talk to me.”
    He slapped the book on the table. “Who you talkin to over there?”
    “Don’t get jealous. That guy was talking to the Captain.”
    “Guy’s a mobster.”
    “Wrong again.”
    Joe shook his head at me.
    “Just because a guy hasn’t had the luxury of spending the past fifteen years with his nose in a book not even having to bother to stand up doesn’t make him a thug automatically.”
    “I’m not a fuckin idiot.”
    We sat and fumed at each other. I wondered if it would be possible to go home with Tyler.
    Joe snorted. “Fuckin Delta assholes.”
    I wanted something to storm off on, but instead I chose a more thoughtful exit: “You know it isn’t going to last,” I said. “Men of leisure like ourselves, sailing the system stoned, living off the surfeit of others, reading” (I grabbed the book from under his hand) “Ginsberg or whatever.” And walked on cold tile back to the bar.
    OHandley and I stayed for the next week in Tyler’s dusty brown apartment. It turned out he had been a solar power engineer before the smog got so thick that terrestrial units became unfeasible. We went over the modifications that would have to be made to the Prometheus and agreed to bring Tyler on as a partner. He seemed level-headed enough, even though he showed outright disdain for our intellectual and literary tendencies.
    There was, however, one topic on which everyone, intellectual or otherwise, had an opinion.
    “I’m sure we’ll always be able to come up with new energy sources,” Tyler said nonchalantly.
    “Always is a long time,” I said.
    I never ended up getting in bed with him. Every time I felt I was getting close he would look at me with those cold eyes and I could feel him laughing behind the mask of his face.

    The crash hit a lot faster than we thought it would. In a week and a half the space elevator hiked up tow fees again and the dockworkers threatened to strike if their pay were cut. Suddenly we were in a position where the hash had to sell like gangbusters for us to even make it back out to orbit. But by then the recession had started, and only the richest of assholes were willing to shell out the money for Plutonian Ice Hash. Consequentially we would be forced to sell the bulk of it at a huge loss and install the conversion components for the Prometheus ourselves. But it ended up taking longer than a month to move the hash, and the dockworkers were getting agitated. Tow fees went up again, and soon whole commodity chains started to fold.
    With coal and gas plants shutting down everywhere, the overburdened nuclear infrastructure couldn’t keep up with demand. Any kind of energy was suddenly ridiculously expensive. Inter- and intra-planetary commerce fell to pieces. Cities started shutting off power at night. Civil unrest was imminent. The dockworkers threatened us daily. Just when everybody wanted to get off the dying puddle it was most expensive to leave. All the high rollers (including the executives of Interplanetary Hydrogen, who knew they were going under in time to sell their shares) evacuated to the colonies, and we were marooned with only a useless spaceship and a hold full of melting hash.
    OHandley withdrew his family’s savings only to find it inadequate compared to the vast sum of money required to fund the expedition. Once hyperinflation set in, we realized there would be no way to get off the planet without a massive loan, and it just so happened that Tyler knew some people who could help us. Never mind they were sketchy people; never mind they were dangerous people. All we had to do was finish those modifications to the Prometheus, tow out to space, drop into orbit for a few years, and we’d come back with more than enough battery power to pay off the loan and ship back out for the next cycle.
    Banks were collapsing all around us, and the only people who had the kind of money we needed were the upper echelons of the Delta Mob, so while Tyler had originally come to us claiming we’d be free of them, he ended up taking us right back when we had nowhere else to go.
    We took Tyler’s skimmer down the floodplain and through a coastal marsh that probably used to be great farmland to a watery villa. It must have been built before the last melt because the water came up over the front porch. Most of the walls on the first floor had been knocked down (presumably because they had rotted to uselessness), leaving a forest of improvised support columns holding up the second level of the building. Two men in olive drab uniforms meant to imitate mid-twentieth-century Army fatigues stood on the wet porch, long black imitation M-16s pointing into the air. One tilted his head and waved us forward.
    We beached the skimmer on the submerged front steps and stepped onto the slimy wooden porch. The water came to my ankles, soaking the cuffs of my dirty grey suit pants. The guards stared at my feet through the murk.
    I laughed. “And you guys are getting pond scum all over those nice boots.” I was excessively stoned after deciding there was no way we could unload the rest of our hash.
    Tyler smiled and shoved me quickly into the building. Not that there really was anything to go into. More like being under a building.
    When the sharks came clunking down the stairs from the upper floor, I had to stop myself from cracking up again. The two of them were dressed in full Napoleonic gear: long blue double-breasted jackets, knee-high leather boots, giant plumed hats, and yellow fringed epaulets. Nostalgia garb is pretty common on Earth, but these were mobsters. It was difficult to take anyone seriously when they were dressed like that on a planet like this. I wondered whether they had planned their style together to impress us with their atavisim or if they dressed like this all the time.
    The one on the left spoke in a gravelly voice. “You pansies would be trapped in gravity forever if it weren’t for us.”
    “Your corporation’s going baaankrupt.”
    The one on the right laughed at him. “You don’t think we have a whole fleet of ships already sailing to the Sun?”
    “Obviously not or you wouldn’t be helping us.”
    “That’s what you think we’re doing?” The right one smirked.
    The leftward Napoleon splashed down off the stairs and paced in front of me kicking waves of muck onto my pants. I decided he was the commanding officer because his motions were those of a leader. As his left hand massaged the pommel of his sabre with lascivious intensity, his right stuffed itself in between the buttons of his jacket. All he needed was something stuffed down his pants to complete the look.
    I couldn’t help but chuckle under my breath a little.
    The man spun throwing a wave off from his ankles. “What makes you think we didn’t just bring you here to kill you?”
    The silence was finally broken by the man’s laughter.
    On that signal, a young man, maybe only forteen, slinked down the staircase in some retro-avant-garde chainmail getup with a briefcase handcuffed to his arm.
    The lesser Napoleon unbuttoned his jacket and removed a small stack of papers and a pen, stepped awkwardly through the water, and handed them to OHandley, who flipped through the pages, signed them, and handed them back. Then the kid splashed forward and placed the briefcase in the Captain’s hands. The mobster with the sword tossed a single key onto the briefcase. OHandley unlocked the handcuff from the briefcase, and the two generals walked slowly back upstairs with the boy.
    When we opened the briefcase, it was filled with pure silver bars, something that was actually gaining value.
    We would be able to make it to Mercury and still have enough left over to pay the dockworkers extra for their wasted time so we wouldn’t be attacked when we came back down.

    After a year of chasing that planet around the Sun our crew was ready for the trip back to Earth. I had attempted to read Marx’s Capital over the trip but found it filled with hilariously confusing equations attempting to ascribe actual value to things. We knew nothing had any value except what value people thought it did. Numbers are arbitrary.
    I asked Joe about it. I remember he used to mention Marx sometimes. He had been reading an absurd amount this time around, even for him. Shirking his duties, hiding in the engine rooms sometimes, his nose in books even I hadn’t ever heard of and probably couldn’t understand. He had been ignoring me since we’d taken Tyler on board, presumably out of jealousy. Now he was tied down in his bunk flipping through a black book with the word Adorno on it.
    I pulled myself to him on the handrail and flicked the huge tome in his direction. “Fuck does any of this shit mean.”
    He glanced at the cover and smiled. “Nineteenth century obsession with quantifiability. Like a lot of theory, it’s just a fancy way of saying something everybody already knows.”
    “Which is...”
    “We don’t get paid what our work is worth.”
    Silence a moment. Then I pointed to his book and said, “I’ve never seen that one in the library.”
    And he erupted. “So you’re gonna bust me for smuggling extra books on ship?”
    Technically it was my duty to. Before we launched, the order had come down not to bring anything extra on board that would add to inertial mass. Tyler had wanted to dump the Captain’s whole library to cut down the tow fee, but that proposal was rejected by various hyperliterate crewmen as something that would make the trip unbearable.
    I pulled myself onto his bunk. “Your secret’s safe with me, baby,” I whispered.
    His face flashed contempt, and he shoved me off.
    I spun and pushed off the opposite wall with my foot.
    “Leave me alone.”
    “Fuck’s your problem?”
    He shoved his book angrily under a strap. “I told you we shouldn’t have brought that thug on board.”
    “He’s not a thug, he’s an engineer.”
    Joe rolled his big eyes again.
    For some reason he hated me, and it hurt more than I wanted to admit.
    But at that moment a call came over the intercom for a full crew meeting. We assembled on deck, taking care not to face the Sun, which was blindingly close even with full ceiling filters up.
    OHandley (in radiation briefs and cutlass, feet clipped to the deck) and Tyler (stubbornly in full land threads, floating) at the front of the bridge shouting to each other in whispers the way married couples do when they don’t want their children to hear. The Captain threw his hand out to the side in what looked like anger. Tyler pushed over to our floating crowd.
    “We’ve caaallected enough battery power to make a good profit, aaand I’m suggesting we return now since the paaawer’s needed so much.”
    At which point Tyler very rudely pushed off my shoulder to propel himself to the front of the group. I recovered against the ceiling.
    Tyler pulled a sheaf of paper from the inside of his (quite inappropriate) jacket. “Unfortunately part of the contract with our lenders promises to maximize profits, meaning we need to orbit another year before...”
    He was drowned out by a chorus of moans from the crewmen. “Let’s vote,” someone shouted. Voting on such matters wasn’t uncommon in those days.
    Tyler let out an annoying scoff. “It’s a contract. You’ve already signed on. You don’t get to vote on it now.”
    “We’ll get enough caaash to pay off the loan aaand have enough energy left to make it to Pluto,” said OHandley. “I say we go home.”
    Tyler shook his head and waved his hands in frustration. “You people don’t understand. This isn’t some game where you get to float around the solar system for fun. You’re supposed to be turning a profit. You’re supposed to be businessmen. You...” (and he didn’t have the courage to say it) “...are so caught up in your books and your drugs and your...” (and he didn’t say it again) “...stupid, homoerotic” (he hedged) “fantasy world that you have no idea how to do anything right.”
    That’s when Joe grabbed Tyler by the neck and we had to pull the two of them apart.
    OHandley stood scowling up at us in the glare of close sunlight, contract papers floating by. “Don’t ever question the way I run my ship, you goose-stepping dirtcrawler. My aaancestors left Earth to get away from aaasshole beancounters like you.”
    Tyler said, “Who do you think you’re working for?”
    It took us all a few seconds to figure out what happened next. Tyler moved suddenly and there was a loud pop as the Captain fell. But that didn’t make sense in freefall orbit. OHandley had been pushed onto the deck as Tyler flew back into the ceiling. A bullet. From a gun.
    Never mind that firearms are completely prohibited on ship. Never mind that firing one in space is completely insane and threatens the whole crew. Thankfully Tyler had been above OHandley so the bullet only went through the deck and not the ceiling enclosure.
    But OHandley was dead. We would have killed Tyler right away, but we were frozen in disbelief. Then he spun upside-down and turned the gun on us. We were terrified his next shot would decompress the whole ship.
    Tyler kicked off the ceiling bubble and propelled himself to OHandley’s body, where he pulled the Captain’s sabre from the dead man’s belt. “I’m taking command of this vessel in the name of the Delta Trust as stipulated in the contract.” He waved vaguely at the cloud of papers with the sword. “Captain OHandley, having violated the terms of his contract, has been executed as a mutineer. You’ll do better without him anyway. Who’s ready to make some serious cash?”
    About half the crew grunted tentative acceptance. They had no loyalty to OHandley. I had overestimated the man’s charisma.
    “It’s time you sailors ran this ship like a business and not some queer intellectual adventure.”
    Some greenhorns nodded in agreement.
    “It’s time to stop floating around like idiots just getting by when you can make a killing off that thing.” Tyler pointed with his gun as he squinted into the blinding Sun.
    More nods from the less-experienced crewmembers.
    I had never thought there would be a mutiny on the Prometheus, and certainly not a successful one. I was sure Tyler would be dead in a few days and we would be on our way back to Earth.
    But instead the crew fell in line behind him. In another week he had us dressing in full space uniforms. Our shift hours were increased with all sorts of meaningless tasks meant to keep us efficient and disciplined. For the first time ever the crew was doing things like cleaning and standing watch. Twice as many crewmen as were necessary would be posted to sail control at any particular time. We were instructed to maintain the solar arrays in the most absolutely efficient positions possible and not to trust the ship’s automatic readjustment systems (which could be off as much as a degree at times).
    Eventually smoking was banned on ship. It was deemed counterproductive. People claimed this wasn’t a big deal because they could still find ways to do it secretly. Then came the order to jettison the library. Joe and I took it hard, but only a few other crewmen objected. The atmosphere was one of such fearful seriousness that nobody even spoke as we tossed OHandley’s books into the ejection chamber.
    Perhaps knowing we cared the most, the others left Joe and me to finish the job. Joe pushed into the chamber and unzipped his leather jacket, which he had been wearing over his uniform jumpsuit. He motioned for me to get in with him.
    Hesitant, but feeling he was the only person I could still trust, I let myself float into the chamber. Joe was already halfway out of his jumpsuit.
    He closed the door behind me. The feeling of being in an ejection chamber is a lot like leaning over the edge of a tall building in gravity. As terrifying as it is exhilarating. Joe kicked his jumpsuit off and it drifted to the other end of the chamber.
    He fished in his jacket pocket, then nodded and handed me his hashpipe. “Hit this and get out of that gear.”
    I took a deep drag from the pipe as Joe stared at the leather jacket in his arms, then passed back to him and started on my zippers.
    We were down to heatship casual again, puffing Pluto hash like the good old days. Then Joe grabbed his radiation briefs and, in one quick motion, whipped them down his legs and off his body, exposing the bouncing penis and testicles I hadn’t seen in a year thanks to our tendentious sex embargo.
    I let out a cloud of smoke and sneered, squinting into the yellow-orange ball of hydrogen through the tiny window at the far end of the chamber. “You know that’s gonna fuck with your junk.”
    Joe just shook his head.
    When we finished smoking we floated silently, rebreathing the green-brown carbon dioxide cloud around us.
    Joe stared out the window a moment then turned back to me. “You ever wonder why we’ve never come into contact with any aliens?”
    “You mean we this ship or we us humans?”
    “We anybody.”
    “They’ve found lots of alien microbes. All over the system. Mars, Venus, Europa, Callisto, Titan.”
    Joe sighed. “I mean intelligent life. Spacemen in flying saucers. That kind of thing.”
    I shrugged. “Maybe interstellar travel isn’t workable.”
    He raised his eyebrows and a finger, very pedantic. “Ahh, but why?”
    I didn’t see what he was getting at.
    “I have this theory,” Joe said, “that there are two kinds of species in the universe. Either they’re like us or they aren’t.”
    “Well...yeah...but what do you mean by that? That isn’t terribly specific.”
    “Either they’re the type of species that has a compulsion to grow beyond their means, or they’re not.”
    I stared at him blankly.
    “If they keep their numbers and technology under control, we would have no way of detecting them. And if they have a technology fetish like us, they inevitably...” He rubbed his forehead.
    There was nothing I could say.
    Joe shook his head. “And we’re all marching to self-destruction.”
    I wanted to say something about the new power theories I’d been reading about. Researchers were going crazy trying to find new fuel sources, and they were actually making good progress. But what Joe had said made so much sense I felt any attempt to cheer him up would be disingenuous.
    “Take this,” he said, pushing the leather jacket into my arms. “Let me stay with the books.”
    “What?”
    He slid the door open. “Get out of the chamber, shut the door, and hit the button.”
    “I can’t do that, Joe.”
    “Will you please just listen to me this once?” He looked into my eyes, something like exhaustion on his face.
    I touched his bare shoulder before slowly pulling myself back into the ship. I wanted him to suggest mutiny instead. I hoped he would want to take back the ship. Maybe we would die, but at least we would die fighting.
    He shut the door.
    I watched him through the window and waited for him to change his mind. I put his jacket on to waste time. I waited as long as I could. But I could see in his eyes he had given up.
    I heard hands pulling their way towards us down the tunnel.
    Joe shouted silently to me, lips flapping wide, and I could see what he was saying: “Hit it fucker.”
    The handsteps came closer. I put one hand over my eyes and slammed the jettison button with my other fist.
    Eyes closed, I jammed my shaking hands into the jacket’s pockets and found something heavy, cold, metal. When I finally turned around and opened my eyes, Tyler was hanging in front of me.
    He looked my half-naked body up and down, squinting his whole face. “What happened to that bookworm butt-buddy of yours?”
    Without thinking, I flipped out Joe’s butterfly knife and buried it in Tyler’s throat. Blood plumed out from the stab wound like a sail.

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This appears in a pre-2010 issue of cc&d magazine. Saddle-stitched issues are no longer printed, but you can requesting it “re-released” through amazon sale as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book! Email us for re-release to order.

This appears in a pre-2010 issue
of cc&d magazine.
Saddle-stitched issues are no longer
printed, but you can requesting it
“re-released” through amazon sale
as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book!
Email us for re-release to order.