Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

I carefully jaunted, in a direction soon to be known as “down,” over to my bed, and docked with it. I’m not sure why, since I had no luggage or other belongings to secure. I guess just to symbolize taking ownership. It didn’t wait to find out. The moment I grabbed it and started using it to brake my arriving mass, one of the two ( two? ) folding angle-braces intended to support it under acceleration tore right out of the plasteel bulkhead. All three bolts—and two of the bolts on the other support. The bed immediately rotated around the remaining bolt, about sixty degrees clockwise, and jammed to a halt against the top of the folded-up lower bunk. This left me dangling from the other end of it like a tyro, trying desperately to clutch bed as well as bedclothes and avoid the indignity of being thrown altogether. I never even noticed banging my face against the wall.

The shriek of frictionally stressed plasteel, and my scrabbling-rat noises, gave way to an omnipresent rather glutinous sound, which was like silence, but different. As I stabilized myself, I realized it was the sound of men not laughing.

I turned to face the room and made, very loudly, the sound of a man not murdering anyone, yet.

Pat Williamson pointed to a spot just “below” me. I glanced down, and in a moment realized that his own bed was not folded up against the bulkhead. It was duct-taped to it. His had torn out of the wall, too. I could see the bolt holes. They were not empty. Each contained a little shiny-ended bolt stump. All six had snapped off clean. I looked, and all five of my failed bolts were the same. I looked back to Pat, and raised my eyebrows inquisitively.

He spread his hands, palm up. He wanted to explain, but couldn’t do it louder than he was not laughing at me.

Balvovatz took it. “Well come into Shuffled , Joel. Do not worry. Is warrantee. Air leaks out, just say so. Kang sends more from Terra.”

Maybe my expression made Herb stop wanting to laugh. “There’s still time,” he said softly. “You can still jump ship and go back down to Terra, if you’re one of those fussbudgets who expects everything to work . It’s not too late to be sensible.”

I closed my eyes. All I could see was Terra… with Jinny’s face. “Yes it is,” I said. “Where’s the duct tape?”

I later learned the bunk-support bolts had been specified by a Kang Cartel engineer, and supplied by a da Costa Associates subsidiary. Both halves of the financial Siamese-twin behemoth that was underwriting this little interstellar venture. The desk that wouldn’t interface properly with my PDC or phone despite nominal system compatibility for the next two days was the other way round: da Costa design, Kang manufacturing. And the blame for the complex cluster of systems failures that combined to keep all my luggage except my four saxophones (Sol Short rescued them, somehow) from catching up to me for another two weeks was, I was eventually able to establish, divided up roughly evenly between the two houses.

Fortunately nudity was not taboo aboard the Sheffield . It was not commonplace either—but nobody got upset if I sat around the laundry room naked while waiting for my only set of clothing to dry, each day, or went to and from the ’fresher without a robe. (There were ship-issue jumpsuits and robes I could have had. I preferred skin. They were, visibly, the plasteel bolts of the clothing world.)

I did end up with a lot of time to reflect that most of the Conrad empire products I had ever purchased had worked pretty reliably. And I retained just enough sanity to realize this was probably an omen of some kind, perhaps even an unfavorable one.

But I had told Herb the truth. It was way too late to change my mind. The center of my personal Solar System had turned out to be a dangerously variable star. It was imperative to break free of her pull, while I still could, and go somewhere else, far far away.

Jinny phoned two days later, about eight hours before we left.

Theoretically she should not have been able to. I’d contributed my phone to the ship’s recycler on arrival, and gotten a new one—under a false name, using nonexistent credit, and paying a premium for a super -unlisted code. That account would vanish like a bubble when the first bill went unpaid, of course. But by then I expected I would no longer need one. I only needed it now to say good-bye to a few friends and acquaintances, and to dispose of my few remaining assets on Ganymede.

I think that might just have been good enough to foil, or at least slow, a Federation agent hunting me. Against a Conrad, it was a gesture. As I slipped in my earbead, I reflected that she could probably have called me five minutes after I’d activated the phone. Her first words practically admitted as much.

“Damn it, Joel, I admire your stubbornness. I really do. You’ve held out to the last possible second, I give you that. But we are out of time now . Stop this foolishness and come home, this fucking minute!”

I’d known this call would come. It wasn’t surprise, even at the word I had never heard her use, that kept me from answering her for several seconds. It was just her face. There on the inside of my wrist, thumbnail-sized, poor quality 2-D image. I had never seen her so clearly or so vividly.

She had never looked more beautiful. I wanted to eat my whole forearm. Her image cut off at her waist, but I could see the rest of her almost as clearly in my mind’s eye. What blurred it a bit was that she was wearing an outfit considerably more expensive than anything I had ever seen her in. That realization restored the power of speech to me.

“I can’t, Jinny. It’s too late. We were out of time yesterday. The last boat has—”

“You idiot, I can be there to get you in two hours! How long do you need to pack your four saxo—”

“Bring me where, did you say?”

“—phones and your one spare—what?”

“Where exactly is this home you speak of? Certainly not your apartment. Some mansion in Nepal accessible only by copter? A secret village at the bottom of the Marianas Trench? A stealthed palace at L-1 or—no, why would you care about saving fuel—somewhere in space, then? Or perhaps a few kilometers below the apparent surface of Jupiter, there floats a—”

She overrode me by yelling, “I deserve that!” I was so surprised I stopped talking. “And I ask you to believe that I have already administered it to myself, and to trust that I will continue to do so, okay? You can kick me all you like, I agree I have it coming—but you won’t be able to if I don’t come get you and bring you back home, and even my window is closing!”

I shook my head wearily. “I meant what I said. Where is ‘home’ for us? No place we’ve ever been. No place I’ve ever been. I don’t think we even mean the same things by the word—or have any clear idea what the discrepancies are, either one of us.”

“Joel, I didn’t have any choice, why can’t you see that? I couldn’t tell you, not until—”

“I know that.”

“You do? Then—”

“Jinny, we’ve never really met.”

“We can . We will meet, and we’ll love each other—we already know how—and the money won’t make any damn difference, none at all.”

I had to grab something with my left hand just then to keep myself from colliding with a bed; I’d been drifting free since her incoming call had caused me to lose my handhold on my own desk. I guess from her perspective it looked like I was turning away. “Joel, I love you!” she cried.