Cristopher Stasheff - Escape Velocity

“Will that give us enough of a start?” Lona growled.

Whitey’s lips pressed into a thin line. “It’ll have to.”

“Come back here, consarn you!” The voice echoed tinnily from the console’s grid. “Come back here with my burro-boat, you blasted pirates! I’ll have the law on you!”

“Damn!” Whitey snapped his fingers into a fist. “I should’ve made him sign a bill of sale! Now he’ll have the Patrol hunting us down for piracy, on top of everything else.”

Dar shrugged. “What does it matter? They’ll chase us anyway, as soon as they pick him up and he tells them his story.”

“I know, I know. But this’ll give ‘em a legal pretext for holding us.”

“I think not,” Fess demurred. “Since the transaction was a verbal contract, I recorded it as standard operating procedure.”

Whitey’s scowl dissolved into a grin. “Old Iron, I think you may have your uses.”

“A lot of them; he wasn’t really designed to pilot a boat, or even just to compute,” said Lona. “He was designed as the brain of a humanoid robot.”

“True, but my motor functions are adaptable to almost any sort of mechanical body,” Fess explained. “I’m really quite generalized.”

“And, therefore, versatile,” Whitey concluded. “Well, what we need you to do most, just now, is to get us to Luna undetected.”

“Why Luna?” Dar frowned. “We want to get to Terra.”

“They don’t allow spacers to land there,” Sam explained. “Population’s too dense; too much chance of a minor accident killing thousands of people. Spacers have to land on the moon, and take a shuttle down to Earth.”

“Besides, we’re running a little high on notoriety at the moment,” Whitey added. “We need some sort of cover to let us travel—and I have a few friends on Luna.”

Dar shrugged. “Why not? You have friends everywhere.”

“Since you wish to avoid attention,” Fess suggested, “it might be best if we wait for a large vessel to pass near, and match orbits, staying as close to it as possible, so that we’re inside its sensor-range, and blend into its silhouette on any Patrol ship’s screens.”

Dar frowned. “Isn’t that a little chancy?”

“Not for the two of us.” Lona patted the console.

Dar felt a hot stab of jealousy. “What do you think that circuit-stack is—the boy next door?”

Lona gave him a look veiled by long lashes above a cat-smile. “Why not?” She turned to the console grid. “Where’d you grow up, electron-pusher?”

“I was manufactured on Maxima.”

“Not exactly my home territory.” Lona’s eyes gleamed. “But I’ve heard of it. All they do there is make computers and robots, right?”

“That is their sole industry, yes. Their sole occupation of any sort, in fact.”

“Sloggers,” the girl translated. “A bunch of technological monks. They don’t care anything about creature comforts; all they want to do is build robots.”

“Not quite true,” Fess corrected. “The few humans on Maxima have every conceivable luxury known—including a few unknown anywhere else, which they invented themselves. In fact, they live like kings.”

“Oh, really!” Lona smiled, amused. “When’re they planning to join the aristocracy?”

“Some have already begun buying patents of nobility from the Terran College of Heralds.”

Lona lost her smile. “That takes real money! Where do they get it from?”

“From the sale of computers and robots.” The computer added modestly, “Their products are already acknowledged to be the finest in any of the human-occupied worlds.”

“So they sell for a small fortune each, of course. But the biggest luxury of all is servants—which they can’t have, if there’re only a few humans.”

“True,” Fess admitted, “but there are three robots to every human, on the average. They do not lack for servitors.”

“Sounds like a great life,” Whitey sighed, “if you don’t mind settling down.”

“And don’t mind being stuck out in the middle of nowhere,” Sam added.

“The planetoid is rather bleak,” Fess admitted.

“ ‘Planetoid’?” Lona frowned. “I thought Maxima was a world.”

“It would be counted a small moon if it orbited a planet,” Fess demurred. “But since it is located in Sinus’s asteroid belt, it can only be counted as one of the larger of those asteroids.”

Whitey frowned. “No atmosphere.”

“No trees or grass,” mused Sam.

“Only rocks and dust,” murmured Dar.

“Only eight point seven light-years from Terra!” caroled Lona.

Dar stared. “You like the sound of the place?”

“It’s practically heaven!” Lona squealed. “Nothing to do but design and build computers, laze around luxury, and hop around the corner to the fleshpots of Terra for the weekend! Where do I sign up?”

“Immigration is completely open,” Fess said slowly, “but very few people choose to go there. It would be miserable for anyone who was poor—and only excellent cyberneticists can make money.”

“I’ll take it!” Lona crowed. “How do I get there?”

“That,” Fess agreed, “is the rub. They will accept you— if you can get there.”

“Grandpa!” Lona whirled around to Whitey. “Got a few royalty checks coming in?”

Whitey shrugged. “You can have the burro-boat when we’re done with it, sweetheart—but first there’s a little matter of saving democracy.”

“Well, let’s get it over with!” Lona whirled back to the console. “I want to get on with the really important things! Found a big liner yet, electro-eyes?”

“I have been tracking the SASE San Martin while we have been conversing,” Fess answered. “It approaches above the plane of the ecliptic, inbound from Ganymede, and will pass us only one hundred thirty-seven kilometers away.”

“Then let’s go !” Lona grabbed her webbing and stretched it across her. “Web in, everybody!”

A chorus of clicks answered her. She grinned down at her console, then frowned at a blinking red light and looked back over her shoulder at Father Marco. “Look, Father, I know you trust in St. Christopher, and all that—but would you please buckle in?”

The monolith of a liner hurtled into eternal morning, its aft hull lost in the total black shadow of its bulging bridge. A tiny speck danced up to it from the asteroid belt, glinting in the sunlight. It swooped up to disappear in shadow under the monster’s belly, where it clung like a pilot fish to a shark by the bulldog magnetic fields of the solenoids in its nose.

Inside, Dar asked, “Couldn’t they spot us by the magnetic fields on their hull?”

“They could .” Lona shrugged. “But why would they look for them?” She switched off the engines.

“It doesn’t quite seem ethical,” Father Marco mused, “hitching a free ride this way.”

“Don’t let it worry you, Father,” Whitey assured him. “I own stock in this shipline.”

The SASE San Martin drifted down toward its berth in the Mare Serenitatis. As it passed over Darkside, a mite dropped off its belly, falling toward the surface at no higher acceleration than lunar gravity could account for. No glint of light reflected from it to any watching eye in the shadows; and if anyone thought to glance at it on a sensor screen, they would surely think it nothing but another meteorite caught by the moon’s gravity, coming to add one more crater to the ancient, pockmarked satellite.

It fell almost to the surface, so low that it was beneath the sensor-nets, and barreled over the jagged landscape.

Inside the cabin, Lona asked. “Is this what you’d call a ‘stress situation’?”