Pohl, Frederik - Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

“But it’s funny, Wan! That must be why they call him ‘dubius’!” The Dead Man was chuckling mechanically, a-heh! A-heh!

“Stop it, Tiny Jim!” But Wan was not just angry any more. He was hooked. It was his favorite subject, as Tiny Jim’s willingness to talk about it, at length and in variety, was what made him Wan’s favorite among the Dead Men. Wan unwrapped a food packet and, munching, said, “What I really want to hear is how to make out, Tiny Jim, please?”

If the Dead Man had had a face it would have shown the strain of trying to keep from laughing, but he said kindly, “‘Kay, sonny. I know you keep hoping. Let’s see, did I tell you to watch their eyes?”

“Yes, Tiny Jim. You said if their pupils dilate it means they are sexually aroused.”

“Right. And I mentioned the existence of the sexually dimorphic structures in the brain?”

“I don’t think I know what that means, exactly.”

“Well, I don’t, either, but it’s anatomically so. They’re different, Wan, inside and out.”

“Please, Tiny Jim, keep telling me about the differences!” The Dead Man did, and Wan listened absorbedly. There was always time to go to the ship, and Tiny Jim was unusually coherent. All of the Dead Men had their own special subjects that they zeroed in to talk about, as though each had been frozen with one big thought in his mind. But even on the favored topics you could not always expect them to make sense. Wan pushed the mobile unit that they used to catch him-when it was working-out of the way and sprawled on the floor, chin in hands, while the Dead Man chattered and reminisced and explained courtship, and gifting, and making your move.

It was fascinating, even though he had heard it before. He listened until the Dead Man slowed down, hesitated, and stopped. Then the boy said, to confirm a theory:

“Teach me, Tiny Jim. I read a book in which a male and a female copulated. He hit her on the head and copulated her while she was unconscious. That appears to me an efficient way to ‘love’, Tiny Jim, but in other stories it takes much longer. Why is this?”

“That was not love, sonny. That was what I was telling you about. Rape. Rape is a bad idea for people, even if it works for mallard ducks.”

Wan nodded and urged him on: “Why, Tiny Jim?”

Pause. “I will demonstrate it for you mathematically, Wan,” the Dead Man said at last. “Attractive sex objects may be defined as female, no more than five years younger than you are, no more than fifteen years older. These figures are normalized to your present age, and are also only approximate. Attractive sex objects may further be characterized by visual, olfactory, tactile, and aural qualities stimulating to you, in descending weighted order of significance plotted against probability of access. Do you understand me so far?”

“Not really.”

Pause. “Well, that’s all right for now. Now pay attention. On the basis of those four preliminary traits, some females will attract you. Up to the point of contact you will not know about other traits which may repel, harm or detumesce you. 5/28 of subjects will be menstruating. 3/87 will have gonorrhea, 2/95 syphilis. 1/17 will have excessive bodily hair, skin blemishes or other physical deformities concealed by clothing. Finally, 2/71 will conduct themselves offensively during intercourse, i/i6 will emit an unpleasant odor, 3/7 will resist rape so extensively as to diminish your enjoyment; these are subjective values quantified to match your known psychological profile. Cumulating these fractions, the odds are better than six to one that you will not receive maximum pleasure from rape.”

“Then I must not copulate a woman without wooing?”

“That’s right, boy. Not counting it’s against the law.”

Wan was thoughtfully silent for a moment, then remembered to ask, “Is all this true, Tiny Jim?”

Cackle of glee. “Got you that time, kid! Every word.”

Wan pouted like a frog-jaw. “That was not very exciting, Tiny Jim. In fact, you have detumesced me.”

“What do you expect, kid?” Tiny Jim said sullenly. “You told me not to make up any stories. Why are you being so unpleasant?”

“I am getting ready to leave. I do not have much time.”

“You don’t have anything else!” cackled Tiny Jim.

“And you have nothing to say that I want to hear,” said Wan cruelly. He disconnected them all, and angrily he went to the ship and squeezed the launch control. It did not occur to him that he was being rude to the only friends he had in the universe. It had never occurred to him that their feelings mattered.

2 On the Way to the Oort Cloud

On the twelve hundred and eighty-second day of our all-expense-paid joyride on the way to the Oort Cloud, the big excitement was the mail. Vera tinkled joyously and we all came to collect it. There were six letters for my horny little halfsister-inlaw from famous movie stars-well, they’re not all movie stars. They’re just famous and good-looking jocks that she writes to, because she’s only fourteen years old and needs some kind of male to dream about, and that write back to her, I think, because their press agents tell them it’s going to be good publicity. A letter from the old country for Payter, my father-in-law. A long one, in German. They want him to come back to Dortmund and run for mayor or Blirgermeister or something. Assuming, of course, that he is still alive when he gets back, which is only an assumption for any of the four of us. But they don’t give up. Two private letters to my wife, Lurvy, I assume from ex-boyfriends. And a letter to all of us from poor Trish Bover’s widower, or maybe husband, depending on whether you considered Trish alive or dead:

Have you seen any trace of Trish’s ship?

Hanson Bover

Short and sweet, because that’s all he could afford, I guess. I told Vera to send him the same reply as always-“Sorry, no.” I had plenty of time to take care of that correspondence, because there was nothing for Paul C. Hall, who is me.

There is usually not much for me, which is one of the reasons I play chess a lot. Payter tells me I’m lucky to be on the mission at all, and I suppose I wouldn’t be if he hadn’t put his own money into it, financing his whole family. Also his skills, but we’ve all done that. Payter is a food chemist. I’m a structural engineer. My wife, Dorema-it’s better not to call her that, and we mostly call her “Lurvy”-is a pilot. Damn good one, too. Lurvy is younger than I am, but she was on Gateway for six years. Never scored, came back next to broke, but she learned a lot. Not just about piloting. Sometimes I look at Lurvy’s arms with the five Out bangles, one for each of her Gateway missions; and her hands, hard and sure on the ship controls, warm and warming when we touch. . . I don’t know much about what happened to her on Gateway. Perhaps I shouldn’t.

And the other one is her little jailbait halfsister, Janine. Ak, Janine! Sometimes she was fourteen years old, and sometimes forty. When she was fourteen she wrote her gushy letters to her movie stars and played with her toys-a ragged, stuffed armadillo, a Heechee prayer fan (real) and a fire-pearl (fake) which her father had bought her to tempt her onto the trip. When she was forty what she mostly wanted to play with was me. And there we are. In each other’s pockets for three and a half years. Trying not to need to commit murder.

We were not the only ones in space. Once in a great while we would get a message from our nearest neighbors, the Triton base or the exploring ship that had got itself lost. But Triton, with Neptune, was well ahead of us in its orbit-round-trip message time, three weeks. And the explorer had no power to waste on us, though they were now only fifty light-hours away. It was not like a friendly natter over the garden hedge.