Pohl, Frederik - Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

The confounded thing did not answer. “Vera! You must do something about the food!” It still did not answer, not for several seconds.

And then only, “One moment, please. . . Mr. Herter.” It was enough to make one sick. In fact, he did feel somewhat sick, he realized. He gazed with hostility at the dish he had been doggedly forcing down, supposed to be a sort of schnitzel, or as close to it as Vera’s limited recombinant capacities would allow, but tasting of whisky or sauerkraut, or both at once. He set it on the floor.

“I do not feel well,” he announced.

Pause. Then, “One moment, please. . . Mr. Hester.” Poor stupid Vera had just so much capacity. She was processing a burst of messages from Earth, endeavoring to carry on a conversation with the Dead Men by means of the faster-than-light radio, encoding and transmitting all of her own telemetry-all at once. She simply did not have time for his queasiness. But his accelerating unease would not be denied: a sudden rush of saliva under the tongue, a quick shuddering of the diaphragm. He barely made it to the sanitary, giving back, there, all he had taken. For the last time, he swore. He did not want to live so long as to see those God-bedamned organic compounds reworked for one more passage through his gut. When he was sure he had stopped vomiting he marched over to the console and pushed the override buttons. “All functions in standby except this,” he ordered. “Monitor my bio-assay at once.”

“Very well,” she said at once,”. . . Mr. Hester.” Silence for a moment, while the unit in the sanitary made what it could of what Peter had just deposited. “You are suffering from food poisoning,” she reported,”. . . Mr. Hester.”

“So! This I already know. What is to be done about it?”

Pause, while her tiny brain revolved the problem. “If you could add water to the system, the fermentation and recycling would be under better control,” she said, “. . . Mr. Hester. At least one hundred liters. There has been considerable loss due to evaporation in the much larger volume of space now available, as well as the stocks withdrawn for the remainder of your party. My recommendation is that you replenish the system with available water as soon as possible.”

“But that is not fit to drink for pigs even!”

“The solutes present problems,” she acknowledged. “Therefore I recommend that at least half of any added water be distilled first. The system should be able to cope with the remainder of the solutes. . . Mr. Hester.”

“God in Heaven! Am I to build a still out of nothing, and become a water-carrier too? And what of the bio-assay mobile unit, so that this will not happen again?”

Vera sorted through the questions for a moment. “Yes, I think that would be appropriate,” she agreed. “If you wish, I will provide construction plans. Also. . . Mr. Hester, you may wish to consider relying more heavily on CHON-food for your diet, since you do not appear to have severe adverse reactions to it.”

“Apart of course from the fact that it tastes like dog-biscuit,” he sneered. “Very well. Complete the construction plans at once. Hard copy, making use of available materials, do you understand?”

“Yes. . . Mr. Hester.” The computer was silent for a time, inventorying redundant parts and materials, devising linkages that would do the job. It was a formidable task for Vera’s limited intelligence. Peter drew a cup of water and rinsed out his mouth, then grimly unwrapped one of the least unattractive CHON tablets and nibbled off a tentative corner. While he waited to see if he would throw up again he faced the possibility that he might in fact die here, and alone. He did not even have the option he had thought was his, of casting everything adrift and returning to Earth by himself-not, at least, unless he first added water as ordered, and did his best to insure that nothing else would go wrong.

And yet it was every day so increasingly tempting. .

To be sure, that would mean casting his daughters and his son-in-law adrift.

But would they ever return? Suppose they did not. Suppose that rude boy turned the wrong switch, or ran out of fuel. Or anything. Suppose, in short, they died. Must he then wither on the vine until he also was dead? And what benefit would that be to humanity, if he perished here, and the whole thing to do over again with a new crew. . . and himself, Schwarze Peter, done out of reward, done out of fame and power, done out of life itself?

Or-an idea struck him-was there another option? This bedamned Food Factory itself, so set on continuing its course. What if he could find the controls that directed it so? What if he could learn to change those directions, so that it could bring him back to Earth not in three years and more, but at once, in days? To be sure, that would doom his family, would it not? But perhaps not! Perhaps they would return, if they returned at all, to the Food Factory itself, wherever it might be. Even in close orbit around Earth! And how marvelously that would solve everyone’s problems at once-He threw the remainder of the packet into the sanitary, to add to the store of organics. “Du bist verruckt, Peter!” he snarled to himself. The flaw in that dream could not be ignored: he had sought with all his might, and the controls to the Food Factory were not to be found.

The frying-bacon sound of the hard-copy printer rescued him from his thoughts. He pulled the sheets out of the machine and frowned over them for a moment. So much work! Twenty hours, at least! And not merely time, but so much of it was hard physical labor! He would have to go out into space to reclaim piping from the struts that were meant to hold the auxiliary transmitters in place, cut them loose, bring them inside; and only then begin to weld them together and form them into a spiral. Simply for the condensation section of the still! He saw that he was beginning to shake-He barely made it to the sanitary in time. “Vera!” he croaked.

“I must have medication for this!”

“At once. . . Mr. Hester. Yes. In the medical kit you will find tablets marked-“

“Dumbhead! The medical kit is gone to Cuckooland!”

“Oh, yes . .. Mr. Hester. One moment. Yes. I have programmed appropriate pharmaceuticals for you. It will take about twenty minutes for them to be prepared.”

“In twenty minutes I could be dead,” be snarled. But there was no help for it, and so he sat and stewed for twenty minutes, the pressures mounting. Illness, hunger, loneliness, overwork, resentment, fear. Anger! That was what, in the end, they all fused into. Anger. Many vectors. One vector sum. By the time Vera’s dispensary popped out his pills, it had submerged all the others. He swallowed them greedily and retired to his private to see what would happen.

Actually they did appear to work. He lay back while the fires in his belly damped themselves, and fell imperceptibly asleep.

When he woke he felt at least physically better. He washed himself, brushed his teeth, brushed his thinning yellow hair, and only then noticed the Christmas tree of attention-demanding lights around Vera’s console. On the screen in bright red letters were the words:

GENTLY REQUEST PERMISSION TO RESUME NORMAL MODES.

He chuckled to himself. He had forgotten to cancel the override. When he ordered the computer to get back to business there was an instant explosion of bells and signal lights, a cascade of hard copy out of the printer and a voice. His elder daughter’s voice, out of Vera’s taped storage: “Hello, Pop. Sorry we couldn’t reach you to tell you we arrived safely. We’re going to explore now. Talk to you later.”

Because Peter Hester loved his family, the joy of their safe arrival flooded his heart and sustained him-for hours. For almost two days. But joy does not flourish in an existence of irritations and worries. He spoke to Lurvy-twice; for no more than thirty seconds each time. Vera simply could not handle more. Vera was harder pressed than Peter himself, stripped and rearranged as she was, handling two-way traffic between Heechee Heaven and the Earth, deferring top priority action commands when even higher priorities demanded attention. The one voice link with the Heechee place could not handle the volume it was given to carry, and mere chitchat between father and daughter could not be allowed.