The Golden Globe

It was the same with our speed. I never asked for a speedometer check. I didn't really want to know. We were moving about as fast as anyone had ever moved before, I guess, but you couldn't tell it, not until we were right down in the photosphere. (Oh, yes, we came that close.) After Jupiter, old Sol grew larger at a prodigious rate. But so what? Three days or thirty days, you still can't see it grow. It still looks static, like any starry night.

But if there were any speed limits set in the solar system, there would have been traffic cops staked out behind every billboard from Mercury to Earth, waiting to pull us over. "Honest, Officer, I was only going a hundred thousand miles per second." "Boy, that wasn't nothin' but whatcha call a 'relativistic effect.' We clocked you at point-nine-nine-nine c, and 'round these parts we figger c ain't jist a good idea, it's the law!"

There were changes around the ship. Spin had to be stopped again, and since there wasn't going to be a lot of time on the other side, certain housekeeping measures to take care of. All the wonderful animals had to be stowed away, back into cold sleep. Many of the plants were "mothballed" in some way I didn't understand. The pond was drained. The whole place became rather depressing, to tell you the truth.

No one was more depressed than Toby, though. The poor little thing was inconsolable. He spent a whole day searching for his big, striped lady love, and when I got out his storage container he actually seemed eager to go to sleep.

And then we were there. Free-falling because Hal had to maneuver the radiation shields of the engine module to stay between us and the sun.

He made all that complication vanish in our overhead display. All we saw was the sun, or actually an image of the sun suitably translated for our frail senses. We could see sunspots, and flares, and prominences, and they all looked rather small. You could tell yourself that a hundred Lunas would fit into that tiny black speck and still leave room for fifty Marses, but you couldn't get a real perspective on it. You might know that the friction from the near vacuum of the photosphere was heating the ship's hull to within a few degrees of its melting point... but even if you could believe that, you didn't want to dwell on it.

We passed within a hundred thousand miles of Icarus, the asteroid that was moved into close solar orbit forty years ago and has been slowly ablating away ever since. They figure it still has about a century to go before it's all used up. We'd never have seen it, of course, but Hal provided a telescopic image: just a smooth ball of molten rock on the Brightside. We could see the tips of some of the instruments peeking around from Darkside. Hal, acting the cheerful tour guide, told us those instruments were continually extended as the ends were burned away. He said Coronaville was now mounted on cooled pillars, as the whole planetoid had become too hot to walk on. I decided to cross it off my list of vacation destinations.

And then we were past and the sun was dwindling behind us. Poly seemed to have enjoyed the experience more than I. She took hundreds of pictures, most of which must have shown little more than patterns of orange-and-yellow streaks with the occasional black pimple. I didn't point out to her that all she was photographing was a television display on the cockpit dome. Why spoil her fun?

Suddenly, after endless weeks of nothing to do, we were in a big hurry. Our velocity was now such that Hal didn't have a hope of bringing us to a stop anywhere close to Earth's orbit—and he didn't have the fuel for it, either. What he had was enough to boost at a steady one gee until he ran out of gas within a million miles of our destination, still going like a bat out of hell.

When he went over his plans with me, I was shocked.

"What do you mean, interstellar space?" I asked him.

"It was the only option," he said. "You said you had to get to Luna. You didn't say I had to."

"But... of course you have to," Poly said. "Tell him, Sparky. He can't just... just drift for a million years."

"It could be a lot longer than that," I said. "How about it, Hal? There's got to be a way you can slow down."

"Yes, of course," he said. "There is always a way." And he shut up.

I still don't know if he would have spoken up for himself. He seemed so human, most of the time. It was easy to forget he was a machine, and though he mimicked human emotions—and I believe actually felt some of them—he operated under different protocols than Poly and I.

"Well?" Poly asked. "What do you have to do?"

"I would need to rendezvous with a refueling drone," he said. "One could be launched from Titan in a few hours, and several months from now we could meet at around eleven billion miles from the sun. A few days to slow down, and head back system-ward... in a year's time I could be back in solar space."

"Then do that," I said.

"I'm not authorized to initiate such an expenditure," he said.

At last I got it. I marched to the freezer in the kitchen—well, marched isn't exactly the word, since I was moving poorly in the one-gee environment—and retrieved Izzy's tired old thumb. Gad, only a week ago I had toyed with the idea of feeding it to Hobbes. And Hal would be on a one-way trip to the Big Bang.

I pressed it to the credit plate and authorized the chartering of an expendable drone full of fuel. I looked at the price tag this time, and had to smile. Isambard's credit had been cut off everywhere in the solar system shortly after we left Oberon... but not here. Hal's credit-verification software had been shut down, on my order. It was possible this new, outrageous charge would cause him trouble. Perhaps he, his wife and children and parents and all the rest of his family would be clapped into debtor's prison when he returned home. I had no idea if Charonese had such a thing, but one can hope.

"Do you have everything?" Hal asked. "Spacesuits, extra oxygen?"

"Something to read?" I suggested. "Candy? Toys?" See what I mean? There was a list in his memory that we'd worked on for days, and he knew each item had been checked and double-checked. If we'd forgotten to put something on the list, we were unlikely to think of it now. He was a computer, dammit, he could not forget things. But here he was sounding like an anxious mom sending her kids off to summer camp. I took it to mean he was worried about us. And that he would miss us. I was pretty sure he could feel lonely.

"We'll be okay, Hal," Poly told him. You can't kiss a computer good-bye, so we waved at him and piled into the lifeboat.

That's right, lifeboat. There were two aboard, and we needed both of them. Hal had fixed them up as a two-stage vehicle, the one we would ride perched on the nose of the other. The bottom one would blast until it ran out of fuel, then be discarded, whereupon our own boat would blast. By then we'd be feeling major gees, but it wouldn't last as long as the boost from Oberon.

Don't look so shocked. It's the way humans first got to Luna, throwing away most of their rocket along the way. Insanely expensive, but hang the cost, say I. The Charonese could afford it.

We got into our acceleration couches and Poly briefly squeezed my hand. We'd be splitting up as soon as we landed, and I'd barely gotten to know her. Story of my life. And probably lucky for her. The few medium-term relationships I've had have ended badly. I've had even fewer long-term ones.

"Hasta la vista," Hal said, over the radio.

"Until we meet again," I said. And the lifeboat's engine fired.

John Valentine turned his back on the company, put his fists on his hips, and stood motionless for a full ten seconds. No one breathed. One lesson you learned early when being directed by Valentine was that when the great man wasn't saying anything, someone was in trouble.