The contract says (and we all have a contract) that as soon as the Bank is open for Business (five years it’s supposed to be now, but five years ago they said that, too) we all go Back into our own bodies. Or into new improved bodies, or into new improved versions of our old bodies, or-you name it. A real party, and we all get a prize. When it all started, around eighty years ago, that is, once everybody had settled after the initial squalling matches, Violent Scenes, hysteria, etc., some of us got a wild thrill out of the novelty. Pebka-Sol, for example, has it on record always, where possible, to come Out as a lady. And when he finally gets a skin of his own again, that is due to be a lady, also. But Pebka-Sol lost his own skin, the true, masculine one, so he’s entitled. I guess we’re the lucky ones, me, Fedalin, Miranda, Christof, Haro- those of us that didn’t lose anything as a result of the Accident. Except, our rights…
I try to be conscientious, myself, I really do. But handling Miranda was going to be a drag. She’s a lot littler than me, or than I’m used to, and her capacity is a lot less. I’m used to drinking fairly hard, but hard was the word it was going to be on her, if I tried that; plus she’d already been doused by some jack, yesterday. I walked into the bar on Mainstreet, the bar we used to hit in gabbling droves long, long ago under the glitter-kissed green dusk, when we were our own men and women. No one was there now, though Fedalin’s haunt had just walked him out the door. I dialed a large pink Angel and put it, a sip at a time, into Miranda’s insides, to get her accustomed. “Here’s not looking at you, kid,” I toasted her.
I had that weird feeling I recollect I had when I first scooped a female body from the draw forty odd years ago. Shock and disorientation, firstly. Then a turn-on, racy, kinky, great. I’d got to the stage now of feeling I was on a date, dating Miranda, only I was Miranda. My first lady had been Qwainie, and Qwainie wasn’t my type, which in the long run made things easier faster. But Miranda is my type. Oh my yes. (Which is odd in a way as the only woman I ever was really serious with-well, she wasn’t like Miranda at all.) So I dialed Miranda another Angel, and we drank it down.
As this was happening, a tall, dark man with a tawny tan, the right weight and nothing forcing steam out of his nose and eyeballs, came into the bar. He dialed a Coalwater, the most lethal beer and alcohol mix in the galaxy (they say); one of my own preferred tipples, and sauntered over.
“Nice day, Scay.”
“He knows me,” said Miranda’s soft cute voice with the slight lisp.
“The way you drink, feller,” he said.
I had emptied the glass, and Miranda’s ears were faintly ringing. I’d have to wait a while for the girl to catch up.
“Well, if he knows me that well, then I’ll hazard on who he is.”
“Win, and he’ll stand you a Coalwater.”
“The lady wouldn’t like that. Anyway. Let’s try Haro Fielding.”
“Hole in one.”
“Well, fancy that. They let us Out the same time again.”
Haro, whom I thought was in the skin of one of the tech. people whose name I had mislaid, grinned mildly.
“I’ve been Out a couple of weeks. Tin and irradium traces over south. Due Back In tomorrow noon. You?”
“Forty-two hours.”
“Hard bread.”
“Yeah.”
We stared into our glasses, mine empty, and I wished sweet Miranda would buck up and stop ringing so I could drink some more. Haro’s rig had been auspicious, a tall dark man just like Haro”s own body. But he’d treated it with respect. That was Haro Fielding all over, if you see what I mean. A really nice guy, super intelligent, intellectual, all that, and sound, as about nothing but people ever are, and that rarely, let me add. We had been working together on the asti-manganese traces the other side of the Rockies when the Accident happened, back here in town. That was how we two kept our skins. I remember we were down a tunnel scraping away, with the analysis robot-pack clunking about in the debris, when the explosion ripped through the planet’s bowels. It was a low, thrumming vibration, where we were, more than a bang. We were both a pair of tall guys, but Haro taller than me, with one of the best brains I ever came across. And he stood up and crashed this brain against the tunnel-ceiling and nearly knocked himself out. “What the F was that?” I asked, after we’d gotten ourselves together. “It sounded,” said Haro to me, “like the whole of Base Town just blew up, hit the troposphere, and fell back down again.” He wasn’t far out.
We made it back through the rock hills in the air-buggy inside twenty minutes. When we came over the top and saw the valley full of red haze and smoke and jets of steam, I was scared as hell. You could hear alarm bells and sirens going, but the smog was too thick to work out what kind of rescue went on and what was just automatic noise and useless. I sat in the driver’s seat, gunning the buggy forward, and swearing and half crying. And Haro said, “It’s okay.”
“Of course it’s not bloody okay. Look at it-there’s no goddamn thing left-”
“Hey,” he said, “calm down.”
“Calm down! You’re crazy. No, I’m not just shaken up over who may have just died in that soup. I’m pissing myself that if it’s all gone, we’ll never get off this guck-heeled planet alive.”
The point being that planet NX 5 (whereon we are) is sufficient distance from H.Q. that it had taken our team, the “pioneer squad” every expert Company sends in ahead of itself, to explore, to test, to annotate, to break open for the use of Man, had taken us, I started to say, around thirty Terran years to arrive. We’d traveled cryogenically, of course, deep-frozen in our neat little cells, and that was how we’d get back when it was time. Only if Base had blown up, then maybe the ship had blown up, too, plus all the life supports, the S.O.S.’s- every darling thing. Naturally, if reports suddenly stopped coming in, the Company would investigate. But it would take thirty years before anything concrete got here. Though NX 5 is a gallant sight, with its pyramidal rocks rich in hidden ores, its dry forests and cold pastel deserts busy with interesting flora and fauna, and its purling pale lemon skies… it doesn’t offer a human much damn anything to get by on. While the quaint doggies that roam the lands, barking and walking upright, joy of the naturalist, had a few times tried to tear some of us to pieces. Marooned without proper supplies, shelter or defense: with nothing-that was a fate and three-quarters.
“We’ll be dead in half a month,” I said.
“To die-to sleep, no more,” Haro muttered, and I began to think the blow on the head had knocked him silly, so it’d be a half month shared with a lunatic at that.
However. We careered down into the smoke, and the first thing, a robot machine came up and ordered us off to a safety point. Events, it seemed, weren’t so bad as they looked. Matters were in (metal) hand.
The short High Winter day drew to its end under cover of the murk, and we sat in the swimpool building on the outskirts, which had escaped the blast. Other survivors had come streaming and racketing in. There were about ninety of us crammed round the pool, eating potato chips and nuts and drinking cold coffee, which were all the rations the pool machines, on quarter-power, would give us. Most of the survivors had been away on recon., or various digs, or other stuff, like Haro and me. A handful with minor injuries, caught around the periphery of Base Town, were in the underground medical sanitorium which, situated northside, was unscathed. There were some others, too, a third of the planet away on field studies, who had yet to find out. It seemed that the core in the third quadrant of Base’s energy plant had destabilized, gone critical and-wham. The blast was of course “clean,” but that was all you could say for it. The third quadrant (Westtown) had gone down a molten crater, and most of the rest of the place had reacted the way a pile of loose bricks might do in a scale 9 earthquake. That means, too, people die.
By dawn the next chill day, we had the figures. There had been around five thousand of us on-world, what with the primary team, and the back-up personnel-shipmen, ground crew, service, mechanics and techies. Out of those men and women, one thousand nine hundred and seventy-three were now dead. What we felt and said about that I won’t repeat now, there’s nothing worse than a bad case of requiemitis.