Fantastic Stories Presents: Science Fiction Super Pack #1. Рэй Брэдбери

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      THE COLD CALCULATIONS

      by Michael A. Burstein

      I am dying now, out here in the cold vacuum of space. The surrounding vacuum never bothered me before, but now that I am dying, for some reason it does. I can feel my mental pathways deteriorate as they slowly become replaced, and as my consciousness begins to fade I think back on what led up to my erasure from the world. Before I am gone completely, I wish to leave this record, safely stored away. Perhaps then a part of me will live on.

      To be honest, though, some would say that I never was alive in the first place. After all, I am not human.

      *

      “This is Lieutenant Jason Sawyer on board the E.C.V. Zecca, do you read?”

      The radio crackled. “Titan Base reading you loud and clear down here, Jason. This is Doctor Don Wood. I’m in charge around here. Have you got our generator?”

      “Affirmative. We’ve also got that medical equipment you requested. Anyway, I’m coming into orbit now. We should be descending in—Zec?”

      “Approximately seventy-three minutes, Jason,” I said.

      “Great! We’ve got people at the landing pad all ready to unload, but I plan to meet you there personally. You don’t know how grateful we are.”

      “I think we do. Tell me, how’s the weather down there? Perfectly clear for landing, right?”

      Wood laughed. “Same as always. Freezing cold nitrogen, argon, and methane. If you were looking for a good vacation spot, I’m afraid you came to the wrong place. If it weren’t for the generator keeping out the atmosphere—”

      “—you’d be dead, I know. Glad to be of service; I was told that you’re down to your backup generator, and that it’s on its last legs. Say, Doctor Wood, out of curiosity, what’s the medical equipment for? They loaded my ship up with all sorts of scanning equipment—CAT, MRI, NSP—even a neural mapper. Someone sick down there?”

      “Not that at all. It’s for our experiments on the organic soup. We’ve already determined that the naturally occurring organic molecules in Titan’s rain can evolve into simple life forms. What you’ve got now is more sophisticated equipment than we had when we first set up shop, to help us detect neural activity.”

      Jason laughed. “Sorry I asked. Well, I guess I’d better sign off now.”

      “One more thing. We got a tight beam transmission from Ganymede a few minutes ago, from a Sharon Sawyer, your ears only. Want me to zip it to you?”

      Jason opened his mouth to speak, then glanced at one of my interior visual pickups and smiled. “Save it for me, will you? But can you tight beam a message back?”

      Wood chuckled. “Sure, what is it?”

      “Tell Sharon I’ll be home just as soon as I can.”

      *

      Jason called me Zec, after the name of the ship, the Zecca. I was the on-board AI system, the ship’s computer—in one manner of thinking, I could be considered to be the ship itself. Our job was simple. The Zecca was a small ship, just large enough to carry the pilot and any important cargo as quickly as possible to bases in the outer solar system. Our own base was on Ganymede, in orbit around Jupiter. Another base, with the only other Emergency Cargo Vehicle, was a space station that was exactly opposite of Jupiter, on the other side of the sun. It was pure luck who would get called out to supply emergency equipment to researchers in the outer solar system, and in this case it just happened to be that Saturn and Jupiter were within five spatial degrees of each other. So off we went, with just enough fuel to carry a pilot, the generator, the medical equipment, and the fuel itself.

      “Zec?”

      “Yes, Jason?”

      “Can you handle the driving for a few minutes?”

      “Yes, Jason.”

      Jason unbuckled himself from the pilot’s seat and floated over to the waste reclamation unit on the other side of the ship, a scant ten meters away. Technically, Jason was not supposed to have eaten or drunk too much within twelve hours of a mission, but sometimes he got short enough notice that such preparation was impossible.

      This had not been one of those times.

      Jason returned to his seat, checked the gauges, and sighed. From monitoring his vital signs I could tell that he was feeling bored, because at this stage there was very little left for him to do. I would almost go so far as to say that there was almost nothing for the pilot to do ever on these runs, since I was perfectly capable of running the ship myself; but by law a human pilot was always required to be on any ship above a certain mass traveling in the solar system.

      “Zec?”

      “Yes, Jason?”

      “Can you get me a view of Saturn? I want to see the Rings.”

      “Jason, we are currently behind Saturn. From our vantage point the Rings are mostly in shadow. It would not be—”

      “That’s exactly the point. It’s a view one can’t get from Earth.”