Excerpt: Pegasus

To Carl Sagan, for giving me the perpendicularity drive, probably unintentionally since I only saw him on TV and read some of his books. It took me quite a long time to use it.

To Bill Bryson, for providing me with so much brain food that anyone who’s read A Short History of Nearly Everything might recognize some of it. It’s research, not plagiarism. Really.

To Wikipedia and Google. When I wrote the first version of this in the early 1980s and the second version in the mid-1980s, research meant many enjoyable hours at the local libraries. But now, in 2008, it meant many enjoyable hours on Google, which usually led me to Wikipedia.

To Scott Adams. At least half a decade before I embarked on this little project of mine, his Dilbert Blog regularly inspired me to speculate on science, in awe of its possibilities. In fact, it still does.

To Mike Florio, for my favorite site on the InterGoogle.

To James Ventrillo and A.F House, for inspiring me to find my “new direction” as a novelist.

To Gina Luciana, who hung onto a horrid rough draft for over 20 years, which I banged out on a Commodore 64 with a daisy wheel printer, until I was ready for it.

To Dennis “Boogie Jack” Gaskill, for the story of Joe and gravity, and just for inspiring me with his coolness.

To James Seagraves, for coining the word “geeberhead.” To Ressie Cavenaugh, for being one.

To the subscribers to “Will Edit For Food” for all their suggestions, even the ones I threw out. It’s the thought that counts.

To Riko and David, for listening to me think out loud about this novel during numerous marathon bike rides and for giving me valuable feedback and ideas. It takes a special man to put up with that kind of shit.

To Jan, as always, for putting up with me as I thought, dreamed, researched and raved. I’d like to think Riko and David took some of the heat off.

And finally, to Barry. Welcome back, bro.

PEGASUS
by
Michael LaRocca

“It is with an iron will that they embark on the most daring of all endeavors . . . . to meet the shadowy future without fear and conquer the unknown.
Ferdinand Magellan, circa 1520

The cosmos is all there is, or was, or ever shall be.
Carl Sagan

God is playing marbles
With his planets and his stars
Creating havoc through my life
Through his influence on Mars
Donovan

PEGASUS
Prologue

I looked into my brother’s dead eyes and knew that I had killed him.
Oh, fuck that, it was over 100 years ago.
I’m on a spaceship, believe it or not, flying to some damn place that nobody has ever gone before. Well, no humans, at any rate. And boldly, I guess. I was born in 1964, but here I go, on past Earth and Mars and shit.
Freaky.
Have you ever been driving a little Ford Pinto down the street, with a cheap-ass stereo, and been sitting at a traffic light, listening to your music and minding your own, when some fool with a massive sound system pulls up beside you playing some thumping something that makes your ear wax drip out?
Probably not, considering how long it’s been since Ford made a Pinto, but I’m gonna pretend just the same.
Here’s a little trick for you. Pop in THE PLANETS by Gustav Holst. I tell you what. Do it now. Listen to the first track.
I’ll wait.
Cool, isn’t it?
The first track is called “Mars, The Bringer of War,” and it’s loaded with brass. It will stir your heart, if you have one, but that’s not my point.
Here’s my point.
No matter how cheap your car’s sound system, that particular track will blow the ears off the fool with the amps and the bass going thumpa thumpa thump.
But I digress.
As our little spaceship left Mars, one bright and early morning in April of 2123, and as we watched the red planet slowly shrink behind us on the viewscreen, the captain decided that we on the bridge should hear the same track.
I swear, the man is cool.
The fact that he would eventually despise me is irrelevant. He’s still cool.
Just don’t tell him I said that.

PEGASUS
Chapter One

We’re leaving together.
But still it’s farewell.
And maybe we’ll come back
to Earth. Who can tell?
I guess there is no one to blame.
We’re leaving ground.
Will things ever be the same again?
It’s the final countdown.

“Shut up, Barry.”
“You got it, Adam.”
“Can’t you call me Commander Weinberg?”
“It’s hard to salute a man when you might have fucked his great-great-great-great-grandmother.”
“Why are you on my bridge?”
“The same reason Doctor McCoy was always on the bridge of the ENTERPRISE. It’s a Southern thing.”
“Why are you on my bridge?”
“As a member of your crack Security team, when I’m not securing your crack, I’m making sure there aren’t any Muslims on the bridge. None on the ship, actually, because it’d be hell always figuring out which way Mecca is.”
“Why are you on my bridge?”
“I just like hanging out here, that’s all. I guess you’d prefer John Glenn.”
There were millennia of suffering in Commander Weinberg’s sigh. “I’d settle for someone who could sing well, on key, preferably not some obscure 1980s disco hit that only he and I have heard and which isn’t appropriate.”
“No, that’s rock. Disco would be Push Push In The Bush. Not appropriate how?”
“My plan is to bring us back, besides which the next line in your little ditty claims we’re heading for Venus. Wrong direction, which is why I’m glad you’re not part of my navigation team.”
“Amen to that,” threw in a woman who was sitting at a navigation console.
“What, you’d rather let a woman drive?”
“Your ignorance never ceases to astound me. Every study we’ve done over the past 300 years shows that women have quicker reflexes –”
“Plus we use maps,” the woman at the navigation console interjected.
“—And I presume a test somewhere shows you’re not as stupid as you pretend to be,” Weinberg finished.
“But you could be wrong.”
“I could indeed.”
“Wait a minute, Commander. Was that a joke?”
“Why don’t you think about it somewhere away from the bridge, in case you feel the need to move your lips?”
“Now that was a joke.”
Weinberg chose not to respond.
I was almost in the turbolift – yeah, we do call it that – when I turned back to the man.
“Hey Commander, did you know that you were voted least likely to use an LOL or an emoticon?”
“Good.”
My name’s Barry, as you’ve probably guessed by now. Barry Drake. I was born November 10, 1964 in Fayettehell. Oh, excuse me, Fayettenam. No wait, Fayetteville. North Carolina. I told you I was Southern.
The first job I held after high school was MP. And given how far the US Army has fallen, I’ll translate that as Military Policeman in case you don’t know. I’ve never been a Member of Parliament.
Two years later, I returned home and became a jail deputy. Then a street cop. Then a police detective. After my career hit the skids, I bounced around as a repo man, a private eye, a bounty hunter, and a bodyguard. Just over a century later, I still work in the Security field, although we use the more honest name of Enforcement these days. Never let it be said that I suffer from an excess of imagination.
You probably guessed part of what I left out. Cryonic freeze. Now, it’s not cryogenics, and using that term is the sign of a layman.
Why are cryonics patients stored upside-down?
That sounds like a joke, doesn’t it?
Gee, Barry, I don’t know, why are cryonics patients stored upside down?
And the answer is...
They’re not. Cryonics really isn’t used anymore.
But I bet you wanted another answer.
If there’s a power outage, anything frozen thaws from the top down, such as the liquid nitrogen that cryonics patients are stored in. Putting the head at the bottom is an extra measure of protection.
Oh, and notice that I avoid terms like popsicles, stiffs and sno-cones as being politically incorrect.
Of all the people who have been frozen, dating on back to the first one in 1967, none have been lost due to a power outage. But I just thought I’d mention it as an icebreaker. No pun intended.
So after the Big Chill, I went back to my old employer, which just so happens to be Blackwater. Born in North Carolina, same as me. They looked at my resume, saw a lovely PR opportunity, put me through a bit of subliminal learning to catch me up with the modern world, and put me to work.
Why was I frozen?
United States laws from my time, just like in modern times, prevent freezing someone before he’s legally dead.
Pause a moment to digest that.
I was legally dead.
That’ll put a cramp in your Christmases, won’t it?
What kind of person gets frozen? Well, you’ve got an initial investment which is pretty hefty, and then space and maintenance for the equipment. But if you’re a rookie cop, an insurance salesman might convince your wife to sign you up for a policy that costs less than your cable TV bill.
His words.
On the one hand, the 200 plus who weren’t successfully revived didn’t get refunds on their policies.
On the other hand, if you’re a workaholic cop who never watches TV, you can’t get a refund on your cable bill either.
So the turbolift opened and I resumed my rounds. I was walking the first wheel –
Okay, a brief geography lesson for you. About the cheapest, easiest way to generate gravity on a starship is by rotation. The engineers create a hollow circle – we usually call them wheels – and then rotate it at just the right speed.
Think of those old circus rides that fling you up against the walls. Or a rock on the end of a string. Spin the string. The rock wants to fly away, but the string won’t let it. That’s how we do gravity on PEGASUS.
Yeah, it’s called PEGASUS. It was named after our destination.
Never let it be said that government bureaucrats evolved an imagination while I slept.
So the ship has four “wheels” that are in constant rotation. They’ve got the right speed and circumference to make the gravity earthlike. That also means we can still use the “fifth wheel” idiom.
I won’t bore you with all the science, though, only what matters to the guard on foot patrol. Walking a complete circle is roughly a mile.
Another riddle.
Why do guards walk on rounds?
Gee, Barry, I don’t know. Why do guards walk on rounds?
To get to the other side.
No, wait, that doesn’t work.
You might be surprised at how much debate there was about the need for security guards – excuse me, Enforcement Personnel – on a starship. Considering the battery of tests that the crewmen go through, isn’t having cops running around an admission that the tests are flawed somehow?
Well, even if we assume the tests are 99.9% accurate, somebody’s gotta be around for the other 0.1%. The rest of the time, they can walk around and check on all the equipment that nobody else is looking at, just to make sure nothing’s going to blow up.
So yeah, Enforcement Officers are just glorified safety inspectors most of the time. Same as we’ve always been.
What’s weird about walking the wheels of PEGASUS is that you can look up and see a slight curvature. Your ceiling is a little smaller than your floor, which is just the opposite of being on Earth, where your floor is the curved ground and your ceiling is a sky with a slightly larger curve. Once you get used to that, if you ever do, it’s cool.
The first wheel has the bridge, where I’ll admit I do spend a bit too much time, but wouldn’t you? It also has some of the crew quarters, but most of those are in the second wheel, including mine. The quarters on the first wheel don’t allow cats.
I think you have to be warped to stay in the cat-free zone. Well, considering that we can’t have dogs on the ship. They need a lot more food, a lot more exercise, and Enforcement Officers would spend all their time running around with pooper scoopers.
Plus there’s a fine naval tradition of carrying cats on the ship for good luck.
So the first wheel has the bridge, the cat haters’ crew quarters, our communications computers, half of our force field equipment, half of the weaponry which of course is strictly for defense, a section to keep the first wheel spinning, a big chunk of our computers, and the sick bay, which is where I was headed next.
Tell me you didn’t just ask me about Ted Williams’ head.
Neuropreservation means to only freeze the head. It’s cheaper, it’s easier, and the theory was that by the time we could thaw the head, we’d have the tech to grow a new body for it anyway.
Such a body would have to relearn motor skills, maybe, but it’d be younger than mine and without the scars. I’ve got cadaver tendon in my knee because of an old bullet wound. I am one of the younger crewmen, though, if you forget the years I was frozen. I’m only 58.
It turns out we developed the tech to thaw whole bodies first. Roughly 160 people were frozen in the 20th century, all still frozen, including Ted Williams but not Walt Disney. That was a myth.
Roughly 400 were frozen in the 21st century. All have been thawed, and 182 survived. We’re a small but exclusive club. All full-body jobs. We don’t quite have the tech to thaw a head yet. Maybe next year.
On May 1, 2123, Mars, Saturn and Uranus were all aligned. This was especially useful for ships leaving Earth to fly out of our solar system. They could slingshot off Mars’ gravity, then slingshot off Saturn’s gravity, then slingshot off Uranus’s gravity.
That didn’t quite apply to PEGASUS, however.
It’s a nine-month trip from Earth to Mars, by the way. All voyages are slow getting started and then pick up speed from there.
Did you know that, if we could travel at the speed of light, we’d need seven hours to get to Pluto and about a year to leave our own solar system? Hey, it’s a big place. Which, according to Gene Roddenberry, gives us lots of room to fuck up before we meet anyone else.
So anyway, PEGASUS stopped at Mars to pick up some supplies and crew, including yours truly. But at least we were able to slingshot around Saturn and Uranus. Which reminds me of another story.
“So we’ll slingshot off Saturn, and some time after that you’ll slingshot off Uranus,” I said.
Commander Weinberg nodded. “You got it.”
“Well, I’d certainly rather you slingshot off Uranus than slingshot off my anus.”
“That does it. Get off my bridge.”
Juvenile, isn’t it? I’m trying to set a record for how many times I can get thrown off the bridge. I hear there’s a betting pool. Nice to know humans haven’t forgotten how to have fun while I was sleeping, isn’t it?
Spell “I cup.”
Get off my bridge.
Rip Van Winkle, eat your heart out.
Hey, do you know who we should’ve frozen? Richard Pryor. It’s not like he couldn’t afford it. Ah, well.
It’s 1 AU (Astronomical Unit) from the Sun to Earth and 40 to Pluto. We didn’t see Pluto on this trip – it was somewhere else – but it doesn’t matter.
I’m from the 20th Century, right? Space was a dream for us. A few lucky astronauts and a few lucky bastards who paid a few million to joyride on a Soyuz. But in 2123, we’ve got astronauts who are jaded about anything in our entire solar system. They kinda sleepwalk until they hit the heliosphere or the Oort Cloud. Especially on a ship as cutting-edge as PEGASUS, where everybody’s been out here before, except maybe some newbies in Enforcement like me.
Heck, I’ve seen newbies thinking that we couldn’t go from Mars to Jupiter without dodging asteroids like a video game. Of course they’re out there – our best source of mineral wealth yet – but you can’t hit one without aiming for it. There aren’t that damn many.
Oh, and it takes longer to get from Mars to the Oort Cloud than from the Oort Cloud to Alpha Centauri, if you’re going in that direction, which we’re not.
Why Pegasus? Oh, I’ll tell you later. I see Sickbay up ahead.
Oh, but that’s a boring way to end my little monologue, isn’t it? Here’s another story. It’s a short one, as the actress said to the bishop.
“Barry, why are you on my bridge?”
“Fighting a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way. Three different things, by the way.”
“Go do it somewhere else, Superman.”
"What's better than roses on your piano?"
"I really don't care."
"Two lips on your organ."
"Get off my bridge."