The cargo hold looked cavernous in the starlight, and more than one deep spacer hadn’t lived through a hold accident. But puttering around in the starlit, airless volume got Bull “out” to alleviate his cabin fever and so he took the slight risk involved in doing it solo.
He carefully toured the hold, inspecting the small amount of equipment left in it. Pluto had been on the way out so he’d stopped there first, two years ago, and the government had paid him handsomely to deliver a hefty load to the outpost. So what remained was a deep spacer’s dream. He had all the tools, he’d endured the trip out, and now all he had to do was get lucky, real lucky.
The Kuiper Belt is big … no, giant, compared to the asteroid belt. TC had given him a cheap answer quickly, but the probability sphere maximum offered only a 12% chance of being correct and the spheroid was big. TC had advised that doubling the computing time would improve that only to 14%. Even with his good trajectories, he was looking for a needle in a haystack. Before now, those odds would have made the trip pointless, but he had constant acceleration. He could see a whole lot of territory very quickly, and he could follow up on any new find in an eye blink … comparatively speaking. Yes, constant acceleration was a game changer, but it was a hideously expensive one and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Push-on Propulsion, the company working on this that he was investing in, figured their market consisted of outfitting space yachts for the hyper-ostentatious rich and emergency medical courier services for Belt stations, and that was it.
Now he was on the edge of his search area and it was time to look. He’d set the parameters for what he considered interesting meteors and other space stuff and the ship would let him know when it found something. He was like an old-time California prospector panning for gold in a stream, searching for the mother lode by looking for more fragments.
If nothing panned out, well, the Kuiper Belt was largely uncharted, and he could bring back some charts.
Suited up in the hold, Bull responded immediately to the interesting-stuff alert beep by putting the display through his helmet. “Hot dang, I’m getting lucky!” he muttered to himself. “Honeycomb already?” There was room for error, as Bull had discovered shortly after passing Neptune’s orbit. It had turned out his density parameter for honeycomb included a lot of little snowball proto-comets that had never come near the inner Solar System and so hadn’t melted or consolidated at all, so they were as fluffy as a collection of snowflakes. Interesting, and Bull was surveying them, but they weren’t worthy of alerts. He’d spent a week working on an algorithm that could distinguish snowflakes from honeycomb, so there was a better chance that this was paydirt, but it still might be an out of spec snowball.
He examined the readings closely. It sure looked like paydirt. “Track this for a week and ready a catcher to be sent out, Honey. And see if you can reserve some time on TC in … what, a month? Will we have that specimen back here in a month?”
“If we send a catcher in a week,” the ship’s system answered, “the specimen will be back in twenty-four days. Optimal time to send the catcher for quick retrieval is ten days. We’ll have it back in twenty-two days.”
“OK, do it in ten.”
Back in the control room, Bull spent a while on other business.
Deep spacing is highly individualistic. Some deep spacers pretty much go into a haze during the transit time. Others pursue hobbies, from art history to microgravity fishkeeping, with feverish intensity. Those who plan on returning soon to Earth or Mars are exercise fanatics. They spend half their day in the exercise room, and some will spin their ship and sleep in the outer parts to build up their bone calcium again.
Bull did property development. He’d done commodities on Earth in an earlier life, but being minutes to hours behind the action was a giant handicap to that. But a lot of development deals were leisurely enough that the communications delay was no real disadvantage. So he stayed busy reading up on current events, dabbling in non-volatile stocks, and swinging interplanetary development deals. His specialty was buying up property in strife-torn cities and holding until normalcy returned. Property development supported his pursuit of the Comet, and would give him something productive to do when he decided to return to Earth. Thanks to his properties, even if he came back empty handed this expedition would not break him, though he might not be able to afford living in a Greenland condo, either—a Belter’s standard retirement dream. And he could continue to invest in Push-on Propulsion.
When he’d finished analysis on his property database and done the upkeep, Bull muttered to himself, “Damn, I’m hot tonight!” and headed to the exercise room to give himself a real treat, working on the second hobby he didn’t talk much about: Tweaking virtual reality simulations so they were better suited for Belters. He didn’t write original code, but he messed with parameters of existing offerings so the simulations worked better for low-G players in general and sometimes himself in particular. This tweaking was illegal on Earth, and much of the stuff was pornographic, but like serial killers, who in the Belt cared? And with only ten thousand Belters total, it wasn’t a market that Earth or Mars cared much about either.
As he suited up he made his selection. Murmuring “I’ve earned you tonight, Suzanne,” Bull donned the VR suit and found her waiting.
“I haven’t seen you in quite a while, darling,” Suzanne cooed. She was a tall, athletic 20-year-old whose long red hair fell in enticing waves over her shoulders, dressed in a tennis skirt. She had a racket in hand. She stood in the kitchen of a suburban LA bungalow, adapted from one in the classic Knots Landing first aired in the 1970s. When he was with her Bull felt like Professor Henry Higgins from My Fair Lady, turning her into his kind of lady. When he first found Suzanne, she was a ninja in an action VR. He’d done a lot of tweaking her parameters since then, and he was pretty happy with the results.
“True, but I’m hot tonight, and that’s why you’re my sweetheart tonight.” Bull walked up to her, took the racket, and put it on the counter. Suzanne moved into his arms and reached up, slightly, to kiss him. Bull returned the kiss and backed her into the counter to press her hips hard with his as his hands ran up and down her back and wove through her hair. As she sighed and pressed a little harder into his chest, he tickled her sides. She grabbed for his hands, but he caught her wrists instead and twisted her arms behind her. His left hand held them there while his right ranged from breast to thigh, rubbing, stroking, feeling the texture of her body. Suzanne’s breathing deepened. Bull’s hips thrust hard as he kissed her on the lips, cheeks, and neck.
Then he backed off and simply held her hands. “Hmm, it must have been a special day, Bull,” she said. She was smiling at him with admiration and respect as her breathing returned to normal. “Tennis first?” she asked as she moved to him again and slid her arms from his chest around to his back to hold him gently.
Bull kissed her. “Tennis first. This is going to be a full evening,” he announced. She smiled and kissed him again as if that was the best news of the week.
“Your racket’s in the closet,” she said as she went for her purse and the keys. Her 240Z was just outside.
Hours later Bull pulled off the simulator suit.
“What a night,” he muttered. He was working kinks out of his muscles as he put his gear in the cleaner, then put himself in.
“I’ve got to spend more time keeping in shape,” he resolved once again. “I’m not getting out of this setup what I should.”
But that was a scheduling problem he still hadn’t satisfactorily resolved, and his mind was now on to other issues. After he slept, there would be property to analyze and a report on the snowflake mini-comets to finish. Bull was back on his normal routine.