Fiction: The Space Guys Adventure, Part 3!

 I've been holding out on a decision on what to do to end this week. What I had was another installment of the Space Guys, so here it is. Here's links for parts 1 and 2. Oh yeah, and the pic is from a Marx dairy farm accessory set I will probably be getting to.

Jason remained frozen in place. “Come, come!” the bearded man called out. “Sit down! Welcome to the table of Captain Raeder!”

“Yes, yes!” said the woman with the beautiful and increasingly familiar face. “Come and sit with me!” The other man rose in good cheer. Jason stood frozen for a moment before he realized the woman was waiting for him to take the seat between her and the bulkhead.

There was an awkward shuffle, and Jason ended up beside the very woman he had been desperate to find. She wore a dress made of a strange material that looked striped, but on closer examination contained something like tubing. Its hem stopped a little more than halfway between her hips and her knees, leaving her shapely if pale legs open to inspection. He looked down far enough to see her shoes, which looked like clogs. Meanwhile, Moxon stretched out on the couch, leaving enough room for Jackson and Dr. Cahill to sit on one end. Jason ignored a smirk from Jax, but to distract himself from the shapely form beside him, he alternated between looking out a tiny porthole at the lesser moon or inspecting a non-regulation tankard that the captain, officially Mission Commander Hans Raeder, from a tankard modified to take a straw. He read an insignia on the mug as WELTRAUMKORPS DE FREIDEUTSCHLAND. Around it he made out the words FREI VEREIGNIT ALLEIN. He recognized it as, “Free, united, alone.”

“I suppose I should make introductions,” the captain said. “This is Jason Freeman from the North American Sector of Mars, a fine pilot. Herr Freeman, this is none other than Aleksandra Kapek, the Chief of Automated Labor for the expedition. She’s an expert roboticist and a biologist. I’m given to understand she is also a psychologist.”

Jason was uneasily pondering the vaguely familiar name when the woman spoke up. “Oh, we know each other,” she said. “We corresponded regarding the J3 units. And call me Alek.”

The truth was dawning on Jason. “Yeah, I remember,” he said. “I read your paper in the Journal of Applied Robotics. Then…” He blushed.

 Alek smiled. “I publish as A. Kapek,” she said. “In his first communique, he addressed me as `Mr. Kapek’. It worked out, though. We wrote each other for a year, almost. Every day, sometimes. I even offered to come visit. Then he told me he needed time to study, and things dropped off.” That made Jackson shift. “Many people make same mistake. Most time, I try to make sure people don’t know. I come from a famous family.”

From the end of the couch, Jackson spoke up. “Karl Kapek,” he said. “The founder of modern automation…”

 “My grandfather,” Alek said. “He disappear during the Great Wars. Really, nobody knows where he go. I go to mathematics, nobody ask no questions. I show them, mathematics work for a lot of things. Not just machines and rockets and planets, but animals, plants, muscle, bone, even brains. I take what I learn to grandfather’s old business, we get ten years ahead in two.”

 “So,” Jax said, “you’re from… Russia? The Federation, anyway?”

“No,” she said. “Well, not that Federation. I come from the Republic of Dalmatia. It is part of Federation of Jugoslavia and the Adriatic States. We are an alliance of autonomous neutral states. Like him.” She pointed to the captain.

Raeder smiled. “We may be neutral,” he said, “but we’re still friendly.”

“So are we, of course,” Alek said. “We are free to go where we please, and folk from all over the world come to us. A lot of them stay. We have a saying, `What could be friendlier than making love?’”

 That drew a snort from Moxon. She paused and blurted out, “I am sorry for my English. When I write my papers, I can take time to get the words right. When I talk, sometimes I make mistake. Just now, I think I meant to say, `falling in love’. That’s the same, right?”

There was another silence before Jason spoke up. “Well,” he said, “it… can be.”

Alek smiled. “See?” she said. “We all understand each other.”

 Jason stepped in before things could go downhill. “So what’s it like where you come from?” he asked.

“We have mountains,” Alek said. “We have lot of mountains. There are beaches, too. I come from Republic of Dalmatia, just one long beach. Lot of sand, lot of sun, except on cloudy days.”

 As the conversation went on, Jason repeated his question to Dr. Cahill, the captain and even Moxon. The Englishwoman talked about the moors of Scotland. Raeder spoke of the huge forests and tiny towns of Thuringia. Moxon told of a dozen places at least. “In my old job, we never knew where we were going next,” he said. “So, we traveled as many places we could, and we really got out there. Wherever we went, people were always friendly. People are friendly all over.” As he spoke, his evidently lopsided smile spread to his scarred cheek. The sight made Jason shudder.

 By that point, Moxon was getting animated. “It’s all about internationalism, back home,” he said. “It’s not just the Pan-Atlantic Union and the Trans-Eurasian Federation anymore. There’s unions and federations and things popping up everywhere. There’s the Sino-Edonian Alliance, the Turko-Iranian Alignment, the Arab League, the Federated Republics of Central America, the Indo-Malayan Federation, not to be confused with the Indo-Oceanian Federation… Everybody wants peace, and everybody knows the way to do it is to make as many friends as they can. Really, if anybody wanted a fight, how would they even keep track of who they aren’t friendly with?”

 Fortunately, that was followed by questions about Mars, which Jason was spirited enough to answer. He waxed longest about the Hellas Basin. “We’re just small settlements so far, but we’re going to get bigger,” he said. “The crater’s deep enough to hold in atmosphere, you know. Then there’s lots of ice along the edge we can harvest for our crops. That will get a lot easier once we can get a proper pipeline in. We have about 400 people, besides the crew at Port Eris, spread out over 600 kliks. That’s up from under 150 in the first wave. Folks say we were one of the first places to receive whole families.”

It was Alek who asked, “How do you get married on Mars?”

Jax took the initiative to answer. “There’s really nothing special about it,” he said. “The thing is, even people in the same settlement are so spread out, we usually have to use the wire to talk to anybody outside our families. We can do video calls, if there isn’t some scientist crowding the feed.”

“Don’t you have radio? TV?” Alek said.

Jason shook his head. “There’s too much solar interference,” he said. “We’re further from the sun than Earth is, but we don’t have a magnetic field or a thick enough atmosphere to keep out radiation. The ports have equipment that can cut through it, but they only use it to transmit off-planet. For the rest of us, over the distances we have to deal with, cables are the only thing that works. We started out with copper wire, but that was expensive and too damn heavy. Now, we use fiberoptic cable. It’s light and cheap. We still have to have most of it shipped from Earth, though.”

Alek nodded. “It makes sense,” she said. “So anyway, what happen when you want to meet in person? You know, go on a date?”

 “We try to do that at one of the ports,” Jax said. “A lot of us just kind of skip that part.”

“You mean you get engaged, before you even meet?” Alek said.

“Sometimes,” Jax said. “It’s a bit complicated.”

“How so?” Alek said. “Do girls propose to boys?” She smiled mischieviously at that.

“We… don’t really do that,” Jax said. “Actually, what usually happens is, our families decide when we should get married.”

 “Yeah,” Jason said. “It’s not like it sounds. I mean, usually, the lady moves in with his folks or the guy moves in with hers even before the marriage, so it’s not just their decision. If they see we’re getting along, they give us their blessing, and then as often as not, we have what you could call the wedding celebration that night. Everything after that is just waiting for the colonial administration to clear the paperwork.”

 After a time, the talk turned to the crew. “The Janus is 360 meters long, 57 meters in diameter at its widest point, and has a total complement of 96 people,” the captain had confirmed. “That consists of 4 senior officers including Mr. Moxon, Dr. Cahill and myself, 8 core crew members, 12 engineers for the power and drive systems, 8 technical specialists, that is Dr. Kapek’s formal title, a survey crew of 32 scientists from a range of disciplines, 18 pilots and crew for the Pegasus payloader and auxiliary shuttlecraft, and a military detachment of 14 troops and officers, for the heavy lifting, of course. We expect to be in space 20 months to reach our destination, followed by a 90-day survey and a return trip of 16 months to Titan Base.”

The captain folded his hands. “Twenty years ago or even ten, the ship would have been crewed entirely by men,” he said. “Five years ago, at the time planning started, there were still rules in place barring any married couples from serving together, and informally prohibiting fraternization among the crew. In light of the length of voyage, however, the rules have been relaxed. About a third of the crew are female. Because of the number of participating nations, the exact details are not yet confirmed. We do know that least 3 women will be serving alongside their husbands. We are prepared for the possibility of additional unions during the voyage. We were assigned a chaplain who can perform marriage rites, with my approval. I have been told there are rumors that anyone who marries will get an officer’s cabin. That simply isn’t true. No assignment is guaranteed, though the needs of married crewmembers will certainly be considered.”

At that point, he smiled and said, “Ah! I still haven’t introduced you to the most esteemed members of our expedition.” He pointed to the man who had vacated the seat Jason now occupied, now seated in the recreation area next to a slender woman. Looking in his direction, he realized the other man was older than he looked. The woman was, too, though Jason would not have credited that she was less than half the man’s age. “This is Professor Jan Futura and his lovely wife Irena!”

 Jason looked closer and gaped. It was Jax who gushed, “You mean that Futura? The billionaire inventor? The commander of the Ares? The one who climbed Everest and went to the bottom of the 7 Mile Trench? And wait, is she the girl you rescued from the Empire State building? Damn, we have all your books everywhere on Mars!”

 “That’s me,” the older man said. “A lifetime in my own legend. I decided to live a quiet life for a while.” He clasped the hand of the woman at his side.

 “Now,” the captain said, “there’s a bit of business to attend to… the mission briefing for the first flight to Neptune.”