Every Man's Fantasy Ch. 01

"Besides the bars and the casino, there's a low-gravity exercise hall and a public park with a small zoo. Of course, if you have money" - she used a word that Ezra thought was significant - "there are plenty of shops. I don't know much else. I'm new here myself."

Ezra could not make out the girl. The mention of money seemed to hint that she was an Entertainer; but then why mention shopping? Another Entertainer would have added: "Show me your credit stick and I'll take you somewhere fun."

The girl sounded educated and refined, speaking English with barely an accent. This meant nothing in a place like Capella Space Station, unless she was holding out for a high price and a more attractive customer. Even so, she interested him.

"My name's Ezra," he said.

"I'm Yumi."

"What brings you to Capella, Yumi?"

"I'm on holiday," she answered. "How about you?"

No one came to Capella on holiday, but Ezra was still unclear whether Yumi was an Entertainer or an innocent customer who misunderstood what she looked like. She seemed a little anxious: her gaze flitted to the door every so often.

"Just stopping here for the night," he said. "I'm off prospecting tomorrow."

Yumi knew a Planetary Prospector's life to be an exciting one of danger, thrills and a woman in every spaceport; but she showed only a polite interest. However, there was no one else to talk to, so they continued to talk, though they both glanced at the door many times.

Ezra was failing to secure the services of an Entertainer, yet nothing else was happening in the pub. When they talked about where they came from on Earth, the lazy barman, who was pretending not to listen while he idly rubbed a glass with a dirty towel, gave up eavesdropping and went away to avoid work somewhere else.

They took their drinks to a table in the window to be more comfortable and, while he kept a surreptitious eye on the door, Ezra became genuinely interested in Yumi, who had gained an engineering degree, had recently started working for one of the big Japanese engineering firms and specialised in hyperspace drives. He still did not believe her story of a solo holiday on Capella. He thought she was waiting for someone, so obviously did she scan the pub's entrance every time she sipped her drink.

People gradually drifted in and the bar was noisy and full by the time Hestia, the gorgeous entertainer Ezra had been seeking, arrived in the boisterous company of about twenty men and women. The men were in military uniform. The women wore the kind of short skirts and tight tops preferred by Entertainers and, apparently, Japanese hyper-drive engineers on holiday.

Hestia was of average height, with dark-red hair, large dark-green eyes, an oval face of heart-stopping beauty, with a straight nose and a delicate chin. Her figure was slender but curvy. She was perfectly made up. Her dress was long and tight with a bodice and a low neckline. It suited a woman a few years older than her. She looked about eighteen.

Excusing himself for a moment, Ezra got up to speak to Hestia but, as he approached, he saw she already had a customer, an officer in Naval whites. Hestia saw Ezra and whispered to her escort. While the officer obediently made his way to the bar, she signalled Ezra to approach.

He pushed his way through the throng to her table.

"Hello, Hestia," he said. "I was hoping to meet you. It's my last night on Capella for a while."

"What bad luck, Sweetie!" she replied. "If only you'd sent me a message. A cruiser arrived this afternoon and we all went down to the Military Dock to meet it. ... I love watching a big stately vessel come into a tight berth," she added with a salacious grin. "It barely fitted."

Ezra was too preoccupied, thinking that the arrival of a rare military spaceship explained why it was so quiet in the pub when he arrived, to notice the opening Hestia gave him for a dirty joke.

"It was just my luck," he said.

She nonchalantly shrugged away her failure at initiating sexual banter.

"I'm sorry I can't recommend a friend to you," Hestia said. "Everyone I know has an escort."

There were gorgeous Entertainers all around. Some were sitting on the sailors' laps; others got up to dance with their customers, in a voluptuous but energy-saving style. Clearly disappointed, Ezra glanced back at Yumi and Hestia followed his eyes. Even before he spoke, she had kindly advice for him.

"Not a chance," she said, gently. "Unless it's her first night, she's not that kind of girl."

"Oh, well. At least I can be a gentleman. I'll take Yumi on a tour of the station and show her a good time."

"Well aren't you just the sweetest man imaginable," Hestia cooed, stroking his cheek. "What a pity that horrid old Commodore grabbed me first."

Just at that moment, the horrid old Commodore marched back carrying their drinks, keen to know why Hestia was talking to another man.

"Well, good bye, Ezra," she said, gently pushing him away and fixing an engaging smile to turn on the Commodore. "Duty calls. Have a safe trip!"

Putting his own brave face on, Ezra returned to Yumi, who had spent the last five minutes looking hopefully at the door.

"Yumi, it's noisy in here," he said. "Would to like to go somewhere else?"

Yumi checked the time, decided she had waited long enough and smiled sweetly up at Ezra.

"Yes, I'd like that."

As they passed through the throng to the exit, Yumi resigned herself to whatever fate her disappointed vigil had ensured. Outside the bar, she made up her mind to be happy.

Becoming bright and chatty, she demanding to know where Ezra planned to take her. Improvising, he suggested the low-gravity exercise hall.

"Oh, good!" she said. "Can we walk to the lift?"

4 Tour of the station

The lifts went up through the roof of the causeway into a spoke of the great wheel and through the central spindle to the other causeways. This was a quick route six-miles across the diameter of the wheel, rather than the slower route around the circumference on the moving walkway. Some passengers got off the lift in the middle of the spindle to take elevators to the docks, the hydroponics farms, the low-gravity exercise hall or the Star View Promenade and Restaurant at the very top of the space station.

The nearest lift was the one Ezra arrived on, twelve blocks anticlockwise, at the junction of the East Causeway and the North Causeway, but Yumi wanted to walk the other way, so she could ogle in the window of a clothes shop.

It was always a pleasant temperature on the space station at night, when the white roof lights were dimmed and the yellow streetlights came on, giving even the shadowy pawnshops and rowdy bars a romantic feel. Yumi skipped along happily. Though she dawdled a little at the clothes shop, they were soon at the lift. She made a graceful hop into the cubicle, taking Ezra's arm in anticipation of the reduced gravitation and Coriolis effect that would try to knock them off balance.

At the exercise deck in the central spindle, they changed into brightly-coloured jumpsuits to float, gyrate and bounce off the trampoline walls of the rubber-padded hall. Serious athletes used bungee ropes attached to harnesses around their waists to get a strong resistance to their leaps, getting a proper workout; but Yumi was content to bounce from wall to wall, gliding and spinning for fun as she went.

She laughed when an ambitious somersault caused a soft collision with another gymnast, leaving her stranded too far from the wall to push off again. She called for Ezra's help. He made a good bounce and glided to her rescue, holding her to stop her spinning. They got entangled, which made Yumi laugh more, but his momentum brought them safely to the opposite side. He turned her the right way up.

She blamed the restrictive top-half of her capacious jumpsuit, which she undid, tying its arms around her waist. She pushed off again.

Yumi spun gymnastically in only trousers and bra in such apparent ignorance of its teasing effect on Ezra that he scolded himself for ever thinking that such an innocent girl could have been an Entertainer.

Hot and sweaty after a good workout, they enjoyed invigorating steam showers and met outside the sports hall, flushed and radiant.

If Yumi loved the low-gravity deck, she adored the Star View Promenade: a walkway under a plastiglass dome at the very top of the space station, pointing away from Capella, giving a clear view of deep space. They wore magnestrip harnesses and shoes to parade under a velvety heaven glistening with a billion diamond pinpricks of liquid fire. The romantic possibilities of a man, a woman and a canopy of stars was not lost on Ezra, but his role that night required gentlemanly restraint, as he enjoyed Yumi's company for her own sake.

Entranced by their immersion in immensity, Yumi and Ezra proceeded slowly and silently to the Star View Restaurant and ate a surprisingly good dinner for 40 Galactic cents on Ezra's credit stick. Re-charged by her meal and charmed by Ezra's attention, Yumi completed her transformation into a lively and knowledgeable companion, interested to know how Ezra's hyperdrive engine had performed in its recent tests.

Ezra was proud of his ship. His description of its virtues was a pleasant coda to an evening in which two random strangers were thrown together light-years from their mutual home. It was now time to return to his ship and get some sleep before his big day tomorrow.

"Come on, Yumi," he said as they left the restaurant. "I'll see you back to your hotel."

"Is the night over, then?"

"It is for me, I leave in ten hours."

"But you haven't shown me your ship yet."

"It's not that impressive."

"Ezra, I'd like to see your ship very much."

"All right. We'll go for a nightcap. Then I'll take you to your hotel."

They were at the passenger docks in ten minutes and began the tour with a view of the outside of his ship.

It was a robust yellow and silver tube with a bulbous front containing the piloting bridge, a plastiglass viewing-dome below and an entry hatch above, with the airlock docking system on the blunt nose. Beyond the bridge were two more hatches with explosive release-bolts. They covered the emergency escape pods.

The living quarters were between the escape pods and the hold, which bulged out to give the ship a fat belly.

There were four manoeuvring rockets, fore and aft, that could be turned in any direction. There were radio antennas and receiving dishes on the hull. It was a craft designed to stay in space, not to land on a planet with a strong gravitational field or a thick atmosphere, so it need not be aerodynamic, though it had power enough to take off from a small planet, such as Earth, in an emergency.

The hyperdrive unit was a model that Yumi knew well. The engine took up one-third the length of the ship and was in two parts. A cone-shaped ion drive, covered in red pipes and valves, provided forward thrust. Extending beyond the ion drive was the expanding concentric silver rings of the hyperdrive motor that pushed the spaceship into hyperspace.

Inside the spaceship, Ezra led Yumi through the bridge, past the two escape pods into the living quarters. There were the galley, shower and head, storage drawers and collapsible furniture. Beyond them was the hold, full of well-used prospecting equipment: a digger, bulldozer, jetcopter and rocket-powered robot drones to send down to a planet's surface. There were tools, emergency supplies of food rations and water, and even a second head. Everything was held down by rope ties as well as magnetic lugs, to be doubly secure.

In fifteen minutes they had finished the tour and sat as comfortably as possible in the restricted cabin under zero gravity. Ezra made tea for Yumi and poured a whisky for himself. They drank from sealed beakers with non-spill attachments.

"Will you tell me about your trip?" Yumi asked. "You never said where you're going."

Ezra had not wanted to talk about his mission in public, but back at his ship, the night before he left, there was no further need for secrecy.

5 All about Samothea

"Have you heard of Samothea?" he asked.

"It's the lost planet, isn't it? The 'other Earth' on the far side of the galaxy. No one who goes there ever comes back."

"Well, that's the myth. Samothea isn't on the far side of the galaxy but it's true that no one has come back from there for more than a century. It's the 'other Earth' in the sense that, had Samothea been successfully colonised, it would have rivalled Earth as the most life-friendly planet in the galaxy."

"Where is it?"

"1,850 light-years from Earth, on the outer edge of our spiral arm toward the centre of the galaxy. We can't see its solar system from any inhabited world or space station because they are all on the inside edge of the Orion-Cygnus Arm and there are dust clouds in the middle of the arm."

"What's Samothea like?"

"When it was first prospected, 150 years ago, it was described as a young and lifeless world, recently volcanic but now mostly stable. It's the same size as Earth, with identical gravitation, a similar temperature, slightly slower speed of rotation and is about 90 million miles from its sun, a mid-range yellow star similar to Earth's sun. Samothea seemed to be the ideal planet to colonize.

"Terraforming began shortly after discovery. In the first stage, probes were sent loaded with molecular nanotechnology robots. The nanobots were designed to replicate almost without limit, taking power from the sun to oxygenate the atmosphere. In the second stage of terraforming, probes were sent loaded with bacteria, seeds and spores, to spread life to the oceans and land."

"The third stage was the arrival of 300 engineers with machinery, a stock of plants, animals and a cloning laboratory to complete the terraforming process. The engineers landed about 125 years ago on the smallest continent; really a very large kidney-shaped island in the tropical zone of the planet. This was the first part of the planet to be made fully habitable. They stocked the ocean with fish, planted forests and released insects, frogs, small reptiles, birds and mammals onto the land. They cloned domestic animals and they built houses to make a settlement, fabricating building materials from volcanic rock and sand.

"There was prospecting for ores and minerals. All the reports were good and, five years later, a first transport of 3,000 settlers was sent. They were farmers, foresters, builders and mechanics. They took their families and domestic animals. No acknowledgement of their arrival was ever received. For the last 120 years, nothing had been heard of either engineers or settlers."

"What happened?" Yumi asked.

"No one knows for sure."

"Did no one try to contact Samothea?"

"Plenty of times. Communication probes were sent but none returned. Even some prospectors tried jumping to Samothea but they also seemed to disappear. Whatever happened there disrupted communications and probably killed spaceships, maybe even a whole planet."

"And you're just going to jump there?"

"Well, it's a calculated risk. No one has tried for 50 years or so. Maybe whatever caused the problem has died down now and gone away. I'll be careful. I'll make a dozen gradually shorter jumps so that, unless what hit Samothea disrupted hyperspace pathways, my final jump should land a good distance from the planet. Time enough to take stock and prepare for danger."

"I hope so," Yumi said sincerely. "What do you expect to find there?"

"An empty world. It's unlikely there'll be any people surviving, neither engineers nor settlers, but their terraforming technology might have done its job. If not, we'll have to start over. The worst-case scenario is there's no planet there because some catastrophe destroyed it completely."

Yumi shuddered at the prospect, showing real concern for a man whom she had grown to like in the last few hours.

"You're very brave leaping to a place where hundreds of people might have been killed. I wouldn't do that."

"Yet you came all the way to Capella on your own."

"That's different," Yumi assured him. "I had to come."

"You had to?"

"I mean I wanted to. I wanted to do something different, just for once."

"Well, Capella is certainly different but I think you've taken just as much risk as me."

"Will you have any stops on the way to Samothea?" Yumi wondered, changing the subject to something more comfortable for her.

"No. I don't plan to stop unless I need to."

"And how long will you stay away?"

"Well, that depends on what I find, but I have provisions for a year."

Yumi stayed silent, thinking for a moment while Ezra sipped his whisky. She shyly glanced at him and smiled. Recalling what she knew of prospectors, she said:

"You've been out in space for a month testing your engines, then you were on Capella for just this evening and tomorrow you're going off for maybe a year. You know what I would have done tonight if I were you?"

"What would you have done?"

"I would have found myself a woman to sleep with. ..."

Ezra was shocked into silence but Yumi was not finished.

"... and I would have fucked her brains out."

Ezra coughed. He quickly recovered his voice and decided on an honest reply.

"Did you see me talking in the bar to a beautiful red-headed woman in a tight dress?"

"I think so." Yumi had been introspective at the time but she had scanned everyone who came into the bar.

"Her name is Hestia. She's an Entertainer. I'd gone to the bar in the hope of meeting her but she already had a customer."

"I see," Yumi said. "So you ended up being nurse-maid to me. I'm sorry."

"Don't be," Ezra assured her. "You're good company. I had a lovely evening."

Then Yumi remembered.

"But you started talking to me before Hestia came in ... and it wasn't just idle conversation, was it?"

There was a realisation and an accusation. She stood up, her hands on her hips.

"You thought I was ..."

Ezra closed his eyes, waiting for an explosion of offended dignity. It never came. Instead, Yumi burst out laughing. Her high tinkling laugh was full of amusement.

"Well, that's ... precious, wouldn't you say?"

"I don't dare say anything," he said, risking opening an eye. Yumi relaxed her arms but remained standing.

"You were the perfect gentleman all evening," she said. "Why were you so bashful? After all, I know you think I dress like a prostitute."

She came closer, speaking softly:

"I could be her, if you want."

"Whom?"

"The woman who sends you off into the unknown with a smile on your face ..."

She reached out to touch his cheek and lift his face up.

"... the woman who makes your last night on Capella a special one."

"You've already done that."

"You know what I mean. ... I suppose you know how to make a woman happy?"

"No man knows that; but if you're referring to sex, then my ... er ... equipment was still working last time I used it."

"Well, come on then, Ezra. You've hired me and it's time I did what I was paid for."

"Please don't joke like that."

"You're too much of a gentleman. I see I'm going to have to seduce you."

For the third time that evening, Yumi was a different woman. Nothing remained of the introspective girl in the bar. Even as Ezra's animated companion in the exercise hall and his knowledgeable dinner-companion, Yumi had not been as gay as she was now. Her naturally joyful soul emerged as she attempted to sit on his lap and kiss him.

"Calm down, Yumi, you're not yourself," he said, fending her off.

"But I am, Ezra, finally."

Whatever her plan had been earlier that evening, this was what she now wanted. Yumi showed genuine happiness.

In the end, it was not hard to seduce him. As soon as she laid a good kiss on his lips, he kissed her back and pulled her onto his lap. She sat forward, her legs spread, holding his head as they kissed, pressing their tongues together.