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         THE FLIGHT OF THE PEQUOD II          
                                               
                      by H. Palmer Hall               
                   Copyright (c)1992

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When she heard the front door of the Miners' Inn open, Cora Dalmire looked up from her work. A middle-aged man had stopped in front of the dreary oil painting that occupied most of one wall of the entryway 

He looked at the swirls of black and the pinprick glares of white intently as if searching for some reason he should have encountered it. The look on his face and his hands tracing the swirls told Cora the painting had disturbed him as it had most out-Vesta visitors to the asteroid. She had studied each of their reactions as closely as she studied his and had never quite seen what she was looking for. 

Cora and her husband, Garcin Dalmire, had brought the painting with them to Vesta thirty years earlier when they had still hoped to find excitement and to strike it rich mining the asteroids. Running out of credits and with no funds to leave Vesta, Garcin had signed on with the Vesta Mining Company. Twenty-one years later, a drunken miner had set a short fuse and a collapsing tunnel buried Garcin beneath tons of ore. 

With the last of her insurance money, Cora had purchased the inn, and, in her first act as owner, had hung the painting by the entrance. It reminded her of Earth and of the emotional impetus that had forced her into what both she and Garcin had dreamed of as a personal voyage of discovery, but had wound up as a decadeslong period of entrapment on a small planetoid with nothing to offer except the possibility of one day earning enough credits to return to Earth. 

Finally, the stranger turned his face from the painting and walked slowly to her desk. "That's a hell of a painting you got there, lady." 

"Yes," she said, not even bothering to smile. "Are you staying long?" 

"Only the one night. By then, my ship should have cleared Vesta Security and I'll be able to set up shop." 

"What are you selling?" Cora pulled her scanner to the front of the desk and reached for his credicard. She scanned it quickly and, as the display lit up, added his name. "Mr. Bunskin, is it?" 

"Yes, ma'am, Ray Bunskin. And I'm not selling anything. I landed in the Alcuin, a libship. I lend, for a small fee, datawhirls, tri-dees, and a very small stock of the world's great books. Nothing but the finest." Sensing that he had a customer, Ray smiled. "If you can come down in the morning, the library bay in the ship'll be opening early." 

"You have books?" For the first time in a year, a slight smile played across Cora's normally dour face. 

"Yes, but only a few. Nothing but the classics. Most of my customers just want the latest datawhirls. It doesn't pay to stock books. They want to experience the emotions of the characters in various situations, have the datawhirler spin out different scenarios based on their own ideas. You know what I mean? Not just follow a plot that someone else devised." 

"When I was a young girl, Mr. Bunskin, I haunted our local library. Read book after book after book. How lovely! The smell and the feel of books! Oh, it has been a long, long time." 

Ray Bunskin stared at the innkeeper. She wasn't young anymore, in her fifties, but still attractive when she smiled. Must be bored, too, he thought, to talk about books like that, when he had so many datawhirls and tri-dees. "You come on down to the Alcuin, Ms....?" 

"Cora Dalmire, Mr. Bunskin. And I'll definitely make it down to your ship when you're ready." 

The next morning, after serving breakfast to the unmarried miners who stayed in the Inn, Cora Dalmire walked out under the clear dome and, for the first time in more than a year, noticed the brightness of the strange sky. Though she had lived on Vesta for more than two decades, she continued to recall the night stars from Earth. This year on Vesta, the night sky with its familiar constellations, was marred by the return of the comet. Such predictability isn't right in such an unpredictable universe, she thought. Falling in towards the sun, Halley's tail had already begun to streak behind it as it raced inside Jupiter's orbit and began its plunge through the belt. She shuddered slightly as she stared at the growing tail and thought of its long voyages century after century, then she turned back towards the library. 

Cora had grown used to the reduced gravity of Vesta and loped in long, almost slow-motion, strides through the streets of the small town and over the too-close horizon to the seldom-used spaceport. 

The Alcuin, one of two ships in dock at the time, was garish in the extreme. As she walked up to the two synthalloy lions flanking the entrance to the library, Cora laughed out loud. They recalled memories of her Earthtown library, but these lions were distorted. Their over-sized eyes glowed red and sensors, detecting Cora, caused the eyes to swivel towards her and show scenes from the latest tri-dees. From the speakers in their mouths, the lions roared out the costs of datawhirls and players and invited her in. 

As she walked between the lions and into the ship's main library, Cora spotted Ray Bunskin napping behind the main desk. She walked quickly through the glare of tri-dee screens and past shelf after shelf of datawhirls to the very back of the shop where she had spotted a small collection of only a few hundred books. 

"Beg pardon, Ms. Dalmire," Bunskin yawned widely and stretched, "didn't see you come in. Just taking a little rest. Setting up the entrance and the lions wore me out." 

His eyes lit up as he saw her pull one of the books from its shelf. He could smell a rental. "As I said last night, we don't get much call for book books, but we do have that small set you're looking at. There simply aren't enough real book readers in the system any more." 

"Is this all? For a library?" A slight frown appeared on Cora's face. 

"Yes, ma'am. I've got a great collection of datawhirls, though, if you'd like to really lose yourself in a strong plot that you help to create." 

"I don't think so, Mr. Bunskin. I don't want to lose myself, not again." She turned back to the books and pulled down from the shelf a fat copy of Moby Dick. "It's been years since I've seen this book. Will you be on Vesta long? Will I have time to read it?" 

"It's hard to tell, Ms. Dalmire. From the looks of things," he waved around the empty room, "I'm not going to make my nut any time soon. I could be stuck here forever." 

"Then I'll take it," she said, handing him her credicard. 

"Here," he said, "take this one, too, no charge. Just for taking that old book off the shelves." He handed her an unlabeled datawhirl. 

"What is it?" she asked. 

"Old French stuff, mid-twentieth century, but the label's worn off. Only thing you can read is `existentialisme'. Plug it in while you're reading the book and it'll double your pleasure." 

To the sound of roaring lions, Cora left the library and retreated to her small room behind the Inn's desk. With two hours before she needed to prepare dinner for the dozen miners who stopped by on the way to their cubicles, she had time to make a start on the story. She put the datawhirl on the small table next to her chair and opened the book to the first page. "Call me Ishmael!" she read, and lost herself in the story. 

After what seemed to Cora only a few minutes, a yell from the front of the Inn interrupted her quiet. "What's for dinner, Cora? Where the hell are you?" 

"Clam chowder," she screamed back, then realized where she was. "I mean, whatever it is will be ready in a minute. Go on into the dining room!" She put the book down next to the datawhirl and stretched her whole body as she reimmersed herself in the daily routine of running the Miners' Inn. 

Serving dinner to the miners, she thought back to Earth and whales and oceans and wondered why she had ever left. "Aaah!" she screamed, Karl Johnsen, one of the younger miners, grabbed her around the waist and pulled her onto his lap. She slapped him hard on the face and ran out of the room tears streaming down her face. 

"Cora! What's wrong?" Karl yelled after her and ran back to the office. "Cora, honey, I didn't mean anything by it. Just a little fun. Can't do much of anything else on this rock." 

"There's a library, Karl. Go check out a book or something and stop treating me like a piece of natural beef." 

"Hey, Cora. I'm real sorry, honey." 

"Don't you "honey" me, Karl Johnsen. If I had the money, I'd get off this scurvy rock and back to Earth where men like you can find these to do without bothering me." 

"Earth? You talking about the Earth I came from last year, Cora? There's nothing there for anyone except chemshooters and socketheads. It's not like out here, honey, where you're free to do whatever you can afford to do." Karl smiled at her and drew her into his arms. As she looked up, he bent his head down and brought his lips down hard on hers. 

Cora pushed back and kicked him hard in the groin. "Keep the hell away from me!" She ran into the dining room. "All of you just keep away from me!" 

That night, after the last miner had either gone to bed or down the street to the bar, she lay down in her own bed and picked up the book to read again. She looked down at the datawhirl which she had brought up the stairs with her, and with a shrug, pushed it into the slot next to the lamp socket. She opened the book to Father Mapple's sermon and, enjoying the company of Ishmael and Queequeg, began to read of various whaling disasters. 

But what was Garcin doing in the old clapboard church? And who was Estelle? Why couldn't they open the door? And where did the door lead? She realized that the datawhirl had put her and her lost husband into the church with Ishmael, but could not figure out the attractive blonde woman named Estelle who clung to her husband's arm or the big bronze clock sitting on the pew in front of her. She put the book down and unplugged the datawhirl. 

Finding her place again, she read until late in the night. When she fell asleep, the book dropping to the floor beside her, Cora dreamed. In her dream, she sailed a spaceship called Pequod II chasing throughout the system a great phantasm with a huge tail streaming behind it. She whispered into the night that nothing would box her in, not ever again. She strove with the malignant beast and woke, sweat-soaked, with fire in her eyes, shouting, "I'd strike the sun if it insulted me!" 

Still shaking with rage, Cora pulled her faded clothing back over her body and brushed her hair in front of the mirror. As she twisted her long black hair out of her face, she saw the wild look in her own eyes and, faintly behind her, the shape of a man holding a gold doubloon in his hand. And she knew, suddenly, who Estelle was. 

She remembered walking home to the small dome she and Garcin shared and seeing the young blonde woman racing out of the house. When she had asked Garcin about her, he had shrugged off the incident. "Nothing to worry about," he had said. "Just a woman from the shop. Not a brain in her head." She had only been the first, and perhaps not even that, the first Cora has caught. In the years before Garcin's death, Cora knew of three other women he had bedded in their dome. She had been ready to leave, but had no other place to go. 

Images of whales and the bronze clock and of Estelle and Garcin and a locked room stayed in her mind all day. That night she dreamed again of the Pequod II and saw her husband, his hands in Estelle's long blond hair, and herself locked in the small room. Garcin glanced quickly at Cora, stroked Estelle's face and then pounded against the door, banging harder and harder, until finally it cracked open and swung out. He stood at the threshold and stared out into the dark corridor. Taking Estelle's hand and turning his back to Cora, he shook his head sadly. 

Watching the two of them move back into the room and sit down on a hideously green sofa, Cora walked to the door, then turned back and looked once more at Garcin. "Aren't you coming?" she asked. When he replied that he had too much still to learn about himself in the locked room, she laughed bitterly, and walked through the prison door into a blackness devoid of light. She looked back into the bright room, then slammed the door shut behind her. 

When Cora awoke the next morning, she felt relaxed and more alive than she had felt in years. Plugging in the datawhirl, she opened the pages of the book to read the last chapters and learn of the death of Captain Ahab. The datawhirl no longer fed her the story of Estelle and Garcin; the clock was gone. But Ahab raged and speared the whale and the Pequod sank. When Queequeg's coffin shot to the top of the ocean, she sighed and put the book away. 

Cora made her mind up that morning to leave Vesta. The datawhirl had reminded of her of her husband's infidelities and of the stagnancy that had pervaded her life. She would do something and in that doing would rise out of the locked box. And she would begin with Bunskin. 

The first thing she saw when she left the Inn that morning was Comet Halley, its tail already stretching across the horizon as the solar winds pushed them farther and farther behind the small nucleus. She raised her hands as if to strangle the chunk of dirty ice. "Nothing should be so predictable!" she screamed at it. 

Ray Bunskin never had a chance. He stood to greet her when he heard the lions roaring. Asking her if she wanted to rent anything else, he was stunned at her reply. 

"I want the ship! Now!" As she spoke her eyes pinned him to the wall. 

"But you can't have it! It's my livelihood." 

"Livelihood hell!" She almost spat the words at him. "What kind of living can a man make doing what you do. With me as your only customer on Vesta, you'll never earn enough money to take the old tub off asteroid. You might as well sell it now instead of waiting `til you can't even afford a meal at the Inn." 

"Sell it? The Alcuin? How could you afford to buy a ship like this? The automated navaids alone would cost more than a dead miner's wife could ever hope to pay. No, Ms. Dalmire, I'd love to sell out from under this thing, but you couldn't float the credits." 

Cora looked at him sharply. "I can afford the ship. Not with credits, but with the Inn. It's yours Bunskin and all its contents and damnable customers, for the ship." 

Bunskin saw the way her eyes lipped over the datawhirls and her hands clasped the book and thought he could get more out of her. "Okay, Ms. Dalmire, she's yours for the Inn and for whatever credits you have in your account." 

"Half the credits or no deal," Cora said. "I've got to get the powerpacks refilled. But take all the datawhirls with you this afternoon." 

She plugged her credicard into the scanner and told it to transfer half her credits and the rights to the Miners' Inn on Vesta to Ray Bunskin as soon as he transferred the Alcuin to her. Bunskin then inserted his credicard. 

"You've got yourself a ship, Ms. Dalmire." 

"Enjoy the inn, Mr. Bunskin. I'm going home to Earth." 

"But that's the one place you can't go, Ms. Dalmire. You can go any other place in the system, but not to Earth." 

"Why not?" She turned to him, knowing when she saw him shift his eyes that he was telling the truth. "Why not, Bunskin?" 

"The same reason I didn't go there. Only drones can land near Earth. The poisons in the atmosphere got so bad over the past few decades that no one's allowed in, only out. Only reason people can leave is the authorities figure that way there'd be more of everything for the people left." 

Cora ran back to the inn, leaping madly, recklessly through the small town. When she got back to the room, she through her clothes into a small bag and lurched back outside, stopping only to take down the oil painting that was her last link to the dying planet. 

The next morning, she cleared port authority and floated gently away from Vesta. Selecting a navigation chip, she set the time, date, and Vesta coordinates on the console and told the ship to plot a course for Comet Halley. Pequod II flashed an enlarged view of Jupiter on the six foot screen above the console. 

"Not Jupiter, idiot! The comet! Take us to the comet!" 

In rhythmic speech, the computer responded. "This ship is incapable of reaching Comet Halley without taking advantage of the gravity well of Planet Jupiter. The only possible window lies in Jupiter. Pequod II will intersect Halley orbit between Planet Earth and Planet Venus." 

For the next few weeks, Cora worked her way through Ray Bunskin's book collection, stopping only to exercise, eat and drink and to stare at Jupiter as it occupied a greater and greater part of the display. 

"Have you ever read Moby Dick, computer?" 

"This computer has scanned most books and has links to all major datalibraries. It does not read, but can display the contents of any scanned book." 

After a few months, the ship dove through the rings of Jupiter and Cora sank deeply into her acceleration couch as the forces slingshotting Pequod towards Earth pressed against her. By that time, she had grown bored. Of the ship and the food! Of the books and the computer. Of the low vibrations of the ship's engine. It's time, she thought. Time to fight back. Time to thrust my hand through the wall and shout like Ahab against the walls that hold me in. Her head ached and throbbed in time with the pulsing of the ship. 

A new picture had appeared on the console. The picture framed in a black background a myriad of white specks swirling across the sky. Halley's Comet, its head tiny compared to the long tail streaming away from the sun, had made its long journey through the outer planets on its circuit into the system and streaked in to brush near the sun. She felt the ship shudder as the main engine boosted speed with the assistance of Jupiter's gravity and sped on its way to its rendezvous. Cora sat back down to finish her book. 

She had forced herself to exercise during her three-month flight to reach the comet. Her hair grew ever longer and her muscles toned up as the regimen matched the rhythm of the pounding in her head. Ever in front of her, she could see the comet. It blended with the painting in the Miners' Inn, swirled through the blackness of the canvas. Her eyes flashed wildly at the screen as the comet's head grew larger and larger until, at length, the tail could fill only half the display and the head, only eight kilometers wide, grew larger than a human's. 

She laughed wildly as she slammed her body through the routine that had begun with a half hour each morning and night and now occupied half her waking hours. She needed less sleep than she had earlier required and ate ravenously to feed the demands of her growing muscles. Cora prepared herself for the great task to come. 

Finally, the ship's alarms clanged and she heard the first evidence that she was closing with the comet as tiny fragments of the tail intercepted Pequod II's path. 

Cora ordered the ship to give full front display and blanched as she saw, then heard, more fragments banging into the front deflector screens. The plasma display unit came alive with the tiny pinpricks of light racing toward the ship in bright lines as she matched patterns with the streaking ball of ice and flew into the tail. 

Her fingers flashing across the keyboard, Cora ordered the Pequod II back into the flume as comet and ship plunged down toward the inner planets and the sun. At 18,000 kilometers out she saw the black nucleus in the center of the bright spray of gasses. A fist of ice and encrusted dust, the comet's head dominated the screen like some malevolent despot demanding her retreat, and Cora screamed in defiance. 

Choosing the heaviest trail of light she could find, Cora made last minute adjustments to the console and nursed the ship to greater and greater speed. As she saw the black fist grow larger and larger, filling the screen, she ordered the computer to cut the engines. The Pequod II raced down the shining yellow tunnel made by the comet's tail and plunged downward into the spray. Cora raised her own fist back at the comet and sang in outrage as the ship plunged into the abyss and fractured the ball of ice in an explosion that sent showers of multicolored lights racing through the system for days. 

A large chunk of its nucleus broke off and Comet Halley, calving, created a daughter comet. Twin tails licked outward from the comets as they grew farther and farther apart. The night sky over Vesta lit up with the reflection from Cora's comet as it began its journey past Earth and around the sun. 


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