We Don't Know When It Will Be Fixed

“Please, I’m asking for your patience.”

This from a frazzled techie with a day’s worth of stubble on his face who’s all but literally wringing his hands. He’s standing a couple of feet above us and behind a railing, looking down on a small group of worthies in an angry knot on the shed floor.

“Please,” he says again, “go back to your homes and wait patiently. We don’t know when it will be fixed.”

“I absolutely will not wait patiently,” says Mitch Gunderson, our local Soltech executive and the orneriest civilian on this rock. “I have a one o’clock meeting in New York City, I want to return to Earth now!”

“It’s just not possible,” the techie says desperately, “the machine is down!”

This causes no small stir among the worthies. I exchange a look with Jay Scoot. Jay rides a desk in the Earthlink office, he gave me the tip and it’s turned out to be a good one. If the Earthlink is broken, that is big news. I double check that my glasses are recording – this is going to be good vid.

“I don’t understand,” says Diana Fitzpoloi accusingly, and I shudder. Ever since her oldest kid started going to school, she’s singlehandedly turned PTA meetings into a beat about as dangerous as the police blotter. “We’re going to Bermuda.”

“It’s a scheduled vacation,” she says with authority, like she’s telling Moses to grab his chisel and take dictation.

“I understand that,” the techie says patronizingly, “but it’s just not possible now. Please, we’ll resume our regular schedule when the problem is sorted.”

“I won’t be treated like this!” says Domino, who is organized crime around here, the worst kept secret in town.

“Get me this man’s manager!” says someone else.

“My...” I have my glasses pointed right at him when the techie looses it completely. “I’m a scientist, you ignorant clod!” he shouts, “not a cashier at the cantina! I can’t bend the laws of physics to fit your schedule, the answer is no! Now get the hell out of my shed!”

He turns and storms back into the booth, slamming the door, a gesture somewhat undermined by the fat the fact that the booth is all windows, and the door is pneumatic, it can’t really slam, and as it closes we’re all still staring at one another. But he’s untied the knot. The worthies mutter to each other and disperse.

Great vid. I’ll be eating out on this for a week, and the story isn’t over, I can feel it.

* * *

I go to leave the shed too. At the door, I unstick a strip of velcro at my shoulder and pull out a plastic tube. I clip it to my glasses and stick the applicators into my nostrils. Once they’re in, oxygen starts flowing automatically. That done, I push through the door and step outside.

The reason for the oxygen tube is that Plantagenet III isn’t fully terraformed yet. The toxins have been leached from the atmosphere, but the oxygen percentage isn’t yet capable of sustaining human life. Just the most obvious sign that Plantagenet III is a frontier planet – most of us haven’t even been here a year, which is still 365 cycles of 24 hours, although that isn’t long enough to take us all the way around our sun.

The air on Plantagenet III is crisp and bright. The earth is soft and springy. The terraforming machines chewed up the top layer of rock and mixed it with algae while we were still in orbit. Organic life has all ready taken root here, and soon the soil will bear crops.

The Earthlink shed is near the center of town. We haven’t actually built anything yet – town is a collection of Durasteel sheds detached from the ship that brought us here and arranged in a grid pattern. In town, there’s the saloon, the cantina, the dormitory, the school, the sheriff’s station, and around that there are single family houses for the worthies.

Star travel isn’t glamorous, and we aren’t pioneers. Soltech decided that sending a town to Plantagenet III would be profitable, so they did, complete with workers, soldiers, worthies and class conflict. This is basically a company town, which makes me as a journalist about as welcome as infectious disease. I get by because we aren’t unique – there are hundreds of settlement worlds, a lot of them with more social complexity than this one, and people want to hear the news. That, and I keep my head down.

I figure that this story is only getting started. Worthies wouldn’t be worthies if they were the types of people to go home and wait patiently. Or to let themselves be talked to like that. That techie was having a very bad day, and I’d bet money that it’s going to get worse.

I walk a few hundred yards and go into the sheriff’s station.

* * *

I’m right.

“So do something about it!” says Diana Fitzpoloi angrily.

Sheriff Penderman has an aggrieved expression on his face, and is holding his hands up in front of himself in the universal posture of fear and submission. “Now hold on, Diana,” he says. “Do what?”

“That man can’t just get away with it! He is ruining my family’s scheduled vacation! I won’t be treated like this by a- by a-”

“By some fucking techie!” Mitch Gunderson agrees.

“Now hold on folks. Now just wait a minute,” says Sheriff Penderman. “What did he actually say?”

“He told us to get the hell out of his shed for one thing!” says Mitch Gunderson.

“And that we can’t go back to Earth, even though we reserved this time in advance!” adds Diana.

“Well alright, but what did he say about the Earthlink?”

“Some fucking nonsense!” shouts Mitch Gunderson.

“It isn’t working, he said. But how could it not be working??”

“You figure it out, goddamn it.” says Mitch Gunderson. “Bring him in here!”

“Now hold on, just hold on. I can’t arrest the man!”

“Sure you can,” says Domino staring me right in the face. Hint taken. I stop my glasses recording.

“He’s a menace to society,” says Domino. “Disturbing the peace. Indecent exposure. Antisocial behavior. Arson. You bring him in here, and one of my guys will make him turn the Earthlink on.”

“Now wait just a minute, Domino, he’s a techie. I don’t think he’s capable of doing all that.”

“Oh he did it,” says Diana Fitzpoloi, “and he’d do it again.”

The sheriff sighs. I surreptitiously start recording again.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he says, “I’ll bring him in here, and I’ll have a chat with him about firing up the Earthlink, but that’s all I can do.”

“All you can do is your job, you mean?” says Diana Fitzpoloi, radiating hatred.

“That’s right sheriff,” agrees Mitch Gunderson. “This is a well run town and it’s going to stay that way. We won’t tolerate anything else.”

The sheriff sighs again. “I’ll get him,” he says.

As a mob, we follow the sheriff out of the station.

* * *

As a mob, we burst back into the Earthlink shed.

The techies are all doing whatever it is they’re doing very grimly. Typing grimly, whispering grimly, fiddling dials grimly. The head techie, who started all of this notices us come in and comes back out onto his balcony.

“Please, I’ve told you, we can’t send anyone yet. The machine isn’t working. Go home, we don’t know when it will be fixed.”

Then he catches sight of the sheriff.

“Sheriff Penderman?” he says in surprise.

“Just what is all this?” the sheriff asks. “These good people need to get to Earth.”

“Yes, I understand that,” says the techie, flustered, “but the Earthlink isn’t working. They’ll have to wait.”

“What does that mean? Not-”

“Do you see what we’ve been dealing with?!” Diana Fitzpoloi cuts him off. “His attitude is completely unacceptable!”

“That’s right!” says Mitch Gunderson, “Sheriff, you haul this man down to the station and you lock him up until he changes his tune.”

“What?!” says the techie.

“That’s not necessary, Sheriff,” says Domino. “I’m sure I can solve this problem myself.”

“Techie, you’re coming with me,” says the sheriff, eyeballing Domino, “For your own protection.”

The techie gibbers as they get the cuffs on him. The sheriff marches him to the station, and the mob follows after.

* * *

The sheriff puts the techie in the cell, and then we all stand around. It’s pretty clear that no one has thought about what to do next.

“Now let’s just get down to solving this problem,” says the sheriff, “we need to get the Earthlink up and running.”

The techie doesn’t respond to this, but it wasn’t really aimed at him.

“Well put, sheriff,” says Mitch Gunderson sarcastically, “what an incredibly incisive read on the situation.”

“There’s no call for-” the sheriff begins, but Diana Fitzpoloi cuts him off.

“Are you not the man who can make that happen, sheriff? Because we all came in here thinking you were good for something.”

“Well hold on-” the sheriff begins, but Mitch Gunderson cuts him off.

“Fuck this. We should’ve gone right to the top in the first place. Sheriff, you get Captain Abernathy on the com this minute.”

Captain Abernathy commands the starship Reliable, which brought us here. Technically Space Com and Soltech aren’t the same thing – he’s a soldier and we’re civilians, but at the end of the day, Captain Abernathy is still the guy who says jump and we all jump.

The sheriff pales. Captain Abernathy has important things to do, and this whole mess falls squarely in the category of civilian bullshit. The sheriff’s whole purpose in life is keeping stuff like this off the captain’s desk.

“Well hold on-” the sheriff tries again, but Diana Fitzpoloi cuts him off.

“Call him, sheriff,” she says evilly.

“This minute,” repeats Mitch Gunderson.

The sheriff crumples in defeat and keys his com.

“Sheriff Penderman for Captain Abernathy,” he says. “… I’ll hold. … I’m waiting, it’ll take a minute. … Captain sir! This is sheriff Penderman. … Yes, well there does seem to be a problem. We’ve got a delayed jump to Earth, and we’ve got some angry people down here. … Well the techie says is isn’t working. … I can’t tell them that, sir. … It’s just, these people have places to be. … They won’t like that, sir. … No, I. Yes. I understand, sir. … Yes, sir.” The sheriff keys his com off and takes a deep breath. “Captain Abernathy says that you’ll just have to wait patiently until the Earthlink is working again.”

Diana Fitzpoloi and Mitch Gunderson exchange a look of utter disbelief.

“Unacceptable,” says Domino.

“We’re going up to the ship,” says Diana Fitzpoloi. “I’m going to have a talk with that man.”

“People, please,” says sheriff Penderman, but no one is listening to him.

“That’s right, Diana,” says Mitch Gunderson. “That is exactly right.”

The mob leaves the sheriff’s station with the sheriff following after in desperation.

I stay behind. I have a hunch that the rest of this story is right here.

* * *

The techie is staring dumbly into space.

“What’s really wrong with the Earthlink?” I ask him.

“Nothing,” he says quietly. “Nothing on our end. But there’s no correspondence.”

“What does that mean?”

“We always knew it was going to happen. I guess it did. The sun blew up. Earth’s gone.”

“Well shit,” I tell him. I’ve never been to Earth, but the news still hits hard.

There’s a moment of silence after that. I stop recording.

“You know,” I say, “there’s an easy solution to your problem.”

“Oh yeah?” he asks me.

“Yeah,” I tell him. “Just send them through.”

“I can’t,” he says, “there’s no where to go.”

“Send them through anyway.”

He lets out a chokey little laugh, and I smile.

I go over to the sheriff’s desk and key the com.

“Hey, sheriff? … No need to bother Captain Abernathy. The techie says he’ll fire up the Earthlink after all.”

* * *

All of the worthies are standing on the concrete floor of the Earthlink shed.

There’s Mitch Gunderson, dressed for his important meeting in New York City.

“It’s about fucking time,” he says. “If you’d just done this in the first place.”

There’s Diana Fitzpoloi with her husband and their two kids. They’re all dressed for the beach and carrying towels, sand toys, a cooler and an umbrella.

“This is only how reasonable people expect to be treated,” says Diana Fitzpoloi. “We’re already an hour late.”

There’s Domino, going who knows where for purposes of his own.

“When I get back here,” says Domino, “I’m going to get to the bottom of this, and you better believe nothing like this is going to happen again.

The techie, the sheriff and I stand off to the side, away from the departure floor.

“Key Earth,” says the techie, rubbing his wrists.

“Sir?” asks the techie at the desk.

“You heard him,” I say.

“Yes sir,” says the techie at the desk. He fiddles with some knobs.

And they’re gone. Mitch Gunderson, Diana Fitzpoloi and her family, Domino, and all of the other worthies are gone. Just gone.