WALKABOUT by Shelby Vick and Richard W Brown Mankind's first fuel was wood for fire; many different fuels have been developed since then, and all had a dangerous potential. Few, however, were as dangerous as the fuel developed by the Flaaxians. – Oglethorpe's Universal Encyclopedia, Volume Six Alone. Many people, at one time or another in our history, have been alone, but none like us. 'Us' - Banti L'Rotte, Creg Whitman and me, Lars Sorenson. While there are three of us, we are far more alone than anyone has ever been, a hundred or more lightyears from the next star. I'm talking to myself, I know. That's supposed to be a sign you're going spacey – and maybe I am. Here on this alien planet, a cold desert with a dim sun overhead, my two partners useless and worse than spacey, why shouldn't I be out of my mind? No way to communicate, no way to get out of here if we can't get our fuel. But that's not why I keep talking. I'm speaking out loud to myself to keep from losing it, the way Creg and Banti did after walking into this gel I'm slogging through. Their suits didn't protect them from whatever sort of alien danger this is, and I wasn't about to count on my suit protecting me any better. My partners and I had set down this far from the automated fuel manufacturing depot because, for a brief time while our ship's tanks were still hot, there was just enough fuel left over to make close proximity to more fuel a bad idea. It would take about half an hour to cool down enough for us to install the replacement tank. When I agreed to be part of this odyssey, I thought I had nothing to lose; no family, no close friends, not really that much to live for, nothing to miss. Nothing to miss? Right now, I'd love to see blue skies above me, spotted with cumulus clouds. Right now, even a thunderstorm would be great. Snow-capped mountains on the horizon would be wonderful. Or the sea; I never realized how beautiful the sea could be. The presence of the gel surprised us. It's perfectly transparent, so we didn't realize it was there until Creg started forward, intent on getting to the automated fuel depot half a mile away. And stopped. "There's something here!" he said, backing away in surprise. The comealong he'd taken to carry a fuel tank back bumped into his heels as it slid to a stop. Banti was a tall blonde with a figure our tightfitting suits emphasized. The suit was also built to support her bare breasts, of which she was proud; they were firm, well-rounded, with brown nipples surrounded by a tan aureole. Creg and I often admired those breasts -- with our eyes only, that is. To this point, Banti had not Chosen. Usually, two men and a woman would not be sent on a lengthy trip because of possible . . . ah, "personal conflict," shall we say? This trip was supposed to be quick; either we made it, or we were dead. No one had anticipated what we'd run into. Anyway, Banti immediately replied to Creg: "Of course! Our fuel." Creg shook his close-cropped head, visible through his clear helmet. "No; I mean here." He waved his hands in front of him. "Come see. --Well, not see; feel. There's some sort of . . . resistance." "Let me scan it first," Banti said. "Move aside." Creg did so, and Banti touched her scanner controls. "By my readings, it's an eight-foot thick, mile-wide disk of some kind of transparent gel -- like a giant pancake, with our fuel machine the slice of butter in the middle." Fuel. It could get you to your destination quick as thought -- all you had to add in was time for the individual steps. When you reach the system specified by your computer, your rockets took over; if that wasn't your end goal, you picked up more fuel and took the next step. The fuel was introduced by the Flaaxians who, despite their longevity, took several generations to reach us from their distant part of the galaxy, since we were out in the fringes, so to speak. Now that the chain of fuel pods are in place, their home planet is within easy reach. They gave us the fuel when they first joined our Interstellar Council a century ago. "Interstellar Council" sounds grand -- doesn't it? Actually, it had consisted of three races, us plus the Orionids and the Arians; with the addition of the Flaaxians the group became, of course, the Universal Council. Now there are many other members, thanks to the distances made possible by the fuel. The fuel was perfectly safe as long as you didn't have too much or too little. The only major drawback to Flaaxian fuel -- the thing about it that has yet to be worked around -- is that it's a one-way ticket and you have to use up all 20 Universal Litres to get to where you're going, whether it's the minimum of three quarters of a lightyear or the 119-lightyear maximum. So, before you start, you'd damn well better know where you're going, and it had damn well better be somewhere with more fuel or facilities to make it. Try to activate a tank with more than 20 U.L.s and your ship detonates with the force of a fusion bomb; try to activate it with less than 20 U.L.s and . . . well, we didn't know precisely. Early on, a few ships tried to skimp on fuel and they simply disappeared and they've not been seen or heard from since. Maybe they're in another galaxy. Or another dimension. Maybe they no longer exist in any time or space. No one knows; after a few disappearances like that, people became remarkably indifferent to trying to find out. But some systems were very far apart and there were no habitable planets in between to create more tanks, and some of them were where hardly anything but space existed. In our case, there was this one system, halfway to nowhere, or, to be precise, between two spiral arms of our Milky Way galaxy. Both arms are colonized and there's a lot of trade between them, but up to now traffic has first had to go toward the core until a point is reached where the arms are closer together -- down our side and then up theirs. But this one-planet 'orphan' system is adrift between the two arms -- not exactly half way, but close enough for our purposes. Totally uninhabited. Uninhabited, with no one to produce fuel. Remember the old saying, 'Luck is 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration?' Inspiration came first, this time. Two things happened: An automated system designed to create fuel pods was perfected and this orphan system was discovered. Maybe I should add in another factor: I heard about it on the same day, and decided two plus two could add up to billions. I went straight to the decision-maker in our company (the president's wife, of course) and laid it out. "It takes money to make money," I told her, using another ancient saying, "but it's more likely to work when money meets with opportunity. We're pretty much in the middle of our galactic arm. Less than 200 lightyears away, there's another arm with a highly-developed cluster composing billions of customers with whom we trade on a regular basis." "True. But it's expensive." she said. "It takes at least twelve steps, twelve very expensive tanks of fuel, to get there!" "That's where we put it together, the orphan system and this new automated fuel- making mechanism. If our guys can figure some way to get it set up on the one planet in that system, we can use it as a way station and make the trip to the other arm in only two steps!" "Making us all wealthy!" she said, catching my excitement. "Yes! But that's where the money's needed -- to develop a way to get that mechanism out there." "I'm certain it can be done," she proclaimed. She was right, proving that almost anything can be done with sufficient motivation. Money was the motivation; the perspiration was provided by our thinktank and technicians. Eventually, they produced something they called a "dimensional slingshot." A magnetic bottle containing the system was suspended in space between two drone ships -- little more than fuel tanks inside a controlling computer system far enough apart for each to exist -- which had a magnetic field between them that imparted momentum to the magnetic bottle when they blasted off. The dimensional momentum would carry the bottle's load to its destination; once there, small rockets under its own computer control would carry it to its planetfall. It got here, and not much later we got here with our cargo, but the system and cargo was doing us no good until we could pick up our fuel. Without it, we were stuck, stranded more than any legend had ever imagined. Banti looked at her scanner, frowned, and then looked at me. "This is strange," she said, her bafflement showing on her pretty face. She did what testing she could, but we lacked the equipment to be certain about the nature of the gel and whether we could get through it safely. Safe or not, however, our ship could go no further without our fuel tank. We first wondered if the gel was a result of a mixture of leaking fuel and the composition of the planet, atmosphere or ground. Banti, however, was our fuel expert and after a few calculations she announced there was no way the fuel was responsible. "But it's dead in the middle of this stuff!" I objected. "That's no accident." "Doesn't matter what caused it," Creg said. "If it's safe, I'm going." "I didn't say it was safe," Banti objected. "I just can't tell what it is. If you go in--" "If I don't," Creg interrupted, "we aren't leaving! We can't go anywhere without fuel!" Determined, he turned and started his trek. The comealong, a three-by-five platform, three inches thick, followed, hovering an inch off the ground. "It isn't so hard," Creg said. "Like wading through water. Slows me down a bit, that's all. If I get tired, I can always rest." "Let's go inside and watch from the console," Banti s...
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