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I got an email this morning from a fellow who wanted a link to buy a printed copy of Mars, Ho! In it, he said he wanted to buy copies as gifts, so now I'm chomping at the bit even more wanting to get it out -- CHRISTMAS PRESENTS!

There is as yet no link, which won't exist until I publish. I have no idea what it will be, as it won't be on my site. But this sort of thing makes my day, and it happens almost daily. If you were modded up this morning, thank yourself. That email put me in such a good mood I didn't issue a single downmod, and I usually give out one or two.

It's a good thing I didn't have points yesterday, visits to the dentist never puts anyone in a good mood.

But Wednesday was even better than today. As I got a beer, someone was reading the bar copy of Nobots (I wrote part of it there) and chuckling. I took my beer out to the beer garden, and one fellow was raving about both my books to another fellow, and eagerly asked me when the next one will be out.

This is one of the most emotionally rewarding things I've ever done. I love you folks!

The breakthrough was not in physics itself, but in mathematics. The new insights led physicists to see physics in a new light, and it wasn't long before they were experimenting with the equations, which seemed to indicate that it might be possible to instantly transport an object to anywhere in the universe.
        It was a quarter century before a machine using the new understandings that actually did anything at all had any result, and the result was completely unexpected.
        The apparatus was set up and turned on. A mouse seemed to come from nowhere, scurrying across the room as mice do. One of the participants shrieked, startled, but no one saw a connection between their experiment, which had seemingly failed yet again, and the unexpected intruder.
        “Lets try it again,” a grad student suggested. Doctor Phillips laughed, and said “Doing the same thing the same way and expecting it to work is insane.”
        “I'm not suggesting we do it exactly the same way. Lets try a higher voltage.”
        “Well, voltage is one part of the equation that's a little fuzzy. Same wattage, or raise voltage and leave amperage alone?”
        “We could try both.”
        “Go ahead, but I'm not expecting any different results.”
        The student set the experiment back up, doubled the input voltage, and turned the device on. A large wild boar appeared in the room close to the wall. They all ran in fright, closed the door, and called animal control. Animal control caught the hog, which was taken to the municipal zoo.

        Gabriel Watkins had a different job to do today than yesterday; his mule would get a break from the plowing. There was a wild boar that was upsetting his animals and would be trampling his fields and eating his produce if he didn't do anything. He had a pig to hunt, kill, butcher, and eat.
        It was otherwise a normal morning like any other. He read The Spectator and drank coffee as his wife prepared breakfast. The newspaper was talking about the new president, James Monroe. It also spoke of the nation's newest state, Maine. Everyone had expected that for weeks, since the Missouri Compromise had been signed. Missouri was sure to become a state soon.
        After he finished his breakfast he loaded all three of his muskets and both of his pistols, told his wife he would be back before lunch and set off towards the woods.
        The boar wasn't hard to find. He raised his musket, aimed – and the animal disappeared before his eyes. He scratched his head, and the woods themselves disappeared, replaced with mowed grass and brick buildings.

        Officer Oscar Jobs of the SIU campus police department was shocked. A heavily armed man was on the campus! He drew his weapon and ordered the man to drop his weapons and get on the ground. This was especially disturbing, since all of law enforcement was on high alert because the Twin Towers and part of the Pentagon had been destroyed that morning.
        Oscar was greatly relieved when the suspect complied.
        Because of the terrorism, the news of the armed man on campus didn't even hit the Edwardsville Intelligencer, let alone the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

        “This is the strangest case I've ever seen,” Dr. Wilson said to Dr. Kent. “The man is obviously suffering from schizophrenia, and the type of schizophrenia isn't that uncommon. What's weird is that his whole persona, and not just the fantasy in his mind, all corroborate. He swears that he was born in 1780, that he's a thirty one year old farmer and it's spring of 1821. He was wearing antique clothing from the era and carrying antique firearms; front loading muskets. All of the antiques were in excellent shape for their age, almost two hundred years old. He claims to have owned the muzzle loading weapons for a decade.
        “Really strange. Anyway, Haldol isn't having any effect except to put him to sleep. I've hit a brick wall. Any suggestions?”

        They didn't repeat the experiment for another year to allow the theorists to scratch their heads and do calculations. It was, as it often is, one of the graduate students who was close to writing his doctoral thesis who found the answer, or what appeared to be the answer. Rather than sending objects away from the device, it brought them closer to it. They changed some circuitry and repeated it.
        It failed spectacularly.

        “Dr. Wilson, your patient has escaped.”
        “What? When? How?”
        “We just discovered him missing and we're faced with a mystery. Everything was properly secured, none of the guards saw anything, the cameras trained on the doors saw nothing. He just disappeared into thin air.”
        “That poor man! I hope he's okay until he gets picked up again.”
        “There's more, it gets even weirder. His clothing was laying on the bed, laid out like someone laying there but he hadn't stuffed them with anything, and I just got a call that all of his antiques are missing, and nothing else from storage was gone. No sign of forced entry, the door was locked when they went to do inventory."

        It was two o'clock, and Emma was worried. Her husband was still gone, and fearing for him went in search. She was afraid that the boar, or perhaps some other animal, might have gotten the best of him.
        She found him at the edge of the woods, naked and sleeping, with his clothing and other belongings scattered around him. She almost didn't recognize him; his beard was gone and his hair was clipped short, but she saw the scar on his leg. He had thought he would lose that leg, but God had been good to them.
        She touched his cheek and he woke up.
        “Emma? Where am I? Where are my clothes? What am I doing here? Dear Jesus, I had the strangest dream!”
        “Are you all right, Gabe?”
        “I don't know. The strangest thing... where is my clothing?”
        “Scattered all around you. What happened to your beard and hair?”
        He touched his face. “Dear sweet Jesus, Emma, it had to be that damned witch!”
        “Alice?”
        “Who else? You know that old crone hates me and it's the only explanation. Emma, she somehow transported me to some sort of magical but evil place. I don't know how I got back. I was in some sort of prison and went to sleep, and when you woke me up I was here, not far from where I was when... Oh, good Lord, this is terrible!” He started getting dressed and gathering his belongings. “We need to see the sheriff. That witch needs to hang!”
        “What did you see?”
        “Well, I had the hog in my sights and he flat out just disappeared without a trace. Then everything else was gone and I was somewhere else and a man with what looked like a weapon of some sort, although it wasn't like any gun I ever saw ordered me to drop my guns and get on the ground, and I did.
        “He tied my hands behind my back with some sort of metal thing and put me in a really strange thing, made of what looked like painted metal but really shiny, on four black wheels that didn't look anything like any wheel I've ever seen. The thing had seats. He got in it in front of me, did some things, and it started moving! All by itself! And really fast, faster than I've seen anything go.
        “And then he talked into a small black thing and it answered!
        “They put ink on my fingers, rubbed them on paper, and flashed something in my face. Then they put me in a tiny stone room with a steel door.
        “Then they took me, with their witchy magic things, to another place, some sort of jail where they pretended to be nice. There was lots more magic, a crystal ball that showed moving pictures and had sound, it was really weird.
        “Then they filled me with magic potions that dulled my mind and made me sleep. Someone they called a doctor, some woman, kept asking me stupid questions almost every day.
        “Then one night I went to sleep and you woke me up here. We need to talk to the preacher and the sheriff, that witch needs to die!

        It took another century for the theorists to figure it out. The mistake they had made was not realizing that time and space are inseparable; that there is no difference, that time is just another dimension.

        The sheriff said there was nothing he could legally do, but Alice Chalmers was hung by a lynch mob on May 12, 1821. No one was charged with or prosecuted for her murder.

John's first patron of the day was waiting at the door when he approached.
        "Roger!" he said as he unlocked the door. "I haven't seen you in years! Want a beer? My stuff is pretty damned good if I do say so myself, and it's a lot cheaper than the imported stuff."
        "Sure," he said. John poured a beer and handed it to him. He took a sip. "Not bad, John. So you're tending bar now? I heard the shipping company fired you for that thing on Vesta. They said you killed a couple of guys."
        John laughed. "Tending bar? It's my bar! Fired me? The president and the CEO both tried to talk me out of retiring, but my wife's building a telescope here. Time for me to settle down, I'm tired of pirates and all that other bullshit."
        "Yeah, I heard you married a scientist."
        "So what have you been up to, Rog?"
        Roger laughed. "Well, I've been waiting for you to open for an hour most lately, it's been almost a year since I had a beer. I've had a bunch of Saturn runs and a Vesta assignment the last couple of years and haven't been to Mars in a long time, but when I got back from Vesta they sent me here with a load of barley and hops and stuff like that. Did you buy all of that?"
        "Yeah, that's my shipment. I told you I'm making beer, didn't you see the sign? I have a microbrewery here, that's all beer ingredients. So how do you like it?"
        "It's good beer, you're pretty good at it. So they begged you not to retire? When I was on Vesta unloading some food supplies they told me that you got fired for killing two passengers. Did that happen?"
        John laughed. "No, not only did they not fire me, I got a raise. And yeah, two stupid rich tourists died but it was their own stupidity, arrogance, and sense of entitlement that killed them, not me."
        "So what happened?"
        "Well, I was taking scientific equipment to Vesta and a couple of the other asteroid stations in the belt, and I had two first class passengers. A couple of assholes from Austin who were born rich and got richer speculating on the stock market. Idiots who couldn't learn because they thought they knew everything."
        "Yeah," Roger said, "Texas is damned weird, I lived in Houston for a while when I was a kid. Everybody wore those stupid looking hats and acted like they were all ranchers or something. History class was filled with Sam Houston, the Alamo, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It's been a museum for a couple hundred years now."
        "Yeah, that's those two morons to a tee. Drug store cowboys, all hat and no cattle. Probably couldn't tell a cow from a horse and thought milk came from factories.
        "All they did was bitch and complain and break rules. They hated the coffee I made for them, and my coffee's pretty good, lots better than robots did then. I'm glad they upgraded those robots, I always made coffee for passengers because the robot coffee was barely drinkable.
        "They complained about the pork, what would I know about pork? Hell, I wasn't rich, I was just a boat captain. I only ate pork a couple of times in my life before I met Destiny. There wasn't anything I could have done about the pork but they bitched about it every damned day even though the cookbots did damned good on everything else but barbecue. Oh, they complained their asses off about the barbecue, too."
        "They're crazy about barbecue in Texas," Roger said. "Some folks there eat it every day. I've seen them barbecue eggs! They're always bragging about how big everything is in Texas, too."
        "Yeah, they bitched about how ‘dinky’ their cabin was. Hell, my whole damned houseboat would probably have fit in their living room and it's a big houseboat. Crappy trip, the only good thing was they were paying for full gravity so it didn't take very long to get there.
        "Anyway, these guys liked reading old science fiction, really ancient stuff. They'd run across a short story called Marooned Off Vesta, and when Vesta ordered supplies from one of their companies they decided to buy tickets and ride along.
        "These dumbasses wanted to recreate the damned story!"
        "What was the story about?"
        "Well, it starts with..." Another patron entered. "Gus Harrison! How about that!" John said.
        Roger grinned. "What are you doing in a bar this time of morning, old man? I haven't seen you in years, either."
        Gus laughed. "You're the one with a beer in front of you. I just got back from Europa and haven't had a beer in months. What do you have, John?"
        "Pretty much everything, but my best seller is my own stuff."
        "John makes some damned good beer," Roger said. "I like it better than imported. Give me another one, John."
        "Yeah, I'll try one," said Gus. "So what have you guys been doing?"
        "John's been telling space stories. He was telling me about some morons off Vesta."
        "Yeah, like I was telling Roger, two annoying rich tourists wanted to recreate an ancient story some Russian guy wrote a few hundred years ago. It starts with three guys who have just survived a collision with an asteroid that destroyed most of the ship and killed everyone else."
        "I think I read that," Gus said. "Marooned Off Vesta?"
        "Yeah, that's the one."
        "He wasn't Russian, he was American, Isaac Asimov. He emigrated to the United States with his parents from Russia when he was three. Rog, in the book one of the three guys puts on a space suit, crawls around the outside of the ship and blasts the ship's water tank with a laser or something and the water shoots out and puts them on Vesta where they're rescued by its science station. So what happened on your trip, John?"
        "Well, these morons thought the guys in the story could have just jumped from orbit and landed on Vesta and decided to prove it."
        "What?" Gus and Roger exclaimed in unison.
        "That's just stupid," Gus added.
        "No shit," John replied. Well, they found out the hard way."
        "How did they get outside the boat?" Roger asked. "We keep everything like storage locked away from passengers."
        "They hacked the lock with some kind of gizmo they bought on the black market. It was really damned sophisticated, it kept the alarm quiet and the warning light dark."
        "Son of a bitch," Gus said, "The stupid bastards dealt with pirates? They're lucky they lived long enough to buy the tickets. So they suffocated out there after they ran out of air?"
        "No, worse. It was bad. I discovered it half an hour after they were floating outside and the meteor alarm went off. Lucky they wasn't able to unhook that alarm, or it really would have been like that story, only we'd all have died. There wasn't time to rescue the morons so I got the hell out of the way of the rocks. When the storm passed I went back into orbit and retrieved what little of them that was left, and delivered the cargo and the dead morons to the landing boat from the station."
        "Almost wrecked your ship, did they?" Roger said.
        "Yeah. I was moroned off Vesta."

I was thinking about shopping his out to various science fiction magazines, then remembered all the ones I bought when I was young. I realized that there was no way any story with John and his friends and their "colorful language" was going to published in a "family magazine" so I decided to go ahead and post it here. I hacked most of it out this morning.

Marooned Off Vesta was Isaac Asimov's first published story, appearing in the pulp fiction magazine Amazing Stories in 1939.

The magazine stopped publication in 2005. It was reborn as a free web magazine at the above link in 2012. It's where I found the link to the Asimov story.

Bored, since I can't do anything to the book but wait for the USPS, I decided to log into my web host's site and check out statistics for my site. Most of them were completely unexpected.

I expected most visitors to be running Windows, but very surprised at how many Linux users came. 71.4% were running Windows, not surprising, but the 12.5% running Linux was completely surprising, considering that everything I read says only something like 1% run that OS. Many of the 14% "unknown" are likely to be Linux as well.

Linux kicks Apple's ass on my site! Only 1.4% are logging on with a Mac; they're dead last.

Browsers surprised me, too. The 52.3% that Firefox has wasn't surprising, but the fact that IE was dead last among desktop browsers (well, except Safari) but what surprised me even more is that people are still using Netscape and Mozilla. And I thought I was bad about not upgrading! 7.8% were on Android's browser.

Also surprising was the number of folks from non-English speaking countries, some of which outnumbers visitors from New Zealand (not many Kiwis visiting at all).

What really surprised me was that there were zero with scripting disabled. Not that it matters; I don't use any (except a little CSS) but I did use a little javascript back in the day when I was running my old Quake site. If I did use it, disabled scripting wouldn't hurt anything, my code always failed gracefully when it failed.

I still can't believe all the tools I have at my disposal, although I doubt I'll use more than one or two; I manage files with FileZilla and rarely log on to my host's site.

I've been busy editing. I sent off for a printed copy this morning, so you'll probably see more of me the next couple of weeks, as will the folks at the bar. I'll probably be bored, since I've been working obsessively on that book since March.

I updated my web site slightly this morning, adding a "coming soon" heads up about the book. I'm hoping to publish in a month. There will be one lucky fellow who will get a free hardcover copy, and hardcover copies will be "invitation only" but all you'll have to do is email a request and I'll return the mail with a URL where you can get it. I may do the same with the paperback.

My apologies, but the eBook version will be priced at two dollars more than my first books, which were free. It will be a two dollar Amazon download. If your reader doesn't do Amazon, forward your Amazon receipt to me with your reader type and preferred file type and I'll send it back by email.

If you're afraid I'm just trying to collect email addresses to spam, I'm not. I don't give or sell my address book to anyone. Moreover, my site collects absolutely no information about visitors whatever, and doesn't use cookies or any kind of scripting whatever.

PDF and HTML files will continue to be free, as well as the eBooks of the two previous books. The prices on the printed books will only change if the printer changes his prices.

Most likely I'll work on that new short story, Moroned Off Vesta about the incident Captain Knolls mentions several times in the book. It will have him in his Martian bar telling a friend who captains the company ships about what happened.

The title is a nod to Isaac Asimov's first published story, Marooned Off Vesta. I may try to shop it to a few science fiction magazines before I post it.

I mentioned my web site earlier, the domain registration needed to be renewed and I needed more space; their "free" hosting (it comes with registration) only gives you five megabytes. I had to delete the Bible to make room for The Paxil Diaries and wouldn't have had room for Mars, Ho! It's costing me $35 a year for ten times the space. "Free" is fifteen bucks.

Yes, they're cheap and they're good. I had to use their tech support to get FileZilla to see the files for FTP; the process had completely changed. Unlike some help desks I've dealt with in the past, they were excellent.

The changes to FTP include a lot. I can have subdomains, many subusers with their own separate users, all sorts of goodies now. Forums, discussion boards, comments, SQL, PHP, Java, Ruby, the whole kit and kaboodle.

And I won't be using any of it, but if someone on Soylent's staff is reading this, you might want to check them out, it may save you some money. I don't know how much your extra traffic would cost, you'ld have to talk to them.

I've registered all my past domains with them, starting in 2000, and never once had a problem with them. They're a Canadian company, register4less. If you have a small site and need less than 5 megs and no frills it's only fifteen bucks.

Oh, and buy a book, I have new false teeth to pay for.

Mars!
        John and Destiny left the houseboat parked on a space port pad they had rented at the spaceport at the Meridian Bay dome and got in a cab. Destiny said "I don't want to shop on an empty stomach. Taxi, take us to a restaurant that serves eggs and pork sausage this time of day."
        "Wow," John said. "That's going to be an expensive place."
        "Well, I'm buying. You said you never tried pork sausage, now's your chance, it's my treat. Besides, I've been thinking about pork sausage for half the trip and I don't want to wait any longer!"
        Dewey was on his way to Mars when he finished reading Knolls' report. He sipped on the coffee the captain had brought and switched on the news. They were digging the deep hole in Mars again.
        Plans were being made to tow the tragic Venus station to drop into the sun. It had been argued that if they dropped it on Venus it would incinerate from the friction with Venus' thick carbon dioxide atmosphere, but some lesser educated people were afraid that the disease might somehow survive Venus' hellish surface.
        Charles was back on TV talking about pirates. He was glad it was Charles and not him, Dewey hated TV cameras.
        He emailed Kowalski, telling him that when Kelly got back to Earth to have a couple of his best electrical engineers, one who was good with batteries and one that was good with engines, to talk to him and find out how he got a third gravity out of batteries. Nobody else had managed to do that before, and some engineers claimed it was physically impossible.
        John and Destiny were really busy on Mars the next few days, mostly shopping. First shopping for a wedding ring, then for real estate; they would buy a house and a bar. The houseboat was big as houseboats go, but was a bit small for someone as wealthy as Destiny who had lived all her life in very large homes, especially since the houseboat was half full of beer. After signing papers for the house they went for breakfast at a nice restaurant, where Destiny bought John another omelette and pork sausage. John wasn't any more impressed with this sausage than at the other restaurant.
        Then they visited Tammy in her hotel room. Her face was still a little bruised but she wasn't wearing the sling.
        "Hi, come on in, guys. Want some coffee?"
        "Sure," Destiny said. "So how are you coming with your research?"
        "Well, we haven't had time to do much except move them into the facility and acquaint them with it, but Rilla had really come a long way and Lek was almost cured already, at least from the physical withdrawal symptoms, by the time we got to Mars. She's to the point that withdrawal is still torture to her, but no longer deadly. She's still in mental and physical pain but she's not dropping any more. The physical pain should be gone in a few weeks. Of course, full therapy will probably take years."
        John said "Yes, Lek sure did change during the trip. This is great coffee, Tammy!"
        She laughed. "It's robot coffee!"
        "No way," John said.
        "Yep, and it's one of your company's robots that made it, too!"
        "No way in hell!" John exclaimed.
        "It's true," she said. "Your company updated all their coffeebots' operating systems and other programs. And it perks a whole pot of coffee in five minutes, and a cup in less than a minute. You have one of their robots, now it can make good coffee. I only found out because they're advertising it all over everywhere. I'm surprised you didn't notice."
        John said "I saw the ads, I just didn't believe them."
        Destiny laughed. "Dad must have tried a cup of his own robots' nasty coffee, I think he fired his head engineer. He should get here in another week."
        John said "Bill lands in two days. I'm still reeling from the trip here. God, but that was a damned nightmare!"
        They continued chatting a while before going home. They would be moving into their new home about the time Bill showed up two days later and would have more shopping to do; they would need furniture and appliances.
        John and Destiny met him at the spaceport, and they stopped at a bar for the beer he'd promised John. He bought John and Destiny several, in fact. John tried to buy a round and Bill wouldn't let him.
        "Excuse me, Bartender, but I want to buy a round," he said. The bartender told John what they cost.
        "Wow," he said. "That's pretty high! Is it like that everywhere here?"
        The bartender told him the reason was the cost of shipping it to Mars from Earth. He was going to clean up in the tavern business, it seemed, since Destiny would get a huge discount on shipping. He decided that while he was learning business he'd learn how to make beer and open a microbrewery in his tavern, too. He'd have really cheap beer, at least compared to other taverns, that he could sell for a huge profit and still be way cheaper than anyone else's if he could learn to make good beer.
        Bill said "Bartender, don't take his money, this is all on me. I have to write a damned report tomorrow, I don't know why" he said, turning to John.
        "I had to write one and they really wanted detail," John said. "Maybe they changed policies and everybody has to write reports now."
        A few days after that they met Dewey at the spaceport. After Dewey and his daughter hugged she said "Where's Mom?"
        Dewey said "Come on, Destiny, you know how your mom is. She's scared to death to even get on an airplane, let alone a space ship. I'm going to wear a camera at the wedding, though, so she'll be there in a way."
        He stuck out his hand. "Good seeing you again, John. That was some great work you did on that trip. We're going to be rewriting the book. I wish I could talk you out of retiring."
        "Well, thank you, Mister Green..."
        "Call me Dewey, John. You're family now."

Landing
        The alarm woke me up. Still asleep I thought "damned whores" out of habit, thinking we were having an emergency before I remembered that we were due to enter orbit and I'd set the alarm myself the night before. We had been on approach since late yesterday afternoon and would be in orbit and docking with the maintenance facility at nine this morning. The landing boats would already be docked there and we would be on Mars' surface by late this afternoon.
        The alarm woke Destiny up, too, and she got up as I was making coffee. Destiny told the computer to make steak and scrambled eggs with toast, and we took a shower together.
        Wow! We were finally entering orbit around Mars and would be docking at nine and we hadn't died! Not yet, at least. The way this trip had gone we'd probably crash land on Mars, or get assassinated at the spaceport. I did have a price on my head, after all. Of course, they most likely didn't know my name or what I looked like, but the boat's new captain would probably be in danger.
        We put on the news and started eating breakfast and the doorbell rang. It was Tammy.
        "Hi, Tammy," Destiny said. "Want some breakfast?"
        "No, thanks," she said, "I already ate, but I'll take a cup of coffee if it isn't made by a robot. So, who's going to be your bridesmaid?"
        "Well, who do you think, silly," Destiny said. "You, of course. Who's going to be your best man, John?"
        "Bill, of course, but he won't be here for a week or more, he's on batteries."
        They started talking about clothes and I just kind of zoned out and nodded once in a while.
        At five 'til eight I went in the pilot room to finish getting us in orbit, and by eight thirty we were weightless and would be docking in a few minutes. I floated to my quarters.
        At quarter to nine the three of us started floating towards the docking bay that still worked without tearing up somebody else's docking bay and didn't have my boat attached, so we could meet the landing crafts' captains who would escort passenger and cargo to Mars. Then we'd take off in the houseboat and Tammy would go down with the droppers.
        I got on the PA. "Attention, ladies. Please assemble in docking bay one for landing."
        The boat docked a few minutes later as the droppers started showing up, and I greeted two of the three landing pilots, Tom Farley and Jim Woolsley. I'd known both of them for a few years, so we talked about old times as Destiny and Tammy said their goodbyes and cargo streamed in.
        They and Tammy started escorting the droppers to the landing boats while me and Destiny went to my houseboat to land on Mars. Lek walked by and said "Thank you, Captain."
        We undocked from the ship and flew down to Meridian spaceport together. Now if you guys will excuse me I need to buy a wedding ring.
        See you.

Next: Mars!

Engines
        We'd be in orbit around Mars and landing on the surface tomorrow. Only one more day of this horror movie! We might all live after all!
        Destiny was still asleep. I got out of bed and went to the head, went in the kitchen to start coffee (stupid robots) and put a robe on.
        Yeah, in that order. Fuck you.
        Anyway, I told the robots to make me some breakfast. Destiny got up and went in the kitchen while I got dressed. The robot was almost done frying my eggs and sausage and had started cooking hers.
        "Good morning!" she said. "Been up long?"
        "'Mornin', sweetheart. Maybe ten minutes. Computer," I said, "What time is it?"
        It read "Oh seven thirty three."
        We ate our breakfast and drank coffee and watched the news in the living room as the robots cleared the table. They were still trying to figure out what do do about Venus. It also had something about the battle the fleet fought, but Destiny said that they didn't mention me or her charity that the company was hauling for but they mentioned Bill's boat and its sabotage. I didn't get to see the whole thing. They had an interview with Mister Osbourne, but I had to go to the pilot room and I missed that part.
        We didn't need a course correction, but there were red lights on engines sixteen and eighteen, right next to seventeen. I shut those two down and the two next to them as well and went to inspect them, stopping at home to fill my coffee. There was some politician talking about shipping and pirates on the news while I was there.
        "Trouble?" Destiny asked, seeing my frown.
        "Only a little, we have two more broken engines right next to seventeen. I'm going down to inspect them now."
        I was astonished when I walked past the commons and saw Tammy talking to the German woman, and the German lady was actually wearing clothes!
        I trudged down the five damned flights of stairs and inspected engines fifteen through nineteen first. Sixteen and eighteen had shorted out like seventeen, so I left fifteen and nineteen shut down as well in case it was something spreading from one engine to another like they did on that Titan run, and I ordered the computer to leave all five alone. The book doesn't say to do that and I don't know how those engines work, but I saw a pattern here and I wasn't going to take any chances, anyway. I plugged repairbots in diagnostic mode into the four I'd shut off, hoping they wouldn't melt like the two that had tried to fix the dead number seventeen, but maybe they could record something engineering could use.
        I logged it all, but the rest of the motors and the working generator were exactly like the tablet said they were supposed to be. Busy morning!
        I trudged up all those damned stairs and took off my nasty boots and went straight to the shower. UGH! Damn but it was nasty down there.
        I put on clean clothes and inspected cargo next, thankfully for the last time; no more inspections. Tomorrow morning we would dock at the repair facility and Destiny and me would leave on the houseboat, and the company's boat and the stench downstairs would be somebody else's problem. I couldn't wait to get off of that damned boat!
        The only ones who were in their rooms were all asleep, and the rest were in the commons, maybe thirty or so. It was noon, I was hungry, and decided to finish inspections after lunch.
        "Done already?" Destiny asked.
        "No, I was downstairs longer than normal. I still have to inspect the passenger section and the commons and the sick bay. Want to go for a walk with me after lunch? I'm starved."
        "Sure," she said. "Robot, two rare ribeye steaks, mashed potatoes and gravy, and coleslaw."
        We ate, and she came along as I finished my inspection. I did the commons last, and by then the only two people in there were Lek and the German woman. Lek was drinking coffee and the blonde was eating some kind of sandwich, and both of them were wearing clothes. I guess the blonde didn't want to be an animal, either. It was nice seeing people in the commons and nobody was naked for a change. Destiny said "hello, ladies, I like your dresses." Lek said "Cup coon mock; oops, that Thai for ‘thank you very much’."
        The heavy German woman said "thank you" in her heavy German accent as well.
        We were due to enter orbit around Mars the next morning, so Destiny came in the pilot room with me as I watched over the computers for our final approach. "You're going to be happy and the droppers are going to hate it," I said. "We'll be weightless when we enter orbit and dock tomorrow."
        We had walked slowly and by then it was almost suppertime, so when I finished getting us ready to go into orbit we went home and had the robot make pizza and bring us each a beer. I'm getting used to Newcastle, I might keep drinking it on Mars. Well, I was going to have to drink Newcastle for a while anyway, because I still had an awful lot of it crammed in my houseboat. I don't get many chances to drink much of it on a journey. My boat's half full of beer!
        After supper we moved our luggage to the houseboat, and Destiny put on the third Lord of the Rings movie and we ate the pizza while we watched the beginning of the movie, then we cuddled while we watched the rest of it.
        Those are some a long movies! We listened to some Vaughn and then went to bed. I told the computer to wake me up at six.

Next: Landing

scriptis Interruptus
I've been spending six to ten hours a day, seven days a week, working on Mars, Ho!. But not Wednesday; Wednesday I visited a surgeon. It was the least fun I've had since my last eye surgery in 2007.

I've had a serious case of advanced periodontitis for several years. Surgery for the condition was scheduled for this past Wednesday. The anesthetic was painful as hell; the guy was a lot better at cutting than at sticking. There was a sharp stab of pain when one of the teeth came out, too. Scraping the bone and suturing didn't hurt... yet. He inserted my new dentures, the nurse inserted gauze, and I couldn't get my lips together because of the swelling and the gauze. My clothing was bloody by the time I came home. I was deeply uncomfortable.

When the anesthetic wore off I was in severe, extreme pain. I'd been prescribed a bottle of hydrocodone pills for the pain, but I refrained from taking them because I've never liked the opioids. I took naproxin (generic Alieve, same drig at 1/3 the price) instead, despite the fact that I knew it would make the bleeding worse.

By eight thirty I broke down and took a hydrocodone. I can see why people with chronic pain get addicted to those things, because the pain went away completely a half hour after taking it. Like any addictive drug, long term use causes tolerance for the drug and the user needs more and more for the same effect. It didn't seem to dull my mind like the opiates I took after that car wreck in 1976, although like codiene it made me itch all over. Far better than the excruciating pain I'd been in.

By midnight I felt like I might be able to sleep. I rinsed my mouth out with the prescription antibiotic mouthwast they had prescribed, took another hydrocodone and another naproxin and went to bed.

I didn't sleep well; the teeth kept waking me up. I was up and drinking coffee by six AM. I took another naproxin and hydrocodone as soon as I woke up, and used the nasty mouthwash that I have to use three times a day. At eleven I visited the dentist, who adjusted the appliance and made it much less painful. I didn't need any more pills, although the dentures are gooing to need more adjustment.

I went through sixteen chapters after the dentist, made nine changes, and left the book five words shorter than it had been Tuesday. It's getting closer and closer to being finished.

I didn't have to wear my teeth last night. I slept like a log. My mouth was fine when I woke up, but it was hard getting the teeth in. They look good, but so far I can't eat with them; all I had yesterday was soup. I couldn't even eat cottage cheese. All I'd eaten the day before was breakfast, but I had no appetite whatever after the surgery.

I did manage to eat an egg this morning, but barely. This will take some time.

I'll post another Mars, Ho! chapter tomorrow; there are only three left.

Nobots
I've changed the format of the paperback version of the book. It's now "pocket book" size, still seven bucks.

Paleobiology
Yesterday's Ilinois Times had an article that will be of interest to those who have an interest in paleobiology, and face it -- we're nerds, if it's science or technology we're interested.

The article is titled 300 million years ago, and I found it fascinating.

A warm, moist breeze blows through the swampy forest at what is now Danville, Illinois. An eight-foot-long millipede scurries by. Nearby, a dragonfly with a foot-wide wingspan zips through the 100-foot-tall fern trees. It’s 300 million years before the present day – before the supercontinent Pangaea broke apart, and long before any dinosaurs walked the earth.

That swampy forest has survived for millions of years as a field of fossils buried 250 feet below the surface near Danville. Discovered in 2007 in the Riola and Vermillion Grove coal mines, the forest has given scientists important clues about Illinois’ ancient past.

The article is four pages long in its printed version (free almost anywhere around here).

And no, I'm not affiliated with that newspaper.

<OfficialDevHat>
So, I'd given an estimate of "by this weekend" for crypto-currency payment processing. I was pretty close for not even having looked at it or picked a payment processor yet. It's looking like I'll finish Monday unless I find another 3-4 hours of coding in my brain today. I can't really speak to when it will deployed to prod afterwards.

The skinny of it is I went through two other payment processors before settling on Bitpay. It would have been nice to accept litecoin and dodgecoin as well as bitcoin but some payment processor who shall remain nameless had a dev environment that did not mirror their prod environment and all the documentation for the API was for their dev environment, so I killed with fire all nine or ten hours of coding I'd done to process payments with them and went back to looking for another processor. Maybe one of these days they'll update and bring some sanity to their system and you lot will be able to use litecoin and dodgecoin here. Until then, bitcoin payments via Bitpay are currently working from my dev environment but in need of some finishing touches and testing before being deployed for you lot to use.
</OfficialDevHat>

<PrivateCitizenHat>
A quick word about Bitpay. If you ever want to receive USD when being sent BTC, I personally highly recommend using them. Aside from test.bitpay.com not being mentioned in the docs at the time, they were bloody brilliant to code against. As a random code monkey on the Internet, they have my resounding personal endorsement.
</PrivateCitizenHat>