SoylentNews

I'm absolutely stocked with the response the first bit of original content I've written for SN has gotten over 80 comments (even if a fair number are my own). It's very good motivation to keep going with it, and I've started working on outlining and planning the next section which I think will cover the following.

• The Stack
• SI/DS registers
• Terminate and Stay Resident
• (Maybe) DOS memory layout

I'm targetting ~2000 words in total, not counting the prelude section of the article. This will serve as a prelude to looking at the DOS memory map as a whole as well as get our first taste of how segmentation and relocation work under DOS since we will have to manage CS/DS/SS when we're in TSR mode. I'm currently writing out some demo code but its been fairly slow going since I got tripped up by the fact a pointer is 2 bytes (16-bit), and a lack of free time until this weekend. I'm hoping to have the code half of this cranked out by Friday to write up over the weekend.

I've decided for the time being to continue using NASM. While NASM is not a period specific assembler, its very easy to use, free software and has excellent documentation, and its the only assembler that can target x86_16 from Win64 and Linux64 that actually works. I wouldn't mind using the OpenWatcom assembler except its essentially undocumented. If I was going for period specific, I would need a 16-bit copy of LINK.EXE and MASM. Both are in the Windows DDK but extremely unfriendly to setup, or use Turbo Assembler and code in VirtualBox (pass; I like Notepad++ on Windows).

I've had some hangups on figuring out where to go beyond the basics of TSR programming. Unfortunately, non-IP based stuff appears to have dropped off the face of the internet. LANMAN client on Microsoft's FTP is completely MIA, and I can't find a freeware stack available anywhere that supports anything !TCP/IP. I could write something using Layer 2 protocols, but even then I'm kinda "eh" since that really doesn't go into the history of early networking or stuff. As best I can tell, at least for IPX, the actual Novell NetWare client was TSR, but its essentially non-existent. LANMAN in theory is free on Microsoft's FTP, but no developer documentation that I can find.

One idea I had though was perhaps reviving my ham radio stuff, and plugging the whole thing into AX.25. KA9Q for DOS is open source and implements KISS, and I can emulate another AX.25 host over the serial port (or go full turkey, and plug the other side into an actual radip using Linux as a glorified BNC). That would get me a period specific way of getting the data out of a target system in a targetting attack. (obviously, real NSA would use something beside amauter radio bands, but the concept exists. You could easily hide a micro-radio in a PC case wired up to an ISA slot or something, using the case itself as an antenna).

Here we go again. AC is excluded of course because he cheats by having tens of thousands of people do his posting for him.

By count: Nick Trolls %Troll Ethanol-fueled56517% Runaway19563097% jmorris23712% The Mighty Buzzard21910% aristarchus2179% frojack1503% Hairyfeet1499% zugedneb9025% khallow876% VLM802% By percent: Nick Trolls %Troll zugedneb9025% Ethanol-fueled56517% Khyber2015% jmorris23712% The Mighty Buzzard21910% jasassin3010% aristarchus2179% Hairyfeet1499% TLA148% Runaway19563097%

A tip of the hat to the returning champions and a hearty welcome aboard to the newcomers.

(Version with photos is at My web log)
        I had more fun this weekend than I have in years! Patty and I attended this year’s World Science Fiction Convention in Kansas City.
        Patty had said that she would be at my mom’s house in Belleville around one, and I got there a little before.
        She got caught in construction work traffic in Indiana, and we didn’t get on the road until three. Traffic was terrible, not just through St Louis but all the way there. We decided to go straight to the convention; we could check in to the hotel later.
        We got parked (finally), and went in through the light rain, which would be a hard rain later, and cold wind. There inside the building sat Dr. Who’s Tardis! There was a door handle, and Patty decided to see if it would open. She walked up to it, and it moved away!
        That was the first really cool thing we saw, but not the coolest by far.
        We got to the place to get our badges, and oops: I forgot the magic numbers: the membership and PIN numbers. All I could do was hope we could get in, anyway -- I had the emails from worldcon on my phone.
        It turned in not to be a problem, as they had us in their computer systems. Patty’s name tag said “Patty McGrew”, mine said simply “mcgrew”. A helpful lady in a scooter gave us the lowdown on everything. I asked where the nearest drinking fountain was, and she said that bottled water, soda, and snacks were free in the exhibit hall.
        I got a bottle of water and Patty got a soda. We wandered around and came across a life sized cardboard cutout of an astronaut, and someone said a real astronaut was there. There was a fellow in a business suit, the first business suit I’d seen and asked him if he were the astronaut.
        “No, she is,” he said, gesturing towards a trim, fit, attractive black woman in a green dress.
        I’ve never been one to be starstruck. I’d met dozens, probably hundreds of celebrities while pumping gas for Disney World between 1980 and 1985 – major league baseball, basketball, and football players; professional golfers, more than one who became irate because I didn’t recognize them, despite the fact that I’ve hated that sport since my first job at age sixteen, working as a groundskeeper (“If anybody has to work that damned hard for me to play a silly game, I’m done with golf”); Rock and pop stars (one of whom, Cris Cross, was a complete and total jerk, but most were pleasant enough)...
        And Movie stars. My favorite movie star was Buddy Hackett, a really nice guy. Knowing he had done Disney movies, I told him if he were an employee I could give him a discount. He said he had before and may be again. “Yes,” I said, “I recognized you” and told him my favorite movie was Mad Mad World. He grimaced.
        “I hated that movie,” he said. “It was hot, half the actors were not very nice and Mickey Rooney was an asshole and Jim Backus...” (the actor who played the rich guy in Gilligan’s Island) “...was always flubbing his lines because he was always drunk.
        “My favorite movie was The Love bug,” he said. “we had SO much fun making that movie!” He had quite a few tales about that movie.
        He said he was there to talk to the brass about an upcoming movie, which he didn’t name but was The Little Mermaid, where he played... I’ve forgotten, I took my kids when they were little.
        It was a very pleasant conversation. He gave me his credit card, I ran it through the machine, the old-fashioned kind with carbon paper, returned his card, thanked him, and he drove off. I mentioned to my co-workers, who all were star-struck, who I had just served. They didn’t believe me, so I showed them the card receipt and they all went ape-shit.
        John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd stopped by and the star-struck dummies I worked with kept pestering them and they kept repeating that they’d never heard of those guys. “Guys, if they say they’re not John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd
  they’re not!”
        As they were leaving, one of them winked and thanked me. The morons I worked with seemed not to realize that the only difference between them and us was that they had better jobs.
        And then I met NASA engineer and astronaut Jeanette J. Epps at Worldcon, and for the first time in my life I WAS star-struck. This woman had been in outer space (or rather, will be in 2018)! I had a very pleasant conversation with her. She asked if I wrote science fiction, and I told her “yeah, but I read more of it than I write.” It seems she was as impressed by meeting a science fiction writer as I was by meeting an astronaut! At her questioning I told her Sputnik launched when I was six, I watched Armstrong land on the moon, and while living in Florida I saw every shuttle launch before the Challenger accident... and the look on her face told me no astronaut likes to think of that.
        She said she was envious, to see all that history with my own eyes. I told her I was envious of folks Patty’s age. “Now, only a select, elite few ever make it to space but by the time Patty is my age, space will be open to everyone.”
        By then, the word “astronaut” would be as disused as the word “Aviator” is now, as everyone would be able to visit space. After all, there was no such thing as an airplane when my grandmother was born, the first airplane flight being six months later, and she flew on several planes and saw men in space land on the moon. Yuri Gagarin flew into space twenty sic years before Patty was born.
        We talked of America’s inability to send people to space (I got the idea that she didn’t like Russian rockets) and I countered that at least we could launch cargo, and would soon have our own capsule. “Three of them,” she said. I took Patty’s picture with her and shook her hand. She indicated she wanted to see us again the next day (today; the awards are presented tonight; I’m typing a draft in the hotel and will finish when we get home) and I assured her we’d be back. I intend to give her a copy of Nobots if I see her today.
        As Patty and I walked off, I realized that for the first time in my life I was star-struck. This woman was not only an engineer (all the astronauts are, if I’m not mistaken, scientists and engineers) but an astronaut! “That alone was worth the price of admission,” I told Patty with a huge smile on my face, and she was as impressed as I was.
        Dr. Epps was one of the few black people I saw there. There were more Chinese alone, and Japanese, than black people. I saw more blacks in my hotel than in the teeming masses at the convention. I met one black fellow later, an overweight gentleman who said he was an actor from New York. For all I know, he was in Hamilton.
        S/N ran a piece last week about “racism in SF” and I can tell you that there are few black SF writers because black SF fans are almost nonexistent.
        The crowd was almost as Caucasian as a Donald Trump rally.
        Most of the night was that good. I took Patty’s picture as she sat on the throne from Game of Thrones, she took my picture with some alien Japanese monster. However, the weather got to me – it got cold outside, and with the huge building’s air conditioning it was cold inside and my arthritis started aching terribly. But the pain didn’t stop me from having a great time.
        There was a very short man in a Jedi robe, a woman with a robotic baby dragon, and lots of booths put up by cities hoping to host a worldcon. Dublin wants it in 2019, and God if it’s there I want to go! Ireland’s on my bucket list, anyway.
        They were raffling stuff off, some of it really expensive stuff, so we each got a ticket.
        We didn’t win anything.
        After the raffle we drove to the hotel, checked in, and went to our rooms.

Day Two:
        I’d gotten to bed about two, and since I can’t seem to sleep when it’s light I got up about seven. There was a strange small coffeemaker, two packets that said they were coffee, but no basket.
        So I took the elevator down to the lobby, hoping to find coffee. Coffeeless, I pushed the wrong button on the elevator and it stopped on the second floor, and there were two computers for guests. I decided to write when I was awake enough; the previous night I had regretted bringing a computer.
        Not only was there coffee, there was breakfast. I got a cup of coffee and went back up to my room to read and watch the news. Back down for more coffee and a thumb drive, and on the way back up I stopped on the second floor to write.
        No such luck, there were two young teens at the two computers. So I went back up to read some more. Patty was sleeping and wouldn’t wake up. It was her rental car, and I considered taking a cab to the convention center, but didn’t.
        While reading, I heard strange sounds outside the window, three stories down. Looking out through the screen, I saw the Kids on skateboards. Good, I could write!
        My coffee was empty after writing for a half hour or so, so I went back downstairs to fill my cup, and back to my room, again considering a cab. It was eight-thirty, so I called Patty’s phone again. This time she answered, and I informed her that she had twenty minutes to get breakfast.
        She came back up after breakfast and said she needed to lay down a little while and would be half an hour or so. She said she wasn’t feeling well, which was understandable since she’d driven from Cincinnati to Kansas City the day before, and we’d been at the convention until after midnight.
        Oddly, despite only sleeping five hours the night before, I was fine, wide awake.
        We got to the convention about eleven-thirty or so, too late to meet Dr. Epps again. But we discovered that the daytime was a lot more busy and had a lot more to see – and buy. I bought three tee shirts, and so many books I won’t be at the library for months. One was Star Prince Charlie, co-written by Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson, signed by its editor. At least, I think it’s the editor’s signature. There was all sorts of cool stuff, like the bridge of the Enterprise and a huge sculpture of the part of the Death Star that Luke Skywalker blew up, made from Legos and including Luke’s and another pilot’s craft.
        The illustration here is from one of the tee shirts I bought. The title of the book the robot is reading is “Tomorrow is Now”, which makes me wonder if the artist has read Yesterday’s Tomorrows. If so, I’m flattered.
        Then I met David Gerrold, who has been writing and selling science fiction since he was twelve, which is an interesting story in itself. He had written a screenplay called The Trouble with Tribbles and sent it, unsolicited, to Paramount. Paramount, like all film studios, return unsolicited manuscripts unopened.
        However, they had no script for the next Star Trek episode and were becoming panicked. They read, then after several rewrites, filmed the script. He’s been making a living at it ever since. The September issue of S&SF is dedicated to him, and he signed a copy of it and I bought it from him.
        There were more nerds than I’d ever seen at once, far more. And every one of them was smiling. I had pleasant conversations with several people, including a gentleman from the Kansas City library.
        Carrying around what felt like fifty pounds of books and short on sleep, I decided to get the car keys from Patty and put the swag in the trunk.
        I must have walked around for miles carrying that load trying to find the car. Hot and tired I was stumbling like a drunk, and when I fell down I decided it was time to surrender, and staggered back to the convention center, still hauling my load.
        I ran across the librarian, who grinned and said, as has been written in so many science fiction stories and comic books, “So – We meet again!”
        I stumbled back in and got a bottle of water and sat on a couch towards the back of the hall; my back was killing me. I tried to call Patty, but she wasn’t answering. I was starting to worry, as my phone battery was getting low, and she had my battery charging battery in her purse. Ten minutes later, my water empty, I decided to get a beer. I tried calling again – no luck. I sat back down on the couch again as my phone rang; it was Patty. I told her where I was and she couldn’t find me.
        “Do you know where that big screen is?” she asked. I answered “Yes, I can see it from here.”
        “Stand under it!” I did, and she found me. We sat at a table by the screen and I plugged my phone into the charging battery. There was a heavy black man in a polo shirt, one of the incredibly few black people there. There was an engineering company logo on his shirt.
        “So,” I asked, “Are you an engineer?”
        “No, but I play one on television.”
        Patty had gone for snacks and I had a pleasant conversation with the actor, about SF in general and the convention in general.
        Patty came back with some veggies; raw broccoli and cherry tomatoes and cheese. We ate it and walked around some more.
        There were a couple dozen people in various science fiction costumes. One was a very short man in a Jedi outfit that I mentioned earlier. I could swear I’ve seen the guy on-screen somewhere.
        We decided we’d seen everything there was to see there by three, so went back to the tables by the screen. It had been beaming some sort of thing that was going on in the auditorium the night before, but only a static photo now. We had a conversation with a couple of folks who looked about my age, two men and a woman. The woman and one man and I talked about science fiction and art, the other man, who was with the woman, was largely silent. Patty had gone to the restroom.
        I decided to get a slice of pizza and a beer at the Papa Johns booth, which looked like a permanent part of the place. A very small four piece pizza was eight bucks, and a pint can of Budweiser was six, twice what a Guinness was in any bar at home. But I was having too much fun to worry about my bank balance or credit card bills.
        I ate one slice, and nobody else wanted any. The three left, and a while later we made our way to the auditorium to watch the Hugos be presented. “Too bad we got here too late to see Dr. Epps again,” I said.
        “I saw her when you were looking for the car,” she said, “but she was with people looking busy so I didn’t bother her.”
        We got pretty good seats toward the front, but it was still forty five minutes before the ceremonies started. I used the rest room and got another beer, this time a Corona; beer choices were pretty limited.
        Finally it started. The Master of Ceremonies was Pat Cadigan, a woman who had won a hugo decades ago, and she would have made a pretty good stand-up comedian.
        She came on stage holding a bull whip and after telling everyone to silence their phones, admonished us “Don’t make me use this!” Her whip was the center of many jokes by many people on stage.
        I’d been disappointed since 2012 when I read The Martian that it hadn’t gotten the Hugo it deserved, and apparently I wasn’t alone, because Andy Wier got two of them this year. One was “best new writer”, probably since it was years too late to award it for the book, and one for Best Long Version Photoplay for the movie version, that even beat Star Wars!
        Mr. Wier wasn’t there. An astronaut in his astronaut uniform accepted the award in his place for “best new writer”.
        When “ Best Long Version Photoplay” came around, another astronaut in uniform accepted it for him: None other than Dr. Epps! I gave her a standing ovation, but no one else did.
        I haven’t had that much fun in years! I spent a fortune, but it was worth every penny.

Mayor Waldo was eating his salad as he waited for the main course when he was summoned to Dome Hall for an emergency. His secretary insisted that he couldn't talk about it in public or on the phone.
        He paid for the meal, told the serverbot to keep his food warm when it was finished cooking, and returned to Dome Hall, muttering under his breath. He asked Willie Clark, his secretary, what was going on that was so important it would interrupt his lunch hour.
        “A body was found outside the dome, sir. We suspect murder.”
        Murder? There had been a lot of death in Mars’ hundred years of colonization, but until now there hadn’t been a single murder, at least that anyone had known about. There were no homicides on the planet’s surface, at least; in space the pirates would kill you the first chance they got. In space, only the Green-Osbourne Transportation Company’s security fleet kept things relatively calm.
        “Why do you suspect murder? There’s never been a murder on Mars.”
        “Until now. The body was found outside the dome and wasn’t wearing a suit.”
        “Maybe he was drunk and stumbled through the wrong door. I should talk to council members about assigning guards to the airlocks.”
        “No, sir. Impossible. The body was found a half kilometer from the nearest lock. If he’d simply walked through the airlock...”
        “Hmm, yes. He’d have died before he went two steps and probably would have died inside the lock. Who do you have investigating?”
        “Nobody yet, sir. The police chief called us right before we called you, looking for guidance. The coroner is examining the body and we expect her report in a week or two. The corpse had been out there a couple of days at least. Of course there was no decay, but the body was completely desiccated, freeze-dried, as would be expected.”
        “Do we know the cause of death? Was a dead body taken outside, or a live one out there to die?”
        “The coroner is still doing the examination, sir. We’ll let you know as soon as we know.”
        “Thanks, Willie. Have the police start an investigation, and have them get in touch with an Earthian police detective who has experience in solving homicides, and have our people get advice from him or her.”
        “Should we keep this secret? At least until we know more? The Chief thinks so.”
        “No, you’re not working for Wilcox any more, and I’m not anything like Wilcox was. That’s why we won in a landslide, people hated his secrecy. Set up a press conference for tomorrow morning.”
        “Yes, sir.”
        He went back and finished his lunch.

        Albert Morton was the electrician who had discovered the body. It had been the most horrible thing he had ever seen in his life, and it ate at him that there had been nothing about it on the news. Who had done this, and why? He decided to contact a newspaper the next morning. Tonight he was going to get drunk; he’d never seen anything so gruesome, and couldn’t get the awful scene out of his head.

        “Say, Ed, how’s being Mayor treating you? Lager?”
        “Hi, John. Yeah, and a shot, I don’t care what. Scotch, I guess. My job’s sure not very fun today, we’re almost certain that we have a murder on our hands.”
        “Murder? On Mars? Really?”
        “We can’t see how it could be anything else. He was found half a kilometer from the airlock without an environment suit.”
        “What killed him?”
        “We won’t know until the coroner’s report comes in. But it has to be murder, nothing else makes sense. How’s business?”
        “I just got mail from Dewey this morning. We captured five pirate vessels last week and got a nice big finder’s fee from the boats’ rightful owners. He and Charles are looking at some new propulsion systems that might be a lot more efficient than the ion engines we’re using now. That will both lower the shipper’s cost and increase our profits, maybe even more than when we went from fission generators to fusions. And there’s a lot more shipping since they found all those rare earths on Ceres.”
        “Your bar doesn’t seem to be doing all that good.”
        John snorted. “You know this is just a hobby, but still, it is turning a small profit. It doesn’t usually get too busy until later at night. My brewery is doing almost too good. It’s hard to grow enough ingredients to brew enough of it to supply the demand. I may have to buy another building to grow more hops and barley and other ingredients.”
        A man walked in. “Hi, Al,” the bartender said. “The usual?”
        “Not today, John. Really bad day, I’ll have nightmares tonight. A lager and a shot of that white lightning you make. God damn, I ran across a dead body at work today outside the dome, and it was someone I’d met a few times. The poor guy didn’t have a suit on. Not just no suit, he wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing.”
        “Yeah, Ed here was telling me about it.”
        The mayor said “I hadn’t heard that. They only said he had no suit.”
        The electrician asked “Ed, why isn’t this in the news?”
        “Beats me, but I’m holding a press conference about it tomorrow. Wilcox would have tried to keep it secret, but that’s why he lost the election. Was it gruesome?”
        Al downed his shot, took a sip of beer, and said “You wouldn’t have wanted to be there. John, another shot, please. Make it a double.

        Sam Woodside was a reporter for the Martian Times, one of several dozen such newspapers in Mars’ many domes. Al Morton called him the next morning, a day after the discovery, with news of the dead body that he had found. The reporter asked the electrician “Who was he and how did he die?”
        “I don’t know, His first name was Bob, but I don’t know what his last name was. He was an electrician, too, but he usually worked the other side of the dome from me and I didn’t know him very well, I only met him a few times. His shop was short staffed so they assigned me on that side temporarily. You’ll have to ask the cops his full name and how he died. I talked to the mayor last night at Hooker’s, and they don’t know much yet.”
        “Hookers?”
        “Hooker’s Tavern, named after a musician who lived in the nineteen hundreds. John Knolls is a good friend of mine and owns the place.”
        They spoke for another fifteen minutes without Sam learning much.
        As he was beginning to dial the mayor’s office to get more information, another call came in. It was from his boss, who assigned him to a press conference the mayor had scheduled for the morning.
        Typical. He really wanted to write about the murder and here he had to attend a meaningless press conference. He wondered what it was about. “Probably something nobody would want to read about,” he thought.
        The news conference lasted a long time, even though little was yet known about the murder. The only clue had been the corpse itself, and it hadn’t yet yielded any answers. They would have to wait for the coroner, who had possession of the case’s only clue that had turned up so far.
        The mayor issued an executive order that all airlocks be guarded, and that no one would be allowed outside the dome alone. Martians had to be extra cautious about everything, since the environment outside the domes was so deadly. Safety was drilled into native-born Martians from birth.
        The mayor had of course been in contact with Dome Council members, all of whom were going to present a bill making the guards and the “nobody goes out alone” rule law. All had urged him to make the executive order, which would last until the council next met.
        Sam wrote the story, which was on the front page with an extra large headline: “GRUESOME MURDER OUTSIDE THE DOME” and in smaller type, “Police Have Few Clues, No Suspects”. Sam took what little information he had about the murder and skillfully stretched it to two full columns, most of which was the accounts of the electrician’s grieving friends and family, and some of it slightly redundant.
        The dome’s police contacted a homicide investigator on Earth, who chided the Martian for doing so little investigating. “Come on, man, get a warrant and search the victim’s home and workplace. It may have been for robbery, but there are a lot of things that cause murder. Find out who he associated with, if he was having any love affairs, who saw him last. Don’t wait for the coroner! What did the crime scene look like?”
        “Like there was a dust storm between when he was killed and when the body was found. If there were any footprints or wheel tracks or any other such evidence they were gone.”
        It seemed the newspaper had done more investigating than the police. The Martian took the Earthian policeman’s advice, but still came up with little, at least at first.

        “Hi, George, I was wondering if you were sick or something and didn’t go to work today, you always drop by for a beer on your way home.” John poured an ale for him.
        “I ran really late tonight, somebody stole my tools. At first I thought somebody might have grabbed my tool box by mistake, but I’m pretty sure they were stolen. Anyway, I had to fill out a ton of paperwork for the insurance.”
        “Sorry to hear that, the tools must be expensive.”
        “Yeah, they are. Brand new tools, state of the art stuff. I was working on two panels around a corner from each other, and I had my tool chest by one panel when I was working on the other one. I closed that panel up and went to finish the side where my tools were, and they were gone.
        “Like I was saying, at first I thought someone must have picked the tools up by mistake, but I noticed boot prints going away from the dome from where my tools had been. So when I got back in the dome and out of my suit I called the cops. I didn’t think anyone picked them up by mistake after seeing footprints leading away from the dome. The cops said it was possible that were taken by mistake, but I don’t think so. Talking to the cops took another hour.”
        A man in a policeman’s uniform came in, sat down, and ordered a shot of Bourbon and a wheat beer. “Rough week,” he told the bartender. “Murder a few days ago, probable theft today.”
        “Yeah, I heard.”
        The policeman looked at George. “Say, you’re the fellow whose tools are missing, aren’t you?”
        George answered in the affirmative and ordered another beer. Obviously a little distraught, he had drank the first one far faster than usual.
        The officer said “those boot prints you saw led to wheel tracks. We followed them for ten kilometers, and it looked like a space craft had landed and taken off. We think pirates have your tools.”
        George shook his head sadly. “Damned pirates, the tools are insured but it’ll take three weeks to get them replaced, and I won’t be able to work.”
        “That sucks, George. Need to run a tab until your new tools come?” the bartender asked.
        “Thanks, John, but I have enough cash and credit to make it until I can get new tools delivered.”
        The police officer finished his beer and shot and walked home, just as Mayor Waldo came in. “Hi, John. We had a theft today, give me the usual.”
        “Hi, Ed. Yeah, I heard,” he said, pouring the mayor a beer and the thirsty electrician a third beer.
        Ed sighed. “News travels fast.”
        John laughed. “Where would you go if your tools were stolen and you couldn’t work for weeks? You know George, don’t you?”
        “Yeah, hi George. Those were your tools?”
        “Yeah, it really sucks.”
        “Anything I can do? Or the dome can do?”
        George laughed. “Yeah, get a better football team, the Australians and Europeans always kick our asses!”
        Talk drifted off to sports for a while, and a thought came to John. “Ed,” he said, “Could the pirates have committed that murder?”
        “No, they would have taken him to their ship so they wouldn’t harm the suit. Everyone knows how valuable a suit is. They would have just dumped the body in space.”
        “You ought to dump those footballers in space,” George said dourly.
        The mayor and bartender laughed, and talk went back to sports as more people started trickling in.

        The next day the Chief of Police called the mayor with news of clues: the dead man’s tools and environment suit were missing. Did someone murder him for his suit and tools? It looked like that was the motive, although police were still investigating the victim’s associates. If they found that suit and those tools, they would likely find the murderer.
        Things seemed to be looking up. He usually only stopped by John’s bar when he’d had a bad day or a seemingly insoluble problem, but he decided to make an exception this time since his old friend Charlie Onehorse would be there. Charlie was the mayor of Dome Australia Two, about twenty kilometers from his dome. Old Charlie had been visiting on a trade mission.
        When he got off work, John’s bar was already filling up. “Ed!” came a voice from the gloom, as his eyes hadn’t yet adjusted, but he knew that voice.
        “Hey, Charlie! How did your deal go?”
        “Ace, even though those blokes aren’t drongos, but the deals always go well. Almost all of them, anyway. I heard your dome had a homicide?”
        “Yeah, it sure looks like the poor guy was murdered. Had some thefts, too, but one of them looks like pirates.”
        “Maybe it was pirates that killed that bloke,” Charlie said.
        “That’s what John said, but like I told him, they would have just carried him and his suit away and dumped the body in space.”
        “Yeah, you’re right, they would have. Damned pirates, I hope they leave my dome alone. Hey, John, get a grog for Ed, would you?” Just then a robot rolled up with Mayor Waldo’s beer.
        At the other end of the bar, John was talking to Al. Al had been telling him of the nightmarishly horrible discovery and how it was affecting him for the last few days, which he had mostly spent in the bar getting very drunk. “Al, I want you to meet a friend of mine,” John said as an attractive woman walked up. “Al, meet Tammy Winters.”
        “Hello, Ms. Winters.”
        “It’s doctor, but call me Tammy. John tells me you’re having some problems.”
        Al glared at John angrily. Tammy said “Look, Al, your reaction to what you’ve gone through is normal. Look, I have a friend who needs some new patients, could you help him out?” and handed him her colleague’s business card.
        “Well, I don’t know,” Al said, looking at the card. “What will it cost?”
        “Nothing, the government pays for it.”
        “Thanks, I will!”
        Tammy replied “John, are you going to pour me a beer or what?”

        Several days later the coroner's report came back, right before the mayor was due to go home, and Mayor Waldo was puzzled. The report said the victim had a stroke; a blood vessel in his brain had burst and he’d died instantly. But why was he out there naked?
        He decided to talk to John. John always had an answer when things got crazy.

        “Holy crap,” Sam said when he got the news. “Damn, the most sensational news in my career and it wasn’t. How can I spin this? The boss wants more papers sold!”
        He decided to focus on the mystery of the naked corpse.

        “And your cops can’t figure it out, either?” John asked.
        “No,” said Ed. “It’s still a mystery.”
        “Christ, Ed, it’s as plain as the nose on your face! Look, only a few days later George’s tools were stolen, and the police say it was pirates. It’s simple, Ed. They were waiting for a chance to steal the poor guy’s expensive tools and he collapsed. So they not only stole his tools, but his environment suit and clothing as well. Why didn’t you guys see that?”
        Ed scratched his head. “I don’t know, but it makes sense. I’ll talk to the police chief about it tomorrow.” Just then George entered.
        “John!” he yelled. “Drinks for everybody! WOO HOO!”
        “What happened?” Ed asked.
        “John’s army!”
        “John’s army?”
        “It isn’t my army,” John said. “More Dewey’s than anyone’s, I only hold maybe fifteen percent of Green-Osbourne.”
        George said “I can’t thank you enough, John.”
        “George, I didn’t do anything, there wasn’t anything I could do,” John replied. “We capture pirates all the time. It earns us a lot of cash and makes shipping easier for everybody, including our competition. You just got lucky.”
        “I don’t care, I’m still grateful. They said I’d have my tools back the day after tomorrow.
        “Oh, and Ed—they found Bob’s suit and tools when they found my tools.”
        John grinned. “See?”

        After the Mayor’s press conference the next morning, Sam cursed. How could he spin this one without looking like a damned fool?

It was some time last year that someone on Facebook posted a graphic that said "Beer: because no good story ever started with someone eating a salad." There are a lot of them to be found in Google Images.

So I decided to write a good story that starts with someone eating a salad, although parts of the story do take place in a bar. How good is it?

Magazines like F&SF get a thousand submissions a month, and each bi-monthly issue only has half a dozen stories. Only the very best get printed, and almost all rejection slips are form letters that all say pretty much the same thing, no matter what magazine.

Out of over a hundred rejections, I've only gotten two that were not form letters. The first was actually the first story I ever submitted, "Voyage to Earth". A junior editor (or perhaps slush reader) wrote back saying that it was a good story and well written, but the beginning didn't grab her.

The story I'm posting tomorrow, "The Naked Truth" garnered a personalized rejection from Charles Finlay, F&SF's Editor in Chief! He wrote a very encouraging letter saying that the idea of a murder mystery on Mars intrigued him and it was well written, but he didn't like the ending.

It was very nearly in F&SF. That means it isn't just a good story that starts with someone eating a salad, but a VERY good story.

I'm putting magazine submissions on hiatus until I finish "Voyage to Earth and Other Stories". I want to publish it next year, some magazines hang on to stories for a really long time ("Dewey's War" was in Analog's slush pile for six months, Tor has had "The Exhibit" since December) and if they publish one, I won't be able to publish it for a couple of years.

I have five finished stories you haven't read, three of which nobody has. I'll probably post one every couple of weeks until I run out of them. I've been working on one story, "The Pirate" (which I may rename) for a couple of months. Writing's been hard since I smoked my last cigarette last New Year's Eve.

I didn't know how much storage my "new" tablet has (hadn't looked, it's eight gigs) but reading the manual that I had to google to find (It's second-hand) I saw that it would take a 30 gig SD card, what they're calling single inline memory modules (SIMMs) these days. I decided to get one at Walgreens when I got beer.

It was a 32 GB SIMM (MicroSD, whatever) so I made sure to keep the receipt in case it wouldn't work in the tablet, but installing it was easy.

I can't say the same about getting it out of the retail packaging! It took half an hour and I was afraid of breaking the chip getting it out.

When I booted the tablet, it reported that it had installed it and reported 32 GB. That's two gigs more than the size of the part of my music collection I actually listen to. So I connected to my network drive with the same file manager II use on the phone, copied the folder holding the music, and pasted into the SD card. It took several hours.

When it was done, it informed me that third party apps didn't have permission to write to the SD card! WHAT THE HELL IS THIS BULLSHIT?? So I googled, and it said that Android 4 was the reason -- except my phone is running 4 and it had no problem writing to the simm.

The tablet has a built-in file manager that will access the SD, but can't access the network drive. I started copying a few at a time... and had a thought. I wondered if that 32 gig SD would work in the phone?

It does. So right now my phone's copying music from the network so I gan get it in the tablet. Good thing the physical chip is so easy to install and remove. I have a 12 gig chip in the phone, I think I'll get another 32 gig for the phone. Maybe bigger, I'll have to google to see what it can hold. I'll give the phone chip away.

But why would they have had a restriction like that?? Anyone have a clue for me?

It was a bigger mess than I thought. Yesterday's Tomorrows looked fine on an e-reader on the computer, but when I bought that tablet I discovered it was really messed up in MobiSystems' Universal Book Reader (UB Reader). Not only was the table of contents hosed, but there were no indents on paragraph beginnings, and it was an ugly sans serif font rather than the Gentium Book Basic in the printed volumes and HTML (at least on a computer with that font installed, if not it falls back to Times New Roman).

It was, of course, from my own ignorance, both of e-books in general and Calibre in particular. I never had any interest in e-books, because you paid for something you didn't own. If I buy a book I can give it away or sell it, it's a physical thing. Not so with e-books, and the e-books usually cost as much as the paperback.

But since I was giving books away I needed to learn about them. I wish I'd bought a tablet a long time ago. At any rate, I finally got all of them straightened out. At least, I think I have, except I can'tseem to get the cover to show in the Kindle version of Mars, Ho!, and I'm still checking out the epubs in the Nook app.

There's still a few minor annoyances in Yesterday's Tomorrows. Images that are supposed to fill the page don't on a tablet. I experimented with changing the page size to 12x20 in Open Office and scaling the images, but it came out the same. Maybe I need to raise the resolution?

Reading the HTML on a phone gives no serifs. It appears that Android devices are almost devoid of fonts, from what I've googled about it. Time Magazine seems to somehow have a Times font. I'll get it eventually.

Meanwhile, I documented the steps needed with Calibre. I'll need it, since I likely won't be using that program until next year when I finish Voyage to Earth and Other Stories.

So, audioguy (one of our sysadminy types) was checking the firewall logs and apparently one of the speedbumps we put in for bots got tripped by an L-3 Communications Holdings address. Not to be confused with Level 3 Communications, L-3 is the sneaky spy corp born of the Lockheed Martin merger. So, yes, we're officially being actively (as opposed to the passive scraping the NSA does to everyone's traffic) electronically surveiled.

Mind you, since they're tripping our firewall, they're not going to be seeing much unless they throttle back how many connections they use at once. They really should make use of the API for bot stuff. It's still firewalled but there are bits in it that can get you much more info at once and save us both the overhead of inefficient scraping.

I discovered the SFWA website last year, and it was a treasure trove of useful information. I'd probably have given up trying to sell stories by now were it not for that site.

There's an article by Terry Bison, one of my current favorite SF writers, titled "60 rules for short SF." Another is by a slush reader (someone employed by publishers to read and pass stories they like up to a junior editor) has an article about what you need to get her to pass it to an editor. And a whole lot more, I still haven't read them all.

I discovered that almost all of the advice and rules they pontificated on were things I was already doing. I also discovered how damned hard it was, how nearly impossible to get a good story published, because of the sheer mass of competition. There are only a dozen or two SF magazines, and they get a thousand submissions a month each, and print six each.

That's some damned bad odds.

I also learned from SFWA that if your rejection slip comes from an editor rather than a computer, you came really close to being published. I've had three! I'm not going to stop writing because I love doing it so much, but if I hadn't ran across SFWA I'd have stopped submitting them a long time ago. I am going to cut down on submissions, because I want to finish and publish "Voyage to Earth and Other Stories" by some time next year, and most of the magazines are REALLY slow at getting through their slush piles. I may keep submitting to Asimov's and F&SF since they're quick, but then again if they buy it I'll have to replace it with another story for the book.

Then late last week I was reading an article on SFWA and discovered that Stephen King had written a book about writing, called "On Writing".

King is one of the very best writers of our time, IMO. I don't like his genre so haven't read much of his stuff, but what I did read was brilliant and beautifully written, sucking you into the story and not letting go (and I don't want to be sucked into horror, I hate horror movies and books are even more intense than movies). So I opened a new tab on the browser and checked to see if Lincoln Library had a copy.

It did, even in e-book form so I wouldn't even have to go up there. Then I made another discovery -- my library card expired last month. That was Friday night, so Saturday morning I went to the library. I renewed my card, checked out the hardcover copy of the book, and started reading. I finished it last night; I'd been alternating between reading King's book, SFWA articles, Google News, the Illinois Times, and working on "The Pirate".

Another discovery: this book would be a great read even if I wasn't looking to improve my writing. It gives insights to a reader who isn't a writer on the connection between reader and writer. Kind of why you like to read what you like to read.

The first third of the book is an autobiography of sorts, and it starts with a child's pain (it IS Stephen King, after all). But from the time he reached high school until he gets to the writing part (even though the part before the writing part was about writing, too) it was hilarious. I don't nean it made me grin and maybe chuckle, I mean I was laughing so hard I had to put the book down to wipe the tears off my face. Well, I did have some pretty good pot. Anyway, If you're a reader, do yourself a favor and read it. If you live in Springfield and have a library card and a smartphone you can read it for free without even going to the library. In other cities as well, I checked last night and Belleville residents can access e-books from that library.

So this morning I decided that I wanted a copy of my own sitting on my bookshelf, because this isn't a "read once and throw it away" book. So after two frustrating hours trying to get a hardcover copy I'm flustered and frustrated and annoyed. Damn publishers and bookstores!

First, publishers. The paperback and e-book was released 3 years ago, but the hardcover is out of print. What, did Rority kidnap me last night and take me back to 1970 when books were written on typewriters and printed on presses designed a century earlier? Because now that we have computers and the internet, there should be no such thing as "out of print". Now there's "print on demand", so why should any book ever be out of print?

It's stupid.

Amazon said simply "out of stock" so I tried B&N. Their offline stores are excellent; large, with friendly, helpful staff.

Their website is a total clusterfuck to buy from. They should fire the incompetent webmaster who is enamored of flashy bells and whistles and hire someone who can design a usable interface.

First those stupid mouseover menus that open and cover whet you're trying to read. If you're doing that on your website, STOP IT!! Pissing off a prospective customer is brain-dead stupid. Where do companies find all these educated idiots?

So after navigating their awful interface to actually get to the book, there are three buttons: paperback, $11.95; e-book, $11.95; hardcover, $19.06. So once again there's stupidity, or rather, stupid greed. There is absolutely no reason whatever why an ebook should cost as much as a paperback. No paper to buy, no ink to buy, no pages to bind, nothing to ship, nothing to warehouse. An e-book costs almost NOTHING to produce and deliver once it's written.

The button for the hardcover didn't work. No feedback, it just didn't work, which is how the morons who designed the site set it up to work when an item was out of print.

By now I was annoyed and frustrated. I finally found a used copy there, and went to order it. They wanted to use an old credit card I no longer have, and it was more frustrating trying to get the damned thing to change cards.

I finally managed that, entered all the info, and it told me there was a problem with the card. IT'S A VALID CARD, DAMMIT! So I say "screw it" and call the local store. It's out of print, so they give me the 800 number.

After almost five minutes on hold a rude woman who keeps trying to interrupt me answers. I finally hung up on her, saying "fuck it, maybe one of the used stores in town has a copy."

I'll take it back to the library today. They sell books, maybe they'll have a copy for sale.

But I learned a lot from this book, a whole lot. But what he says you should do I already do, so maybe my stuff... nah.

“Hey, Ed! Haven’t seen you in weeks. How are you? You look worried. The usual?”
        “Hi, John. Yeah, and a shot of the strongest stuff on your shelf. I’ve had a really bad day.”
        “So what’s wrong?”
        “Trouble. And bad news for all of us Martians.”
        “Damn it, Ed, what’s going on?”
        “Earth’s going on. I was in a teleconference with the other dome mayors all morning over it. We’re in trouble. Earth is at war!”
        “What? At war with who? Us?” John exclaimed somewhat ungrammatically.
        “Each other.”
        “What? I thought it was a single government?”
        “It was, sort of, although nations had a certain independence, but had to follow U.N. laws. North America, China, and Australia rebelled. The Arab states may be next. It’s civil war!”
        “So what’s that got to do with us?”
        “Trade, John.”
        “Oh, shit. I’d better call Dewey.” Of course, he could only leave a message, since Mars and Earth were on opposite sides of the sun and the relay station was half an astronomical unit north of it, making radio lag even worse. It would be quite a while before the message reached its destination.
        John left his message and got back to the mayor. “Okay, it affects me, but what’s it got to do with Mars? We can get along without Earth, we’re self-sufficient and have been for fifty years. I have a problem, some other Martians probably have the same or similar problems, but why does Mars have a problem?”
        “Because technically we’re under the auspices of different states in the United Nations. We’re North American, the Alba Patera dome is Chinese. Half of the domes are European, so are affiliated with the U.N.”
        “But we’re all Martians. I’m an immigrant, but most of us were born here and have never left the planet.”
        “Half or more of the Euros here share that opinion, but their governments, like China’s and unlike ours and the Australians, are staffed with Earthians imported from Earth, and are appointed by Earthians rather than being elected by Martians.”
        “How about the Africans and South Americans?”
        “They’re neutral, but nobody from those continents have built domes here, anyway.”
        “It it a hot war yet?”
        “No, the diplomats are still talking but blockades are being erected. Give me another beer and another shot, John. This war crap is making me crazy. I just don’t know what to do.”
        “Well, the only advice I have is to be nice to the European domes’ mayors, maybe try to talk up independence.”
        “Independence?”
        “Why not? We need to get untied from Mamma Earth’s apron strings. Why should we be tied to their laws? They’re millions of kilometers away!”
        “You’re talking about revolution!”
        “Yes, I am. Hopefully peaceful. But like I said, we have to follow a lot of laws and regulations that make perfect sense on Earth, but are either meaningless or downright stupid here. I think it’s time!”
        “John, that’s crazy talk. We aren’t even armed!”
        “Yes, we are. You’re forgetting who does half of all space transport, and that’s Green-Osbourne Transportation Systems. Between the two of us, Destiny and I own a quarter of the company, and her dad and Charles control almost two thirds.
        “We have the fastest, most heavily armed and armored ships in the solar system, and Dewey has worried about war for a long time and has been preparing. War’s really bad for the shipping industry and we’ve always refused to engineer warships for Earth’s governments just because of that. Not many people know it, but our transports are warships, and there aren’t any Earthian government warships in deep space.”
        The Mayor sighed and ordered another beer and shot. “Maybe I should hold a Dome Hall meeting, televised and with the public invited so we can get a feel of the public’s attitudes.”
        “Ed, better slow down on the alcohol. It wouldn’t do to have a drunken mayor when war might be imminent.”
        “You’re right, skip the shot but give me another beer.”
        “I agree about Dome Hall, but don’t forget: GOTS is not about to let anything bad happen to Mars’ colonies.
        “Not only are we better armed, but we’re experienced, thanks to the damned pirates. Dewey started the defense fleet eight years ago because of the pirates and we’ve killed or captured most of them. Earth’s armies haven’t any experience at all with real war; there hasn’t been a shooting war for half a century except the war of shippers and pirates.”
        “Well, I don’t know what to say.”
        “Say you’re about drunk and it isn’t even two in the afternoon and you need to go home and sleep it off.”
        “I’m not going to be able to sleep with this over my head!”
        “Here, take these home with you,” John said, pulling out a bottle of white lightning and a twelve pack of beer. “It wouldn’t do to have the mayor staggering around the dome, especially now. Get drunk at home.”
        “You’re right, of course... about getting drunk. But revolution?”
        “Sleep it off and think about it. It’s time Mars was independent. Look how much we’re paying in taxes to Earth, and we’re getting absolutely nothing from it. We could use that to make Mars a better place.”
        “I’ll think about it.”
        “Look, Ed, stay sober tomorrow, okay?”
        “I’ll have to. See you, John.”
        “Later, Ed.”
        John’s phone made a noise; there was a message from Dewey.

        Aimée Beaulieu hated her job. She didn’t want to be in this damné dome on this God-forsaken planet. But she had been exiled here; “exiled” isn’t exactly accurate, but it’s close.
        She had been head of the EU’s diplomatic corps, and had an idea that could give Europe more commercial power. She sent her diplomats to the other continents’ governments with orders to negotiate her plan. Instead of negotiating, three of them, inexperienced but influential people appointed by Europe’s government, presented the idea as an ultimatum.
        They were fired and she was paying a price as well. Stuck on Mars, Mayor of one of the stupid domes.
        Damned dome! She’d only been here a month and hated it with a passion. Now there was that stupid revolution, civil war, whatever back on Earth and they told her she was no longer allowed to trade with the North American, Australian, or Chinese domes.
        And she loved Knolls beer, Damn it! That was the only good thing about this God-forsaken planet. She wondered what could be done about the situation. Probably nothing, she thought. Except by the idiots in charge on Earth, damn them.
        She didn’t much like the Martians, either, but she understood where they were coming from. A lot of the Martian-born Martians in her dome had been talking about independence from Earth. That would suit her... as long as she was off of this damned rock and back in France first. After all, if the dome revolted under her watch her career would be ruined even worse than it already was. She’d probably be forced to resign.
        She sighed, and went back to the meaningless paperwork Earth demanded.

        Chuck Watson, mayor of Ceres, was angry. What were those idiots on Earth thinking? If he followed their directive Cererians would surely starve! Those who had been born on Ceres had already been talking independence.
        And Charlie, who had been a close friend for years and a trading partner for almost as long, he was prohibited from communicating with.
        He had enough, he decided, and called Charlie. To hell with the Earthians!

        Charlie Onehorse, Mayor of Dome Australia Two, was annoyed. DA2’s main export, high quality steel and rare earth ferromagnetics mostly went to the European domes, and half of all the domes on Mars were European. And the ores were from the British mining colony on one of the asteroids. DA2 was going to have trouble both importing and exporting.
        They could probably have ore shipped from China, but Earthian ores were incredibly expensive, thanks to Earth’s gravity well and environmental regulations; mining anything on Earth was effectively outlawed by regulations that made it a hundred times cheaper to import from Martians and asterites.
        He was thankful that a few of the North American domes were farming domes, since none of Australia’s three domes had farms, and they had to import all of their food. He swore to himself that the situation was intolerable and would have to change.
        Born in DA3, his parents were immigrants from Australia. His paternal grandfather had moved to Australia from somewhere in North America.
        But unlike other countries’ domes, the Australians had great autonomy. They could pass their own laws and regulations, and only had to pay tax to the Earthians. Still, paying those taxes rankled; the money would be better spent improving life on Mars. Things were still rough on the Martian frontier, although nowhere near as bad as it had been before the robot factories were built.
        He wondered where the Europeans were going to get new robots, since the three robot factories were all in North American domes. Parts to repair malfunctioning robots, as well. He grinned at that, and thought to himself “bloody dills! Those bludgers are going to have to work now. Bloody hell, it’ll be Rafferty’s rules for sure; things are already becoming a bit chaotic.”
        He decided to call his old friend Ed Waldo. Ed always knew what to do when things got crazy.
        Ed’s secretary said he had taken the afternoon off.
        “With this war stuff going on?”
        “He said he was going to talk to his friend John, said John always knew what to do when things got crazy.”
        He should drop by Ed and John’s dome and bend the elbow with them, he thought. He liked John, who didn’t charge as much for his grog as anybody else charged for theirs, and his beer was the best. Even better than Victoria Bitter, although that brand’s quality had suffered in the last couple of decades.
        He called Ed’s pocket number, but Ed had it shut off. He called the French dome, which was only twenty kilometers from DA2, but was told that there could be no communication with non-UN domes as well as no trade; the diplomats were all in charge. And there were no diplomats on Mars, only Earth.
        Except, well, John, maybe. John wasn’t even a real Martian. Not yet, anyway. You had to be a resident of any dome for ten years to get voting rights, even though those rights were pretty meaningless in some domes, like the Chinese and UN domes. John had two years to go before he was a citizen.
        John had connections. He was the son in law of the founder of the biggest shipping company in the solar system, and between he and his wife owned a quarter of company stock. He also had a small farm, a brewery, and a bar on Mars, all of which his wife said were hobbies even though they all made him a lot of money and even more friends.
        As he was trying to figure out a plan, a message came from his friend and trading partner Chuck Watson. luckily Ceres and Mars were close enough at the time that the radio lag wasn’t too bad.
        “Charlie, what are we going to do? The damned Earthians are killing us!”
        “Come on, Chuck. don’t over react.”
        “Charlie, I’m not. We’re going to need food, where’s it going to come from? Earth? We’ll starve!”
        “No you won’t. Earthians can go to hell, we Martians and you asterites can stick together. You want to trade, we’ll trade. We need rare earths and you need food, and neither of us needs Earth.”
        Of course, it was a very long conversation because of the lightspeed lag.

        “You look like hell, Ed.”
        “Hung over, and I even had trouble sleeping after getting stumbling drunk. Got any coffee?”
        “Yeah, coffee’s free. The pot’s over there.”
        “Thanks, John. What the hell am I going to do? We don’t need much from the Europeans that the Chinese and Aussies can’t provide, but if this lasts a long time...”
        “Don’t worry, it’s only going to last a few months and when it’s finished, Mars is going to be independent of Earth.”
        “No way. This is a diplomatic and economic war, it could last for years.”
        The mayor from the neighboring dome came in. “Hey, Charlie,” Ed said. “Hell of a mess.”
        John grinned. “Nope. Where’s Europe going to get any rare earth magnets, or any of the other rare earths?”
        Charlie groaned. “John, ever hear of the asteroid belt?”
        John grinned. “Yep. Ever heard of Green-Osbourne?”
        “So what?”
        “So they shouldn’t have pissed off Dewey and Charles. First the Europeans seized company holdings in Europe, but luckily all the engineering is done in North America and most of the assets are in space. Then we lost a man and a landing craft when the Euros fired on it. It was full of my beer, too, damn it. Anyway, that was the last straw.”
        “I thought your ships were almost impervious to weapons?”
        “Only the interplanetary ships. Landers and boosters have to deal with the gravity well and can’t be that heavy.”
        “So what can Dewey do?”
        “Guys, do any of you know anything about war?”
        “I do,” an elderly female voice piped up from the other end of the bar. “I was only twenty. It was horrible.”
        “Oh,” said Ed, “Hello, Mrs. Ferguson. I didn’t see you down there. Where are you going with this, John?”
        “Earth hasn’t had a shooting war for half a century, and their armies have forgotten how to fight. They’re barely armies.
        “Meanwhile, Mars has been at war almost from the beginning, at war with pirates. Green-Osbourne has an army, a space army, and an experienced one.
        “Dewey convinced all the other shippers to refuse interplanetary shipments until the mess on Earth is over. Some he had to threaten, he made it clear that his army would allow no shipping, and people who tried to trade with Earth would be blown out of the sky. Nobody but Green-Osbourne is doing any shipping, and only to select clients, like us. You Aussies can have all the rare earths you can afford, but the Euros get nothing.
        “China and North America are the only Earthly sources of rare earths, so Europe is screwed; mining is effectively impossible there. Their economies will collapse; they’ll come around.
        “Meanwhile, I expect to see riots in the European domes pretty soon. There will be revolution for sure. Lots of Martians are tired of being tied to Mother Earth’s apron strings. We want to be free!”
        “I don’t know, maytie,” Charlie said. “Australians almost have independence already, I don’t see any revolt coming.”
        “John’s right,” Ed replied. “you folks will be last, except maybe the Chinese, you might revolt before them. But when we’re not paying taxes to Earth and you are, and there’s nothing that can happen to you for not paying the tax, you’ll sign the declaration.”
        “Declaration?”
        “We’ll declare our independence. When the time is right. Mars has an army and Earth doesn’t. They can’t boss us Martians around any more!”

        “Sir, we’ve detected a craft coming in from the belt.”
        “Very well, Captain Phillips. Disable it with an EMP and set it in orbit around Mars. It will be their prison until a treaty is signed, we’ll supply them with the necessities of life.”
        “Yes, sir.”

        A month later, there was indeed rioting in the French dome. The elected, normally powerless city council presented a demand for independence from Earth; after all, Earth was powerless against Green-Osbourne, and that company had protected Mars from pirates – and now was protecting Mars from the Earthians.
        The mayor refused to sign the declaration and was arrested, and an election for a new mayor was scheduled.
        News reached the other domes, of course, and almost all of the Martians became rebels.

        Three months later on June thirteenth, by Earth’s calendar (Mars rotates at a different rate and is on a longer orbit), the UN had no choice but to sign a treaty with the Martians, which recognized the domes as sovereign states. Their economy was crumbling, citizens were doing more than grumbling, elected leaders were in danger of no longer being elected.
        Earth no longer had the illusion of a single government.
        Aimée Beaulieu was released from jail and returned to Earth after the treaty was signed, and retired with honors and a huge pension, seen as a patriotic hero by her French countrymen and the French government.
        The only loss of life in the entire “war” was the Greene-Osbourne landing craft captain that the U.N. had shot down.

        John’s bar was full of happy people with nothing on their minds except celebrating Martian independence. John downplayed his involvement.
        “I’m not even a real Martian, Charlie. Not for two more years. The real Martians, guys like you who were born here are the real Martians.”
        A voice came from a few stools down. “Hey John, don’t you serve Frenchmen?”
        “Lewis! Good to see you, old man. Lager?”
        “Of course.”
        “So how do you like your new job?”
        “Oh, man, I hate it. I wish I hadn’t run for office, those damned Euros really fouled everything up. But I’ll manage. Mars will, too, now that we’re not wearing Earth’s yoke.”
        “The second French revolution and nobody got guillotined!”
        “The second American revolution, too. And it was a lot more like now than the French revolution.”
        John grinned. “I wouldn’t know, my wife’s the history buff. Excuse me, Lewis, it looks like there’s a lot of empty glasses! PARTY!! Robot, don’t just stand there, you stupid junkpile, get Lewis a lager.”