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Half a century ago I was reading a book by Isaac Asimov. I don’t remember what book, but I know it wasn’t I, Robot because I looked last night and it wasn’t in that book. But in the book, whichever one it was, Dr. Asimov wrote about the origin of the word “robot”; a story by Karel Capek titled R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots.
        I searched every library I had access to, looking for this story, for years. I finally gave up.
        Then a few weeks ago I thought of the story again. I have no idea what triggered that thought, but it occurred to me that there was no internet back then, and since the book was so old, it would probably be at Gutenberg.org.
        It was! I downloaded it, and to my dismay it was written in Czech. So I fed it to Google Translate.
        Thirty five years ago when I was first learning how computers work and how to program them, I read of a program the US government had written to translate Russian to English and back. To test it, they fed it the English phrase “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Then they fed the Russian translation back in. The re-conversion to English read “The wine is good, but the meat is spoiled.”
        I figured that in the decades since their first efforts at machine translation, it would do a better job.
        I figured wrong. What came out of Google Translate was gibberish. It does a good job of translating single words; paper dictionaries have done this well for centuries. But for large blocks of text, it was worthless.
        When I first saw the Czech version I could see that it was, in fact, not a novel, but a stage play. I kept looking, and found an English language version translated by an Australian. It’s licensed under the Creative Commons, so I may add it to my online library.
        Wikipedia informed me that the play was written in 1920, and a man named Paul Selver translated it into English in 1923. So I searched Gutenberg for “Paul Selver” and there it was! However, it was in PDF form. Right now I’m at the tail end of converting it to HTML.
        After reading it I realized that this story was the basis for every robot story written in the twentieth century, and its robots aren’t even robots as we know robots today. Rather, they were like the “replicants” in the movie Blade Runner—flesh and blood artificial people. That movie, taken from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? would have actually been a sequel to R.U.R., had R.U.R. ended differently.
        The Terminator was R.U.R. with intelligent mechanical robots instead of artificial life. Their aim, as the “robots” in Kapek’s story, is to destroy all humans.
        Asimov said that his robots were an answer to Frankenstein and R.U.R. He thought the very idea was ridiculous, so he made his own robots inorganic and mechanical rather than organic, and added his “three laws of robotics”. His laws weren’t physical laws like the inability of anything to travel faster than light, but legislation; similar to Blade Runner, where the artificial people weren’t allowed on Earth. In a few of his books, like The Caves of Steel, robot use on Earth is strictly limited and controlled and people hate them.
        I thought Asimov had the first mechanical, non-magical robots, but I was wrong. There were fictional mechanical robots before Asimov was born. The first US science fiction dime novel was Edward S. Ellis’ 1865 The Steam Man of the Prairies, with a giant steam powered robot.
        One thing that put me off about this play (besides the fact that it’s a play, which is far better watched than read) was that the original story was written in a language I don’t understand. That’s why I don’t read Jules Verne; his stories were written in French, and I don’t speak that language, either.
        I dislike translations because I used to speak Spanish well, according to South American tourists, and a smattering of Thai. And I’m a reader. It’s more than just the story, it’s how it’s written. There are word plays and idioms that are impossible to translate. For instance, a beautiful English phrase that uses alliteration would lose its beauty in any translation. And, there are no boring stories, only boring storytellers. I suspect that Kapek may have been an excellent writer, but Selver wasn’t, to my mind. Little of the dialog seemed believable to me.
        But in the case of this story, even the poor translation (Wikipedia informs me it’s abridged) is worth reading, just for the context it places all other robot stories in.
        It will be at mcgrewbooks.com soon.

(Illustrated version here)
        After buying copies of books from my book printer, finding errors to correct, and giving the bad copies to my daughter who wants them, rather than discarding them I realized I was stupid. It would be a lot cheaper to buy a laser printer.
        An inkjet wouldn’t work for me. The printer is going to be sitting idle most of the time, and inkjet nozzles clog; I’ve had several, and all clogged if you didn’t use them at least every other day. Plus, the ink dries out in the cartridges. Being a powder, toner has no such problem.
        So I went looking at the Staples site, and they badly need a new webmaster. This little four year old laptop only has a gig of memory, and a lot of people have far less. The poor little machine choked. That damned web site took every single one of my billion bytes!
        Or rather than firing him, make him design his websites on an old 486. Or even 386.
        So what the hell, I just drove down there; I didn’t want to wait for (or pay for) it to be shipped, anyway, I just wanted to see what they had.
        Buying it was easy. They had exactly the printer I was looking for; Canon, a name I trusted since we had Canons and other brands at work, wireless networking, and not expensive. They had a huge selection of lasers; it’s a very big store. I paid for the printer and sheaf of paper, and man, lasers sure have gotten a lot less expensive. I expected at least $250 just for the printer, maybe without even toner, but the total including tax and paper was just a little over a hundred.
        When I got home, of course I pulled out the manual like I do with every piece of electronics I buy—and it was worse than the “manual” that came with the external hard drive I ranted about here earlier. Cryptic drawings and very little text. At least the hard drive didn’t need a manual. All there is is a network port, a USB port, a power socket, and an on/off button. Plug it in and it just works. With the printer, I really needed a manual.
        Kids, hieroglyphics are thousands of years out of style and I don’t know why you’re so drawn to emoticons, but there was an obvious reason for these hieroglyphics: globalization. Far fewer words to be written in three different languages.
        I could find nothing better on Canon’s web site. So I followed the instructions in the poor excuse for a manual for unpacking it and setting it up, as best as I could.
        I couldn’t find the paper tray.
        I’ve been printing since 1984 when I bought a small plotter and wrote software to make it into a printer. Afterwards I had ink jets at home until now, and lasers at work. All the lasers were different from each other in various ways, usually the shape of the toner cartridge, but all had a drawer that held the paper no matter what brand of printer.
        I couldn’t find it. Sighing and muttering, I opened the lid to the big laptop and copied the CD’s contents to a thumb drive to install the printer on the smaller notebook. There’s no reason to make two calls to tech support, because an installation screwup is never unexpected when you’ve been dealing with computers as long as I have.
        And why send a CD? Fewer and fewer computers have CD or DVD burners any more. Why not a thumb drive? All computers have USB ports these days, and have had for over a decade.
        The installation was trouble-free but still troubling; I didn’t think the wi-fi was connecting, as it said to hold the router button until the blue light on the printer stopped flashing. I held the button down until my finger hurt and was about to call tech support, but as I reached for the phone the light stopped flashing and burned steadily.
        Maybe it was working, but I’d have to find the paper tray to find out. But it had installed a manual, one I couldn’t find. So I plugged the thumb drive back in and searched it visually with a file manager, and found an executable for the manual. Running it took me to an offline web page which wasn’t too badly designed, but I would have far preferred a PDF, as I could put that on the little tablet to reference while I was examining the printer in search of where to stick the damned paper, instead of a bulky, clumsy notebook.
        I finally found it, and it wasn’t a tray, even though that’s what the documents called it. I haven’t seen anything like it before, and the documentation was very unclear. But I did manage to get paper in it, and sent a page to it, and it worked well.
        Meanwhile, I wish Staples would fix their web site, and Canon would fix their documentation.
        When did clear, legible documentation go out of style? Hell, the lasers we had at work didn’t even need docs. Good thing, too, because IT never left them when they installed crap. Another reason I’m glad I’m retired! Work sucks.
        At any rate, a few hours later I printed the cleaned up scans of The Golden Book of Springfield so I could check for dirt I missed looking on a screen. I saved it as PDF and printed it from that. And amazingly, this thing prints duplex! It only took fifteen or twenty minutes or so to print the 329 pages.
        I’m happy with it. Man, progress... it just amazes me. But when I went to print from Open Office, the word processor I’ve used for years, I didn’t try sending the print job to the printer, but it looked like Oo won’t print duplex.
        Then I discovered that they may stop developing Open Office because they couldn’t get developers; the developers were all working on Libre Office.
        Damn. The last time I tried Lo it didn’t have full justification, which was a show stopper when I’m publishing books. I’d tried it because someone said it would write in MS Word format. I was skeptical, and my skepticism was fully warranted. It could write a DOC file, but Word couldn’t read it. Plus, of course, the show stopping lack of full justification.
        I decided to try it out again, since Oo may be doomed… and man! Not only does it have full justification, it has a lot Oo lacks that I didn’t even know I needed. It appears to now actually write a DOC file that Word can read, even though when you save it in DOC the program warns you it might not work in Word.
        And it might… I haven’t tested it… might arrange pages for a booklet. I’ll test it with this article… when it’s longer than four pages, as it is now.
        This was all over the course of the last week as I was working on a PDF of the Vachel Lindsay book. The computer nagged me that the printer was running low on toner (it has a small “starter” cartridge), with a button to order toner from Canon. I clicked it, and damn, the toner cost almost as much as the printer did.
        Then I ran out of paper, so I went back to Staples, where I discovered that the printer I had paid eighty something plus tax for was now twice that price! So I got the toner and five reams of paper.
        At any rate, I tried to print this as a booklet, and this is what came out:

        It’s backlit; the picture on the top left and the grayer text on the bottom right are on the other side of the page.
        But a little fiddling and yes, it will print booklets. It isn’t Libre Office doing it, it’s the printer itself!

        I like this printer. I’ve figured it to about a penny per page, and I don’t think that’s too expensive, considering a page is both sides.
        And then I had this document open in Libre Office, tried to insert a graphic (the second one in this article), and it simply didn’t insert. Maybe it doesn’t like JPG files, I don’t yet know. A little googling showed me that I’m not the only one with this problem, and none of the fixes I found fixed it. I have Open Office open now.
        And here I was going to uninstall Open Office. I’d better not, I guess. I’ll need it if I want to insert a graphic; inserted in Oo they show in Lo. Puzzling.
        A week later and I’ve found that sometimes it will insert a graphic, but only if you go through the menu; using text shortcuts never inserts it. And sometimes it simply doesn’t insert the picture, and sometimes it says it doesn’t recognize the format when I’d just put the same graphic in another Lo document.
        Well, I’m not uninstalling Open Office yet, anyway. Not until Lo solves the graphics show-stoppng bug.
…
        I wrote that a few weeks ago, and have been using both. Libre Office has a horrible problem with keyboard shortcuts, and those shortcuts save a LOT of time. But except for its horrible bugs, it’s a better word processor than Open Office. So both will remain installed.
        It’s possible I may uninstall Microsoft Office, depending on how well Lo’s spreadsheet works. I haven’t even fired it up yet, but Oo’s spreadsheet is almost useless.
…
        The above is several months old now. Lo does lack one important thing Oo has: controls to move to the next or previous page. Not good when you’re writing books. Also, it still has graphics problems. Often, simply opening a document in Lo removes any graphics.
        After sitting idle for a month or so, I needed to print a return label. I’m starting to become wary of buying anything from Amazon. I’d bought a new battery for this laptop a year or two ago, and the battery came from someone other than Amazon, and it was the wrong battery. I got the right battery directly from Acer.
        Then I ordered a long throw stapler to make booklets with, and staples for it. The stapler came a week later; no staples. So I bought a box from Walgreen’s. A week later, the staples came, again not from Amazon, and they had simply thrown the box of staples in an unprotected envelope. The box was smashed, the rows of staples broken.
        Then I ordered a DVD, Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I watched the first six, put the seventh in the DVD player—and it was region coded for the UK! Some company from Florida sent it. WTF is wrong with people? So I needed a return label.
        It wouldn’t print; it just hung in the print queue until it timed out. After a little digging, I found that the router had assigned a new IP address to it.
        So after a lot of googling, I gave up and cringed; I was going to need tech support, which is usually a nightmare. I wind up on the phone talking to someone with an accent so heavy I can barely understand them, if at all, who is ignorant of the product and reading from a checklist.
        I found Canon was one of those few companies that actually care about keeping their customers happy. Support was over email, painless, and effective.
        I have to say, it’s the best printer I’ve ever owned.

Some highly paid people seem to not be very good at thinking straight... or at all.

We’ve all seen robot bartenders in movies: Star Wars episode one; The Fifth Element; I, Robot, etc. Ever notice that human bartenders often have a lot of screen time in movies, but robot bartenders don’t? The reason is simple: robots are boring. Which is why we won’t see many robot bartenders in real life, and this real life robot bartender is going to go over like the proverbial lead balloon.

I suspect that the engineer who designed the thing doen’t frequent bars, but likes science fiction movies, because nobody goes to a bar to drink. From my upcoming Voyage to Earth:

“Is Mars still short of robots?”

“Not since that factory opened two years ago.”

“I’m surprised you don’t have robots tending bar, then.”

“Screw that. People don’t go to bars to drink, they go to bars to socialize; bars are full of lonely people. If there’s nobody to talk to but a damned robot they’re just going to walk out. I do have a tendbot for emergencies, like if one of the human bartenders is sick and we don’t have anyone to cover. The tendbot will be working when we’re going to Earth, but I avoid using it.”

Someone who doesn’t visit bars inventing something to use in bars is about as stupid as Richardson in Mars, Ho!, who assigned a Muslim to design a robot to cook pork and an engineer who didn’t drink coffee to make a robotic coffeemaker.

Just because it works in the movies doesn’t mean it works in real life.

(This was written last year but never posted)

        I spent a hundred bucks on my next book last week.
        Each story had an illustration at the beginning, except one: “Watch Your Language, Young Man!” I could find no suitable old women on Google Images, so I figured I’d have to either find an old woman at a bar who would want to be the illustration of a shrewish old lady, or just get out my pencil and make one.
        Rust never sleeps! And boy, but my fingers seemed to be solid rust. Of course, when I was young I drew every day, or at least almost every day. I was damned good.
        Not any more. I haven’t drawn a single thing since my kids were born three decades ago. So of course when I sat down with pencil and paper, nothing was produced but offal.
        Damn. It was late and I’d had a few beers, so maybe I was drunk? I set it aside for the next morning.
        Several days and a couple sheets of paper later and I finally had a cartoon drawing of an angry old crone. I figured I’d digitize her the same way I digitized my slides—I’d use my phone’s camera. With an eight by ten image to photograph, it should work fine. After all, the cover of The Paxil Diaries is a photo of one of my paintings I painted when I still had talent, and it turned out all right.
        Not Mrs. Ferguson. The white paper was a neutral gray in the digital image. “GIMP’ll fix it,” I thought.
        Nope. Adjusting the brightness and contrast removed some of the details. Actually, a lot of them.
        Several tries later I gave up, and decided to just scan it. I went down to the basement, where the scanner’s been since I moved in here, and realized that first, it probably wouldn’t work any more, and even if it did it used a parallel port to get the image in a computer, and when was the last time you saw a parallel port? So I drove to Staples, where all the scanners were attached to printers!
        I finally found a sales guy, who found a couple without printers that cost more than the ones with printers attached. He said they always put printers on cheap scanners, so I bought one of the expensive ones, an Epson Perfection V39.
        I took it home and scanned Mrs. Ferguson, put her at the top of the story, printed her out, and shrunk down like that, again a lot of the details were gone. So I thickened some lines and rescanned. It’s fine now.
        I wasn’t going to mention it because when I bought the scanner I had the idea of scanning all the photo albums for Patty, but that’s taking a long time, they won’t be done by Christmas, and Leila says she can’t come this year, anyway.
        I have one scanned, and half its photos straightened out and separated from each other, but I’ll be at it for a while. I’m also going to scan the book my uncle co-write, and if I get permission from my aunt to publish it I’ll do so. Of course, it would only be of interest to family since it’s about family history, some of it ancient, fifteenth century ancient.
        I really like that scanner! It’s a lot smaller than the old one in the basement; that one’s four or five inches thick and a foot and a half by two feet, and has a power cord with a big box in the middle and a parallel port. The new one is smaller than my big laptop and needs no power cable, as it gets its power from the USB port. It uses the same kind of USB cable as your phone (unless you have an Apple, which is compatible with nothing).
        At any rate, I haven’t written much lately...

Found a story about my... well not my home town but the town you have to go to from my home town for anything besides gas, beer, or religion. Turns out Nick Cage's rental car broke down there and he had a thing or two to say about the place. See, that's what I mean when I say to folks who only see what my views on politics and other big shat are, you don't know me at all.

This kind of shit is just another day in a red state. If someone comes up and says you owe them something that you don't, you laugh and punch them in the face but if you see someone in actual need, you help your fellow man because it's the right thing to do and because you might need a hand too some time. In a place where most everybody grows up poor and having to work their ass off to get by, you help each other because it's just what you do. Nick could have broke down a half mile from where he did over by the meth dealers and he still would have gotten the same reception.

Updated... see below.

I was at a concert a while ago and recorded, what I found out later, was a debut performance of a song. As I am friends with the lead singer, I'd like to send her a copy, but there are a couple of "issues".

Part 1: Editing

So, I've got a couple video files that I want to "process". I have no experience with video and only very limited experience with audio file manipulation.

Here is the pertinent data from ffprobe on the 25.6 MB introduction:

Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'intro.mp4':
  Duration: 00:00:18.54, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 11342 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(eng): Video: h264 (Constrained Baseline) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p, 1280x720, 11378 kb/s, SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9, 24.08 fps, 24.17 tbr, 90k tbn, 180k tbc (default)
    Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: aac (LC) (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 96 kb/s (default)

Here is the pertinent data from ffprobe on the 1099.8 MB song itself:

Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'song.mp4':
  Duration: 00:10:39.32, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 14092 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(eng): Video: h264 (Constrained Baseline) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p, 1280x720, 14000 kb/s, SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9, 30 fps, 30 tbr, 90k tbn, 180k tbc (default)
    Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: aac (LC) (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 95 kb/s (default)

(1) At the outset I had accidentally activated the wrong camera on my mobile phone. I'd like to keep the audio of the singer introducing the song.

(2) The video of the song actually contains TWO songs. I'm only interested in extracting the first song (the first 4m40s) from this video.

(3) Optional, but would be really nice, I'd like to make a "title" with the name of the group, name of the song, date, and location with the intro audio playing in the background.

(4) Ideally, I'd like to catenate the intro from (3) to the video from (2) and create a single file.

I'm running Windows 7 Professional. Have you ever done something like this? What free tools would you recommend?

Part 2: Shipping

I expect the final file to be about 500 MB, give or take. How would you recommend getting the file to her? It is rather large to send as an e-mail attachment. I do not have drop-box or one-cloud or any of the other file-sharing services. I'd like to keep the file private. I can't be the first who wants to do this. What options do I have?

Update(s):

Update 1: 20170101a - Happy New Year!

I've completed step (1) and extracted the audio for the intro to a separate file, intro.mp3, using:

   ffmpeg -i intro.mp4 -ab 96k  intro.mp3

Yeah, I know. 96kbps is not the greatest, but it's what was captured in the video, so I'm stuck with it.

Now to extract just the first 4m40s video of the song to a separate file. Looks like this could be done with ffmpeg?

Update 2: 20170101b

With many thanks to fn0rd666, got the "magic" incantation for ffmpeg:

fmpeg -ss 00:00:00.0 -i infile.mp4 -t 285 -codec copy outfile.mp4

Which means: start at the very beginning of the source, read from the file infile.mp4, copy 285 seconds, copy input straight to output (no transcoding), and send the output to the file: outfile.mp4!

Sixteen: The Final Chapter

It's that time of year again. The time of year when everyone and their dog waxes nostalgic about all the shit nobody cares about from the year past, and stupidly predicts the next year in the grim knowledge that when the next New Year comes along nobody will remember
that the dumbass predicted a bunch of foolish shit that turned out to be complete and utter balderdash. I might as well, too. Just like I did last year (yes, a lot of this was pasted from last year's final chapter).

Some of these links go to /., S/N, mcgrewbooks.com, or mcgrew.info. Stories and articles meant to ultimately be published in a printed book have smart quotes, and slashdot isn't smart enough for smart quotes.

As usual, first: the yearly index:
Journals:
Random Scribblings
the Paxil Diaries
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015

Articles:
Useful Dead Technologies Redux
The Old Sayings Are Wrong
How to digitize all of your film slides for less than ten dollars
GIMPy Text
The 2016 Hugo convention

Song
My Generation 21st Century
Santa Killed My Dog!

Book reviews
Stephen King, On Writing
Vachel Lindsay, The Golden Book of Springfield
J. D. Lakey, Black Bead

Scince Fiction:
Wierd Planet
The Muse
Cornodium
Dewey's War
The Naked Truth
The Exhibit
Agoraphobia
Trouble on Ceres

Last years' stupid predictions (and more):

Last year I said I wasn't going to predict publication of Voyage to Earth and Other Stories, and I was right, it's nearly done. So this year I do predict that Voyage to Earth and Other Stories will be published. I'm waiting for Sentience to come back from Motherboard, who's been hanging on to it since last February. I may have to e-mail them and cancel the submission if it isn't back by this February.

I'll also hang on to last year's predictions:

Someone will die. Not necessarily anybody I know...
SETI will find no sign of intelligent life. Not even on Earth.
The Pirate Party won't make inroads in the US. I hope I'm wrong about that one.
US politicians will continue to be wholly owned by the corporations.
I'll still be a nerd.
You'll still be a nerd.
Technophobic fashionista jocks will troll slashdot (but not S/N).
Slashdot will be rife with dupes.
Many Slashdot FPs will be poorly edited.
Slashdot still won't have fixed its patented text mangler.
Microsoft will continue sucking.
And a new one: DONALD TRUMP WILL (gasp) BE PRESIDENT IF THE US!!! God help us all! (He can't possibly be worse than George H. Bush or James Buchanan, can he?)

Happy New Year! Ready for another trip around the sun?

I know a lot of you are disappointed I didn't go ahead and finish the debate on the MIT petition story. Tough.

Most days it's fun smacking down the willfully ignorant but sometimes outside forces conspire to make me too tired to bother. I just delete all the messages, pop open a beer, and watch some TV.

This was one of those times and you're just going to have to live with it.

They say that Santa's coming,
He comes 'round every year.
He comes he'll meet a shotgun slug
'cause he ain't welcome here.

Five years ago this Christmas
The fatass came around
With jingle bells and ho ho hos
And looking like a clown.

He came in for a landing
As I let out a yawn
My house is pretty little
So he landed on the lawn.

I didn't have the time to yell
As he came in through the fog;
He came in fast and and came down hard
And landed on my dog.

He looked around all furtive like
As I reached for my gun,
Then jumped in sleigh, yelled “giddie up”
And took off on the run.

And so, that fatassed bastard
Better stay away from here
'cause ever since he killed my dog
I have no Christmas cheer.

“Bill! Where’ve you been? I thought you said you were going to spend your vacation here on Mars?”

“Up on Ceres for the last three weeks, give me a beer. Make it one of your lagers. They had a real bad emergency up there, and my boat was the only one close enough and fast enough to do any good. They were to do maintenance while I was vacationing, but postponed it for Ceres. Orion Transport had a ship here on Mars, too, but you know better than anybody that their ships are only a third or less as fast as ours. Hell, you used to be a captain and you’re on the Green-Osbourne board of directors.

“Everyone would have been dead when the Orion boat got there if we didn’t have one of our ships here. They sent it anyway, with even more batteries. They would have needed ‘em.”

John, the bartender and owner, replied “Yeah, I talked to Chuck. He called as soon as it happened. I didn’t know you ran the rescue boat. Sorry about your vacation.”

“Well, it was just postponed and I’m on vacation now. So Chuck called?”

***

Chuck Watson, mayor of the habitat dome on Ceres, was shaking as he put down the phone. It was one of the worst catastrophes possible on an asteroid dome; or in his case, a dwarf planet dome. It would have been even worse up on Mars, with the gigantic domes that had been built on that planet, with all of the people living in them. Of course, on Mars they would have all the supplies they would need, considering how many domes were up there.

But still, there were twenty thousand people down here on Ceres, the mining robot operators and the tradespeople and service people and repair people necessary for normal life, and all of their children. And they had less than twenty minutes to get inside a building, as the dome was leaking air, and leaking badly. The sirens went off in everyone’s pockets and purses immediately after the power went out and the battery-powered emergency lighting lit up.

Buildings inside domes were designed for this sort of emergency. They were airtight when the windows were closed, which was seldom; temperatures in the domes were comfortable whether one was inside or outside a building. But when alarms went off, windows closed by themselves. The doors to the outside of buildings opened inwards, and most buildings even had airlocks. Commercial buildings had at least one person-sized airlock at their entrances and exits, and a home’s garage served as the house’s airlock. Anyone not home who didn’t have a garage would have to find shelter elsewhere, because there was no getting inside or outside a building without an airlock when the dome’s pressure dropped too low.

Chuck called his old friend Charlie Onehorse, mayor of Dome Australia Two on Mars, hoping there was a Green-Osbourne ship there, and hoping there were enough supplies on Mars. Nobody but G-O had ships that were fast enough to get here in time, and he wasn’t sure they would survive even if one of that company’s ships were on Mars. The message would be a while getting to Mars, even though luckily the two bodies’ orbits were relatively close right now.

“You’re a dumb arse,” the London-born Chuck told himself when he got off the phone, and called another friend living in a different Martian dome, John Knolls. John owned his favorite Martian bar and quite a bit of Green-Osbourne stock, was on G-O’s board of directors, and his wife was the daughter of one of that company’s founders. If there was a ship available, John could get it here. If he didn’t, more people would die. In fact, he was afraid that everybody might die.

Two were killed in the blast, and three were already dying from radiation sickness. Several more people were injured, four of them critically. There had been an accident in the fusion-powered electrical generators; one of the chambers that the fusion took place in exploded. The entire place was now toxic, and many of the survivors probably wouldn’t survive in the long run.

It wasn't, of course, a fusion explosion. A fusion explosion would have leveled the dome and instantly incinerated everyone there. It was a chemical explosion, and it would likely take months to find the accident’s initial cause.

Buildings in domes were always built with a dome leak in mind, and that was the problem in this case. The reactor was built against and as part of a dome wall. It was built intentionally thin behind the generating plant, far less sturdy than the rest of the building’s walls, so if the unlikely chamber explosion ever actually happened, the force and radiation would go outside the dome.

It worked perfectly, except that some of the building’s seams weren’t quite strong enough. Luckily the whole building didn’t give way or everyone outside at the time would have died instantly. But there were cracks around the doors and air was leaking badly.

It was a matter of time now. Air inside buildings would only last so long, and many had no extra oxygen.

***

“Holy crap,” John said when he read Chuck’s phone call from Ceres. He called the main office on Mars, which was in his dome, and ordered that a ship be readied immediately.

“We only have two here, sir. One is due for maintenance, and the other one is stranded in orbit with two badly damaged generators waiting for a shipment of parts from Earth.”

“Reschedule the maintenance on the one that flies and get it and its pilot ready, and I mean now. This is a real emergency.”

He then called his friend Ed Waldo, who was mayor of his dome. He’d need Ed’s help coordinating everything. Maybe Ed would come by his bar later on when he got off from work.

***

Karen Wilkerson was chief engineer at the power station on Ceres, and was watching the board closely before it happened. One of the techs had pointed out some abnormal readings, and when she saw the blue line spike she hit the evacuation alarm immediately, saving a lot of lives. Had she not seen it coming, everyone in the building would have died. Instead, the only casualties were those who didn’t drop everything and leave the building immediately, and one who had fallen down in her rush to escape and had broken her arm.

Now she was in the annex, worrying about her people. She had already called Dome Hall with the disaster alert. Now all there was to do was to wait until the leaks were patched and a supply ship came with batteries, because they wouldn’t be generating any electricity from this generator again and building a new one would take months.

And wait for air, of course. If that ship didn’t get here on time everyone would likely die.

***

Commander Jose Ramos and the Green-Osbourne Security fleet that he was in charge of were in orbit around Mars, as usual, when he saw the pirates. “¡Santo mierde!” he swore in his native Spanish. That was an awful lot of pirates, more than he’d seen together for years. He set course towards them, and when the pirates saw Ramos’ fleet they took off. The G-O Security ships took chase.

A call came in from G-O headquarters. Transport 487-B was missing, and they believed that it was now in the hands of pirates. It had been stranded in orbit around Mars, waiting for parts for generator repairs. When the first transport showed up with its parts, the ship was gone. The repair facility’s crew was missing, hadn’t even radioed, and was presumed dead.

He swore again. Where was that damned Jones? Jones’ ship was supposed to be guarding the orbiting repair facility that held 487-B. He worried about Bob and his crew, praying that they had simply been disabled by a mechanical malfunction before getting there. He cursed himself; he shouldn’t have let Larry leave until Bob got there.

He then cursed himself for stupidity again; there was no way any pirate could beat Bob and his ship and crew. It must have been a mechanical malfunction.

He wondered how many of the facilities’ personnel had been killed. Damn. There were three orbiting facilities, each with a G-O security ship guarding it, except the ship guarding this one was missing. And it was his responsibility; he should never have let Larry leave no matter how long he had been since he’d eaten or slept. This, he swore, would never happen again.

This was bad. Ever since the piracy had started not long after Mars was colonized, all space vessels were armed to some degree, but G-O ships were the best built, most heavily armored and heavily armed. Transport ships owned by Green-Osborne even had EMPs, atomics, and rail guns, and the security fleet was armed and armored even better. An atomic explosion wouldn’t even damage a G-O craft, whether transport or security, unless it detonated closer than two hundred meters away. They were completely impervious to EMP blasts, which took out any electronics on anyone else’s ships.

Now that pirates had a G-O ship...

***

Bill Kelly was sound asleep when the alarm went off on his phone. It was his boss, who told him he had a half an hour to be in the pilot seat ready for takeoff.

He rolled out of bed and swore. Not having time for a shower or breakfast, he hurriedly dressed and rushed to the spaceport.

“Glad you got here so fast, Bill,” his boss told him. “There’s a terrible disaster up on Ceres. Their power generator blew up and caused a huge air leak. We would have called sooner but I knew you’d be sleeping. You need to get those batteries and tanks of solid oxygen and nitrogen to the belt as fast as you can make that ship go. The robots should be done loading in ten or fifteen minutes.”

Bill flew his houseboat to the ship and entered, belted into the pilot seat, and detached from the repair facility. Now he only had to wait for the countdown to leave orbit to begin as the ship drifted slowly away from the repair station.

The captain of the ship guarding the facility came on the radio. “You’re on your own for a while, buddy. Commander Ramos says I need to join the chase against an awful lot of pirates, so keep your eyes open.”

“I take off in five minutes anyway,” Bill said. “I’ll be okay.”

“Well, I’ll check on you shortly.”

***

The pirates split up and ran in different directions. The Green-Osbourne defense fleet split up to chase them, and Commander Ramos went after the biggest one. It might be the stolen transport.

“¿Qué en el infierno?” It was outrunning him! That shouldn’t be possible. Maybe it was an old fission ship that had been converted to fusions. When converting them from fission generators to fusions, the engineers had left the fission generator as a backup to the fusions, which often malfunctioned back then. Apparently the pirates had done a bit of hardware hacking and had made it so that they were using all three generators at once. He shook his head, when the company got that one back it was going to really need a lot of work. They might even have to scrap it.

Not only were Green-Osbourne ships heavily armed and armored, they were also stealthy. But not invisible, not as long as the engines were running, since they left a trail of ions behind. Jose grinned at this; common knowledge was that they were completely invisible. Common knowledge is often incorrect, although they were indeed invisible unless you knew what to look for.

It looked like the pirate was circling back towards Mars. He kept following the trail.

***

Will Welton was relieved. His crew had finally finished sealing off the generator building, putting plates and glue on the doorways and sealing the smaller leaks by the dome wall. But the danger was far from over, as the dome itself had practically no air pressure at all now. Rather than going back to the shop, he went home, thankful that his house had a garage that doubled as an airlock. If it didn’t he would have had to stay in the shop until air arrived. All he could do now was wait for the supply ship to come, and hope his air held out long enough. “I need to get some house plants,” he told himself.

When he got home he took off his helmet and gloves, and shut off the environment suit’s power and valves, but didn’t remove the suit; he didn’t know how long his house’s air would last. There was two hours worth of air left in its tank, and if his house ran out of air he'd need it. He wondered if anyone would live.

***

Bill was barely out of orbit before pirates were after him, and a lot of them, too. And wouldn’t you know it, none of the Green-Osbourne defense fleet was anywhere near Mars where they usually were. Probably still chasing the other pirates, he thought, and here there were more. Well, Ralph had warned him, but he wished Jeff could have stuck around.

There was a lot more piracy now, ever since the trouble on Earth had started. The company’s defense fleet was busier than it had ever been.

Pirates could be pretty clever at times, and may have lured the defense fleet away somehow. They had once infiltrated company maintenance years ago and sabotaged Bill’s ship when it was being worked on. If it hadn’t had been for John, who was a company captain at the time, he’d have been dead.

“God damn it,” he swore out loud. “Not now! Pirates are the last thing I need. People are going to die if I don’t get to Ceres!”

But pirates don’t mind people dying. In fact, they quite often caused it. They seemed to enjoy killing.

He could have simply outrun them, but instead dropped an EMP set to discharge when it was right in the middle of the fleet that was after his boat. That should end the problem, and since it would kill everything electronic, the ships’ life control systems would also be dead. If the salvage fleet didn’t show up in time the pirates would be, too.

He hoped so. An awful lot of his friends had been killed at the hands of pirates. The only good pirate was a dead pirate, but he was okay with bad pirates rotting in prison.

His EMP didn’t disable them all. Bad aim on his part? Half a dozen were still accelerating.

He dropped an atomic. He hated destroying valuable space ships that would get a bonus for him if there was a finder’s fee involved, but it seemed the right thing to do at the time.

The lead ship survived. “Damn, they have one of ours,” he said aloud, wondering how pirates had gotten hold of a virtually invincible G-O ship. He quickly called headquarters informing them that pirates had a company transport, although they were certainly aware of it, he thought. This was real trouble. G-O ships were faster, better armed, and sturdier (and usually larger) than other companies’ ships. Now the pirates had EMPs and atomics!

But Bill knew these ships, and knew them better than most company captains, let alone any pirate. Bill was a nerd who loved not only studying how they worked, but how to make them work better. He’d gotten a third gravity on batteries once, and nobody else had ever managed to. Even though he’d tried to explain to the company engineers how he did it, they still didn’t understand.

He’d outrun that sucker.

It took hours, but he did. He was running on both generators and batteries, which he’d set up when he realized that the pirates had one of his company’s boats. He wondered why he wasn’t pulling ahead of the pirate any faster than he was, especially since it was an old ship after him that he should have been able to outrun easily, even without the extra boost from the batteries. He hoped the extra wattage didn’t harm any of the engines; this was a bit of his own nerdy design, the craft already was overdue for maintenance, and he had to run like this far longer than he thought he’d have to.

When he was far enough ahead of the pirate ship that he could no longer detect it, he went at full thrust for another two hours. Then he disconnected the batteries from the engines and set them charging from the generators as he continued on at the ship’s normal top speed. His boss had told him to go as fast as he could make it go, but he worried about the maintenance issues.

He still hadn't had a shower or breakfast. He remedied that immediately.

***

Mayor Watson paced in his office, cursing himself. Why weren’t there more oxygen generators? They had existed since the late twentieth century when they were used to treat emphysema, long before that disease was cured. There were a few in Dome Ceres, of course, but not many. Not nearly enough for an emergency like this.

There weren’t many plants inside buildings, either, except inside the farm buildings. There were a lot of plants outside, but outdoor plants would do little good now; they’d die quickly without air, and in the cold. They would be a help in a home or business, changing the carbon dioxide people exhaled into oxygen and plant material, and he vowed to get plants in every building. Lots of them. Plants inside buildings would save lives!

And why didn’t he have enough air for this sort of emergency stored away? He swore that there would be enough if something like this ever happened again. He cursed himself again for his lack of foresight.

Well, hindsight would have to do. If He lived. He’d gotten a message from John that a ship full of air and batteries was on its way, but would it get here on time?

***

The company defense fleet's commander never lost the ion trail, and eventually came up on the pirate ship, which was drifting through space at a high rate of speed. Either its engines had all burned out, or more likely all three of its generators had malfunctioned; it had been waiting for parts, and the pirates had probably installed old used, sub-par equipment. The other pirate vessels had been traveling along side, apparently trying to get the disabled craft going again. They took off in different directions, maybe five of them; his fleet had taken the rest when he was chasing the pirate Green-Osbourne transport.

He got a message from Bob Jones that he and his crew were safe. It had indeed been a mechanical problem, and he was at one of the repair facilities in orbit around Mars, cursing about the stolen transport. If only... And Ramos was still cursing himself for letting Larry leave before his replacement showed up. He wasn’t going to do that again!

Docking with the crippled purloined transport was easy, and now his commandos were all on duty. He wondered how many pirates would be captured, and how many killed. He gave no thought to G-O casualties, because there never were any. These men and women were very well trained.

He chuckled. When pirates fought with the police on Earth, often the pirates won. But never when they tangled with the G-O security fleet. Earth had better never go to war with Mars!

***

Bill fretted. Engine 129 was showing a small undervoltage in one computer, and a small overvoltage on a different computer. All four computers were supposed to agree. He trudged down the five flights of stairs, worrying and cursing. He was half a day from Ceres, his time, but it would be longer Ceres time because of the time dilation that extreme speed causes. If he lost any more engines... and God forbid that he lose a generator. Everyone on Ceres would die, including Chuck.

Even though two of the four computers disagreeing usually meant a bad electrical connection, he shut number 129 down, as per normal operation. He considered shutting the two next to it down as well, knowing that sometimes this sort of problem spread from engine to engine. One engine wouldn't matter, since he was ahead of schedule, sort of, but three might.

He'd probably broken another speed record and would arrive “early”, if there was such a thing in a situation like this. He'd been doing more than a gravity and a half when the pirate ship was chasing him, which was as high as the indicator would go. The craft’s top speed was supposed to be one point four Gs, and he wondered how much he’d really gotten out of it. Walking up those five flights of stairs in that gravity was a real workout, especially after being on Mars and on low gravity runs.

Unlike most runs, he spent most of his waking time the whole run in the pilot room, the engine room at the bottom of the ship, and traveling between the two. “My legs will look like turkey legs when this run’s over,” he panted as he climbed the stairs.

It was time to turn the ship around and decelerate, and he was glad it wasn't an old boat. The old models almost always had something break when you reversed them for braking. If he lost a generator now, he’d overshoot Ceres.

***

On Ceres it had been two Earthian days since the accident, and things were getting grim. Some people were running out of food, air was getting pretty bad in some buildings, and if the ship ran late a lot of people would die. Maybe everyone.

Will Welton had taken off the suit finally, realizing he couldn’t keep wearing it until air came. He’d put it back on if the air in his house got thick.

Mayor Watson had spent that time mostly pacing in his office, feeling like a caged animal. Most Cererians were probably feeling the same way, he thought.

While he paced, the same thoughts raced through his head, over and over, planning for the aftermath of this mess. Dome Ceres was going to have emergency oxygen, and a lot more inside plants. He envisioned air pipes running into homes from a central emergency air supply that would run parallel to water pipes. He wondered why this hadn't been done before, and wondered what else he could do to make the Cererian Dome safer. All he could do now was hope that ship wasn't late.

***

Jen Carpenter was in the hospital with a broken arm. She had panicked when she had a strange feeling and started running, and was outside before the alarms even sounded. She didn't even know what had spooked her. The first one out of the building, she tripped and fell right when the alarm sounded.

Her arm hurt, but she was glad of her misstep, because hospitals keep lots of oxygen. The folks there would be the last to asphyxiate if that ship was late.

A tear ran down her cheek; she had lost friends in the accident, and probably wouldn’t even get to attend the funerals.

***

Chuck answered his phone. It was his Martian friend Captain Bill Kelly, piloting the rescue ship. He was only a half hour away, planet time! He hadn't expected it to arrive until the next Earth day. Nobody counted Cererian days, since they were so short.

“Thank God!” he said over the phone to Captain Kelly.

Bill laughed in the weirdly fast, high pitch of someone on an approaching ship coming in at high speeds. “Thank pirates. They have one of our ships and I had to do what might have been dangerous to outrun ‘em. I'm pretty sure I broke a speed record. Look, Chuck, suit up and I’ll meet you at the transport dock. Ceres’ gravity is low enough I can land an ion ship on the surface.”

They spoke for another minute or two before hanging up. Bill readied the ship for landing, and Chuck suited up to meet him.

***

Will Welton was worried. Oxygen was getting low and carbon dioxide was getting thick in his house, and he was becoming confused and had a terrible headache. He donned his environment suit, helmet, and gloves, turned on the valves and electronics, and drove to the hospital. Surely they would have enough oxygen.

Confused by the anoxia he had gotten before donning his helmet, he had a hard time finding the hospital and didn’t think of having the vehicle go there. He gave it verbal directions, many of which were wrong, instead of simply saying “take me to the nearest hospital.” His head was pounding, and his mood was swinging like a yo-yo. He finally reached the hospital two hours later, parked in the lot, and collapsed in the emergency room’s airlock.

It was only a minute or two before he was found, as he wasn’t the only one who had started running out of air. Hospital staff were extra busy today!

***

“I sure am glad to see you, mate. Things are getting desperate,” said the British Chuck.

“I hope I got here on time,” Bill replied.

“Barely, but yeah. Once those canisters are finished unloading and opened they’ll melt and boil away quickly in this warmth.” The robots were bringing them in and opening them, and the first ones opened were already appreciably less full. Clouds of vapor were rolling out of the boiling but super-cold liquid in the opened canisters.

Bill looked at the thermometer on his environment suit’s sleeve. Warmth? Oh, well. “So how long will it be until you can get a new generator built?”

“Six months. It would only take two if we could afford speed, but we’re going to need so many batteries our budget is going to be really strained.”

“Why don’t you call John and see if the company will rent this ship to you for a couple of months?”

“I don’t need a ship, I need electricity!”

“What do you think this tub runs on, hydrazine? There are two fusion generators on it, big ones, three stories tall each. We dock ships that have busted generators and charge the broken ship’s backup batteries all the time.

“My boat was going to be out of action for a while anyway for maintenance, and considering what I did to get here alive and on time it’s really going to need it. Maintenance should be easier with gravity, even as low a gravity as Ceres has. We could send the dozen or so people necessary to do it here. Call John. I'll bet he’d do it for a load of rare earths, and you folks have plenty!”

“Come on, Bill, lets get to my office so I can call him, that’s a great idea!”

“Look, Chuck, I’d love to, but I need to supervise hooking the ship’s generators up to your grid so everybody can charge their batteries. I’ll meet you at the Bull’s Head for a beer later if it’s open.”

“It should be. Every restaurant, pub, and shop on the dome will be busy tonight. Cooped up in their homes running out of air they’re going to want to be out, and only a fool would leave his shop closed. I’ll meet you there.”

***

“Yeah, Chuck called, twice.” “I thought his staff would have.”

“I don’t know, I couldn’t exactly talk to him there. It was email, of course, but I can’t see Chuck not handling something like that himself. So how was your trip? What happened after you got to Ceres?”

“Well, there was nothing out of the ordinary on the way there, just routine. You were a captain once, you know how it goes.” He chuckled. “I’m pretty sure I broke a speed record, though.”

John laughed. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Well, anyway, a couple of hours after I got there you could walk around outside without an environment suit, and half the people there opened their windows because the cold, thin air outside was more breathable than the thick, oxygen-thin and carbon dioxide-saturated air inside.

“The police checked all of the buildings to make sure the occupants were all right, and I met Chuck at the pub when we were done working.

“I was on Ceres for a long time, rode back on the Orion ship after it finally got there, unloaded all the batteries, and loaded a shipment of rare earths for Charlie Onehorse’s dome here on Mars. As slow as Orion’s ships are I was on Ceres a week before he even got there, and it took half a day to unload the batteries and load the ore.

“So how have things been down here on Mars?”