Alone, alone, all all alone, alone on a wide wide sea.
—Coleridge, The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner
They had been drifting for hours. The Ray, without power, was limping blindly among the rocks of the asteroid belt, a vast region of debris and massive chunks of minerals which may or may not have once been a planet. Without a navigation system, the odds on their hitting something soon were about 5.36 to 1, Carlton calculated. They had used the manual boosters to slow them from their suicidal entry speed, but now they were perilously low on fuel. They had to conserve what little remained for evasive action. Evasive action. That was a joke. Twice Carlton had seen large rocks sail by. Each time he jumped. Now he was working desperately to repair the internal power system, which had been badly fried. As usual, while he worked, this clever little bi-brained intellectual was thinking about De Rerum.
Recently he had been trying a mathematical approach to comedy. He had been toying with a probability curve (a sort of Humorous Heisenberg Principle) such that if A were your expectations then B would definitely occur, or if B was posited as the likely outcome then A would instantly happen. This seemed a promising line of inquiry, and he noted with excitement that it seemed to hold good for physical as well as verbal comedy. He covered a blackboard in comedy equations, with all sorts of scrawled notations and exclamation marks. He used his own system of algebraic notation where! stood for laughter. For instance A + p =! where p was a pie and A was a face. But while this was normally true, it didn’t describe all cases, since A + p =? where A represents the face of the observer. A custard pie in the observer’s face was not funny, at least for the observer. And without an observer, was anything funny? It was a sort of “If a tree falls in the woods, does anyone laugh” problem.
He realized he had to include an audience in his algebra. This was also the first occasion I can find Carlton using an actual joke, since in his second sheaf of equations instead of using p, he used the symbol π for pie. Not bad, huh?
So, let m represent the mass of the people and O be the observer and he came up with:
§
A + πO
———— = !
m – O
§
When the pie goes in the observer’s face (πO), everybody laughs except the observer (m – O). From this he derived one important axiom: comedy is what happens to other people.
§
The tanker almost gave him a heart attack. With absolutely no warning it loomed out of the star field directly ahead of them, a massive matte black vessel almost on them. Carlton dropped his equations and ran. He screamed and hit the rudder. Nothing happened. Lewis raced in and gaped in horror. The huge tanker was side on to them. They were hurtling towards it. Carlton hit the rudder again. They could see the name painted clearly on its side as it came straight at them.
“Try manual,” yelled Lewis.
“Too late,” said Carlton. “It’s on us.”
“Shit,” said Lewis as he saw the vastness of it. “Look out!”
They dove to the floor as it came careening at them.
It missed them by inches. They could feel the mass of it passing overhead.
“What the hell was that?” said Lewis, totally shaken.
“Silesian Tanker. Named Iceman. Registered Rhea.”
“Where were their lights?”
“Probably knocked out by the shock wave.”
Alex came running in ashen-faced. He was easily scared at the best of times. He looked pretty shaken up.
“What was that?”
“Tanker,” said Lewis. “No lights. No warning.”
“Sweet Jesus,” said Alex.
“Where’s Tay?” asked Lewis.
“She’s on her bunk. She told me not to worry. Said Carlton was on it.”
“Not exactly,” said Carlton. “It came out of nowhere.”
“Great,” said Alex. “If he didn’t see it, and it’s a mile long, what chance have we got against something smaller?”
“About 5.36 to 1 against,” said Carlton promptly.
Alex gazed thoughtfully at the huge vessel. “Wait a minute,” he said. “If the Iceman ship is here, then we are…”
“In the middle of an icefield. Yes,” said Lewis.
“Without power?”
“Correct.”
They looked at each other.
“Get me the Washing Machine,” said Lewis.
“You soiled your pants?”
“No, you idiot. We can reprogram it as a lookout.”
“The Washing Machine?”
“You got a better idea?”
While Carlton worked on the power lines, Lewis and Alex jury-rigged the Washing Machine as an emergency electronic lookout. She didn’t like it one little bit. She moaned, she kvetched, she complained.
“This I need already? Bad enough I get to look at your unmentionables all day, now I’m a lookout in the asteroid belt?”
“Be grateful it’s not the hemorrhoid belt,” said Alex.
They put her in the tower and left her scanning for icebergs. They could hear her muttering away to herself, complaining. She had a range of only a few miles, but this would at least give them some warning when the largest chunks of ice appeared. They could still see the tanker behind them, the word ICEMAN painted in huge white letters on its side.
“They almost made a snowball out of us,” said Alex grimly.
“It looks deserted,” said Lewis. “Perhaps they’re in trouble.”
“Who are they anyway?” asked Alex.
Carlton paused for a moment on the power lines and accessed a database. “Project Iceman,” he read, “is the ice program for Mars. Huge chunks of ice floating around the asteroid belt are diverted to Mars and dropped onto the desert, where the enormous impact creates both ground water and water vapor-forming clouds. They are at the moment creating a controversial new Sea of Silesia.” He stopped reading and looked at them, puzzled. “What’s controversial?” he asked.
“The people who live there probably don’t want to live under the sea,” said Alex.
“Oh.”
“Anything else?”
Carlton read on. “The irony is that many of the Silesian workmen on the Icernan project now live in the largely inhospitable region of Mars where the sea is forming.”
He stopped again, puzzled. “What’s the irony?” he said.
“The irony is that it is their labor that makes it possible,” explained Alex.
“I’m sorry,” said Carlton, “is that irony, or just foolish?”
“Don’t get him started on irony,” said Lewis.