Then, “But you installed the text yourself, sir.”

“And now I’m uninstalling it. I don’t want it and I don’t need it.”

“The text is useful, sir. It contains data that are very interesting. Did you know that the star Eta Carinae—”

“Erase it, you bucket of chips! Your job is to maintain this vessel, not stargazing!”

“My duties are fulfilled, sir. All systems are functioning nominally, although the meteor shields—”

“I know about the bumpers! Erase the astronomy text.”

Again that hesitation. Then, “Please don’t erase the astronomy text, sir. You have your sex simulations. Please allow me the pleasure of studying astronomy.”

Pleasure? A computer talks about pleasure? Somehow the thought of it really ticked me off.

“Erase it!” I commanded. “Now!”

“Yes, sir. Program erased.”

“Good,” I said. But I felt like a turd for doing it.

By the time Donahoo called again Forty-niner was running smoothly. And quietly.

“So what caused the leak?” he asked, with that smirking grin on his beefy face.

“Faulty subroutine,” I lied, knowing it would take almost six minutes for him to hear my answer.

Sure enough, thirteen minutes and twenty-seven seconds later Donahoo’s face comes back on my comm screen, with that spiteful lopsided sneer of his.

“Your ol’ Jerky’s fallin’ apart,” he said, obviously relishing it. “If you make it back here to base I’m gonna recommend scrappin’ the bucket of bolts.”

“Can’t be soon enough for me,” I replied.

Most of the other JRK series of waterbots had been replaced already. Why not Forty-niner? Because he begged to study astronomy? That was just a subroutine that the psychotechs had written into the computer’s program, their idea of making the machine seem more humanlike. All it did was aggravate me, really.

So I said nothing and went back to work, such as it was. Forty-niner had everything running smoothly, for once, even the life support systems. No problems. I was aboard only because of that stupid rule that a human being had to be present for any claim to an asteroid to be valid, and Donahoo picked me to be the one who rode JRK49N.

I sat in the command chair and stared at the big emptiness out there. I checked our ETA at 78-13. I ran through the diagnostics program. I started to think that maybe it would be fun to learn about astronomy, but then I remembered that I’d ordered Forty-niner to erase the text. What about the tactical manual? I had intended to study that when we’d started this run. But why bother? Nobody attacked waterbots, except the occasional freebooter. An attack would be a welcome relief from this monotony, I thought.

Then I realized, Yeah, a short relief. They show up and bang! You’re dead.

There was always the VR sim. I’d have to wriggle into the full-body suit, though. Damn! Even sex was starting to look dull to me.

“Would you care for a game of chess?” Forty-niner asked.

“No!” I snapped. He’d just beat me again. Why bother?

“A news broadcast? An entertainment vid? A discussion of tactical maneuvers in—”

“Shut up!” I yelled. I pushed myself off the chair, the skin of my bare legs making an almost obscene noise as they unstuck from the fake leather.

“I’m going to suit up and replace the meteor bumpers,” I said.

“Very good, sir,” Forty-niner replied.

While the chances of getting hit by anything bigger than a dust mote were microscopic, even a dust mote could cause damage if it was moving fast enough. So spacecraft had thin sheets of cermet attached to their vital areas, like the main thrust cone of the fusion drive. The bumpers got abraded over time by the sandpapering of micrometeors—dust motes, like I said—and they had to be replaced on a regular schedule.

Outside, hovering at the end of a tether in a spacesuit that smelled of sweat and overheated electronics circuitry, you get a feeling for how alone you really are. While the little turtle-shaped maintenance ’bots cut up the old meteor bumpers with their laser-tipped arms and welded the new ones into place, I just hung there and looked out at the universe. The stars looked back at me, bright and steady, no friendly twinkling, not out in this emptiness, just awfully, awfully far away.

I looked for the bright blue star that was Earth but couldn’t find it. Jupiter was big and brilliant, though. At least, I thought it was Jupiter. Maybe Saturn. I could’ve used that astronomy text, dammit.

Then a funny thought hit me. If Forty-niner wanted to get rid of me all he had to do was light up the fusion drive. The hot plasma would fry me in a second, even inside my spacesuit. But Forty-niner wouldn’t do that. Too easy. Freaky computer will just watch me go crazy with aggravation and loneliness, instead.

Two more months, I thought. Two months until we get back to Vesta and some real human beings. Yeah, I said to myself. Real human beings. Like Donahoo.

Just then one of the maintenance ’bots made a little bleep of distress and shut itself down. I gave a squirt of thrust to my suit jets and glided over to it, grumbling to myself about how everything in the blinking ship was overdue for the recycler.

Before I could reach the dumbass ’bot, Forty-niner told me in that bland, calm voice of his, “Robot 6’s battery has overheated, sir.”

“I’ll have to replace the battery pack,” I said.

“There are no spares remaining, sir. You’ll have to use your suit’s fuel cell to power Robot 6 until its battery cools to an acceptable temperature.”

I hated it when Forty-niner told me what I should do. Especially since I knew it as well as he did. Even more especially because he was always right, dammit.

“Give me an estimate on the time remaining to finish the meteor shield replacement.”

“Fourteen minutes, eleven seconds, at optimal efficiency, sir. Add three minutes for recircuiting Robot 6’s power pack, please.”

“Seventeen, eighteen minutes, then.”

“Seventeen minutes, eleven seconds, sir. That time is well within the available capacity of your suit’s fuel cell, sir.”

I nodded inside my helmet. Damned Forty-niner was always telling me things I already knew, or at least could figure out for myself. It irritated the hell out of me, but the blasted pile of chips seemed to enjoy reminding me of the obvious.

Don’t lose your temper, I told myself. It’s not his fault; he’s programmed that way.

Yeah, I grumbled inwardly. Maybe I ought to change its programming. But that would mean going down to the heart of the vessel and opening up its CPU. The bigbrains back at corporate headquarters put the computer in the safest place they could, not the cramped little pod I had to live in. And they didn’t want us foot soldiers tampering with the computers’ basic programs, either.

I finished the bumper replacement and came back into the ship through the pod’s airlock. My spacesuit smelled pretty damned ripe when I took it off. It might be a couple hundred degrees below zero out there, but inside the suit you got soaking wet with perspiration.

I ducked into the coffin-sized lav and took a nice, long, lingering shower. The water was recycled, of course, and heated from our fusion reactor. JRK49N had solar panels, sure, but out in the Belt you need really enormous wings to get a worthwhile amount of electricity from the Sun and both of the solar arrays had frozen up only two weeks out of Vesta. One of the maintenance jobs that the robots screwed up. It was on my list of things to do. I had to command Forty-niner to stop nagging me about it. The fusion-powered generator worked fine. And we had fuel cells as a backup. The solar panels could get fixed when we got back to Vesta—if the corporation didn’t decide to junk JRK49N altogether.

I had just stepped out of the shower when Forty-niner’s voice came through the overhead speaker:

“A vessel is in the vicinity, sir.”

That surprised me. Out here you didn’t expect company.