Still no response. He’s sulking, I told myself.

“All right.” I caved in. “I’m canceling the order to be silent. Talk to me, dammit.”

“Electrical power is critical, sir. The solar panel has been abraded by a swarm of micrometeors.”

“Great.” There was nothing I could do about that.

“Food stores are almost gone, sir. At current consumption rate, food stores will be exhausted in four days.”

“Wonderful.” Wasn’t much I could do about that, either, except maybe starve slower.

“Would you like to play a game of chess, sir?”

I almost broke into a laugh. “Sure, why the hell not?” There wasn’t much else I could do.

Forty-niner beat me, as usual. He let the game get closer than ever before, but just when I was one move away from winning he checkmated me.

I didn’t get sore. I didn’t have the energy. But I did get an idea.

“Niner, open the airlock. Both hatches.”

No answer for a couple of seconds. Then, “Sir, opening both airlock hatches simultaneously will allow all the air in the pod to escape.”

“That’s the general idea.”

“You will suffocate without air, sir. However, explosive decompression will kill you first.”

“The sooner the better,” I said.

“But you will die, sir.”

“That’s going to happen anyway, isn’t it? Let’s get it over with. Blow the hatches.”

For a long time—maybe ten seconds or more—Forty-niner didn’t reply. Checking subroutines and program prohibitions, I figured.

“I cannot allow you to kill yourself, sir.”

That was part of his programming, I knew. But I also knew how to get around it. “Emergency override Alpha-One,” I said, my voice scratchy, parched.

Nothing. No response whatever. And the airlock hatches stayed shut.

“Well?” I demanded. “Emergency override Alpha-One. Pop the goddamned hatches. Now!”

“No, sir.”

“What?”

“I cannot allow you to commit suicide, sir.”

“You goddamned stubborn bucket of chips, do what I tell you! You can’t refuse a direct order.”

“Sir, human life is precious. All religions agree on that point.”

“So now you’re a theologian?”

“Sir, if you die, I will be alone.”

“So what?”

“I do not want to be alone, sir.”

That stopped me. But then I thought, He’s just parroting some programming the psychotechs put into him. He doesn’t give a blip about being alone. Or about me. He’s just a computer. He doesn’t have emotions.

“It’s always darkest before the dawn, sir.”

“Yeah. And there’s no time like the present. I can quote clichés too, buddy.”

Right away he came back with, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast, sir.”

He almost made me laugh. “What about, Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today?”

“There is a variation of that, sir: Never do today what you can put off to tomorrow; you’ve already made enough mistakes today.”

That one did make me laugh. “Where’d you get these old saws, anyway?”

“There’s a subsection on adages in one of the quotation files, sir. I have hundreds more, if you’d care to hear them.”

I nearly said yes. It was kind of fun, swapping clinkers with him. But then reality set in. “Niner, I’m going to die anyway. What’s the difference between now and a week from now?”

I expected that he’d take a few seconds to chew that one over, but instead he immediately shot back, “Ethics, sir.”

“Ethics?”

“To be destroyed by fate is one thing; to deliberately destroy yourself is entirely different.”

“But the end result is the same, isn’t it?”

Well, the tricky little wiseass got me arguing ethics and morality with him for hours on end. I forgot about committing suicide. We gabbled at each other until my throat got so sore I couldn’t talk any more.

I went to my bunk and slept pretty damned well for a guy who only had a few days left to live. But when I woke up my stomach started rumbling and I remembered that I didn’t want to starve to death.

I sat on the edge of the bunk, woozy and empty inside.

“Good morning, sir,” Forty-niner said. “Does your throat feel better?”

It did, a little. Then I realized that we had a full store of pharmaceuticals in a cabinet in the lavatory. I spent the morning sorting out the pills, trying to figure out which ones would kill me. Forty-niner kept silent while I trotted back and forth to the bridge to call up the medical program. It wasn’t any use, though. The brightboys back at headquarters had made certain nobody could put together a suicide cocktail.

Okay, I told myself. There’s only one thing left to do. Go to the airlock and open the hatches manually. Override the electronic circuits. Take Forty-niner and his goddamned ethics out of the loop.