Ms. Harte smiled prettily. “I’ll bet VR Duels, Inc. will declare a dividend.”

“Very likely,” Franklin agreed happily. “Very likely.”

They both ordered trout, and Franklin picked a dry white wine to go with the fish.

“I really want to thank you,” Franklin said, once they had sipped at the wine. “I know it was quite a sacrifice for you.”

“Sacrifice?”

“The club’s board turned down your petition about the Men’s Bar.”

Ms. Harte shrugged prettily. “It wasn’t my petition. I don’t care about your old Men’s Bar.”

“Oh,” said Franklin. “When I first talked to you about it, I thought—”

“I’m not a radical feminist. The petition was just the bait for your trap. And it worked.”

Franklin nodded, a little warily, and turned his attention to the trout.

She said, “So now the good citizens of this state can settle their differences with a duel in virtual reality.”

“Under the specified conditions. Both parties have to sign a formal agreement to make the results of the duel binding on them.”

She took another sip of wine, then said. “It’s funny. You told me that Justice Halpern was a champion pistol shot, but he was worse than I am.”

“There’s a big difference between shooting at a target and firing at someone who’s shooting back at you,” Franklin said. “And that Dragoon’s revolver we gave him is a lot different from the Glock he’s accustomed to.”

“I suppose,” Ms. Harte agreed faintly. “But boy, he was a really rotten shot, you know. I deliberately missed him four times and I still had to pretend to be hit; he never came close to me.”

Franklin hissed, “For God’s sake don’t let anyone else know that! If it ever gets back to him. . .”

“Don’t worry, my lips are sealed,” she replied. “After all, an assistant district attorney has got to have some discretion.”

With a relieved chuckle, Franklin said, “You’ll get the next opening in the DA’s office. It’s all set. We just have to wait a few months so Halpern doesn’t start putting two and two together.”

She nodded, but then asked, “So why did you go through all this? Why are you so intent on getting VR duels accepted as legally binding?”

Franklin eyed her carefully for a long, silent moment. At last he answered, “Several reasons. First, it will help people get their differences settled without waiting for months or even years for a court to come to a decision for them.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Second, it will unclog court calendars. A lot of petty nuisance suits will disappear. People will fight duels instead of calling for lawyers.”

“Lawyers’ incomes will go down, you know.”

“Yes, but it’s all for the best,” Franklin said loftily. “It will make our society better. Healthier. People will take out their aggressions in harmless but emotionally satisfying virtual reality duels. As a former psychologist, I’m certain that it will be a great benefit to society.”

“Really?”

“So some lawyers won’t make as much money,” he went on. “They won’t have as many ambulances to chase. So what? Money isn’t everything. We have to think of the greater good.”

“I see.” Ms. Harte broke into a knowing grin. “And just how much money have you invested in VR Duels, Inc.?”

Franklin tried to keep a straight face but failed. Smiling like a true lawyer, he replied, “Quite a bit, Roxanne, my dear. Quite a healthy goddamned bit.”

MARS FARTS

First, I should apologize for the somewhat vulgar title. But, as you will see, it really is appropriate.

Satellites placed in orbit around the planet Mars have detected occasional whiffs of methane gas in the thin Martian atmosphere. They seem to appear seasonally, in the springtime.

Methane is a compound of carbon and hydrogen. The gas is quickly broken up into its constituent elements by solar ultraviolet radiation. The freed hydrogen presumably wafts to the top of the atmosphere and eventually boils away into space.

So the methane is destroyed almost as soon as it is produced. Yet something produces fresh methane every year.

On Earth, microbes living deep underground use the energy of our planet’s hot core to drive their metabolism. They eat rock or iron and excrete methane.

Could such methanogenic bacteria be producing the methane found in the Martian atmosphere?

Here is a frontier to be explored!

“A catholic, a Jew, and a Muslim are stuck in the middle of Mars,” said Rashid Faiyum.

“That isn’t funny,” Jacob Bernstein replied, wearily.

Patrick O’Connor, the leader of the three-man team, shook his head inside the helmet of his pressure suit. “Laugh and the world laughs with you, Jake.”

None of them could see the faces of their companions through the tinting of their helmet visors. But they could hear the bleakness in Bernstein’s tone. “There’s not much to laugh about, is there?”

“Not much,” Faiyum agreed.

All around them stretched the barren, frozen, rust-red sands of Utopia Planita. Their little hopper leaned lopsidedly on its three spindly legs in the middle of newly churned pockmarks from the meteor shower that had struck the area overnight.

Off on the horizon stood the blocky form of the old Viking 2 lander, which had been there for more than a century. One of their mission objectives had been to retrieve parts of the Viking to return to Earth, for study and eventual sale to a museum. Like everything else about their mission, that objective had been sidelined by the meteor shower. Their goal now was survival.

A barrage of tiny bits of stone, most of them no larger than dust motes. Once they had been part of an icy comet, but the ice had melted away after God-knew-how-many trips around the sun, and now only the stones were left when the remains of the comet happened to collide with the planet Mars.