Again with The Hermit of Iapetus

NOTE: Trying this again. A new tack. New ideas coming. That's a good thing, right?

Only Nixon, the old Vulcan proverb goes, could go to China.

Just perhaps, however, he might consider crossing the wide Missouri with me, as I undertake a voyage.

. . .

"There's no chance of rescue," the bursar said. "Nor, of course, even a guarantee we could get you there. Not that it's far. It's just . . . uncommon. There's no one - nothing - there. You'd be alone."

"Yes."

The bursar was silent.

"If it's a question of money -"

"No," he said. "Hardly. Well almost hardly. The orbit surcharge is a pittance when the entire voyage is considered. Mathematicians go cheap these days. And freight, well, almost negligible, considering. Where it's all dead load, and you said - you did say - you'd gather it all up, no matter where it fell. But . . it's the -"

"Isolation, yes," I said. "That's the idea."

"Communication. Intermittent at best. Then we just don't know, as there's no one there. And the debris fields. The radiation."

"The solitude. The room for introspection. The possibility."

"The poisons. It's toxic enough - well, is likely toxic enough-"

"It's fine," I said. "We're used to toxicity."

"We?"

"He said he'd come with me."

"Yes," the bursar said, circling a finger around an ear, catching the planning officer's eye. "You mentioned him. Free on board, I believe we agreed?"

"Yes," I said. "The company is most generous on that point."

Silence, broken only by a sniff from the planning officer.

"And the ship is called," I asked after a moment.

The bursar tapped at the keyboard. "Shenandoah."

"Then the voyage has already begun."

I'm going to take some advice from some writing instructions given to our students this week -- set parts of my writing to different music. This song is for the first part of the book. Other parts will feature Claude Debussy's "Clair de Lune" and "San Antonio Rose" by Patsy Cline.