“Hitchhiking ain’t what it used to be, ya know?” said the drifter.
“Mmm.” We were cramped in the flight pod of my cargo vessel. I didn’t trust this shabby drifter to roam my ship on his own.
“Yep yep,” he said like he was about to tell the world’s best joke. “You got too much of that—what do you call it?—dichotomy!”
“How so?” I inquired, surprised that such a big word was coming from such a bedraggled man.
We continued in silence as he collected his thoughts, cruising down the Sol 65 belt-way. Markers on asteroids counted the kilomiles as we slowly got closer to Vega Prime.
“Well, you see… On Earth you’ve got drifters, and in space you have drifters. On Earth it’s easy enough to get by. Heck, a cousin of mine used to make a living as a hobo. He’d hitch rides and catch trains and he saw more countries than he can count—so at least more than three, I reckon!”
The echoes of his laughter in my cramped cabin grated my nerves.
He settled eventually, and I asked, “Yes, but how is that different from out here?” Even crazed conversation was better than a space trucker talking to himself.
“Because out here you mess around and you die! You got limited oxygen, and if you hadn’t of picked me up when you did, I’da been a goner in a few hours. Don’t have to be a genius to know that when an air tank hits zero—that’s it!”
“That is true,” I said. “One can make a living being a drifter on Earth or in the colonies—but not out in the black. Right?”
“Right!”
We were quiet then, save for a few muttered laughs under his breath.
My stomach grumbled, and his answered similarly. Before he could beg some food off me, I grabbed a vacuum-dried BLT and handed him half, eating the rest myself. We continued on pondering during our mastication. I was focused on the road, he was thinking of more to say about the polarization of hitchhiking.
“Another thing that’s like a coin is me,” he said after we had eaten.
“A coin?”
“Yeah, can only be a head or a tail. Only one thing or another.”
“And that’s you?”
“Yes! You see,” a brief chuckle, “I can either be me—a loveable but beaten drifter who had an accident in space and needed to be rescued.” He did smell the part, and before I picked him up I had spied a large chunk of artificial spacejunk on my Ladar. Likely his ship.
“And what’s the tails side?”
More chuckling from him. He couldn’t hold in his revelation: “I could be a killer pirate! Don’t’cha know that those pirates like to act like hitchhikers to bait ya into letting ‘em on?”
“You? A killer pirate?”
“I’m not sayin’ I am,” he said, eyeing the revolver-shaped bulge under my jacket. “Just that I could be. A friend of mine’s brother—or maybe it was a brother of mine’s friend—told me about some raider crew workin’ the shipping lanes around here. They board ya, then do some terrible things.”
“What sorts of terrible things?”
“Terrible thing type things, from what I hear. Like burnin’ yer women and rapin’ yer cargo type of things. No survivors and blood spatterin’ all over the decks. Ships robbed and looted. All I’m sayin’ is that you got to be careful in these parts, ya hear me?”
“I suppose so,” I mused. “It’s always a mystery—picking up strangers. A lot like a box of chocolates.”
“Box of what now?” he asked.
“Classical reference. There is more difference, actually,” I continued. “As you said, you could either be heads, an unlucky spacer; or tails, a vicious pirate. That differs greatly from an Earth-bound drifter, where one could be a plethora of things.”
I could smell wood burning as his brain processed the word “plethora.”
“My father did some time as a drifter after college,” I said. “He had enough money saved up, but he traveled because it was fun. ‘Best years of my life,’ he’d say to me. Wasn’t the smartest thing he did, but at least he had the brains not to try it in space. No guarantee you’d get from one place or another in space. No guarantee you’d even live if your oxygen runs out.”
“Yeah! That dichotomy thing again!” he exclaimed.
For a few minutes, silence whispered as we traveled through space. Then, he said, “But just as we have pirates out here waiting to kill ya, some jerk could do the same hitchhiking the colonies.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“Really makes you think, don’t it. Who’s safe and who’s not?”
I nodded, but had to cut the conversation off. I needed to focus as I guided us towards a large and flat surface of metal and rock.
The drifter recognized the concentration on my face. He knew just enough about spacecraft to leave the pilot alone during maneuvers. He hummed a quiet ditty to himself, content to sit by as I made my pickup in this nearly abandoned weigh-station built into an asteroid.
Struts and landing gear descended as we coasted onto this rest stop for spacers.
Once we landed, a figure began strutting towards us from a small covered alcove. He was clad in a white spacesuit and a large oxygen tank that had seen better days, his face blocked by his reflective gold helmet visor. I opened the back cargo door for him.
“Friend of yours?” the drifter asked.
I nodded.
“He like spendin’ time on abandoned hunks of space?”
Again I nodded. The drifter twiddled his thumbs.
My friend opened the door separating the cargo pod from the piloting module and stepped in, sans helmet.
His black mustache bristled and he said in a gruff voice, “Took you long enough, Spence. I was getting low. Getting to about ten percent air left. You sure like to cut it close.”
“Had to pick up this old fart, Lou.” I said. “Sorry about that. No luck, I take it?”
“Nah, not a bite.” said Lou, eyeing the drifter who sat glancing between Lou and me. “No one wanted to stop for me. Looks like they’re getting wise to us.” Lou settled into a seat just behind the drifter. Leaning forward: “We should find some other lanes to prowl. We’ve been here too long.”
I nodded.
A vacuum of silence filled the cabin, and I glanced at the drifter. He’d gone quite pale behind his brown and bushy beard. I favored him with a reassuring smile—and a wink—as I lifted off.
#
author bio:
Marcus Vance lives next to a lake with his family. Sometimes he writes about the lake, sometimes he writes about his family, sometimes he writes about something completely different. Follow him on Twitter @MarcusCVance.