Vacation

Take me to the moon.
Oh, thank God. That was just too much. One week. BS one week. That was eight days, and more than the twelve hours on day one and day five. Time dilation. Hey, they make you keep track of that on this job? Those seconds add up. The insurance company makes ‘em watch it on the Luna-Ceres run.  Management’s got pilots boosting rock jocks out to the belt pretty much every moment they can keep ‘em awake, and let me tell you, take a guy out of circumterran runs, you know some Virgin or TWA lifer been dumped cause they can’t get enough megawatts into Glacier National to run the mass drivers all the time, you put that same guy on a deep interorbital run like that, I’m telling you one week, this guy could get himself a PhD in pharmacology if it weren’t for the fact they guys out there already figured it out. I’m not just talking Ritalin like a normal pilot, either; think most of them spent time trying to figure the right ignition mix on Depasten and Antivol. I swear, because I heard it from a right guy, they’ve got a pair a guys out there they’re jacking actual primate serotonin right into each other’s medullas with a ten inch needle. Lord knows what monster colony sells that stuff. It’s straight-up unnatural is what it is. I’d give you even money for a month’s pay right now if I hadn’t had to spend it on rum that those two are doing each other more injections than that, you get what I’m saying. It’s repulsive. I don’t even wanna talk about it. But anyway like I’m saying the insurance company’s thinking about OSHA, cause the company’s got ‘merican registry, and making them put all this money into super-accurate accelerometers, so they can get really strict on measuring the time dilation. Says nobody’s ever worked at those kind of velocities for so long before. Like, what, you’re gonna sprout little antennas? Time’s gonna start moving backwards? Can you imagine these people back in 1776? They’d have put Washington in jail for trying to fly that kite! Hey this bulb’s empty, you gotta place on here for empties?—oh, never mind—up here . . . .
Yeah I don’t care whether you can sell booze on a taxi run like this ‘stead of on a commercial line because I’ve got six more of these babies back here, all whiskey instead of rum because, get this, okay, you can actually buy squeezebulbs of rum in Honolulu, down there at sea level, because they get so many freefall operators on leave and half of these numbskulls don’t even know which end of a bottle you use, so I buy enough rum-bulbs I look like some kind of weirdass electronmicrosocopy cell being attacked by a bunch a little viruses all over me, I got these things hanging off me like grenades on some kind of bandolier, and you know why, it’s because I gotta stay drunk to the top of that elevator. I mean of course I’m drunk going over, by that point I’ve been drunk for about ten days, and I’m in the terminal and I can hear that song from Chariots of Fire going, you know, bulbs bouncing off me while I run up to the gate in slow motion, right at the finish line, in and out of the well without being straight for a single second of it, and this chiseling whore says that I can’t take the rum up! Some kind of new reg about how they got that new bunch in charge of the elevator so ‘mericans can’t get the edge on the orbital tariffs. I don’t care about that stuff anymore. Used to be I was pretty into voting and all that back when I was a kid, you know, like with Santorum and everything, but far as I’m concerned you say you aren’t some kind of communist you ought to get up out of that dump and start making some money. Am I right, man! Am I right! Tell me if I’m wrong! That’s right! Rest of that stuff I just couldn’t give five bucks about it anymore. You just keep it back down the well where I don’t gotta think about it.
But what I do know is I’m not letting this trumped-up Transorbital gypsy commissar just steal all my rum.  Because you know that’s what she’s thinking, you know, she’s a smooth operator, she’s gonna take this stuff and give it to some flight attendant she knows gonna smuggle it into Iran and pull some good moeny for it.  She’s a smooooth operatah . . . on the spaaaaace elevat—oh geeze, I’m out, one sec . . . .
So, what I’m saying is, no taxation without—you can’t—it’s in the Constitution says you can’t just take someone’s—she’s a thief, is what I’m saying, and I’m gonna get some money for all this rum, I mean like I got like a month’s worth of this rum on me and it’s good rum that I bought because I need it because I can’t stand to be in gravity, I know sure as if I’d gone to a doctor, it’ll kill me, it’ll kill a man to be under constant acceleration like that day in, day out, while you’re sleeping, for weeks, and this bitch is trying to steal all my money like it belongs to her cause she don’t have a single gram of decency anywhere in her Mexican body! I’m sorry; I get worked up. But that’s what it is! So I have to sell this stuff to the tourists; what can I do? And now the trouble starts because you know how it is when you get down the well, you gotta have rules about everything, I don’t mean like rules to stop you from degassing your suit or having getting a relative velocity problem, I mean rules that make no sense and that they just make up on the spot, like about how you’re not supposed to try to sell booze to people in the—a consensual transaction! Trying to tell me that—they’re talking about me like I’m some kind of pimp or something, when I’m just trying to hold on my money, ‘you’re scaring them,’ scaring them? What kind of simpering pussy gets afraid of a guy trying to sell him some fine Hawaiian Rum, and yeah of course I’m angry, officer, because this thieving fascist lesbian murderess is trying to steal everything I own, and then these bent cops make me miss my car up, so I miss the connection to Luna, and I’m telling them the truth right there in front of everybody that I will not be responsible for my actions if I don’t get out of this gravity—right—now!
Ugh.
So anyway one of the cops had sense and he got me some whiskey at the duty-free and they put me on the next car up. Can you believe the company makes me do this? I swear! They call it the ‘mental health regulation.’ Mental health! And running on treadmills like a hamster when the clock says just so I can do it without collapsing my ribcage!  We're living in the dark ages!
Don’t get me wrong on the missed connection thing. You’re a good ride.
Sheesh, we gotta get out of this dump. Moon’s a dump, too. Belt’s alright, but I mean there’s not really anything out there ‘side from the mining and mostly when you’re off the drill or orbit mod or whatever there’s not much but drinking and shows. And giving your copilot an injection. It ain’t right. I gotta go out to Jupiter. I’m thinking Jupiter’s the way to go. A man could live out there, you know?
I think I could be happy in Jupiter orbit. Long as they don’t put down on one of those lousy rocks they got going round it.