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Then it took another week to plot a trajectory. Once Mercury had chosen his trajectory, he programmed it into the ship's flight computer and his job was done. The ship would adjust speed and direction according to Mercury's projections. This would be the third loop on Mercury's voyage, all of which had gone flawlessly. Of course, after thousands of flawless simulations during probe pilot training, the calculations were second nature, almost instinct. The enormity of the red giant had offered some unique possibilities in his calculations, but in the end the most correct solution became perfectly clear to Mercury, in matters of mathematical calculations it always did. If only he could find a formula for his life. But he had chosen a twenty year trajectory.


Nine days work every year and a half should have had Mercury grinning like a Cheshire cat. But it was really the other five-hundred-plus days between loops that was the hardest part of piloting. How did you keep yourself occupied and not go crazy? As Mercury knew, there were no guarantees that you wouldn't.


In order to avoid turning his journey into twenty years of solitary confinement, Mercury engaged in various activities. He listened to music, he wrote poetry and stories, and like everyone else in the universe, he scoured the network, or the Work as it was called for short. Of course the lag time for communication on the Work could be maddening of itself. There was always lag, but the truly frustrating part for a probe pilot who was jumping all over the universe was that there was no way to predict what the lag would be. Because of the distances, a query or response might take days one time and months the next.


It would be another month until Mercury hit this rift, so he decided to jump on the Work. There was nothing left to catalog here anyway.


It was always confusing to Mercury when he first logged onto the Work. It was like a tidal wave of personal ads, ad hoc meetings, stilted conversations, and lunatic asylum debates. Gradually patterns started emerging that gave Mercury enough data to try and join in a conversation or introduce himself to someone that seemed interesting. Of course Probe Authority back at Kilimanjaro Station kept a permanent profile up for him. But few people on Luna or even back at command authority had enough patience to try and communicate with a probe pilot.


That was why Mercury was surprised when he logged on this time to find a message waiting for him:


"Loved your headline. Eli," was all it said.


There was a Probe Authority icon next to the name "Eli" so this guy was with command. Probably some bored trainee who was spraying the Work with inane comments to see if anyone would respond. When Merc was in training they called this tactic "chumming." But chumming an active duty probe pilot, although not illegal, was generally regarded as a serious breach of protocol. Mercury shrugged. At least the fact that this Eli was PA might mean that there was a profile in the database, maybe even a picture, a face to associate with the name.