Thousand+ Words for Nov. 13, 2025

It’s a Long Way to Pluto. No, I Mean it’s a Long Way. It’s a Long way to the....

It’s a long way to Pluto.

No, I mean it’s a long way. It’s a long way to the stars, sure, but that’s not graspable in the direct sense. The nearest star is four light years, but four or forty million, what’s the difference? You’re never going to get there and neither am I.

But Pluto—you can get there, if you’re determined enough, and patient.

Never been there myself, of course. I’m crazy, but I’m not that crazy, as the saying goes. I was crazy enough to make four Jupiter runs—the first one I made as caretaker, the only guy awake the whole way. Supersleep made me nervous, and I didn’t sign up for that until Supersleep Release 5 came out, the second one with the nobots. After I had done it, I realized they were right: caretaker duty was worse that the sleep was.

That first Jupiter run, I spent three years in that little can with barely enough room to turn around in. Got my exercise on the bike every day, and lifted waterweights—well, they started out as waterweights and ended up pissweights, as they do—and I read about a hundred books and watched about a thousand movies, and still I just about went nuts. I don’t see how prisoners in solitary do it, I really don’t. I got the ship and crew to Jupiter, all right, and I got them all revived, but lucky for me, Supersleep 5 came out while we were on Jupiter, and I let ‘em put me under for the trip home. Nowadays, Supersleep 8, or SS8, is the standard, and it makes supersleeping almost like dying and coming back to life—there’s no dream bounce, no consciousness of the sleeping interval, although when they do wake you up, you feel like a zombie for about a week. I did. After that first return from Jupiter on SS5, I felt like a corpse for a month and I couldn’t really think straight for longer than that. Even on SS8, I had a hard time with short-term memory—they say they’ve got that worked out now. I don’t know, but I guess I’m going to find out.

But not by letting them sleep me for the fourteen years it takes to get to Pluto. Three years to get to Jupiter, four to Saturn, six and nine to get to Uranus and Neptune—but why would you want to?—and fourteen years of hard, cold supersleep to get to Pluto. And that’s one way. As I say, I’m crazy, but not that crazy.

Robbie’s going to do it, or at least I think he is. “Rob,” I said, “What the hell do you want to go to Pluto for?”

“Discovery,” he said when the beer glass came down from his mouth. ”It’s the last place in the solar system where there’s still something to find that someone else hasn’t already found.

“Yeah, well, what do you think you might find?” I asked him. ”Unicorns? Leprechauns? Bigfoot? What?”

“How about finding the crystals of helium-3 that everybody says might exist at temperatures that low? A single crystal might weigh four or five grams and have as much helium as a whole shipload of the top-grade Saturn stuff.”

“Yeah, well that’s bullshit,” I said. ”There ain’t no helium-3 crystals.”

“Sez you,” he said. He threw a hundred-dollar bill on the table between us for the three beers we’d had. ”Come on, I want to show you something.” I followed Robbie out of the bar and down the sidewalk toward his building. He put a key in the door and pulled it open, holding it for me. I stepped inside and then waited as he followed me and locked the door from the inside. ”Nobody’s here today, it’s some goofy holiday or other.”

“It’s called Marten Day,” I said. ”It’s part of the courtship ritual, or something like that.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” he said, already down a corridor. I followed him and he suddenly turned to the left and opened a door, which was unlocked; I remember thinking that was weird at the time. “Okay, you remember Crantz, President Crantz?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I said. ”What about him?”

“He turned 97 years old yesterday, did you know that?” “No,” I responded. ”I know he’s ancient, a cranky old man.”

“That’s right,” Robbie said. ”I’ve had some visits from his office.”

“Crantz has an office?” I said. ”I thought he was senile, laying in a bed somewheres or other drooling on himself.

“He’s better,” Robbie said. ”New nobot technology, they got his brain fixed up and now—” Robbie stopped. ”You better let me show you.” He led me through a series of doors until we were in a large chamber somewhere in the guts of the building. The walls were painted snow white, blinding white, and in the center of the room was what looked like a hospital bed with what looked like a steel mannequin lying on it.

"Oh, that’s cool,” I said. In response to my voice, the steel mannequin turned his head towards me in a fluid, almost animal-like motion. ”Whoa,” I said and turned toward Robbie and shrugged. "So what?"

"it's Crantz."

I looked at the mannequin's face--it was half metal, but the half that wasn't sort of looked like President Crantz. "Yeah, it kind of looks like him, I guess."

"It is me," the mannequin said.

I think it was the voice that convinced me. "Mr. President?" I asked.

"Hello, Richie," the President said. His metal arm came up and the hand stretched towards me. "Come closer."

I stepped over to the side of the bed and touched his metal hand. "You remember me, Mr. President?"

"Of course I remember you," Crantz said. "You're Richard Conrad Morrison, you were my in my press office that last year of my presidency."

"Ah, yes, sir, that's right," I replied. I really hadn't thought that he knew me at all way back then; after all, I was only 28 years old. That had been 32 years ago. Crantz departed the White House after two terms. The only news I had from him other than what was in the media was the Christmas card I got every year. "What happened to you?"

"That's what I brought you here to talk about," Robbie said. Then he turned to Crantz. "We need to tell him, Mr. President."

"Go ahead and tell him, then," Crantz said. He was irritated. "You should have told him before you brought him here."

“Pluto is a long way away,” Robbie said.