"We Built This City on Rock and Roll" was blaring out over the speakers on the low-budget PA system. Despite the fact that the sound was emanating from a beat-up speaker coil that was probably manufactured over a century ago, the music still played with reasonable fidelity, the shrill FM-synth high notes cutting through even the rattling hum of the info terminal Stan Wysnowski was sitting in front of.

"Hey, Stan, mind if I change the track?" Wendell yelled from his spot behind the counter.

"Nah, let it play." Stan didn't even bother to look away from the brightness of the terminal's screen. "It's been almost a week since this one made it into the rotation."

"Hey, you're the boss." Wendell went back to paging through a generic magazine, leaning against the polished granite-and-chrome counter that ran most of the length of one wall of the store.

The kid was right, Stan mused, as he clicked through another page of redundant celebrity news. He was the boss, for what it was worth. They didn't call this place Stan's Last Stand for nothing.

As usual, no matter what media you picked to try and eke out some small measure of entertainment, the info terminal was lacking. Or, maybe it was the fact that it was all he had to keep him occupied, day after day, month after month. That, and the rare occasion that anyone actually happened to walk into this place. Given that the shop, the environmental module, and a bunch of hydrogen fuel storage tanks were the only structures present here, on a chunk of rock barely large enough to even count as a glorified asteroid, it wasn't exactly like there were hordes of customers waiting to beat down the doors.

Stan punched off the terminal, and rolled his swivel chair out of the small alcove at the corner of the shop, which served as his office, bedroom, and storage for the few possessions of his that he couldn't just take off one of the shelves. The alcove was a bit of a cross between a rat's nest and an office drone's worst nightmare, but he could get to everything he needed - and that's what counted. He still had it better of than Wendell, though. The environmental module was made with the intent of having an operator living inside it, but the living quarters provided were spartan at best, and Stan had packed the most spacious of the rooms full of back-stock from the store long before Wendell had first arrived on his doorstep.

Stan looked over at the kid, still engrossed in his magazine. Wendell had shown up a few years before, back when the portal was still all the rage - back when people still thought that traversing portals was an intelligent and viable choice. He'd come in with a group from one of the larger convoys, stocking up with one last run of supplies before heading out to the final waypoint. The group had been so frantic in their last-minute purchases that they hadn't even noticed that the kid wasn't with them when they debarked. Stan didn't notice, either, until he found the kid cowering behind a stack of news printouts a few hours later.

Wendell, from the start, had apparently not been a brave person, but his whole family had decided to embark as a group - he hadn't had much of a choice. He panicked at the last minute, and decided to run away to the only place left on this side of the portal. Perhaps he was just a coward, or perhaps he possessed some sort of strange prescience - in either case, the convoy he should have been on, as was the case with all convoys both before and after his own, never reported back.

Stan had tried to find someone to take him back, but no one ever came here without logically continuing through, and he certainly couldn't send him back on the supply-replenishment scows, which were both fully automated and nonpressurized. So, he'd let the kid stay on, and so far, Wendell had managed to earn his keep. Even more amazing, though, was the fact that the kid hadn't gone bonkers yet, like the one other person he'd had work for him before. That one had finally decided that it was a good idea to traverse the portal in nothing more than a standard emergency pressure suit.