Free Starbound by Joe Haldeman

to answer?”
    “No.” He growled a string of foreign syllables. “That’s Farsi: ‘There is some shit a man does not have to eat.’ Adapted from American English, I think, though the principle is widely spread.”
    “But it implies there’s another kind of shit that a man does have to eat. Glad I’m a woman.”
    He smiled at me. “See? You’re a philosopher already.” He sniffed the lime flowers again. “Though living on recycled shit is something I tried to become philosophical about, before we came up.”
    “Hunger helps.” It dominated the menu in Little Mars. The pantry machine broke up all organic waste, and some inorganic, and put it back together to make amino acids, then protein. Mixed in with measured amounts of carbohydrates and fiber and fat, some trace elements, it could produce blocks of edible stuff in programmed colors, textures, and flavors. “Elza said that Namir is a good cook. I wonder what he can do with pseudobeef and pseudochicken.”
    “Make pseudo-Beef Stroganoff and pseudo-Chicken Florentine, I guess.” He sighed and leaned back against the lattice that would be supporting bean vines. “Carmen, what do you think our chances really are? Are we just wasting our time? Intuition, I mean, not science.”
    “I don’t think you can do science without data. I do have an intuition, though, or an optimistic delusion.” I sat down on the edge of the tank. “Do you know the story of the lucky chicken?”
    “Tell me.”
    “Well, suppose you had a flat of fertilized chicken eggs—that’s one hundred and forty-four—and you dropped the flat from waist height or shoulder height. Some eggs would break. Discard them and do it again, and again, until finally you have just one egg.”
    “The lucky egg.”
    “You’re getting it. You hatch it and collect its fertilized eggs—”
    “Unless it’s a rooster.”
    “Then you have to start over, I guess. But you do the same thing, dropping them over and over until one survives. Then you wait for it to mature and collect its eggs. And again and again.”
    “I see,” he said.
    “Eventually, you will produce the luckiest chicken in the world. The version I heard, the benefactor was the pope. He put the chicken in a fancy papal chicken basket, and it never left his side. So nothing bad ever happened to him.”
    “This is not the last pope we’re talking about, then.”
    “Not a real pope. Me, actually. I’m the lucky chicken.”
    “They dropped your mother from a great height?”
    He was so much like Paul I could smack him. “Not that I know of. But ever since I got to Mars, I’ve had the most incredible luck. All ‘The Mars Girl’ crap. All kinds of trouble, and I always seem to come out on top. So maybe my main qualification for this job is as a talisman. Stay close to me, the way the pope stayed close to his lucky chicken.”
    He was nodding, looking serious. “You do believe in luck?”
    “Well, at some level I suppose I do. Not in lucky charms, talismans. But just as an observation, sure. Some people seem to be lucky all the time, while others seem to be born losers.”
    “That’s true enough. Something that statistics would predict.”
    “I suppose you could pretend to be scientific, and put the whole population on a bell curve, just like you would for height or weight. Normal people bulking up in the middle, the unlucky ones off to the left, the luckiest trailing off on the right.”
    “Ah ha !” He grinned and rubbed his beard. “There’s your fallacy. You can only do it with dead people.”
    “What? Dead people have all run out of luck.”
    “No, I mean, all you can say of someone is after the fact: ‘he was lucky all his life’ or ‘she was unlucky’—but a living, breathing person always has tomorrow to worry about. You could be the luckiest person in the world, in two worlds, in the whole universe. But some tomorrow, like the day you meet the Others, boom. Your ‘luck’ runs out, like a gambler’s winning