“I know what you’re going to say,” he nodded. “I’ve been thinking it over myself.”
“Please,” I went on. “There’s nothing here for him. He wouldn’t be missed. Just one person, Captain? Just one?”
He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked at Elasson, who stood just a couple of meters away.
The Captain looked at me with helplessness in his eyes. “You can ask him.”
My heart leapt. I had no doubt that he’d accept if we offered him the chance to leave. Pulling the book out of my bag, I hurried up to him.
“Elasson,” I typed into the dictionary, “will you come with us?”
As the foreign words were pronounced in that strange, automated tone, he looked up at me. But his face held, not hope, but pain.
The shaking of his head told me his answer before the translation even appeared. “I cannot.”
I let my mouth fall open, and for a moment could do nothing but stare. Then I bit my lip and typed out “Why can you not?”
After listening, he explained. “It is the law. I cannot leave my people.”
I looked helplessly at the Doctor. “The law, the law. They keep talking about the law—what…?”
He walked to my side with his fingers wrapped around the language scanner. “This can probably tell us a little about it, once we get the translation. But Andi—I think I understand it.”
“So do I.” Crash’s voice, strong and firm from behind me, made me turn my head in surprise.
He walked forward and looked the Doctor steadfastly in the eye, something he hadn’t done in days. “Man is made in the image of the divine lawgiver. He can’t exist without law.”
“No matter how perverted it is,” the Doctor nodded, “law of some kind is the basis of who we are. Who they are. The harder the life, the greater dependence on rules, regulations, a moral code of some kind. In this place—” he gestured around us to the barren, sandy world, “—law is all they can understand anymore.”
Crash nodded.
“But—there’s so much more to life than their law. There’s beauty and love and hope…” My voice failed me as I looked at Elasson.
“You know that. I know that. But he can’t understand it. It’s no use, Andi.”
“But…” I wasn’t going to give up. My eyes blurred with tears. “He helped us. And Basilius chose to let me go.”
“And they can’t understand why they did that,” the Doctor explained. “The extent of their disobedience is to not observe the law. I don’t think they can actually bring themselves to violate it.”
My vision cleared as my eyes overflowed, and two tears ran down my cheeks. Elasson took my left hand in both of his. “Ou me sou epilesomai,” he said. Then he reached up and lifted the little round cap from his hair. “Tode ge phylasse,” he said, and placed it in my hand.
I smiled, but it was a sad smile. “Elasson…” I choked.
Touching the book, he looked at me expectantly, and I set it to transcribe and translate. He shook his head, and said, “Ar’ exesti moi ten pyxid’ echein ten mageutiken?”
On the screen appeared the words, “May I have the magic box?”
I laughed, but the laugh made a little pain in my chest. “He wants the book,” I told the Captain.
“Of course,” the Captain said. “He’s earned it, and more.”
He seemed to understand that the Captain had replied affirmatively, and received it gratefully from my hand.
“He won’t be able to read it,” I said, wondering why he would ask for it.
“That doesn’t matter.” I felt the Doctor’s hands on my shoulders. “It’s a symbol to him—a symbol of something more.”
“The engines are ready,” I heard Ralston’s voice announce. Turning, I saw the Captain standing in the door of the shuttle, August and Crash looking out from behind him. The Doctor and I and Elasson were the only ones still standing outside.
“Andi, Gerry, it’s time to go.” The Captain’s voice was understanding but urgent. “Come on.”
I couldn’t seem to tear myself away. I didn’t want to leave him. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right. He was so smart, so kind; he could have such a great life waiting for him on earth or in space.
“Andi.” The Doctor’s hands tightened on my shoulders. “We have to go.”
“If this works, then we‘ll come back someday, Andi,” the Captain called. “I promise.”
“Come on,” said the Doctor gently.
I looked back into his gray eyes, which were echoing the Captain’s promise.
“He has his people, you have yours. You belong with us.”
I knew it was true, and I knew he was right. Still holding the little cap in my hands, I took Elasson’s hand and looked into his eyes. “Goodbye, Elasson,” I sobbed, and then turned and ran to the shuttle, not looking back.
XXIV
The thrusters spluttered, and the shuttle was alive with beeps and lights once again. Normally the preliminaries to a takeoff would have interested me, but I just rushed to my seat and dropped into it. I couldn’t think about anything but Elasson, stuck on a desert planet with such a dreary life in front of him.
The Doctor hurried in after me, and quietly buckled my seat harness, then his own. August sat next to me and silently squeezed my hand.
Whales had already taken his place, and Crash was at the helm.
“Standby generator,” the Captain ordered, sealing the door. Then he slid into the co-pilot’s seat. Ralston was back in the reactor chamber, ready to generate the warp bubble at the Captain’s word.
“May fortune favor the innovative,” the Captain murmured, and then called, “Thrusters full propulsion, Mr. Crash.”
Crash turned the sliders up, and with a blast that made me cringe we rocketed off the ground.
Looking out the window, I saw one last glance of Elasson standing there with the book in his hand, watching our departure with wide eyes.
Then we accelerated, and he grew smaller and smaller and smaller until he was nothing more than a black dot.
Already the gravitation forced me back against my seat, unable to move without the greatest of efforts.
“Warp, Mr. Ralston,” the Captain called. I held my breath. This would be a bumpy trip, with the little cobbled-together core.
But no blast came. “Mr. Ralston?” the Captain yelled. Swearing, the Captain tried to force himself out of his chair. “Reduce thrusters, Mr. Crash,” he yelled.
“I can’t! We’ve reached the stratosphere, if we lower power we’ll lose it altogether!”
The Captain once again struggled to rise from his chair, but the gravitational force was too strong for him. “Mr. Ralston!” he yelled again.
A faint voice came from the reactor chamber. “Captain, we need more power. The thrusters are draining the reactor too much. We need that bubble in the next minute.”
Whales unbuckled his harness with some effort and struggled to get up. But it was no use. He couldn’t raise himself enough to get free of his seat.
Looking over at me, he exclaimed, “Andi! The arm of your seat is up!”
I forced my head to turn and look. It was true. In my emotion over leaving Elasson, I had stumbled into my seat without taking the time to ensure all safety measures, and the arm of my seat was up, leaving me free access to the center aisle.
“Can you roll off your seat?” he asked.
“I think so,” I began, but the Doctor forced his hand over and gripped my arm.
“Unbuckle your harness,” Whales began, “then hold onto it and roll off your seat. Don’t let go or you’ll fall back and be crushed.”
“Forty seconds!” Ralston called desperately.
“No!” the Doctor gripped my arm tighter. “You’re not doing that.”
“Doctor Lloyd, she has to.” It was August who spoke now, his pale face determined. “It’s the only way.”
“Thirty-five seconds!”
His lips quivering, the Doctor le
t me go. I struggled to unbuckle my harness and then gripped it firmly with one hand. With a great effort, I rolled off my seat and was instantly jerked back towards the rear. My arm yanked so hard as I was stopped by the harness that I felt sure it must have been pulled out of its socket. But I didn’t let go.
I dangled back in the aisle, being pulled back towards the chamber by the gravitation, feeling like I was being sucked into a vortex.
“Twenty seconds!”
“Here!” Whales yelled, to be heard over the rumbling of the craft. He reached his hand towards me, and in it was a small power converter of some kind. “It’ll boost the power. Hand it to him!”
I gritted my teeth as I forced my arm towards him, centimeter by centimeter. At last I gripped it and let my arm fall back, which sent a searing pain through my arm and into my back. But I didn’t stop to think about that. I reached towards Ralston’s outstretched hand, straining myself like I never had before. I cried out in pain as it felt like something ripped in my arm, but kept on reaching, praying, straining. Ralston, too, reached out, moving towards me so slowly.
After what seemed like an eternity, his fingers grasped it and he pulled back carefully, reaching his hand towards the power socket on the bottom of the reactor. I saw now that the reactor was glowing orange, growing hotter by the millisecond. It could burn out any minute, and then we’d crash to the ground. And we’d drained the power so much that there’d be no hope of a soft landing.
Just when I thought it couldn’t possibly get any hotter, he plugged the converter in and pounded the button on the generator. The craft gave a lurch and I flew up towards the ceiling, and then was yanked back again. I heard the Captain cry, “Now, Mr. Crash!” and then my fingers slipped free from the harness.
My first sensation was one of relief from the pain and tension in my arm. I caught a split-second glimpse of Ralston braced in the reactor chamber, and then I smashed into something and lights exploded in my brain. Then everything vanished.
………
“Thank you, Mr. Guilders. We’ll be expecting you in fifty minutes or so; Trent out.”
These were the first words I heard after my crash into the back of the reactor chamber. Keeping my eyes closed, I tried to take in what had happened. We were no longer moving; at least I couldn’t feel any motion. This meant that either we had crashed, or we had been successful in making our way out of the atmosphere, and were now in orbit, waiting for the Surveyor. The Captain’s words seemed to indicate the latter.
I also felt dizzy and slightly nauseated, and there was shooting pain in both of my shoulder joints. Just as I was making these observations, a hand touched my left shoulder gently. I winced as a little spasm of pain shot down my arm.
“She’s conscious,” I heard the Doctor say, and then I heard a sigh of relief on my right. “Andi, can you hear me? It’s your Dad. Everything’s okay, sweetheart.”
I opened my eyes slowly. The Doctor’s face hovered above me, and I smiled weakly. I turned to see who had sighed, but the pain in both shoulders made me groan and go back to my previous position.
“Don’t try to move,” the Doctor ordered. “You’ve torn ligaments in both shoulders, and you had a concussion. How do you feel?”
I looked up at him and managed another smile. “Sore,” I said.
He gave me a half-smile. “She’ll be okay,” he announced, not to me, but to someone next to me.
“Good.” That was August’s voice, and I realized that he was the one who had sighed. “Andi, you saved our lives.”
“Good,” I echoed, with another smile, and closed my eyes again.
“I didn’t want you to get hurt, Miss Andi,” Whales’s business-like voice said, with as much sympathy as I’d ever heard in it, “but it was the only way.”
“That’s okay, Mr. Whales. Are we in orbit now?”
“Yes,” August answered. “The Surveyor is a little less than an hour away. She’ll pick us up when she gets here.”
“Why didn’t you tell me she was awake, Gerry?” the Captain’s voice demanded. “Andi, if I thought you’d let me, I’d promote you.”
“No thank you, Captain.” He’d been trying to promote me and get me up on the bridge for the last four years. I didn’t mind visiting, but I loved being in sickbay best, helping the Doctor. “But it’s nice of you to say so.”
I opened my eyes again and tried to figure out where I was. They must have taken some cushions from the chairs and made a pallet for me on the floor. Without turning my head, I could see the Captain sit down in one of the seats and lay his arm over the back of it. “Gerry, I guess this is as good a time as any to hear that translation.”
“You finished it?” I asked gladly.
“Yes. I don’t know how to work this thing…”
“Oh, give it to me.” The Captain took the scanner and then picked up one of Whales’s logs. “You just plug it in and click okay. Then tell it what language you want to translate and what you want to translate to.” He demonstrated by doing all of this, and then handed it back to the Doctor. “Go ahead.”
Clearing his throat, the Doctor took it and began.
“Here follows the history and law of the people of new world, who have come here to explore. There were twelve who came, and six died in the first week. They came from Greece at the bequest of Pericles, to try to reach the gods. They came in a metal flying ship, a deep secret that only the very wise knew of. They found then a hole of darkness that pulled them in and threw them far away from their old world.”
“A wormhole,” Whales put in. “Almost impossible, but... conceivable.”
August nodded thoughtfully, and the Doctor went on.
“They were lost for three days and then were thrown to New World. They had to learn to survive here, and began erecting our walls. The walls were not finished until the fourth generation, and in that time, many died.
They learned to live on food that could be grown, and found soon the importance of eating salt. If they did not do so, they soon died of the red death.”
“Heatstroke,” I murmured, as the Doctor paused for breath.
“Now there are sixty of us, and I have been ordered by king to write down these things so that we will not forget. This scroll was brought to record their findings for Pericles when they returned, but they did not use it, for they saw that they would never be able to leave New World. I have been ordered to use it now to write down our story and our law.
The laws are few and known by all. These are they:
Every citizen must do his part if he wishes to eat.
No citizen may leave.
Every member of the royal family must be protected unless they catch the red death.
No one can be terminated without the approval of every living member of the royal family, with one exception:
He who causes the wall to break must die.”
Here the Doctor looked up, and stopped.
“Is that all?” Crash asked. I couldn’t see where he was, but it sounded like his voice was coming from close to the cockpit, behind me.
“After that there’s just a list of all the names of the kings.”
The Captain stared. “You don’t believe that, Gerry? How is it possible? If that story is true then these people would have had to come here—around the fifth century B.C.! You don’t expect me to believe that?”
“If it’s not true,” Crash said with a voice that told me he was smiling roguishly, “how did they know the words ‘Greece’ and ‘Pericles’?”
The Captain’s silence was almost amusing.
Whales’ low voice spoke up. “There is evidence that the Greeks of that period could predict solar eclipses with extreme precision and calculate the motions of the planets, as well as creating clocks and other technical apparatus. And... I do have something to report, Captain.”
“What is it, Mr. Whales?” The terseness in the Captain’s voice spoke eloquently of his frustration with his inability to hold his position.
> “It’s why I was gone for so long sir. I found—well, it’s hard to describe, sir, but a few hundred meters away from the walls, in the opposite direction of us—well sir, I found what certainly looked like the remains of a very strange, very, very old—”
“Yes, yes, what was it, Whales?”
Whales seemed to hesitate. I couldn’t see his face, but I imagined that it was unsure. “A—craft, sir. A spacecraft—but unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I tried to find out its propulsion system for my report, sir, but I’m afraid it was just too deteriorated. But it was definitely a craft, and it was definitely metal, which does not exist on that planet as far as I could see. As I said, almost impossible...”
There was a long silence. I could only see two faces from where I lay—the Doctor’s and the Captain’s. But the quiet triumph of the one and the amazed bewilderment of the other was enough. I smiled, despite my pain. At last, the Doctor had his victory.
A hand touched my arm gently, and I saw August’s face appear above mine. His sympathetic smile spoke volumes. But all he said aloud was, “I’d say that’s fairly scientifically conclusive, sir.”
For once, the Captain didn’t scold him for speaking out of turn.
“I’ll say so, Mr. Howitz,” came a cocky, enthusiastic voice from the cockpit. “And if I didn’t have my hands full keeping this thing stabilized, I’d give Uncle a round of applause. He’s just about made a fool of the rest of us—he and Andi.”
“You may call yourself a fool if you like, Mr. Crash.” The Captain spoke at last, and his face finally relaxed into a look of friendly defeat. “But I do not appreciate you taking the liberty with my name.”
The Doctor smiled at his friend. “I’ll take you up on that dare now, Trent.”
The Captain actually laughed, and put a hand out. “I suppose I must concede that you’ve won your verdict, and I’m sure you’ll never let me hear the end of it.”
As the two shook hands, the Captain held up his other hand with a warning look. “Mind you, I don’t say there are no extra-terrestrial life forms out there. I believe they exist but these…” he gestured out the window, where I knew the planet must be below, “do not appear to be among them.”
Firmament: In His Image Page 17
