by Ben Bova
He tried to pray. He tried to conjure up a mental picture of Marjorie, of their times together, of those brief moments when they shared the warmth of their bodies pressing close on a world where the sky was blue and there were trees and grass and birds singing.
Nothing worked. He was imprisoned inside this metal tomb, breathing a horrible alien slime, a billion kilometers from home, from Marjorie, from his parents, from safety. Even God had forgotten him. He was alone and forsaken.
Yet he must have drifted into sleep, because he found himself surrounded by monsters, vague dark shapes that growled and snarled and shambled after him in a world of shadows and menace. One of the shapes looked like a gorilla, only much bigger, looming over him like a mountain. Another pursued him in a powerchair, growling at him.
Grant’s eyes popped open. The growling sound was the clock, its normal alarm buzzer sounding strange, alien in the liquid. Sleep shift was over. Time to return to the bridge.
Grant slid out of the bunk; there was no room to stand except outside in the narrow common area. He bobbed gently off the deck, decided there was no point to changing the tights he’d been wearing. No point to trying to go to the toilet; the predigested pond scum they pumped into his veins produced almost no waste matter at all.
Feeling like one of the damned souls in Dante’s Hell, Grant swam through the hatch back onto the bridge.
Krebs was still there, hovering over Karlstad and O’Hara, who were at their consoles, their backs turned to him. The captain glared at Grant as if he’d somehow done something wrong. Then he realized she was looking past him. Turning slightly, he saw Zeb coming through the hatch.
Krebs stared at the two of them as if she didn’t recognize them. Her eyes flicked back and forth from Muzorawa’s face to his own.
“Returning for duty,” Muzorawa said gently.
“Ah. Dr. Muzorawa,” Krebs replied, as if seeing him for the first time. “And Mr. Archer.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Grant said.
Krebs drifted back away from them as Grant took his station between Lane and Zeb. Then she said in a commanding tone, “Now we will all connect with the ship’s systems.”
O’Hara turned from her console and nodded, smiling. Karlstad looked—Grant couldn’t decipher the expression on Egon’s face. He seemed to be trying to keep his features frozen, impassive, like a little boy pretending that he doesn’t know he’s about to be showered with Christmas presents.
Muzorawa said, “Ready to link, Captain.”
“Proceed,” she said.
Grant did what he saw the other three do: He flicked open the slim panel set into his console’s front. A set of hair-thin fiber-optic wires snaked out of the narrow compartment, floating lazily in the perfluorocarbon liquid like the coiling hair of a murderous Medusa. The end of each fiber was color-coded to match the anodized color spots on the electrodes in Grant’s legs.
Grant watched the others out of the corner of his eye as he fumbled with the devilishly thin fibers. His fingers seemed too fat and clumsy to handle them. The others were finished before he had done even one of his legs. Thankfully, the fiber ends were electrically charged to mate with specific electrodes; they would not connect with the wrong electrode; instead Grant felt a slight but very real repulsive force, like trying to put two north poles of a magnet together.
“We are waiting, Mr. Archer,” Krebs said as he finished one leg at last and started on the other.
Finally he got it done. He straightened up, feeling a little like a puppet with his legs connected to the wires. He saw that the fibers on Krebs’s stubby legs connected to a panel set into the overhead. If she’s not careful, Grant thought, she’ll get herself tangled in those wires. The thought of the captain wrapping herself in her own set of wires, struggling to get herself loose like some fat fly in a spider’s web, almost made him laugh out loud.
“You are amused, Mr. Archer?”
Grant realized he was smiling. Startled, he didn’t know what to do, how to respond to the captain’s accusative glare.
“We are all pleased that we are about to link with the ship, Captain,” said Muzorawa, beside him.
“We’re looking forward to the experience,” O’Hara chimed in.
“Indeed.” Krebs’s angry glare shifted back and forth. “And what have you to say?” she demanded, pointing at Karlstad.
“Not a word, ma’am,” Egon replied. “I’m waiting for your next order.”
Krebs mumbled something too low for Grant to make out, then said grudgingly, “Very well. Activate the linkage.
Each of them reached to the console, lifted the plastic cover plate from the switch that triggered the linkage, then clicked the switch on.
Grant expected some surge of power, a jolt of electrical energy, perhaps a thrill of euphoria or at least pleasure. Better than sex, they had told him. Instead, he felt nothing. A slight tingling in his legs, as if they were going asleep. But that passed almost before he recognized the sensation and he was left with … almost nothing.
Almost.
Grant stood there, ignoring his crewmates alongside him, and felt an odd tremor begin to pulse through his legs. Unlike anything he’d ever sensed before. No, not just along his legs. His entire body seemed to be vibrating, humming inside like a plucked string of a bass viol. He stared down at his hands. They looked steady, not shaking at all, yet inside he felt as if he were quivering like a man hit by a seizure.
He closed his eyes and realized that it wasn’t he who was vibrating, it was the fusion generator, deep in the core of the ship, reverberating with the power of transforming matter into energy, fusing atomic nuclei together to extract their hidden might, converting the blinding radiation into electrical power that raced along the ship’s wiring like blood pulsing through arteries and veins. Grant could feel the throbbing, relentless force of this man-made star buried behind layers of dense shielding as it powered the universe that was their ship. He wanted to reach out his hand and let his fingers touch that glowing hot plasma; he could virtually hear the thunder of its endless blaze.
It was like music, like a symphonic orchestra playing in his mind, in his body, along every nerve, every blood vessel. The electrical currents racing through the ship tingled like a thrillingly beautiful cadenza, endless, eternal, glorious.
The propulsion system was shut down, more’s the pity. Grant wanted to sense it, to connect with it, to feel the drive and force of raw energy hurtling out of the ship’s thruster vents, pushing them forward, onward.
Dimly he heard a voice. He ignored it. This was too much pleasure to allow anything to distract him from it. The whole ship’s electrical systems were part of him. I am the ship! Grant thought. We are one. It’s pure delight. Ecstasy! It’s like being a god.
“Are you all right?”
He forced himself to open his eyes, saw Zeb peering at him worriedly.
“I’m fine,” Grant said. And he meant it. He’d never felt so … so alive in all his life.
“It can be a powerful feeling,” O’Hara said. Grant turned his head and saw that she too looked concerned. “Don’t let it sweep you away now.”
He nodded. Yes, I’ve got to be careful. It is powerful. Overwhelming. Better than sex. Better than drugs. They were right. It’s enough to sell your soul for.
“Are we ready to return to work?” Krebs’s sour voice cut through Grant’s excitement.
“Yes, Captain,” he said sharply.
“Very well. Now we will go through the separation and ignition simulation once again.”
But this time, Grant realized, this time we’ll be connected to the ship. I’ll feel the electrical currents. I’ll power up the thrusters. I’ll move the ship with my own will.
DEPARTURE
I am the ship.
Grant had never felt so powerful and excited in his entire life. When Krebs called a halt to their simulations exercise he didn’t want to stop, didn’t want to disconnect from the ship. Let’s go on, he urged silently. L
et’s power it up for real and get going. Let me feel what it’s like to dive through those clouds and into the Jovian sea.
“I said disconnect, Mr. Archer! Now!”
Krebs’s hard, demanding voice cut into him like a whip. With enormous reluctance, Grant did what the others had already done: reached to the console and clicked off his linkage to the ship’s electrical and propulsion systems.
It felt like a lobotomy. One moment he had all the power of a miniature star pulsing through him, part of him, as intimately interwoven into his consciousness as his awareness of his own identity. Then with the click of a switch it was all gone; he was a solitary weak hairless ape again, alone, isolated from the rest of the universe.
He had to blink several times before he realized that the others were unplugging the fiber-optic leads from the electrodes in their legs. Feeling a sullen resentment rising within him, Grant yanked the fibers from his legs one by one. The loose ends floated lightly, bobbing gently in the perfluorocarbon as if beckoning to him. When he was finished he activated the spring that pulled the fibers back into their slim storage rack and snapped shut the door that covered them.
“The simulation is completed,” Krebs said. “Now we all sleep. When we return to duty, no more simulations. The mission begins in five hours and fourteen minutes.”
The four crew members drifted back toward the catacombs and their coffin-sized berths. Krebs remained on the bridge, floating up near the overhead, fitting a communications headset over her bald skull.
“Doesn’t she ever sleep?” Karlstad whispered.
Muzorawa whispered back, “She must.”
“But when?”
The captain was already deep in discussion, presumably with Dr. Wo.
“Well, now,” O’Hara said to Grant, with a smile that looked a bit forced, “how did you like being linked?”
Grant realized he was breathless. It took him several tries to make his voice work. “Overpowering,” he said at last.
“Yes, ’tis that, isn’t it?”
Karlstad butted in, “When do we link with each other like that?” He leered at O’Hara. “That’s what I’m looking forward to.”
She frowned at him. Muzorawa said, serious as usual, “You must be wary of being overwhelmed by the experience. It is extremely powerful, but you must not allow it to overcome your judgment.”
“That’s right,” O’Hara said. “We’re here to run the ship, not to invent some new form of depravity.”
Karlstad smirked. “All work and no play isn’t good for you.”
Muzorawa floated between him and O’Hara. “Egon, the first mission was wrecked, possibly because one of its crew allowed the sensations of linking with the ship to overwhelm his judgment.”
“Or her judgment,” Karlstad said, nodding toward Krebs, still floating in the bridge, deep in discussion with Dr. Wo.
There was absolutely no privacy in the catacombs: nothing but a bare, confined common area so small and tight that the four of them could hardly fit into it together. Their shelflike berths took up one side of it, the hatch to the bridge the other.
“I’ve got to get into a fresh outfit,” O’Hara announced, and she began to strip off her tights.
Grant couldn’t help staring. Karlstad grinned wolfishly and asked, “Do you need any help, Lane?”
“Grow up, won’t you!”
He shrugged and began taking off his own tights.
“Yes, we should put on clean clothes,” Muzorawa agreed.
Grant was surprised that he felt no physical arousal at the sight of O’Hara’s naked body. Yet his breath quickened, his mind raced. She was slim, with small breasts and slender hips, totally hairless, but still this was a naked woman with smooth creamy skin and beautiful green eyes less than an arm’s length from him. He felt embarrassed more than anything else, especially when Zeb and Egon peeled off their tights. Neither of them was aroused, either, Grant saw.
Without a word he ducked into his bunk, pulled the privacy screen shut, and started wriggling out of his own tights. The fresh clothes were in a locker out in the common area, he knew. So was the recycler for the old tights. He decided to wait until the others were in their berths and asleep before venturing out again.
You’re being silly, he told himself. Silly and prudish. There’s nothing sinful about any of this. Your sex drive has been practically eliminated by the surgery. It’s like looking at a painting of a nude.
Yes, said another voice in his mind. But you enjoyed looking at her. The most important sex organ in the human body is the brain, and you took pleasure in seeing her naked body. That’s sinful.
He heard O’Hara slither into the berth next to his; nothing between them but a thin plastic partition. He sensed her stretching out on the bunk, still naked, absolutely hairless. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to drive the image out of his mind.
“What do you think of her?” It was Karlstad’s voice, whispering outside his berth.
“The captain?” Muzorawa’s deeper voice replied.
“Right.”
“What about her?”
“Do you think she’s ever going to sleep?”
“Yes, of course. She takes her responsibilities very seriously.”
Grant remembered his earlier conversation with Zeb, when he’d brought up the possibility that Krebs might be a suicidal Zealot.
Karlstad asked, “Have you noticed the way she gives you the fish-eye? As if she doesn’t recognize you.”
“Yes, it is strange,” Muzorawa agreed.
“Gives me the creeps.”
“As long as she does her job properly we have nothing to complain about.”
“Maybe you don’t,” Karlstad replied, still whispering, “but I don’t like it, not one microbit. She’s weird. I think she’s crazy.”
For several heartbeats Muzorawa said nothing. At last he replied, “Get some sleep. We’re going to need all our energy in about five hours.”
“Engage the linkage,” commanded Krebs.
Grant clicked the switch that energized the fiberoptic links to the chips implanted in his legs. He closed his eyes as he felt the thrumming power of the ship’s fusion generator vibrating within him, warming him, filling him with sensations he had never felt before linkage. He had a blazing man-made star within him. The electricity it generated was pulsing through him, the ship’s wiring was his own nervous system, the ship’s conduits were his own arteries and veins.
He could sense the vibrations of the life-support fans circulating the perfluorocarbon liquid through the ship’s living space; each light and display screen on the bridge’s consoles was like an extension of his fingers. He felt the ship’s sensors powering up, peering into the space outside the hull like searchlights from an ancient lighthouse sweeping a stormy seacoast.
It took a concentrated effort of will to open his eyes and recognize that he was standing in front of his console on the bridge, feet anchored in the floor loops, flanked by Muzorawa and O’Hara, Karlstad on O’Hara’s other side, Krebs floating behind him.
O’Hara was at the communications console, with its multiple touchscreens staring at her like the eyes of a spider. Wo’s chunky, intense face filled the central display screen.
“… automated separation sequence begins in fifteen seconds,” the director was saying.
“Fifteen seconds,” Krebs repeated, her voice flat, unemotional. If separating from the station and launching Zheng He into Jupiter’s clouds excited her, she hid it completely.
Grant licked his lips. The computer’s synthesized voice began the final minute of countdown.
“Power and propulsion?” Krebs asked needlessly. She could see Grant’s screens as easily as he could himself.
“Power and propulsion all green,” he said.
“Life support?”
“In the green,” said Karlstad.
“Communications?”
“Communications normal,” O’Hara replied.
“Sensors?”
>
“All sensors on and functioning,” reported Muzorawa.
“We are ready for separation and launch,” Krebs said to Wo’s image.
Precisely at that moment the computer’s voice announced, “Automated separation sequence initiated. Separation in thirty seconds … twenty-nine …”
The seconds stretched endlessly. Grant stood there, aware that he was breathing a cold, slimy, oxygenated liquid but no longer caring about that. The ship was coming alive, electrical currents racing through all its systems now, the propulsion units starting up, pumps beginning to stir, the electrons in the powerful superconducting coils singing their eternal hymn of perpetual motion, ceaseless devotion to their task.
“Full internal power,” Krebs said.
“Ten seconds,” announced the computer.
Grant could feel the magnetohydrodynamic channels stirring into life, preparing to take the star-hot plasma exhaust from the fusion generator and accelerate it through the ship’s thruster tubes. Along his nerves Grant felt the trembling thrill of anticipation.
The clamps and bolts that held Zheng He to the station opened like a dozen faces breaking into smiles. Grant broke into a smile himself. We’re free, he knew. We’re on our own now.
“Ignition.”
The plasma thrusters started softly, gently. Grant felt their strength as if it were his own arms reaching out and lifting a heavy burden. As the thrust built up, his strength multiplied, tripled, quadrupled. He was stronger than any mere human could ever be, stronger than Sheena, stronger than a whole tribe of gorillas, he was lifting the entire ship, hurling it with fine purposeful power and precision, flinging it away from the station and down into the waiting clouds of Jupiter.
Better than sex? This was better than life! I can rev up the thrusters to full power and blast this ship past Jupiter in an eyeblink. I can push us out to the stars! To the farthest edge of the universe! Grant knew he had all the power of the universe throbbing inside him, superhuman energy, the strength and power of a god.
That surge of arrogance snapped him back to reality. Pride goeth before a fall, he heard his father’s voice in his mind. All this power, all this sensation of godlike strength, is a trap, a snare, a temptation to the kind of hubris that has hurled many a good man into eternal damnation. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity …
