by Peter Riva
I was running out of time. I had used almost thirty minutes and what I had seen of my graphene electrical steering system—hell, this whole idea could take longer than the oxygen I had. I pressed on ahead quickly now. I called for polarity, reverse polarity, switched between the two graphene beasts, switching probes on different sides of the graphene braiding, trying to extract some finesse in my steering. The huge bulk of the engines was moving well, with me tethered to the underside. Somehow, I created a straightening of the tethers to perhaps ten degrees off straight and true. Cramer called up, “That’s all the cable we have, it’ll have to do, get out of there.” He was right, if the engines could be started now, the pilots could alternate power slowly to fully straighten out the engines and, eventually, our course.
That’s when I heard it. Something familiar, something that resonated at the back of the brain. I shook my head and it was gone. Must be poor oxygen flow in these damn suits, I thought. I wondered if I could stay longer and hear, whatever it was, again.
But then I heard Todd’s voice, in my helmet, telling me I was almost out of time—the alarms on board ship had started already. He urged me to come back immediately, then Aten was pleading, heck even Abadine was shouting at me that my hour was up. The job had to be finished or they would not, not one of us could, survive. There was no time for Cramer or anyone to come out and take over, we had used all the suits that had oxygen cylinders. Cramer didn’t say a word. I guessed he knew that was useless. I needed to finish the job and trust that the canisters, although 100 years old or more, would have been slightly over-charged way back then. Let’s hope, was what I thought, let’s hope.
I slipped the cable ends into the start-up motor power junction box, but there was nothing to lock the ends in place, just click-in-place clasps. Now I understood why Abadine shaped the ends the way she had. They clicked in and held. Next I tethered the gyro, flipped the switch, then I radioed Abadine about the power, “I have no idea which way we’re connected here, tell them to turn number two on slowly and have the flight deck monitor polarity. Hey, but give me a few minutes to start back, okay? I really don’t want to get a sun tan if these motors start up.” I meant it as a joke. Well, it seemed funny to me. Cramer still said nothing. Everyone else was yelling for me to hurry, and some of them seemed angry. Cramer told them all to shut up and they did.
I loose tethered onto the electrical cable and pushed off toward the ship with all the ten-year-old leg oomph I could. I went hand over hand—I had a long way to go, almost 400 meters now that the engines were more or less pointed ahead. My helmet lights gave out first. Blink one, blink two, and blink three. I thought how well made they are, to have juice for only so much time, so nearly matched in their planned obsolescence. The darkness enveloped me. I tried to focus on the puny lights of the ship still so far away, but the darkness, the darkness—hypoxia no doubt—my mind played tricks on me. I was there, all alone on that damn asteroid again. That damn shard had bounced in at us from out of radar range and careened into our spacecraft and had killed the crew, all except me. The mayday signal had taken a long, long time to be answered. I never before felt so lonely and alone. And here I was again, holding on to a cable halfway into nothingness and not enough oxygen to see me home.
There was that sound again, no, not a sound, a feeling in my mind—maybe I was already unconscious from lack of oxygen.
Cramer had the same thought, of course, he usually does, “Engine number two warming up, power restored. We’re pulling the cable, do you read me, we’re pulling the cable. Hold tight, fasten your tether, breathe shallow or hold your breath, we’re pulling you in.”
I shook my head, trying to focus. I called back, urgently repeating, “Back flush and fire up number one now.” As I started to say it again, well, it was the last thing I remembered.
And, of course, Cramer did pull me in. He and Sam. Later I found out that when I sent Ernest back, Cramer put him on guard, went into the airlock with Sam to save suit oxygen and, when needed, he and Sam still had twenty minutes left. They pulled me to safety.
I think I must have been about half way there when I blacked out, tether wrapped tight around my wrist and looped loosely over the cable. Cramer complained that they had a devil of a time untangling me. He made it sound like I had made his life difficult on purpose. Aten merely cried and hugged me.
Now her, I liked.
Phooey to Cramer. Saved my life and he complains? Yeah, well—that’s Cramer. I know, I know. I guessed I owed him, again.
And yet, still I know I heard something. Well, not heard exactly …
13
COMING ’ROUND—JUST
Zero-G didn’t bother me, they had slapped me to start me breathing and my body took in oxygen, involuntarily at first, and then when the brain got its supply, I awoke and smiled. “Okay, who hit me?” No need to ask, really. Cramer was grinning, Sam next to him.
As I said, they got number two fired up and then came the challenge of getting number one burped and restarted. The engineer was explaining, “We’ll keep number two running, slow for now, but maybe we can jump power at the same time we scavenge power to back flush that object from number one …”
The fog lifted, “How long have I been out?” I looked around, shook my head, “Doesn’t matter.” I screamed up to the flight deck, “Back flush number one NOW!”
Aten was worried, “Simon, no! It will push the whole motor assembly sideways, perhaps back toward the ship, it could fracture the tethers, I’ve done calculations …”
I put my hand over her mouth, “Aten, I know what I am doing.” Floating there in my manly spacesuit, too large for my ten-year-old frame, I turned to the engineer, gave my most forceful command “Fire up number two, half power, immediately burp number one, it will not deviate from course.”
“Yes, sir,” was the reply and he gave the order. I saw Sam being restrained by Cramer. Cramer had faith in me; Sam didn’t yet, especially in a little kid.
Inside the ship, you could not hear a thing from outside normally. No vibration transmitted down the tethers, no snap, crackle, or pop, nothing. Oh, there was something, from the flight deck, “Hey, it worked, the engines stayed pointed ahead!” Other enthusiastic hurrahs drifted down and then a “Well, damn, all clear! All clear!”
From Cramer there was only a smile of confidence—it told me my plan had worked.
Suddenly there was a loud thump from forward, and the crew yelled down the hatchway from the flight deck, “We’re ‘kay, something looking like a helmet hit a stanchion, bounced off, nothing broken.” The back-flushed blockage from number one had left us unscathed, so far.
Reports were flooding in on the intercoms that the crew below, with the advent of central lighting once more, had come out of anxiety and reaffirmed their belief that the voyage was blessed or, at least, not jinxed. I hoped they were right, but my thoughts would not stay fixed, I seemed to be drifting mentally to match the weightlessness. I still don’t know what it has done to our course to Angelica—and what was it I heard? I closed my eyes, curled up and as if I were back in my ET home, and fell fast asleep.
They slipped me into a hammock, zipped it up, and left me there, Doc Todd and occasionally Aten checking while I dozed from exhaustion and the effects of hypoxia. I vaguely remember Doc Todd putting an earlobe sensor on and muttering something about low levels …
When I awoke, Aten told me the vids were all on and all the crew needed to know, to experience was how she put it, the saving of the ship by the great Simon. So I explained that it was really Aten’s, her own doing. Her genius in constructing the portable gyrostabilizer made it all possible. Using the ship’s plans before we went EVA, I had determined the exact vector, the point of imbalance under number one engine that, if stabilized, could hold the whole motor assembly, providing number two was running at about half speed, in order to allow the burping of number one. Just before I launched myself back toward the ship, I had used Ernest’s tether to firmly attach the gyro
helmet to the back of number one’s exhaust nacelle, pointed in alignment. Then I clicked the power on full, which Aten had shown me could destroy the gyros, but I was hoping the gyro bearing would hold until I got far enough away. Hell, that gyro was designed to steady a huge hover truck, about maybe half the mass of the engines. Surely on full power it could work. That’s what I had hoped, and when there was nothing else that could work that’s what all we humans do, we try and we hope.
So, I gave credit to Aten for designing the device that saved us all. Apparently, the gyro did the job and kept number one pointed forward long enough to then be fired up and realign the tethers and with them, the voyage of the ship. The exhaust no doubt fried the little helmet, its usefulness fulfilled.
Aten, knowing the crew was still watching on screens around the ship, said, “But you stayed until your oxygen was depleted, you knew you were going to die to save us all.”
I could see Cramer there, hovering behind some of the crew, “Nope, don’t think for a moment I did. First, I’m still a little kid, so I use less oxygen than a full-grown man; and, second, Cramer was around, wasn’t he? And Sam there too and Ernest.” I gave a nod to Sam, who waved back, Ernest merely pointed at Cramer. I nodded. “When Cramer is around, you can be pretty sure he’ll figure out a way to save the day. Risk-taking, me? Nah, that’s more Cramer’s expertise. Tag, he’s it. He’s always it in the end.” It was our little joke of passing responsibility back and forth.
But Aten persisted, “Simon …” She shook her head, “People want to know, what it was like, risking your life for others, Simon? Is the Path so ingrained in you that you do not hesitate?”
Typical Ra, sorry, Peter, sorry Aten, coming up with questions I either could not answer or was afraid to. What popped in my head was something simpler, “I wasn’t the only one out there, everyone pulled their weight—out there and in here, everyone, equally. I had guessed you and Cramer and Zip and all my new friends needed my help, not a sacrifice, just my help. I could, so I did. If the tables were turned, I am sure you would do the same thing.” And, being the ham I seemed born to be, turned toward the vid lens, grinned in a patronizing way and said, “All of you would so the same thing for your friends, we stay on the Path.”
There wasn’t anything more to say. Unzipping and floating free of the hammock, I told Aten I needed to talk to Abadine and make sure the electric relays for landfalls had not been damaged. I floated over and asked Abadine if the electric cables had been retrieved and, above all, I wished that somewhere on the ship someone was pulling up schematics on space suits and maybe even backpack thrusters and giving them to engineering and maintenance to fabricate. “No way should we be without them. So, let’s get to work and prepare in case this happens again.” Abadine agreed, wholeheartedly.
As I passed through the swivel tube gangway into the ship, the enormity of the brightly lit three-kilometer by one-kilometer cavity before me once again amazed me. I faced the wall and climbed down the sloping ladder and handholds inside the safety cage for the 300 meters and arrived in more or less normal gravity—Aten above me and Cramer and Doc Todd above her.
As I reached the deck, I turned and there arose such a yelling, screaming, whistling with “bravo!” and “Simon!” and “our leader” being voiced by all gathered, almost the whole human crew and the dogs. I didn’t know what to say. I shook hands, was hugged by children and men and women alike; dogs passed by and thumped me with their tails, and as I stumbled forward, Cramer came up beside me and, putting his arm around my shoulders, said, “I thought that jump from the window back in Washington was brave, but this? This was epic, my friend, epic.” He winked, I smiled, but I knew there was a dig coming, “Fortunately for you, someone was thinking to save some O2, to save your ass—yet again!”
Then I laughed remembering the blind leap from that window in DC when Apollo had made WeatherGood One gust a gale to catch and then deposit me rolling on the sidewalk, evading Cramer’s police goons. So, with all those people around feeling so joyous, I hugged him and simply said “Thanks—again” And meant it. With Aten and Cramer holding hands, Zip showed up by my thigh and passed me a message, “Good boy” and wagged his tail. It was perhaps the most heartwarming thanks of the day.
Funny thing about dogs, their lack of subterfuge makes all their actions trustworthy, even the ones that might threaten. You can trust that they mean what they are doing or, in Zip’s case, saying. That was still weird though. Nice, but weird.
14
WILL REGUS ALLOW PLANET FALL?
“Message for Aten and, if capable, Simon and Cramer, private.
“Received yours 1.31.75.14. Understand no progress Cramer and Simon.
“In my last transmission Gaia confirmed that what we think of as dark energy is Regus or is under Regus’s control. It is my hope that Simon is awake and aware by now. As I said, his ability to free think and imagine may be useful for next part this transmission. In case you are relying on crewmembers for evaluation our Gaia findings, I will restate astrophysics and astronomy basis of my perspective in conversations with Gaia.
“The Universe consists of dark voids and densely packed superclusters made up of billions of stars, millions of galaxies. Superclusters are the largest structures in the Universe, but since the twentieth century, astronomers have been trying to determine where one supercluster ends and another begins. Earth’s position in a supercluster has been well mapped. However, the extent—size—of our supercluster remains unknown and may be irrelevant in what follows.
“Dr. Brent Tully’s work in the early millennium showed that the movement of galaxies and superclusters could be mapped. He produced a 3-D plot showing their trajectories. By discounting the effects of acceleration away from the center of the Universe and only mapping the gravitation’s effects of one galaxy upon another, he plotted those galaxies being attracted toward the center of the Milky Way, our galaxy, and those that were moving away. From there, he plotted the location of “The Great Attractor”—that point in our supercluster into which all galaxies are being pulled, to collide, and, therefore, be destroyed back into primary matter, axions, and so forth. This helps account for the newfound increased total quantities of dark matter and certainly allows for the new massive calculations of dark energy.
“Part of what he found was, of course, for the time, useful in rudimentary astrophysics, like differentiating the Milky Way from the Virgo cluster—showing the two clusters within the same supercluster were on different trajectories toward the Great Attractor. But the most important spin-off of his research was the revelation that the Milky Way and Virgo were only a very small part of a truly massive supercluster that they named Laniakea meaning immeasurable heavens in Hawaiian.
“Following that discovery, they looked at Laniakea as a single entity and could see that the individual trajectories of every galaxy within Laniakea toward the Great Attractor mimicked our nearest supercluster neighbor, Perseus-Pisces. In fact, one is the mirror image of the other, each occupying the same amount of space and each emitting the same signatures of energy. The odds of random creation of such balance, each one side of the Great Attractor, two identical, repeat identical, superclusters, is mathematically nearing the infinite.”
I sat there trying to follow. Apollo was getting into realms that could take me, an ordinary human, years of study. But then again, perhaps that was the point, he knew we still had years aboard the ship.
“In studying Gaia’s revelation that Regus may be, in fact, dark energy or something that manipulates it, especially the dedication (this is my new calculation) of forty-three and a half percent of that dark energy to the creation of new stars and planets—this brought me to accurately calculate the rate of destruction of planets, stars, and galaxies at the point central in the Great Attractor to a degree of accuracy approaching ninety-nine percent. The system appears not in balance if you do the calculations of the creation and destruction of matter. Destruction is only twelve percent of that being created
in terms of mass and dark matter. The balance in terms of energy is, however, constant, of course.”
I looked at Cramer and he shook his head. Aten paused the recording and explained, “Energy cannot be lost this way, if galaxies are destroyed as mass, they release energy, which remains constant. That energy as dark energy will be changed into dark matter as part of the acceleration of the overall universe. Remember, we’re only talking here about two superclusters out of perhaps millions. Not including any parallel universes.”
I tried to get Aten to explain further, but she was more intent on listening to Apollo’s message as if it were being sent live and not recorded all those years ago. She switched the recording back on.
“Evaluating the path of the dark energy involved here, discounting the calculations for Universal acceleration away from the point of origin at the Big Bang leaves us with the following areas of study: One—measurement and plotting of the radiation involved within each supercluster. Two—measurement of the movement, the vectors, of the supercluster’s galactic components including dark matter. And three—using Dr. Tully’s old 3-D plots to correlate the direction of the supercluster components, as well as the overall direction of our twinned supercluster Laniakea with her sister Perseus-Pisces.
“My findings, seen as a new 3-D plotting with all three criteria superimposed one on the other look like the ganglia and neuron pathways found in all brains, and, especially, I have identified over one million plexuses. Plexus are the joining up locus for individual ganglia and ganglia chains used by neurons for energy transmission. Exactly like the brain’s pathways, for species ranging from worm to jellyfish to man. Complexity may change when adjusted for the number of neurons of each brain, but the functionality and pathway creations are identical including ganglia and up to plexuses. In short, biology of life, based on neural stimulus and control, mimics exactly the patterns of the transmission of energy, dark energy, creation of matter in the form of planets, stars, solar systems, galaxies, and dark matter. And it is worth considering that these biological expire-and-growth rates are found within the Universal scheme when you adjust the time clock from Earth biological life and regeneration time span to that of the Universe by a factor of two to the zero point six five cubed billion years. I have yet to affirm this time constant with Gaia.
