But every few moments his attention would stray from the stars and fall back to the last known place where he had seen Peregrine Station.
“You should come away from the viewport, Nathanial,” Annabelle said. Her voice was thick with drowsiness. The medical kit had also contained a bottle of laudanum, and she was again falling under its effects. As she had muttered earlier as he had brought the bottle to her lips, “I’ve spent more time unconscious lately, in one way or another, than I have since I was a baby.”
He looked at her over his shoulder. “I can’t stop thinking of them,” he said. “I see their faces in my head. Holmes, Fullbright, Provost. The others, even, but I see those three the most. I only knew them a short time, but I’d come to call them friends. Even in my darkest thoughts, I believed that one day we would reunite on Earth, share a bottle of brandy, and tell fabulous lies of an evening. I never considered it would come to this.”
“It’s not your fault. You aren’t the madman who trapped them. That was Le Boeuf.”
Nathanial looked in the telescope’s eyepiece. “A while ago, I thought I saw a flash,” he said. “It looked like the flashes of the interplanetary mirror. Of course, such a flash was probably a trick of the light, but nevertheless, I thought it might be the first few flashes of an SOS.”
“Don’t think such things. Come away from the viewport.”
Nathanial did not stir. Eventually, Annabelle fell asleep. He stared a while longer through the telescope before giving up. He took up the chair next to Annabelle. She snored a little, her chin resting on her chest. He took her hand and squeezed it. She snorted, still asleep, and squirmed a little. He let go of her hand and turned his attentions to the stars outside the viewport.
What day was it? What year, even? Here again, were the same thoughts, the same predicament, as before. What had changed? Nothing. Everything. When they cleared the vortex he would change their course back toward Mars, and slowly, by and by, it would fill his vision. He reached into his satchel and removed Professor Wren’s journal. It was still there. He returned it and removed his own journal. Thoughts were all he had out here in the aether, the long hours dragging out before him. He would jot down his later, when boredom and inactivity started to become more than he could manage.
Until then, he stared out the viewport, at the stars, at the black, and painful images that danced in front of his mind’s eye.
And he waited.
To Be Continued…
A Prince of Mars by Frank Chadwick
L. Joseph Shosty lives in Beaumont, Texas with his wife and son. He is the author of nearly fifty short stories, as well as numerous essays, articles, book reviews, and poems. A novel, Sign of the Hanged Man, was serialised on the web in 2000 and 2001, and his story collection, Hoodwinks on a Crumbling Fence, was published in 2000. His second novel, a mainstream work titled The Return of Baldheaded Johnson, has recently been completed.
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