Well, okay, I made that last bit up.
Tommy:
They used to say there were only five people on Earth who really understood how a gravitonic engine worked, and I certainly wasn’t one of them. What I do know is that, for a few seconds at the point of leap, what an engine does is generate an artificial gravitational field that converts the space around it into the equivalent of a black hole. And because an engine works by gravity, it can’t be used too close to any large object with a gravitational field of its own. This would distort the field and would result, at minimum, in the ship emerging in a completely different place from the target area. At maximum it could result in the field failing to properly enclose the ship, so that the ship itself would be damaged or destroyed.
This was why, at the rate of acceleration that the Defiant could achieve with its conventional Euclidean drive, it would be eight hours before we could reach the nearest safe point to make our leap through sub-Euclidean space: the so-called leap point. It would take half that time in any case for the engine to build up a sufficient charge.
It was after we’d been going for about an hour that we became aware that we were being followed.
“It’s gaining on us too,” Mehmet said.
“Shall we talk to them?” Dixon asked.
I thought better not. But the others decided we should call and tell them if they didn’t back off, they might get sucked down into sub-E with us when the time came to make a leap.
We were surprised to hear the voice of a self-assured young Englishwoman in reply.
“We’ll reach you long before you get to your leap point,” she said in response to our threat, “and we are certainly not going to back off.”
Dixon winked at us.
“Listen,” he radioed back, “When you get close to us, we leap, even if we’re four hours short of the leap point. It’s up to you.”
Mehmet looked at me with an expression that said, “He’s bluffing, yeah?”
But he hadn’t seen the gleam in Dixon’s eye, the mad religious gleam as he turned back to watch the power monitor.
The interceptor drew closer. There was no sign of them backing off.
“I meant what I said,” Dixon told the orbit-cops.
“So did I,” said the young woman who we now knew to be Sergeant Angela Young.
Dixon shrugged.
“Okay, then,” he said, “here goes or it’ll be too late! God save us all.”
“What!” Mehmet and I simultaneously yelled. We were still three and a half hours short of a safe leap point!
But Dixon laughed as he switched on the field.
“Thy will be done!” he hollered as we plunged into the pit.
Angela:
Purple lightening prickled up and down the Defiant’s pylons, and the stars all around it shuddered like a mirage. Our vehicle shook violently, its metal groaning with the strain as it was sucked towards the artificial gravity the galactic ship was generating. And then suddenly the stars and moon and sun and earth all vanished and all around us, in every direction, was something like a huge distorting mirror. It was like when you’re under water and look up and you can’t see the sky or the world outside, only the silvery undersides of waves. Our own faces were there in front of us, little distorted reflections of our frightened faces maybe fifty yards away, peering back at us from a distorted reflection of our cabin window. There was a jolt like an explosion and I vaguely remember hearing a hissing noise coming from somewhere and Mike giving out a despairing groan. Then I blacked out
When I came round again I was in the Defiant, and those three famous galactonauts were looking guiltily down at me like naughty little boys who’ve done a stupid dare and it’s gone wrong.
“Hi, you okay? Listen, I’m…”
“Where’s Mike?”
“Your partner? He’s okay. He’s not come round yet, but he’s okay. Listen, I’m Mehmet Harribey and…”
“…and I’m Dixon Thorley.”
“…and I’m…”
“I know. You’re Tommy Schneider. The famous love rat.”
My head was killing me, and I was very scared and feeling sick, but I was damned if I was going to show any sign of weakness.
“I meant to leap before you got too close to us,” said Dixon, “but I must have left it too late because we pulled your interceptor vehicle through sub-E with us. It was very badly damaged but the three of us came over and managed to get you and your crewmate out before the pressure dropped too low.”
“So we did complete the leap then?”
“Yeah, I’m afraid we’re kind of…”
“So where the hell are we?”
“Well, we’re…”
“The truth is,” Mehmet said, “that we don’t exactly know. We’re in intergalactic space, I’m afraid, which… um… is kind of a first. But we believe that the nearest galaxy is our own. So it should still be possible to…um…”
“…to get back to Earth and not suffocate or freeze to death in space – although that is the most likely outcome. Is that how it is?”
“Well, yes, I’m afraid so,” Mehmet laughed ruefully. (I grew to like him best of the three. He was nice-looking, had natural friendly manners, and didn’t come with a reputation either as a religious nut or a serial adulterer. I remembered seeing a photo of him in some magazine with a pretty wife by the Aegean somewhere and three or four pretty little Turkish kids.)
I looked around. The cramped little cabin was about as big as the back of a small delivery truck and it smelled like the boys’ changing room at school, but as far as we knew it was the only habitable place for thousands and thousands of light years: the only place in which a human being could remain intact and alive even for a single second.
“You arseholes,” I told the three of them, and I felt like I was a copper back on the streets of London, pulling up three silly naughty little boys. “You selfish, childish, thoughtless little arseholes.”
They never had a chance to respond because suddenly Mike screamed. He’d opened his eyes and the first thing he saw was the wheel of the galaxy outside the porthole.
Tommy:
It was pure hell there for a while. The British guy hollered and roared and grabbed us and snatched at the controls and swore and wept. I got a black eye, Mehmet got his shirt torn, Angela was yelling at us to back off and not make things even worse (but where the hell were we supposed to back off to?) and all of us were getting dangerously close to seeing ourselves just like the Englishman saw us: doomed, doomed to die slowly and horribly in a stuffy tin can with nothing but nothingness outside.
Eventually Dixon managed to get to the medical box and whack a sedative into the guy’s ass.
“He’s afraid of space,” Angela explained as he slumped down.
“A space-cop who’s afraid of space?”
Even Angela reluctantly laughed.
I’d never gone for black girls particularly before, but I found myself noticing that this was one attractive young woman. She was tough, and funny, and sharp – and she looked great. Maybe this was what I’d been looking for all this time, I couldn’t help thinking (as, God help me, I’d thought so many times before). Maybe I’d just been looking in the wrong place?
Yeah, I know, I know. We were in a damaged ship in intergalactic space and so far from home that, if we could pick out our own sun in that billion-star wheel, we’d be seeing it as it was back in the Pleistocene era. And yet even then I was thinking about sex. I guess that is what you call an obsession.
I mean we had a month’s supplies at most. Maybe six week’s oxygen.
But I caught her eye anyway and smiled at her, just to let her know she was appreciated.
Angela:
It turned out that their stupid leap had not only sucked through our interceptor and turned it into scrap, it had also damaged the Defiant itself. Because they’d made the leap too early the artificial gravity of the field had been pulled back toward the Earth by real gravity – that was w
hy Mike and I had been caught inside it. Some of the pylons at the front end of the ship had actually remained outside of the field, and so literally ceased to exist, while others further back had been bent and twisted. This was very bad news. To get home from this distance would take a minimum of three or four leaps, which was pushing things at the best of times, even without a defective engine.
So Dixon, Mehmet and Tommy suited up and went outside to see what repairs they could make, Tommy cheesily asking me if I was sure I’d be okay minding the fort and keeping an eye on Mike. Can you believe that he’d already given me the eye several times? Was this bloke entirely ruled by his dick?
“I’ll be okay,” I said, “and I promise not to answer the phone or to let in any strangers.”
Answer the phone! Even if my mum and dad could have called me up from Earth – even if there was a signal strong enough to reach this far, I mean – I’d have been dead a million years by the time their message got to me.
Pretty soon all three gallant galactonauts were back. They’d been able to straighten out a few bent pylons. But now something else was on their minds and they rushed to the sensor panel and started playing around with frequencies and filters like kids with a new video game.
“There was this dark disc in front of the galaxy,” Tommy explained to me eventually, “Mehmet spotted it first…”
“Never seen anything like it!” Mehmet interrupted. “It was…”
“Here it is!” called Dixon, pointing to a screen.
He’d used radar on whatever it was and it turned out to be a solid object the size of earth, a planet in other words.
“There’s a thing called the Ballantyne effect,” Mehmet explained to me. “A ship’s trajectory through sub-E space is always twisted in the direction of any large mass that’s in the vicinity of its notional exit point. It means that you always end up nearer to stars that you would predict on chance alone. But who’d have thought there would be any sort of object out here to pull us towards it, eh?”
“So it’s a planet with no sun,” I said.
“Yes,” Dixon told me excitedly. “A planet all on its own. It’s been assumed for a long time that they existed, but we’ve never found one before.”
“Well so what?” I said. “What use is it to us? Even Pluto would be hospitable by comparison with a planet that has no sun at all and Pluto is so cold it’s covered with solid methane. We’re trying to survive, remember? What use is a dismal place like that?”
“But the thing is, Angela,” Mehmet said excitedly, “the thing is that this planet isn’t cold!”
“And it’s not completely dark either!” said Tommy.
They were all over one another in their haste to show me the evidence. Somehow, even without a sun, this strange object had a surface as warm as Earth’s. Seen in infrared it glowed. In fact, even in the visible spectrum it glowed, though very softly, so softly that against the blazing mass of stars it still seemed dark.
And when Dixon did the spectrometry on the starlight passing round the planet’s edge, he made the most sensational discovery yet. This was a planet with breathable air.
Tommy:
Mehmet, Dixon and I had made a whole career of looking for habitable planets. And now, with very little chance of ever being able to bring the news back to Earth, it looked like we’d finally succeeded, by accident and in the least likely place imaginable.
Of course we had to go and look at it. The thing was only few days away across Euclidean space and a short delay wouldn’t make our next leap any more or less likely to succeed. The only difficulty was Angela and Mike, but she shrugged and said okay, if she was going to die, she might as well see this first – and he was strapped to a bunk and peacefully off with the fairies.
Angela:
When we’d got the Defiant in orbit, we climbed into the ship’s landing capsule and sank down towards a surface that we could now clearly see to be gently glowing over much of its area, as if the planet was covered by a huge candle-lit city. But it wasn’t a city. It was a forest. It was a shining forest of glowing trees and luminous streams and pools, that filled up all but the highest ground.
The trees were like gnarled oaks, leafless but with shining flowers along their branches. Their trunks were warm to the touch and they constantly pulsed. You could feel it if you touched them. You could even hear it. Hmmmmph – hmmmmph – hmmmmph, they went, and the sound of all of them together combined into a constant hum that pervaded the whole forest. The ground under the trees grew strange leafless flowers that shone like stars. Under the surface of pools and streams waving waterweed carried more shining flowers that made the water luminous, like a swimming pool lit up by underwater lights. And the whole forest was mild and scented like a summer evening on Earth.
“Look at that!” cried Mehmet as something bird-like with neon blue wings swept by overhead.
“Hey, come and see this!” called Dixon, squatting down to look at a clump of small shining flowers like miniature sodium streetlights.
Tommy wandered off in one direction, Mehmet in another. Neither of them said where they were going, and no one asked. Dixon settled down under a tree with his back to its warm trunk. I settled down on the mossy banks of a nearby stream. Strange melodious cries came to us from other parts of the forest. All around us the trees throbbed and hummed and shone under the great wheel of the Milky Way galaxy that filled up most of the sky. Fluttering creatures resembling fluorescent butterflies fed on the shining flowers and in the warm air vents that many of the trees had on their trunks. Bird- and batlike creatures swooped and dived among them.
I was lying by the stream watching little shining fish-things darting around in the water when I remembered that Mike was still inside the capsule.
“Dixon,” I said, “would you mind giving me a hand?”
My voice sounded very strange and looming, like when someone suddenly speaks after a long silence during a night journey in a car. It was as if this planet wasn’t used to human voices.
Tommy:
Angela and Dixon fetched Mike down from the capsule and settled him on the ground, still fast asleep. He came round a few hours later. There was no screaming and yelling this time. He just wandered through the trees like the rest of us and found a place to sit down and stare and try and take it all in. It turned out that he was some kind of amateur naturalist back home – he went on bird-watching holidays and stuff like that with his wife and kids – and now he had a whole new set of plants and animals to explore. It was him that came up with the theory that the trees worked like radiators, pumping water through hot rocks underground, circulating it through their branches, and warming the surrounding air. They got their energy from the planet’s core, he reckoned, instead of from a sun.
Eventually everyone got hungry and we reconvened round the capsule for a share of the rations we’d brought down with us. We supplemented this cautiously with fruit we’d found on the trees. Most of it turned out to be good to eat.
“Isn’t this great?” exclaimed Dixon, munching contentedly, his back against a warm tree-trunk. “This is what it must have been like in Eden before the Fall.”
And Eden is what we decided to call the place.
Angela:
Mehmet was the one I got on best with. He was friendly and interested and fun to be with. Dixon was okay I suppose but I was really angry with him for selfishly doing the leap when Mike and I were so close. I’m not a person that likes to hold grudges but I really did need to get some of that anger off my chest before I could get along with him – and he simply wouldn’t let me. Whenever I tried to challenge him, he just said that God had told him to make the leap: the fact that we’d found Eden was proof of it.
‘I’m sorry I dragged you away from your family and your friends Angela,’ would have been nice, or even: ‘I quite understand why you’re so angry.’
But I wasn’t going to get any of that. Instead it was: ‘Angela, you need to try and accept the will of God.’
/> The will of God! The arrogant prig! It seems wrong to talk about him like that now, after what’s happened since to the poor bloke, but that’s how I felt at the time.
Mike, on the hand, was really sweet in this context. Free of the role of RAF officer and free of the fear of space, he became a sort of gentle, dreamy, solitary child. He’d spend his time making lists of all the animals and plants he could find, and giving them names.
But Tommy, he really got on my nerves. He tried to be charming and helpful but he was this world-famous lady-killer and he couldn’t forget it. In one way I felt that he just took it for granted that I’d want to fall at his feet, yet in another way he was quite afraid of me and needed to keep testing me out all the time to see if he could get a reaction and work out where he stood with me. So he was complacent and insecure, both at the same time, a weird and seriously irritating combination.
Annoyingly, though, he was just as handsome as he’d always looked on TV, so you couldn’t help looking at him, whether you wanted to or not.
Tommy:
Angela was graceful, funny, natural. I thought she was wonderful. Stranded a million light-years away from home and very probably in the final days of her life, she was dignified and undefeated and unbowed.
I’ve been with all kinds of women in my life – models, film stars, university professors, athletes and, yes, I admit it, even whores – and I guess what everyone says about me is true in a way. Women are not just people to me: they are also a kind of addictive drug. But, and I guess this is the part that many people don’t understand, I really do like women. I mean I just like being with them, I like them as human beings – and I always have. I remember when I was five years old my teacher asked the whole class one day to pair up for a walk in the local park – and all the boys looked for other boys and all the girls looked for other girls, but I risked the ridicule of everyone to ask a girl called Susan if I could hold her hand. I remember another time I was chasing round the school yard with a bunch of boys, yelling and hollering and waving sticks around, when I noticed a bunch of girls quietly playing in a tree. And suddenly I wanted to be in their game with them, their quiet game, and not with the boys at all. That’s how I felt about Angela. I just wanted her to let me join in her game.
The Turing Test Page 18
