Mental Contact

by Beth Martin

  I could have sworn she had been smiling while she looked at me. Just that one friendly smile put me more at ease.

  The beautiful face from the shuttle slowly dissolved from my vision as I was brought back to the present.

  “Jake, Jake!”

  The room was too bright. I could barely open my eyes.

  “Jake? Do you know where you are?” the doctor asked.

  “I better not still be in that fucking alley.” My tongue felt like a sack of rocks, but I’d be back to normal in an hour or so.

  “Do you know my name?”

  “How could I ever forget you?” The doctor peered at me from above, his poofs of white hair and trim pale beard making his lined face almost disappear into the alabaster ceiling.

  Adam’s voice came next. “Given the classic Metcalf wit, I’d say he’s fine.”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Adam,” I said. “That’s Doc’s call.”

  “He’s fine,” Doc proclaimed before taking off his exam gloves and throwing them in my face.

  I heard Doc’s footsteps fade away and turned my head to see Adam sitting in a chair next to the cot I was laying on. Now that Doc was gone, Adam’s expression changed from amused to concerned.

  “They’re happening more often,” he said.

  I sat up and touched the sore spot at my temple. I could feel the knot just under my skin. It must have been caused by the fall. “You think I haven’t noticed?”

  “Stop making a fucking joke about everything. I’m serious.”

  I caught my reflection in the mirror above the hand wash station and saw the red and purple bruise which covered a quarter of my face. No wonder it hurt so badly. “I’ll worry about me, and you worry about you.”

  Adam looked down to the floor and shook his head. I didn’t need his concern. These episodes were just a side-effect of my medication. They weren’t going to kill me.

  “Did they delay the launch because of me?” I asked.

  “Commander Ford was going to if you didn’t wake up within the hour. Guess that means we’re back on schedule.” Adam turned away and walked out of the medical room.

  •••

  I was nervous; it was my first class at Theta Academy, and I really wanted to make a good impression. I had arrived at the lecture hall ten minutes early in order to secure a seat in the front. Slowly, the room filled with students, and our professor came in the minute class was scheduled to start.

  When I started up my pad, it displayed a hologram of the campus and all the buildings at the academy. I swiped my hand through the image to make it go away. The last thing I needed was to let my peers know that I couldn’t even find my way to class without help.

  “Hello, young and eager minds,” the professor’s voice boomed through the room. “Welcome to Navigation One. I am your professor, Dr. Pierce. At the end of this course, you will all be intimately familiar with the locations of all colonized planetary systems. Who here can tell me the span of the currently settled systems?”

  I had heard this number several times from my father and had even read the first chapter of the class text-file before I left Spaceship Titanium. I shot up my hand to answer.

  “The eager young man in the front.”

  “87 light-years,” I said with confidence.

  “That would have been right four years ago. Who knows the correct number?”

  Dr. Pierce pointed at another student. “You, sir.”

  “89 light-years.”

  “Very good.”

  I sunk down in my chair, thoroughly embarrassed. I hadn’t considered that things would change during my five years in transit. For the rest of the lecture, I kept quiet and stared at my pad.

  When Dr. Pierce dismissed us, I put my pad into my backpack and raced out of the side exit as quickly as I could. I would take the back exit to avoid all of my classmates. The unfortunate truth, however, was that I had no idea how to navigate this building. I blindly walked down one hall after another looking for a door leading outside. Once I encountered a fourth dead end, I pulled out my pad to bring up a map of the building.

  As I was focusing on the pathways depicted on my pad, a voice startled me.

  “You lost?”

  I looked up to see the face of the woman from the shuttle. She was absolutely stunning with pale skin, long white hair, and icy-blue eyes. She had thick blond eyelashes and a straight nose.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I know my way out.”

  She pursed her glossy pink lips and looked at me for a moment before saying, “You know, everyone makes a fool of themselves on their first day. You’re not special.”

  I winced. I had built up this whole persona for the woman on the shuttle. In my mind she was friendly, welcoming, and even a bit playful. Instead, the real person in front of me was curt and pompous.

  “You want to be a pilot?” I asked. Of course the goal of Theta Academy was to train future pilots, but most students would secure other jobs aboard starships after graduation.

  She merely shrugged her shoulders. “If you want to be a pilot, you should really learn how to navigate your school first.” She gave me a sly smile before walking away.

  •••

  Paradido had a small crew, so all the seats for lift-off and landing were situated on the bridge. It was a circular room with panels lining one half and seats taking up the other. In the center were the pilot and commander’s chairs. Near the pilot’s chair was a ladder leading up to the observation deck which had the largest window in the entire spaceship. It was also my favorite spot on the little ship.

  This bridge looked like a closet compared to those on the spaceships my father had piloted. I had given up hope of ever traveling at warp or seeing my family again. The last time I had seen my mother was when I had left for the academy eleven years ago. Now I was thirty years old, at least according to universal, time-travel adjusted.

  I tightened my restraints a little more as Pilot Greene counted down for launch. Greene carried himself like any other retired military man, making his short, compact stature seem imposing. He grew a thick brown beard which made him look much older than his actual age of twenty-seven. I knew the controls were lit up with holograms of all sorts of dials, switches, buttons, and indicators, but I couldn’t see them. Greene’s fingers seemed to dance in front of him as Ford looked around and read off invisible numbers and systems.

  “Here we go,” Adam whispered from next to me.

  I swallowed and nodded. The whole spaceship started rumbling as the engines kicked in and Paradido lifted off the ground. The best way to describe the feeling of lift-off is to imagine an elephant sitting on top of you with another elephant sitting on the first. It was hard to even breathe, and new crew members would often pass out on their first few flights.

  Escaping Delta’s gravity didn’t take long, maybe twenty minutes. “All right, folks, we’re on autopilot now,” Greene said. “Thirty days until we reach Zeta.”

  Zeta wasn’t as bad as Delta, but it certainly wasn’t my favorite planet in the system. It was too hot and just as small as Delta. Come to think about it, I wasn’t fond of any of the planets in Trappist.

  The room filled with the sound of clanking metal as everyone unbuckled their restraints.

  “Let’s get to work, men,” Ford said. Ford didn’t have much of a role in navigating the ship, that was Greene’s job, but he did have full authority over the crew.

  You should stay here. Watch the view.

  Ignoring her voice, I carefully navigated out of the bridge using the yellow rope handles on the wall to propel myself forward. Paradido didn’t have any advanced features like an artificial gravity generator. Although weightlessness made moving around the ship a lot faster, if anyone skimped on their exercises during the flight they’d collapse like a wet noodle once we landed.

  Normally, I would have been able to take a break right after lift-off, but I had been unconscious for the pre-flight operations and had a lot of work to catch
up on.

  My supplies were in the engine room located at the back of the ship. I floated down the crude looking halls, exposed metal flashing and ducts lining the walls. Diamond-patterned steel covered the floor and ceiling. The same handles as on the bridge also dotted the hallways. I reached for the next handle as someone came up from behind me. “Going to go swab the deck?” Van asked as he raced past. For a big guy, he could get around really fast. He was tall and heavy and his face looked like molded dough punctured with a round nose and two beady eyes.

  “Har har.” I made it to the engine room and opened the supply closet. It was quiet since the engine wouldn’t need to run again until we approached Zeta.

  I had to pause a moment. My episode had sucked out all of my energy. I should have gotten some sleep, but knew that Adam was probably already in the mess room brewing coffee. I’d just grab some in a beverage pouch on my way to the cabins.

  If you didn’t fight it, you wouldn’t have the episodes.

  It was a lie. As long as I kept taking those damned pills, I would continue to suffer from intense headaches and blackouts. I grabbed my pressure mop, a bottle of cleaning solution, and my gloves. I just needed to keep busy.

  •••

  Even though I was already doing well in all my classes, I spent most of my time in the library. My roommate had an acrid smell about him which had permeated our entire dorm room. Since he spent most of his time in our room, I did not.

  School had always been easy for me. I thought that going to flight academy would finally present me with an academic challenge, but I had been wrong. Instead, I read texts that were meant for advanced study. I memorized every bit of information I came across. I could rattle off the names of every inhabited planet in alphabetical order and also in the order in which they were settled. It was a long list—easily over two hundred names.

  I learned all about my current planetary system, Trappist. I researched the history for each warp spaceship. I knew everything.

  One day while I was working in the library, something other than my studies caught my attention. The pale woman with her white hair cascading down her back browsed the stacks of books, picking random ones and leafing through them before returning them to the shelves. I was having a hard time concentrating. I kept finding myself admiring her instead of looking at my pad.

  She glanced over at me and caught me staring. I quickly looked down pretending to be engrossed in my studies, hoping she hadn’t noticed me watching her. Instead, she walked over and leaned against my study table. I cleared my throat and kept my eyes on my pad. “I’m busy.”

  With a flick of her finger, the hologram of Spaceship Cobalt began to spin. “Reading about warp ships? Why bother?”

  I pushed my hand onto my pad to turn it off and tucked it into my backpack. “I’m going to be a pilot of one of these ships some day.”

  “That’s never going to happen.” She examined her fingernails for a moment before glaring at me with those ice-blue eyes.

  I leaned back, putting more space between us. “You don’t know that.”

  She walked around the table and sat in the seat across from me. “Sure I do. It’s simple probability. There are forty-five students at Theta Academy, and hundreds of other pilot academies around the universe. Thousands of students graduate with flight degrees each year. That’s a lot of pilots. And how many warp ships are there? Three hundred?”

  “Three hundred thirty-two.”

  “Right, three thirty-two. And how many of their pilots came from Aldrin Academy?”

  I paused. “All of them.”

  “Well, there you go. Theta Academy just doesn’t produce warp pilots. If we’re really lucky, we’ll get pilot positions on regular spaceships. The rest will probably only land jobs as officers and crew. Face it, we’re all bound to this system.”

  I crossed my arms. “I’m not getting stuck anywhere. Especially not here.”

  “I wouldn’t be so confident about that.” The way she said it sent a chill down my spine. She got up and sauntered away.

  •••

  I did a half-assed job on all of my work duties before taking a break. Ford would have disapproved if he knew I had quit early, but he spent most of his time in his office or the rec room. I wouldn’t run into him on the bridge.

  The best thing about the bridge was the observation deck. The windows in front of the pilot’s seat extended up into a dome above the entire bridge. There was a metal catwalk ten feet above the floor which made a circle near the top. There was a ladder to get up there, but with no gravity, I just had to jump up from the floor.

  I settled down on the catwalk and watched outer space above me. I had spent too much time in my life traveling faster than light with a view of only darkness through the windows. If I had to point out one thing I learned from my eleven (universal) years on Trappist, it was that sometimes, you just have to slow down and look at the stars.

  Over there. An asteroid.

  I looked in the direction my mind was pointing to before I could stop myself. Sure enough, something was off. I knew the star charts better than I knew myself. To the left of Polaris was a mass that wasn’t supposed to be there. It was an asteroid.

  I sat up so quickly that I bashed my head against the thick window. I held my hand against the sore spot on my temple. At least now my face would have symmetrical bruising.

  I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my gut. Without any evidence to support it, I just knew that the asteroid was coming straight for us. I needed to find Pilot Greene. There’s no time. You need to navigate the spaceship out of its path.

  “I can’t. I can’t see the controls.” I had a general sense of where the throttle was, but without the ability to see holograms, I couldn’t be sure of it’s exact position.

  You know where they are and how they work. You can do this. I took a deep breath and climbed down from the observation deck to just in front of the control panels. I would have to act fast. I tried to reach my hands out to the steering yoke and froze. You can do this. Doubt flooded my body, stretching to even the ends of my fingertips. I had never done these maneuvers myself. My brain was actively feeding me misinformation and making me hear someone who wasn’t there. In the end, I didn’t trust myself with my own life. I needed to find the pilot.

  Where would Greene be right now? The mess? His cabin? I decided to check the mess first.

  The only person there was Adam. He was cooking something that smelled horrible. Normally I’d give him a dig for it, but I didn’t have much time.

  “Adam! Have you seen Greene?”

  Adam turned to face me, goo detaching from his spoon in spherical globs. “Why?” He was attempting to heat something in an uncovered container—whatever it was spreading out from the side of the bowl and sloshing everywhere. I hated Adam’s cooking experiments since I was the one who always had to clean up after them.

  “It’s urgent. Where is he?”

  Adam chuckled. “You have nothing but time, Metcalf. I’m not getting pulled into some prank.”

  Feeling my life slip away as the giant rock was hurtling toward us, I raised my voice. “Just tell me where he is, dammit!”

  “Okay, okay,” Adam said, holding his hands up, the gesture splashing goo onto the walls. “He went to the rec room.”

  I didn’t waste a moment and propelled myself directly to the rec room. When I got there, Greene and Officer Cory were in the middle of a game of handball.

  By then, I was so anxious I could barely speak. “Pilot Greene… I saw… there’s a… an asteroid.”

  I now had both men’s full attention. They came rushing out of the room and raced down the halls. I followed them back to the bridge.

  “Where?” Greene asked.

  I pointed to the mass I had spotted just moments earlier. Greene rushed to the pilot’s chair and started poking at all the panels that I couldn’t see.

  “Oh shit,” Cory muttered, his pale complexion getting even paler. He got into the c
ommander seat and buckled the restraints.

  Greene looked up at the asteroid and said, “The scan of the system didn’t show any particulates that could potentially cross our path. This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It’s heading toward us?” My heart was hammering in my

  chest. It looked so much closer already. We wouldn’t have enough time.

  “Officer Cory, enact emergency collision protocol,” Greene said.

  Cory nodded and said, “Yes, sir.” He touched some invisible button in the air, and then his voice boomed through the entire ship. “Emergency. Emergency. Secure yourselves for anti-collision maneuvers.”

  It was heading toward us. I jumped to my seat, the same one I had used for lift-off only hours ago.

  Paradido’s engines roared as it abruptly banked to the left. The asteroid was now big enough to see the cloud of dust around it and a few of the pocks on its gray surface. It looked like it was still coming straight for us.

  I watched it get bigger and bigger as it drew closer. My hands started trembling as I gripped my restraints. This was it. This was how I was going to die.

  Greene muttered incessantly to himself as he banked the ship farther to the left. I could feel my body getting pulled to the port side of the ship as we kept turning. The asteroid seemed to change minutely in relation to us, but not enough.

  “Hold on,” Green said as he swung his arms quickly to the right, and the ship followed, spinning rapidly. The asteroid whipped across the windows over and over. I could no longer tell which direction either it or us were going.

  The engines ramped up even louder as we picked up speed. Our spinning motion slowed to a stop. I could feel my body getting crushed against the back of my seat as the asteroid got larger and larger until it filled the entire window.