Mental Contact

by Beth Martin

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. All I’ve heard is that you’ve been pestering them with your crazy shit. I don’t want to poke the monster.”

  “It’s not crazy. Our trajectory is askew. We’re going to miss Zeta.”

  “I hate to break it to you, Metcalf, but you don’t know how to navigate.”

  I laid back down on my cot and stared up at the ceiling. Of course he thought that I couldn’t navigate. Navigation was done completely on the panels. Anyone who’d ever attended a flight academy would learn about using the stars to calculate location and orientation, but most students didn’t study navigation nearly as intensely as I had.

  But even if I proved that our navigation systems had gotten damaged, Greene still wouldn’t trust me to get us to Zeta. I wasn’t entirely sure what the backup protocol for a damaged delivery ship was, but I knew what it was for a warp spaceship: check the stars.

  “You should get to work,” Adam said. “I don’t want Dr. Whipple to put you down for the rest of the trip.”

  •••

  I thought when Dr. Ryan had said he’d set up my transfer that I would get discharged from the hospital and go to some other facility in town. Instead, Dr. Ryan had me sent to the Nazarian and Ryan Institute, a huge mental health complex located on Kappa.

  After my outburst in the dorm, I was labeled as a violent patient. I was strapped in full-body restraints for the short flight between planets. I felt so mentally broken, I didn’t even try to fight the straitjacket. Plus, if I was a compliant patient, perhaps I would return to the academy faster.

  The small passenger spaceship was a rough ride during launch and landing. If I had the use of my arms, I would have been able to brace myself against my seat. But without, I bounced around, the loose seatbelt digging into me each time gravity threw me from my seat.

  My body felt battered and sore when the ship finally landed. As soon as the cabin door opened, a couple nurses came into the spaceship, removed my seatbelt, and hefted me out of the ship. They placed me not-so-gently on a gurney, rolling me through the crowded spaceport like that. I was too tired and drained to feel embarrassed as others stared.

  A land vehicle took me the rest of the way to the institute. I must have somehow fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, a voice broke through the darkness.

  “Jake,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean to do this to you. I just got so upset. I promise I’ll never do it again. Just wake up, please. Please, please, wake up.”

  There was pressure against my hand. I opened my eyes just a slit. Lola sat on the edge of my bed, both of her hands grasped around one of mine. But instead of the sensation of soft, warm skin touching my hand, it felt more like someone had set a book on top of it.

  We were in a small, stark-white room with large windows. Outside were rolling green hills and a blue sky. The only adornment in the room was an analog clock high on the wall.

  She turned to look at my face. “Jake?” she said in a hopeful voice. There were tear-tracks streaking her cheeks. Her tears shone like a thousand little crystals instead of looking glossy and wet. She wiped one away with her hand, and the shimmering dust spread across her cheek. “Don’t ever do that to me again.”

  “Do what?”

  “Shh,” she said, leaning closer to my face. “Don’t let anyone hear you talking to me. They’ll think you really are crazy.”

  “But I am.”

  She looked to the door before focusing back on me. “Don’t trust the doctors. They’ll try to convince you that there’s something wrong with your brain, but there isn’t. You’re special, not broken.” Before I could ask her what she meant, she leaned forward and kissed my forehead. “I’ll stay with you.” Then, she laid down on the bed, overlapping my body, absorbing herself into me.

  It’s hard to describe what happened next. It felt like someone slapping me hard across the face, but all over my body. My eyes shot open. My lungs were dry and void of air, but when I tried to breathe in, my throat constricted. The sensation of pins and needles covered my skin as lightning shot through my chest. What little air I was able to get in came right back out in a scream.

  I wasn’t in a stark-white hospital room, but a gray room constructed from rough blocks. There was a tiny window lined with bars near the top of the wall with nothing but darkness on the other side.

  “Try to relax.” I was suddenly aware of the other person in the room. She was a heavy-set, older woman wearing a light green uniform. She had just injected something into my arm. The last thing I could do was relax. My muscled tensed and twitched while the pins in my skin turned to burning pain. I tried to breathe, but my lungs would barely inflate.

  “Takes a while to come out of the sedation. I’ll check on you in an hour.” She turned and left my little room, her ponytail swishing behind her. I couldn’t recall being put to sleep. If this was what it was like, I never wanted to get sedated again.

  As the pain continued to wash over me, I tried to call out. Lola said she’d be with me. Where was she? For the first time in my life, I wanted her by my side.

  •••

  At that moment, I wanted Lola, and she just wasn’t there. She’d know what to do.

  No, she’d just tell me to commandeer the spaceship and fly it myself. That would only lead to another stay at an insane asylum, assuming I successfully landed Paradido without killing everyone on board. Staying in an institute was worse than simply being insane.

  I had barely started in on my work when I got this feeling that I needed to check the control panels. Maybe I’d be able to see at least some of the holograms.

  I brought my cleaning supplies with me as I rushed down the hall. I could see it in my mind: the steering wheel and buttons for controlled blasts. I’d need to turn Paradido to see how close we were to Zeta, and then change our direction. It would take extra fuel to do the visual check, but I already knew I couldn’t rely on the ship’s navigation systems.

  When I got to the bridge, the room was entirely dark. The control panels were invisible to me and all the lights were off as well. Only the soft glow of the stars illuminated the room. I propelled myself to the observation area and looked out, then pressed my hand against the window.

  My crew didn’t understand me or what I was going through. I was smarter than all of them combined, but had still been relegated to the most menial task. I sorely wished that they would listen to me. “What should I do?” I asked, knowing that the stars wouldn’t be able to answer.

  They’ll never believe you. You only got this job because Ford was desperate for new crew members.

  I closed my eyes, letting full darkness wash over me. “You’re back?”

  Not yet. Not enough. Keep an eye out for the holograms.

  “I will.”

  “You talking to someone?” The lights of the bridge came on, glaring against the windows.

  “The stars,” I said wistfully before turning to look at Greene.

  “You still have work to do.”

  “Yes, sir.” I pushed against the window and floated back to the floor of the bridge and left.

  The hardest part of the next day was keeping my anxiety and anger in check. Doc was becoming more suspicious, and soon it felt like the entire crew was keeping tabs on my behavior. Perhaps they were, or maybe I was just being paranoid.

  Greene banned me from going on the bridge. Even though I had always kept a safe distance from the panels—and aside from the grease marker hadn’t caused a disturbance—his trust in me had bottomed out. I wasn’t even permitted to go there to clean. Instead, Van was assigned to maintain the area. As an expert mechanic, at least according to himself, he protested the new duty as being beneath him. It was beneath me, too, but without the ability to see holograms, I would never come close to reaching my full potential.

  I eagerly waited for the side-effects from my medication to go away. I realized that I had no idea how many panels were on Paradido. The ones on the bridge were obvious, as was the l
arge entertainment panel in the rec room, but what were the others?

  On Spaceship Titanium, there was an entire room full of panels. My mom used to take me there and show me places she had been fond of when she was younger. There was a field of tall grass with a red structure in the distance and endless blue skies. Another was a forest of dense trees with thousands of bright green leaves shading a small clearing next to a waterfall. But they were still only holograms. I never knew where in the universe these places were.

  Throughout the day, I constantly checked the few panels I knew of. When putting away my cleaning supplies, I glanced at the small dark rectangle on the front of the air-circulation panel which would display the current settings. I stared at it for a few minutes, looking for any sort of glimmer of something being there. There wasn’t even the faintest shadow of an outline. My thoughts had already become crystal clear, but why wasn’t my vision improving?

  I wished there was some way to look up information on Xanestam without it letting Doc know. How long before the drug would all leave my system and finally stop manipulating my senses?

  While pretending everything was my drugged-up normal, I put together a plan. Adam had mentioned that Paradido had actually hit the asteroid. From my memory of where the space rock had started and the maneuvers the ship did to try and avoid it, I had a good guess of where it had made contact with the hull.

  With this information, I drew out a diagram of the spaceship and marked what was near the point of contact. It was a little in front of the mechanical room, so the engine wouldn’t have been affected. Either the navigation computer was at the spot of impact, or in a position where the aftershock of the impact had damaged it. When I did some poking around, I found the interior side of the dent the asteroid left just outside of a storage closet. The wall inside were barely bent, so the asteroid must not have hit Paradido very hard.

  Even if I couldn’t prove to Greene that the navigation systems were off, I could still remedy the situation. I drew even more detailed star charts to plot the exact course to Zeta. I knew enough about flying a ship to correct Paradido’s course. This solution relied heavily on my ability to see the controls and was further complicated by my ban from the bridge.

  This was our best shot. I looked over my star chart again one last time before folding it up and tucking it under the bedding on my cot. I hadn’t spent much of my sleep shift actually sleeping and now it was time to get up and ready.

  I went through my normal routine, including chatting with Adam in the mess hall, before going to the mechanical room to get my cleaning stuff. Cory was already in there examining the engine, so I couldn’t spend the usual few minutes looking at the air control panel.

  “Hello, Jake.”

  “Hey, Officer Cory. Just getting my mop.”

  Cory turned from the engine and watched me as I rummaged through the closet. “You know, some spaceships are self-cleaning. They don’t require an extra person to keep them tidy.”

  “Yes, I am aware of that.”

  “Why did you want to be a janitor on a delivery ship? Surely there are more exciting things to clean.”

  I grabbed the cleaning solution and a rag and let the closet door glide shut. “I’m sure there are.” I turned and started to walk away.

  “I went to flight academy too.” I stopped and turned back. Only Doc, Greene, and Ford were aware of my history at the academy. I never knew Cory had gone to one as well. “Just because I learned how to navigate a spaceship doesn’t mean I should.”

  I nodded briefly before leaving the engine room. If Cory had actually gone to flight academy, he would have graduated just before joining the Paradido Crew two years previous. That was assuming he had finished. Working with crew members younger than me wasn’t so bad. Even having supervisors who were younger was annoying, but manageable. But when an egomaniac several years my junior acted like he was superior to me, I had a hard time not lashing out.

  I clenched my teeth as I made my way down the hall. The rec room needed cleaning first. My mind was reeling as I scrubbed stains from the walls, ceiling, and floor. There was no way Cory had also gone to Theta Academy. He never would have gotten accepted there. More likely, he went to some third-rate school and spent all of his money on a warp ticket to Trappist. Why he would come to Trappist eluded me. If I could go back, I would have never chosen to come to this system.

  I was so in my head, I almost missed it. Only when I approached the entertainment panel did it become recognizable. I saw the faintest outline of a woman tossing a disk just above the panel. It was the brand logo for this panel’s manufacturer. My heart rate quickened as I reached out to touch it. My hand passed through the arm of the woman before she flickered and disappeared.

  There was no doubt. I had definitely seen it. Still, my vision would need to get a lot better, and fast, if I was going to successfully execute my plan.

  “Jake, are you all right?” I turned to see Doc at the doorway to the rec room watching me.

  I glanced at the now blank panel before answering. “Yes. I’m fine. There’s a spot on this panel.”

  “You accidentally turned it on again.”

  I couldn’t see or hear whatever activity the panel was currently broadcasting. “Sorry. I didn’t realize it was on. Could you make sure it’s off when I’m done?”

  Doc came into the room and made his way next to me. “Let’s turn it off now.” He held his hand up and pressed his palm toward the screen. “One of the mates must have left it on their gentleman’s show. I have a hard time working while listening to one of those in the background, don’t you?”

  “I’ve never heard one,” I admitted honestly.

  “You’re not missing much.”

  •••

  After eating my last meal before my sleep shift, I lounged in the rec room with Van. I had a ball which I repeatedly threw at the wall then caught as it bounced back. At that moment, I was trying to get it to hit two walls and the ceiling before I caught it.

  “You want to play Dungeon Cards?” Van asked.

  “Nah, I’m good.”

  Van got up from the sofa and turned on the entertainment panel. “Great. There’s a playoff game going on right now. Crabs versus Penguins.”

  I nodded before throwing my ball again. I couldn’t care less about Trappist sports. Hockey had always been my game, but the only planet in this system with reliable ice was Chi, and it was way too cold there to hold any sporting events. It would have been completely uninhabited if it weren’t for the group of scientists there doing some form of research.

  Van lounged on the sofa next to me. I glanced at the entertainment panel. It was completely dark. I hoped that the shadow I had seen earlier wasn’t just a fluke.

  Ford appeared in the doorway. “Mate Metcalf, I need you to come with me.”

  I looked at Van, who shrugged his shoulders, before I got up and propelled myself to the door. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “You’ll find out in just a minute.” Ford led me to the front of the ship and stopped in front of the door to the bridge. “Go ahead.”

  I was excited to be permitted back on the bridge, but apprehensive at the same time. Part of me wanted to go straight to the observation deck and look at the stars. Cory and Doc were both on the bridge waiting for me. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it couldn’t be good.

  “Take a seat,” Doc said, gesturing to the pilot’s chair. It felt like a trap. I looked back at Ford, and he nodded. I went over to the chair and carefully pulled myself into the seat. Doc sat down in the commander’s chair while Ford positioned himself to my right and Cory to my left.

  “Go ahead and show him,” Ford said in a gentle voice.

  Doc pulled something out of his pocket. My heart dropped to the bottom of my gut. I immediately recognized the crumpled papers. “Cory found these while doing a check of the cabins.”

  I looked at Cory, who lifted a single eyebrow. He looked so smug.

  “Can you tell me w
hat they are?” Doc asked. He held the pages out to me, but I didn’t dare touch them.

  “They’re just doodles.”

  Cory let out a single dry laugh.

  “These pages look like they’ve been carefully drawn with much more detail than simple doodles,” Doc said. He carefully unfolded one, my diagram of Paradido, and held it so I could look at my own drawing. “Tell me about this one.”

  “It’s a ship,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

  “It’s Paradido,” Ford said.

  “Yes,” I said tentatively. I already felt like I had done something wrong, even though I had no idea why everyone was being so serious. “Does it matter?”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Doc said, while tucking the first page back in his pocket and then unfolding the other one. “And here we have another star map.”

  “You’re pretty stuck on those,” Cory said.

  “It’s no secret that I enjoy looking at the stars.”

  “It’s a very nice map,” Doc said. “What interests me is your depiction of our planetary system.” I hadn’t drawn our system in great detail: just Trappist and its seven planets. I leaned forward to see what Doc was talking about. I suspected Cory had added something in hopes of getting me removed from the crew.

  This time I did take the paper when Doc offered it. I scanned it quickly. In the middle was our star surrounded by elliptical orbits holding little dots denoting the planets. Each planet was labeled by name in my handwriting.

  “What did you draw there?” Doc asked.

  “It’s a diagram of the current state of the Trappist system,” I said. I should have denied drawing it, but I didn’t think anyone else in the crew could mimic my handwriting that well.

  “What’s the closest planet to Trappist?”

  “Beta.”

  “And the second?”

  I knew the answer was Gamma, but there was something drawn orbiting Trappist between Beta and Gamma. It didn’t have a label, but it was clearly there. “Gamma.”