To Infinity

by Darren Humphries

  “I understand,” Haynes nodded. “Let’s go in shall we?”

  The barn was filled to the rafters. In fact, it was filled past the rafters, several people having found perches up in the roof beams from which to watch the proceedings. Several more were hanging from precarious positions on window sills and equipment shelves. Every inch of floor space was filled with people. There were no seats. There was not enough space for everyone to fit inside unless they were all standing upright. Many hadn’t stopped off on the way back in from the fields for a shower or a wash and the smell was terrible, but Haynes still hadn’t recovered his full sense of smell and the inhabitants of the planet had long since become inured to the aromas of manure.

  There was much fidgeting and shuffling of tired feet, but all sound ceased as soon as he took to the stage. It was really just some planks laid haphazardly over a load of hay bales, none of which had been selected for being the same height as the others, so it felt far from stable or secure. Haynes was not feeling all that secure himself. For someone so recently escaped from a top security prison (the top security prison), being examined so intently by so many enquiring eyes was inherently disquieting. So was the silence. It wasn’t just quiet, but quiet enough so that he thought he could hear the worm beetles burrowing in the beams, something that they were not renowned for doing loudly.

  “Er...wow,” he managed to say lamely. The silence swallowed up the words as if they had never been. “It’s good, so great, that so many of you have been able come here today,” he tried again, equally unsuccessfully.

  Pull yourself together, he told himself sternly. This was the kind of situation that he ought to be able to handle with ease, the kind of situation that he normally thrived upon, and he was messing it up like a green first timer.

  “The world turns!” he intoned solemnly. This was the kind of thing that normally got a response of some kind, even if it was confusion.

  Nothing.

  There were, he noted, a few feet that had started to shuffle again. Country bumpkins they might be, but an easy crowd they were not.

  Mentally, he rolled up his sleeves. This was going to be a challenge and nothing brought the best out of him like a challenge. His eyes caught sight of Simeon and Keely amongst the press of bodies. Yes, it was a challenge and that is what he needed to present to them.

  “Do you know what?” he asked suddenly, stepping forward to the edge of the stage and hoping that it wasn’t going to tip him into the front row. “There are people who don’t believe in me. There at people who think that the manner of my arrival does not prove who I am.”

  Now, he noticed that he was getting a response. This sounded a lot like a reprimand and reprimands from God’s chosen messenger usually came with thunderbolts and plagues attached. A few murmured understandingly. It seemed like a safe thing to do.

  “Do you believe who I am?” Haynes demanded.

  There were a few more murmurs of general agreement and a couple of shouts.

  “Do you believe?” he demanded again, more forcefully.

  “We do!” was the generally expressed opinion. They were starting to get into it now.

  “I rose up out of the very stuff of life itself!” Haynes exhorted. “It was witnessed, it’s a fact. Could I have done that and not be who I am?”

  “No!” there was real feeling in the shouting now. Everyone was being swept away with the shared experience and shared emotions.

  “Could you have done that ?” Haynes challenged them.

  “No!”

  “Could they have done that ?” he exhorted.

  “No!”

  “And yet they still doubt me. Do you doubt me?”

  The shout this time rattled the supports of the barn sufficiently to dislodge a fine haze of dust, “No!”

  “And yet there are people out there who do doubt me!” Haynes was approaching the trickiest part of the performance.

  There was an inarticulate roar from the crowd as it voiced its feelings about the doubters beyond.

  “And there are people in here who doubt me!”

  The mood of the audience was turning nasty, just as he had planned it to. Unthinking mobs were so much easier to manipulate than thinking individuals. It was time to pull the rug out from underneath them.

  “And do you know what I think about that?” he demanded.

  “No!”

  “Do you know what I think about that?” he demanded again, driving them to just the pitch of fever that he wanted. He expected that Simeon and his like-minded friends would be getting a little bit nervous by this point.

  “NO!” This time Haynes felt the stage beneath his feet resonate.

  “I think it’s great!” he yelled.

  The mob roared its approval and then stopped dead as it realised the words that had been spoken were not those that had been expected.

  “That’s right!” Haynes confirmed, pressing on, using the surprise. “I said that I think it’s great. You see, they think ‘What have I done for you? What have I achieved? What am I compared to you?’ Well, what am I compared to you? You have taken a lifeless lump of a planet and made things grow. You have made a life here, built a civilisation out of nothing. What, then can I do for you that you cannot do for yourselves? They would tell you ‘nothing’’.”

  Time for the bombshell.

  “And they would be right!”

  He had expected an uproar, the vocal equivalent of a hand grenade going off in a tin can, but there was nothing of the sort. There was only the click of a few hundred chins hitting the floor.

  “But there is something that neither they nor you know,” Haynes continued, momentarily discomfited, “and that is that I was not sent here for you.”

  This time, the grenade went off. Haynes waited patiently for the worst of the hubbub to die down before continuing.

  “That’s right, I was not sent here to make life easier for you. That is for you to do and you are doing a fine job on your own. With the pig fertiliser, you will be able to grow more and different crops. Soon you will have more than you need and will be able to sell to others. You have the ethos of hard work and it has brought you much. It will bring you much more. You do not need me.”

  And that much was the absolute truth.

  “There are others, however, who do not have your ethic, who have not heard of the wonder of Manure and it is to them that I must go. That is my purpose and your last challenge. We must find a way to make that happen.”

  With that, he walked off the stage and out of the building. He had not been sure that he would make it all the way out and was still acutely aware of his lack of a quick getaway vehicle. Of course, there was nowhere on Hochnar to get away to.

  Bentham abruptly burst out of the same door that Haynes had used. He looked extremely upset. Simeon and Keely were close behind. It was clear from the level of noise that also escaped from within that a very lively debate was breaking out. It also seemed to be breaking chairs over people’s heads as well.

  “I take it that my little speech didn’t go down too well,” Haynes remarked conversationally.

  “It was not...” Bentham paused to choose his words carefully. It was something that he did often, but when in the presence of the chosen representative of God, any misunderstanding could have consequences of (literally) biblical proportions, “...what they were expecting.”

  “Is the will of God ever what we expect?”

  “If it is, in fact, the will of God.”

  Haynes turned resignedly to Simeon. He was pleased, at least, to see Keely stood behind her brother. “Still don’t believe me, Simeon?”

  Simeon scratched the nape of his neck ruefully, “Well, actually I think I am more disposed to believe in you now than ever before, though that’s not the same thing as actually believing.”

  “There you are Bentham,” Haynes declared, “proof positive. If I can make Simeon almost believe I can do almost anything.”

  “I have always had faith in you,” Be
ntham affirmed, though with less certainty in his voice than was usual.

  “All I have to do now is find a way off this planet...to the unbelievers.”

  “Well, there is always...”

  “No, hush,” Simeon silenced his sister.

  “I don’t think you can start saying something like that and then stop,” Haynes said reasonably. To Keely, he added, “What is there always?”

  She hesitated.

  “It won’t work,” Simeon hissed to his sister in as low an undertone as he could manage, but everyone’s attention was focussed on him, so everyone heard, “it’s just a piece of old junk.”

  “But Uncle Silas...” Keely insisted, or tried to, at least.

  “Only made sense when he was drunk and only then because he couldn’t speak!” Simeon said vehemently. “He was just a crazy old man.”

  “Don’t say that!” Keely yelled. There was clearly some difference within the family regarding the status of good old Uncle Silas, or his sanity at least.

  “I’m warning you!” Simeon told his sister firmly.

  Haynes was well enough acquainted with the behaviour of women to recognise the thinning of the lips, clenching of the jaw and flashing of eyes on Keely’s face and took a precautionary step backwards.

  “Don’t you ever say that to me again,” she growled through teeth so tightly clenched that the words had trouble getting past. For a moment it looked as if Simeon would say it again but then wisdom proved to be the better part of valour and he shrugged resignedly.

  “Keely?” Haynes questioned again. “You have something that you’d like to share with the group?”

  “We know where there is a spaceship,” Keely finally told him, “Sort of.”

  “Well then,” Haynes allowed himself a flush of joyous optimism. Admittedly, it was, by Simeon’s account at least, going to be just a pile of mouldering old spare parts fit only for rust, but then again there might just be enough left to get him up into a spaceliner’s path. An hour ago he had been faced with the prospect of life on a planet-sized dung heap with no hope of a way off and now hope had returned with a vengeance and brought along possibility and opportunity as guests. “Let’s go and see this sort of spaceship.”

  IN SPACE NO-ONE CAN HEAR YOU SING SHOWTUNES

  Space can be a lonely place in ways that no other place can. Some people claim that the loneliest time is the holidays and the loneliest place is in a crowd. Well Dennis Crump had been assigned the ‘dark’ shift aboard a deep-space sugar freighter for three weeks now and was in a position to tell those people that their claims were a pile of jellied eel entrails after a long, hot summer. There was no time in space, but it still managed to drag eternally. All of the normal markers of time - daylight, the dawn chorus, the call of ‘time gentlemen please’ - were all absent here. Other, man-made markers such as daytime TV and late-night love song radio shows could be streamed from the Galactic Net at any hour from any planet. As a result, the Galactic Standard 30 hour (24 hours was just too stupid a number) Space Day was introduced. On freighters, that was split into 3 shifts. One of those shifts was designated ‘Dark’ and represented a figurative night when most of the crew slept.

  That left Crump on the flight deck all alone. There was an engineer on duty in the engine room (although radiation levels meant that the engine room was nowhere near the engines of course) and a lowly med-tech would be whiling away the hours counting bandages in the infirmary, but Crump didn’t get on with either of them, so the communications channels remained resolutely closed.

  All there was, apart from Crump, was a viewscreen full of space. Nothing. An awful lot of nothing.

  Crump watched the nothing and was fairly sure that the nothing watched him back. At times, he thought he might be going mad. On the bad days, he was certain he already had.

  What had saved him was showtunes. By disabling the flight deck recorder, locking the access ports and changing the comms channels to incoming only, he was able to sing along to favourites such as ‘Oh what a beautiful binary sunrise’, ‘Don’t cry for me Betelgeuse 5’ and ‘Singin’ in the Asteroid shower’ as loud as he liked and even try a few dance moves in the cramped space between the consoles. He had just finished a particularly breathless rendition of ‘Tiptoe through Saturn’s Rings’, when the black ship appeared in the void ahead of the freighter.

  The ship was clearly trouble. Everything about it screamed danger. The huge banks of blaster cannons screamed it the loudest, but every line of the hull, every sensor array protrusion, every plate of unidentifiable black metal plating joined the chorus. The design seemed to have been conceived for the primary purpose of instilling fear into its enemies. Its secondary purpose was clearly instilling death into those same enemies. All of which made it quite unfortunate that it was nearly invisible in space. The ship’s blackness, normally so impressive to the eye, was pretty redundant against a basically black backdrop.

  What made it visible, though, was its passage through space. Space, though it is called a vacuum, is far from empty. Even in the starless gulfs between the galaxy’s spiral arms there is dust and gas and, increasingly, speed cameras all of which could annihilate a ship travelling at such high velocities. As it cruised through the void, the black ship’s force shields encountered these bits of matter, reduced them to their constituent atoms and then pulled those apart in completely gratuitous displays of power. None of this was necessary (Crump’s freighter’s force shields merely displaced the offending items), but the energy released by the atomic destruction created a green aura around the vessel. The aura wasn’t naturally green, so the force shields had to be modulated to just the right frequency. Green and black has been scientifically proven to be the colour combination most easily recognised as denoting alien terror.

  “Object detected in flight path,” the computer announced calmly.

  “Can’t the shield handle it?” Crump asked, distracted, wondering if he should try ‘Anything you can do (is better in zero-g)’ and not wanting to be disturbed by basic ship’s operations.

  “Object mass is 67 million metric tonnes,” the computer informed him.

  “What!?” he exclaimed and then ordered before the computer could repeat itself, “Adjust course - avoid.”

  “Two previous course adjustments have failed,” the computer replied before complying with the instruction.

  “On-screen,” Crump ordered, slipping into the command chair. The Captain had specifically made it clear that nobody sat in the command chair except him, even if he wasn’t there. With the doors firmly locked, Crump ignored him.

  The green aura of the alien ship’s passage filled the middle of the small computer screen. It moved slowly back into the centre as he watched.

  “Is it a vessel?” he wondered.

  “Insufficient information exists to make a determination,” the computer told him with its insufferable, inhuman calm. No wonder the best cyberneticists in the Republic continued to work on systems that mimicked personalities despite earlier failures.

  “Captain to the Bridge!” Crump called and then realised that he had the comm system set to incoming only. It would take ten minutes to reset it.

  “Computer, hard left and up,” he instructed.

  Due to the inertia cancelling technology, there was no evidence of the change in attitude of the ship apart from the green aura on the screen sliding into one corner before drifting back into the centre. It was noticeably larger.

  “It’s matching our course,” Crump said. Stating the obvious to an empty room is one of the recorded side effects of all too many ‘dark’ shifts alone.

  “Silhouette now identified,” the computer remarked.

  “Well, what is it?” Crump demanded testily. In moments of crisis, it had been noted that the unflappability of the standard computer interface could contribute to rather than dilute a crew’s stress response. Attempts had been made to synthesise human behaviour patterns, but had all proved disastrously flawed.

  “T
he silhouette is of Halreptor origin,” the computer revealed with just the right amount of calmness to cause maximum annoyance.

  “Halreptor!” Crump considered his options carefully and decided that the best thing to do was to panic, so he started straight away. “Computer, open the escape pod and hit the red alert.”

  As the siren started to wail throughout the freighter, Crump dived through a port that had just opened in the hull and fell into the escape pod, hammering the large, red emergency eject button. The port iris swirled shut behind him and the explosive bolts fired. As the pod was thrown clear of the hull, small engines fired and pushed it further away.

  Escape pods on spaceships are, by definition, a waste of space. If ejected in deep space. The air supply will run out long before help can possibly arrive. If you are lucky enough to be near a planet then the pod will burn up on re-entry into the atmosphere. There is not enough shielding to save the occupant from radiation and they are usually only supplied because the space regs say they must be as a psychological measure.

  Dennis Crump wasn’t aware of any of this, having missed that day’s lectures at the academy in order to take part on an unofficial field trip to a club called Legs Eleven. Unfortunately, the name had proved to be literal and all the dancers had possessed 11 legs. Thus he felt a sense of security that was false in every single way as he peered through the tiny view port that escape pods are required to have even though the occupant can do nothing about anything that they might see through it.

  In the darkness beyond, the freighter was lit up like a Christmas tree that had been set on fire. This was because lasers from the Halreptor ship had sliced into it and it was on fire, the flames fed by ruptured oxygen lines. Huge blocks of plas-wrapped cargo were floating free and Crump realised belatedly that they were floating directly towards his position and moving much faster than the pod due to the explosive decompression of the cargo bay. He realised that there was a good chance that he was about to be crushed by a 100 tonne sugar cube.