by Pat Hauldren
As he walked down the empty hallway he checked the bathroom. Still empty with the curtain in the tub. A quick scan of the living room showed it still empty as well. First, he needed a beer to speed his healing up. He grabbed one out the fridge and poured some out. Reaching into the cabinet opposite the fridge, he grabbed a bottle of brandy. He drew two shots from the bottle and put them in the beer. Shaking the bottle for a second, he downed it in one chug.
Samuel rolled his neck. The liquor seeping into his veins pumped him up. Muscle and new tissue grew to cover the hole he had in his neck. This is one fight you are going to wish you hadn’t started whoever you are. He slammed the bottle against one of his steel frying pans shattering the bottle. Shards of glass flew around the kitchen landing everywhere. Samuel filled the sink with water and ducked his face in it. The cold water refreshed his mind as he ducked his head in it over and over.
Samuel turned on the light over the stove and bent under the cabinet near the sink to get a towel and dry his face. He heard water splash before a hand grabbed the back of his head and slammed it into the side of the cabinet. Another hand grabbed the back of Samuel’s head and pushed him forward hard into the pipes under the sink. His ears started ringing as he wrestled with the hands. They slipped away from him many times and made fighting back hard. After a few minutes of wrestling with no one gaining an advantage the hands left him.
Samuel scrambled from under the sink quickly back to the stove. Water on the floor showed him his face and he saw the fear. If I heal from anything, maybe there are ghosts. Where’d I put my keys? I need help. The guys at the station will say I’m crazy but screw them. I know what I’m seeing, what I’m not seeing.
Samuel ran to his bookshelf and grabbed his keys from there. He left the apartment, not bothering to lock the door, and ran down the flights of stairs to his car. Not until he sat down behind the steering wheel did he realize how fast his heart raced. He took the moment of safety to take deep, steadying breaths. Tension in his shoulders relaxed as his grip on the wheel eased up. He felt safe now.
He put the key in the ignition and started the car. He threw the car in reverse, then drive, to leave the apartment complex as quickly as possible. Rain fell as he pulled out the gate and headed to the police station. Get to the station, get laughed at, and then get evaluated, meds must not be working. I need another drink.
The rain fell faster while he drove. As Samuel sped through turns his tires screeched in protest. No one here to pull me over, wrong day for this. Samuel looked at both oncoming lanes, saw the streets clear, and made a left to get to the on ramp. The red light cameras flashed as he ran through the light. He didn’t care, he would explain it once he got there.
The lane turned into an exit immediately after getting on the highway. Samuel swerved into the left lane cutting off a driver. He checked the rearview to make sure the other driver was OK and saw a man sitting in his back seat. He nearly lost control of his car as he twisted quickly and pulled his gun to point at the stranger. Nobody sat behind him. I’m losing it. I’m even seeing things in my car.
He put the gun in the seat and checked the mirror again. He saw two hands pressed against the left window glass suddenly. His eyes grew wide as the hands moved through the glass and grabbed the steering wheel. The hands jerked the wheel to the left. Caught off guard, Samuel tried to free the wheel and maintain control of the vehicle. They fought, moving from one side of the highway to the other. Samuel barley able to keep the car from hitting any of the few drivers remaining on the road.
They approached a sharp curve in the road. Samuel struggled to get the hands to let go of the wheel. He grabbed his gun and took aim at one hand. He squeezed the trigger. The hand he pointed at moved just in time to let the bullet go through the instrument panel taking out the speedometer and fuel gauge. Samuel cursed and dropped the gun to grab the wheel as the two hands began to overpower his one. Smoke coming from dash caused his eyes water and made it hard to see the road ahead.
They got to the curve and the hands pushed the steering wheel hard to the right. He countered using all his might to turn the wheel back to the left. The hands quickly switched direction of force to the left and the car sped towards the guard rail. It took Samuel a second to realize he had been duped. His car crashed through the rail and into the open air below.
The hands let go and waved goodbye to him as they pulled back into the window. Samuel had the briefest thought that the wave looked like a sad goodbye before the car crashed into the ground. Blackness took him instantly from the force of his head slamming into his dash board crushing his skull.
The car creaked in the wind of the night as the engine cooled and the frame rocked. The bright moonlight caused a reflection on the river that passed under the bridge. A body rose from the surface of the water and stood still. Sirens blared in the distance.
The man flipped his white newsboy cap around and walked to Samuel’s car. In his hand, he held the bottle of brandy Samuel pulled the shots from. He tossed the open bottle into the passenger side of the car. He pulled out a box of matches and struck one in the still night. The man sighed deeply and tossed the match into the car watching the flames rise to engulf the vehicle.
The first car appeared at the scene of the accident before he stood on the surface of the river. People shouted to him asking what happened and he ignored them, focused on the car. He tipped his hat to the car engulfed in flames before sinking into the surface of the river again.
Samuel’s body burned before he could heal enough to feel it.
***
Tom Rodgers is a writer, film producer and engineer from Texas. As you'll discover from this story, he has raced ten times in the Ironman World Championships in Hawaii and covered endurance events as a sports journalist all over the world. Before that, he was Lead Biomedical and Software Engineer for the NASA Human Research Facility aboard the International Space Station. Find out more about Tom: @IronTriNews, IronTriNews.com, & YouTube/IronTriNews
INTERPLANETARY TRIATHLON
by Tom Rodgers
Phase One: The Europa Cave Swim
Yes, the water is cold, damn cold, but it's great to finally get this friggin' race started. I've been prodded, poked, probed, interviewed, interrogated, injected, subjected and otherwise paid attention to by way too many people. For me, the stress of travel, space-time lag, weird food, and nervous athletes are worse than the race itself. The only good thing I did before the race is evidenced by the slight bulge I feel near the waist of my nanoskin wetsuit. I reach down to feel a tiny circular object with my gloved hand, and I smile a little smile.
At the Europa Station press conference I said, "I could do this event every month if only I lived nearby," and that got a good laugh from the reporters. Actually, I live over 628 million kilometers from the starting line, with a house near the base of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii.
To my left floats Thomas Hellriegel of Team Deutsche-Telekom and on my right is Greg Welch of Team Australia-Billiton. The German is definitely serious looking, the Aussie is smilin' and jivin', and I would be too if I'd already gotten my first gold medal in the short-course event.
No matter what he does today, "Welchy" is set for life with millions in endorsements. But he won't tender any mercy here today. He has the chance to score the first-ever double gold medal, something no one has ever done in triathlon, not even in the old earth-bound games. No one ever came into our sport with more natural talent than he.
Hellriegel is not excited yet because the swim is not his event. His only goal is to get through the not-quite-frozen waters without burning too many calories or losing too many minutes. Then he'll explode past people on the faring ship during the second phase. He trains with pure faring racers because so few triathletes can keep up with him, earning him the nickname "Hell-drive" Hellriegel. The faring ship is my best event also, except I think I can outrun the Hun once we get to Mars.
There are a couple of guys floating ahead of us who can rea
lly swim, including one gold medal winner in the 1500 meters from the 2088 Olympics who converted to triathlon in 2094. None of us can stay with him in the water, but then again, there's no way he can stay ahead of us once we exit the water and leave Europa.
We do have women in this race. They start with us inside Europa on the same day and hear the same damn old cannon go off at the start, unlike the Tour de France or the standalone faring events, where men and women have remained segregated for 150 years.
Don't ask me why, but major races still begin with a nanoforged replica of some old gunpowder cannon, even though the same sound wave can now come from a thumbnail music player. Go figure.
Wendy "Wingnut" Ingraham may well beat me on the swim today, and in my humble opinion she is one of the most beautiful triathletes on the circuit--and also one of the nicest. She's finished in the top five overall of the women's division.
[RACE TIME 00:00:01]
BOOM! And the race is on. They never count down or give you any warning at the start, because people might cheat up a few meters in the water. Staring at Wendy distracted me, so I'm caught lagging behind. Dammit--just swim you idiot and forget about it. It's a long day, almost an entire Earth day--a few seconds don't mean a bloody thing.
The nanoskin wetsuit does keep you from freezing, but you couldn't exactly say it keeps you warm. The only thing I can compare it to is swimming in a neoprene wetsuit in 12-degree Centigrade waters near San Francisco. No hypothermia, but never comfortable. Add on the breathing gear we need both above and below the surface of the water, and it affects the swim technique you learned back on Earth.
The good news is Europa has only one-sixth Earth's gravity, so I float higher in the water and glide faster than I would back in the Pacific waters of Hawaii.
Europa looks beautiful from space, a little smaller than Earth's moon, mostly white surface ice with ruddy albedo features--one of the smoothest bodies in the solar system. There are a few crater impacts, but for the most part she is protected by her "lover," the huge gravity well of Jupiter. He also keeps the interior of Europa warm with huge gravitational and magnetic forces. Thrace, the cave lake where the race starts, was found in 2027 by a HydroBot probe from the Europa-Jupiter System Mission (EJSM) sent by NASA/ESA.
No alien creatures were ever found on Europa, though they looked very hard for decades. After all that old-fashioned sci-fi about alien viruses spreading plague or taking over the world, we found out that earthborn diseases are the biggest risk in space. One oldie but goody from Earth, the Swine-Z Flu that took down Beijing back in 2072, returned with a vengeance on Europa station about two weeks ago after I landed. Something about the unique radiation from Jupiter's strong electromagnetic field forced mutations a thousand times faster, creating a flu strain we might not see on Earth for centuries.
The bug took one of the top competitors out of the race entirely, a former champion. Another had recovered enough to make it to the starting line, albeit three kilos lighter from dehydration. Some of us thought he was crazy to race, but then most people think all of us are crazy for doing this sport.
My girlfriend, Sylvia, and I brought our own prepared food with us, which probably helped prevent infection. She is so supportive of my racing and all my other struggles this past year: my divorce, the selection to the interplanetary Olympic triathlon team, the arduous travel and training load. She would follow me to Alpha Centauri to watch me race. And I don't think I'd ever get tired of her curly red hair, matching freckles, and that infectious smile beneath clear blue eyes.
My ex-wife did not look so kindly on my obsession with the sport by the time we got divorced. At first, she thought it was exciting to be the wife of a famous triathlete. She seemed happy when I qualified for the Olympic team by finishing second in the 117th Ford-GravCar Ironman World Championship in Hawaii, but the sheen had worn off because she knew what that meant for the next few years. She loved me so much I thought she would put up with anything, but when the interplanetary events came along, she decided that was just too much.
The irony was that by the time she left me, I was more in love with her than ever before. She said that was because men want things more when they can't have them--maybe she was right.
Some people think top athletes are inherently selfish, and I agree that you must be egotistical during the training and racing itself, perhaps even a little mean. But I try as hard as I can to leave all that behind when I'm not training or racing, to be gentle, kind and loving, to listen more and talk less, to shrink myself down to size, to remain grounded and to give back to the community.
What I do is really no different from someone focused on their career or an academic subject: to rise to the top, it is necessary to become obsessed with it, and sometimes even obsessed by it. There are things in life more important to me than triathlon, but if I want to make it to the top, I just can't spend much time on them--at least not now.
[RACE TIME 00:38:37]
About a third of the way into the lake course, I'm in a good swim-stroke groove. I'm nested in a little drafting pack with Hellriegel from Germany, while Welchy is off the front trying to bridge up to the group ahead of us, using that strong Aussie stroke to glide through the water. For some strange reason, I get this crazy idea that I might surge to join the chase, even though I know I'm not as strong a swimmer. You can go a lot faster when you overstretch your credit limit with the Adrenaline Express card.
Yet you have to pay the bill in lost glycogen, depleted oxygen, and the poisons that accumulate in the bloodstream.
The ruddy ice roof is as solid as rock, or so they say, but sometimes a good size chunk has been known to fall into the nanothread safety net. I don't really worry too much about this, seeing as I live by two active volcanos, Mauna Loa and Kilauea.
I pull up behind Welchy, and we are able to move up to the chase pack with seven of us drafting together. We hit the turnaround point marked by a huge catamaran just like the traditional Hawaii race, which seems a bit ridiculous when you realize we are swimming in a windless underground cave. This ship will never sail, but it will sell a helluva a lot of energy bars with the giant CLYDE logo on its mainsail, for all the holocams and solar vlogosphere to see.
Some folks say ClydeBar is thinking of buying out Canada this year from Manulife Financial, making it the first sports nutrition company to ever own a nation. Nike bought out Singapore a few years ago, to become the first sports apparel nation. In America, we proudly claim we are too big to be owned by any single corporation, though in fact we are wholly owned by an oligarchy of Dow Jones 100 firms.
I've attempted to train my mind not to wander while I'm racing, but in InterPlanetary Triathlon (IPT), you can't expect to stay focused for the whole 20 hours. While I'm musing about solar-system politics, one swimmer slides over from the left and kicks me in the face. He kicks me very hard, and it feels like he's breaking my jaw--probably not intentional.
My breathing mask slides off, letting the icy water pour into the mask. I swallow a gulp of the mineral-rich, frigid fluid down my throat, and it soaks my lower lip. My whole face seems to go numb, so I switch to the breast stroke just to keep from drowning.
You have about 30 seconds to live in this water without a nanoskin suit and mask, and then you will go down, down, down. Maybe they will drag you out of the water in time before you go into hypothermic shock. Maybe if you're dead they can coax you back with nanotech resurrection--but then again, maybe not. Even with modern medicine, when you're dead you usually stay dead.
Me, I don't want to die--not even for thirty seconds--because it would cost me race time. To hell with safety, I want my Olympic gold medal. Nothing matters as long as I keep moving forward.
I roll onto my back and see the ruddy-blue roof of the ice cave, droplets melting down on me like rain. Then I pull the mask back on and get lucky with a re-seal of the gasket, but now I'm staring at a 20-meter gap to Welchy and the rest of the pack. Numb face, but still breathing. The Breath is the Life! Let'
s just hope I can drink and eat when I get out of the water.
I exit the 7,500-meter swim even with Wendy, the first woman out of the water, and about five minutes behind the best male swimmer. That puts me only two minutes behind my real competition, the guys who can race a ship for 555 million kilometers and then still run fast for six hours.
Phase 2: Faring from Europa to Mars
[RACE TIME 01:42:33]
In Transition Area One (T1), low air-pressure in the cave allows me to hear muted cheers from superfans who made the trip all the way to Europa to watch the swim start.
Running to the airlock, I reach behind my neck, pull the release cord, and the nanoskin wetsuit dissolves, having done its job in the icy water. Then I'm into the airlock, sliding through the 50-meter insertion tube to my faring ship, outside the cave on the surface of Europa.
A different "dry" nanosuit forms around my body spun by the ship itself. I peer out the window for my first look at Jupiter since arriving on Europa. Even at a distance of 670,000 kilometers, huge does not describe the orange and red-striped orb. That big, rolling, red eye staring at me as if to say, "Not so fast, puny human--first you must break away from me, the King of the Gods." I can see gaseous storm-lines moving counter to each other, storms as old as human cave drawings.
The ship launches silently without "burning" any fuel, relying instead upon graviton shielding to repel matter. Once it reaches escape velocity of two kilometers per second, I switch on the zero-point energy (ZPE) drive and start getting up to full speed.