by Unknown
The Inn Between
Michael Anderson
He would sit for long periods and visualize distant memories in his mind’s eye. The details were clear as a mountain lake in summertime. Sometimes he tried to organize his recollections, making a conscious effort to begin with the earliest ones and working forward to the most recent. He did this mainly to pass the time.
Time had no meaning here.
He did not eat or drink. There was neither food nor water in this place, anyway.
It was important to ignore the unrealities of the situation and remain sane.
My memories tell me I am real. I must be alive. If I were dead, there would be more to this experience-or nothing at all.
After a time he got to his feet and stretched until his bones cracked. I never noticed that before. My body makes sounds. I can hear them. It is another piece of evidence saying I exist, that I must still be alive somehow.
For lack of a better name, he called the place Limbo. It was a nothingness stretching to forever in all directions like a vast billiard table running to an invisible horizon. The physical surface was impossibly smooth, without visible depth and difficult to identify. It felt like cold plastic. The sky was a dull grey and cast a diffused light. It was neither day nor night, only now, and the now never changed.
He had no clear memory of his arrival. He had simply awakened to find himself lying on the cold surface and staring at a formless sky of grey shadows and soft light.
Fear and panic had flooded his mind in a rush. He had run, shouted and screamed for help until he could run no more. He had pounded his fist upon the smooth surface in an effort to discover the limits of his prison. He had cried and pleaded for God to help him.
If God had heard his pleadings, He did not answer.
He tried little experiments to test his senses. He pinched his own arm. It hurt. He scratched himself on the leg with a sharp fingernail. Blood oozed from the scratch. However, when he looked back at his leg a moment later, the scratch was gone.
When he closed his eyes and sought sleep, he did not find real slumber. In his pseudo-dreams, he would sometimes hear a voice and awaken with a pounding heart to search for the source of the voice, to no avail.
He wore not a stitch of clothing as well.
Time for my morning constitutional to nowhere.
He walked toward the horizon for the hundredth time since he had come to the place. After a few steps, he stopped cold. An idea popped into his mind. He remembered something from the old fairy tale Hansel and Gretel. Hansel had left a trail of white pebbles to help find the way home.
I have no pebbles, he thought wryly. Hair. I can leave my own hair to mark the trail. He wound his fingers around a clump of hair and jerked it free. He stared at the bit of hair for a few moments.
I’ll need more than this. He continued yanking out small strands of hair until he had a good-sized handful, and then started to walk toward the horizon.
Every twenty meters he stopped and carefully lay a bit of hair on the ground. After some time, he looked back to see the previous piece he had laid down.
It was gone.
He touched his head and realized his missing hair had been restored. He had been quite careful to walk in a straight line. He backtracked for a while, but found no trace of his Hansel-trail.
I haven’t gone far. I should have seen something, at least a few pieces.
Not everything here is real.
“What the hell is this?” He drove his fists upward in righteous anger and indignation. “I was a good man! I don’t deserve this!”
The exertion from shouting left him panting for breath.
Depression washed over him like an ocean wave hitting the beach. His shoulders shook as he sobbed quietly. He caught a few of his own tears in his hand and tasted them. They were salty and warm.
He awoke after another sleep-not-sleep and rubbed his eyes. I think I know what is happening,. In his latest dream, he had remembered something important.
I was in an accident. Yes. I remember it now.
My name is Mitchell Gavin. I live in Mansfield, Ohio. I was working on a demolition project with a labor crew, and the wall collapsed. Yes. I remember someone shouting at me and I remember seeing the wall falling on top of me. I don’t remember being struck, though.
So I’m either dead...or in a coma.
Mitchell Gavin smiled for the first time and sighed in relief. Yes, that’s it. I’m not crazy, and this isn’t some kind of cosmic joke. I’m either dead or in a hospital somewhere. What other explanation is there?
He racked his brain for a solution to the problem. If I am in a coma, is there a way out?
I know I cannot walk out of here. I have to think my way out.
He decided to walk again, but only to pass the time. He started toward the horizon at a relaxed pace.
I wish I had some clothes. At least I could put my hands in my pockets while I walk.
No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than clothes magically appeared on his body. He found himself wearing his old work boots, pants, shirt, even his hardhat.
I thought about it and it happened. I wished for it and it came true.
“I want to go home! I want to wake up now!” He shouted at the sky.
Nothing happened.
He walked for a very long time. The horizon drew no closer. The surface was cold, smooth, and endless. Gavin placed his hands on his temples and tried to imagine his bed at home.
The bed appeared, then the bedroom. He ran to the window and watched in awe as his entire neighborhood began forming out of nothing and spreading across the landscape. It undulated in brilliant colors and snapped into reality. The sun, sky, and clouds appeared.
He saw a young woman with brunette hair pushing a baby carriage down the sidewalk outside his house. He dashed to the front door and threw it open. I must not scare her, he thought, slowing a bit. Crossing the well-trimmed lawn, he called out to her in a polite voice, “Ma’am? May I speak to you for a moment?”
The young lady turned and smiled. “Yes, sir?”
“Do you know where we are? What is this place?”
“You must be new here,” she replied. “You’re in Mansfield, of course.” She turned away and pushed the carriage up the sidewalk.
Gavin ran into the street and toward the center of town.
He awoke to find himself lying flat on the smooth surface again, without clothes, house, or a woman with a baby carriage.
Okay, it was all my imagination. How about giving me my clothes back?
The clothes returned to his body.
He projected a more powerful thought to see the results.
I want to live in my old house with all the comforts of home.
His house came into focus. He was standing at the door. He reached for the knob and entered.
I don’t know what is going on, but this is better than the other place.
I’m home.
He would rise late in the morning and cook a leisurely breakfast. He always followed this with a hot shower and a walk around the block. He was completely alone. Cars were parked in front of silent houses on quiet streets. He would spend the remainder of the day watching television. The shows were always reruns, and strangely, he could never find a single channel broadcasting the local news.
Maybe I’ve been kidnapped by aliens and this is an experiment. This thought brought a rare smile to his face.
He made marks on the bedroom wall to record the passing of days, since the sun now rose and set for him. When he awoke in the morning the mark from the previous day was always gone. After a few attempts, he gave up the project.
For a while, he tried different experiments to stretch the limits of what was possible. He wished for a gun and it appeared. When he fired the pistol into the wall, it made a loud noise and left a hole in the wall. When he tried to fire the gun into his leg, it always misfired.
The bullet hole in the wall was gone in the morning.
> He tried imagining anything and everything, no matter how ridiculous. He wished for a television that would show him the ‘outside world.’ A television appeared with a picture of the Earth as seen from space. He tried changing the channel and the television vanished.
He imagined he was an astronaut going to Mars and suddenly found himself aboard a spacecraft on its way to the Red Planet. He realized the spacecraft was all wrong, something he had once seen in an old film. He closed his eyes and wished himself home at once.
These things are created from my memories, not from reality itself.
He went on different adventures for a long time, searching out possible answers to his imprisonment.
He climbed Mount Everest without oxygen in an hour.
He walked the deepest trenches of the Pacific Ocean and marveled at the strange life living under such enormous pressures.
He prayed to God to help him understand.
The answers he sought did not come.
He finally abandoned his imaginary travels and settled down at home.
He cooked gourmet meals and watched reruns on television while he ate.
He wished for a bar stocked with his favorite brands of alcohol and stayed drunk for a week.
He took long baths. Each day was the same as the last.
Something had changed.
Mitchell Gavin awoke in his bed from sleep-not-sleep and stared at the ceiling.
He felt different somehow.
He started to shiver and drew the blankets around his body. They had no effect on the chill that was now permeating his bones to their very core.
A sudden sharp pain caught him by surprise. It was as if someone had plunged a knife deep into his back. He gasped and tried to rise from the bed. I wish for something to ease the pain! Now!
Instead of instant relief, an invisible force pushed him back down onto the bed. The room swirled in strange colors and the pain grew more intense. He lost consciousness.
“Doctor, I think the patient is coming out of the anesthesia,” said the attending nurse.
Dr. Bowers peered into Mitchell Gavin’s face. He saw the patient’s eyelids fluttering, the head turning slowly from side to side. “Perhaps you’re right,” the doctor said. “Give him another ten cc’s, please.”
The nurse reached behind her for the syringe and began drawing a clear liquid into it from a vial. “Yes, doctor. I’ll have it in a moment.”
Mitchell Gavin opened his eyes. He was lying on his back, the central character in a bright white operating theatre. He saw a young woman holding a syringe and feeling his arm for a vein. He struggled to speak.
“Wha...what...please...”
He felt a slight sting as the needle went smoothly into his arm. He suddenly felt very tired and closed his eyes.
“Did you hear that, doctor? I think he tried to say something.”
“Impossible. The man has been brain-dead for years. Let’s close him up and get him back down to cryogenics. Mrs. Johnson is waiting on her kidney.”
“I’m almost sure he spoke.”
“Nurse?”
“Yes, doctor?”
“Sometimes they babble a word or two when we wake them up. It doesn’t mean a thing. I would rather the patient not die on my operating table while you engage in speculation. Do as I ask, please.”
The embarrassed nurse quickly retrieved the needle and stitching from a nearby tray and handed them to the surgeon. “Here you are, doctor.”
“Thank you.” He made a mental note to have her replaced as soon as he was finished.
The Prettiest Star
Jaine Fenn
Once, the view from here was amazing. There’s not much to see now, but I still come here every day. It’s the only place that’s anything like home.
My Uncle Jack was an amateur astronomer, and when I was nine, he showed me a picture of the Horsehead nebula. I gawked at the perfect, recognizable outline – yep, it looked like a horse’s head all right - and asked: Is that thing really out there in space?
It sure is, he said. Then he asked how big I thought Earth would be if it was in that picture. I made a few guesses (‘big as a dime?’ ‘big as my fingernail?’) while he shook his head and smiled. Finally he picked up one of my aunt’s pins and stabbed the picture. He told me to imagine that the pin-prick was the size of the room, and then he pricked again. The second pin-prick, that tiny spot within a tiny spot, was about the size of Earth, he said. I was smart enough to grasp what he meant at once; space was bigger than I could easily imagine.
From that moment space was the place for me.
Of course I know that we only made it to the Moon last century because of all that Cold War ‘my rocket’s bigger than yours’ macho political crap. But that didn’t stop me hoping.
I’m an inveterate optimist, you see. Certainly not the kind of woman who’d usually consider suicide.
Oh. That was the first sign. I lifted my hand to scratch my nose, and felt a delay before my body responded. Loss of physical co-ordination: check. Let’s see, next I can expect a tingling in the extremities and, if I’m really lucky, mild euphoria. All I have to do is wait.
Anoxia is such a lazy way to die.
I’ve looked into other options. If I stick it out another two years then I’ll run out of the unattractive mush that passes for food up here; of course, that assumes the recycler units don’t break down. I’m just cutting my losses before the Station, or my sanity, become irrevocably screwed.
I did consider going EVA without a space suit. There’s a dozen fail-safes built into the airlock, but nothing except common sense to make sure you are actually wearing a suit before you open the outer doors. If I were a man, perhaps I’d have done it that way. It’s more of a grand gesture than asphyxiating whilst recording your last diary entry.
Instead, I’ve decided to go for the easy option, fading away rather than going out in a blaze of glory.
When I first came up to the ISS, I spent every spare moment floating next to this window and staring down at Earth. I loved watching storms form in the oceans; the swirls of cloud looked like spray-cream, and it sent a shiver down my spine to think that these delicate patterns blossoming over the deep blue of inner space were actually huge natural phenomena. And the land appeared in every color and texture: mountain, desert, forest, and plain.
When we went into darkness, clusters and strings of light sprung up, stretching across the globe and marking man’s territory. They were my stars, in a night that arrived every three quarters of an hour.
After I’d been here for a couple of months I stopped looking at the real stars, but I never tired of this view of Earth.
The rest of the crew would rib me about it: ‘Where’s Marianne?’ ‘Oh, she’s playing ‘I can see your house from here’, again’.
But I wasn’t homesick, that wasn’t it. I just loved watching my home planet from a distance. It was never that special when I lived on it, but from up here it’s glorious. Seen from space, Earth has no borders, no wars, and no politics.
It’s perfect.
One of the many ironies about the timing of the apocalypse was that we were finally getting somewhere with China. When the trajectory of the Fenris comet was confirmed, we had a couple of Chinese diplomats aboard, taking in the cramped delights of the West’s aging ‘Platform to the Stars’. The media were hailing it as the first step on the road to reconciliation.
Until something rather more important grabbed everyone’s attention, that is.
We evacuated at once. The lifeboats were designed for normal crew compliment plus one, so someone had to stay. We didn’t draw straws: I volunteered. There was nothing on Earth for me. I had no lover, no children and my parents and brother all died in the pandemic.
I wanted to watch the end from up here, cosmic voyeur that I am.
And the verdict, from my castle in the sky? Well, I’ve got to say, we didn’t do very well. Space could have been our future, and instead it was the end of us.
All that ‘humanity always wins through in the end’ stuff was pathetic self-delusion. We’re nothing special. There are plenty of things in the universe that human perseverance, independence and tenacity just can’t beat.
A rock the size of New Jersey, for instance.
It’s so quiet without the air scrubbers. That’s space for you. Quiet. Pristine. Uncaring.
Except ... I think I’m getting a mild aural hallucination. Music. A tune from before I was born. Can’t remember the name. Something about a star.
Ah, tingling in the extremities. Right on cue. Actually it’s more of a burning. Not hot though, more like mild frostbite. I should burn, really. That’s the way most of humanity went, after all.
Whenever I think about the final moments I have this stupid image of half-naked fishermen on an azure ocean, looking up from their homespun nets, mouths dropping open in horrified surprise. Or wild central Asian nomads reining their horses in from a mad gallop over the steppes, trying to control their tossing mounts and pointing to the sky.
That's crap of course. Everyone knew what was coming. Okay, maybe there was still some lost tribe in Brazil or Borneo who had no idea, but I doubt it. Every country in the world has internet access. Had internet access.
I didn’t see the main impact. The ISS was over the Atlantic, and most of Comet Fenris came down in the Pacific. I saw the aftermath though. Black clouds boiling out on a wave of silver lightning. It wasn’t as colorful as I had expected. I thought we’d get lovely lethal shades of gold and red and orange, and instead we just got gray and black and silver.
I felt cheated; the End of the World was always in full color in those old millennial disaster movies. I didn’t let myself feel anything else, at the time. I didn’t think about what was happening to the few people who mattered to me. I didn’t think about the wealth of history and culture evaporating away in the heat and screaming winds. I didn’t think about the death of hope, the pointlessness of everything humanity had tried to achieve.