by Darrel Bird
liked her, but she had been raped by her uncle. He had tried to get her to loosen up to him for the longest, but he gave up; realizing that she had been ruined by the sordid ordeal. Maybe if I had tried a little longer…stuck it out…she would have eventually come around. His mind moved on; I wonder if I could do an EVA; even for a short while.
He walked through the three airlock doors, only turning the lock on one of them, the door to the cockpit of the ship. He entered the last airlock door, walked to the suit closet, and began to examine the gray metallic material. He struggled into the suit; the sewn in air tanks making it difficult, then put the helmet over his head, and twisted it into the grooves of the neck of the suit. As soon as he heard the click of the lock, air began to come into the helmet. He pushed the neck lock again, and twisted the helmet back out of the groove, then stripped off the suit. He found some long underwear that was made of a silk like substance at the bottom of the suit lockers.
Next time, he would wear the underwear that would be warm, and help to fit better inside the suit. He would get a few hours sleep before trying an EVA.
He lay down in his bed, and laid there with his hands laced behind his head. He suddenly realized that he hadn’t tried any of the other beds. How soon we humans form habits.
He slept about six hours, and then drew a cup of the thick soup out of the spigot; I wonder if I’m eating my own crap, or worse, their crap? The thought of it bothered him a little, and he wondered what had made those men sick? It could have been our air, or any number of a thousand things, no use worrying about it now. He drained the cup of the last of the soup, and walked back through the three airlock doors to the round door in the back of the ship that he supposed was for EVA. Another problem he thought of was the speed the ship was going. Would it kill him to step out of the ship at next to light speed, or would he become part of the bubble? Only one way to find the answer to that.
He got into the long underwear, then worked his way into the suit, twisted the helmet on, and felt the air pressurize the suit. He then hooked a tether onto a ring beside the door. He was ready to go. He bushed the green button at the side of the round door, and saw it go red. He could distinctly hear a wheeze as the air escaped, and he knew he was in space, even inside the ship.
He clambered through the door, feeding the tether, and then he was outside the ship. He looked up at the bulbous tail of the ship as it slowly turned on the tether. The tether was on a swivel, and it left him right-side up as the ship turned.
He fired one of the six small air tubes, and began turning away from the ship. He saw the absolutely astronomical distances of the real space. His mind could not take it in, and he felt his mind slipping away into madness, and he screamed inside the helmet. “Oh God, Oh God!” He fumbled with the air, and was finally able to hit the right nozzle, and began to turn back toward the ship. He yanked on the tether, and began pulling himself back through the door. When he got through the door, he jammed his fist at the red button, and the door slowly closed on eternity.
He lay on the floor shaking, trying his best to grab hold of sanity again, and he lay there panting, his breath fogging the lens of the helmet. He eventually twisted it off, and drew a long breathe of free air. He worked his way out of the suit, and hung it back inside the closet. He looked at his hands, and they were still shaking badly.
“I want to go home; I don’t belong out here… no man does.” He walked back to the control center locking the air lock doors as he went, minimizing the chance that an air leak in a near vacuum would suck the life out of him. A life he had found that he very much wanted to live.
“Charles Darwin’s ass! I’ll bet Darwin never looked into the face of God.” He mumbled to himself as he unsteadily made his way back to the console seat.
He sat down in the seat, and thought about the problem. I can’t just slow this thing, and stop it, then turn around and go back the way I came. If I did that, the earth wouldn’t be where I left it.
He began pecking at keys until a map of his history of travel appeared on the screen, then he moved the cross hairs to his origin, and hit the enter button. Now a line appeared on the screen in a great sweeping curve, and he hit the enter button again. He hoped that would take him back to earth, but he would have to spend the next several weeks in uncertainty. He thought back to Einstein’s equations. Obviously, Einstein had been partially wrong because these people, whoever they were, were able to exceed the speed of light by more than twice. The math behind it was over his head though, but what he wondered at this time was the question of what was happening with time. Had time actually slowed for him? If so, IBM, and his job may not be there. What would one drop in time be going twice the speed of light for weeks?
For the next several weeks, the ship made its way around the imaginary line that the computers had created, and he hoped, would take him back to his home planet. As the ship drew closer, and closer, he began to let himself think about the girls of Vegas flocking down the strip, just waiting to do his bidding.
Three more days on the ship, and it finally sank its great legs in the sand. He pushed the button, and the door opened with a swoosh of air, and the stairs unfolded to the desert floor.
He walked down the stairs looking around at the desert, and the first thing he noticed was that the desert was different. He looked off to his right and saw a line that might resemble a road. He went back into the ship, and drew a bottle of water, then pushed the button that would seal the ship from outsiders forever. What he did not know when he sealed the ship from the outside was that it set off some kind of timer, and when he was about two hundred yards away, the ship blew, knocking him to the ground.
He got up, and blew sand out of his mouth, “Geez; I had no idea!” He looked back, and saw metal still raining down over the desert.
He took his water bottle, and headed toward the line in the desert, and when he got to it, he discovered that it was an old road. The asphalt was buckled badly, and sand and Creosote bushes had nearly taken over the road. He followed the road in the general direction he thought might lead to Vegas.
After about a mile he came to an old, and badly weathered highway sign that he could just make out the letters on, it read ‘Las Vegas’ ‘Seven Miles,’, and he knew he was going in the right direction. The suit he had on seemed to reflect the sun’s heat. The gray material it was made of, even though it was three ply looking material left his body fairly cool in the heat, but soon sweat ran into his eyes, and he wiped it away.
He was getting very tired by the time he saw what looked like broken buildings in the distance, and he longed to lie down in the cool bed of the ship, and sleep. He turned to look behind him at the gray-blue smoky hills, and he gauged the time at being around nine o’clock, and he turned to plodding on toward the distant city.
As he drew closer he saw that what had looked like broken buildings from a distance was just what they were, broken buildings, their steel skeletons reaching to the sky.
He saw a trunk of a car sticking out of the sand, and he walked over, and rubbed the dirt off the license plate. The car's plate told him it had been abandoned in 2019, but it was OLD.
“Huh…no more Vegas, and I guess no more girls either. Wonder where they all went to?” It was not in Gene’s make up to be concerned about what had happened to the people, or to care that Vegas was a ghost town, but the women, or lack thereof was a worrisome matter. The fact that he had just came back from a trip among the stars had already faded from his mind, as far as caring went. To him, it was just an incident in his life that didn’t really matter, now that he was back on earth where he belonged.
It did jiggle at his mind that even though he had been gone for several weeks, time could have passed in an awful lot of years here on earth. “Well, I’ll just have to deal with it; I've got to find something to eat, and I should have taken food off the ship, but anything is better than eating your own waste.”
He turned down what used to be an off ramp; the concrete overpass had l
ong since caved in, and the buckled asphalt led up what was at one time the Las Vegas Strip.
The buildings were eerie as he plodded on. He stared up at a four steel girders of one of the old hotels; the floors had fallen through leaving huge piles of debris.
He thought he heard something, and he stopped to listen, but heard nothing. “Must have been something flapping in the breeze.” He walked on, stepping around the debris on the street, or what used to be a street, then he heard it again, only closer this time, and he stopped a second time.
A spotted horse rounded a bend from behind the walls of a building, and it had someone riding it. He waited on the figure on the horse that was coming toward him, then he spoke, and the horse jumped, and stopped. The boy had a wicked looking cross bow, but it didn’t look as if he wanted to shoot him with it.
“Hello.”
The boy who was on the horse looked to be about fifteen years old. “Hello yourself.” The boy said as he sat the horse which was about fifty feet away. “I didn’t expect to find anyone here.”
“I just got