SHEDDING LIGHT

by Michael Edelson

  CHAPTER 7

  “ABOUT TEN YEARS AGO,” he said. “I was really bored with my job so I decided to go back to school. I applied for the astrogation program at MIT. It was a new program, and so nobody really knew what to expect. I liked that.”

  “Impressive,” she said, nodding her head. “MIT. That’s got to be tough to get in to.”

  “No, not that year. I was a sorry excuse for an applicant. My grades were below average and my undergrad degree was in English.” Despite his bitterness, thinking back to those days brought memories of a happier time. Getting into MIT had been a wonderful feeling. The possibilities had seemed endless.

  “Was it work experience that got you in?” she asked, seemingly baffled. “Though what kind of work would get you into an astrogation program I have no idea. Amateur astronomer maybe? Won some awards?”

  “Nope,” he said, shaking his head.

  “All right,” she said, leaning forward, her cup held in both hands. “I’m intrigued. How the hell did you get into MIT with bad grades?”

  He smiled. “Don’t you remember? It was 2053. You’re a journalist for God’s sake, you should know this.”

  “The Columbia III disaster? That was a little before my time. I was still in college.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, the Columbia. It was supposed to be the first manned ship to leave the solar system. That voyage was the reason they started the program in the first place, and then the ship blows up because of containment failure in the reactor. What do you think that did for enrolment?”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Yeah. They didn’t have nearly enough qualified people, but they couldn’t shut down the program or they would have lost millions in government funding. They took what they could get. To be honest, that’s the only reason I bothered to apply. I knew I would get in. Three years later, I had a master’s degree, and that was that.”

  “So what about the navy? How’d you get started there?”

  “Well,” he said, absentmindedly fingering the silver oak leaf on his collar. “Part of the program was a reserve commission in the navy…that’s why people hesitated to enrol. They thought the navy would stick them on some Columbia IV time bomb. But, they were offering a pretty decent rank, and I guess I fell for the whole Star Trek space officer thing, though my job in the navy wasn’t all that interesting.”

  “What did they have you doing, scrubbing toilets?” She giggled, drinking her coffee.

  He tried in vain to repress a smile. “Not that exciting. Even though I held a reserve commission, I took a full time position teaching astrogation. With the Columbia gone and plans for the next ship in the air, that’s all they could find for me to do. But when they started building the Venture, they offered me a job designing the navigation GUI. I jumped on it. It’s what I used to do before I went back to school.”

  “You built this ship’s interface?” she asked, eyebrows raised. He wished he had; she seemed really impressed.

  “No, I just designed it, some programmers actually coded it. It was fun, though. I got to do something related to astrogation besides repackaging my MIT education for bored cadets.”

  “Okay, so how did you wind up here?”

  “Now that,” he said and laughed, shaking his head. “Is quite bizarre. Remember Captain Noguchi died in a car crash a month before the launch date?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well Commander Cole, their second choice, refused. Said it contradicted his religious beliefs. Hell, if he was here, I’d order him locked up. He’s one of those people who think what we are doing is against God.”

  “Do you?” she asked, her lips hidden in her coffee cup as her eyes watched him.

  “Oh yeah,” he replied sarcastically. “Praise the Lord! Hallelujah!” They shared a laugh, releasing some tension. It felt good to laugh, he hadn’t done much of it since the expedition started.

  “Just checking,” she said, getting up to refill her cup.

  “Well about you?” he asked. “How do you feel about refuting religion?”

  She laughed again. “I’m a Buddhist. Figure it out.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” She was right, of course. Buddhists miracles were ones of revelation and enlightenment. There was no way to disprove them with a fancy telescope.

  “So why did they pick you?” she asked, returning to the previous topic. “There was no one else?”

  “There were three other officers of suitable rank with the same degree I had. They were active duty too, real straight shooters. They called them in, gave them the qualification tests.”

  “So what happened?”

  “They failed, that’s what happened. One had a heart condition, the other was afraid of enclosed spaces. What do you call that?”

  “Claustrophobic?”

  “Right. He couldn’t even stand being in the simulator. The third guy turned out to be diabetic. Poor bastard didn’t even know it until the test.”

  “So that left you.”

  “Yup.” He shrugged. “That left me, but only because by that time they were scheduled to launch in less than a week. I was in the facility, tying up all the GUI bugs, and they just came up to me and said ‘Hey, how’d you like to take a medical exam?’” He shook his head. “I guess they could have found some astronomer if they had more time, but they didn’t.”

  “So you feel like crap because they exhausted all possible options before coming to you?”

  “Yeah, basically. Wouldn’t you?”

  She emptied her cup, then said, “No, not me. They way I see it, there were eight billion other people they could have asked. When you look at it that way, being choice number six isn’t so bad.”

  “Yeah, well…”

  “Besides,” she interrupted. “You may have been lucky getting into MIT, but you graduated. You’re here on the mission, and you haven’t screwed up yet. If you manage not to mess anything up before we make it home, you’ll be a hero, and no one will care how you got to be here.”

  “You think so?” he asked, feeling a little better. He wondered why she was being nice to him all of a sudden. Was it because he was one of the two people on the ship she trusted? Or was she just buttering him up to get more information for her article?

  “Trust me, I know how people think. I’m a reporter, remember?”

  “How could I forget.” They shared another laugh. “Now it’s your turn.”

  “Me? What do you want to know about me? CNN won the press lottery and I was the only one crazy enough to want to go.” She turned away, perhaps trying to deflect further questions.

  “That’s not what I want to know. I want to know why someone like you constantly sticks her neck out. Why not settle down, get married, have a couple of kids?”

  She cocked an eyebrow. “Isn’t that a little personal?”

  “I guess,” he said, embarrassed by her rebuff. “Sorry.”

  “No, that’s okay,” she said, smiling. He realized she’d been teasing him. “You told me about yourself, it’s only fair. I was married, but it didn’t last, and it was my fault. I don’t know why I screwed it up. Maybe I’m just not ready to have my wings clipped. You’re one to talk, though. You’re divorced too.”

  “How’d you know that?” he asked. Before she could answer, the intercom came on.

  “Commander Roberts,” Captain Perpignan’s voice trumpeted over the speaker. “Get over to the observation deck, ASAP. Repeat, Roberts, ass to Merrick’s lab pronto.”

  “Dammit,” Jack cursed, picking up his cup and tossing it in the waste disposal chute. “Gotta run.” He took off at a trot.

  “Wait up,” she called after him. “Whatever it is, I’m not going to miss it.”

  CHAPTER 8

  “HOW COULD YOU, YOU wretched little worm?” Merrick cursed, spittle spraying from his mouth. “I’ll throttle the life out of you!” Jack had to restrain him, though it wasn’t easy. The old man was stronger than he looked.

  “Take it easy, professor,” the captain orde
red.

  “Just tell me why, you despicable backstabber!” Merrick demanded. “Why? I trusted you, brought you along on the chance of a lifetime—”

  “It’s just wrong, Charles,” Jonathan yelled. Carl had a hand on the young man’s shoulder. He had secured his hands with a plastic zip-tie. “You’re out to discredit God, you old fool! Did you ever stop to think what effect that would have on our society?”

  “Science is the pursuit of truth, not what you want truth to be!” Merrick growled, his rage clearly displayed in the rippling lines of his face.

  “It’s about right and wrong, Charles. Religion is what gives us morality. Just think what taking that away will do—”

  Merrick broke free of Jack’s grasp and stormed out of the laboratory. “I can’t stand to look at him,” he said as he left. “Put him in the airlock and expose him to space for all I care!” Other assorted curses echoed down the hall as his voice faded. Jonathan looked down at the ground, his face a mask of shame and anger.

  “Lock him in his quarters,” Captain Perpignan ordered. Carl took Jonathan away, leaving Jack and Debbie alone with the captain.

  “How’d you catch him?” Jack asked, still shocked at the discovery. Jonathan was the last person he would have suspected.

  “Actually, you caught him,” the captain said, patting Jack’s shoulder. “It was the camera you put in here. I told you to put it by the hatch, but that’s a much better place.” He pointed to the support brace above which Jack had hidden the camera. “He probably couldn’t see it, maybe thought you didn’t get around to mounting it yet.”

  “Sorry sir,” Jack said. “But I didn’t like the angle from the doorway.” The observation deck was a mess of equipment and books, arranged in a haphazard pattern only a madman could find convenient. It was a miracle the camera had been able to catch anything at all.

  “Don’t apologize,” Perpignan said. “You did good. That’s one less problem on our hands.”

  “Did he admit to making the bomb?” Debbie asked.

  “No,” the captain said. “But he will. Once he understands his situation, he’ll want to cooperate. I just can’t figure out why he would want to do it.”

  “What do you mean?” Jack asked. Jonathan’s motive seemed obvious, especially after the young man’s attempt to explain it to Merrick.

  “Well,” Perpignan said. “He’s Jewish.”

  “So what? We’re more than three thousand light years from Earth. That would put us square in the middle of the Old Testament.”

  The captain shook his head. “I don’t know. How many Jewish terrorists are there? Jewish extremists? I just don’t buy it. He had to have been working for someone. We’ll need to question him intently.”

  “I suppose,” Jack agreed, though the captain’s attitude was peculiar. A Jew had as much reason to want to stop the research as a Christian did, as far as he could see. “What did he try to do, anyway?”

  “He was wiping data chips, the ones with the interval shots of Egypt. He got about ten terabytes before Carl and I got here. You’ll need to get with the professor to find out what was destroyed and try to recover it from backups.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  The captain left the observation deck, leaving Jack alone with an uncharacteristically silent Debbie.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked her. He was still struggling with the idea that they caught their saboteur and everything was fine. It had been too easy. Why would Jonathan throw away a promising career over something so stupid?

  “I don’t know,” Debbie said, shaking her head. “But something is.”

  “Woman’s intuition again?” he said, trying to lighten things up.

  “No,” she said, oblivious to his attempt. “Reporter’s intuition. Something isn’t right here, this was too easy.”

  “My sentiments exactly,” Jack said, not at all surprised at how her words mirrored his thoughts. “Still, life is strange. Sometimes the easiest answer is the right one.”

  She did not sound convinced. “Let’s hope so.”

  * * * * *

  ENCLOSED IN THE SMOKY canopy of his hop capsule, Jack felt an uncharacteristic fear well up within him. As he felt the hum of the reactor build up in intensity, he couldn’t help but wonder if everything was alright with his capsule. There were safety systems, but a system could fail. If his capsule didn’t work perfectly, they would be peeling him off the wall.

  An orange light flashed on his communications console, signalling a private message from another pod—Debbie’s.

  “Scared?” Her voice filled the pod with unmistakable tones of wry amusement.

  “A bit,” he admitted. “But it’s just normal jitters. What’s there to be scared of?” This hop was routine, they were just going to coast and take on-the-fly snapshots. It was the next one he was terrified of.

  “Maybe someone sabotaged our capsules. We could both die right now.” There was always that, of course, but it was very unlikely. Even the prior problem with the capsules had resulted only in an aborted hop.

  “If so, any regrets?” he asked.

  She paused. “Yes.”

  “Like?”

  “Ask me again if we live.”

  “Alright then, goodnight.”

  “Goodnight.”

  He closed the circuit.

  The humming became increasingly loud and he felt a momentary jolt as tiny discrepancies between the induced motion and the derived velocity of the ship were corrected. His instruments showed that everything was fine

  His heart skipped a beat when something white came flying at his capsule and smashed into the canopy, where it formed a white stain that spread slowly. Realizing it was just a styrofoam cup, he groaned in relief. The mass interface was an efficient conductor of motion state, but sometimes things not properly secured in equipment lockers had accidents. A tiny orange stain spread around the cup as a bit of leftover tea was smashed into a five-inch circle before being spread invisibly thin.

  It would take about eleven hours to hop to eight thousand seven hundred and sixty times the speed of light. Although it was theoretically possible to achieve full speed at once, they could never contain enough energy to make such a drastic state change. FTL 8760 was hellishly fast. At that velocity, they would travel a light year in one hour, taking a VTF telescope shot every ten minutes. The course he’d laid in was perfect, it had to be. The pattern disruptor field was severely limited; entering a nebula or even a sparse hydrogen cloud at that speed would destroy them instantly.

  To pass the time, he used the capsule interface to recheck his calculations, going over every detail with paranoid intensity. After several hours of this, he was tired enough to sleep. Thankfully, the hop was short enough that he did not need to use the hellish neural pacifier.

  He drifted off into fitful slumber, woken by the motion of the capsule as it righted itself from a reclined position. The green light was on, indicating that they were no longer hopping. The ship was cruising at a steady speed of almost ten thousand times the speed of light, the motion state fully induced and the probability field no longer fluctuating. Except for the color shift, as far as the scene on the view screen was concerned, they might as well have been standing still.

  They all climbed out of their respective capsules, Carl aiding the bound Jonathan out of his.

  “I’m off to the observation deck,” Merrick announced. “Captain, could you assign someone to assist me? Without that treasonous rat Mr. Goldstein it’s very difficult to get everything done. Commander Roberts, perhaps?”

  The young grad student stared at the floor, hiding his expression. Carl took him by the arm and led him away.

  “Jack?” Perpignan turned to him. “Do you have time?”

  “Yes, sir. We’re safe on this heading for quite a while.” How big and empty the cosmos was, he marvelled. A light year in a hour, and still nothing in front of them for days.

  “Splendid,” Merrick said as he made for the hatch. “Come along then,
Jack, we have work to do.”

  CHAPTER 9

  FOR THE NEXT THREE days, Jack was busy scanning ancient Egypt for favourable weather conditions, taking snapshots where he could. The magnification was too low to see what he was capturing, but that would come later. Image enhancement had been Jonathan’s specialty, but Jack was sure he could pick it up quickly enough.

  Yelena was there some of the time, struggling to keep the Van Tessel field steady. They’d had three collapses already, and her best efforts could only yield an average diameter of point three astronomical units. There was just too much interference from cosmic debris at their current velocity. This was also just about the maximum speed with which the image processors could cope. When they were moving faster than light, they were actually scooping up photons from behind, and that required a ton of data processing to make a coherent image. They couldn’t get anywhere near the same level of detail they had when the ship was at Earth-relative standstill, but Merrick claimed he didn’t need it.

  The professor was pouring over the data, sorting, cataloguing, making comparisons. He constantly referenced three thick texts on biblical anthropology, as well as countless others stored in his palm-puter. He worked with a feverish intensity, eating sparingly and sleeping for only a few hours a day.

  Debbie came and went, asking questions, taking notes. Sometimes she stuck around, chatting and killing time. Where the others felt fear or apprehension, she was excited about the happenings on board. It would give her one hell of a story.

  Besides keeping him company, Debbie kept Jack up to date on the captain’s attempts to get information out of Jonathan. The man still claimed to know nothing about the bomb or the other glitches, keeping to his story that the wiped data chips were his only act of sabotage. Whether criminal charges could be filed was dubious. He had not destroyed equipment, merely erased data chips. Since the research was partly his, the illegality of the situation was questionable.

  By the end of the third day, Merrick announced that he had everything he needed from Egypt. It was time for the dreaded hop to four hundred thousand light years from Earth.