Smith's Monthly #9

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  “What’s the ship?” Fergason asked, stunned that he was seeing what she was indicating. He had never had a drop-out on his watch, and the last serious drop-out that had occurred was two years before. Ships, with all the fail-safes, and the nature of the hyper-space tubes between jump points, just didn’t drop out of hyperspace in the middle of nowhere.

  Yet one just had.

  “It’s a supply and research ship, a big one called the Western. Headed for the lower edge of the “D” section to help supply a new colony there.”

  Fergason nodded. Nothing unusual at all.

  “Seventeen jumps successful, Canny said, “thirty-six more to go.”

  “So any signal from the ship?” Fergason asked, following procedure.

  “Nothing,” Canny said. “One minute it was fine, the next it had dropped out of hyper.”

  “Can you pinpoint its location?” Fergason asked, still following the questions he was supposed to ask a controller in this situation.

  “I did,” Canny said. She reached forward and tapped her board, changing the image on the screen on the wall.

  Fergason just shook his head. The area shown on the map where the ship would have dropped back into normal space was a sphere of over three light years in diameter.

  There was one more question on the list that he had to ask any controller in this situation, just for the record. “Could you get a reading on the real-space speed of the ship as it dropped?”

  “Fast,” Canny said. “Ninety-one-point-three percent of the speed of light.”

  “Damn,” Fergason said.

  “You can say that again,” Canny said, shaking her head. “The poor guy. He probably isn’t even awake yet, with the difference in time factored in.”

  “Only one crew?” Fergason asked. Usually freighters had two or three. The Western must be one of the newer model ships, only needing one man to take the chance on the deep sleep and the hyper jumps with the cargo. And all that one man did was wake up at each jump point, run diagnostics of the systems, then give the all-clear for the ship to make the next jump.

  She leaned forward, tapped a key on her board again, and then sat back. “His name is Reeves, from Earth actually.”

  “What part?” Fergason asked, as if that was going to make any difference at this point.

  Canny again glanced at her board. “Idaho region.”

  One of the old United States areas. Fergason had never been near it on any of his visits to Earth. Maybe next time.

  “Alert rescue,” Fergason said, glancing at the other controllers who were watching the event. “Tell them to get a ship headed to the center of his possible drop-out area. Make sure you feed them all your data, including his likely speed.”

  Canny glanced back at him, her green eyes showing surprise and maybe a little something else. “Sir, you know they will veto you. It’s not worth risking the lives of a rescue team and ship in an unscheduled hyper-drop.”

  Fergason knew, but he said nothing.

  Canny went on. “Plus the percentage chances of finding one ship in that much area are close to zero, even if the thing was equipped with a newer emergency beacon. The rescue ship would have to stumble within light-days of the Western to trace-hear it.”

  “I know,” Fergason said. “But I’m not going to be the one to make the decision to let that poor man die out there alone.”

  She looked at him harder than she had ever done before. There was a caring and understanding in the look that he hadn’t seen before. Finally she nodded and turned back to her board. “Alerting rescue,” she said.

  Later that night, she asked him to join her for dinner. It had been fantastic, a special baked-trout dinner with all the trimmings. That night she told him how much she admired him and his heart.

  And later that night they kissed and kissed and finally talked about being together for the rest of their lives.

  The next morning he learned, as they had both expected, that Rescue Control had declined to send a ship.

  Reeves from Earth was on his own.

  THREE

  REEVES KNEW, WITHOUT a doubt, that he would grow tired of fresh-caught, freshly-cooked trout, no matter how good they tasted.

  He had set up camp with bedding, a tent, and a change of clothes in an area of the botanical garden near where he had cooked the fish the first time. After dinner that first night he had changed into some western-style clothes he had found in supplies for the colonists. Then with the addition of a cowboy hat, cowboy boots, and a duster he felt almost at home. He could almost imagine he was back in the mountains of Idaho, especially when he was near his fire.

  He had reset the lighting in the garden so that there was more night, because that was the time he didn’t have to think about where he was, and what had happened to him.

  After finding the clothes he had gone to a mirror in one of the bathrooms. The hat hid his white forehead and receding hairline, and the duster swung loose and free, giving his body a lean and mean appearance. He had been lucky that the colony this ship had been packed to supply was for a western-based group. He hoped they survived the loss of these supplies long enough to get more.

  Too bad there hadn’t been something he could have done about saving the ship. He had been in cold sleep, as anyone was going through jump space, when the ship had malfunctioned and dropped out of hyper-space. His last readings before the jump had shown no indication of any problem at all.

  The moment he had woken up to the sounds of the alarms filling every inch of the cold sleep chamber, he knew he was in trouble.

  Deep trouble.

  It had taken him a long time to check all the ship’s systems and discover everything was just fine, except for the fact that he, the ship, and all its cargo were no longer in hyper-space. He had no idea what had gone wrong, and didn’t have the skills or the desire to find out.

  He had set the rescue beacon just in case someone came for him, and actually found him, and then he had sat for hours just staring out of the control room’s viewports at the stars and the blackness of space. He had no idea where he was, or even exactly how fast he was moving, or where he was heading.

  Hyper-space travel used jump stations, connected to other jump stations. Only close-in system travel used actual real-space movement. It just took too long and had too many troubles with the differences in ship-board time and real time.

  While he sat there staring at the stars and feeling sorry for himself, he started thinking about never seeing Earth again, and just generally considering his future death alone in deep space. Then, as if hit by a sudden blast of realization, he really understood his situation. He might die alone out here, but until he did he was now a really free man.

  No more worrying about money, or jobs. The ship had more than enough supplies to last him for a very long life.

  He no longer had anyone to answer to, to be chewed out by.

  He was on his own, in a seven-mile-long space ship full of everything he might need.

  With the realization he had laughed out loud, staring at the stars. The entire thing was sort of a glass half-empty, glass half-full sort of thing. Yes, he was trapped in deep space with almost no hope of rescue, yes he had known this possibility might happen, but now that it had happened, he could live any way he wanted.

  He could cook fish over an open campfire.

  He was a free man who loved fresh-caught fish.

  Finally, on the third day of staying in the meadow near his campfire, it became clear he was going to need other fresh foods beside fish. So after finishing a wonderful breakfast of trout, he made a trip through the seven mile-long ship to the embryo stores near the nose of the giant ship.

  He felt odd walking in his cowboy boots down the wide halls, his duster swirling around his legs with every step. And his duster was a little warm for the environmental settings, but he didn’t care. He was living on a new frontier, just like his ancient ancestors had done when they had gone west in the old United States. There were hards
hips on the frontier, the least of which was heat and cold.

  They had been alone, in a wild and dangerous place.

  He was alone in a wild and dangerous place.

  They had survived in their way, he would survive in his.

  It had taken him hours to finally reach the right area, not wanting to use the ship’s directional systems to help him. His ancestors didn’t have directional systems to help them out west.

  After only a few wrong turns, he found the storage area he was looking for. It was where the animals that were scheduled to be born and raised on the new colony were kept. He pulled up on a screen the animal cargo list and smiled when he saw it was as he had hoped it would be. Cattle, horses, sheep, pigs, chickens, and so on. And there was enough feed on the ship as well to keep the animals well-fed for many years.

  And another thing that worked in his favor. The ship was carrying an Accelerated Growth Lab that could take an animal from embryo state to full grown in three or four days.

  He studied the list of his choices. He didn’t want to raise too many animals too quickly, mostly because he only needed as much as he could use over a few months time, and he wanted to make their feed last as long as possible. So he did some calculations as to exactly how long the feed would last for a certain number of each animal, then went to work taking out a few of the animals and putting them in the Accelerated Growth Lab chamber.

  Then, as almost an afterthought, he picked out a horse and put it in the chamber as well. His ancestors rode horses, so could he.

  He spent three days there in the lab, eating rations while wishing for trout, sleeping in a bunk room, growing the animals to a decent size. He used that time to set up sections of the ship for each group of animals to live.

  The chickens he put in a large storage area with old-world furniture they could nest in, then set the timer on the ship’s computer to remind him every three days that he needed to replenish the chicken’s food and supplies, and with luck harvest the eggs.

  His mouth watered at the idea of eggs and bacon, cooked over a camp fire. What a perfect life he was setting up.

  He worked out similar environments for the cattle and pigs, then prepped a slaughter area and then used it to kill a calf, using a colony butchering-machine to package and refrigerate the meat all in one process.

  Tonight, back in his meadow, over his campfire, he would cook veal. And then tomorrow he would start changing a few of the areas in the gardens for fruit and vegetable growing. Maybe in a few weeks he might have corn-on-the-cob with a great New York steak. His mouth watered at the thought as well.

  Finally, after everything was set up, and his saddle bags were packed with the veal and oat feed for the horse, he led the big, brown mare he had raised into the hallway and back down the miles of corridor to the botanical gardens.

  On this trip he felt better walking the halls in his duster, the horse’s hooves clopping on the hard surface behind him. He now felt like a true pioneer going into the unknown.

  FOUR

  FERGASON SAT AT his desk in his living room and stared at a picture of Canny, his wife of over sixty years. He missed her more than he wanted to admit. Their children and grandchildren were good company, visiting him often, but nothing could replace the closeness that he had had with Canny.

  They had had a great life together, happy, and had recently been planning trips back to their different home worlds to visit family. Then, without warning, a few months before she had died of a heart attack at the young age of only 104. He had another thirty or forty years of life expectancy these days, yet he couldn’t imagine living those years without her. It was as if everything inside him had been ripped out.

  “Grandpa?” a voice said from behind him.

  The voice was from his youngest grandson, Steph, standing respectfully in the door to the study. Steph was going on thirty, and was already making a name for himself in Space Rescue Corp.

  Fergason took a deep breath and slowly swung around, looking up into the green eyes and pale skin of his grandson. The kid was about the same age as Canny had been when they had started working together. Steph had her eyes and her good looks and fair skin.

  “You all right, Grandpa?”

  Fergason shrugged. “I guess as good as can be expected.”

  There was no other answer to that question. Of course he wasn’t all right. He had lost the love and meaning in his life.

  “Thought you might be interested in this,” Steph said, stepping forward and handing a report from Rescue Central to him. “It came into control today after one of the test runs of a new search system.”

  Fergason glanced at the paper, not really seeing it. Then suddenly a name caught his attention. Western.

  He quickly scanned the sheet, stunned at what he was reading. They had finally found the cargo ship Western, over sixty years after it had dropped out of hyper-drive and vanished.

  He glanced up at Steph who was smiling. “This is the ship that was lost on your grandmother’s watch. I was supervisor that day.”

  “I know,” Steph said, smiling. “You and grandma decided to get married that night, didn’t you?”

  Fergason nodded as he stared at the report. He couldn’t believe the Western had been found. He hadn’t thought of that ship for decades.

  “There was a man on that ship,” Fergason asked, trying to find the information on the report that he was looking for, but failing. “What happened to him?”

  Steph snorted. “His name was Reeves. Shipboard time only had two weeks passing. But the guy didn’t manage to survive that long.”

  Fergason shuddered. He couldn’t imagine the loneliness the man named Reeves must have thought he was facing. Deep space did that to people, sent them over the edge and into insanity, often far quicker than two weeks.

  Fergason knew he was facing the same type of loneliness without Canny.

  “What did he do, kill himself?”

  “No,” Steph said, shaking his head. “He broke his neck.”

  Fergason glanced up at his grandson. “How?”

  “From what the investigators could tell,” Steph said, “he fell off a horse.”

  “A horse?”

  “A horse,” Steph said. “And he had grown cattle, pigs, chickens and who knows what else in an old Accelerated Growth Chamber. He even had a campfire going in a botanical garden. He had reverted to being a cowboy from the old west region of Earth.”

  Fergason shook his head as his grandson went on, not really understanding how a spaceman could become a cowboy on a hyper-drive jump freighter in less than two weeks.

  “You ought to see a picture of the guy. He put on the cowboy hat, duster and all.”

  “You’re kidding?” Fergason asked, knowing his grandson wouldn’t joke about something like that.”

  “Nope,” Steph said, “it’s the truth. And what’s even more amazing is that he’d only been dead for less than an hour when they found the ship. There was even burnt fish still cooking over a campfire.”

  “Fish?” Fergason asked, remembering the wonderful fish dinner he and Canny had had the night the Western vanished sixty-three years before. The dinner that had changed their lives.

  “Fish,” Steph said. “Burnt fish. I doubt they’re ever going to get the smell out of there.”

  “Fish,” Fergason repeated softly to himself, shaking his head and remembering the dinner that night all those years ago.

  The dinner over which he and Canny had decided to spend a lifetime together.

  He glanced up at his grandson. “He fell off a horse?”

  His grandson smiled. “Broke his neck while cooking a fish dinner over an open campfire.”

  For the first time since Canny had died, Fergason laughed, knowing without a doubt that Canny would have laughed with him.

  What Came Before…

  Nineteen-year-old Boston native Jimmy Gray had been traveling with his parents and older brother, Luke, headed west to find a new home and new riches.
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br />   Before even reaching Independence, they were attacked and robbed by Jake Benson and his gang. Jimmy’s parents were killed, his brother wounded.

  In one of the wildest towns in all of American history, Jimmy Gray, a sheltered, educated son of a banker from Boston suddenly finds himself very, very much alone.

  But then through some luck, he finds other young men about his age and down on their luck who might be able to help him.

  Together, the five of them head west after Benson.

  They end up hunting buffalo as he always dreamed of doing, but then they are hit with a massive flash flood and Jimmy is left alone, his friends more than likely dead.

  Luckily, they all meet up again and are all safe. So they continue west, knowing that Benson is just ahead of them.

  Suddenly they come upon Benson and his men killing a farm family. They manage to get one of the men separated from the others, but in a fall he accidently dies.

  So they scatter to meet up later at a camp. They managed that but found a survivor of the killings. So one of them had to go back with the kid while the others followed Benson.

  They caught him once again terrorizing a small wagon train and managed to scare him and his men off.

  But then they had to cross the forty-mile desert. And right from the start, things started off deadly.

  THE LIFE AND TIMES OF BUFFALO JIMMY

  Part Twenty-five

  INTO THE DESERT

  FOR THE NEXT two hours, as the sun started to color the sky in reds and browns, they rode in silence, moving at a fast pace across the flat sand while it was still cool. Then, just before the sun came up, Jimmy had them stop and rest and water the horses.

  “From here,” Long said, “we go slowly.”

  Long and Truitt and Samuel took care of the horses while Jimmy and Zach checked to make sure all the water was secured, protected from direct sun, and not leaking. With the day they had ahead of them, they were going to need every drop.